It is our old friend Hopkins. Two months ago, with one sleeve left to go, I abandoned Hopkins for a T-shirt and a prayer shawl. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

For future reference, it was not a good idea. I have misplaced the last skein of the yarn and am just trusting that it will turn up. I have forgotten what size needles I was using, or possibly my gauge has changed slightly in this warmer and more relaxed time of year, and I cannot match my previous gauge -- and since I sewed all the other pieces together, I cannot get accurate measurements to compare this sleeve with the completed one.

I am forging ahead nonetheless. I have frogged once already, but am now past the colorwork. Here is Hopkins at an earlier stage of life, draped over a toy sheep, to refresh your memory. Hopkins is being made in Wool-Ease, on #3 needles at the moment, but who knows. The pattern is Siv from Viking Patterns for Knitting, and the colorwork is a combination of several different charts from Alice Starmore's The Celtic Collection.

The boys have two days of exams and then will be through with school. There is talk of a trip to War Eagle Mill for the vacationers in the group. I am heading back to work. My husband is already nearly late for work. You can  wear white shoes now, if you like. (Except, I suppose, those in the Southern Hemisphere. They must have some other rule.)

There were indeed pineapple boats. Also many other foods, including deviled eggs, cabbage salad, baked beans, sauteed mushrooms, and tri-colored Jello which probably no one will eat. I always make fancy Jello for holidays, just as a table decoration. It makes the whole thing look festive, and contains absolutely no real food, so you don't have to feel bad about throwing it away the next day.

The burgers were on their way in when these pictures were taken. My husband grilled them while the rest of us fixed up the other stuff -- '50s style? 

The plates say "yum-yum" and the cups and napkins say "eat," which is almost though not quite as amusing as pirate tableware.

 Say nothing about simple carbs or saturated fats. Just notice all the fruits and vegetables.

Dinner is Gai Pad Khing, with brown rice, cucumbers, and Fresh Fruit Indulgence. Daddy is cooking. This is partly because we want Dr. Drew to enjoy some authentic Southeast Asian home cooking and partly because Mama has cooked quite enough for one day. I did the chopping, though. We also decorated for the occasion. Ahem, that paper bell hanging on the doorknob of the china cabinet is the decoration. It was in the house when we moved in, and we have faithfully brought it out for all patriotic celebrations since. 

There were no outdoor games, except for #1 son, who went off to the park to play volleyball with his buds. The rest of us took the dogs for a walk to our neighborhood park, where they had the thrill of seeing some woodland mammal (woodchuck?) waddle off into the creek. The dogs nearly expired from excitement, and felt that their entire day was worthwhile, even though they spent so much of it watching people eat delicacies they were not allowed to share.

The rest of our day was spent in reading, knitting, playing video games, practicing piano, napping, chatting, and otherwise lolling about. Not everyone participated in all these activities. Each joined in according to his or her particular tastes and skills, as it should be. Fiona demonstrated her extremely good form in the general lolling about category.

I am thinking today of my father, who is buried in a military cemetery, and my son-in-law, who is safe on a submarine in an undisclosed but presumably watery location. My mother says that on Decoration Day (which I think was the precursor of Memorial Day) when she was a child, they would take a picnic into the cemetery and decorate the graves of their family members. We have a convenient local cemetery, but no family members there. I suppose we could have taken our goodies there and disported ourselves among strangers' gravestones, but it doesn't seem the same, somehow.

Well, I must get back to my heavy schedule of hanging around. I hope all of you have enjoyed your weekends as much as I have.

Here is the completed scarf, with fringe. I had never added fringe to anything before... just never came up. I may do it again at some point in the future, though. Today I will take the shawl to Mrs. M, the Keeper of the Prayer Shawls.

Yesterday I picked Partygirl up for lunch, thus getting an opportunity to stroll through her rose garden. I call it hers, but it is her husband who actually grows the roses. It has beds the size of mine, with equal numbers of roses -- but she has dozens of beds. It's pleasant to stroll through.

Then I spent some time in my own garden, and finally came in to the cool of the house to read The Serpent in the Garden,  which is largely about the growing of pineapples. So a fairly garden-filled day overall. I find that many of the other xangans are out in their gardens, too. There we all are, in our respective gardens enjoying the fresh air and sunshine and colors and scents. "Do you question," a character in Gleeson's book asks, "that gardening is a prerequisite of civilized society?"

