Alison, the designer of the T-shirt, left me an encouraging comment suggesting that I redo the neckline. She found that very careful picking up of stitches was required, and recommended a reference work. Deb from the Tshirtalong picked her stiches up and knitted the neckband, then turned it inside out and sewed it on the outside, which seems to have worked well. And Wendy not long ago picked up the stitches in the main color and then switched to the contrast color for a tidier edge on a different design. Any of these approaches might work. So I have planned to spend tomorrow evening redoing the neckband, possibly in several different ways, until I get it right.

Anyone who is planning a Friday evening at the symphony, or going out dancing, or some other more exciting thing than staying in knitting, has my permission to feel sorry for me. I do not, however, feel sorry for myself. LikeWowMom has alerted me to the presence of canals in Ohio, thus providing new inspiration for my family history studies, the beans are up in my garden and the strawberries are ripe, and last night's choir practice showed unmistakable signs of incipient choir-like-ness. All these things make me happy.

This evening will be spent in giving #1 son driving lessons. My husband has been doing it so far, since I have been out every evening this week, but #1 son claims that he feels nervous when driving with his dad. Something about maniacal laughter....

I have been tagged by Silkenshine. So here are the questions.

1) Total Number of Books in Your House: Oh, I have no idea. I counted one shelf in the dining room and multiplied by the total number of shelves in there and from this I estimate that I have about 125 in the dining room. By the same method, I estimate 500 in the living room. There are also books in the three bedrooms, the kitchen, the garage, the hallway, and the linen cupboard, so I guess... um... I have lots of books.

2) The Last Book You Bought Was: Art Glass Quilts by Julie Hirota.

3)What Did You Last Read Before Getting Tagged: Well, I am currently reading Hamlet, Revenge by Michael Innes. The literal last book I read from  before the tagging was the Bible. The last book I finished was N or M? by Agatha Christie. I bought both those novels used in Liberty last month while visiting my college girl.

4) Write Down 5 (or 6) Books You Often Read, or That Mean a Lot to You: I read Three Men in a Boat every year. I also re-read E.F. Benson's Lucia books every year, and Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. I read Shakespeare and the Bible the most regularly. Brian Wren's Praying Twice is a book that has had an effect on my view of the world, which doesn't happen often -- or at least I am not often conscious of it, which is probably the same thing.

5) Who are You Going to Pass The Stick on to and Why? Chanthaboune, The Water Jar, and Scriveling, because I know they are all readers, so it won't be too hard for them.

In pursuit of my family history project, I checked the major databases, hoping to establish whether or not the new William Lewis could be "my" William Lewis. I do not know yet. Part of the problem is certainly the commonness of his name. There were thousands of guys with this name. The chances of my finding the right guy among them are slim.

But there is another problem. He is one of the Midwesterners, you see.

Among my American ancestors, there are two groups. There are the folks who arrived in the colonies, some in the North and some in the South. The Northerners moved south after a bit, and then all of them became pioneers when that became the trendy thing to do, and they moved west. They were all farmers. Occasionally someone would hook up with an artisan of some kind, but generally they just grew stuff. They left land records and built churches and sent their children back east for college, and generally behaved in predictable ways, strewing letters and records and papers hither and yon. I know all about them.

The other group was the Midwesterners. They moved around. Up and down rivers, you know, and back and forth from Ohio to Illinois and Missouri. They mentioned trips to Oregon in passing. They up and headed west and were never heard from again. I don't know what they were thinking. One described his occupation as "gentleman." Another worked "on the bank." Another went to piano-tuning school, and another ran a "gypsy camp." They claimed different states and years of birth on different censuses. They lived with men not their husbands and fought on both sides of the Civil War.

Now part of this is probably my lack of knowledge about the local history. I don't know what they were up to in Ohio. I am not at all sure what the bank in question might have been, or what a gypsy camp would be, although it appears that ice featured in the entertainment. If I were less ignorant, if I understood the history of that region, if I knew the patterns of migration, I would probably be able to make sense of it.

I don't believe in speculation in family history projects. But if I did, I could come up with a good story about William Lewis. The first record we have for him is that of his marriage to a lady named Mary Ann. This is the house she grew up in. The current owners kindly sent me this picture of it. Mary Ann was the daughter of one of the early settlers in the county, a man named Noble. In the house next to this there was a family with a live-in servant named Elizabeth Lewis.

