Month: August 2006

  • Yesterday morning I tidied the pantry. I wasn't cleaning it, though it could have used it, just tidying, but I couldn't help but notice that there was hardly anything in it. Empty containers waiting to be refilled, coffee and tea, a couple of cans of tomato sauce... I felt like Mother Hubbard.

    Then I made some soap. I have made soap with lye and oils, but I am not temperamentally suited to it. Now I make melt & pour, or M&P soap. Someone else does the chemistry, and I just do the fun part. Usually  I put a lot of effort into soaps, blending scents and making interesting colors and fancy pours, combining bases for just the right level of translucency and adding suspensions and stuff.


    M&P soap is rather like a cake mix, it seemed to me. Someone else has done all the complicated things, and you can make it fancy if you want, and end up with something quite good, but you can also just put in a very small bit of time and you will still end up with a cake.


    So yesterday, I wasn't expressing myself through soapmaking, we were just running out of soap. I stuck the base in the microwave, dumped in a fragrance blend Brambleberry sent as a sample, poured it in the molds, and skedaddled to work.


    Where I found that I am scheduled for 15 days straight, including Sundays. On one day I have "off?" on the calendar, but otherwise, I will be there early and late every day. I am not unwilling, but I cannot help thinking about getting home every evening at 7:00 or so. Tired.


    And cooking dinner.


    All these things coalesced into one thought: convenience foods.


    Those of us who believe in eating healthy foods with ecologically sound packaging (i.e., as close to none as possible) can sometimes get the impression that if we were not purists, we would find many marvelous quick foods under the heading of convenience foods. People talk about avoiding convenience foods as though they were sort of lurking about tempting us with their delectable selves to disregard our knowledge that they are composed entirely of amazingly-processed corn and palm tree by-products. I visited the Amazon grocery store to see what wonders were out there.


    There are 306 varieties of packaged macaroni and cheese.


    Also lots of cookies and crackers. And Jello products. Apparently, if you are ready to give in and eat processed foods, you can eat like a dorm-dweller. I know there is something called Hamburger Helper out there, and frozen pizzas, and Refrigerated Crescent Rolls, but I was sort of hoping for something that allows a person to prepare Chicken Marsala in 15 minutes.


    I obviously do not have time to familiarize myself with processed foods in the actual grocery store, as opposed to the virtual one, so I think I will check my Pampered Chef cookbooks (they are big believers in convenience food, those pampered chefs) and the Kraft website and whatnot. Then tomorrow morning I can race into the grocery before work and pick up jarred spaghetti sauce, taco kits, hot dogs, and whatever new and modern wonders I discover between now and then. I intend not to read the labels.


    Disappointed by the Amazon offerings, I ended up ordering half a dozen frozen meals from the Schwan's man. This will mean that 1/3 of the time, I can call home and tell the boys to stick something in the oven. If I get some pre-packaged salads, and my husband pitches in a little, we should be fine.


    #2 son emailed me this recipe for Strawberry Cream Puffs Extraordinaire. I say "this" because you can click on this link and find the recipe yourself if you want to. We made it last night. It took two hours, and about $5 worth of ingredients. It was my farewell to proper fait maison foods for the duration.


    You begin by making choux paste. This is the traditional French pastry used in cream puffs, Napoleons, eclairs, and so on. You cook it, and then bake it. It isn't hard to make, though it takes some time and little bit of muscle.


    It is supposed to be in a ring, but we did not think ahead. We were using the pan needed for baking the ring to cook the choux paste. Next time we will be more prepared. In any case, you pipe the dough into the pan and bake it, and get this light, crisp, mostly hollow pastry with lovely swirls all over it. If it were a ring, you would cut it in half and fill it with the almond pastry cream and strawberries, but we decided, since ours ended up as a rectangle, that we would just put the pastry cream on top.


    Once you have united the pastry, the almond cream, and the berries, you drizzle the top with chocolate glaze.


    The finished masterpiece must be eaten immediately. We had some leftovers, though, so I baked them this morning as I would a strata, and it resulted in a miracle of a bread pudding. I only had one bite, as no amount of overworked-ness justifies the consumption of this much butter and cream two days running, but I strongly recommend that you try it yourself. Some time when you have leftover cream puffs. and only if you made the pastry cream yourself with those 6 egg yolks. I can't imagine what would happen if you tried to bake an ersatz cream puff made with Refrigerated Crescent Rolls, Cool Whip and Jello pie filling.