The book is irritating to me, though, because the language seems unnatural. It sounds as though Gleeson is using words she isn't really comfortable with -- as though she wrote it one way and then went with a thesaurus and changed "face" to "physiognomy" and so forth. The choice of words is just slightly off all the way through -- as though she were trying to make a certain impression, but without really being familiar enough with the characters to make it convincing. I like words, I don't object to people using words not only for the sake of communication but also for mere fun, but the unnaturalness of the language intrudes into the story. I may or may not finish it.

In the evening a group of boys came over. They are still sleeping on the sofa bed, though Dr. Drew is expected momentarily. Then we will have church and then the preparations for tomorrow's cookout will commence. I intend to do everything in a lazy and desultory fashion over the course of the next 24 hours, so that the overall sense of a leisurely weekend will not be shattered.

There may very well be pineapple boats.

Reading this book about food in the '50s (an excellent book, by the way), I was reminded of Memorial Day 2000. That year, my friend S and I were working together at the historical museum, doing educational events. We had done Native American weekends and Sheep to Shawl afternoons and Victorian Tea Parties and Edwardian living history tours and suchlike all year. Come Memorial Day weekend, our children wanted to do a 1950s theme at home.

I'm afraid our first response was a pair of blank stares. S and I are not old enough to remember the 1950s, but we are too young to have studied it in school. Search your memeory, and you will probably find that you have a gap like that, too. The decade right before you were born is probably a bit of a mystery to you. So there we were thinking helplessly of the 1950s, and we came up with James Bond, the Cold War, and -- given the Memorial Day weekend -- cookouts. We decided we'd have a cookout.

S had a drawer full of vintage aprons and I had the Betty Crocker Cookbook, so we felt prepared. We made Pineapple Boats. When I was a little girl, my sister and I used to look at the color photographs in the Betty Crocker Cookbook, marvelling at the sophisticated dishes there presented. And the most glamorous of them all was surely the Pineapple Boat. This dish involves cutting a fresh pineapple in half, with the leaves still attached, and filling it with fruit salad. You serve it with the leaves on, for that exotic tropical air. Did people ever make Pineapple Boats in real life? I don't know. If you are cutting up a fresh pineapple for your fruit salad anyway, it isn't really any extra trouble. And it does look festive.

We also made grilled chicken, devilled eggs, baked beans, cole slaw, three-bean salad, potato salad, and fresh berry cobbler. I don't think that any of my readers will have a personal recollection of a 1950s cookout, but if so, I would love to hear whether or not we got the menu right. Something from the Oven doesn't talk much about side dishes for cookouts -- they say "the main event was protein and fire." But we -- trying to follow the '50s theme -- had four males outside grilling chicken and five females in the kitchen making everything else.

We intend to cook out this weekend as well, but we are planning on burgers (please insert KC joke here). Probably also Fresh Fruit Indulgence. We could make Pineapple Boats. There will however be only two females present, so we have to draw the line somewhere.

No muppets were harmed in the production of this prayer shawl. Of course, you are right. Muppet pelts do automatically imply dead Muppets. This had not occurred to me, and I am terribly sorry for spoiling anyone's breakfast.

#2 daughter agreed to model the prayer shawl for me, in this Zorro-like pose, to save it from another terminally boring photo. It still looks like a blue rectangle of muppet wool (wool, not pelts), but at least it is being swirled about in an exciting fashion. I have gone against my normal policy of not putting any faces in my posts, at least so far as to show a quarter of her face, but if she is being paid to stand around being looked at (which she is, at the mall), then she might as well model a shawl here.

In other animal-welfare news, here is Nadia, the cat. She is sitting in the sink, for reasons best known to herself. She has settled in, to the extent of roaming all around the house whenever Toby is in his crate, and hanging out with the people. She still hides whenever Toby come near her, spits at him, and otherwise shows that she has not forgiven him. As for Toby, he tries to be good, he really tries, but if at any time he is actually face to face with her, he breaks into a fusillade of barking. He cannot control himself. Sigh.

The back garden, in the rain.Well, a very small part of the back garden, obviously. Most of it is stuff like tomatoes, green beans, strawberries, peppers, and cilantro, none of which looks picturesque so early in the season. Or at least not when I am taking the pictures.

