#2 daughter and #1 son were both working yesterday,and may have to work all week. The weather reports are daunting. Delays in #2 daughter's invitations and passport are threatening. My husband is responding to all talk of my taking the kids on a road trip without him with odd barks like, "Where?!" and "When?!"

It seems entirely possible that our road trip vacation will shrink down to a weekend.

No matter.

Yesterday, I strolled over to the Prayer Shawl Ministry meeting. I am normally at work when these meetings are held, so I did not realize that they go on for four hours. Yep. Four hours of knitting and talking. You can get a lot of both done in that length of time. Birth, school, work, marriage, death, computers -- we pretty much got to every subject but politics.

And one of the ladies gave me that old dishcloth pattern with the eyelets which I guess everyone but me already knew. I am looking forward to making a few of those some sweltering summer day when my kitchen needs some retro chic.

Actually, I nearly left before the others arrived. Being a punctual person, I was there at a few minutes before ten, and the rest sauntered in at about ten past, as I was wondering whether they had cancelled the meeting because of spring break. Apparently, they know the real time the thing begins.

I was knitting my prayer shawl, of course, and had also picked up a book to read while waiting. It was The Methodist Primer. This book was, we decided once we had all looked at it, given to new church members in the 1960s, and a copy had been hanging around ever since. The ladies were inclined to laugh at it. I was interested, though. I am always interested in history and philosophy anyway, and in particular, now that I have joined the Methodist church I want to know what it is that distinguishes Methodists from the other mainline Protestants. I told them that I could tell they were a fun and relaxed church, but wanted to be sure there weren't any surprising doctrines.

"Like naked chanting?" offered one of the ladies.
"Oh, I think I would have noticed naked chanting. I'm in the choir."
"Only if it took place here in the sanctuary. There could be private naked chanting."
"Actually, The Methodist Primer here -- " and I held it up "says that 'it is conduct, not creed' that distinguishes Methodists from Episcopalians."

The ladies were silenced by that. They mulled it over a bit. They said they had always heard good things of the Episcopalian church down the road, and I quickly agreed with them.

"I think," ventured one, "it's the Catholics who throw you out for naked chanting."

Then I strolled back home. "Strolled" might suggest something different from the actual experience, which featured piercing winds and lots of mud underfoot.

But, having reached my home, I sat in front of the fire and knitted and read.

Just as "strolling to the church" might put you in mind of some bucolic ramble -- and I guess it is that, what with the horses and freshly blooming redbuds and all -- but you must mentally add the cold and damp and the wind, the image of sitting by the fire with a book and some knitting might sound peaceful. You must add the backdrop of video games. Basketball, in particular, and that is better than "Vice City" or whatever it's called, so I am not complaining. Then you also have to add rock music. And frequent calls for food. And, once #1 son got home, rassling.

It was still pleasant. And it is amazing how much knitting you can accomplish when you don't have to go to work. At this point, however, it is nothing but pink rectangles.

#2 daughter and I pulled out a calculator at one point and figured up the area of the production of the first ball of Luna, and the area of the eventual sweater, and it seems likely that I will run out of yarn. This will add suspense to the otherwise peaceful day I have planned.

At the moment, the major challenge is winkling #2 daughter out of bed to go to the gym before she takes my car to work. Our gym has been closed for a week to install new equipment, and we have not been working out diligently at home, so I don't want to miss another day.

Perhaps I will go now and tickle her.

We returned to the hospital to visit Bonanza Jellybean. We really enjoyed meeting her and talking with her. She told us about the community choir she had sung with, and a family trip to Ireland, and the difficulty of getting healthy food when one is a truck driver.

If you have to be in a hospital, this is a nice one to be in. The picture here is of the courtyard. March is clearly not its best season, but it was still nice. If you are coping with terrible news, or having to spend a lot of time at the hospital, it would be good to have a calm place with water fountains to rest in for a bit.

Bonanza thought she might be able to go home today. She is sort of a stoical person, and had ignored stomach pain for three days as her appendix burst. She had had an emergency appendectomy on Saturday, and then sat up a bit on Sunday to meet her roommate's relatives (that's me and #2 daughter) for the first time in her hospital gown. And she was lively and cheerful. This says something about her character, it seems to me.

