My xanga has not worked properly for two weeks today, and Chris is ignoring my e-mails. You know, the letter Chris sent me (three times -- the identical e-mail) seemed so friendly and understanding that I thought we could be friends, but apparently not.
An anonymous commenter on my chatterbox said that xanga was proprietarty. I figured that this was sort of like a Bushism -- you know, when Mr. Bush says that quotas "vulcanize" people, or that he wants to get rid of "federal cufflinks." We all have a lot of fun trying to imagine what Mr. Bush means when he says things like this -- it is a popular parlor game around here, and That Man actually has a calendar with a new Bushism for each day, so we can start off our workday with a mind-limbering experience.
For the record, I think "vulcanize" was intended to be "polarize." My first thought was that he meant work quotas would galvanize people into working harder, but The Empress favors the idea that he meant that hiring quotas would polarize ethnic groups. It was suggested at one point that he was thinking of something that would depress affect -- making people like Star Trek Vulcans.
Vulcanizing, in case you are wondering, is an antique method of reparing tires. Rubber, heat, the god Vulcan...
In any case, I assumed that "proprietarty" was something like this. However, Pokey looked it up, and she tells me that lots of technologically savvy people say "proprietarty." It has nothing to do with being a tart (old word for "prostitute") or with impropriety (bad behavior). It is rather a variation on "proprietary," (in computers, the opposite of openly shared, as in software you have to pay for).
I still don't know what it means to say that xanga is proprietarty, and it does not seem to offer me any clues to repair my broken xanga, but I was fascinated to know of this usage.
So I have knitted not at all this week. I have been working on the quilt. There was choir practice last night (we learned that the Oldest Member, who is an absolute baa-lamb, takes off his hearing aid before rehearsal and puts it in his pocket, which explains some of the things you hear from the tenor section). There has been a lot of weeding to do. My husband lost his mind over the mess in the house, which was a rather time consuming experience for us all. You know. Things get in the way.
But I have been poring over my knitting books in search of suitable small things to knit in the dog days, and I have some possibilities in mind.

I finished reading Janet Evanovich's One for the Money. It was well written, with interesting characters, but it was just too violent for me. I had to skip through some of it, and will not read more in the series. Instead, I have moved on to Richard Feynman's The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.
LikeWowMom has read and rejected Frenchwomen Don't Get Fat, which appears to lean heavily on leek soup. I enjoy a good leek soup as much as the next woman, but it's too hot even to think of that right now.
The Princess is reading The French Diet which recommends chocolate, and allows one to eat plenty of ostrich and quark. I have never eaten either of those things knowingly, in France or elsewhere. I think of "quark" as a term in physics, in fact.
Booksfree has just sent me The Mediterranean Diet, so I feel as though I am climbing onto this bandwagon. I do not, however, think about my figure. I have to think about lipid profiles, and count grams of saturated fat and sugar, so it would be excessive to expect me to think about calories as well.
I do think about physics quite a lot. When #2 son got home from Trebuchet Physics camp last year, he confided that they "could have done it all without the physics." I really like that idea. We do of course do things "without the physics" all the time, and could not perhaps get through the day at all if we had to calculate stuff before we could accomplish it. Like walking, for example. Feynman says that there are things which are not about physics, like love. That is the only example he was able to come up with, but he generously allows that love does not require any math.
I think that physics is like God in that respect, that we really cannot do anything without either of them, and are in fact subject to them, whether we ever think about it or not.
Thoughts of God and physics together are perhaps naturally coming to my mind, because I have also just read a new book that arrived at the store: Galileo for Kids. The physics in this book was not new to me, but I definitely got some history lessons. I had never before really understood why Copernicus's view of the universe was considered heretical, for one thing. For another, I had the time line all wrong. Copernicus did not get into any trouble for his views -- he actually dedicated the book explaining why he thought the earth moved around the sun to the Pope, and the Pope is reported to have liked the book.
Then, of course, Galileo and some other guys got in trouble for believing what Copernicus had written. If you are interested in law at all, I think you would find his story quite fascinating. This part of the story I had pretty clear in my mind -- the Inquisition and all.
But the Catholic Church did not publicly take back their condemnation of Galileo until the 1990s. Yet there must have been some point at which they decided that a heliocentric view of the solar system was not heresy. It cannot have been the case that Catholic schools in the 1980s were teaching the Ptolemaic model. If you know more about this, enlighten me, please.
We also got a nice shipment of toys in. This was not a Christmas preparation shipment, but rather just a summer fill-in. We are thinking back-to-school, but children continue to have birthdays and things, so we have to have some toys.
Every year, the Poster Queen announces to us on June 25th that it is six months till Christmas. Somehow, this year she neglected to do so (she was home having a garage sale). As we unpacked toys on June 28th, I realized that we had missed that important announcement.
It is not time to think about Christmas in the usual way, of course. However, since I spent much of last year's cool weather knitting small things for holiday gifts, I am resolved to knit my gift things this year in the hot weather, and leave the cool weather for knitting the lovely wool Fair Isle cardi that I have been planning since last year. If you do not knit, you may not understand why this matters. If you knit, though, you will know immediately why a person might not care to knit large woolen objects when the temperature is in the upper 90s.
So I am looking through my knitting books in search of inspiration on this subject. If you have suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
In the meantime, #2 daughter and I are trying to decide on a duet for church for the 24th, #2 son is giving no thought to his upcoming camp (I suggested that he begin to think about what he would like to take with him, but he thinks of packing no more than he thinks of physics, and was politely incredulous), and #1 son is considering taking up food service for the second half of the summer.

