Xanga has apparently gotten all its servers across the Hudson, a phrase which seems as though it ought to have a ballad available for it. However, I do not yet trust it enough to write much, because posts, pictures, and comments are still disappearing into the ether.

So I will merely mention that I am making progress on the Regal Orchid Jasmine sleeves.

The term "sleeve island," coined by Fluffa! back in the mists of blogtime, is often used in knitting blogs to refer to the sense one gets while doing a sleeve that time is stretching out. You know how it is. You have completed the front and back, you sort of feel like you are almost finished, you'll just whip out a couple of sleeves, and then you knit and knit and they do not seem to get any longer. You feel stuck, rather than as though you are sailing along briskly, prepared to shout "Yarn, Ho!" at any moment.

This blog has allowed me to discover that sleeves for an adult sweater take me about two weeks. So I still expect to finish this sweater in May.

There was a time in my knitting life when I mostly made baby things. That was because I had a house full of babies at the time. I could whip out a garment while they had their naps.

I am not nostalgic for that time, but I do look forward to having grandchildren so I can make baby stuff again. 

Anyway, I have no objection to sleeves. I read while I knit, so long stretches of stockinette with minimal shaping are welcome.

My choir director, Bigsax (I did not make up that name; it is his screen name), told me the other night that he does not read novels. We were talking about The Da Vinci Code, and how het up over it people were getting. At one point he asked me, "Have you read it?"

I was a little bit taken aback. Wasn't that what we were talking about? But he had not read it, had merely read about it. "I don't read novels," he said. And fewer than half of Americans do, if you believe the studies.

This is old news, of course, but Bigsax's remark made me think about it again. And I was wondering whether it is fiction overall that is suffering, rather than novels as a medium. Because it seems to me that a lot of popular TV is also not fiction.

The TV is often on at my house, so I do not think that I am entirely ignorant about TV, although I am rarely the one in control of the remote. And it seems to me that most of what is on does not have a story line. We watch The Daily Show, and then there are the sports and news programs, and then there are things like Nashville Star and game shows, which my husband loves for reasons which are not clear to the rest of us. I watch Monk when I can figure out when it comes on, but otherwise there is probably not a single plot on the TV in a week.

I am not prepared to draw conclusions about this yet, because I might put lots of thought into it and craft paragraphs persuading you to my point of view and then push "submit" and get that "not responding" screen and that would feel a lot like Sleeve Island.

Chanthaboune's and my entry for the writing contest went in the mail yesterday, allowing me to cross something off my list for the month.

Another goal for May is to get into the habit of having a simple schedule that will keep my life serene through the summer. To this end, I am enlisting flylady.

My friend Partygirl told me about flylady. Partygirl is a good person to listen to when it comes to housekeeping. I drop by her place before work often enough to know that her house is pleasant and comfortable pretty much all the time, and if it is a Saturday, there might be mimosas in the rose garden. So I took her advice and checked out flylady.

Flylady is a free email reminder service. You check your email in the morning and have a message telling you to, as it might be, wash the faces of your kitchen cabinets. Now, my mind is generally on higher things, so if I waited till I thought of washing my cabinets on my own.... Well, it would be a long time, that's all. But with flylady I see that it is time to do that, and while my breakfast oats are cooking, I do it.

It's a pretty simple system. There are daily routine tasks, a weekly housecleaning, and monthly things. You also get reminders to do your BSE, floss your teeth, check your calendar for the next day, and suchlike. I like not having to think much about housework because someone else is keeping track of when I last cleaned my refrigerator.

People have complaints about flylady. For one thing, they say, she is irritatingly cute. Well, this is true. I have a higher tolerance for cuteness than I used to, now that I have spent all these years working with teachers, but even so I must agree that she is too cute. However, you will find that, if you program your spam filter to refuse everything that contains the term "testimonial," that will cut a lot of the cuteness. The rest you can just overlook and ignore.