#2 daughter and I had joined the Methodist church. Since we have been there, singing in the choir, for a year, we had one person after another come up and say that they hadn't realized we weren't members. #2 daughter had sung a solo, so she also got to hear that she had made people cry, always a good thing. We will now have to become Methodists, I suppose.

Anyway, we were dressed nicely, so we went directly from church to the hospital. We picked up #2 son from a sleepover and did our grocery shopping and went to a bookstore for a bit, and then got back to our program of intensive lolling.

I finished reading The Ancestor's Tale, 600+ pages of really interesting stuff. I think I will miss it. It was like having someone very interesting ride in in the elevator with you every day. "You know," he would say, "it is very possible that the bacteria now living deep underground in such hot temperature that we cannot go find them, are very like the earliest form of life." "Really?" I'd say. Then he'd quote some Belloc and arrive at his floor.

We don't ever have conversations like that in elevators in real life, do we? And if we did, we might be afraid of the guy.

Dawkins finished up his book by speculating about what might happen if the entire process of evolution began again. He was arguing against the notion that we humans are in some way the pinnacle of creation, or that evolution is sort of aiming at something. But I have much this discussion when I do presentations about prehistoric people. Some things, I say, are such good ideas that they come up everywhere eventually. Just about everyone gets around to agriculture at some point. Weaving, too. North American prehistoric people didn't get around to fabric till European contact, but they all did some weaving. It's just such a good idea that some clever person in every civilization has to think of it sometime. Just so, Dawkins says, with the eye. It is such a good idea that it has come up repeatedly on various evolutionary pathways, and it probably always would.

He points out that Australia sort of has its own separate evolutionary strand, and that it came up with kangaroos where Africa had gone with gazelles. Kangaroos and gazelles don't look much alike, but they fill the same niche. Just so, perhaps humans would not arise a second time, but something might well come up to fill that "smart things that may not be all that impressive physically but can live almost anywhere once they get their thumbs going" niche. On the other hand, he points out that New Zealand never got around to mammals, and ended up importing them, so the creature in that niche could be quite different from us.

And by an interesting coincidence, Eddie Izzard pointed out in the DVD we watched yesterday that humans have thumbs and communication and that makes us think we are so great.

It isn't really an interesting coincidence. Chaos, Coincidence, and All That Jazz reminds us that coincidences lose all their interest as soon as we do some calculations on them. Some people feel a sense of loss at this, we are told, but then we are supposed to be comforted by the Dragon Curve fractals. If you want really clear, simple explanations of all those mathematical things like fractals and chaos theory and so forth, then this is the book for you. The authors seem to think that people who need really simple explanations of these very common ideas will also be interested in long columns of figures, and I think they are wrong about that, but you can always skip all those numbers.

So, yes, that is what we did yesterday for the second half of the day: read, watched DVDs, played video games (not me), knitted (not the kids).

My sister once told me that she was slightly alarmed by how much sheer lying around she could do. I see her point on that.

With Erin's knitting emergency completely cured by Kali Mama's quick thinking, I have been able to continue on it. I have also done quite a few inches of the Silken Damask Luna on #1 needles. That is the curly shrimplike thing nestling with Erin in the picture. It has no ribbing, since there is this unaccountable shortage of #0 needles in my town, and so it is just curling up. I will do the ribbing after the 0s arrive. That is also when I will begin the Regal Orchid version of this sweater (Lavold's Jasmine) for M. So far, I find this yarn very pleasant to work with. It has a slight inclination toward stranding, and I find that my stitches are a bit less even in this than in wool, but it feels very nice and has a good drape to it. I am looking forward to using it for the lace sections.

But vacations are supposed to include a lot of lying around. Unfortunately, hours of solid lying around lead to scenes like this one --

Okay. If you are a person of delicate sensibilities, perhaps you should just stop reading right now. I am about to show you a scene of raw horror.

Still with me? Well then, here it is:

It is dark and murky, and there are no severed limbs in it, but it is clear that my house no longer contains any surfaces not covered by stuff. #2 daughter's still-packed suitcase, all the things she has taken out of her suitcase, the junk food packages #2 son conned me into buying, books and DVD cases, art supplies, and dumbbells litter all flat places in the house. Clearly, I will have to do something about that before I can continue with the lolling-around phase of my vacation.

