The government has issued new dietary guidelines (here is the scoop, made as inconvenient to read as possible: http://www.healthierus.gov/dietaryguidelines/ ). They are what those of us who keep up with this stuff already know: exercise at least 30 minutes a day, eat no trans fat, little saturated fat, few simple carbohydrates, and plenty of whole plant foods. You're already doing that, right?

Well, apparently not. Fewer than half of Americans exercise at all, and 40% of us eat no whole grains. The government guidelines actually say that "at least half" of the grains we eat should be whole grains (I don't get that -- I thought we were all agreed that refined grains are nutritional bad guys), and commenters on these new guidelines are mostly saying that this is the hardest change we are being asked to make. Nine servings a day of fruits and vegetables is another change from the old food pyramid, and exercise is a new addition.

#2 daughter said, when I first read that a new food pyramid was in the works, that the old one didn't work because it was just a piece of paper, not equipped with electrodes. The new one is expected not to work either, because it is just too hard. I kind of like it, because it says in the fine print that I can have 11 grams of saturated fat and 20 grams of sugar a day, whereas my doctor was saying to "avoid" those things, which sounds a lot like not being able to have any. In fact, my first thought was "I can definitely find a piece of Ghirardelli chocolate small enough to fit those numbers." Unfortunately, if you start reading labels on your groceries, you discover that a slice of Orowheat bread has 4 grams of sugar, a serving of tomato sauce has 10... Sigh. I plan to look for foods with very few grams of sugar, though, in hopes of squeezing some chocolate in somewhere. Loopholes, that's what I want!

We had dinner last night with Son-in-Law's charming family. With two medical professionals at the table, it was inevitable that we would discuss these recommendations. Soft rolls, butter, homemade chiffon cake with berries and whipped cream -- these are the things we ate as we discussed it. Son-in-Law's aunt, who is head of cardiac care at a local hospital, said serenely that moderation was the key, and genetics played such a large part that we could all relax. She also said I should hold out against the medication my doctor has been urging on me. Sounds good to me.

We also discussed knitting, as it happens. Son-in-Law's grandmother had made a lovely afghan for them for Christmas. Then his mother showed us a scarf she had made. So, since I was wearing the dull socks, I showed them to her. Sure, it would have been better had I been wearing, say, the handspun scarf or Siv, but the dull socks were what I happened to have on.

It was fun, in any case. #1 daughter and Son-in-Law head back to the frozen north today. It was wonderful to have them around for a while.

We had a snow day yesterday. Well, the boys had a snow day. I went to work. My husband went to work.  #1 daughter and Son-in-Law went to a neighboring state to see #2 daughter. The boys stayed home and used their school lunch money to have pizza delivered. They also had snow ball fights and used way more electricity and gas than anyone really needs. When I came home and told them choir practice had been cancelled, however, #2 son said that was good, because I am "fun to have around." That's worth something.

Here is Hopkins. It is named Hopkins after Gerard Manley Hopkins who wrote the poem "Pied Beauty," which begins "Glory be to God for dappled things." Hopkins earned that name by being made with variegated yarn. It is quite a beautiful poem, and if you didn't read it in high school, this would be a good time to do so. Here's a link: http://www.bartleby.com/122/13.html I think, though that there is a typo here and the cow in line 2 should be "brindled." Maybe not.

The Water Jar, who appears to find it odd that my sweater has a name (not a knitter, obviously), suggests that poetry is not read and appreciated as it used to be. People do not read poetry for pleasure any more, it would seem. Reverse the trend! Go read some poetry! It takes very little time, because the stuff is usually short. But I digress.

I was showing you Hopkins so that you could see the stitch markers. When doing color work, it helps to put a marker at the beginning of each repeat. That way, if you lose track of what you are doing on the chart, you need only go back to the beginning of that repeat. And if you make an error, you will catch it within the repeat (when you run out of stitches or have some left) rather than at the end of a long row. This is my advice for the day.

The snow is gone now, fortunately. I am hoping that all the plants, which were leafing and budding and generally carrying on as though it were spring, have not been blighted. With luck, they will merely have been watered and invigorated.

