I’ve been tagged by dweezy to list 10 things that bring me joy, and then tag 6 people. The thing about this meme is that there is little room for originality. It’s almost like — “Are you a human? Okay, put down your family and friends, nature, your work or other creative outlet, your spiritual satisfaction whatever that may be… Next!”

I thought immediately of the old song, “For the beauty of the earth/ For the beauty of the skies/ For the love which from our birth/ over and around us lies…” Later verses move on to “the joy of human love” and the pleasures of our senses, plus spiritual joys. Some of us may not be stirred to raise joyful hymns of grateful praise, but this is what brings us joy, isn’t it?

Still, this is a nice meme. It starts the day off right to read lists of things that make people happy, or to write one for yourself. So here, with a sense of predictability, is mine.

1. my family

2. music

3. playing with colors

4. ditto textures

5. ditto flavors

6. ditto ideas

7. movement

8. the beauty of the earth

9. working with others toward a shared goal

10. children — even other people’s

I tag Chanthaboune, The Water Jar, Sighkey, Ramfeezled Chuzzlewit, Distant Eyes, and Kali Mama.

Now, you were probably expecting a picture of Brooklyn in its actual final completed form. Me, too. But when I finished putting the zipper in, we found that it was sort of … wavy. I have never put a zipper into a sweater before, and would appreciate input from those who have. The zipper measures the same as the knitting. I pinned it in, at which point it did seem flat, and then sewed it in flat with the yarn and a darning needle. I am planning, unless I get better advice, to tear it all out and sew it back in with sewing thread. I have at this point no other ideas, but would love some. Thanks!

Here is Brooklyn, looking finished because you can’t see that there is no zipper in the front. I completed it last night while #1 son was out using his new driver’s license, so I have not yet had the chance to find out whether it fits or he likes it.

Nor to buy the zipper for it.

But I like it a lot. It is much heavier than you would think to look at it (“Well, yeah,” was #1 son’s reaction, “It’s made out of denim.”) It is soft and cozy, too, but cotton. In fact, we are talking here about denim. I think I will make myself that denim jacket from Debbie Bliss’s  Celtic Collection next year.

And here is the front, pre-zipper. The vital statistics: Brooklyn, from Denim People, in Den-M-Nit, done on #2 and #3 needles. No changes to the pattern — I knitted it just as directed. It took an extra ball of ecru, but otherwise there were no errors or problems with the pattern. I started it on July 22nd, which means it took quite a long time, but there was a hiatus while I waited for the extra yarn to arrive. #1 son suggests that it would also look good with contrast color sleeves, and I bet he’s right.

So, with the track jacket mostly finished, I pulled out the autumn textiles (don’t look at me like that — I’m a needleworker so of course I have autumn textiles) and the beaded pumpkins and squash, and decorated the house up a bit. Pokey and some friends are coming down next weekend, so I will wait for them to carve pumpkins and that stuff. The quilt here is Rail Fence, my first piece done with “fast patch” methods, back when they were new.

This is the Hallowe’en table runner. And to the right and below is the Thanksgiving table runner. It’s only a Thanksgiving table runner because that’s what I made it for last year. The pattern is actually from a book called Creepy Crafty Hallowe’en, and the main motif is one of pumpkins. I did it in harvest colors and blues to go with my china, and left off the stars and moons.

In the picture here I have it on my black and orange checked table cloth so that it will look October-ish, but for November I put it on white damask and it settles down a lot. In fact, the back is a yellow-and-vegetable-print effect that I thought would be excellent for summer. I was thinking, at the time, that I would use it from June through November, and thinking that I was being clever, because it didn’t occur to me that we hardly set the table in the summer, let alone use runners.

#1 daughter is a little nervous because she is having her in-laws to Thanksgiving dinner. My immediate reaction, when I heard this, was that she needed a table runner.

I told her this when we were talking on the phone, and there was a little pause on her end. I am familiar with that, because my mother  sometimes says loony things , and there is always a little pause on my end of the line while I gather my thoughts and try to come up with a response.