    #2 son will be making this for the visit of his sisters and brother-in-law next month. He does not want my help next time, he assures me.


    It occurred to me, when he told me this, that perhaps he could do some of the cooking this month.


    A boy who can make cream puffs surely can make tacos from a kit.

  • I've managed to acquire some seriously sore muscles at the gym. I'm in favor of sore muscles, of course, but I'm also sensible. I had to roll hundreds of yards of bulletin board paper yesterday and I'll have to do it again today, so I will start the day with a stretching session instead of gym time.


    JJ is off today, at a school meeting, so I suppose it will be me and That Man at the store. Last night at choir practice there were prayers offered up for the teachers getting ready for school and I spoke up, "Nah, until they get back to school, I'm the one who needs the prayers."


    Here is the Telemark sweater (black spot in the picture, but actually a nice dark blue with an attractive line of increases), one skein of it. The skein didn't go as far as I would have expected or hoped.


    I think it very likely that I will have to order more of this yarn.


    The trouble is that each run of yarn is likely to be a slightly different color, and the chances of getting the same dye lot are slim to begin with and lessen the longer you wait. So I can wait, and increase my chances of ending up with weird color variations in the sweater, or I can go ahead and order more yarn, and perhaps end up having spent back-to-school funds on unneeded yarn.


    #2 son did his clothing inventory yesterday. It is a rule at our house that the kids should sort out their clothes at this time of year, get rid of everything tattered or outgrown or which they will refuse to wear, and present a list of what they own. Based on this, we make a list of what to buy during our BTS shopping trip.


    This works well, although it has been complicated in recent years by the speed at which boys grow. Have you seen that commercial where the teenage boy leaves the house in well-fitting clothes and comes home from school bursting out of the same clothes? It's like that.


    So I no longer expect to buy the full season's worth of clothes in one trip.


    Also, in high school, you do not get a list of needed materials beforehand. You get lists, including many demands for fees now that all the school's money goes toward Mr. Bush's "No Child Left Untested" program, for weeks after they begin. So the BTS shopping trip is just sort of a ritualistic throwback to earlier days.


    #2 son owns 26 shirts. I don't know how that happened. It seems like a scandalous number of shirts for one person to own. It may be the result of the souvenir T-shirt phenomenon, where all kids' life events are marked by a T-shirt. My husband's work does this, too. He has T-shirts commemorating 100 days without an industrial accident at the plant and stuff like that.


    With such a wealth of shirts already on hand, it is possible that we will be able to manage the BTS shopping well enough to squeeze in the additional yarn. If there is too much, I can make a matching purse of the remainder.


    The trick would be to estimate yarn well to begin with. Sometimes we use different yarns from what the designer used, and that can change things. The Jasmine sweaters each took three more balls of yarn than called for in the pattern, even though I had adjusted for yardage differences. The Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns admits that the yarn quantities in published patterns are extrapolated from the one sweater that was actually knitted up -- usually the smallest size. Some books are appallingly bad at estimating yarn quantities (Simple Knits for Sophisticated Living springs to mind). But I am just doing this sweater mathematically, so I have no one to blame but myself if my guess on the yarn was off.

  • For the end of the story -- #2 daughter was unemployed for one week, almost to the hour. Actually she was offered a temporary job just about 7 hours after first becoming unemployed, so she wasn't exactly unemployed, but she was underemployed. As of Monday, she will have two jobs -- organizing a music library (the temporary one) and being an administrative assistant (the permanent one). I think she is still a job huntress, but she has the coveted Day Job that an aspiring performer must have. She is singing in the Symphony Chorus and in a special choir for the performance of a composer visiting the city, and is being considered for the position of choir director at her local church. It seems to me that she is back on track.


    She has an apartment with basic stuff and a roomie who will soon arrive with furniture. She has a car to drive, although there seem still to be some issues with the arrival of the actual car she bought. It is some kind of prima donna of a car which can't be gotten out of Kentucky. She will presumably be late everywhere she goes as soon as she starts driving it. She has dates or non-date meet-ups every night, as far as I can tell.