I got good news from the Filth-O-Meter. I cannot link, since xanga hates me, but you can visit them by cutting and pasting this:
http://www.channel4.com/life/microsites/H/how_clean_is_your_house/quiz/index.jsp
I learned about this from Creating Text(iles), who likes this British TV show. At their website, you can take a quiz called the "Filth-O-Meter," which is such a good name for a quiz.
They told me that my home is an oasis and I have a sparkling personality, which is an ambitious conclusion to draw from the fact that I clean things before they begin to smell.
However, it did cheer me up a bit in the face of the rising tide of mess that is one of the many signs of summer.
You may not feel that you need any signs of summer. After all, we have had Midsummer Night already, and there is all that sunshine and sweat and people keep heading off on vacation and everything, so the existence of summer is pretty well established.
But summer for me is a continuum. There are the early signs, which are all nice things like fresh vegetables and the return of my college kid and fireflies. Then there are the signs of midsummer, like horrible messes and no food on hand at home, and Bordette and whininess at work.
You may not be familiar with Bordette. It is the support hose and hair net of classroom decorations, stuff so outmoded and dull that it does not even count as retro. The Princess ordered it this year, so she did her best by bringing in teal (think diner linoleum) and magenta (plastic frames of cats-eye glasses, maybe). And I did my best by arranging it in edgy color groupings, like teal with red and brown, and violet with apple green and sky blue. People do not buy Bordette during the rest of the year, but at back-to-school, there is an odd compulsion to buy the stuff. Like buying Spam because a snowstorm is predicted, maybe. I wouldn't buy either of those things, myself, but it must comfort some folks.
And then comes High Summer, which is characterized by sauna-like days and nights, bugs, and Stage Three Shoppers.
But we are not there quite yet. It is still midsummer, and I am fighting a valiant rear-guard action against the advancing tide of mess and filth.
Well, maybe not filth. It is more like towels on the floor (Why? Why? There are towel bars right there at hand!) and dishes on all available surfaces throughout the house, and random detritus on top of the piano. Sigh.
As for the TV show, I have never seen it, because it is not shown here. Also, it is a reality show, and I generally dislike those. But it causes me to question my general belief in the superiority of British TV. Apparently, it is a program in which two ladies go into strangers' houses and point out all the dirt. Then someone cleans it, and they point out the cleanliness. Doesn't really sound all that amusing, does it?
I am reading One for the Money by Janet Evanovich, the first Stephanie Plum novel. Stephanie Plum is quite tough, and a rotten housekeeper. She is in desperate straits, and yet maintains a witty if not exactly cheerful outloook, so she has my sympathy. The book mentions Kathleen Turner as a good choice to play her in a movie, but I would update that to Sandra Bullock (have I got the name right? The one in Miss Congeniality).
The thing that I have in common with Stephanie Plum in summertime is the hope that the Refrigerator Fairy will have replenished the stores overnight. Not, you understand, that my refrigerator contains moldy bread and beer and ancient take-out food. But you will, on summer mornings, often find me searching through the refrigerator or freezer in hopes of finding overlooked items that could be meals.
My score on the Filth-O-Meter will tell you that my food storage areas are not so higgledy-piggledy that I am really likely to emerge from them saying, "Ah! There's that chicken, whole-wheat pasta, zucchini, and sorbet I thought I had somewhere!" And yet I still look.
I had better go forage for breakfast foods. Here is my personal mess, by the way. You can see #2 daughter's tie skirt, and that is the corrected quilt there pretending to be a chair cover. I guess I have no room to talk...

