It was the fashion, in Victorian times, for people to visit some exotic locale for a fortnight and then write a travel book on the subject, filled with information and misinformation and hints and tips for future travellers.

I can follow this custom, because yesterday I went to the mall. I do not normally go to the mall. Many people say this, in the area where I live, but it turns out that the words do not mean the same thing when I say them as when these other people say them. I could tell, in conversations about my upcoming visit to the mall, that other people who say "I don't go to the mall," mean "I generally shop elsewhere." The expression on The Empress's face, for example,when I told her that I had bought my Mother-of-the-Bride dress online, showed that it was eccentric of me.

When I say that I don't go to the mall, it is the same as when I say, "I don't go to the water treatment facility." I went there three years ago with my daughter when she registered for china before her wedding. Otherwise, I don't go to the mall.

#2 daughter and I went there yesterday to buy clothes. I also do not buy clothes. My entire clothes shopping consists of approximately ten minutes each year around my birthday when I go online and buy the same three items in different colors from what I bought the previous year. I wear them until they simply cannot be worn any more. #2 daughter tells me that most of what I own now falls into that category. She claims that I should only wear the things that fit me. She even thinks that I should wear something different from the three items I have bought online for the past decade. Go figure.

So it was an interesting trip for me. I learned that shirts for women this year all have darts. I learned that most of the stores that cater to young people are selling -- and in fact showing in their windows -- jeans with holes in them. These are the kinds of jeans that I secretly throw away in the laundry room after I have told my kids that they are too tattered to wear and they have said, "But it's the style!" I learned that it is the dernier cri to smell like cake.

There were people I knew there at the mall. Why I found this surprising I do not quite know. I live in a small town; there are people I know absolutely everywhere, so why not at the mall? In one clothing shop, there was a woman I know actually working there. I introduced her to #2 daughter and we had one of those Southern conversations in which you explore and clarify all the connections among all the participants in the conversation, down to "best friend of the daughter of the lady who had the bridal shower for your sister." Once we all knew who we were, she found linen shirts for me, a skill I had not known she possessed. I am now a reformed character. I have shopped for items not strictly required for the preservation of life (NB: I consider books and yarn to be essential for the preservation of life).

#2 daughter suggested to me, quite gently, that I ought to go back to the mall sometime in the next year and buy other garments. We were, at the time, sitting quietly having fruit salad for lunch in an effort to combat my desperate desire to GET OUT OF THERE, so I found her suggestion a bit implausible, but I did not burst into tears at the thought. I was even able, following our lunch, to continue shopping.

The shop that #2 daughter is going to work in plays music so loud that your initial feeling is that you are in a dance club. I have not been to a dance club since they were called discos, so this is probably not the right term. But I'm sure you know what I mean. Low lights, throbbing music so loud that you cannot talk -- there should have been dancing. Instead there were the Brand Reps standing at the entrance staring vacantly until a person appeared, at which point they would flash a blinding smile. Then there were the Impacts scurrying around arranging things. It was like a beehive.

We also went into the video shop and told the gentleman there that we were in search of manly movies with little dialogue. He was able to accomodate us immediately. There was in fact a rack of just such movies. Neflix is wonderful, but they cannot do this. Some things are just better with actual human beings in them, aren't they?

Following this foray into the unknown reaches of our town, we came home and worked on cutting the quilt. I offer you an impressionistic toy camera shot of the mess we have made.

If you read my xanga and have total recall, you will know that I have a bad habit of making decisions about projects as I go along instead of beforehand. This often causes, if not problems, at least suspense. In this case, I had planned -- and bought fabric for -- a throw using the traditional

Windblown Square pattern. However, I found in my quilting book a handsome version of this called Windblown Shadows. It has a particular color combination and setting which is particularly charming. It also has modern cutting directions. It also is a bed-size quilt. So it was evident almost immediately that there was not enough fabric for it.

