Earlier today I reported that our high school was the #1 team in the country. Leonidas asked who said so. I didn't know. I figure someone decides these things. For example, our local college has been the NCAA champion a few times, and I assume that means that some organization called the NCAA decides, perhaps on the basis of a tournament, that they are the winner for that year. But I did not know the details for the high school team, only that the boys had come in, all purple, and pushing their arms in the air and so on, and shouted "We're #1!" Whereupon I said, "Oh, did you win?" and they replied, "We're #1 in the country."

So I went to them to find out who had said so.

The short answer is --

No, you don't get the short answer. I had to listen to the long answer. Here's what happened. They met up in the parking lot and completed their body painting. They were going to do the three letters of their school's initials on their chests,a nd not allow #2 son to take part in this because he is a sophomore. The seniors were going to cover themselves with long-sleeved purple shirts and then, at some suitable moment, pull their shirts off and be revealed in purple paint with their letters.

The S, however, was late. They were standing around in the parking lot waiting for the S and worrying that they would not get seats, and they decided to allow another friend to be the backup S. Hardly had they gotten him painted up when the original S sauntered up. He pointed out that their team was first in their division, a fact that had been announced at the pep rally.

Their team, he averred, was in the best division, so that meant that they were the best team in the state. At this point, and without benefit of beer or anything, they decided that our state clearly has the best high school football in the nation, and that their school was, ipso facto, #1. QED.

He, the former S said, would be the numeral 1. #2 son could become a numeral sign, and they could leap up and be "FHS #1" at their moment of gloriosity.

So the short answer is that the boys said so.

A teacher told them to wash their paint off, but the assistant principal said it was okay as long as they didn't paint their faces, and at the appropriate moment they revealed their announcement.

When the purple team won, they ran down onto the field, where #2 son did backflips (he can do that kind of stuff) and many admirers took pictures.

I assume that this will give them many prestige points at school on Monday.

I slept in till 7:30 and the motorcyclists are already out in force. Actually, as far as I know they never went to bed, since I went to sleep in a noise level apppoximating what you would get if you slept on the median of a freeway. They will be closing the roads to car traffic in a little while, so I must hurry out for provisions and a vise.

My purple-painted boys came home elated because not only did the purple dogs win, but they are now the #1 high school football team in the country.

Here is an important note to myself: I enjoy Chamber Singers rehearsals. I need to make this note to myself and perhaps also to remind myself to come read it next Thursday, because I never want to go, and once I get there I really enjoy the singing.

Last night was unusual, because we were recording, and also doing pictures for our CD cover. I didn't mind about the pictures, because although I'm not that photogenic, I'm also not that vain, so I don't care much. Also my hair was being fluffy.

I was aware of this because the woman who cleaned my teeth mentioned it. "When you get to our age," she said confidingly, "You need a bit of fluffiness."

She had begun by asking me if my hair was natural, a question I get surprisingly often. I have no control whatsoever of my hair, and it is hard to imagine that anyone would think I had made it look as it does (whatever that is on a given day) on purpose. It may be that what they really mean is more like what a Canadian woman asked me once: "Do you feel a lot of pressure to dye your hair?"

Unfortunately, we were speaking French at the time, and the question was not merely outside of conventional conversation, but outside of my vocabulary in French, so I was flummoxed. She had to translate, and by the time I understood the question, the discussion had sort of gotten derailed.

That is still better than my Spanish. In spite of faithfully attending Conversational Spanish class for a month, I still can only say I have this and I am that. Once you have enquired after your interlocuter's pets and kids, you have pretty well exhausted the polite conversational options for those two verbs.

I had constructed a discussion to have with the instructor, on the question of whether it was common in Argentina for people to have domestic servants. I figured she could then go on to talk about the political and social situation in her country, and I would nod intelligently and say "Si, si." However, I have not yet had the opportunity. Since I do not know anyone else from Argentina, and do not know the names of any other countries in Spanish, if I do not get to use this particular conversational sally with her, it will just go to waste. Still, it could happen that someone will come into the store and ask in Spanish whether we have any books in Spanish, at which point I will be able to say triumphantly, "Si, tengo libros en espanol," and it will all have been worthwhile.

But I digress.

The thing is, after having gone to class on Tuesday and Wednesday and choir practice on Wednesday, by Thursday night I do not want to go anywhere. But I really like the music we are singing (Renaissance and Baroque, mostly) and the rehearsals are well-conducted, so it is fun.

