#1 daughter has taken a job. Her job search lasted for one week, just like #2 daughter's. And she didn't find her job online. Formerprincess asked whether it was a job based on looks, and indeed it was.

She had been applying for positions with medical and social-service places, but realized that her main goal in taking a job was to get out and meet young people other than submariners, so she went to Abercrombie and Fitch, a popular chain clothing store. She worked at their store in our local mall while she was in school, and they were glad to hire her at their store up there in the frozen north.  This link will take you to an interview with the head guy in which he explains why they hire workers on the basis of their looks.

Do not hope for anything very coherent.

Both my daughters have worked for A&F as "brand reps." This term describes workers who stand in the doorway wearing size 0 A&F clothes. Their entire job is to look good enough that passersby will think "Oooh, if I buy those $89 jeans, I'll look like that." They are not allowed to move away from the door. Music is played at a volume rivalling your loudest local nightclub, and the brand reps are only allowed to stand at the door, flashing smiles when people walk in. If you ask for help, they have to refer you to someone else.

My son-in-law was not allowed to be a brand rep. He is a handsome fellow, but wasn't buff enough to make the cut for the stand-in-the-doorway job, so he worked in the store with actual customers. There are also the worker bees, who scurry around unpacking and arranging things. #2 daughter wanted to do that, but was not allowed to. She used to tidy the stuff within the area around the door where she was allowed to move, but that behavior is discouraged. I guess passersby are not attracted by people doing work.

Once I learned that the hierarchy was based on appearance, I admit that I did squint at the worker bees from the corner of my eyes, hoping to determine what had made them unsuitable for the brand rep position, but I still don't know. Maybe they wear size 1.

There is a xanga webring for A&F workers. I have not visited their sites, but there are 136 of them. My girls used to have very funny stories to tell about their experiences at the store. Perhaps the webring has some, too. I used to take their stories back to the store that I manage, to see whether perhaps we could incorporate some of their ideas into our marketing efforts. Perhaps we could hire workers on the basis of how studious they look, and have them stand in the doorway doing math problems? Then passersby would think "Oooh, if I buy some of their books, I'll be as smart as they are."

I have a stack of unread books. This is very unusual for me.  Maybe once a year a concatenation of circumstances leads to this effect. In this stack you can see not only unread books, but even half-read books. I am slowly working my way through The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. I think I should count it for the RIP challenge. It is beautifully written, reminding me of my mother's storytelling, but is about the murder of a 12-year-old boy, so it creeps me out. I am reading it because it is my physical-world Book Club book. I had thought that perhaps I would read some other book by this author, but I see that she is showing up on the RIP challenge lists, so she may specialize in creeping people out. Among the RIP challengers I have found this very entertaining blog. I actually found her because I was looking for data on a book called Shopportunity, and she had written about it. I saw the RIP challenge link and explored further.

Also in the half-finished category is A Civil Campaign, recommended to me by Lostarts. This was my light reading to contrast with The Little Friend. It is well-written, and just your basic Good Story.

However, I realized that September is practically gone, and here I was not having begun the Knitting the Classics book, let alone knitted something inspired by it. So The Time Traveler's Wife has moved up to the Book in Progress position.

This is a charming book, with intriguing characters and snappy repartee. I don't know why it was chosen as a "classic" -- I really can't feature it being read a century hence as an example of seminal works of the 21st century -- but I am enjoying it.  The time-travel bit is handled in a very unusual and unusually thoughtful way. One reader called it science fiction, but I think they were in error. For one thing, there is no science involved, other than the most sketchy "Gosh, I guess I need a mechanism for the time travel" reference to the traveler's medical condition. The time-traveler has a chronological disorder, which he compares to epilepsy, which makes him subject to sudden fits of time travel.

I am thinking about making a bag, as the time-traveler's wife is always leaving him stuff to find when he arrives, naked and hungry, at a new temporal destination. On the other hand, housekeeping is a recurrent theme, so I may accept Natalie's invitation to join the cult of the dishcloth, and whip one up. That is a project that I could finish by the deadline, after all.