If it were a novel instead of history, we could imagine that Elizabeth Lewis had a son named William who visited her, possibly helping with the outdoor work. We can imagine Miss Mary Ann seeing the young man pruning a hedge and taking a glass of lemonade to him. We can imagine Noble seeing this and deciding to see his daughter safely married to someone more suitable.

Because we know that Mary Ann married a man from another prominent family. The Southerners who owned thousands of acres of land and dozens of slaves described themselves as "farmers," but Mary Ann's husband said he was a gentleman. I've always assumed that was swank, but let's take him at his word for the sake of the story. We can imagine him as a cultured man, and we know that he and Mary Ann had a bunch of children. We could give him a pale countenance and a slightly hollow chest. We could make her reasonably happy with him, but give her an occasional thought of the healthy young man she had taken lemonade to, and laughed with amid the -- hm... I think that LikeWowMom lives in Ohio, and she has lilies of the valley, so let's give them lilies of the valley to laugh amid. The scent could remind her of him during the years that they were apart. Mary Ann's first husband can be a decent man, and she can be a good wife to him, and we can have her sometimes grow thoughtful when the lilies of the valley bloom, and him look at her then with a tightness around his mouth, but say nothing to her about it.

But after his death, she was a prosperous widow. She could please herself. And she married William Lewis, himself by that time a widower with a son. They left almost immediately for Missouri. For the sake of the story, let's say that they were leaving behind the disapproval of her relatives, who could never forget that William was the son of a servant.

That would make a good story, wouldn't it?

If you make New Year's resolutions, then by now, you have either made them a part of your life, or you have given up on them and forgotten them entirely. If you have goals for the year, then you are about one third of the way through the year and it is a good time to review those goals.

I've accomplished #6 and #10, have kept up with ongoing goals 1, 2, and 3, and am making good progress on 7 and 8. Doing fairly well on #9, too. However, #5 was to return to my family history study. Knowing that, for me, scheduling makes it likelier that a thing will actually take place, I planned to work on this project on Tuesday mornings. But somehow Tuesdays got busy and I have done nothing on this project for some time.

This week, however, I had several reminders. First, Lionne pointed out this remarkable site in her xanga. At this site, you can search for people, and find their addresses and phone numbers. Lionne was pointing it out as a danger to privacy, and I see her point, but it also came in handy for us. #1 daughter was trying to find her cousins who live near her in the Frozen North. These are the kids of my husband's sister, and we had rather lost track of them. Since my sister-in-law does not speak English, #1 daughter couldn't just call her and say she wanted to meet her cousins. So it was handy to have their information all pop up in one place. (If you want to try this yourself, be advised that you can only see the addresses once for free; on a second visit, you have to pay.)

It only worked for us because, at this point in my husband's family history, it is literally true that everyone with his last name is related. The only people in the U.S. with his name are himself, his siblings, and their children and grandchildren. He is an actual case of what genealogists know as the "Three Brothers" fallacy. That is, that there were three brothers named X who came to America, and all people named X are descended from one of these three brothers.

The second reminder of the Three Brothers came last night when Dr. Drew was trying, during a game, to get #2 daughter to think of Daniel Boone. His clues were all good, except that he kept reiterating that the person he was thinking of was imaginary. Boone was a real person, a kinsman of ours, and one of the favorite Three Brothers cases. That is, people named Boone all over the country look at Daniel and his brothers and try to figure out which of the Boones they are descended from.

The trouble is, while the sons of George Boone might have been the only Boones in their neck of the woods when they first arrived -- just like my husband and his siblings -- since then, there have been numerous unrelated Boones arriving from elsewhere. Most American Boones are not related to Daniel at all.

And so comes the third family history reminder. When it seems impossible to find the parents of some particular person on your family tree, that person is known as "a brick wall." One of my brick walls is a guy named William Lewis. I have no hesitation in telling you his name, because there were and are so many people named William Lewis that he is no threat to my anonymity. My particular William Lewis popped up in Ohio in the 1800s with a son, married, and moved to Missouri. A kind person with an Ohio William Lewis on his own tree has emailed me, offering me his William. So I need to do some detective work to try to determine whether this William could indeed be "my" William.

This is what is fun for me about genealogy. It is fun to track down information, and when it is information about your own family, you do not have to feel that you are being nosy. My mother tried to track down her Lewis forebears by the Three Brothers method, without success. I have searched through land and marriage and birth and death records without success. But the kindness of strangers can often be the deciding factor in genealogy. So perhaps today I will be able to climb over the brick wall, or at least peer over it.