#2 daughter is doing the major cutting. This quilt requires hundreds of 3 7/8" squares. This is not the kind of number I can be expected to work with successfully for long. And there is not enough fabric to accomodate my errors. So she is doing that part, while I scrounge the scraps to cut extra triangles individually in hopes of eking out enough. We did go back to the shop to try to buy more of the fabric of which there is too little, by the way, but they had none. It has been discontinued. I bought the fat quarters for this in another state, so I can hardly get more of those fabrics. We will not know until all [36 x 35] triangles have been cut, whether there is actually a problem or not. I am planning to be resourceful, and contemplating various options.

The Celtic Cross quilt? It continues to taunt me with its evil laughter. I have made no further progress on it. Nor have I given up. It is in limbo.

There is a potluck today at the church, and a jazz band. I had better go cook something.

#1 daughter and I finished Ishmael together. She is now moving on to the rest of the trilogy, but I am going directly to the nonfiction.

Ishmael suggests that civilization itself -- the process of giving up tribal society for agricultural and perhaps eventually industrial society -- is not a worthwhile endeavor. Civilizations fall, Quinn says, because the very premise of civilization is impracticable. Having presented his ideas on this, he then offers a solution. Well, sort of. His solution is that everyone should read Ishmael. With our consciousness raised, we will then be resourceful enough to move beyond civilization to some sort of neo-tribalism. And this will result not only in greater happiness for humanity (or "man," as Quinn persists in calling us), but also in a renewed process of evolution for other creatures. In Beyond Civilization, he confirms that he thought getting people to read his books would lead inexorably to this happy ending, but that he now recognizes that it did not. That's as far as I've gotten.

Quinn's initial idea had some flaws, of course. For one thing, he is sort of echoing one of my favorite cartoons, which has a couple of lab-coated guys at a chalkboard where there is a set of formulae with the words "at this point, a miracle occurs" in the middle. "That part may need more explication," one says to the other. If you want to say that as soon as all the elect are saved, there will be a new heaven and a new earth, you have a prediction complete with the implication that a miracle is going to occur, since God is part of the prediction. Quinn's idea that the world will be changed because people read his books, however, definitely requires further explication.

Another problem is that his ideas are not new. People did not listen to Thomas Malthus and say, "Hey, he's right! Let's give up agriculture!" Why should adding a telepathic gorilla make such a difference?

Personally, I am inclined to think that agriculture's main effect is not the inexorable progress toward destruction of the natural world, but the opportunity for humans to specialize in their work. That is, agriculture allows a small proportion of the population to provide food for the population as a whole, thus freeing other people to knit, make pottery, and write oratorios.

This is not to say that Quinn's work has not had profound effects on some of his readers. You can visit his website to see evidence of this.

Meanwhile, Saturday is beginning here. That means a day of agriculture (ahem, gardening), hunting and gathering (grocery shopping), and the restoration of civilization (housework). Also, #2 daughter is intending to make me go to the mall and buy clothes. In retaliation, I will make her help me cut my quilt. Work on the prayer shawl, walking the dogs in the park, mending a bicycle tire, and watching "Vanity Fair" are also on my list for today. My husband will continue training the animals in hopes of reaching a state of peaceful coexistence which will allow Nadia the cat to stay here with us. The boys are visiting friends in the country. I hope you all have equally pleasant plans.

Here is #2 daughter (in an unrecognisable photograph) picking strawberries with roses and herbs looking on.

Here is an impressionistic toy camera shot of the roses. I like a garden to be all wild jungle or at least cottage-garden looking. It is supposed to look as though everything is growing there natural and wild, although obviously it isn't. There is no place in which these particular plants would all grow together -- and of course the trellis is a dead giveaway. 

Here is Nadia, a sweet cat whom the Princess gave to us last night. My husband spent the entire evening training the dogs to tolerate her. Fiona, the smart one, has learned the lesson completely, but poor Toby is still working on it. He is trying very hard. My husband put the cat in his lap and had Toby sit at his feet, and said calming things to them until Nadia would look Toby in the face and Toby would sit quietly. We all chorused "Good dog!" and praised him, and indeed, he looked as though he was calmly making friends with the cat.