But #1 daughter is a good cook, and always helped with preparations for Thanksgiving dinner when she was growing up, so I felt sure that she wasn’t nervous about the cooking. I also know that her wedding gifts included plenty of nice dishes, so it couldn’t be that. What else could she need, then? Why, obviously a table runner.

Yeah, well, it wasn’t that. She is actually nervous about the conversation. Those of you who know #1 daughter in her home circle are thinking that it is reasonable for her to worry about that. After all, the experience of conversing with her is rather like talking with a particularly glamorous shark. Naturally, she would be concerned that her aging in-laws —

No, that is not it. The thing that we who know her well forget is that #1 daughter is shy. When talking with people whom she doesn’t know that well, she is not like a shark at all, but like a — well, some shy kind of fish. And, while her daddy says “They are like your parents. You don’t have to be shy,” for some reason she doesn’t find that this solves the problem.

I say, if she made the dinner and set the table, then her husband can be in charge of keeping the conversation going. He is the same kind of conversationalist #1 daughter is, but louder and less glamorous. She should be able to keep her eyes demurely on her knitting and say, “You are absolutely right” every now and then. In fact, there are plenty of girls with her kind of looks who take the position that the opportunity to look upon them is all they have to bring to the table. You can’t do that all your life, but presumably she will become less shy around her inlaws as time goes on.

Ngaio Marsh’s Died in the Wool is an intelligent novel, with deep characters, thought-provoking subplots, and snappy, if dated dialogue. Kruger’s Died in the Wool is none of those things. It is a harmless, pleasant read while knitting, and it accompanied me through the completed collar of Brooklyn, here looking like some denizen of the deep. There hasn’t been much actual knitting in this book so far, though there has been some of the same yarn fetishism I have noticed in other books of the  ”Ooh, knitting’s in style, I’ll make my detective a knitter!” genre.

Are you wondering about yarn fetishes? Look here. Actually, although I did google the term “yarn fetish” in case this was some sort of actual mental condition about which I should not make jokes, I only found knitters bragging about their stashes. I did once, while preparing for a workshop on insects for elementary school teachers, learn rather more than I wanted to know about insect fetishes, and yarn seems a more plausible perversion than that. But I see that I have become distracted here. I was talking about books. And now I have to tell you that the book I learned about insect fetishes from is called Sex, Bugs, and Rock and Roll. It is perhaps the most entertaining book on insects I have ever read, and includes a piece on Weird Al Yancovik. This is the only occasion on which I have read about this person, except at the blog of Scriveling. I am not prepared to draw any conclusions.

#1 daughter is reading River Out of Eden (our read-along merely requires the reading of something by Richard Dawkins — I’m going to move on to Unweaving the Rainbow pretty soon here, but I have some light reading to do first) and getting creeped out by how closely related all of us humans are. She doesn’t like the idea that she and her husband are all but cousins. Since we have found no hint of shared ancestry (or indeed, shared geography) any time in the last four centuries, I am not troubled by this, but I know what she means. I once took a group of kids to a water treatment facility, where they assured us that there had been no new water on the earth since the dinosaurs drank it. In the silence that followed, I knew we were all realizing that in some far-fetched way, this meant we were all drinking purified dinosaur urine.

Even though we understood their point completely, I could not help but notice that no one chose to drink any water for the rest of the day. There has some notions that just make you uncomfortable on a visceral level, no matter what your brain may say about them.

I am trying to get Brooklyn sewn up before I leave for work, but not having high expectations for success.

While picking up stitches for Brooklyn’s collar, I encountered the first misbehavior on the part of the yarn and the pattern. (This jacket has involved misbehavior on this part of the recipient, but that is another story.) The yarn, having behaved very well for me so far, in spite of its reputation, flatly rebelled when it came to picking up the stitches. I had to bring in a crochet hook, which works fine but slows the process down unbelievably. Then I found that I was supposed to pick up 39 stitches across the back, where there are only 31. Some accomodating yarns will let you do this, but not the denim. I squished in 34, and snuck the remainder in with the first row.