Last night, we were in our concert black and standing in a mixed performance sort of grouping around the microphones for the recording. Twila Paris attends the church where our director conducts the choir and was, he thinks, the anonymous donor of a bunch of snazzy recording equipment which we were able to borrow for the occasion. I passed this on to the tenor next to me, as a bit of gossip for the evening, but he looked at me blankly. He may not know who Twila Paris is (you can click on her name up there if you don't know either). The tenor on my other side said, "I'm not used to standing with altos," and I was trying to determine whether that was a "Eeeuw! Girl cooties!" remark or what, when the first tenor chimed in, "I'm enjoying it," so I guess the blankness on his part was about Twila Paris and not about me.

The director was sweating. He was trying to get a particular sound from us and apparently was not getting it. He told us to be transparent. He told us to sing like tightrope walkers. He told us to sing in such a way as to give the listeners a kick in the pants. We can do "darker" or "greater intensity" but I guess we were not able to do "transparent."

Tonight I am supposed to go pick #2 son up after the Big Game. The high school is playing its great rival. Both the teams are called bulldogs, but different colors, so it is the game of the purple dogs and the red dogs. The boys have washed their purple shirts and practiced up with purple body paint and saved up their voices for the shouting. After the game, however, #1 son has a party to go to and wants me to come get his little brother and bring him home.

Since I have this little trouble with agoraphobia, the thought of having to drive in the dark through the bikers (I did mention the 400,000 bikers we are entertaining this weekend, didn't I?) after having had to drive to places on the last three nights as well is weighing on my mind. The boys tell me it will be good for me.

I'll tell you one thing, though. It may be good for me, in the sense of not allowing my agoraphobia to progress any further. And it is certainly true that I enjoy my classes and rehearsals once I am actually present at them, so they are worth it. But all this gallivanting around does cut into my knitting.

Following Rachelsent and Ozarque's excellent advice, I will go this weekend and get a vise before I continue attempting to solder. I can see that it would make a big difference.

I have a lot of other things that need doing, in any case. For the HGP this week, we are supposed to thoroughly clean our bathrooms, and I haven't even done my closets from last week, nor do I have any cookies in my freezer. I have a trio to prepare for Sunday, we're doing photos at Chamber Singers rehearsal tonight, there is my jacket to finish soon here if I want to stay on my self-imposed schedule for the SWAP, I have till Sunday to make the SewRetro project I have in mind, the books for the Sunday School class I am teaching have just arrived and I need to prepare this week's lesson, and The Little Friend is not going to read itself.

Partygirl came in for a book yesterday and was very bracing about my sleep deprivation problem. She is a poster girl for happy marriage, and part of that seems to be that she has convinced herself that her husband is perfect. She assured me that he would never expect her to get up early with him. The trouble is that I started doing that at the beginning of our marriage, and I can't stop now after 25 years. She thought I could. Hmmmm.

Partygirl and I are studying the Book of Romans together. Well, us and several hundred other women, but we carpool, so it is more together for us. We talk it over a lot when we see each other, which can lead to some odd public conversations, as it did this week when we found ourselves discussing bird-worship.

The first chapter includes a sort of laundry list of sins, and our homework involved coming up with modern examples of them.

This is not a difficult assignment in general. As you know if you ever read the Bible, or history, or well, books of any kind, people don't change much. We can still relate to Othello, there are still people who consider torture appropriate, and we still commit just about the same sins we always did. Eddie Izzard has a very funny bit about original sin vs. original sins which just emphasizes that point. The sheer sameness of human bad behavior over the centuries is yawnsome indeed.

But there is a point in Romans where the sins are a little outre. The homework questions directed us very specifically to think about modern examples for the part where the people are worshipping humans, birds, quadrupeds, and reptiles. Usually, I think of this stuff as being about idolatry in general, and think in terms of what one of the ladies in my discussion group called, "Oh, you know, the usual stuff: money, houses, cars..." 

(I should perhaps explain a little about idolatry. People who are not very familiar with the Bible usually seem to think that most of the discussion about wrongdoing in it is about sex. In fact, idolatry is one of the most frequently discussed sins. You may think idolatry has to do with bowing down before golden statues of calves, but in the mainstream Protestant churches, it is interpreted to mean putting other things, including yourself, above God. So workaholism, selfishness, claiming that you are The Decider of what is right and wrong, and materialism are popular examples of idolatry.)