The only positive thing about having to do a bunch of cooking and cleaning while on vacation is that it is even worse to come home from working all day during the kids' spring break and deal with this kind of thing.

Yesterday was the start of the lolling-around phase of Spring Break, so we began the day with an excursion to gather provisions for the lolling. The plan was to pick up smaller knitting needles, some DVDs, and groceries. Since we were in need of grains and a friend's Celtic band was playing at the local gristmill, we figured we'd go there for lunch and then, with all the errands done, come home and settle in on the couch.

So we went to Hobby Lobby to pick up 0 needles, and they did not have any. This was not amazing. I think it is their policy not to carry any small needles -- perhaps they just aren't popular enough. We stopped at the video rental place and picked up movies to watch while knitting.

Then we went here -- the hospital. That was not part of our plan for the day, but we got a call from my mother as we went into Hobby Lobby, saying that a friend of my brother's had a ruptured appendix. They live in the next county, but our local hospital is the closest one for them, and she had checked in there.

We wandered around in search of my brother and his friend. Everywhere we went, they said she had just gone to some other place. The comic effect was heightened by the fact that my brother's friend's name sounds like a stage name. I am entirely serious, here. I hadn't previously known her last name, and when my mother told it to me on the phone, I burst out laughing, even though we were discussing an emergency appendectomy. It reminded me of the Tom Wolfe character Bonanza Jellybean, so just imagine roaming all over the hospital asking for Bonanza Jellybean. When at last we found her, she was sleeping and my brother had gone home. We left a note, and will go back today.

Next we headed confidently into our LYS to pick up those 0 needles.

Nope.

Apparently, in spite of the big craft stores' belief that people don't use small needles, there was a great rush on small needles, and there were none in the shop smaller than a size 1. And not many of those, either. The woman behind me in the line wondered aloud what everyone was making. And it is true that sometimes there is a great mad lemming-like rush among knitters to make some particular thing, but whatever it is, I'm not part of it. I just want some small needles.

#2 daughter had a phone call from a distraught friend in Australia just as we arrived at the shop, so she wandered around talking on her cell phone the whole time. I apologized to the shop owner, fondled yarn, and admired some snazzy felted crocheted bunny slippers. They were in a wonderful lavender mohair, and I immediately wanted to make them. Do I know anyone who would wear fuzzy bunny slippers? No. But they were very cute. The lady in the shop didn't know where the pattern came from, or I would tell you. After all, you may know someone who would really enjoy some mohair bunny slippers.

At that point, it was time to zoom over to the mill for Irish music and lunch. #2 daughter was wearing a sticker that said "I'm not Irish, but you can kiss me anyway," but no one did.

Both the lunch and the music were excellent, and we had the opportunity to catch up on #2's adventures, the place of art in daily life, modern courtship patterns and their negative consequences, and how bad those knitted culottes look on just about everybody.

This is the house that goes with the mill. The mill is one of the few remaining working water-powered gristmills in the country.

It still looks like winter, doesn't it?

 

 

We picked up fresh-ground flours and hot cereals and things. The main thing on my list was their delicious 7-grain cereal, and they had only very small quantities of that on hand. I suppose we could have asked them to grind us up some posthaste in this machine -- not an option with knitting needles -- but we did not.

We stood for a bit and watched the grinding, and also looked out of the window at the mill wheel. When the kids were small, they used to try out the hand-grinding, too, but we are past that now.

Though we contemplated getting some more exotic grains -- spelt flour, quinoa, flax meal -- once we had gotten all our favorites, it seemed like plenty and was almost too much to carry. We did get some of that new white whole wheat flour. I intend to trick the boys with it, when they start in to fussing about having whole grains all the time. I'll let you know how it is.

Then back home through the cherry trees. We watched for a yarn shop all along, and even stopped and looked at a phone book, and asked people, and everything, but I still have no 0 needles. Sigh.

We returned to the LYS and bought a set of 1s, since mine are involved in a lace shawl. I have decided to start the pink Jasmine on them. That way, if it doesn't work out, I will have ruined my own sweater, not M's. The new needles are Addi Turbos, about which knitting bloggers often wax poetic. The thing I like about them so far is that they have the size marked on them. I do not notice that I knit faster with them, but we shall see.

We were more successful with our remaining errand.

This is the shop where we went for #2 daughter's recital invitations.