My favorite housekeeping scene thus far is when the male character, Henry, invites his beloved Clare to his apartment for the first time and makes her close her eyes and count to 1000 while he rushes around grabbing up all the mess. We later discover that he has thrown all the mess in the kitchen sink -- socks, everything.

This book, by the way, also has one of the most convincing madly-in-love relationships I have encountered in a book.

It occurs to me that I need to tidy up some endings. The Know-It-All does in fact end with the narrator's wife expecting a baby, and that is all the plot we are going to get. It is a pleasant book to read, though, and good perhaps for bus trips or other occasions when concentration might be difficult. And I took out a wedge of the second Tychus hat and finished it up, and #1 son pronounced it wearable, even though it now has a bit of the scorpion-nose thing going on.

I am sneaking over here during working hours to report that #1 daughter has found a job and starts on Friday. Celebrations are in order.

I was unintentionally confusing yesterday. First, here is a tawashi.

This is a special Japanese scrubby thing. Apparently, in Japan there are specific tawashi for all sorts of things -- vegetables, cars... Each object has its own. My personal favorite (in concept, I mean; in real life, the only one I use is the one shown here) is a weird little thing that looks like a space alien, knitted of special anti-microbial yarn, for cleaning your computer keyboard. I was not able to find the link to it, but if I run upon it again I will show it to you.

Anyway, these are generally made of cotton, although I have a linen set that I really love. Some people swear by acrylic yarn on the grounds that it is harsher and scrubbier than natural fibers.

 This link will take you to the pattern for the tawashi and facecloth shown at right.

Shea butter is a plant butter -- that is, a fixed oil from a plant that is solid at room temperature. It comes from shea nuts. Many other plants can produce butters, including mango, avocado, cocoa, and olive. The other ingredients for the bath fizzies can be found at your grocery store (citric acid is in the pickling section), and the butter is optional. However, if you get some shea or other butter, you can make many more cool things with them. I get mine from  Brambleberry.

Yesterday, in fact, I made some lotion bars. Hand lotion in bottles is all very well when you are at home, but many of us have had it spill or spoil in our purses or cars, and most men will not consider carrying it. My guys especially need hand lotion, since they spend their days doing things like rock climbing and making wrenches. Lotion bars have the moisturizing qualities of lotion, but are solid, like soap, or soft like lip balm, and practical to carry around with you. I use a recipe from Brambleberry, and many recipients of these lotion bars say that they are the best hand lotion they have ever tried. My husband's coworkers try to buy his from him.

To make these, you melt roughly equal amounts of butter (I used cocoa butter in this case, but I also like mango or shea butter), beeswax, and liquid oil (I used coconut oil, but almond or olive oil are also good). Blend them together, scent them, and pour into molds. The color is very nice as it is. Butters and waxes have strong scents of their own, so it is not realistic to try to scent them with some light floral fragrance. I have tried -- because when you give a gift you want to make it a matching collection -- but the scent will either fight with the natural scents of the butter and wax, or simply give up and disappear. Instead, use something compatible with the natural scents -- honey is an excellent one -- or something robust enough to stand up to them, such as sandalwood or musk. Cocoa butter, beeswax, honey, and sandalwood in combination make a very pleasant smell.

To make really excellent lip balm, use equal parts of almond oil and beeswax, plus about half as much peppermint oil. You can adjust the proportions to make a softer or harder formula. People use other waxes or oils, too, but I think this combination makes the best and gentlest. You can also use plant butters to make salt or sugar scrubs, bath oils, liquid lotions, face creams, soaps, and all sorts of other things.

Most of the bath and body products that you buy are made from petroleum, even the most expensive ones. I was surprised and dismayed when I learned this. Dweezy pointed out that you are paying for the experience, which includes the scent, the colors, the packaging, and even the ads that make you feel tres chic for using the product, not for the nickel's worth of chemicals. But almost all the bath and body products you buy are made from various kinds of salts and oils, and it is easy enough to make your own. I like to use plant ingredients, but you can also use lanolin, which comes from sheep (the sheep are not harmed in the process), and you will still be doing environmental good.