But we were being asked to break this down and have specific examples for each of these things.

Humans were no problem. The cult of personality and celebrity is alive and well, and lots of us pay more attention to Britney Spears than to God. But I could not for the life of me come up with any examples of modern reptile worship.

That Man suggested "those women who dance with snakes," which rather echoed The Empress's suggestion that we just don't travel in the right circles to be up on modern trends in animal worship. She reminded me that we hadn't been aware of insect fetishists until we were in our 40s. One of  Partygirl's colleagues thought of the names of cars. Could excessive fondness for one's Mustang or Falcon be a sort of animal worship? One of the women in the class hesitantly suggested tattoos. The rest of us looked at her with polite incomprehension, but she did not elaborate.

I am looking forward to finding out what the writers of the questions had in mind.

Last night was the beginning of our annual biker festival. You may think I am kidding, but my idyllic little town is host to the second largest biker festival in the nation. It claims, in fact, to be "the largest family-friendly nonprofit motorcycle rally in the world." We have just over 58,000 people living in our town, and last year there were 300,000 at the festival and this year we are expecting 400,000. If they wanted to, they could completely take over the town and we would be helpless. They don't seem to want our town, though, except for this one week.

I have never gone to any of the events, but I have been inconvenienced by the parade a few times. Mostly it is the noise level that I notice. That and the bikers who come into the store to buy presents for their grandchildren. We always say we are going to get toy Harleys in for the occasion, but this year once again we didn't do so.

I expect my sleep deprivation to increase this week, because it will be too noisy to sleep. I live about 15 blocks from the center of things, 3 blocks off a main road which is very popular for riding around on, and right at this early moment I can hear the motorcycles. I don't know how the folks who actually live downtown stand it.

But I may go down and see it this year. Blessing always goes, she says, because her family likes to look at all the bikes. Maybe my family would too. There is also lots of music and barbeque, which could be fun even if they don't want to look at bikes.

Here is my soldering station. Particularly nonstandard aspects include the quilt protecting the table, the use of an upturned ancient cookie sheet for a work surface (now decorated with a couple of soldered-on jump rings), the bottom of a butter dish (the lid broke) for the flux, and well, everything.

However, attempts to continue improving my soldering skill were delayed. I also did not get to the gym yesterday, or knit, or anything.

Here is the reason: I needed to do the invitations for The Princess's bridal shower. Partygirl and I are giving her a shower. Partygirl gave one for my daughter, and I expect to do one for hers next year. Ladies, if you have girlfriends, you will someday be giving their daughters bridal showers, so be prepared.

I should have done these invitations last week, but there were delays. So there I was, in my messy computer corner, threading ribbons through tiny punched holes in the invitations and recipe cards as time to go to work came ever closer.

One of the delays in this process had to do with poetry.

Partygirl wrote this sweet little poem for the invitations:

"YY said 'XX, marry me'"
we think that's so nice
We want you to bring a recipe
and add a little spice."

It is a "Spice up the Marriage" shower, something Partygirl introduced, where all the guests bring a recipe and a spice so The Princess can start her marriage with a full spice cabinet.

So the poem was cute. However, it didn't scan. I wasn't going to quibble about rhyming "marry me" and "recipe." As it happens, I spend a lot of time with bad poetry.

It is generally agreed that rhymes are good for kids, and nearly every shipment of classroom books contains some books with classroom poetry, rotten bits of doggerel about the wind or telling time or something, often intended to be sung to "Do Your Ears Hang Low?" or another popular tune.

I have never understood this. America must be bristling with unemployed poets, any of whom could write a decent quatrain about how to tell time, so why do the publishers insist on bringing out acres of rotten poetry every year? A simple ad in the paper would surely bring in a plethora of responses, and Scholastic can afford to keep a poet on the payroll, what with all the Harry Potter loot, so there seems to be no excuse.

Anyway, I really felt that the second line needed replacing.

I tried to get Blessing and That Man to assist me in a quick second-line-ectomy. They were all involved in their numbers, and couldn't care less. I made a list of alternate second lines to follow "YY said 'XX, marry me!'":

We're going to see them spliced.
"Let them shower us with rice!"
"Don't make me ask you twice!"
And this is our advice:
She accepted in a trice
Her answer was concise
as smooth as polished ice
and kissed her once or twice

The only other words I could think of that rhymed with "spice" were "lice" and "vice," neither of which seemed possible.