Second, people say there is too much mail. Again, your spam filter will help on this. But most of the messages do not need to be opened. You see the subject line saying "What is for dinner?" and think, "Ah, yes, I had better think about that," and delete it.

Finally, people say that they do not like to be told what to do. I don't mind being told what to do, as I have no trouble ignoring it. In fact, when Partygirl brought it up , she said, "Flylady tells me to clean out my car every Friday, and I don't do it." For those who have a rebellious streak, I would think this would be a plus. After all, if you had a friend who reminded you to clean out your car every Friday and you never did, she would eventually give up. Flylady does not. If you get a kick out of refusing advice, go ahead and ignore it. Some Friday, years hence, you will get the reminder to clean out your car, and do it. And be glad you did.

There are a few writers whose books are so well-written and entertaining that I would like them to give up all other activities and just write books for me to read. Christopher Buckley is one of them, and this is one of my favorites of his. I loaned it to someone years ago (probably pressed it into their barely-willing hands, because this is a bad habit of mine) and never got it back. Now that it has been made into a movie, there is a new mass edition, so I have a copy again and am re-reading it with great pleasure.

I have done no knitting since the last thrilling installment, and this is all the further I have gotten with my current sewing project: a pleat. Not even a sewn pleat, just a pinned one.

Partly this is because my sewing machine is at work and I have been busy writing and went to class last night. The writing has been semi-fictional so far. I cleaned up #2 daughter's job application which she couldn't quite finish up before leaving the country and emailed it in. I didn't feel that I could make stuff up too freely there. Then I did a press release. My press releases are pretty successful, in that they are usually printed, and often much as they were written. I always make up quotes. Then I check with the person whose name I put on the quote, to make sure that they are okay with it. I see nothing wrong with this. Press releases are advertising masquerading as news, and the whole point of the exercise is to make the masquerade convincing. You can't always do that with stuff people actually say.

Then I worked on the store newsletter. This is not fiction; it is describing the new products. However, when I write it I like to take on a different persona. The person writing the newsletter is worried about the things that our customers worry about, committed to state mandates, and capable of getting very excited over the new look in bulletin boards. I think this is true of fashion magazine writers, too. They don't give a flip about the Return of the White Dress, but are temporarily taking on the personality of someone who does. Like the cartoon showing a bald, overweight, middle-aged guy with a cigarette dangling from his lip and a beer by his typewriter, with the caption "I guess you could say I'm that typical Cosmo girl..."

So this is why there was no knitting yesterday. The lack of sewing progress, however, is not just about time. It is also about space.

In general, I feel reasonably adept with dimensionality. After all, I routinely take two-dimensional stuff like fabric, and even rather one-dimensional stuff like yarn, and make it into three-dimensional things. My attempt to make a flat piece of fabric into something shaped like this bag, however, has me remembering a conversation I had with a mathematician friend of mine.

We were admiring a Zome construct he had made (that's Zome, on the left) and he was explaining its history and fine points. Though I gazed at it intently, I had at length to admit that I did not see the fine points in question. He looked at me pityingly and explained that that was because they were in other dimensions.

I sort of feel that way about the bag. I tried all sorts of things to get that center pleat right, including kite folds. I am here to tell you that this doesn't work on fabric. It looks perfect, but when you pick it up, the bias grain wars with the straight grain and the whole thing behaves neither like a kite nor a bag, but like something which has left some of its parts in another dimension.

With my husband's assistance, I finally got the center pleat done, but then the question arises: how to get the right shape at the bottom? I made the little prototype bag from a single rectangle with pleats at both ends, but it has a straight bottom, not a curved one. Possibly I need to cut a curve for it, but it also seems possible that further pleats of a satchel-like nature would do it.

Not everyone has these geometrical challenges. Some people can move directly to three dimensionality without extensive preliminary thoughts about gravity and the space-time continuum. Oschene, for example, made a fabric origami wallet, which you can admire here. It involved report-cover plastic, and I intend to copy that idea and make myself another.