I am still working on Hopkins -- I have in fact finished the armscye shaping -- and it is growing on me in spite of my distaste for variegated yarn. Here is a blog with many variegated pictures: http://trickytricot.typepad.com/my_weblog/ If you look at these and think "How bright! How cheery!" then you are a variegated yarn fan. This is not my reaction. However, this tricoteur is very amusing on the subject of cough drops.

And here is the sock with the gusset completed. I did not show you pictures of the gusset in progress (you are permitted a sigh of relief) because the continuing colorwork makes the process less clear.

Yesterday being Tuesday, I was putting the data from the nice lady in Alabama into my family history database, when I noticed something curious. There appears to be a prediliction in my family for marrying foreigners.

Of course, I knew that we had a lot of immigrants on the tree. That's how I got started on this in the first place -- the year that National History Day had the theme "Immigration," #1 daughter did a project called "An Immigrant Family," in which she starred all the people on our family tree who were immigrants. We have a very starry tree, I must say.  But we are after all a nation of immigrants: we all have immigrants on our trees. That's one reason her project won -- it was a great example of an American family.

However, I was checking the data on my 'Bama ancestress and realized that, in a time when the average Southern woman married a man born within 9 miles of her own birthplace, she had married a guy from New York. Not an immigrant, though Alabama had barely achieved statehood, but the first hint of a pattern. Her father was from Scotland. I typed in a few more immigrants. And then I began to notice -- our immigrants were never immigrant families. The last actual immigrant family I can claim arrived in the colonies in the 1700s. All the rest have been single immigrants who married in. In fact, there is not one generation in my family that does not contain a marriage to a foreigner.

Some have gone further than others. My great-grandparents were from two different continents, and then went and lived on a third, thus almost ensuring that their children would marry foreigners. My grandparents, having come from two different countries, married on another continent and then went back to Europe and lived in a country where they were both foreigners. And then sent their son off to the U.S. to go to school. My sister did not marry a foreigner (I am the one for my generation), but they went to live in another hemisphere with their American children, considerably upping the chances that their kids would marry foreigners.

There was the 18th century guy who arranged -- his family having lived in a little town in southern France essentially forever -- to be born in Guadeloupe. Like the New Yorker, his motivation for moving was a mystery, but it did allow him to return to the ancestral home and marry someone born in a different country from the one he was born in.

My daughter, the first of her generation to marry, wed a boy she met in high school. He was born on St. Thomas. Like the fellow born in Guadeloupe, he returned to his parents' native land at an early age. But he still adds another birthplace to the tree.

These last two examples show, I think, that it is not the case that my family is filled with people who hanker after exotic partners. We have no more than the usual amount of fascination with pirates. It is less that we seek out foreigners to marry than that we keep turning up as single immigrants. Where your family tree may have a family of Russians coming through Ellis Island, mine has a lonely Canadian shoemaker, a single missionary heading for China, a 15-year-old Welsh boy seeking his fortune in the colonies.

#2 son has been agonizing lately about what to do when he grows up. Last night he told me that he had decided. He intends to be a drifter. He doesn't mind hard work, he says, but he wants to go to foreign countries, work at random jobs, and perhaps eventually to build himself a house in Ireland, and live as a subsistence farmer. He was prepared to be a lumberjack, but we were not clear on whether they have any of those in Ireland. "What would you tell people when they asked you what I did?" he wondered. "I would say you were a journalist," I answered without hesitation. After all, he intends to go to college first. He is going, he says, to be a cultured drifter.

And there it was, the characteristic that has led to generations of foreigners on our family tree. A handsome young man who decides to wander off to foreign countries is bound to marry a foreigner, isn't he? #2 son's preference for countries where they speak English may even explain why we continue to be essentially an American family -- every generation or two, someone wanders back, now a foreigner himself. Now, when we look back at these people, they have occupations like journalist, librarian for the U.N., carriagemaker, or diplomat, but there may well have been a point for each at which they could have been described as drifters.