Because I have been doing this for some years, I have a bunch of fragrances and molds, and my total cost each year to make all these goodies for my household and for gifts is about equal to one store-bought bottle of really good bath gel and one jar of ready-made salt scrub. If you were going to make some of these yourself and were just starting out, you could use yogurt containers or other such recyled containers instead of commercial molds. You can skip colors entirely, but they are part of the fun for me. I just buy soap dyes in the primary colors -- I get the cheap kind at the local craft store. Do not, however, buy the scents there. They smell terrible, and are not cheaper than good ones. You can buy one fragrance blend you really love to start out with, or you can get a few essential oils to play around with. If you decide to get several for blending, remember that perfumes are like chords: you need the bass notes (woods and animal scents like musk and ambergris), the tenors (spices), the altos (herbs), and the sopranos (flowers and citrus). If you have, for example, oakmoss, ginger, mint, and jasmine, you can make a surprising variety of blends. Use more of the high notes and less of the low notes -- like a 3-2-1 ratio -- and try your blends out on coffee filters before your throw them into your bath and beauty products.

Sweetcakes is another company I like, and you will find a lot of informaton about scent blending there. They were also kind enough to blend a scent I requested ("Christmas Forest" -- a good copy of Crabtree and Evelyn's "Noel," made safe for use in soaps and things).

That is probably more than you wanted to know.

This is the other thing I did yesterday: more tiny collages in microscope slide sandwiches.

This is so much fun. It would be easy to get carried away and end up with unreasonable numbers of these.

This is particularly true since they are not practical -- that is, if I have dozens of Tychus hats, they can keep somebody's head warm. If I end up with so many that I run out of people to give them to, I could donate them to a shelter.

These little things are not like that.

I have ordered my soldering gear. It has crossed my mind that I should not use up all my slides before I try soldering one, in case I am making some horrible error with the foil tape which will not become clear until I have soldered. However, these are so fun to do that I am having difficulty restraining myself.

Here are the opposite sides.

I have seen jewelry made of these things going for $40 to $200 per piece. Accustomed as I am to needlework, where the value of an object has to do with the number of hours a person has spent on it, I am questioning those prices quite a bit. However, I suppose they are Art. And I shouldn't draw any conclusions till I have actually finished them. However, these do seem so far to be more like melt-and-pour soap than, say, handmade quilts.

My boys say they are cool, although #1 son, picking a few up, also said, "I'm a guy. I don't comment." It seemed to be a kindly remark, intended perhaps to keep me from getting my feelings hurt by his lack of detailed response. I am hoping that the need for safety goggles will inspire them, once the soldering gear arrives, to join me in this project. Danger inevitably makes crafts more appealing to guys, right?

Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Here is some background, with links to the Pirate Insult Generator and some handy dictionaries.

Everybody likes a pirate, I think. However, it is also #2 son's birthday. I have always thought it was pretty cool that he got to have his birthday on Talk Like a Pirate Day, and have made the most of the connection. We have a Pirate Cookbook, and a pirate CD, and have in the past had pirate cakes and humorous pirate tableware.

I have been told that the joke is wearing thin. #2 son still wants to have birthday cake and presents for breakfast, but he is now 15, and too cool to celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day along with his birthday.

Oh, well.

I am baking birthday cake right now, at 5:04 a.m. (xanga is unclear about my time zone), and we have bought a new cell phone, a pull-up bar, and a couple of books as presents.

One is Tales of Alan Quartermain, because #2 son is a big fan of H. Rider Haggard. The other is Cooking Up a Storm, a cool new teen cookbook. This book is so current that the pictures will be funny in a decade, but the food is healthy and sounds tasty. Recipes include things like guacamole and curry and spaghetti, and it has categories like things to eat on exam day and things to fix when you want to impress girls. We haven't made anything out of it yet, but the ingredients are all real food. It is a British cookbook, but the version available in the U.S is not confusing. No saveloys.