    And yet, she is not contented. To me she appears to be doing exactly what the plot calls for in the story of the rising young opera singer. Maybe she should be waiting tables, but otherwise, she is exactly on target. She has had some problems, moved the plot along a bit, and now she can make some career progress, fall in love with someone, get a new hat, whatever -- depends what kind of story it is, and we don't know that yet. It may be time for an amusing misunderstanding with the male lead, if it is going to be that sort of story. There should be some picturesque moments, and I think she is managing that with meals of reheated pasta (she learned to cook for a family and hasn't gotten the hang of reducing recipes yet) and bottle of celebratory wine.


    The catch of course is that she isn't in a story, but in her real life, which is more difficult and uncertain than it was when she lived at home or in the dorms.


    Except that I think we are all, in some ways, in our own stories. I mentioned that I thought job-hunting was fun, and Lostarts wanted to know how that could be. For me, when I have looked for jobs, it has felt like a smorgasbord of possibilities, and an opportunity to meet new people -- like a party, or the beginning of a journey. For many, it feels like a trial. What we do is the same, but my story about it -- my internal experience of it -- is different and positive.


    The book Freedom From Agoraphobia points out that people pay good money to be scared on roller coasters, so the terror I feel on freeway overpasses could be reframed as thrills and chills, which are fun, instead of life-threatening fear. I haven't quite achieved that, but I do remind myself of it whenever I face those overpasses.


    C.S. Lewis once wrote that we tend to accept bad feelings as real, but discount good feelings as illusory. Some of #2 daughter's feelings don't seem to me to hook up with her observable reality, but that doesn't make them less real for her. For example, she has said she feels lonely, even though she is almost never alone and has lots of friends, a useful mentor, a church family, and fairly continuous contact with her family. Since she grew up in a close family, with a sister very near her age, and then lived in a dorm where stepping out into the hall brought immediate human contact, her current situation can seem lonely by contrast. But it's a story, the friendless young woman in the big city. The fact that whenever she starts telling it to herself someone calls and invites her to see a movie gets in the way of it a little, but we can maintain our stories about ourselves in the face of real-world counter-evidence pretty well.


    A bit of morning philosophy, here.


    #1 son got his class schedule yesterday; it was full of surprises for me, but I guess classes in psychology and marketing can be helpful to a drifter (his career goal). #2 son will get his today -- his dad is taking him, which will solve my two-places-at-once problem. The Telemark sweater has grown but would still look like a black spot on the screen, so I am not offering any pictures. I am continuing to insist on some laziness on these summer evenings, in the interest of maintaining calm cheerfulness in the crazed atmosphere that we now have all day at work. Our own family back-to-school preparations are crying out for time and money, but I know that all things will get done.


    One of the singers from the Master Chorale was in yesterday, asking if I planned to sing in it this season. We are doing Brahms. I don't get that many opportunities to sing Brahms, actually. If I sing in the Master Chorale on Mondays, go to class with Partygirl on Tuesdays, sing in my church choir on Wednesdays, and join the Chamber Singers on Thursdays, will I feel overextended? Will my menfolks feel neglected? Will I miss them? Will the housework ever get done?

  • It is Week Eleven of the Summer Reading Challenge. The original challenge was to read two books per week between June 1 and August 31. Some readers made themselves fancier challenges, but summer is a trying time chez fibermom, so I left mine at that. This allows me to report complete success so far. There are still a few weeks left, of course, but I am not in suspense.


    This week's two books have been Murder Every Monday by Pamela Branch and A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle. The two books have nothing whatsoever in common. No, wait, they are both in English. And well-written. I have catholic tastes in literature anyway, but I won't read things that are not well-written.


    Pamela Branch is a new author to me, one recommended at the site of another Summer Reading Challenger. I cannot remember which one, I am sorry to say, because if I could remember, I would go thank her. Murder Every Monday is witty and macabre without excessive gore, a pleasant romp of a book, and I plan to read everything else Branch has written.


    A Star Called Henry is not a pleasant romp, being about the Irish Troubles. Poverty is a main character in the book, and so there is also filth, hunger, disease, crime, and degradation. I had previously only read Doyle's children's books, so reading this book is like reading Roald Dahl's adult fiction if you had previously read only James and the Giant Peach. Both these authors have a darkness in their children's books, so the darkness of their work for adults doesn't come as a surprise, but it is certainly a contrast.


    A Star Called Henry strikes me as a very Irish book, a great torrent of words that carry the reader to the intended impression. I have only the sketchiest knowledge of Irish history in the 20th century, so I am feeling as though I ought to brush up before I read any further.