In reality, however, he was a quivering mass of dog nerves, filled with a desire to play with the new toy -- that is, Nadia. My husband also says that he is very jealous. We are hoping that he will be able to adjust and that everyone will be happy together.

The other new denizen of chez Fibermom is a pedal steel guitar. #1 son developed a sudden and inexplicable desire to play one. We're hoping for good things there, too. He already plays guitar and bass, so in some ways it was a logical next step.

Ishmael, in the section I have just read, has argued that pre-agricultural societies were more affluent than we are, because they had a great deal of leisure and plenty of food. They did not, I think, have pedal steel guitars.

This is the prayer shawl, being modeled by a toy sheep sitting on a piano. It hardly matters, because basically it is just a blue rectangle, gradually getting bigger.

This is being done in blue Homespun on needles too large for my knitting gauge to measure -- maybe 13s. It is in the special prayer shawl stitch (here is more information about the project) of K3, P3 over 57 stitches, beginning every row with K3. And it is a nice, fluffy shawl. About 2/3 finished.

Homespun is not a yarn I usually use, and not the thing I would have chosen for a shawl, either, but I think it was a good choice. It is forgiving, so knitters of different ability levels can succeed with it. It is inexpensive, so lots of shawls can be made. It is machine wash and dry, so people don't have to be careful with it. You don't have to worry about allergies. And it comes in lots of colors and is readily available in most communities.

Knitting a large rectangle does not afford many thrills and chills, so I haven't written much about it. But I am knitting it.

#2 daughter and I have added an abs class to our morning workout. This involves large beach ball things, big enough to sit on. Then, once you are sitting on it and giggling slightly, you have to roll down so that your back is on the ball and your legs out in front of you. At once you have to concentrate more so you don't fall off the ball. Now, you have to flail around with your extremities in various surprising ways while music filled with indecent suggestions plays loudly.

After a bit, you lie down on the ground. Do not get carried away with relief, because at this point you are expected to lift this enormous ball with your feet, continuing the flailing about with other objects. There is no way to accomplish this with dignity.

I am the oldest person in the class, though comfortingly not the least fit.The instructor is an extremely perky blonde. All parts of her body are perky. Her knees are perky. She has us do The Plank with no apparent sense of remorse.

After two days of this, #2 daughter and I have discovered that you use your abs in all kinds of situations in which we had not before realized it. Like laughing, shifting gears, lifting boxes, and sitting forward in your chair at choir rehearsal. Little stabs of pain accompany us through our days. We are thinking about how strong we will be by the end of the summer. We are thinking of skipping it this morning.

Before you make the effort to read this, I should warn you that when I told it to Chanthaboune, she said, "Have you noticed how hard it is sometimes to recognize the interesting bits?" When I explained why it was really very exciting, she said, "Did you know that you can open bananas from the bottom?" But I think it is a worthwhile object lesson in how assumptions affect research.

Yesterday was family history day, and I was following up the new direction LikeWowMom pointed out to me. I have a branch of the family that I have always thought of as "the Midwesterners," whom I have found hard to get information on. They are all in Missouri by the beginning of the 20th century, and I can follow them back to Illinois and Ohio, but there -- in the mid-1800s -- I stick. 

As I worked, I realized that I had hindered my study of my Midwesterners by making two false assumptions.

First, I was thinking of them all as Midwesterners. Here is what the Yarn Harlot says about regions of the U.S.: "I have remarked several times now that (not that I would ever dream of pressuring you) it would be much easier for travellers if you would contemplate dividing your country into geographic regions based on geography, rather than attitude. "  She has a point. Even books on the regions of the United States do not always agree with one another on the divisions. But it is not only attitude and subcultures. Often there are historical differences that affect the character of a region.

