Partygirl, upon hearing that I was hanging out with the Methodists for Easter, said, "Are you sure you want to be entertained that much in church?" And, indeed, the Presbyterian Assembly, reacting in the 1800s to the Methodist revival movement, warned against "undue excitement in church". But I am enjoying being in a church in which people shout "You tell 'em, Girl!" to the pastor during the sermon.

Of course, Partygirl is Catholic. On the High Church to Low Church continuum, they are at the top, followed by the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and then the Methodists. I think if you went any further down, you'd be a Baptist. I am not sure where the Lutherans fall; I have enough trouble with Holy Communion without bringing in transubstantiation, so I did not include them in my possibilities.

The Methodists have not yet begun their Easter music, and they say I can come sing it with them without having to make any commitment (do I seem particularly noncommital to them, I wonder, or do they always offer that possibility?), so I will be hanging out with the choir. I will also continue to sing in the early service at the Presbyterian church. I am trying not to feel too much like a secret agent.

Hopkins is coming along happily with the gray back. It is not interesting enough to take a picture of yet, so you will have to take my word for it.

The quilt for #1 son is not coming along that well. I had thought the steps would be something like this: buy pattern and fabric, cut, applique, piece, quilt, bind, give to said son for his birthday in April. Instead, they have gone like this: search bootlessly for pattern and end up having to order it, read instructions and take a week to recuperate, buy fabric, decide to make sample piece to try out new technique, find pattern for same (at right), search bootlessly for freezer paper, beg some from local butcher, trace pattern for sample piece, cut out sample piece with X-acto knife while seeking way to avoid this tedium and cursing myriad slips of said knife, quit to go find scraps for sample piece, return to cutting with X-acto knife, cut self, quit and sort out all quilting scraps by shape, color, and size, return to cutting, quit and play on computer for a while -- oh, well, that's as far as I have gotten. It may be a Christmas gift. Or perhaps for his going away to college in 2007. We'll see.

Now that I have done my serious contemplation, I am going to get down to the work of the day -- cleaning and grocery shopping. Then I can get  down to the fun of the day --knitting and reading. And, since the Empress hooked me up with a source of freezer paper, I intend to do a little fooling around with the new applique method, too. Our butcher will sell me some, it turns out.

Chanthaboune has posted a picture of Toby, one of our dogs. I noticed, while watching the Westminster dog show on TV, that the commentators used all sorts of euphemisms to describe the naughtiness of some breeds. "Not to be trusted off the leash," they would say, or "Not for first-time dog owners." So I am reminded that Toby cannot help being naughty. You can tell he wants to be good, but he cannot resist his essential nature, which tells him to be bad whenever possible. It's a great picture, though. She has also posted a picture of her brothers, but in an artistic manner that will ensure that no one will recognize them. You can tell that they have great hair, though. Here, you mostly just see pictures of knitting.

This book is very helpful. It sometimes feels as though we are constantly given lists of things to worry about, and many of them are questionable (though I am no longer buying Australian wool, just in case). We fret over whether to use paper or plastic bags at the market. We emphasize recycling in schools to the point of ignoring the whole "reduce, reuse" section of the Three Rs mantra. We despair over our government's rapacious behavior when it comes to the environment, but feel helpless to do anything about it.

The Union of Concerned Scientists have broken it down for us. They have listed the behaviors that actually make some difference to the environment, and clearly explained not only what difference these behaviors make, but also how they arrived at that conclusion.

If you drive as little as possible, and make fuel efficiency a priority when you do drive, you will have done the single most important thing you can for the environment. If you reduce your meat consumption and buy organic produce, you can quit thinking about paper or plastic, because these are the grocery shopping decisions that have the greatest effect. If you conserve power and water at home, give up personal use of toxic chemicals, and buy only as much stuff as you need, you will have done your part. Whether you use cloth or disposable diapers makes such a tiny difference in terms of environmental impact that you don't have to worry about it. The same thing applies to my concerns over whether or not to take the newspaper. Not that we should give no thought to smaller issues -- but we should realize that they are small. If you religously recycle all your paper but still dry clean your clothes, you are fooling yourself. If you give up leather shoes but own ten pairs of synthetic ones, you are doing far more harm than good.