We had looked at Hobby Lobby for options for making them ourselves, and been able to estimate the cost of doing so fairly well.

Once we saw what these guys could do, and thought realistically about the time available, we went ahead and ordered them. In general, we like to make everything ourselves, but sometimes you have to be realistic.

 

I like this little courtyard.

 

 

 

 

And the angles of the buildings. This is our downtown.

It's actually part of the gentrification of our downtown. There was some resistance to the process. There were restaurants and such which had been downtown for years, and which could no longer afford the neighborhood after the Arts Center and the snazzy new places were built. I have sympathy for them. I also really like the new downtown. The architects were very respectful of the character of the historic buildings and incorporated as much original building as possible into the renovations. Some of the places that ended up having to relocate were in very poor condition, and there were ruined buildings known for their use as drug dealing meeting places. The downtown renewal project cleaned that up, and was a blessing for those businesses that were able to stay. I don't know what the solution for that sort of problem is.

Another part of the city's downtown project was the installation of a bunch of life-sized human statues, including this knitting woman. She sits in a little garden behind the Arts Center. As you see, she is using enormous needles, holding her arms oddly, and concentrating way too hard for the sort of knitting she's doing. I like her anyway -- and all the others. There has been a certain amount of vandalism since these guys came to live here, as you can probably imagine, but I think most of us are very fond of them all.

In any case, we went home at that point, leaving the groceries for another day. We had a couple of pizzas from the Schwan's man in the freezer, and things for salad, and we decided that that would do for dinner. Imagine our surprise when we learned later that #1 son had eaten an entire pizza for breakfast after we left that morning. So I did actually have to cook, but otherwise it felt like vacation.

Kali Mama sent me the Erin chart which had been destroyed, and I will get started on M's Jasmine once I come up with a suitable needle. So there may be knitting pictures tomorrow. But I am on vacation, so who knows what I might do?

My chatterbox is on strike, so here is Lydia's complete Plotz:

"Pinched by her satin dance slippers and the life they represent, the firey and warm unjustly exiled Marquise Marie-Madeleine-Andalusie-Pompidou of Upper-Midwest-Southern-Cologne must come to terms with her new place in exile society, grieve the loss of her talented fink of a husband, and find out why there are kittens living in her writing desk. "

Pretty great, huh?

In general, I am not much on pictures of yarn. I know that the colors will not be accurate, the texture will not be visible, and just generally you can't tell that much about yarn by looking at a photo on a monitor.

SweetGeorgia's pictures of yarn are an exception, but she takes tender, evocative pictures of her backyard grill, so this is obviously not about the yarn.

 

Still, I am showing you pictures of yarn. This is the yarn M sent me: Luna from the Endless Summer collection. It is a viscose/cotton blend, and it is soft and lustrous. The two fibers are in separate strands, plied together, giving it a subtle tweed effect of shiny and matte textures. I am excited about working with it.

It seems unlikely that this amount of yarn will make an entire sweater, but fine yarns often seem like that, so we shall see.

This is the sweater I will be making with it: Jasmine, by Elsebeth Lavold. This is from her book The Summer Breeze Collection.

Regal Orchid for M, and then pink (or rather, Silken Damask -- not a very transparent color name, but lovely to say) for me.

Chanthaboune wants one after that.

I think this sweater would also be nice with shorter sleeves -- ballerina length, or even cap sleeves. In fact, carrying the lace up into straps and leaving it sleeveless would also be pretty. I may make a lot of these.

 

 

I swatched, and was surprised. The fact that I get surprised when I swatch is the reason that I swatch. (The needle at the top of the picture is not some unusual new knitting technique. I just threaded the second needle throught the cast on row in order to make the swatch hold still for its picture. So yes, this swatch is upside down. Come on now, you are paying way too much attention to what is after all just another picture of yarn.)

I went clear down to size 1 needles before I got a nice fabric. My gauge on #1s is 23 stitches to 4" -- the pattern requires 22. I had a momentary thought of just watching scary movies while I knitted in order to add a bit of tenseness... No, I must move further down. In case you are curious, the pattern recommends #4 needles for the ribbing, and #6 for the main knitting. Let this be a reminder not to pay a whole lot of attention to the pattern's recommendation for needle size. I am a relaxed knitter, myself, and always have to use smaller needles than the pattern calls for.