Now, here is what I know about the Midwest: Missouri. I know a lot about Missouri. I figured that the Midwest just went on from there until you hit the West, the East, or Canada. As you travel north, I thought, it gets colder and the people get that really cute accent, but otherwise it is basically all the same region.

This is false. Ohio and Illinois, where my people were hanging out, are part of the Great Lakes Region, not the same thing at all as the Plains States. They had an entirely different sort of history in the 19th century, filled with industry and technology (they were building the Erie Canal, for one thing) and a great influx of immigrants through Pennsylvania.

This leads me to my second false assumption.

United States history is largely a story of migratory patterns. The one I am familiar with in my own family history is the classic. You are in Western Europe in the 1600s or 1700s, being a younger son or a religious dissident or a criminal or something, so you head for the colonies. Some of your offspring stay in the place where you settled, and some move south. Then, in the 1800s, some of their offspring move west. Most moved pretty well straight across the country once they headed west. The folks from North Carolina went to Louisiana, the folks from Virginia went to Missouri. Once they got there, they did much the same things their grandparents and great-grandparents had done back when they were colonists.

While I have lumped my Midwesterners together, the fact is that the ones who went from Virginia to Missouri behaved in this very typical way, growing sorghum and so on. But then there were the others. These folks who turned up in Ohio in the 1800s, claiming on the census to have been born in Maryland or that their parents were from Pennsylvania.

I had always figured that those folks had colonist forebears in Maryland or Pennsylvania, and that they were being ordinary pioneers, travelling west through Ohio and Illinois to Missouri. But somehow when they got to Ohio, they behaved oddly. They began romping back and forth from one state to another, turning up on the census with husband and wife living apart in different states, and sometimes not turning up on the census at all. I could not imagine what was up with these folks. Were they merely more exciting than the southerners? Was there something in the air in Ohio?

Once LikeWowMom clued me in to the canals, I began to see another possibility. These people were not descended from colonists. They were not farmers. They were probably the children of later immigrants. And if they worked on canals -- well, many things became clearer. After all, it is possible that you could build a canal by getting all the local farm boys down to the canal to work on the bits in their own towns, hoping they would all end up forming a canal in the end, but it may well be that there were crews of canal workers. If so, they might have travelled from one place to another. When the canal they were working on was finished, they might have gone to another place, where another canal was being built. Depending how long it took to build a canal, they might even have left their wives and children with some relatives while they were working on it.

Obviously, I have to learn more about this, but I have found that the towns where my folks lived in Ohio and Illinois were the sites of canals built in the 19th century. It seems that I may have been looking in the wrong places for these ancestors. I need to look at 19th century immigrants, for example. And perhaps there are records of canal workers to check. I may still never find out more about these folks and their heritage, but at least I can now stop looking in the wrong places.

Ishmael says something about these migration patterns, by the way. He says that tribal peoples could not have gone, as my ancestors did, from being Virginians to being Missourians. If the Shoshone got crowded, they could not decide to go be Arapaho. This, Quinn says, provided a natural incentive to keep populations small and distinct, and thus lessened the chances of famine. In fact, tribal peoples moved in on one another with some degree of frequency (all the "native" peoples where I live, for example, moved here from other parts of the country), though never with the fervor shown by the European immigrants to the Americas. "Fervor" is probably the wrong word, but I don't want to suggest that they were vulpine or rapacious or anything, becase they honestly believed they were doing the right thing. And I am descended from them. And there is every evidence that, in spite of their doing things which we now regard with horror, they were essentially nice people. No doubt we are currently doing many things which our own descendants will regard with horror.

While contemplating these deep questions, #2 daughter and I made a CD case for a new graduate friend of ours from a pattern we found at this marvelous site. I am directing you to their intriguing philosophy page, where they talk about materialism, and why you should make things yourself. We added a CD from the group Apocolyptica, which is a heavy metal cello ensemble. Really.