Having fought with the knitting to this point — and it took almost an hour — I did in fact have sore hands, and forearms for that matter. It is possible that there was a predisposition to it, based on the previous day’s time spent wrestling big ol’ German toy excavators up into the rafters, but my new theory on why some knitters find that knitting with denim tires their hands is that it is the fighting, not the knitting, that does it. The lack of stretch is what does it, I think. Instead of stretching agreeably like wool when you manipulate it, the denim sits staunchly refusing to budge.

I like to have theories for things, however ad hoc.

But I would say that this makes denim most appropriate for fairly straightforward knitting, like Brooklyn, rather than, say, lace or Viking cables. And you’d probably want to avoid complex finishing, too.

Be that as it may, the end is in sight. I am working tomorrow instead of today, and so I have a day at home today. I hope to get Brooklyn done, at least to the point of the zipper.

This weekend is Homecoming, and Autumnfest, and I know that #1 son will want to wear his jacket. It is still entirely possible that he will reject the finished item, in which case Pokey gets it. But he will want it finished so he can accept or reject it in a lordly manner.

I am also taking him to get his license today, and doing the housework and errands I would normally do on Saturday. What’s more, #2 son has alerted me to the fact that everyone else has decorated for Hallowe’en, so I am planning to do that as well. He keeps us up to par on such things. As he says, we do not want to be the black sheep of the neighborhood.

I nearly finished sewing the last raglan seam. How can it be that in an entire day I did not even finish one seam, you may be wondering? Well, #1 son, whose jacket this is destined to be, was standing over me nagging me, while I debated with #1 daughter (via IM) the deep question of whether Fairfield CT is actually now called Bridgeport CT. And if so, should one go to the historical society, or is it too dangerous there?

While #1 son shrieked “Umgawa!” at me and asked when I would finish, much as other children say, “Are we there yet?” every few minutes. He was, I hasten to add, being funny.

And I have to say that I had just gotten home from choir, where The Little Red Haired Girl has decided to be an alto. She is an annoying little girl, and I find it especially annoying that she says, “I’m a natural alto” in her high squeaky voice after spending all these months singing soprano.

Why does this irritate me? I don’t know. But I know that, having had her in my section of choir and then coming home and trying to sew up the raglan seam while IMing with #1 daughter and having #2 son stand over me being admittedly humorous but decidedly annoying — well, it interfered with my productivity.

Work also interferes with knitting, doesn’t it? And I did have to show up at the shop yesterday, after all.

Cleverboots had brought a friend into the store to meet us, and we had a conversation covering censorship, Desperate Housewives, dog training, book storage, and whether jumping rope is harder on the bosom or the bladder. When we got to the question of why students were not allowed to carry backpacks or purses at the junior high (weapons and drugs), another customer joined in, pointing out that this meant the girls had nowhere to carry their tampons. Men, we concluded, just weren’t thinking when they made up these rules. Thus refreshed, those of us who work at the store spent the remainder of the morning moving furniture. After lunch, I was up and down the ladder arranging toys for five solid hours. I confess that I was tired by the end of that time, and I was glad that I had skipped the weights at the gym that morning. The toys are looking good, though.

So, what with one thing and another, I did not get very far on Brooklyn. I have hopes for this evening, though.

Assuming I do not smother #1 son between now and then. Fortunately, when he came out this morning pointing out that it has finally cooled down and now, because I did not finish his jacket, he has no sweaters to wear and will freeze to death — well, instead of smacking him one in the puff, I was able to go to the Historical Sweater Shelf and pull out four sweaters in his size. Made by my grandmother, who was an expert knitter. Lucky him.

Now, you may be wondering why I am putting up with this behavior.

The fact is, my recent experience of irrationality has given me some extra sympathy for people behaving badly because they can’t help it. Slightly badly, at least. This kid is sixteen, so he could be doing much worse things than nagging me about the jacket. Smoking behind the barn. Selling drugs. Murdering people. Sixteen year-old boys do that kind of stuff. This is why people used to send sixteen year olds out to do exhausting stuff. After plowing a few fields, helping a knight on and off with his armor, or hunting buffalo, they were too tired to be irritating, let alone dangerous.

Do you like the way I have compressed human history into a response to teenage hormonal activity?