Blessing thought I could change it to a haiku, so the whole scanning bit wouldn't matter. She and That Man got back to their discussion of whether to include gift cards in the balance or whatever it was.

I continued fooling around with the poem in between work-related tasks. Somewhere between packing the Indian grants and fluffing the baby toys,  I ended up with this:

"XX," said YY, "Marry me!"
She said "Yes, with all my heart!"
Please bring a spice and a recipe
to give them a spicy start.

At this point I realized that there was almost nothing of Partygirl's poem left. Mine was not significantly better than hers, and hers had been from the heart. I threw in an "and" to make it scan and typed up the text for the invitation, leaving the poem in very nearly its original form. If we can't let sentiment rule at a bridal shower, where can we?

Today I am having my teeth cleaned instead of soldering, going to the gym, knitting, or any other fun activity. It was supposed to be Book Club day, but I awoke to an email from La Bella saying that none of us have finished the book (including me) so we are postponing the meeting. The Little Friend, the book in question, is beautifully written but just too unpleasant for me, and I had resigned myself to admitting that I hadn't finished it and giving up. Now, with the postponement, I will be honor bound to finish it. I will read it at the dentist's office; that should be appropriate. Tomorrow I can return to more enjoyable pursuits.

My soldering iron arrived. I followed all the safety precautions and used my experimental slides for some experimental soldering. What I had done before involved electronics -- think two seconds to make a bead of metal in a desired spot. For my current project, you want a long flow of solder. Quite a different thing My initial efforts are very rustic.

The thing about soldering is that there are many, many ways to do it wrong. You can get great gouts of solder instead of a smooth line. You can drop splashes of it onto your work surface. You can solder your piece to your work surface. You can miss bits. Fortunately, you can also fix it. However, every time you fix one part, it will spoil the perfectly good part right next to it.

Soldering takes three hands. Soldering jump rings onto your piece requires three right hands. Wearing gloves is one of the safety precautions, so you can imagine that holding those wee little rings in a gloved hand, or even a pair of tweezers and a gloved hand, is challenging. Then you need a hand to hold the slide, and one for the solder and one for the iron.Ah -- that adds up to four hands, doesn't it? So you can lay your slide down onto the work surface (see "soldering your piece to the work surface" above) and hold the jump ring in the right spot and then the solder and the soldering iron in your other two hands, and then you must hold the ring in place for ten seconds while it sets. Then, since the solder will have filled the hole of the jump ring, you must remelt it, at which point the jump ring will fall off.

Seriously, I think I will be able to develop this skill. #2 son was able to put the experimental slides into the order in which I had done them, showing that I have improved. The issue for me, I think, will be the fumes. I am in a well-ventilated area, but I still find that I am affected. A fan, perhaps, is needed.

I would like to show you a picture of my new toy, but the camera has disappeared. I think I know where it is. Pictures of my sons' muscles have been showing up on it. I think that, now that they have the Door Gym #2 son got for his birthday, they are taking pictures of each other doing pull-ups and push-ups and other flexy things, and admiring their burgeoning musculature.

This is such a guy thing. I don't think my daughters would ever have thought of doing this.

I probably shouldn't have told you this at all, but at least I am not posting the pictures. When they wake up, I will rescue the camera from whichever bedroom it is in and show you a picture of my soldering station, and possibly even of one of my soldered things, if I have any by that time that aren't too humorous. This is in no way like taking pictures of muscles. Actually, there could be body-building blogs where, just as we show one another pictures of that day's inch of knitting or whatever, the athletes show one another pictures of the new half-inch they've put on their deltoids.

An unsettling thought.

   SWAP progress for the weekend continued on Sunday with some work on the Hong Kong finish for the jacket.

A Hong Kong finish is enclosing the seams of  a garment with bias strips. You sew them to the seam allowance, fold them over, and hand-sew them down on the other side. I was very tempted to do my jacket with the paisley fabric which is the print for my SWAP. This, I felt, would add a certain je ne sais quoi to it, even though mostly no one would see it. I have a store-bought jacket in blue corduroy with the seams finished in a striped shirting, and I like the contrast.