The Lenten study I am following this year is about hunger. This is an unappealing topic -- after all, we all know that world hunger is a terrible problem, but what can we possibly do about it? Why dwell on the suffering when we cannot help? Two of the disciplines set by this study are not to eat between meals and not to buy prepared foods. The point here is to become aware of how easy it is for us to get food -- indeed, it can be hard to avoid it -- when it is so difficult for many of the people in the world. I am also learning about the strong connection between environmental irresponsibility -- waste and pollution -- and malnutrition. I did not realize that my using chlorine cleaners would affect someone else's ability to get food and water. Did you?

Here is what Sighkey says about the question of Hopkins's back: "Personally I like the idea of a grey back to Hopkins. A type of disguise in which the back deceives the audience into thinking that they are looking at a fairly ordinary jersey and then they are thunderstruck when they see the glory of the variegation and Fair Isle of the front."  I do not know that Hopkins will have an audience, properly speaking, but if so, I sure want them to be thunderstruck by its glory. I will therefore pull out the variegation back to the ribbing and do it in gray. Or even grey.

Sighkey also asked what we sell at the store where I work, and she is not the first, so this time I will answer. The short answer is this: educational stuff. Toys, games, puppets, puzzles, books, art supplies, music, musical instruments, classroom decorations, math and science supplies -- well, that's hardly a short answer any more.

So for example yesterday we took care of a grandfather seeking a game for the whole family to play, a woman wanting to fill a basket with things related to hunting and fishing, a factory supervisor laminating spec sheets, a parent worried about a second grader who wasn't grasping subtraction, a discount store manager choosing motivational stuff for her staff's sales goals, a person planning to supervise the making of 25 model sharks, and a private investigator looking for a good test of observational ability and "forward-thinking." Plus of course lots of teachers, homeschoolers, religious educators, and people buying toys. We also had toy reps in, so we got to play with puppets and decide between the undressed quacking duck and the duck and frog combo with slickers and Sou'westers. In addition to selling things, we have workshops for parents and teachers, storytimes for children, and suchlike. Not every town has a store like ours -- we are the only one in our county, and the nearest such for people in several counties in two neighboring states as well -- but if there is one near you, you should go there some day and play.

Right -- someone did not grasp the whole Southern Living reference below. See, Southern Living is a magazine. Each month, it has recipes for the things that are in season at that time where I live. If it's blueberry time, it has blueberry recipes. Etc. The recipes are so good that my daughter who lives in the Frozen North still subscribes to it. So around here, if you are having guests and don't know what to serve them, you naturally go to Southern Living. People always joke about that at dinner parties and during chance meetings at the market. But giraffes aren't in season, see... well, it wasn't funny enough to survive explanation.

This is why I am spending so much of my time at work unpacking. The Poster Queen was in yesterday for a while and got through a few boxes, but she has been off at conferences (they are switching from "scope and sequence" to "focus" -- an amazing amount of supposed change in education is actually about terminology) and whatnot, so I am mostly doing all these boxes myself. That is why it is taking so long.

And, while I do think about work some of the time while I am doing it, thinking too much about the other projects that are on hold while I do this would lead to my wanting to dash off to the computer to work on them, or at the very least to my being stressed over not getting them done. Why do that to myself? So I am instead just doing a lot of gentle discursive thinking about my Lenten study, knitting projects, and household arrangements.

We used to have a worker who spent all her time in that sort of thoughtful fog. She would pull off yards of paper towels and then suddenly come to and have to wind them back up, or dust in an abstracted way that didn't involve any real movement. We all had theories about what it was she contemplated during those hours she spent sort of working with us. I thought she was probably writing a novel in her head the whole time. That Man just  thought she had an active fantasy life.

I have been trying to make some decisions about my knitting projects. It might have been sensible of me to decide these things before I began knitting, but I never seem to do it that way. On the left is the front of Hopkins, while it was still on the needles, being modeled by a stuffed sheep. There is a little band of variegation at the bottom. That is as far as I have gotten on the back. So it is time to make the final decision. Am I going to make the back all variegated? Match it to the front? Or do the whole thing in the fretwork pattern which makes up the top 2/3 of the front? Or frog it back to the ribbing and do it in plain gray? I can't believe how difficult I am finding this decision. You would think it was important.