    Today is the day for my high school senior to pick up his schedule. Tomorrow will be Sophomore Orientation, which will begin at the moment when I am supposed to get off work (not, at this time of year, the time when I actually get off work, and that doesn't even count driving and finding a parking place) and continue into choir practice. I am not sure how I will work that out. We haven't yet done the boys' back to school shopping or completed our transportation negotiations, and I also need to register #2 son for gymnastics and figure out transportation for that.


    #2 daughter has an interview this morning. I must do some grocery shopping before work, even though I try to be pretty strict about only going once a week. The house is, as #2 daughter said, embarrassingly messy. I am ignoring it, repeating Sighkey's words encouraging laziness to myself, and employing the same tunnel vision I use at work at this time of year.


    Here's what I mean by tunnel vision. I am checking out one person with several hundred dollars worth of stuff (and since a lot of our stuff is priced at $2.99, this can be a lot of stuff) for a purchase order, with two more people in line and a phone call wanting to explain to me at length why she needs me to set aside eight rolls of Mavalous tape, and there are crying children and messes being created all over the store and the principal of a local school strides up wanting confirmation that his materials have been ordered.


    With tunnel vision, I can say, "I will check for you, sir, just as soon as I have finished with this order" with a comforting smile intended to mask the fact that I have no information about the special orders and probably won't be able to get any, and then look only at the stuff I am scanning and packing.


    JJ hasn't developed this yet. She hisses "The whole store is a mess!" as we stand back to back at the computers, slipping people's purchases into sacks. Everyone always wants to check out at once. When these people are all settled, we can go around the store and clean up.


    Equally, at home, I look only at the meal I am cooking or the current load of laundry, clean a space for myself and take a couple of hours in the evening for knitting and reading because it is just a season. Once we are through this, I can clean up.


    Update for those eagerly waiting for the news: #2 got the job.

  • Here is a swatch of Telemark, the new sport-weight yarn from Knit Picks. I am using "Ink," a very dark blue, so it is hard perhaps to see the stitches, but it works up nicely.

    I'm knitting it on #1 needles, which gives a nice firm fabric, smooth but not soft. It should be warm for winter. Since I have been knitting a soft cotton on #3s, it feels a bit effortful. The Telemark works up nicely on #3s (5 stitches to the inch) as well, but there is much better definition in the color work at the smaller gauge on the 1s (6 stitches to the inch). This swatch just has some of the smallest traditional Fair Isle motifs.

    Once I had finished my swatch, I cast on for the actual project I am making. It doesn't have a name. Here you see about 20 rows of it. I doubt you will be seeing much of it, since it is just a black shape in the picture. Actually, it is dark blue. My grandmother, who taught me to knit, would never make anyone a dark sweater. She particularly hated Navy blue. I like it, myself, but it is admittedly not interesting to look at.

    We had a pleasant lunch with my parents yesterday. We were a smaller group than usual, just me and the kids and my parents. They gave #2 daughter an air mattress and a comprehensive set of kitchen goods, down to a cookbook, and we have given her all the bedroom stuff that will fit in her car, so she will not be in quite such a Zen minimalist state as she has been.

    She has a temporary job that will take care of her bills for the month while she is a job huntress, and her car is supposed to arrive from Kentucky today.

    There is clearly no need to worry about her. I'll let you know how that goes.

    Naturally, I am musing on the process of the job hunt.

    I used to teach classes on this. We gave a test called the COPE which identified the person's interests and abilities. We helped the students recognize the characteristics of various jobs -- their levels of income, prestige, pleasure, stress, etc. -- and showed them how to write resumes. We told them that job-hunting was a 40 hour a week job, and that they should get up in the morning and dress professionally as though they were going to work, head out the door for a full day of job-hunting, and come home and write their thank you notes for all the people they had met that day. We told them to make sure to tell everyone they met that they were looking for work, and to try not to leave any place that didn't want them without asking for a lead to another possible place. We told them to mail resumes out, but not to expect responses from that, as personal contact was the most likely route to a job. We pointed out that the typical job hunter gets 1 interview for every 10 applications, and that the average new graduate can expect to search for 3 months before finding a job. We advised them not to get their hearts set on one particular job, but to do their best with each application and then move on. Lots of irons in the fire, lots of exploration, lots of contacts.