But in this case, my circular #1 needles are busy keeping my shawl from last summer from disintegrating. This is not a UFO, I swear. It is merely a WIP that is having a long vacation.

I also don't like scary movies, so I would not want to have to watch them the whole time I am knitting. And I have never actually tested the hypothesis that watching scary movies while knitting will change your gauge.

So it is clear that a trip to the LYS is in order. #2 daughter is at home, and expressed a willingness to be awakened at 9:30. So we should be able to hit the yarn shop when they open, score a set of 0s and 00s (for the ribbing) and get home in time for a long day full of lolling around.

Our coffee table bears mute witness to the fact that we put in a good amount of lolling time last night, too. Highlights of the picture include Erin, getting a couple more rows; newspapers listing the St. Patrick's Day entertainments, none of which we actually attended; books and Netflix which we were discussing; and leftover snacks from husband and daughter's drive down from her school. Also sneakers, weights, and other random mess. Therefore, it is clear that between now and the time when I have permission to awaken #2 daughter, I will be cleaning house.

Normally, I would also go grocery shopping, but the Yarn Harlot recommends buying only enough food for one day at a time during Spring Break, on the grounds that teenagers will eat all the food in the house, no matter how much there is. She could be right about that.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I hear that in KC, St. Patrick's Day is like Mardi Gras here. #2 daughter says there will be enormous parties, and her dad says they may just have to stay and party for a while before coming home.

Otherwise, I will see them reasonably early this evening. Quite exciting. And since I am taking off spring break, this is the last work day before vacation, which makes it a step up from any ordinary TGIF. Well, eat some sort of Irish food, wear green but don't pinch people who forgot, and kiss folks randomly, even if they do not have their "Kiss Me, I'm Irish" t-shirts on (but only if you are sure they will not slap you).

I am taking my vacation during spring break, this coming week.

This has drawbacks. The main one is that I will not be going into Back to School fresh from a vacation. Summer vacation is supposed to make me fond of the customers again before they begin obsessing over their plan books.

However, The Empress and I gazed at the calendar for now till BTS, and it is clear that May and June are both out, and my kids have no breaks between Spring Break and May, so this is it.

#2 daughter will be home from college, but both she and #2 son are working for part of the week. So any thoughts of a week-long camping trip are out. Also, we must take said daughter back to her school at the end of the week. So any road trip must end up in Liberty, MO.

At the moment, I am thinking that I should spend the first half of the week lolling around knitting and reading, and then have a leisurely road trip to Liberty and back.

We have taken a lot of road trips as a family. The perfect road trip, to my mind, is when you point your car roughly in the direction of your eventual destination and mosey on over there, stopping at all interesting places. "Interesting places" should ideally include, but not be limited to, the following: weird little museums, roadside stands with things like fresh-pressed cherry cider, small parks with surprising features and live music, bookstores (stocked, in an ideal world, with used copies of out-of-print books by favorite authors, and wonderful brand new unfamiliar authors in cheap paper editions), yarn shops with local handspun and imported craft magazines, and encounters with friendly and unusual people. You eat intriguing local foods and hear different radio stations. At the end of the day, you find a great campsite or rustic cabin with good plumbing and someplace to swim.

Of course, as we all know, road trips often include long spells of flatness broken only by scary roads and ugly strip malls containing the exact same chain stores that you have back home, nasty fast food, and spending 40 minutes driving around bootlessly searching for the World's Largest Coal Scuttle which the sign suggested was just off the freeway. At the end of the day, you stop at place after place with no vacancy, finally ending up with a room at an overpriced motel where people scream at each other through the night. You also cannot, on many road trips, get a good cup of tea for love nor money. And sometimes hardly a shower, either.

Most road trips actually have both these types of experiences. The excitement of road trips is that you don't know ahead of time the ratio of bad to good or the details.

(If you think that the excitement of road trips is the possibility of having exciting but non-fatal adventures with people you meet in bars, you have been watching too many movies.)

I have been thinking back on the high points of previous family road trips: friendly deer, Navajo tacos, an Albuquerque wedding, pig de-snooters and other artifacts of  exotic daily lives, breathtaking scenery, Sequoyah's home, Dove bars eaten with knife and fork in a wrought-iron courtyard, paddle-boats, happening upon sculptures in a garden.