As to the other decisions, I am going to enliven my ribbed sock with a cabled knot at the ankle, order the Morocco for my bathmat (from an independent store in my state), and serve the visitors Roasted Pepper Lasagne the first night. The Water Jar had recommended Baked Giraffe, but for some reason Southern Living does not have any recipes for giraffe. No matter. I will lay in plenty of ice cream, and all will be well.

Yesterday was a lovely, spring-like day, so it was quiet at work. Our pen rep came to visit. He reminds me of Clint Eastwood -- if Clint Eastwood had become a pen salesman and part-time Tulsa nightclub singer. He always brings us the coolest new pens -- this time, it was this one: the Ergo-Sof. But overall it was a quiet day. I spent it unpacking things and thinking.

You might suppose that I would think of matters of great pith and moment, and sometimes of course I did. But I also spent some time thinking about small things. For example, I found the exact shade of cobalt blue yarn I wanted for my bathmat, but it is a wool blend. Wool is absorbent, but acrylic sure isn't -- would it be like a wet dog on the bathroom floor? And there is always Sugar'n'Cream worsted-weight cotton, but it doesn't come in quite the color I had in mind. The pattern calls for Reynolds Morocco, a bulky cotton/linen, which would feel great, comes in just that shade of blue, and costs $10 a skein plus (since it's not available locally) shipping. For something to step on? Of course, a store-bought bath mat of that quality would cost much more. But I had just gotten the estimate from the dentist for #2 son's upcoming dental work, so I had been mentally rehearsing my budget anyway.

Once I had exhausted that subject -- not by deciding, just by getting tired of it -- my thoughts turned to the upcoming visit of Pokey and her contingent of boys. She always seems to travel with a contingent of boys. Not the same ones -- she seems to have an inexhaustible supply. So I was thinking about what to feed them. Since they are coming from KC, my first thought was of course to roast them an ox. However, one of them has stayed with us a couple of times before. If I were a really good hostess, I would have written down the menus in the book I kept for the purpose, and I would know how many times I  had already served this fellow roasted ox, but I didn't. I cannot, in fact, remember what I served him before at all, except that he was here for the gingerbread and peach frozen yogurt with caramel sauce and slivered almonds, which was so good I thought of serving it again.

No decisions have been made on that subject, either. After all, on a gorgeous spring-like day, when one is unpacking box after box of stickers, the mind can drift a bit. Last night I heard the first faint sound of the peepers -- the little frogs which make such an ungodly racket once the weather really starts getting warm. Sleet is predicted for Friday morning, so I am resisting all temptations to go out and play in the garden, but it's difficult.

Leonidas said that he had read 200 blogs one afternoon. He didn't even say it as though it were a personal record or anything. I am astonished. I only make it through the Yarn Ho!s webring about once a week, and have resigned myself to the fact that I will never make it through all 605 of the Knitting Bloggers.

And yet, by failing to read all the available blogs, what wonders might we miss? Elabeth's blog had a link to this amazing thing: http://www.abc.net.au/tasmania/stories/s1212449.htm/ An old folk's home has gotten together to knit a replica of a 1950's room. An odd thing to do, but they explained that they needed a goal.

Not all goals have to be big and important. I think I have mentioned some of my goals for this year. I have nine in all. I like to have goals every year. They allow  me to feel that I am accomplishing things, even though I have done all the obvious stuff like getting degrees, having a career or two, marrying, and having children. And I am not yet to the point in my life where I have leisure to make new big goals for myself. So I have small ones, not important to anyone but me.

Some I have scheduled -- Goal #6 on Sundays, #5 on Tuesdays, and  #4  is scheduled for summer. Others are to work on every day. The one with which I am being least successful is my most frivolous one.

At some point recently I realized that the older ladies whom I admire had one thing in common which I absolutely do not have. Now, I have to make it clear that I admire these ladies because they are smart, talented, good, kind, diligent, and strong. These are the important things about them. But most of them are also well-groomed. So I decided that I had better take that up.