I just noticed the date! It is October 5th, which means that it is #1 daughter’s second anniversary. I don’t even pay attention to my own anniversary, and I don’t intend to pay attention to hers for much longer, but I am going to take this excuse to post this unidentifiable picture from her wedding, just to remember what we were all doing on this day two years ago. We have better pictures, some even without the antennae growing from Son-in-law’s head, but you know my kids are strict about identifiable pictures.

And, since this is a knitting blog, I will take credit for that lovely dress she is wearing, which I sewed, not knitted. Um, yes, that is the end of attempts to make this self-indulgence look better or at least more like following the rules.

Brooklyn went back on the needles for a little correction. CheriM points out that a few washings will erase the problems caused (potentially) by the collar issue, so I am just going to go ahead. With the driving test, work, class, and then all the time I spent hanging around talking with Partygirl and Westie, I haven’t gotten anything done beyond the frogging and correction.

I do have an update on the matter of Nestle’s. If you go to this site, you can find information on child labor which will make it clear to you why I joined the boycott of Nestle, one of the bad guys in the scenario. The good news is that they are moving toward fair trade coffee. Moving slowly, admittedly, but it is worth celebrating. It is also worth keeping their feet to the fire. If you would like to add a little social action to your Hallowe’en celebrations, check this out.

And we must not miss an update to the question of storing reading materials in the bathroom: the current issue of Elle Decor suggests that readers “introduce furniture in the bathroom” in order to “create a sitting area for relaxing, reading and reclining.” Since the bathrooms at our house are about 10′ square, the mind boggles slightly at this suggestion. Even in a large and well-appointed bathroom, surely the person settling down to recline and read would think, “Couldn’t I do this in a room with a better view?”

This reaction of mine reminds me of one of my favorite parts of The Blind Watchmaker.

This book, in typical Dawkins style, responds to one question by approaching it from so many different and interesting angles that the reader ends up with a feast of interesting things to think about.

The original question is the famous one about walking through a field and finding a watch. If you walk through a field and find a stone, you do not have to wonder how it got there. You might just figure it had always been there. But if you find a watch, you have to think about how it got there, and you probably have to assume that there was a watchmaker involved. Thus, for people who favor this argument, the very complexity of life forms implies intelligent design.

Dawkins sets out to show how complexity in life forms could be the result of evolution.

But one of my favorite parts in the book is his explanation of the Argument from Personal Incredulity.

You know how, in school, you learned about the classic logical fallacies, such as the Argumentum Ad Hominem and the Reductio ad Absurdum. Well, Dawkins offers a new one: the Argument from Personal Incredulity. When a theologian says that there does not seem to be any adaptive advantage to polar bears in being white, Dawkins says, what that theologian is really claiming is, “I, sitting in my study and knowing nothing about polar bears and never having even been to the Arctic, can’t think of any reason for polar bears to be white.”

This is what I have done with the question of fully-plumbed reading rooms. If you want a reading area in your bathroom, as someone over at Elle Decor apparently does, go right ahead. But I hope that you will give some thought and perhaps a little reading time to the issue of child labor and slavery before you buy your Hallowe’en candy this year. The arguments against supporting child labor are far more compelling than the Argument from Personal Incredulity.

“Half a league, half a league, half a league onward,
Into the valley of death rode the six hundred.”

This is a very accurate evocation of how I feel right now. Because I have to go with #1 son for him to take his driving test. Not for me to take the driving test. I don’t even have to drive. I just have to sit there, worrying about being late for work. No, I realize that the worrying is not compulsory. But that is what I will be doing. And breathing deeply. And reminding myself that, while these things feel as though there is some serious danger at hand, there is actually nothing wrong.

I won’t be knitting, because my zombie knitting project has taken a turn for the worse (see below).

So, while I am in complete agreement with the many people who have told me that my little agoraphobia doesn’t count as a serious problem, I still want some sympathy. Okay, Pokey? I promise to sympathize with any little unreasonable quirks of yours.

Later… Thank you all for your supportive comments. I survived, and he passed. I almost deleted this, but then it struck me that to do so would be dishonest. After all, I knew that I wasn’t over agoraphobia, but had just overcome it in the sense of being able to cope. Feeling silly is part of it, right?