I also have to try this, from Dweezy.

Right now, #2 daughter should be in an airport in England. I am looking forward to hearing about her adventures.

I was able to speak to her a couple of times yesterday at work, but we were having a mad day. I walked in with my sewing machine, intending to complete the shopping carts, but it was not to be. Instead, I had an order of 178 items to find, gather, check off a list, scan, and pack.

This took me the entire day.

The reason it did is that, while I did this, I was also answering the phone, introducing the dog to children, helping people figure out alternatives to the Butterfly Garden (I do not understand why people think there are caterpillars in there already, since they would obviously be dead, but it is not possible to go from buying the butterfly gardens to seeing butterflies emerge in the three remaining weeks of school, so forget it), selling things, listening to tales of the amazing intellectual prowess of grandchildren, helping people choose a suitable border for a presentation board on the piranha, and responding to repeated pipings of "Sir! Sir! What do you do with this?" from a three-year-old who needed a lot of direction while playing with the train table.

Of course, I like doing all those things. But doing them while also searching through boxes for the sixth package of pink heart-shaped doilies so I could check that off the list requires fortitude. It is not considered good form to shout "Shut up, will you! Can't you see that I'm counting?" at one's customers.

That's bad multi-tasking. Right now I am folding laundry and drinking tea while writing this, and waking up, which may not be a separate task, but feels like one sometimes. That is good multi-tasking.

Last night I watched Pride and Prejudice and got a good start on the Regal Orchid sleeve while waiting to pick #2 son up from a study date, which was another example of good multi-tasking. P&P is a great story, and they did a good job with the film, though I confess that I got distracted by lace sometimes.

#2 son and his classmate were making a video of Uncle Tom's Cabin. "It involved a lot of hitting," he informed me.

It is the Regal Orchid Jasmine sweater, front layered over back to ensure matching, blocking. There appear to be cat footprints, but that will be dealt with in the final finishing.

Some bloggers have lovely blocking pictures, but I do not. Whether it is my blocking or my photography I do not know, but there it is.

And here are the front and back having just been measured before the final ribbing. I guess it is my photography.

This is being knitted from Eternal Summer collection's Luna, in the color Regal Orchid. This is a very soft and drapey yarn, with a subtle sheen. I am very happy with it. The lace panels blocked out very well, and overall the  results are excellent. You never know till you actually get all the pieces together, but I am feeling very optimistic about this sweater.

I got to wear #1 son's track jacket made from Den-M-Nit during our travels (for which read, I put it on and he didn't make me take it off), and loved it, too. I've had a somewhat anti-cotton bias (fueled by the Sinfonia T-shirt experience last year) when it comes to knitted clothing, but these modern cottons are changing my mind.

Much jungly blooming is taking place, but no weeding took place yesterday. Nor was there any significant quantity of housework, completion of the contest entry, or other high-energy activity.

In the interests of recuperating from Saturday, I spent the day reading and knitting, with one small excursion out with #2 son to pick up meatitude and sweetitude for the boys' school lunches this week.

I've still been thinking about the commencement. My favorite part was when the bagpipes led the walk around the quad, with the families standing around the lawn watching for their kids. Incoming freshmen do this, and then they do it again at commencement in their robes.

For commencement, the faculty follow them, all in their medieval heraldic regalia, which gives lots of information to the initiates. "Torches and hats," said #1 son. "Looks like a cult to me."

Then the whole boiling of us followed the college down the hill to the gym and squashed into our seats while the kids did the last bit of their walk.

And this morning, #2 daughter heads off for the UK. My brother has given her some useful suggestions on how to comport herself in pubs, and of course she has been watching BBC programs, so we figure she is well prepared. As my husband says, they speak English, so it will be easy.

Yesterday was a good news/bad news kind of day.