This book was recommended to me by The Princess, daughter of The Empress. While you  might think, if you have noticed what I read, that there are no depths of literature to which I haven't already sunk, the truth is that I have read little in the "chick lit" genre. The Bridget Jones books, of course, but I did not notice that they were an entirely new genre. It seemed to me that there had been fiction of that kind for centuries. That was before the marketing division got to it, obviously. The Shopaholic is witty, though, and well-written. I always enjoy books in which the characters are self-deceptive -- it seems like a challenging task, to make it clear to your readers that the character is deceiving herself.

I am also still reading the Daniel Quinn books. So far, the most interesting idea I've found in Ishmael is the notion that unlimited competition reduces diversity. Actually, I find the notion that increasing the food supply leads to increased population and therefore there will always be famine an interesting one, too, but I recognized it as the work of Thomas Malthus. So I figure the idea about reducing diversity is not a new one, either. I just hadn't read it before, or at least not formulated in that way. I think it is true, though.

In fact, Candyfreak reported that there were 100,000 new candy bars developed in the 20th century, and now they are nearly all gone. This is the result of competition run amuck, leaving us with fewer choices. I didn't warn you about the potential dangers of Candyfreak when I recommended it. The obvious one is that it might make you want to eat chocolate, but this is counteracted by the natural response of nausea when you read about that much sugar. The remaining danger is that you will want to read the funny parts to people who are trying to watch TV or play games or talk to you about something, and they will lose patience with you.

Diversity is a good thing, though. There are ecological advantages to biodiversity, of course, and there are philosophical and aesthetic advantages to cultural diversity. I'm not sure what the advantage would be to having 100,000 different candy bars available to us, but it sounds better to me. I think it was better when every town had a couple of little bookstores and they were different from one another, and from the ones in the next town.

We have an odd new poster at work that says "DIVERSITY" down the side with the words coming off the initials: "Different Individuals Valued Equally Regardless of Skin, Intellect, Talents, or Years." I found this odd because I tend to think of diversity, in humans, in terms of ethnic, religious, and philosophical differences. Age, okay. But is diversity really about valuing people equally regardless of their talents? Maybe so. This could be something for me to strive for, I guess. I tend to admire competence a lot more than incompetence. However, we all have our own areas of competence, don't we? This approach to diversity, if it is indeed a newly shared American value, would go some way toward explaining our government.

In any case, the thing about unlimited competition is interesting to me. It happens that there are a number of different circumstances in my life and my reading that are bringing the issue to my mind. When Ishmael talks about unlimited competition, he is talking about greed -- the desire not merely to have one gazelle for your meal, but to have all the gazelles in case you want them in the future. Or all the land, because it is your Manifest Destiny. The Candyfreak describes himself as "somewhere left of Jesus" on the subject of greed and consumption, in spite of his having hoarded 36 boxes of dark chocolate Kit Kat bars, and writes about the permutations of thinking on that subject, and on economic competition, throughout the book. And the Shopaholic is a study in greed and excessive consumption. In the book that I am reading (perhaps the second in the series), she has decided to buy only what she needs, and we get to see the mental gymnastics she goes through in order to persuade herself that she needs more than she could ever actually use or afford. That's the topic in the books I am reading.

There are also magazines. #1 daughter has given me subscriptions to several lovely decorating magazines. Now, all advertising is designed to create dissatisfaction. That is its job. So when I keep seeing all these patio tables with fire pits -- like the one #1 daughter is buying -- it is natural that I should begin to think how nice it would be to have one of those, even though two weeks ago I had never heard of such a thing.