    All this seems to me still to be good advice. But my daughter the job huntress tells me that nowadays a lot is done over the internet. Leonidas also has a post on the subject of online job-hunting. I will be interested to see how this variable affects modern job searches. I would think that it would be about the same as mailing resumes -- that is, that you hope it gets you an interview, but mostly it gets your name into the hands of someone whose job it is to weed the pile down to the smallest possible number.

    #2 daughter does have applications in for some very fun jobs. I have always found job-hunting fun, which I think may put me in the minority, but I am hoping that she will be able to feel that way about it.

  • Here is the completed Jasmine sweater. It is from Elsebeth Lavold's Summer Breeze Collection, and made in Luna from the Endless Summer Collection, in the shade Silken Damask. I used needle sizes 1 and 3, though I don't really know why people mention that. What needles I used doesn't really say anything about what needles you might use. I'm just following the knitting blog custom.

    The neckline is the big deal for Jasmine. It is a traditional raglan form, but there are bands of lace at the seams, and a scoop neck. The sleeves are straight and rather loose and there is a bit of waist shaping but it is in all a simple sweater.

    This is a very pretty sweater. I've made two -- one went off to an old college friend of mine and this one is for me.

    The yarn suggested for this was Silky Tweed, and someday I may make another in that yarn.

    I have also though all along that this would make a very nice top without the sleeves, just using the lace bands. It turns out that Lavold did a version of it just like that, Audrey in the Sophisticated Lady Collection.

    One last picture of Jasmine with the paisley and the gray skirts from my SWAP. I am not sure that you can actually see anything in this picture, my photography skills being minimal as you know, but  I present it as evidence that my new sweater fits into my SWAP.

    SWAP stands for "sewing with a plan," and refers to the idea of intentionally making things that can be worn together, a wild and exotic idea to us knitters, but common among the sewing bloggers.

    No sewing took place chez fibermom yesterday. We had a little birthday party for #2 daughter, and did some slight amount of going around the town. I went to the store and worked long enough to let That Man have his lunch and #2 daughter meet JJ. Bought some books, mostly for birthday gifts.

    Then we had a chick flick marathon. My menfolks don't care to watch such movies at all, so I had been saving some up to watch with #2 daughter. Not that I mind watching them alone, but it is more fun to watch them together. We saw "Intolerable Cruelty," "Alex and Emma," and "Two Weeks Notice," which were enough to finish the Jasmine sweater.

    It would probably be possible to measure the length of knitting time for a sweater by the number of DVDs one can watch while knitting it. "This is a 25 DVD sweater," you could say. Never mind. That sounds daunting.

    I hope to wear my new sweater to church (not if as soon as I put it on I feel as though I am being fricasseed, but it is cotton, after all) and then to lunch with the extended family in celebration of a couple of family birthdays. #2 daughter is concerned that the lunch will be filled not only with barbecue, but also with piercing commentaries on the current lack of perfection in her life. She is afraid that she will cry. I pointed out that bursting into tears would unfailingly end all criticism, since our family is not the kind that entertains fellow restaurant patrons with poignant human dramas. We're also not the kind that demands perfection in people's lives, but she is worrying.

    A friend had sad news yesterday, and I am feeling sad for her. #2 daughter will have to be packed up and sent off to her Zen minimalist apartment (slightly less minimalist after the packing, though) and her job hunt. And it is nearly 100 degrees already and I must bake and cook breakfast. These things mar the near-perfection of my life today, but life is not supposed to be perfect. The anthem for today is "Soon I Will Be Done With the Troubles of the World," so we will be comforted or at least will feel in tune with what we are singing.

  • #2 daughter arrived home safely. She and #2 son and I watched TV and ate popcorn and popcorn chicken and ice cream. The idea is to feed #2 daughter up while not actually ending up completely ignoring my own healthy eating rules. I have a 7:00 am appointment to pick up a birthday cake and have agreed to get doughnuts at the same time, and tomorrow we will be meeting the extended family at a local BBQ place, so you can see how well that is going already.


    My husband is out with my car. He is attending a wake for a family from his country who lost their son to a drug overdose. The young man was stopped by the police while carrying drugs, hid them in his mouth, and died. If I fret over my children, or over the possibility that my husband will not be back with my car in time for me to make that 7:00 a.m. appointment, it is because I have not had to deal with a tragedy like theirs, and I should just quit it.