However, this jacket makes a suit with my gray skirt, and I used lace hem facing for that skirt, so I decided with only slight regret to use lace for the seam finishing as well. I am also facing the hems with it. I am using a narrow lace, so it will not be as evident as it is on the skirt, but it will match.

My tailoring book points out, correctly I am sure, that it is faster and less trouble just to line the jacket.

When I was picking up a package of hem facing this afternoon, I saw a beautiful dove-gray wool flannel which I am now, in my unrealistic flush of success on this jacket, contemplating using for another jacket. I'll line that one. Supposing I actually make one, that is.

This has not been pressed, but it does, as it is designed to do, make it possible for the wearer to toss the jacket backward over her chair without showing any messy seams.

There have been some interesting comments here lately. I know that I often read your blogs without reading the comments, so I wanted to mention a couple of them. Simplespirit mentioned Artchix for a source of images for microscope slides. They have a number of vintage image collections sized for slides, as well as other interesting stuff and some snazzy examples, as well as directions for non-soldered slide jewelry. While at their site, I noticed that they called their images "collage sheets" and I googled that.

Suffice it to say that there is no need to envy people with cool collections of ephemera any more. I've put links to a bunch of them in the past couple of paragraphs, and here is a link to Somerset Studio, an amazing paper arts resource which Ozark mentioned. They also have collections of collage images.

We made tag art collages for favors for my daughter's wedding. It was very satisfying to collect images from family scrapbooks for the purpose, but also very tedious to scan and print them all, and of course limited. We had no Danish matchbook covers at all. For less sentimental undertakings, having the option of ordering some sheets of images is very handy.

Ozarque also told me about Craftzine.com, which has a number of cool links. It would be easy to spend a lot of time just clicking around there, and they seem to change it every day, so a person who was hoping to get some housework done might want to avoid it, The rest of us, however, can go and enjoy it.

I tried out this project from one of their links. Clicking on the words "this project" will take you to the directions, but they are ... hmm .. filled with mystery.

The basic idea is simple: you take the tackiest cover you can find from an old paperback book and -- in fifteen minutes, according to the instructions -- you make it into a wallet. There are detailed instructions for installing the snap fastener and for measuring and folding the book cover, but the author seems to run out of steam there.

We are told to sew together the edges, but not what edges to sew. We are told that Step 5 will create pockets, but no pockets are in evidence and they are never specified.

I invested $1.00 at a used bookstore and got a couple of truly cheesy books, tore off the covers, and laminated them. The directions suggest covering with vinyl, but laminating seems better.

I cut and folded as instructed, and then I stared at the directions, puzzled. I tried following them, and ended up with a tiny little envelope suitable for holding an ATM card.

Then I tried using a piece of fabric to make a pocket. This will hold money, as you see on the right.

I could not find the snap fasteners described, and the medium isn't suited to sewn-on fastenings, so I just folded it and tucked it under the edge of the computer so you can see the effect when it is closed.

I have no idea what the author had in mind, but I may keep experimenting. I like the idea of using those campy book cover images.

Another interesting comment was from Stephane0305. She asked whether I rushed through my naps for the sake of efficiency. Actually, I am not good at napping, or going back to sleep once I wake up, or even going to sleep at all, and I think it is because I get bored easily. I will keep this in mind and make more of an effort at napping before I give up.

That wasn't the comment of hers that I meant to talk about, though. I was going to mention that she questioned the historicity of Jesus. I don't try to change people's minds about religion, but it's worth mentioning that we don't have just one source for historical references to Jesus -- we just have most of them collected and treat it as a single book. By contrast, we have exactly one reference for Hannibal's going over the Alps with elephants, but most of us believe that. Just something to consider. If you find this an interesting topic, there is a discussion of it here which links to a list of the early non-Christian references to Jesus and so forth.

 I finished the Time Traveler's Wife's dishcloth, and here it is, sitting appropriately out of place amid the books when it ought to be in the kitchen, cleaning. So should I for that matter.

One final random note to finish this random post: yesterday I arrived in the choir room to find not one single second soprano. Quite a lot of folks were missing from the choir, actually, and one of the altos who had shown up was almost too hoarse to sing, from having shouted so much at the football game the day before. Around here, a football game is often followed by a day when lots of people walk around speaking only in hoarse whispers. #1 son had gone to the high school game and also watched the college game with his brother, so he had almost no voice at all. This may be the reason.