And #2 daughter has gotten a job as a "Brand Rep" at Abercrombie & Fitch. #1 daughter had this job, too, so I am familiar with it. A Brand Rep's job is to stand around in A&F clothing in the store, inducing dissatisfaction. My daughters are members of the small genotype that naturally wears a size 0. It is not their fault; they were born that way. #2 daughter in particular eats like a horse. She also has great skin. Hardly anyone looks like this -- and it is, at the moment, the arbitrary cultural definition of beauty --  so it is just about guaranteed that most girls who come into the store will feel dissatisfaction with themselves upon seeing her. They are supposed to respond to this by buying clothes that they may or may not need. Given that I -- a person who hates shopping and believes in consuming only according to actual need -- am seriously considering buying a patio table, this whole method probably works.

But there she is at work with a sign on the break room wall that says "Remember why you were hired -- because you look good!" Is this a decent way to make a living? #2 daughter is not vain or looks-obsessed, and she doesn't make other girls feel bad as part of her daily life. What will it do to her character to do this for her summer job?

And I also am having to buy clothes. #1 son is growing at an unreasonable rate and needs new clothes. I need new clothes, too, even though I bought several pieces of clothing. This is because I haven't bought any in so many years that it will take me a little while to catch up. And #2 daughter has to have some new clothes for her work, because the whole point is to stand around causing jealousy in A&F clothing. Now this is not about greed or excessive consumption. But it means that I am having to venture into arenas of competitive marketing which I normally avoid like the plague. Since I work in retail, I see all the tricks, so I cannot overlook it.

So, what with one thing and another, I am deep in contemplation of this issue. Have you any thoughts on the subject? If so, please share them. And just take one gazelle, okay?

I am still reading Ishmael. But I sort of ration my reading of that book. I'm trying to match #1 daughter, who has frequent impulses to throw the book across the room. So in between times I am reading other things, including Candyfreak, a book which I want to recommend to you.

I can recommend it enthusiastically, because it is funny, insightful, and filled with things about economics, history, geography, politics, and science, as well as being the record of a cross-country tour of specialty chocolate factories. I read this mostly out in the garden when I had intended to be inside cutting for my quilt.

The place where I live is like paradise in May. Walking to church in the morning, sitting out in the gardern in the afternoon with the sound of birdsong and the scents of roses and herbs and honeysuckle, with the boys picking and eating ripe strawberries -- time could stop right there and no one would miss it.

Well, I'm sure that's not true. But that's how I feel. Here are some impressionistic toy camera pictures of the garden.

Yesterday was Pentecost. The children's sermon began with a gourd for the kids to experience, a gourd with seeds dried inside it so it could be a rattle. The pastor talked about seeds with the kids. She made a loud, wild noise with the gourd, and then used it to keep time while singing. The children joined her, and then I did, and then gradually the whole congregation did. Afterward, she explained that the wild noise was like chaos, and the rhythmic playing was what happened when things were in the hands of a master. Some of the children said they had liked the chaos better, and we got to hear the pastor's infectious laugh, and then she led the children in a prayer thanking God for "giving us a way to live which brings good things into the world."

Meanwhile, Ishmael was about the idea that the world was disorderly until humans came along to name everything, and about the dangerous and mistaken idea of good and evil. The agricultural revolution and the idea of there being a right way to live were central themes in the section I read.

I love it when the same topic arises repeatedly in different places. Ishmael was talking about the natural laws of competition -- including the one that says that there is no benefit to entirely eliminating your competition. Then Candyfreak had many sections detailing the business practices that make it impossible for small companies to compete with huge ones, even when they have superior products and people actually want their products. Ishmael was talking about greed, and Candyfreak brings that notion up repeatedly in a variety of contexts. The juxtaposition was interesting.

 This was our psalm yesterday. It's one of my favorites, especially the part that says "the earth is full of your creatures.  There is the sea, vast and spacious,
       teeming with creatures beyond number—
       living things both large and small. There the ships go to and fro,
       and the leviathan, which you formed to frolic there. "

Don't you just love the leviathan frolicking? And the image of big things and small things, natural things and human-made things all sharing the space happily. This, again, is a topic in Ishmael.

We also had a blessing of prayer shawls. Mine is not finished yet, but Mrs. M called me to come up with the rest of the knitters -- or down, in my case, from the choir loft -- and it was nice to take part in the ceremony which I had seen from a back pew the first day I visited the church.