My wonderful husband is going up to pick our girl up today, so I can look forward to the road trip without also having a 12 hour there-and-back today.

I will research what exciting possibilities there may be between here and there.

Grannyvibe had a very interesting post on people who boycott Wal-Mart. I have enormous respect for this writer, and if she says that she understands the issues, I am sure she does. I do not intend to say anything at all about Wal-Mart here. But I think there are two things going on in her story.

The first is about voting with your pocketbook. At its simplest, this means that you do not spend money with companies whose business practices are abhorrent to you, and you let them know that.

So many evils in the world are done not from fiendish malevolence, but merely because they are profitable. If we can threaten that profitability, we can encourage change. Often, this is more effective than political activism.

Take the example of Taco Bell. They had human rights issues with the people who picked their tomatoes. The cost of fixing the problem worked out to about a 15 cent rise in the price of a taco. People all over the country sent them a simple message: "I am one of your customers. I am willing to spend 15 cents more on a taco in order to improve conditions for the people who pick your tomatoes. I won't shop with you again till changes are made." Yum Foods, the enormous international corporation that owns Taco Bell, took care of the problem -- not, I would guess, because they had a change of heart, but because that great big focus group told them that their customers cared whether their workers were treated fairly. Yum now has a human rights policy, and is known for trying to clean up their act, instead of for their bad behavior. Those of us who refused to support them, now make a point of supporting them, and encourage further progress. That's simple good business on their part, and a good example of economic suasion.

Please notice that the pressure was not put on tomato growers. The folks who picked the tomatoes were at the mercy of the growers, but the growers were at the mercy of the enormous buyers. Yum has the money and power to make a difference in the industry. This is why, if we are for example concerned about the chocolate industry, we should boycott -- and communicate with -- Nestle, not just boycott all African chocolate and threaten the economy of Cote d'Ivoire. Economic pressure should go toward those who can actually afford to make changes.

Being a socially responsible consumer is a matter of conscience, for me. To take a historical example, I believe that the people who owned slaves in the American South were wrong. But I also believe that those who knowingly benefited from slavery -- either through direct profit or through the lower prices resulting from slavery -- were wrong. Even when they spoke out against slavery and looked down on the slaveholders, yet continued to profit from the horrible institution.

In the real world, things aren't always simple. Slavery wasn't. In the town where I live, there was a woman in the 1860s who inherited three slaves. At that time, it was illegal to be a free black person in this state. She couldn't simply free her new slaves, because they couldn't live here as free people, but had nowhere to go outside the state. She could not afford to stake them to a new home in another state. Even though she was personally opposed to slavery (I've read her diary), this woman kept her slaves. As Granny points out, sometimes the best choice is not an option.

But we often have choices, and when we do, it is reasonable and right to let our consciences be our guides. It is reasonable, if we are opposed to sweatshops, to child labor, to unfair and deceptive labor practices -- or whatever else we care about -- to make economic choices that reflect that.

If we feel sad about child labor and child slavery, yet support Nestle, one of the companies that is culpable in this, then we should not bother feeling sad. If we did not buy things produced by children sold to cacao growers, there would be no children sold to cacao growers. If we can convince Nestle that we won't buy things produced with child labor, then Nestle will quit buying things produced with child labor, and there will be no more child labor in the chocolate industry -- because Nestle is big and powerful enough to cause that change. Already, economic pressure has persuaded most European chocolate producers not only to stand up against child labor, but to help the growers in Cote d'Ivoire come up with ways to sustain themselves without resorting to these practices.

The Blue Pages mentioned above gives lots of information about the policies, practices, and political action of major companies. It tells what charities they give to, what lawsuits have been brought against them, and when they've gotten in trouble for -- or been rewarded for -- their environmental and health behaviors. This page provides online links with similar information.  If you choose to follow up on these sources, you will have the knowledge you need to put your money where your beliefs are. And I for one hope you will do so, even if you don't happen to share my beliefs.

Now I think there is something else going on in Granny's story. And that is that the people Granny writes about -- the ones who boycott Wal-Mart -- were denigrating the people and the culture of the place they were visiting.