So, hey, I took the kid to his driving test. And lived.

Again, thanks!

In our last exciting episode of Brooklyn, we had #1 son objecting to the washing of the completed pieces.

I traveled around the blogs looking at other people’s experiences with washing denim knitting, and found lots of things saying “You have to wash it before sewing it up. Don’t believe people who say it doesn’t matter.” I found things like this unbelievable swatch-off. I am always enormously impressed by this kind of behavior. Natalie also does things like this — swatching and washing the swatches. I do little swatches and immediately frog them so I can use the yarn.

But even leaving aside #1 son’s concerns about the color getting wimpy, I was concerned about the white stripes. The beauty of those white cables flashing up the sleeves is the main thing I like about this sweater.

Accordingly, I took bits of unused yarn and held them in water in the kitchen sink to see whether they bled. Having been somewhat reassured by this completely thorough and scientific check for colorfastness, but not without a little trepidation, I flung the pieces into the washer before I could talk myself out of it.

Now, I finished the knitting on this thing during a pleasant family Sunday afternoon, with accompaniments of homework, my husband’s work news (boys and girls, do we believe in the existence of something called a “mendrew”?), the Spiderman Ultimate video game, and some fancy cooking.

You see, I am supposed to be strict about saturated fats and simple carbohydrates, and lavish with the vegetables, but things have fallen down a bit chez fibermom. It started with the chaos of Back to School, and then it just sort of became habitual. We haven’t gotten down to cheeseburgers and doughnuts or anything, but there has been a shortage of hot vegetables. There have been some homemade snickerdoodles. A pizza was delivered one day.

(My husband ate a bag of pork cracklings for his afternoon snack on Sunday. He has perfect cholesterol numbers. He also smokes, drinks beer, and never exercises. Feel free to spend a moment hating him.)

So I am returning to strictness. And Sunday night I made a farewell to luxurious foods. Lasagne, with both spinach cheese sauce and roasted pepper meat sauce. Hot bread with butter. Caesar salad. Crisp chocolate wafer cookies (homemade, of course, with 70% cocoa dark chocolate produced without the use of child labor). It was very good.

On Monday morning, after a breakfast involving spinach and yogurt, I went ahead and did the washing. The cables emerged unsullied.

Last night, following a dinner composed largely of vegetables, I started sewing it all together. And thinking about picking up the stitches for the collar — which had not been washed. Of course. Since it doesn’t exist yet.

Lulled into a lack of watchfulness by butter and sugar, and then distracted by the return to fibrous plant foods, I failed to consider the collar.

I checked the pattern and found that I was supposed to sew the raglan sleeves and do the collar, and then wash it.

I got three of the raglan seams sewn up and draped it around #1 son. He and my husband began critiquing it. “There are spaces between the stitches.” “It’s too short.” Things like that. And, yeah, if you stretch the ribbing out, you can see light between the stitches. I would not have considered that a flaw. If it’s too short, though, that’s how it’s designed. It is true that the sleeves are longer than the body, but I have noticed that modern sweaters are like that. That’s how the picture is. And #2 daughter has already said that she wants the jacket if #1 son won’t wear it after it’s finished. So — since the criticisms were not things I could fix — I was just sort of rising above them.

When I went to sew the last seam, though, I discovered an actual error. It appears that I bound off two stitches on the wrong side of the right front. So I will now have to frog a couple of inches of this already-washed bit and knit it back up — hoping that I will not have to use any new, unwashed yarn.

Then, assuming that I can correct this error and get it sewn up, I will do the collar with unwashed yarn. And then what? Wash it again and see what happens? Never wash it again? Wash the yarn before making the collar (perhaps by knitting it all up into a rectangle, washing it, and then raveling it all and rewinding it?)?

Oh, yes. After all that — and I had given up and put Brooklyn away in order to regain pespective before frogging — the boys put a Schwan’s pizza in the oven and I joined them in eating it, while talking to #1 daughter on the phone. My lipids will not thank me, but I enjoyed it. She has an Italian cyber-friend who has joined the great Richard Dawkins read-in, and I will have to tell you about his contributions to the discussion  sometime.