It was also very nice to have #2 daughter with me.

Here are the fruits of yesterday's labors (in an impressionistic picture from the toy camera). A finished and much-improved T-shirt, and a much-enlarged prayer shawl.

Ishmael has moved on to the next step of his argument. People, you will remember, believe that they are the pinnacle of creation, and are supposed to conquer the world. They do this by creating civilizations. Ishmael -- the gorilla -- likens this to early attempts at flying. Not understanding the laws of aerodynamics, he says, folks just jumped off cliffs and flapped their arms. Right up until they hit the ground, they thought they were flying. We, he says, are falling dangerously in our civilization, as so many have before us -- the Maya, etc. -- and still think we are flying. We see that other civilizations failed and disappeared, but we think that we can avoid the errors that caused that and go on happily forever -- but in fact, since we don't know the laws of how to live right, we are really just falling, not flying.

Again, it is an intriguing metaphor and an interesting point, but the gorilla continues to be irritating and the man continues to be stupid. The gorilla, while admonishing the man to try to think better and patronizingly assuring him that he doesn't have to remember everything or understand everything at once, is taking the man step by tedious step through the very simple idea he is trying to convey. The teaching process would be suitable, perhaps, for a class of children working through the discovery process for the principles of aerodynamics -- a set of knowledge which Ishamael refers to briskly as something everyone knows. But applied to this book's body of ideas, it causes the reader to think, "Oh, just say what you want to say, for heaven's sake!" Obviously, I am not achieving suspension of disbelief. But it is still an interesting book. I am eager to find out what the gorilla has in mind as the law of "how to live right."

One thing that struck me as I was talking with #1 daughter about the book yesterday was that both of us had assumed it was written a long time ago. "When Grandma graduated from High School," #1 daughter thought, and I would have said the 1950s, which is about the same time frame. In fact, this book appears to have been written about ten years ago. I think it is the language that gave us that impression. It sounds like something written in the 1950s.

The grandma in question did not like the book at all, and in fact did not make it through the first chapter. This really surprised me. She has a lot more tolerance for mysticism and romanticism than #1 daughter and I, and some of her own novels are dystopian and even include the Wise Teacher from Another Species motif (though hers are usually extraterrestrial).

If I can make guesses about what is coming next, it does seem to me that civilization itself -- the subduing of nature and building up of culture -- is to be the villain in the piece.

#2 daughter and I did not make it all the way through Coupling. We did, however, get to the used bookstore and buy every single novel there which we thought we might be able to read with enjoyment. I had a lot of credit for exchanged books, but it still cost more than we expected. We are stocked up for the summer, though, with light reading. We will alternate this with serious books others have suggested to us, including the Daniel Quinn books and Dr. Drew's Process Theology, which we are for some reason holding hostage here. I want it on record that I would have mailed it to him. We also have Candyfreak, a couple of things on physics and chemistry, and some biographies. We also made it to the quilt shop, where the eucalyptus-colored fabric had arrived. I have washed and dried it, and #2 daughter is going to help me today with the cutting, which requires a level of accuracy I do not naturally possess. We cleaned up enough for me to tolerate the mess.  And the Schwann's man arrived, replenishing the sweetitude with ice cream and sorbet. So, what with one thing and another, I think we are prepared for the summer.

If you have read this book, I want to hear your opinions on it.

#1 daughter recommended that we (the family) all read it. Not because she found it an important, paradigm-shifting sort of book, as many others apparently have, but because it infuriates her. I see her point. The form of this book -- at least in the part that I have read, and it shows no signs of changing -- is a conversation between an insufferably pompous and condescending gorilla and a man who seems to be making an effort to be as stupid as the gorilla wants him to be.