And here are some bits of the front garden in the rain, too. The flowers in these pictures are lavender, dianthus, lamastria, violets, columbine, and some rose petals that got knocked down by the deluge.

I love the rain. I love the smell of the garden in the rain. There is nothing about rain that I do not like. Having said this, I will now join the rest of the town in hoping that the rain will end in time for a lovely Memorial Day weekend. We will not be able to play croquet and boules in the rain.

Dr. Drew is coming to visit us. I have a sneaky plan to get the kids to play boules and croquet rather than basketball, because Dr. D is way taller than the rest of us and thus has an advantage in basketball. Well, yes, I believe he also played the game at school, giving him a further advantage. But will he have played croquet? Will he be accustomed to boules? Does he have badminton skills? Perhaps not. Plotting against guests in this way, with croquet, inevitably puts me in mind of Patrick Campbell's hilarious essays on this subject. If you have not read them, then you should. Check your library, as he is out of print. Is this because fewer people nowadays are plotting against their houseguests, or because fewer people play croquet? Frankly, Dr. D and Pokey entirely skunked me and #1 son at Catchphrase too, so it may be a vain hope that we will be able to uphold the honor of the household with mere croquet. We may have to descend to Scrabble.

Yesterday was unusual in that I heard someone say "Hot damn!" in choir practice for the first time ever.

The director also announced that we were going to "work on attacks, cutoffs, vowels ... and all the things that make music music." I have forgotten all the things he listed, but they were things this choir used to ignore completely. I am very happy. What's more, the old guard of the choir seem happy, too. And the choir is growing.

The older gentlemen in the back row continue to talk nonstop. I did whisper to them at one point that the second sopranos couldn't hear their notes, but I don't think they heard me. I'm glad of that. I don't want to spoil the fun, and I shouldn't have fussed at them. But I think the fact that they didn't hear me says something -- I think perhaps they are a bit deaf. Maybe they don't realize that there is music going on while they're talking, Maybe they think they are speaking so softly that no one else can hear them.

Here is an impressionist toy camera picture of the prayer shawl. It doesn't really matter how the picture is, because it continues to be a large blue rectangle, made apparently of muppet pelts. I am finishing up the second skein. It is measured by holding it between outstretched hands -- when it goes from one hand to the other, it is finished. This is a nice way of measuring.

Your Political Profile

Overall: 5% Conservative, 95% Liberal

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Chanthaboune has the link for this quiz. It is entirely scientific and accurate, as all blog quizzes are.

Work, for me, often involves close interaction with boxes and ladders, so it is nothing unusual for me to notice at some point during the day that I am covered with dirt. Yesterday, since I was going out in the evening, I had a mild flash of irritation at the fact. It also brought the destroyed jeans phenomenon back to my mind, and I mused on it while labelling books.

I think I have it figured out. We had been thinking, why pay eighty bucks for something that is already worn out? Reflecting on this naturally brought to mind #2 son, whose jeans are so frequently in a destroyed state. This is because he walks, cycles, skates, trampolines, does gymnastics and rockclimbing, gardens, climbs fences, and also does whatever it is that gives him jagged wounds which he dismisses with "Oh, I don't remember how that happened."

The wearers of pre-destroyed jeans may spend their time in front of the TV, eating Funyums and watching reruns of "Whose Line Is It Anyway," but their jeans will say that they revel in extreme sports, saving dolphins, fighting evil -- something, in short, more exciting than what they really do. That could be worth $80. I think the authentic adventure is worth a lot more, but you know how opinionated I am.

#2 son's packet of Summer Institute papers arrived. He will be spending three weeks on the campus of the local university, studying architecture. He has chosen his service project, planting flowers and landscaping in local parks. #1 son has applied for a summer job at the local nursery. I am glad to see a love for growing things in them.

I have finished cutting the quilt. #2 daughter got tired of it early on, and I did the majority of it, so the level of accuracy may not be what it should be. I also do not have all 1,260 triangles required. I have enough for 32 blocks, not 35. I may be able to find a fabric that will meld, if not match, or I may just make it smaller than the pattern calls for. It is good to have that element of suspense when beginning a project, isn't it? Well, maybe not. Certainty that all the little packets of triangles, some of which I present to you on the left, will actually become a beautiful quilt, might be better. However, I have made a number of beautiful quilts, and most of them have had a greater suspense factor than this one, so I am not worrying.