I have never before had any desire to be well-groomed. Oh, I was always respectably turned out when I had a hose-and-heels job, but that was a duty. I was brought up to consider any attention to one's looks to be anti-feminist, evidence of light-mindedness,  and generally something to be looked down upon.

Here's a little history lesson. When I was young, attempts to make oneself attractive were seriously scorned. A girl who wore makeup, shaved her legs, dressed to be alluring, "did" her hair, or in any other way showed evidence of trying to be pretty was looked down upon by the other women. This might have been a good thing if the result was that looks no longer mattered, and each woman was judged on her character. But in fact pretty girls continued to have more dates, more power, and an easier life overall. So it wasn't just a tyranny of the pretty, it was a tyranny of the naturally pretty. I don't think that we had any idea how hypocritical and unreasonable this was. Girls put in a lot of time trying to look like models, but without letting anyone know. In fact, models spent a lot of time trying to look as though they had just gotten out of bed looking that good. This was called "the natural look." I have no idea what the guys thought about it.

Well, natural Pre-Raphaelite beauty was fine (for those who were born that way) in our teens and twenties, and in our thirties we had a Bohemian charm, but then it is just a step to looking like a witch, or at least like Georgia O'Keefe. I'm not quite sure why I don't care for this look.

It may be my grandmothers. One was an elegant Frenchwoman, and the other -- though not in the least elegant -- spent an inordinate amount of time when she visited us searching for shoes to match her rainbow of handbags. I was very fond of both of them, and it may be from them that I got the impression that old ladies should be well-groomed, even if young women should not.

That is my paternal grandmother on the left, and my maternal grandmother on the right. She is the one in the hand-knitted Chanel-type suit, and it was she who taught me to knit. I think she is wearing spectator pumps in this picture. I don't know if anyone still wears them, but they were way more chic than my mother's sandals and my sister's and my sneakers.

In any case, it occurred to me that chances were that these ladies did not get up on their 60th birthdays and decide to start taking care of themselves. They dress well, they have lovely skin, they have hair that looks as though it were planned. They were probably well-groomed at 40. Heck, they might have been well-groomed at 20, since I think Audrey Hepburn would have been the role model at the time, rather than Cheryl Tiegs.

I decided to start small. I planned to brush my hair and put on makeup in the mornings. Eventually I thought I might buy new clothes, or some other grander step. However, I have not yet succeeded in the very small goal of getting fully dressed before I leave home. Oh, for a day or two at a time I can do it. But then I get busy, and the ten minutes required to make myself look like a grown-up woman who knows where she keeps her hairbrush --- well, I just can't spare the time. 

Well, it is only February. I still have ten months.

Happy Valentine's Day!

When I was a child, my mother always made a special breakfast table on holidays, with holiday paper plates and cups and napkins, and candy in the cups. Naturally, I have done the same for my own children. I put holiday pencils, stickers, and candy in the cups, appropriate books on the table, and make a theme breakfast of some kind. Now that my youngest is 13, I have tried to give it up, but they complain if I skip this important tradition. In fact,  #1 son warned me last week that they were expecting treats today. So they will have treats.

When they were smaller, we also made valentines, iced cookies, centerpieces, and other such projects, but they will no longer do that. Someone told me, when my daughters were teens, that once they left home, the boys wouldn't do that sort of thing any more, and they were right. My sons humor me a lot, and will still go places with me, but the fact is, teenage guys rarely choose to do crafts with their moms. So, if you have younger children, take that piece of advice someone gave me, and enjoy it now. I am sure that there were things I left undone while we made holiday sweatshirts for the family or attended the Apple Blossom Festival, but I can't remember now what they were, so they can't have been all that important.