The first few chapters establish that civilized people have a world view that says that the earth was created for the purpose of producing humans and giving them something to conquer. I am guessing that the central thesis of the book is that this world view has led to problems, perhaps to all human problems as well as the problems humans create for other creatures. Presumably there will be a prescription for change somewhere along the line.

My mother (you can enjoy her blog over at Ozarque; they've been discussing unconditional love) has done a lot of work on the subject of metaphors, and the real-world consequences of the metaphors that we adopt. I would not deny that choosing a metaphor like Mighty Conqueror to structure our relationship with the world would put humans in a very different position, with regard to things like conservation and use of resources, than choosing one like Member of the Band or Steward of God's Creation. Nor would I deny that Mighty Conqueror is at the very least one of the great favorites among the available metaphors.

#1 daughter has read further than I have, and has also been in correspondence with the large community of people who find that Quinn's work reshapes their thinking, and she thinks that the whole thing is sort of a riff on the old Noble Savage idea. Having grown up with a person from a non-technological society, and having spent some years in very rural life, she has a different personal perspective on it.

As I say, I will be interested in your views on the subject. We are having a sort of cross-country discussion group on this book. After this one, #1 daughter is going to read the next two novels in the series, and I am going to read Quinn's nonfiction apologia, Beyond Civilization. So join in if you have read any of those, too.

I can tell you already that there won't be any knitting in this book. But there has been knitting at my house.

As you may recall, if you have been following my T-shirt adventures, I was unhappy with the neckband. The picture below on the left shows why.  Last night, #2 daughter and I watched the movie Possession (quite different from the book, but still enjoyable) and  I removed the first neckband and started again.

Taking Alison's advice, I read about picking up stitches in The Big Book of Knitting. There I also found the suggestion to make decreases at the shoulder edge before the turning row and then to increase back out after the turning row. Following these suggestions gave me a much better neckband. I also followed Wendy's example and picked up the stitches in the main color, switching to the contrast color on the first knit row.

Today, we are going to watch all the episodes of Britcom Coupling in order, a marathon undertaking which will give me time to tweak the seams a bit (and probably make progress on the prayer shawl as well) and have the T-shirt officially finished by tomorrow. #2 daughter is using the time to make a skirt from men's ties.

Some of you may remember these. They were popular in the '70s, if I remember correctly. The picture here does not actually appear to be made from ties, but rather to be an effort to make a skirt that looks as though it were. #2 daughter is going for the real thing. She has taken a job at Abercrombie & Fitch for the summer, so I think she is wise to make herself a nice bohemian garment to dilute the A&F influence just a little.

Before we begin this orgy of crafting, however, there are errands and housework and gardening to do. I had better get to work.

Here is the prayer shawl. The T-shirt gets its innings again this evening, and then I think there will be time to finish Hopkins before it gets too hot.

There are summer adjustments to be made, in and out of knitting.

#2 daughter is my gym partner again. This means, on the down side, that I have to start the day by rousting her out of bed, and decide whether to go without her or to leave later than usual and be rushed getting ready for work.

On the upside, she remembers how to use all the machinery. So, yesterday, there was this innocent-sounding conversation: "This one is hard." "That's because it's a part of your arm that you never work." And this morning I am in pain.

Then there is the mess. Mess stresses me out. It is messy at work right now, unavoidably so as we get all the new things in for the next school year. And my house has reached a level of messiness which I find intolerable, even though no one else sees it at all.

I am showing you the parts visible right now from the computer, but I assure you that all surfaces in the house are currently covered with stuff in this way. Each flat surface has a dozen objects on it, and each vertical surface is draped with something, including surfaces that are normally too high up to attract any mess.

By July we will all have moved into deep sloth and I will have given up, but right now it is a matter of me complaining to my kids, who behave as though I were imagining things -- specifically, as thought I were imagining the mess. They feel, I think, that since I am the only one who objects to it, I should be the one to clean it up.

Each summer I hope to come up with a solution to this problem, so that I will not spend so much of the season fuming over it. Maybe this will be the year that I succeed.