The bad news was that I got up at 3:20 a.m., spent five hours in a car, listened to lots of speeches, and then immediately turned around (leaving #2 daughter alone in her cap and gown, sob!) and spent five more hours in a car, arriving home shortly past 9:00 p.m. While #2 daughter did find a celebration to join, my day also included two teenage boys who complained about 17.8% of the time, scary roads in the rain, and Burger King drive-through.

The good news outweighed the bad news.

I did not have to drive at all, and got the Regal Orchid Jasmine sweater done up to the shaping on the front.

There was great music, including not just #2 daughter's vocal ensemble, but also a brass medley of "When the Saints Go Marching In" and the Hallelujah Chorus that made the entire day worthwhile. Bagpipes, too, and you just can't help feeling festive when there are bagpipes, right?

The speeches were not bad at all, as speeches go.

There was a brunch which was lavish and delicious, and removed any lingering sympathy we might have felt for #2 daughter's having to eat dorm food. The fact that we had been up for seven hours before eating it doubtless added to its splendor, but it was still very good.

We had the opportunity to meet or to see again a lot of #2 daughter's friends, and often their parents as well. The boys got to be told repeatedly how much they look like their sister. My husband and I got to be told repeatedly how proud everyone is of our daughter.

And of course, the big point of the entire thing was being there for a milestone in the lives of all the young people we were honoring at graduation.

Our daughter commenced!

Congratulations to all the Jewels of Knowledge, and thank you for letting us be a small part of your college experience!

Falstaff was way ahead in the rose race -- first buds, first to begin opening -- but as we see, he still hasn't gotten fully opened.

He has spent the past week trying to get this one bloom fully opened, and it is still only about halfway.

Perhaps he is the kind of guy -- er, rose -- that likes to get things right, even if it takes a long time. After all, he is David Austin's "best crimson." That's a lot to live up to.

Montezuma, on the other hand, went from closed bud to this in one day.

Once he gets going, he will be covered in blossoms.

However, New Dawn came out and pipped them both at the post with the first full-blown rose.

Joseph's Coat, which had the first rose last year, is still asleep.

Chanthaboune and I are in the final stages of our writing contest entry. We have noticed a couple of little problems. For one thing, we haven't given any hint of our characters' ethnicity (except the blonde, I suppose) and, as Chathaboune points out, everyone will assume they are all white.

Chanthaboune isn't white, so she is not being swayed by her own ethnicity, though she may be making assumptions about the readers. Do you assume that characters in books match your own ethnic background if nothing else is specified? Do you care?

There is one series of mystery novels which has a white protagonist, but for some reason she just sounds African-American to me. She is blonde, which is how I know she is supposed to be white, but reading her as white required continual mental readjustment for me, so I gave it up and simply mentally recast her as black. The author will never know.

For another thing, the 800-word summary of the rest of the book is 2500 words long.

Once we deal with these two little things, we will be set.

The Sew? I Knit sewalong has extended the bag project for another couple of weeks. This is good news for me because there is this other bag I have had an idea for, but -- being a slavish rule-follower -- I had decided not to make it, in order to be ready to jump right in on the next sewalong.

It started with this bag, which a friend owns. Hers is in a wonderful crimson tapestry fabric. It is clearly handmade, but also very practical, with pockets and things, and sturdy -- neither of which is always true of the average handmade tote bag.

Unlike my friend, I do not have a budget that will accommodate $200+ custom purses, so I am not considering buying one. But I did admire it online, along with this one from the same designer.

It is the shape, and the pleats, that I most like in these particular bags.

One of the sewalongers hooked us up with this tutorial for a pleated bag. It is a tote bag, not what I want, but the shape of the pattern was a surprise and an education.

That led me to this tutorial for a pleated clutch. Getting closer. Hotpatterns has a pattern for something very similar.

With all these resources and a ten-day extension, I may be able to make a bag of this type for myself.