In knitting news, I was debating which of my WIPs to return to, with the T-shirt finished. Hopkins needs a sleeve, and the bath ensemble is also only partly completed. But then the divine Mrs. M came to the store yesterday with yarn and pattern for my contribution to the Prayer Shawl ministry. Have I ever been snide about giant-gauge rectangles made of novelty yarn? Well, that is what is called for for the prayer shawls. There is a special, symbolic stitch pattern, but it will not be visible, because the shawl is blue Homespun. Yes, variegated novelty yarn. But I do not intend to be snide about the shawl. I intend to be prayerful. I know that the recipients of these shawls are grateful and find them comforting. This may be a message to me to watch out or I will find myself turning into a yarn snob.

I went through all the blogs on the knitalong without finding any solution to my unhappiness with the T-shirt. However, Mia left me some encouraging words, so I took her advice and washed and blocked the thing. There was a bit of improvement, but I think perhaps the solution is the one Scriveling offered: if anyone gets close enough to critique my knitting while I'm wearing it, I'll slap 'em.

While circling the blogs, I found this peculiar post by a boy who hates knitting. His dislike of knitting is abstract and irrational, which is the kind of dislike that I enjoy. Actually, I like abstract and irrational enthusiasms better, but there is something appealing to me in all daft but strongly-held opinions. In the next couple of days after this post, more people weighed in with more curious ideas. One woman said the problem with knitting nowadays is that too many inept people are doing it. She thought that the trendy knitting is like what you'd end up with if amateur opera became trendy. I want to say right here that I would love it if amateur opera became trendy and people all over the country were warbling "La Donn' e Mobile" badly. I've probably misspelled that, just to set the ball rolling.

I don't like that woman's position. It is too elitist and mean-spirited. What I like is the entirely irrational passion for or against something. Like the woman who came into the store the other day and made a speech in favor of "chubby pencils" (the kind kindergartners used to use). I can get pretty emotional about punctuation, myself.

If you go read that post, though, be warned that there is some bad language there and in the comments.

#2 daughter and Dr. Drew arrived safely -- the perfect cap to Mother's Day. I wish #1 daughter had been here, too, but she did call several times, and we called her too, so she was sort of here. Her husband is on a submarine at the moment, so his mother did not get a Mother's Day call from him. Still, he is safe, and plenty of servicemen are not. If you pray, then you might offer a bit of prayer for them and their mothers.

Partygirl told me we would have roses blooming for Mother's Day, and she was right. Last week there was one lone blossom, but now there are plenty. I am especially pleased with Falstaff, because of its misbehavior last year. I have a rose called Montezuma, you see. It is an aggressive, conquering sort of rose, with monstrous thorny canes and dozens of blooms all through the summer. Falstaff, planted last year right by the Montezuma, turned strange in midsummer and appeared to be competing with Montezuma. It was an unequal contest, of course, because Montezuma is an in-your-face hybrid tea and Falstaff is an English rose. But Falstaff responded to Montezuma's challenge by growing one cane, straight up, until it was taller than Montezuma, and topping it off with just one blossom.

Frankly, it looked stupid. I was disappointed with it. I decided to separate them. I planted a New Dawn, a pale pink climber, in between the two. She has  had the desired effect of calming those boys down a bit, and Falstaff now has a dozen blooms ready to open. Falstaff has a really intoxicating fragrance, so there is no need for him to feel inferior to Montezuma or even competitive. Fortunately, Joe stayed out of the fracas.

We also have lots of strawberries. Last year, the birds ate them all. This year, we have netting preserving them. It makes the garden look veiled, but the birds -- fat mockingbirds and cardinals, sleek blackbirds, and the occasional robin -- have not yet gotten to the berries. They are ripening nicely, and we are hopeful of a harvest. I do not feel bad about the birds at all. We would have shared with them, but they were greedy and took all the berries last year, so this year they must do without.

The T-shirt is finished. Here is an impressionistic shot with the toy camera, which doesn't actually look too bad. The fabric is soft and drapey and a little stretchy, and the overall shape of the thing is nice.

Below, though, is a close-up showing its many flaws.

The neckband doesn't lie well, the unevenness of the knitting has not magically righted itself, the intarsia is sort of muddy-looking, and it just generally looks badly-knitted. Is this the result of using cheap yarn? Did I become a bad knitter while I wasn't looking?