My husband went to the grocery to buy some processed food for the poor, beleaguered menfolks who are suffering under the yoke of a mom who shops at the health food store. He brought home, along with potato chips and bacon, some Hostess Artificially Flavored Mega-Muffins. If you read the nutrition labels, which he does not, you will find that each is supposed to be two servings. How they expect an individually-wrapped muffin to be divided into two servings by people scarfing them down on their way to the bus stop is unclear, so I will give you the facts for a whole muffin. These muffins, whose main ingredients are white flour, sugar, and water, provide 10 grams of saturated fat, 42 grams of sugar, and 2 grams of fiber. The latest government guidelines (nothing extreme here -- these guys are still answerable to food-industry lobbyists) say the healthy limits are 11 grams of saturated fat and 20 grams of sugar per day, and you need 30 grams of fiber. So anyone trying to make those muffins "a part of a healthy diet" would be looking at brown rice and steamed broccoli for the rest of the day, and no sugar at all the following day. They also provide 6 grams of protein. A serving of salmon added to your brown rice and broccoli will use up that last gram of saturated fat in the allowance, and give you 12 grams of protein -- but you actually need about 50 per day. Good luck.

While I believe in personal responsibility, I think that it is difficult for people to make healthy food choices when an innocent-looking banana nut muffin packs that kind of health punch. A person buying such a thing in a bakery, where there are no labels to read, might even be thinking it was a wise choice. And yet the numbers are just about the same as two servings of Ghirardelli chocolate -- something few of us would serve our kids for breakfast.

Among the startling discoveries in Supersize Me! was the fact that it was very difficult to find the nutritional information for the food the experimenter ate. (In fact, McDonald's has just agreed to settle a multi-million dollar suit about its failure to inform consumers.) It wasn't difficult for me to find the info on the Megamuffins -- it's right there on the package, as required by law -- but isn't there something a little deceptive about claiming that an individually wrapped muffin consists of two servings? And when I checked the nutritional information on a typical banana nut muffin, I found that it can be expected to contain no saturated fat and 4 grams of fiber -- what you get in one serving of whole-wheat flour. Does the consumer who knows that this is typical of such muffins bear full responsibility for buying those utterly unhealthy muffins? I'm not sure. Do you read labels before you buy? And if you are like my husband and sons and you don't read them because you don't care, then if you later have to care because you find you have high cholesterol or something, then is it all your fault?

My own shopping was scuppered by my inability to find either freezer paper or cobalt blue rug yarn. So, having completed my Fair Isle swatch socks, and knowing that I will need a mindless knitting project for the week to come, I went ahead and began another pair of socks. I've just made a couple of pairs of low, slouchy socks. Then I saw on this knitting blog: http://knittingincolor.blogspot.com/ a couple of pairs that had been made with long, tight ribbing. Frankly, they end up a bit funny-looking. Well-knitted, and lovely colors, but they have a long, skinny cuff and then a normal foot. So of course I wanted to try it out. I don't defend this reaction, I just report it. #2 son and I once made a Coca-Cola Cake just because the recipe was so weird.

So I have begun a ribbed sock on #3 needles. I haven't committed myself yet, of course. I can always veer off and do a stockinette section with more Fair Isle (there are LOTS of patterns in that new book of mine) or morph some of those ribs into a Viking knot. I mustn't get too carried away, though, or it won't be mindless knitting any more.

So, what was the result of my scientific study of churches, designed to give me a new church (or a renewed commitment to my own church) by this Sunday? Well, I have decided to hang out with the Methodists for Lent and Easter. By then I should know whether my Presbyterianism will keep me from being a useful visitor at that church or not. At the same time, the choir director at the church where I am an elder is bedridden with back pain, and so I am going to sing a solo at the early service today, before going to the Methodist service. In between, I will take him soup and muffins -- no saturated fat and lots of fiber, of course.

Here's what I'm singing, with a midi file: http://www.sfcentral.org/ministries/music/gracenotes/gn363.htm

Can I slip out after the anthem and skip the sermon, leaving the organist to do all the service music? Will the congregation get sick of hearing me sing solos every week? I met Egypt at Hobby Lobby yesterday and she said firmly that there was no way she would get up early enough for that service, a sentiment which I think is shared by the rest of the choir. Will I be a rat leaving a sinking ship if I quit going to two church services every week, and leave the early service with no singers? Does a service that can't provide any singers for itself deserve to have some imported from the 11:00 choir? Can I at least take my knitting?