While sewing the shopping carts at work, I toyed with pleated pockets, as well as gusseted and flat ones. In the end, the free-hanging pocket turned out to be the best choice (you will be glad to know this if you ever sew a shopping cart), so I took the pleated practice piece and sewed it up into a little makeup bag or something. It looks like a skirt, maybe.

The boys thought it would make a good hat for Nadia the cat.

It does make her look a bit like an Eastern potentate, doesn't it?

In any case, this shows that you can get something like the desired shape with a square and straight pleats, but more geometry will be required to achieve anything close to the look of the originals.

I bought a gorgeous upholstery remnant for $1.60, and also have some more canvas scraps, not to mention tissue paper, so I will be playing around with various possibilities.

If any of you has the kind of visual/spatial intelligence that allows you to look at the bags above and say "Why, of course, she needs a quatrefoil and a trapezoid!", then please let me know.

As for the little prototype bag, it's pretty cute. I've used one of my son's handmade hemp bracelets and a toggle bead for the closure. It is big enough to hold a glasses case, but small enough to throw into a purse.

I'll probably use it.

Yesterday I took my sewing machine in to work to sew the canvas bags for our shopping carts. This involves sewing up a 32"x60" sack of canvas and making a flat bottom for it, and then we put on grommets to attach it to its frame (my husband is making the frames). So there I was, swinging around yards of canvas and topstitching and whatnot, with the sewing machine set up on the little table where we normally bag people's purchases. But of course people still need to know the difference between a hygrometer and a psychrometer, and buy gifts for four year olds, and spend their TAF money and so forth.

So at one point I was in the middle of a seam, on the phone, leaning across the sewing machine to get an envelope from a pigeonhole three and a half feet away, with one leg stretched out behind me for balance, and a customer came up.

"Multi-tasking, are we?" she purred.

Multi-tasking has been getting some bad press of late. Researchers suggest that, even though it is becoming more and more common, it leads to inefficiency.

I have a card by Annie Tempest called "The Male and Female Characters." The front shows a man making coffee (he is a Brit, so it is instant coffee -- those of us in Hamburger-a-go-go-land must adjust our mental images to encompass kettles and stirring). He puts on the kettle, waits for it to boil, makes the coffee, and takes it back to bed.

Inside is a woman making coffee. She puts on the kettle, does some laundry, feeds the animals, makes the coffee, and takes it back to bed.

This is not the kind of multi-tasking that researchers say is inefficient. They have studied the effects of switching back and forth between solving math problems and sorting geometric shapes, or watching TV and listening to music while also having IM conversations and playing computer games.  Effective multi-tasking is more like reading and knitting in the waiting room, or doing laundry instead of standing around waiting for the kettle. A different thing entirely.

Here is the progress from yesterday's dentist's office time. I will definitely finish the front this week, as I will be in a car for ten hours on Saturday. My daft loon of a husband is determined to drive up to #2 daughter's graduation at 4:00 a.m. rather than going up the night before as any sensible person would, and then driving back the same day. This will ensure that we are all too tired and miserable to enjoy the lengthy speeches and time spent saying "Can you see her? Is that her over there?" and other such features of commencement ceremonies. We will also look dreadful in the pictures. Such is life.

So are you wondering how I am doing with the schedule? Do you want to hear my really, really excellent reasons for not having followed it so far? I didn't think so.

There are new online knitting magazines up. The Anti-craft is the place to go if you want to make ugly stuff. Dress yourself in a lumpy poison-green sweater and wear a coffin-shaped backpack, fill your garden with plastic body parts. There is a statement being made, for sure.

Spun Magazine is back with some nice interpretations of basic patterns and recipes for bath bombs and such. The recipes, like the patterns, are roughly the same ones you can find everywhere else, but if you don't have any yet, you might as well get them here.