And what should I do about it? I could take out the neckband and do it over, but I'm not sure that the rest of the thing is worth the trouble. I may also wash and block it in hopes of having some startling improvement take place in the process. I may just keep it and wear it for gardening.

I had intended to make another, in Plymouth Stone Cotton, along with Pokey. Hmm.

It is Mother's Day. #2 son asked me, having seen an ad touting jewelry for Mother's Day, whether I would prefer diamond earrings or a clean house and a cup of tea. I told him honestly that I would prefer the latter. #2 daughter will arrive, along with Dr. Drew, in time for dinner. I am doing enchiladas (beef with red sauce and chicken with white), a black bean casserole, steamed vegetables, and a chocolate gateau which will serve as a belated birthday cake for my husband. Between church and dinner, my boys will have the opportunity to make me a cup of tea. We'll see whether they will avail themselves of this opportunity or not.

It happens that lately I have been reading old and new novels alternately -- one from the 1940s and then one from 2004 and then another from the 1930s and so on. If you read like this, you cannot help but notice the difference in what the authors expect of the reader.

Novels from the early 20th century assume that the reader will be familiar with Shakespeare, the Bible, the most popular works of the ancient Greeks, a smattering of common words from several European languages, and major people from history, as well as some basic terms from music and the other arts. Modern novelists don't assume anything of the kind. They expect us to recognise popular brand names, but that is about it.

And this is true not only of folks like Michael Innis and Edmund Crispin, whom you might think of as rather highbrow writers anyway, but of Agatha Christie and her ilk as well.

One school of thought is that this is an indictment of modern education. There may be some truth in that. There is more and more emphasis on skills rather than content in children's education, and more and more emphasis on vocational training at the college level. The idea of being an educated person, and that there is some value to being educated rather than trained for something, may be an outmoded idea.

It may also be that literacy was simply not as widespread in those days. Perhaps a novelist could assume that only educated people would be reading his or her books. Nowadays, just about everyone can read, so novelists might have to write with that awareness.

A third possibility is that there is no longer a body of knowledge that can be accepted as what people ought to know. That is, there is so much information running around loose nowadays, that no one can be expected to know all of it. So the idea of some set of information being something everyone can be expected to know might be an outmoded one. Educated people might conceivably have non-overlapping sets of knowledge, and yet still be educated.

I can't quite believe that last one. I find myself startled when people don't know quite ordinary things, don't you? Like a recent caller who wanted a poster of "the spectrum from black to white," or a man I heard talking about "Gertrude Steinem." I mean, don't you sort of wonder where they grew up?

My husband grew up in a completely different place from me, so I would not expect him to be conversant with Shakespeare any more than he would expect me to be able to build a house or to sing the traditional opera of his country. And maybe people younger than I are in a sense growing up in a completely different place, too, and are no longer expected to know who Pepys was.

So they can't read Michael Innes. That's a bit of a loss, isn't it?

With house guests expected tomorrow, I must now give up these abstract speculations and get to my domestic work. I must clean and bake and plant things.The temptation to plant things at this time of year is enormous. You have to remind yourself that they will grow, and have weeds, and require harvesting and processing and storage and so on, or you can get carried away. Or at least I can. 

Well, I didn't get much done on the second sleeve, but that was because I didn't have to wait very long in the doctor's office, so you won't hear me complaining.

You won't hear me complaining at all, in fact. As of last October, I was being threatened with statins, but my lipid profile yesterday was such a thing of beauty that the doctor did not even mention them. He stood gazing at my chart saying, "Beautiful! Beautiful!" Not the reaction that you or I would have to a lipid profile, perhaps, but good news for me. After all, revolutions are built on victories. However much I may believe in lentils and exercise, it is easier to continue to be dedicated to them when I can see results of some kind. Most people can improve their triglycerides and stuff in a matter of weeks if they eat right and exercise, but it took me a year (genes -- what can I say?).

The Empress passed a little shop with homemade chocolates in her travels yesterday and brought back chocolate-dipped strawberries for us all, so there is a sense in which I celebrated the success of my healthy eating by eating something unhealthy, but as La Bella points out, no one is always perfect. They were quite delicious, too.