    #1 son is camping with this college girl he has been hanging out with and, he claims, her father. We had the first rain in weeks last night, along with thunder and lightning.


    So I didn't sleep much last night. As I explained to #1 daughter, the part of my brain that is in charge of whether or not I can sleep is not the rational part with lots of perspective. It is the part that can't settle down until everyone is home.


    Last night, my husband was trying to convince #2 daughter to move home. He told her she could break her lease. There was a lot of drama in his explanation of how she could do this, and it was in fact embellished with stories about people who had filed for bankruptcy and then bought cars and houses in spite of that. The connection with #2 daughter's situation is not clear to me. He was pronouncing "bankruptcy" incorrectly throughout, and #2 daughter was getting that "Oh, my crazy foreign Daddy is giving me one of those weird lectures again..." look. I looked down at my knitting the entire time. There is no way I can help in these situations.


    Today is slated for laziness. Emboldened by the kind offers of help with my sewing, I picked up the book Easy, Easier, Easiest Tailoring by Palmer and Pletsch. There is a new edition of this book coming out next month, with color photos and a price 2.5 times that of the little paperback I have. This may mean that you should grab a copy of this edition before it is too late, or it may mean that you should wait and invest in the fancier version. Depends on you. But if you are interested in making jackets and other tailored garments, this is the clearest book I have seen. It also has the advantage of giving several different ways to do each of the steps involved, from the traditional couture method to quick, modern methods involving glue and very little handsewing. They give time estimates for each method, and explain the pros and cons of each approach for different circumstances.


    They recommend trying out the methods with a tailored skirt or vest before embarking on a jacket or pants, and I may do that today. There will definitely be further knitting and reading, and probably lots of conversation. There may be cleaning and grocery shopping, but I make no promises.

  • Whenever I give in to the temptation to whine at my xanga, I fully understand why people whine so much in their blogs, because you guys are so kind and supportive.


    #2 daughter is coming home for the weekend today. She will get to revel in home-cooked food and sit on furniture and we can plot out a strategy for her, and she will regain perspective. We will all soon have new glasses and/or contacts, and this will probably help with the ol' perspective as well. Cake is planned. In other good news, I am at least half expecting a book shipment today at work. Receiving books meshes better with Back to School than precise clerical work. And I can force people to read books if they become too maddening. "Here," I can say, handing them a picture book, "Read this wonderful new book on the Arctic while I check to see whether the other store has that particular package of counting bears."


    There are new knitting books coming out this fall. I haven't seen the actual books -- they haven't been published yet, and I am not in the circles that get to see the gathered-and-foldeds of knitting books, just kids' books.But the advance notices are still interesting. Here are a few:


    In the "Only a Matter of Time" category, Knitting With Balls, a men's knitting book. I feel fairly certain that the title of this book -- and the cover, featuring a headless man with enormous needles and yarn -- will be the main draw.


    In the "You Read My Website Why Not My Book" category, The DomiKNITrix. The site was not very fascinating, but she might have taken down all the good stuff and put it in the book.


    In the "Lord, How Many More Rectangles?" category, Home Knits. I saw a sample pattern from this book. It was for garter stitch napkin rings. I have no more to say. Honorable mention in this category goes to Crochet Squared, which tells you right on the cover that all the projects are made of squares. Unless this book turns out to be filled with clever origami-like projects, instead of things like the scarf on the cover, I have no more to say about it either.


    Not Tonight, Darling, I'm Knitting is described as a book of anecdotes about knitting, including celebrity knitters telling what knitting means to them. This one is, I hope, in the "Unfortunate Description" category.


    Twist and Loop is about knitting and crocheting with wire, which I have never tried. I have a few patterns for this sort of work, and find it intriguing to look at. I think this book gets to be all alone in the "Books I Might Actually Look At" category.


    My knitting is progressing rather slowly, but it is progressing. Here is Jasmine, with the second sleeve being compared to the first.


    Yes, really, that's what it is. See, across the top, that is the body of the sweater, and on the right is the first sleeve, in the place where you would expect a sleeve to be, and then right next to it, appearing in fact to be part of it, is the second sleeve. I am not sure why I took a picture of this process, except that this is what I did this morning with my knitting. I have determined that I can fit the last increase in and then begin the raglan shaping. I should have a completed sweater within a week.


    Depending on what else happens in my life.


    A little followup from yesterday...