Adriafil has a lot of very nice downloadable designs for those who can decipher knitting instructions in Italian, which you probably can with this glossary. For all I know, there may also be fascinating articles and lots of witty commentary, but my Italian is not up to that. Cognates and stuff people sing about, that's the limit of my Italian.

Magknits has teddy bears and a classic sweater, socks, and baby booties this month. They have gone monthly now -- if you didn't know that, you might have missed a few issues.

All this has nothing to do with the ... umm... slow start of my schedule. It is an example of multitasking.

Knit the Classics is reading Pride and Prejudice for May. I just re-read P&P for my non-virtual book club, and really don't need to re-read it again, though I am planning to watch the movie.

I had a clever plan for my knitting project, too. I was going to make the Silken Damask Jasmine sweater. Here's the cleverness: I was supposed to have finished the Regal Orchid Jasmine sweater. So the Silken Damask would be a repeat, as the book also would be a repeat for me.

Ah, yes. Here is the current state of the front of the Regal Orchid.

Nothing wrong with it, but it is clearly not finished.

I think it is the custom in KTC to go ahead and begin the next project on time, and leave the questioning of finishing for some later occasion. However, I am not doing this.

I have to take a kid to the dentist today, and then I am hoping to be a passenger for many hours this weekend (hoping, that is, that I will not be the driver very much), so I should be able to make some good progress this week.

Today, my physical-world book club meets to discuss Reading Lolita in Tehran. I am looking forward to hearing what the others have to say. The women of my book club are all a good bit older than I am, educated and intelligent, and they are always interesting.

Tuesday nights are when I hang out with the fundamentalists. I don't know why I was put into a small group filled with right-wing Biblical literalists. KaliMama wrote about how she was apparently identified at a glance as not-Republican, and perhaps I should cultivate some of the characteristics she mentioned. On the other hand, I still think that it is good for me to spend some time with people who think differently from myself.

Last night, we were discussing the scene in Genesis where Joseph persuades (?) the Egyptians to sell themselves into slavery. The women in the group, apart from myself, were in favor of this. They were saying that this arrangement was like sharecropping, which -- unlike welfare, which made people lazy and dependent -- allowed hard workers to make something of themselves.

These women are not stupid or unkind. They are charitable, concerned people. They may not know much about the historical circumstances of sharecropping, but they were sincere.

I was keeping quiet, and keeping my eyes down so as not to be drawn into the discussion. So I was noticing all the painted toenails in the room. It is Nearly Summer here, and lots of us are in sandals already. Some of the ladies would not paint their toenails, for religious reasons, but they also will not expose their toes. All the visible toes were bright with polish. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, painted nails are a rebellious statement, a refusal to bow to the theocracy. For the ladies in my group -- many of whom, I am sure, would thank God if the United States became a theocracy -- painted toes are probably more a signal of conformity than of rebellion.

The group leader called on me. I would have preferred not to say anything, but if called on I will speak up. Perhaps it is good for the rest of the ladies to hear someone who disagrees with them. I said that I could not read the passage without remembering what we know of history from other sources, and that I was sure that none of us would choose to be slaves. "It is shocking to us nowadays," I said, "but it would be out of character for Joseph to be rapacious or cruel. I have to assume that it was the best choice under the circumstances."

Later, one of the women from the group said to me that she always enjoyed hearing me speak in class, because my voice is "so melodious." I thought this was so kind of her. I am not shy about speaking up in that group, except when there is a particularly controversial topic involved, but I am always a different voice. The compliment allowed this woman to say something nice to me, something even that could show kind feelings toward me in spite of the horrifying things I say. After all, I say them melodiously.

The section of Reading Lolita in Tehran which deals with Pride and Prejudice is about marriage in Iran more than about Austen's book. But the discussion has to do with choice. I was about to write more on this, but it occurs to me that it would not make sense except to readers who have read both books, or if I went ahead and wrote an essay -- in which case I would be way off schedule and there would be no hot breakfast for my kids this morning.