In order to give myself courage for tearing out and re-sewing my bad quilt squares, I have been reading Quilts from the Quiltmaker's Gift and More Quilts from the Quiltmaker's Gift. The Quiltmaker's Gift is a children's book. It is not a favorite of mine because it is, in a word I learned from Feebeeglee, a bit of a glurge. The books I've been reading are actual quilt pattern books. (I still cannot link or show you the books. You can however see them at www.quiltmakersgift.com)
They are not books that I use much in the sense of following their directions. All the patterns are popular and traditional, so I have them all in other books anyway. The cutting directions in the QG books result in very large blocks, so that their quilts often have only a dozen blocks -- not enough, in my opinion, to show the true nature of a pattern. And the example quilts are what I privately think of as "art quilts."
It has to be private thinking because it is a very specialized and inaccurate use of the term. What I mean is, these are quilts you would have to hang on a neutral wall and admire, because they would not go with your room. Unless your room is all beige or all black, or designed entirely around the quilt.
I could be overgeneralizing here. Quilts in shades of turquoise and saffron with touches of gray, brown, and pink may fit right into your decor. But for me and most of the people I know, any quilt that takes 24 different print fabrics is probably going to clash with the wallpaper.
So if the cutting directions aren't useful and I don't want to copy the quilts, what is the value of these books?
They encourage different ways of looking at things. For the quilt I am working on now, for example, my 1930s quilt pattern book suggests pink, white, and rose. The Thimbleberries book (the one I am actually using for directions) alternates scrappy squares with tone-on-tone beige ones. 5,500 Quilt Block Designs shows it in plain blue and white. More Quilts from the Quiltmaker's Gift shows examples with overdyed fabrics, batiks, and surprising settings.
Any of these ideas can make a beautiful quilt, but having all of them to look at leads to more thinking and a more creative approach. Assuming, that is, that the pieces are put together right. Which mine now are. I am back to where I was before -- no actual progress, but correction is good, too.
My car is also fixed. Not my xanga, but in this life we cannot have everything.
Here is the prayer shawl, encouraging the tomatoes along. Or perhaps it is the other way around. I am not currently knitting anything else, because we have reached the sweaty part of the year, and I have to finish this shawl before it gets too hot to knit something as large as this. Even though it is not wool, you just don't need a lapful of fiber at this time of year. So I plan to have this completed by Independence Day. And the tomatoes should be ripe by then, too, though that requires no further effort on my part.