Anyway, there were only a couple of sopranos, and the alto section consisted of me, the one with laryngitis, and a third who hadn't rehearsed the anthem at all, so we just marched in and sang the piece without one of the parts. It was a beautiful arrangement of this rather sappy Victorian hymn, and the chords would have been pretty stunning if they hadn't been missing one of the notes every time. The choir director took it in stride, but I hope we get to sing the piece again sometime with all the parts present.

 I did write the last entry, since you asked, but I was copying Chanthaboune. In fact, I was teasing her.

And I discovered, while idly looking at my site meter, that someone came to my blog having googled for "scorpion nose"! I think that replaces "knitting sluts" as the weirdest search that has ever brought someone to my site.

Saturday morning I got up at 4:00 and made my husband's coffee and saw him off to work, and then tried to go back to sleep. At this I was entirely unsuccessful. I tried lying in bed with my eyes closed listening to to the storm. Stayed awake. I tried turning on the bedside lamp and reading. Stayed awake. I got up and started dough for cinnamon rolls in the bread machine, went back to bed and tried again to go to sleep. No luck.

Around 7:00 I gave up and got out of bed. It was time to bake the rolls, so I had a couple with a steaming cup of tea while the storm continued. Rather nice, really.

Then it was time to begin the Personal Sewing Day. With my tailoring guide close at hand, I cut and fused the interfacing, sewed the collar and the facings, and put in the sleeves.

 I stopped a lot. I would get to a point like the one pictured at right and quit for a while. The idea behind this was that if there was an error, I might notice it before I went on with the next bit.

I am not very precise.

We do this geometric personality test at work. It is not entirely dissimilar to the pick-a-shape thing on this page, though more serious and less amusing. You answer a bunch of questions, and based on your answers are categorized as a particular geometric shape, which then has a list of workplace strengths, "things that cause you to get bent out of shape" (you get the pun, right?), and so on. Our goal with the test is to have balance in the workplace, and also to know enough about people's preferences and work styles to keep everyone reasonably happy. It works pretty well.

Cleverboots was in the store when Blessing took the test and we let her take it too. She is a psychiatric social worker, so I felt I had to apologize for the pop-psych nature of it. "You probably work with much more elaborate tests," I said. She assured me that she mostly asks her patients what year it is, and what floor they are on. She liked the test, and we had predicted her results correctly, which made us feel clever.

I am a squiggly line. As the page I linked you to put it, " If you chose the squiggly line then you're always in a hurry. You get bored every eight pico-seconds and have to constantly find new challenges. You may be incredibly enthusiastic, but your 'ants in your pants' chopping and changing attitude to life means you'll probably turn out to be a jack of all trades, master of none. You're quite good fun at parties and you can put up quite a steady(ish) shelf (if called on to do so). Basically, you're one of life's 'slightly useful' people."

Blessing is a triangle. She was telling me about the Pirate Family wife-swap program Feebeeglee wrote about. Apparently, the mom of a pirate family switched places with the mom of an organized family for a week. Feebeeglee liked the pirate family

"In what sense were they pirates?" I asked.
"They were lazy. They didn't work. They just dressed up as pirates and lived horribly," said Blessing.

I digested this. I'm still not sure I've got it, but we couldn't get it any clearer.

"The other mom had a labelmaker," said Blessing. "I do too, but she had labeled everything in the house. In the pantry, each shelf had labels for the kind of soup that went in each spot, and everything in the house was in labeled bins. It was my dream house."

She smiled beatifically. Her expression turned to anguish, though, as she told me what the pirate mom had done.

"She dumped out all the bins and made a fort. I kept thinking about the organized mom having to come back to that mess."

I don't think that Blessing sews, but if she did, her notches would always match, her seam allowances would be identical throughout the project, and her collars would never be wonky.

This is not true for me. But I thought of her, and of Marji, and Pokey, and other highly precise people, and tried to channel their precision through my imprecise fingers. I was not entirely unsuccessful. In fact, you can see here that my collar has a distinct resemblance to a collar, my set-in sleeve has a definite air of sleevishness, and there is overall a jacket-like impression in this jacket.

I'm pretty chuffed about it. I still have quite a lot to do -- the Hong Kong finish on the seams, the hems, the buttonholes. I will enjoy the first two parts, and am confident that I can do them well. I am not so sure about the buttonholes, but it could happen.