    Over at SewRetro, a woman went into a fabric store and they were out of one of the patterns she wanted. Click the link to see how she -- and the commenters -- interpreted the absence of the pattern as evidence of rudeness and unhelpfulness in the staff. Unless I am reading this wrong, this woman actually believes that the store staff really had the pattern and were refusing to sell it to her. She does not have any explanation for why this business -- willing to sell her several other patterns -- would cruelly withhold this last one from her, but that does seem to be the implication of her rant.

  • The Poster Queen brought me these lovely souvenirs from her trip to France: a beautiful lace bookmark and chocolate. Also cheese and Sirop de Liege, a wonderful sort of apple and pear butter. If you click the link, you will hear some nice music and can find recipes using the sirop, though there is a preponderance of rabbit and liver, so I think I will just spread it on mes tartines, as the package suggests.


    Here you will find a recipe to make it yourself, should you be less fortunate than I and not have a friend bring you some. A long time ago, Selphiras asked me to post my recipe for peach butter, and this is how I do it, so I now feel less guilty for not getting around to posting it. I confess, however, that I just put the fruit through a blender rather than pushing it through cheesecloth. I do this with apples, pears, plums, peaches, and nectarines. I have heard of people using pumpkin as well, though I have never tried it myself.


    Lace, books, fruit, cheese, and chocolate: this is certainly an image of perfect utopia. You may want to stop reading now, because the rest of the post is not so pleasant.


    Well, as far as I know, #1 daughter and son-in-law are fine, and they will in fact be visiting at the end of the month. They can be part of the utopian vision.


    #2 son tried to turn in his AP class summer assignment on the due date, but no one was there to accept it. I called the school the next day and determined that they had not yet been picked up, and called home to tell him to have his brother take him right over to turn it in. He claimed to have done so, but in fact did not (he was busy with his friends), and so he now has a zero for the summer assignment. Not to mention having lied to me.


    #1 son has quit his job before finding another. We all have appointments today with the eye doctor whom he has left in the lurch. She was also the one with whom he had arranged to do his senior year internship. Not sure quite what he plans. He hasn't done his college applications, either. He is, it seems, well on his way to realizing his ambition to be a drifter.


    #2 daughter has a temporary job, a loaner car, and an apartment furnished with a sleeping bag, a computer, and boxes of books and clothes. She does have applications in for a bunch of cool jobs. I keep telling her this is fun and exciting. She responds rather as I do when she shrieks "Immersion!" at me while I am driving on terrifying freeway overpasses.


    That is to say, a dignified silence.


    My husband was not doing very well with the loss of his second daughter to the wide world, back when she had a job and therefore wasn't coming home. Now that she doesn't have a job and is still not coming home, he is sinking into the slough of despond. He fell asleep in front of the TV last night and left for work this morning having said nothing but "Where's my shirt?"


    I have nothing to complain about personally (apart from having a husband in a slough of despond, which I assure you is no picnic) but I have begun whining, so I might as well continue.


    We have ants in the house.


    And let me give you a taste of work during back to school. Yesterday, I was doing a little clerical chore, sending coupons to particular customers depending on their shopping habits. I do this at the computer in the middle of the store where we check people out, pausing when customers need me. I did this all day, and will be doing it again today.


    Add a couple dozen shoppers. 40% of them are talking on cell phones, and the rest are often talking among themselves. The sound track should include the exclamation "Girl! What are you doing here?" every eight minutes. There should also be lots of complaining about the heat and the ending of the summer vacation.


    There is still classical music playing softly, but it is now entirely drowned out by the unaccustomed noise level.


    Now put in the children. Mostly happy children playing with the train, but there must also be cries of "I pooped in my pants!", "I want that!" and "That's mine!" And some hitting. This is the background sound.


    Now you must add the actual interactions with customers. Again, most of this is pleasant. Conversations on how to teach digraphs to emergent readers, or tours through the store finding all the things with a cowboy theme.


    But you also have to have plenty of whining, because we are running out of things. Or, as the customers usually put it, "Everything is picked over." There has as yet been no swearing or stamping of feet, but people are being cross. They are describing in minute detail the particular star border that they want, and the entire history of how they have bought it here in the past and exactly to what degree they now need it and why. They seem to think that we will say, "Oh, well, okay, if you really need it, we have a secret stash right here under the counter. We were saving it for the person who really needed it."