The Poster Queen has alerted me that my xanga now takes up more than the width of the screen, and it sure enough does. I hope this means that the mysterious Chris is trying really hard to fix my xanga. I also hope that my husband will try really hard to fix my car. I am trying really hard to fix my quilt.
Last night we went to see "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" at the drive-in. The Princess had alerted me to the fact that it was playing. We used to go to drive-in movies all the time when our children were small. Many young couples did, and probably still do. You could put your kids in their pajamas and go to the movies without having to find a sitter. We saw "Grease" and "Kramer vs. Kramer" and all the early Jackie Chan movies that way. Lots more that we have forgotten, too. We were trying to remember them on the drive over there, but without success. It is fun to watch the little children playing on the swingsets in their jammies, and pleasant to be outdoors on balmy summer nights. We had not gone in years.
It is a lot like watching a movie on your TV at home, except that it is noisier and less comfortable. This may be a little unfair, really, because we had a group of emergency vehicles pull up next to us at one point, which is hardly the norm, I am sure.
There were unintentionally humorous 1960s ads for the "refreshment center," which the kids told us had a cappuccino machine, rather than the "rich flavored coffee that puts a man back on his feet" which the ads promised. Does a man want to be put back on his feet while at the drive-in?
My husband forgot to bring his glasses and kept borrowing from me and #2 son. #2 daughter got a phone call. I knitted all the way through, which didn't irritate me and no member of the family mentioned it, but I am being fair here. There was probably clicking of needles, and I did put the light on every now and then to make sure I hadn't dropped stitches or made an error in the pattern.
"The Hitchhiker's Guide" includes some knitting, by the way. I quite liked it. It is taking a chance, to go see a movie made from a book you have read so many times that you can nearly recite it. But I thought they did a good job, without being slaves to the book or the radio program. And I loved the song.
I don't read science fiction, generally. I don't read romance novels, either, although right now I am reading one I bought used, called Married for a Month. There are genres that I absolutely never read, such as Westerns and horror -- I have read perhaps two of each of these in my life. In the area of science fiction or fantasy, however, I generally do not read it, but some of my favorite authors and books fall into that category. So I read and re-read everything by Terry Pratchett, I read everything by Peter David and Elizabeth Scarbrough (sp?) and several others once, and I have read the Hitchhiker's Guide a whole lot of times. This means that I actually read as much science fiction as some aficionados, while still being able to say with perfect sincerity that I don't read science fiction.

It was the prayer shawl that I was knitting. I finished up the first skein.

The bad squares on the quilt, O puzzle fans, were numbers 9, 15, 17, and 21. I will be working today, and I have run out of thread, but I hope to be able to do my repair work tomorrow. We have had too many sleepover guests for me to be able to do much sewing anyway. I don't mind running the sewing machine while my family are trying to do things, but I have to draw the line for guests.
I was reading the new books yesterday at work (looking for a good book for your pre-teens or young teens? Consider No More Dead Dogs) and came upon an item in a reading comprehension book called "The Joy of Camping." This explained how to set up your campsite.
Here's what you do. Upon arrival at the campsite, you set up the tent, the Camp Kitchen Area, and the Personal Care Area.
I bet I've gone camping a hundred times, and have never done this.
CheriM camps with tutus and bathrobes, and Feebeeglee is going to camp in late medieval Irish clothing, so they may very well begin their stay at the campsite by setting up these three essential areas.
We just set up the tent, and go swimming.

This is one of our favorite camping places, a nearby lake. There are several lakes nearby. This one has the advantage of bathhouses and restrooms built by the WPA. It also had, last time we went, this cardboard canoe.
Perhaps the fact that we camp at places with plumbing is why we do not set up a Personal Care Area. Our campsite is through the trees on the left. You cannot see it, being as it is in the forest. When you get up in the morning, though, and poke up the fire and put the kettle on, you can walk down through the trees to the lake. There is a pier to fish from, or just to sit on as you watch the mist rise off the water and everything wakes up.
My car broke down yesterday. I was driving along, I put in the clutch in order to turn into the parking lot at work, and the pedal was not connected to anything. It was hanging loose. I turned, but mere momentum did not get me up the hill.
Drivers behind me were confused. They stopped, as though perhaps I had stopped my car because I wanted to talk with them. I turned off the car and was able to coax it into first, which allowed me to limp up the hill and into a parking space. That is where my car still is.
In general, I am happy with my life choices. But when I have car trouble (which happens as often as you would expect, given that I drive an 11-year-old car with over 100,000 miles on it), I cannot help thinking about the fact that The Empress, when she has car trouble, takes her car to the mechanic and has it back the next day. I must wait for my husband to fix it.
Fortunately, it is a good time for walking to and from work. It is not yet insanely busy, though the Poster Queen gives it another week tops, and it is not yet in triple digit temperatures, though #2 daughter says it will be in the upper 90s today.
And I am very thankful that this happened as I was turning in to work, and not out at the lake, or on the freeway in Kansas City, or any of the other distant destinations I have been to recently.