This jacket is very pretty and feminine. It has an Edwardian air that is stylish this year. But with its broad, shallow neckline,  it is not classic enough that I could make several in different fabrics without it being noticeable that they were all the same pattern.

 This is contrary to the rules of the SWAP. For the SWAP, we are supposed to use basic patterns which we have fine-tuned and perfected, and make multiples with slight variations. This jacket doesn't fall into that category, but I am still very happy with it. It fits well, and I think it will look good when completed, unless I completely destroy it while trying to make the buttonholes. It matches the gray skirt I made last month, and next month I plan to make a pair of pants to go with it. That will finish the "bottoms" part of the SWAP.

One more picture, here, showing how nice the microscope slides will be as brooches on a lapel.

Actually, the picture looks like a pile of wrinkled laundry with a faint bright splash on it. I hope this is my stand-in computer's primitive monitor, and that you can see it better than I can.

(Lostarts mentioned the printer driver, by the way, and I reinstalled it again, and now the printer is working with the stand-in computer. Thank you very much. Now if I can figure out how to put buttons into my custom module, my life will be complete. Triangles and Squares out there, have you any guesses on what I might be doing wrong?)

Once I got to this point on the jacket I decided not to push my luck, and got in some knitting and reading while the guys watched the game (we won). They were yelling and punching their fists into the air and stuff like that. I was saying things like "Huh? Are we winning now?" The announcers got pretty involved, too. I was wondering -- would the people in Alabama watching the game get their own announcers who were on the side of the Alabama team, or are the announcers supposed to be even-handed in their reporting? They didn't manage it in this case.

I finished The Time Traveler's Wife and began the knitting project for it. This is one of Danielle Cote's pretty dishcloth patterns. I have been meaning to make some dishcloths ever since I read that sponges are filled with nasty bacteria which they smear on your counters, unlike dishcloths, which can be run through the washing machine without damaging the mechanism. The pattern of this one, in addition to having that plant-like look that brings The Meadow to mind, also reminds me of the way the story goes back and forth from one time to another, crossing and intertwining yet also stopping and starting abruptly.

Today I have errands and Sunday School and invitations to address, but I am hoping also to do some more sewing and to finish the KTC project.  

Oh, and napping. Definitely more napping.

"I haven't heard from him in three days," she told her coworker, scooping up the stack of invoices with a practiced hand. She clipped them together and flipped them onto the growing stack.

Noticing her mother's screen name on her IM buddy list, she typed in "Mr. Almost Perfect is breaking up with me," as she sipped coffee from a hand-thrown mug. "He has decided he doesn't want an intellectual girlfriend after all."

"Does he know this?" came the response, with the silly grinning beach ball her mother used instead of the unavailable sarcasm emoticon.

"Your mom has a point," said her coworker, peering over her shoulder. "You seem to have all these fights in his absence without ever letting him in on it."

She snapped open her phone and heard her sister's voice. With her eyes on the screen and her fingers tapping briskly on the keyboard, she related the latest in the saga of Mr. Almost Perfect.

"You either need to stop being mad at him for being as busy as you are," her sister said, "or admit that you don't have time for a relationship right now."

She ended the conversation curtly, but the phone buzzed back into life almost immediately. It was Mr. Almost Perfect, texting her sweet nothings.

She crossed her slim ankles, started in on the next stack of invoices, and considered the possibility that everyone else was right about the relationship.

Since last week's planned Personal Sewing Day (PSD) turned out to be just a couple of Personal Sewing Hours, I intend to declare tomorrow a PSD and try again. Also, lots of sleeping will be taking place this weekend, I hope. I am severely sleep deprived at this point, since I am still getting up at 4:00 a.m. every day. Obviously, I should not complain, since my husband is not only getting up at that hour but also going to work at that hour, seven days a week. However, Sighkey has pointed out to me that lack of sleep can lead to psychosis, and we don't want that, do we? So naps are definitely planned.

There will also be housework, reading, and knitting. And some working with #2 son, who has taken over the cooking of dinner, but needs to fine-tune his approach. Here it is Friday, and we are entirely out of meat, but have nearly all the vegetables we started the week with. I've used some at breakfast and lunch, but dinner has been large pieces of meat and roughly-hewn carrot sticks. Think cave men hunkered around the fire. Well, maybe not really cave men, as we have been eating things like Teriyaki Steak and Chicken Marsala, but I think a plate should be about half vegetables. We will see how well I do with persuading our new cook of this.