    JJ comes up after these interactions and whispers fiercely that it is their own stinkin' fault for waiting so late. I try to look as though she has been saying how much she enjoyed discussing plan books with that customer.


    You must also add the phone calls. These come every 2.5 minutes. We are often checking people out at this time, a process which may include adding and subtracting things so that their total will match their purchase order, or checking the database to see which book their friend bought so they can be sure to match. We do this while also answering the phones.


    The calls are things like people wanting to know all the different kinds of art paper we carry, with the prices, dimensions, and number of sheets in each. Sometimes they want us to pick out a second grade science book for them, or they want to know whether the other store will have a particular poster and where their laminator is. They want to know what it will cost them to homeschool their ninth grader, and whether we have bulletin board letters that will coordinate with tiki torches, and where they could rent an overhead projector.


    Every fourteen minutes there is a phone call asking where a customer's faxed purchase order is. I have no idea. The Empress is doing all the purchase orders at the other store. I don't know where their stuff is or when it will be delivered, and have no way of finding out. This naturally infuriates them, and probably makes the customer I am with at that moment wonder about me, too. They probably all excoriate me on their blogs later. I really hate this.


    And in the midst of this, I snatch moments to work on my clerical task. This means I have to find the box into which I piled all the paperwork and stamps and postcards when the last customer came up to check out, and get back to the right screen on the computer, and try to remember where I was and make sure that I left nothing undone on the last item, and just as I get to the next item, someone walks up to the counter and the phone rings.


    I try to make eye contact with the customers and speak in a low and calm voice. This is to avoid stampedes.


    Ironically, one of the interesting discussion going on at the knitting blogs right now is whether crafting blogs present a utopian fantasy of domestic bliss. The irony, for me, is that I try not to whine, and now have spent nearly the entire post doing so. If anything, this is probably more typical of the craft blogs that I read, except that I haven't offered you any pictures of yarn.


    Tomorrow.

  • the next thrilling installment

    My life is calm. Yesterday I walked the Mud Creek Trail instead of going to the gym. #2 son tried to turn in his summer assignment but no one was in the office to accept it, so I have to drive him back out there today. It's been busy at work. I tied the new skein of Luna in and disliked how the knot looked, and so I frogged a few rows to redo it.


    Yawn.


    #2 daughter's life, on the other hand, is all go. You may recall that she finished school on Friday, and had a good job, an apartment (after some drama there),  a car on its way to her, and was generally moving fairly smoothly into adult life.


    So on Tuesday morning, having been off work for a week for finals, she returned to her job and was let go.


    No notice. It seems to me, frankly, that the boss probably did not wake up on Tuesday morning and think, suddenly, that he wanted to fire her. I think that he intended to let her go last week, but allowed her -- an hourly employee -- to be without any source of income for a week while he gathered up his courage or whatever it was he was doing.


    So there she was, having been unknowingly unemployed for a week, and now entirely unemployed.


    She spent a couple of hours moving quickly through disbelief, anger, fear, and misery, and then perked up and began applying for jobs.


    I, thinking of the lease she had signed and the car contract she had signed and her student loans and all that, had quite a sinking feeling myself.


    But last night, shortly after I got the update on her first day of job-hunting, she got a call.


    "I know you have a job," the caller said, "but would you consider..."


    She has a few weeks of work at the same hourly wage she had at her briefly-held manager's job, organizing a music library.


    This gives her some time to job-hunt without worrying about eviction or foreclosure or starvation or any of those things.


    Her grandmother is thinking that she really should come back home and live here while working on her performance career. I think there is little work for opera singers in our neck of the woods. I think that people who hear #2 daughter will gladly hire her, but that folks with positions like that to offer don't mostly come to church with us.


    My mother, however, believes with Thomas Friedman that the earth is flat. She is, after all, a successful writer and speaker living in the middle of nowhere.


    It's a moot point, since there is that lease.


    If you have a prayer list, please add #2 daughter to it.


    While my mother and I were talking about whether foreclosure and eviction might be positive experiences, we considered the possibility that everything happens for a reason.


    I don't fully believe that, but I find it an appealing philosophy.


    At the very least, I think that when bad things happen, one should look for the lesson in them, and the positive side to them.


    So, even though I can imagine that this summer will be enshrined in #2 daughter's memory as The Horrible Summer, I can also imagine that there have been benefits to all the complications she has faced, and lessons to be learned from them.

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Categories