We have green beans and peppers from the garden, and lots of fat green tomatoes whose ripening we eagerly await. We are using the final jar of last year's jam (nectarine). Ah, summer!
The concerts in the park have begun. Tommy came into the store to get "a big paper fish." I had one for her. She was putting it on a pole so her friends could find her at the concert. Because that can be a difficulty. #1 son went with friends and lawn chairs -- luxury indeed -- but many people do as #2 daughter did, and wander about among the groups finding friends here and there. And sometimes it is impossible to find any particular person in the crush.
I used to go with my kids all the time (my husband doesn't care for it), but they reached an age where they were off visiting with people throughout the concert, and I was left alone in the scrum. So I haven't been in a while.
Last night, #2 son and I stayed home with my husband and watched the History Channel's explanation of the Da Vinci Code. This is a favorite novel of both #2 son and #1 daughter, which I have not yet read. The program was interesting, though repetitive. Apparently, they only had enough actual footage for half the program, so they kept repeating bits till it was as long as they wanted it to be.
Here is the quilt. I was sewing blocks, putting them together as they were sewn, and then sewing on the completed rows as they were ready. But at some point I lost track and made an A row when I should have had a B row. Or else I mislaid a B row. Either way, I am currently at four and a half rows. It still could end up being a living room throw rather than a bed quilt. #2 daughter points out that, since the colors are perfect for the living room, it could be the designated quilt for the sofa bed, which has no designated quilt of its own, though it gets a lot of use.

This quilt is from a pattern in The Thimbleberries Book of Quilts, but I have the basic traditional square in a couple of other books. When I idly looked it up, I found that the traditional block is done not with myriad identical triangles, but with two sizes of triangles and a large square. Much less seaming. The Thimbleberries version is for quick cutting and piecing. I don't know whether I would have made it this way had I realized that to begin with.
This method has left me with a lot of extra triangles, though, so I am thinking that I may add a sawtooth border, as well as a couple of plain borders. We'll see. The whole idea of planning the project before making it continues to elude me.
LATER IN THE DAY... #2 daughter came in, looked at my quilt where I had lain it out on the floor for photographing and contemplation, and immediately noticed that there were four squares sewn together wrong.
Four.
This must be some kind of record.
I will therefore be spending the weekend taking the whole blasted thing apart and putting it back together, rather than finishing it up, as I had imagined. All talk of borders is premature.
I am having trouble believing that I did this. Non-pointy triangles is one thing, but actual replacement of the rhombus with an extra triangle because you have sewn a module on upside down -- now would I have done that if I had cut it in the traditonal way instead of the supposedly quick way? Hmmm. Four times?
As #2 daughter points out, it is better to have discovered this now, than while I was actually quilting the thing. This is true. It is a good thing that she looked at it. Since I sewed them, laid them out, photographed them, put them in the photobucket (xanga still hates me), moved them to xanga, and posted them -- all without noticing -- I suppose I might not have seen it until I went to quilt the lovely circles of diamonds and didn't have any in four places.
Four! Excuse me while I go apply a cold compress to my brow.
If you like visual puzzles, though, you might look for the four wrong ones. I'll post the answer tomorrow. Number them from upper left, left to right in rows, one through twenty-two, skipping the blank spots.
And here are a couple of prayer shawls. They are in Homespun on monstrous needles.

This is the gray Sophie bag, with its handles attached. It is sitting in the mess on #2 daughter's dresser. Here it was on Knit in Public Day, when I was knitting it in public by the lake.