I was thinking, in a sleep-deprived and desultory way, about faith. This is because one of my homework questions for the study of the book of Romans was "What can we learn about God from nature?"

In general, I think the answer is "nothing." This is because the whole "Look around you at God's wonderful handiwork" bit only makes sense to people of faith. If you don't believe in God, then you also will not believe that "the rocks and rills proclaim their Maker's praise," as the beautiful hymn puts it. It is one of those circular things.

On the other hand, it seems to me that an atheist seeking to explain the existence of things from a purely mechanistic view -- and I am thinking here of my favorite atheist apologist, Richard Dawkins, not just some random unskilled atheist -- has to believe some pretty tough things.

C.S. Lewis pointed out that an atheist has to be prepared to believe that nearly all the people in the world throughout history have been entirely wrong about the nature of the universe. Not just wrong about the details -- religious people are not in full agreement, certainly -- but absolutely completely wrong. The handful of atheists throughout space and time have to be fairly arrogant to believe that they are right and everyone else is wrong.

Arrogance aside, you also have to be prepared to believe that, say, Handel's Messiah is not significantly different from excrement.

Last year, and this link will take you to it, I wrote about Dawkins's claim that moral behavior is adaptive and that is why humans have a moral sense. I don't think that is a strong argument, for reasons I won't repeat, since I've already written about it.

But you would have to be prepared to claim not only that the human conscience, which to me is one of the strongest intimations of God's existence, but that all things good and beautiful are mere epiphenomena of biochemistry (to quote Sighkey again). Flowers are lovely and fragrant because it increases their reproductive success to be lovely and fragrant. Creatures who live in complete darkness at the bottom of the ocean are bright-colored because for some reason we don't yet know it increases their reproductive successfulness. Or it is an unimportant byproduct of other biological processes. Art and music and the general theory of relativity either increase our reproductive successfulness, or are unimportant byproducts of biochemical processes. Digestion produces excrement, and the electrochemical processes of the brain produce melodies. Sweat, philosophy, carbon dioxide, great literature, dandruff, acts of heroic sacrifice, urine, important scientific discoveries -- no difference among them, really.

In Anthropology of Religion class we learned that religions have to require faith in things that are hard to believe. By definition. That's why there are Christians but not Newtonians. If the things you believe are self-evident, then it's not a religion. And in last week's sermon, our pastor pointed out that God doesn't answer "why" questions. All over the Bible, people (including Jesus) ask God why this and why that, and God never answers.

But atheists, having eschewed faith, spend lots of time answering "why" questions. And some of the answers seem pretty implausible. In fact, some of them seem to require faith.

This may be why agnosticism is more common than atheism.

I haven't been able to restrain myself from making more little slide things. Blisskitty pointed out that they would make good windchimes. And when I saw these little fairies, I thought that #1 daughter would enjoy them on her Christmas tree. She was saying last year that it was hard for her to decorate at Christmas because her house is done in sage green and pink, and most ornaments clashed with her decor. These would not.

The fairies are just one of the pages of microscope-slide-sized prints on handmade paper the clever people at Flights of Fancy have put together. There were three each of six designs on one page, so I paired them up and made six that are identical front and back. That left six over, and I collaged with one of them, up there at the right of the picture. I think #1 daughter will prefer them plain.

I really like making the itty bitty collages, but if you wanted to make slide jewelry and don't like that look, you might like these prints. There are lots to choose from.

I have determined to knit a couple of dishcloths for the KTC project for The Time-Traveler's Wife. There have been darker and less charming scenes since I wrote about the book yesterday, but even they involve cleaning up. It is apparent that time travel would be messy. This is sensible, really, since one of the big truths about history (I learned this most thoroughly during my work at a historical museum) is that history is smelly.

I have not been able to get my stand-in computer (isn't it wonderful that, when our computer died, we had a stand-in computer available?) to communicate with my printer, so I spent some time this morning copying out cool patterns for dishcloths that related to the book in some clever and subtle way. "Tresses Coupees" for the great haircutting scene. "Nids" for the recurrent bird motif. Not only can I not make my printer pay attention to the computer, I also do not know how to put accents on my vowels when needed, as in "coupees" up there. And I cannot figure out how to put buttons in my custom module, either, even with Pokey IM-ing me the directions as I do it. If you know how to do any of these things, please tell me. Thank you.