Here is the grunge sock with a hole in it. A hole and a bit of a run. Right at the toe. I could embrace its grunge nature, following the destroyed jeans look with a destroyed sock look. I could throw it away and knit another. But there is a third option.

Just frog the sock to the beginning of the run and put it right back on the needles. Now it is simple to knit a new toe. Another advantage of hand-knitted socks.

Beyond Civilization has (after misquoting Marx -- you know, it is so easy these days to check quotations that there is really no excuse for misquoting) settled down to cases. This is what I have been wanting it to do, I guess, but the truth is that now it is boring. Quinn says that neo-tribalism consists of working together with others to make a living at something you enjoy, instead of working merely for a paycheck and an unsatisfying quest for more and ever more stuff. Well, yes, we know that, don't we?

Actually, lots of people don't know that. And Quinn's version of this message, in contrast to most versions of this message that are out there, embraces homeless scavengers and slackers as well as artisans and entrepreneurs. He seems to have dropped the hunter-gatherer ethos entirely. Well, it wasn't making sense, was it? But I was enjoying it, and looking forward to the point at which he recommended living on wild berries (not very tasty, really) and squirrels.

He is emphasizing, in this section, that there is no one right way to live, and indeed that diversity of lifestyle is as essential for the human bits of the ecosystem as biodiversity is for the ecosystem as a whole.

Have you heard about the crocheted hyperbolic planes at the Smithsonian? #2 son pointed them out to me in Wired magazine. I like the resourcefulness of using crochet to make math concrete (using quilts in math lessons is fairly common, but this is the first time I've seen crochet used for this purpose).

Indeed, resourcefulness is the theme that links the bits of this post together (to the extent that they are linked). I wish you a resourceful day, and leave you with a gratuitous garden picture. Azalea, boxwood, and sweet woodruff, with a bit of phlox in the corner. In case you were wondering. I know I always do.

Don't you love lying in bed listening to the rain? However, since we had thunderstorms all night, I am beginning the week in a sleep-deprived state. It is also hot. Hot rain seemed strange to me when I arrived here, but now I know it well.

We had the Jack Mitchell jazz band in church yesterday, playing Hoagy Carmichael and "When the Saints Come Marching In." The anthem was Tommy Dorsey's "Precious Lord." There were art projects by the children, and homemade pecan pie. It was a farewell to our dear pastor, and there was a lot of laughing and crying going on.

I'm still knitting the prayer shawl (the prayer shawl ministry gave the pastor a special one for a going-away gift) and cutting the quilt. I defrosted the refrigerator, made grass-stain-scented bubblebath, and traded new-animal stories with #1 daughter, who has gotten a Corgi. This would be a good morning to stay at home, listening to the rain and reading, and indeed the kids are having a very hard time getting out of bed.

In Beyond Civilization, Quinn has done a recap of New World civilizations, pointing out the very interesting fact that it is customary to start such descriptions in the active voice -- they did this, they did that -- and to finish them in the passive voice --  the civilizations were destroyed, the cities were abandoned. Quinn claims that the same folks who did the building of these civilizations did the destruction as well, choosing to give up art and mathematics (his examples) and especially the dread agriculture, and melt back into the jungle. In reading Ishmael, I had said that Quinn might well have chosen fiction as his medium because that allows you to do without references and proof, but he doesn't bother with references or proof here either. He does cite Richard Dawkins, a favorite author of mine, but only as the source of the term "meme." Otherwise, he continues to throw out unsupported assertions and then base his arguments upon them.

The point of his history lesson is to say that people have, in the past, made the choice to abandon civilization, and we could do the same. He then moves on to his concept of neo-tribalism. A tribe, he says, is a group of equals working together to make a living. I work, by this definition, in a tribe -- and indeed he agrees that small business often start out as tribes. Then they become, according to Quinn, a civilization, with low-level workers toiling to build a pyramid for Bill Gates as their predecessors did for the pharoahs.

An interesting concept. If our store is an example of neo-tribalism (or his example, circus people), however, his concurrent them of anti-agriculturalism makes no sense whatever. We do indeed band together to make a living, but we are all down at the farmers' market every week supporting local agriculture.

I guess I'm still waiting for this to make sense.