I know about this. I think I've written about this before. I live in one of those places people visit with a very de haut en bas attitude. (The home of Wal-Mart, coincidentally.) The people who live here are not actually a sideshow put out for maximum quaintness value for visiting tourists, but we occasionally have -- among the many, many nice visitors who enrich our lives -- people who seem to think so. I don't want to hear some tourist slighting my home and the people who live here. I especially don't want some tourist hearing my accent, recognizing that I am not from here, and thinking that I will therefore join them in slighting my home and the people who live here. Frankly, I don't want to hear anybody slighting anybody.

There is a difference between choosing not to shop with a company because they do things you consider wrong, and choosing not to shop with a company because you think they're tacky. And there is an enormous difference between standing on your principles (which I know Granny does) and being disrespectful and rude.

Those of us who make choices about shopping on the basis of principle must, if we are to be effective in what we are trying to do, be sure not to be obnoxious. As a fine woman of my acquaintance once said, "If you think that you are being persecuted for your religion, ask yourself 'Am I being obnoxious?'" (I was not, by the way, the one who felt persecuted.)

Equally, if you think people are indifferent to your message about social change, ask yourself: "Am I being obnoxious?" You don't move people to consider fair trade by being condescending about your hostess's coffee. You don't persuade people to care about worker's rights by looking down on workers (even if you are a worker). And you can't advance an agenda of fairness by being snippy about someone's way of life.

#2 son has Health class this year. In it, he tells me, he had to admit that he exercises regularly and "has to eat lots of whole grains because my mom's a health nut."

His teacher told him it was nothing to be ashamed of. That's a relief.

So, last night, after feeding my poor children whole-wheat spaghetti and homemade whole-wheat bread (and salad and grapes, too, poor children), I went off to class and the boys went to the gym. So far, an ordinary sort of evening.

But when I came home -- arriving just as the boys did -- my husband had Philly Cheese Steak Pockets in the oven and was watching Nashville Star. It was like being in someone else's house. I sat down to try to re-chart Erin's missing inch and watched it with him.

It was interesting, in a novelty sort of way, but I had the reaction I always do have when I incautiously watch a reality show -- I am so sorry for the victim of the program. In this case, ten people sing country songs and one of them gets thrown out each night till the remaining person wins the tontine or whatever it is.

Last night, in spite of there being a funny-looking guy who couldn't sing, one who said he would shoot people who got in his way and sounded like a specially-prepared generic country singer guy, and a girl with a fine voice who was singing Broadway style (and the cruel judge told her so, too), the one they sent home was the old one. She did a good job, but she was 31. Obviously too old for the reality show.

They also spoke scornfully to the one who yodeled. This was wrong. As I told my husband, you might not like to listen to it, but hardly anyone can do it. That ought to count for something.

My husband really likes reality shows. He has strong if quixotic feelings about the participants. He is rooting for the funny-looking one who can't sing. There was a complex reason for this preference, but I have forgotten it now. He and the boys ate their Philly Cheese Steak Pockets and ice cream and then said they were all still hungry. My husband said it was because they had not eaten rice. So there I was in a bizarre parallel Boy Universe, listening to somebody yodel. 

I could have been in a bizarre parallel girl universe, though. There was Fellowship after class last night. Some of you may not know that "fellowship" is a special church word. Depending on your denomination, it can mean a party, food, hanging out only with other Christians, or some other surprising thing. Some denominations do not use it at all, and some use it as a verb. In this case, it means that we can talk freely with the other ladies in our small group, instead of sticking to our carefully-prepared lesson.

In my case, this is not a good thing. You know that I am a mild-mannered matron who sings in the choir. The other ladies in my small group think that I am a dangerous radical. Or possibly worse. And while I can enjoy their views on whether Jacob ever grew to love Leah or not, I tend to be appalled by the kinds of things they say in unfettered discussions. So I guess I think they are dangerous radicals, too. It is better for us all if I do not attend fellowship.

As The Empress said yesterday, "There are people who admit to being Republicans without any embarrassment."

As for the chart, Kali Mama can get it from the library, and will send me the missing inch. Since I own the book and she is getting it from the library, this copying falls under "fair use" and should not make anyone raise his or her eyebrows.

So, secure in the knowledge that whatever I mess up can be fixed, I went ahead and charted from the already-knitted part and did a couple of rows. I can always take it out.

"My Bloginality is INTJ!!!" The multiple exclamation points are clear evidence that I did not write that sentence However, I did copy and paste it so that you could go take this highly scientific test.