As you know, the food pyramid has changed. You might not know that we are now in the interesting position of having competing pyramids to choose from. Here is the one from Harvard that you can probably see in your doctor's office. Here is the government site that will tell you, based on your age and activity level, just how many ounces of each thing you should plan to eat each day. The Harvard pyramid is closest to the original "new pyramid" recommendations. However, early reviews of it said that Americans were not going to do it. Daily exercise? Whole grains? Forget it! And indeed, the Wall Street Journal tells us that only 3% of Americans follow those guidelines. So the government wimped out and said to make half your daily grains be whole grains, to make lean protein choices, and to "vary your veggies." On the other hand, the government site is cute. Take your pick.

Today is the trip to the DMV, and this weekend, #2 daughter comes home from college. We are very excited about this. Still, I realized that an event passed unremarked: my last solitary morning for the year has already happened. Solitude, and the loneliness that goes with it, most often come up in discussions nowadays as a problem of modern life, even a public health problem. But for me solitude is rare enough to be a special opportunity for enjoyment. Having the house to myself for half an hour or so in the mornings during the school year is a treat. It won't happen again till late August. I'm looking forward to my mornings with the kids, but I wish I had savored that last bit of private time -- whenever it was.

There have been many reports over the years linking religion and health: prayer speeds recovery, spirituality increases chances of surviving cancer, etc. So one non-religous researcher decided to do a review of the research in hopes of debunking the supposed connection.

Her results, reported in the Wall Street Journal, surprised me. She found that "being religious" or using spiritual practices for health did not have consistent positive effects, but attending church did. A variety of irreligious explanations for this were offered -- it could be the social benefits, after all, or the fact that regular churchgoers are less likely to be out on the tiles on Saturday nights --  but she concluded that she ought to go to church.

I'm going to the doctor today, and to the DMV tomorrow for #1 son's driver's permit test, so I should be able to make good progress on the remaining T-shirt sleeve. I would rather go to the gym, but that is life. I bet regular attendance at a gym also has health benefits. Perhaps the two could be combined. Services held in the weight area, everyone puffing out the hymns from the elliptical machines... Maybe not.

#2 son has been accepted to the Summer Institute in architecture at the local university (last year he did Trebuchet Physics and had a great time). He has also received a great scholarship, but we still have to come up with some hundreds. I figure we will need to save $50 a week from now till it begins in order to cover it. So we are seeking out creative opportunities for frugality.

Some friends of ours had a list up in their kitchen at one time. They all added their ideas for preserving the spondulicks. Some were good reminders like turning off electrical things when they were not needed. The list also included "Wear bricks on heads to avoid having to buy new clothes." 

They had the right spirit, it seems to me. After all, you can always save by doing without things, but making it a matter of resourcefulness and ingenuity -- and a little silliness --  can make it more fun. So we have sworn off delivery food, new books, craft supplies, game rentals, and such obvious luxuries, but we are thinking more in terms of clever reallocation of resources. We intend to have our camping trip, our summer entertainments, and birthday parties as required -- and to put that $50 by, too.

#1 son is going to have to wear a brick on his head, though.

#2 son is also planning to earn something toward the institute, #2 daughter has to save up for next year's tour, and #1 son hopes to get a summer job since he is 16 now. So they are all thinking about jobs. We have no unemployment here, so it is not a matterof desperately accepting anything, even for student summer jobs. People can pick and choose -- often within the limits of low-paying dead-end jobs, it is true, but this is summer, not career paths. We've been talking about all kinds of possibilities.

#2 son also had the chance through his school to shadow someone at work this week -- random assignment, not chosen by the students. He is visiting an insurance office. At first, I thought this might be disappointing, but then I realized that we do not know anyone who does that sort of office job. We know doctors, lawyers, artists of various kinds, teachers, and people in other academic and service jobs, but an insurance agent would be pretty exotic. Yesterday was his first day. He got to call people and remind them that their payments were due and prepare birthday cards with stamped signatures. They had him practice being "businesslike and assertive." He enjoyed it. Of course, #2 son enjoys everything. That is such a gift -- I hope he can maintain that attitude throughout his life.

In an unrelated note, Cleverboots has suggested to me that I underestimated the importance of regional differences in the TV program "What Not to Wear." Being a Northeastern person herself, and living in the South, she is conscious of these differences. She tells me that the hosts are not mean. That is kind and supportive behavior. What was I thinking -- they were going to say "Girl, I just LOVE your sweater!"? She also recommends that I watch "Supernanny." I am not familiar with this program, but I might do it for Cleverboots.

And Scriveling finished her T-shirt, and has posted a picture too.