I do not usually mention people’s real names, but I am going to tell you the story of Shurmeka and Aquonette using their real names. I am even going to tell you that they are in Texarkana. I hope that one of you will, one day, run into Shurmeka and Aquonette of Texarkana and give them a hug or buy them a drink or something, in recognition of the horrible, frustrating job they have to do.

My involvement in the story began a couple of months ago when a man came in to choose some teaching materials for a disabled child. I scanned it all for him and printed out a list.

We do this all the time. Usually we then hold the stuff for the person who chose it, and they come back at some point with a purchase order and buy their stuff. This man said not to hold it, as it could be a long process, and left with his quote. I deleted it. The man does not enter into the story again.

This quote, you understand, was just what you might get if you filled up your cart at elann.com without pushing the real order buttons, just to see what your total might be if you actually bought the stuff. You could print that out, and it would be a quote.

A month later I get a call from Shurmeka in Texarkana, who has received a fax of that quote. She needs “an original.”

I explain that there wasn’t actually a transaction, that it was just a printout of what was on the screen, etc. Shurmeka understands this. But her supervisor says that they have to have an original.

Having the original can be important. It can prove that you haven’t used the purchase order twice. It can prove that the principal signed the purchase order. It can matter. In this case, it cannot matter. The original paper is not different in any way from the faxed copy. Also, I don’t have the original. I can only make them a fake original with a new date. Even so, I reconstruct the quote and mail it to Shurmeka.

Two weeks later, Aquonette calls. She needs a signed original copy of the quote. The entirely meaningless quote.

I mentioned to her that we would have been happy to have signed it, had we known we were supposed to. This is the first we have heard of any signatures. Aquonette realizes that. It would apparently not have helped had we signed these things before. We have to sign them now.

There is another form that must be signed in triplicate, and she is going to mail it. A week later, she calls again. The papers have not appeared. She faxes them to us. The office is going to accept the faxed form, as long as it has original signatures, and then they need signatures on the original quote. Another, different, fake original quote.

So That Man signs the form in triplicate. It required a SSN or EIN, and it was not clear to me what the person who signed it was agreeing to, so I shoved it off on him. Then I reconstructed the quote. Again. And signed it where they told me to — on the line marked “Received by.”

I can see this in court.

“Ms. Fibermom, did you actually receive these goods?”
“No, Your Honor. There were no goods to receive. It was a quote.”
“Then why did you sign that you had received them?”
“Because, Your Honor, by that time I had grasped that the papers had nothing to do with reality, so I blindly followed orders.”

What would this do to you over time? If your job involved not only doing pointless things because someone told you to, but also persuading other people to do pointless things, when they don’t have your motivation to do them?

I called Aquonette to let her know that the fell deed had been accomplished. She allowed as how now the child might get the books before she was too old for them.

But maybe not. I am assuming that it will be another month, filled with bizarre and meaningless actions on the parts of Aquonette and Shurmeka, before the papers are approved by the next level. By then they might want more fake original quotes with insincere signatures. And then, since we did not hold the materials, we won’t have them in the store. They will have to be ordered from eight different publishers.

Then I guess we will send them to Texarkana. I don’t know where the child is, but I expect there will be a lengthy process involved in transporting the books to her.

Now, it is remotely possible that all the other actions that have taken place at that government office in Texarkana in the months since we first made that quote have been simple and reasonable, and that for some reason only our part in this has been surreal. But I don’t think so, do you? I think that Shurmeka and Aquonette spend their days going through ritualistic actions required by Byzantine regulations made up by committees of beaureaucrats.

Here is Brooklyn, fronts, back, and sleeves. With any luck I will be able to get it sewn together tonight. Then there is the collar, and the zipper. The pieces are too long, which is how it is supposed to be with denim. It shrinks up and not in, so you are supposed to knit it long and then wash it. Patterns written for denim yarns take this into account and turn out long garments. However, #1 son doesn’t want the pieces washed. He is concerned that the color will change in some way, and he likes it as it is. Except that of course it is too long. I could frog the sleeves and make them shorter. I could wash it, over his protests, or perhaps while he is out. I could never make anything for him ever again.