An Update on Moral Questions About Sheep

You can get the PETA point of view on wool at SavetheSheep.com. They are talking about mulesing, a cruel-sounding procedure which seems not to be a big favorite with Aussie sheep ranchers, either, from what I read on the web. The sci-fi sheep turn out to be ordinary Merino sheep. You can read this and decide whether to avoid Australian wool, Merino wool, or wool in general, unless you are like some of us Yarn, Ho!s and know where your wool comes from. The idea of avoiding the use of wool in general is based on the preponderance of Australian sheep -- the theory is that even our Peruvian wool could be made from the wool of Australian sheep, for all we know, since 80% of all the world's wool comes from down under. I did note, in the wool-farmer's online journal, that they are concerned about the blacklisting of Australian wool, and are working on improving things. Many of the things online on this subject have that hysterical tone that I find conducive to skepticism. We are asked to feel sorry for sheep impregnated against their wills, for example, and "kept alive year after year." There is no suggestion for what should be done with the sheep if no sheep products are to be used by humans. I continue to believe that domestic animals are dependent on humans for their livelihood, and cannot expect to survive if they are not productive for humans.

Sighkey tells me, and she is from New Zealand and should know, that Australian sheep can live in the wild, and are kept as pets, too. So we should a) buy Australian wool in order to encourage the current efforts of Aussie ranchers to improve the lives of their sheep, or b) buy wool only from sources that we know treat their sheep humanely, in order to encourage Australian sheep to rise up and leave their humans. She also tells me that there is full employment among sheep in New Zealand, so maybe we should buy New Zealand wool. PETA says we should knit with acrylic and hemp, but that seems like an over-reaction. All the local sheep I have met are meek and stupid, and I have seen them sheared, and they obviously are glad to have it done. So I am thinking I will find a local source of wool, and avoid Merino (sob!) until I know more about it. 

On the home front, #2 daughter has pointed out an unforeseen complication. I had told #1 daughter, who is going to visit #2 at school, to go to the music building, where #2 is well-known."They will help you find her," I said. #2 pointed out what I had forgotten, which is that the two girls are routinely mistaken for one another. When #1 arrives, #2 says, everyone will think she is the Music Dept. girl and will ask her to do things. Students at Chanthaboune's school, will you watch for a girl who looks like her but shorter, and help her? Think of her as a meek and defenseless sheep, not a feisty Australian sheep. Thank you.

Natalie (http://knitting.xaviermusketeer.com/) says that we cannot have Sockuary two months in a row, however easy it would be (January, February, Sockuary...), and it was I think her idea in the first place, so I bow to her on that. Sighkey has suggested that the excessive number of sock posts on my xanga lately is a result of my having multiple shoemaker ancestors. But I think it is simpler than that.

It is because, having just been through Sockuary, there are so many bloggers saying that heels are hard to do! THEY ARE NOT HARD! There are many insane online suggestions for how to do heels in special weird ways and how to avoid them by doing wild feats of kntting. STOP IT ! THEY'RE NOT HARD! DON'T MAKE ME TAKE MY SHOES OFF!

Give me a moment to compose myself. I cannot expect to persuade my readers of this fact, I know. Not at this distance. If you lived near me, I would come to your house and force you to make heels until you admitted that I am right, but as it stands, I will just have to show you my socks a few more times.

I'm still using sport weight and #6 needles, so I'm working on 40 stitches. I did the heel flap back and forth on 20 stitches (that is, half the total number). I knitted in heel-flap stitch until I got a square -- roughly 18 rows. Now I am turning the heel. Here they are, the dread "short rows"! I have done a wrong side row: P12, p2tog,p1, turn. "Turn" just means turn the work over and go back the other way. You don't have to wrap things or make holes if you don't want decorative holes for some reason. You just turn around. Then on the right side, I have slipped the first stitch, k5, k2tog, k1, and turned the work over and gone back the other way. On the purl side, s1, p6, p2tog,p1, turn. Now here I am, ready to go back the other way on the right side. Do you have some yarn you need to swatch? Give it a try. I'll wait for you. Slip 1, k7, k2tog, k1, turn. Do you see a pattern here? Each time, you get up to the point where you turned on the previous row, knit (or purl) two together, one more stitch, and turn. So the next row will be s1, p8, p2tog,p1, turn. Then s1, k9, k 2tog, k1, turn (this time you are at the end of the row, so turning will not seem odd. Do it just the same way). S1, p10, p2tog, turn. S1, k10, k2tog, and stop. You have 12 stitches and you have turned the heel.