As for the bag, I made it according to the pattern (I cannot link right now, but there is a link in a post last week and today over at perroua's xanga), until I came to the part for the handles. At that point, I bound off on the narrow sides of the rectangle, and continued the long sides for another few rows of garter stitch. Then I felted the bag. The garter stitch bands enclose the handles of the bag. I sewed them in with a darning needle and matching yarn.
As for the mess, it is part of summer, I'm afraid. But now, while it is still just in the 80s, I am trying to persuade the kids to get their rooms in some sort of shape. Once we reach the 90s and triple digits, we won't do anything at all.
I have been amassing stuff for the boys' room -- a computer desk, shelves, and so on -- and keeping it in the garage. I want to remix their room (have you seen that TV program?). I have it on good authority that teen boys really want their rooms to look like the inside of a car, so I think we'll go with that look. But, the boys insist, nothing that looks like a theme.
#2 daughter's room is nicely decorated, but looks like a pigsty. Or possibly a prehistoric midden.
The theme for the weekend, I think, is cleaning the kids' rooms.

This is a picture from the hiking trail we followed last weekend. Walking in town is not the same. Since we skipped the gym yesterday, #2 daughter and I took a 45-minute walk around our neighborhood after dinner. Instead of lush nature, we got to enjoy human vagaries.
People's gardens, of course. Some are beautiful, and give me ideas for my own modest gardens. Some are peculiar -- there is one house where they have a handsome stand of tiger lilies right next to a row of plastic flowers "planted" in upside-down terra cotta pots. I'm not sure where they are going with that.
There is a sign on one lawn with the words "Little House" and an explanation of the tradition of making little houses -- and sure enough, if you then search the landscape, you will find a little sort of Wendy house to admire.
We met some people, some dogs, and some rabbits and squirrels as well. A pleasant end to the day.
There was one thing. We were walking very fast. #2 daughter is a fast walker anyway. She is a good deal taller than I am and naturally I am a good deal older than she is. And we were talking about something she is feeling cross about. So as she got more cross, she walked faster. When it came to cool-down time, I insisted on ambling a bit, but we were really making tracks there for a while.
Oddly enough, all three women of our household (my two daughters and I -- I include #1 daughter even though she has her own household now) are feeling cross with our menfolks at the same time. What are the odds?
I'll tell you about #1 daughter's reason, because a) she is probably over it by now, and b)it is a general rather than a specific issue, and c) they do not read this blog.
Her husband has just returned from a submarine trip. That may be the wrong word to use -- it sounds too lighthearted for the military, and I bet there is an official word that should be used instead, like "deployment" or "exercise" Anyway, he has been on a submarine. Naturally, he wants to continue to spend time with the lads from the submarine. Equally naturally, he also wants to spend time with his wife, from whom he has been separated for months. So he figures they can all get together.
Ladies, how do you like to spend time? Hanging out in a bar with a bunch of drunken sailors?
I didn't think so.
Let's face it. Married couples don't have to do everything together. Guys should be able to go do guy things with their guy friends and do couple things with their wives, not insist on mixing the two.
My husband was invited to join us on our walk, but he chose to watch boxing instead. I do not want to watch boxing, and he doesn't want to lope around the neighborhood discussing #2 daughter's emotional complications and admiring people's gardens. Fair enough. It is better not to insist on togetherness in such cases -- there are, or should be, plenty of opportunities for togetherness that both parties could actually enjoy.
Oh -- I'm reading Murder at the Museum by Simon Brett. A well-written, low key mystery novel.

Instead of going to the gym, I am fighting with xanga.
I went and made a new xanga, here:
http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=perroua
It works perfectly. Obviously, the problem is not with my machine. Yet this xanga here, which I have had for nearly a year, does not work. I cannot enter text in the normal text box. It will not link. It will not show books. It will not allow me to enter pictures in the normal way. It will not wrap text. I have to put in weird little symbols before it will do anything at all.
If you have any ideas, please let me know. Thank you.