Now you pick up stitches along the edges of the heel flap, so that you can get a circle again. With this number of stitches, you will pick up ten. In the picture below, you see that I have picked up my ten stitches on the same needle I was using to turn the heel. If you are using a swatch and pretending, that's really all you can do. But you will notice that there aren't any holes, and it wasn't hard. If you are using bulky yarn or eyelash yarn or something, you might have holes, but you shouldn't be using that kind of yarn for socks anyway.

 In this picture, I have the ends of my sleeve needle tucked into the sock so they won't get in my way while I do the heel. You can see that I have just picked up the stitches along the edge of my square there, and they have now met up with the stitches for the front of the sock, which have been waiting patiently while I turned the heel.

In detective novels, the old ladies say, "Just a moment dear, while I turn the heel," and then carry on exposing the murderer.

If you are really doing a sock, you have 20 stitches across the front to knit, so you knit them up onto another needle. You can now pick up ten stitches along the other edge of the heel flap. This will get your sock back into a circle, so you can finish knitting it.

Notice that I have put those 10 stitches on a third needle. Now, using that third needle, I knit up half the stitches from the heel -- 6. I now have 16 stitches each on the side needles and 20 on the front. I am now ready to do the gussett. For the gussett, you knit the first needle till you have three stitches left. K2tog, k1. Knit clear across those 20 front stitches. Knit 1 stitch on the third needle, and then ssk. Knit to the end of that needle. You see that you are decreasing at each side, one stitch away from the front. Knit one round plain. Then decrease again. Do this until you are back to your original 40 stitches. Put the whole schlemozzle back on the sleeve needle and knit till it's as long as you want, and do the toe.

Another of my favorite knitting blogs is Dweezy's. http://www.xanga.com/item.aspx?user=dweezy&tab=weblogs&uid=196578722 This link will take you to the startling tale of PETA and the floppy Aussie sheep. It reminds me of the story "Alligator River" which we used to use in writing classes. In the story, Greg (or whatever his name was) crossed an alligator-filled river, leaving his sweetheart Rosemary on the other side. Rosemary asked Sinbad if she could borrow his boat to follow Greg. Sinbad says yes, if she will sleep with him. Rosemary consults her friend Dave who says, "Oh, well, that's your problem." Rosemary sleeps with Sinbad, follows Greg, tells him -- and he casts her off. The point of the story was to generate thrilling discussions on who was most wrong and who the least wrong in this group of people. Then everyone had to write an essay.

Dweezy's story is like that. Is breeding floppy sheep worse than threatening to poke wool knitters with pointy sticks? Is encouraging the extinction of sheep by giving up the use of wool (hint, O sentimentalists: few people will keep unemployed sheep for pets. Do you think they will go into the woods and compete with deer for food?) worse than arguing with your hairstylist? We need to get our favorite xanga philosophers, The Water Jar and The Antithesis of Emo, to debate this point. Only after the moral questions have been resolved will we ask Leonidas to find out whether there is any truth to the story of the Aussie sheep. We would not want to spoil the philosophical question with mere facts.

(The Antithesis of Emo is here: http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=antithesis_of_emo The other folks are at left under "subscriptions." You needed a few more blogs to read while you knit your socks, right?)

Dweezy is making spiral socks, which I have made from Melanie Falick's Kids Knitting. They are fun to make. He also has an excellent tip for sock-knitters who want their socks to match: make sure you have enough yarn for two socks before you begin. Between his tips and mine, I think you should have no trouble.