There has been knitting going on chez fibermom. I finished the second Tychus hat. You may recall that #1 son said the first Tychus hat was too long -- cuffed hats are Out. He also felt that it was too narrow, and looked pointed at the top. So I made him another. This one, he thinks, is too short and wide.

I tried the first one on for him, because I always think that a hat looks better on a head. "You look like a Hershey's kiss," said #2 son helpfully.

My husband disagreed. "It's pointy like a scorpion's nose," he said.

I must have looked sceptical, because he then reminded me that I had never seen a scorpion's nose, only pictures, and was not qualified to judge the accuracy of his statement. He does this sort of thing all the time.

I blocked the second hat severely, in hopes that the final shape would pass muster with #1 son. I can see dozens of Tychus hats in my future, each subtly different from the others, and none exactly as he wants it to be.

These odd shapes are bath fizzies. I made them during yesterday's hour of working on Christmas presents. There is a hemispheric theme going on, I know. These are pale lavender, but on my monitor they have much the same color as the Tychus hats, too.

You might want to make some yourself. Combine the following things:

10 T baking soda
5 T cornstarch
5 T citric acid

That's the chemistry part. When these things get wet together, they fizz excitingly. The fizziness lies dormant until you throw one into the bath, at which point the fizzing and scent are released by the water. The baking soda gives the bather nice soft skin. I also mixed in some dried lavender flowers from my garden. Not enough to clog the bathtub drain, just enough for a good effect.

Now you get a little spray bottle (little is important, as otherwise it will be hard to achieve enough volume to spray). Combine scented oils, soap coloring, a bit of water, and almond oil if you feel like it. I used lavender oil, peppermint, and a fragrance blend called "herbal garden," and mixed blue and red colors. This is an aromatherapy combination that is supposed to calm and refresh a person, and it is not too girly a scent. In fact, lavender is really not a feminine scent at all. If you find yourself making fragrance gifts for guys, try lavender with eucalyptus, sandalwood, oakmoss, and other such masculine scents and you will be surprised by how well it gives just a bit of sharpness to the blend.

Spray the combined powdery stuff a few times and mix it in quickly with your hands. You must be careful with this step, since you don't want to get the stuff wet enough to precipitate a fizzing, just wet enough to stick together. Keep spraying and quickly mixing till the stuff can be packed together like snow or wet sand or shortbread dough (depending on your personal experience -- surely everyone has experienced at least one of these things). At that point, pack the stuff into molds. I like to rub the molds well with shea butter. Some people mix the shea butter into the fizzy mixture, but I find that less successful. You just want a little for luxury, after all.

Leave the fizzies in the molds for a few hours, then unmold them and quickly wrap them against moisture. Some people bake their fizzies at a low temperature for an hour or so for a crisp finish, and I have done this in the past, but I didn't find that it made a big difference. Some people also hide things in the middle of the fizzies -- fortunes, you know, or charms.

These make nice little gifts for your girlfriends, and combine well with tawashis, knitted facecloths, and suchlike. If you use a non-girly scent like the one I mentioned, there is no reason you couldn't give them to a guy, either. You can also keep them for yourself, and once you try one, you will probably want to.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has come out with a new set of recommendations for the teaching of math. Headlines on the subject have said things like "Back to the Basics" and "No More Fuzzy Math," but that is just the irritating way headlines fail to jibe with reality. In fact, the new recommendations merely suggest focal points for each grade. They continue to encourage problem-solving and algebraic thinking at every grade level, and continue to mandate basic skills in calculation and so on, but they are saying "If you can only get a few things across, let it be this group." And "this" is the usual counting in kindergarten, adding in first grade, subtraction in second grade, multiplication in third, and division in fourth, along with the math topics (that's stuff like measurement) as usual. The NCTM is, I think, responding not so much to the possible overdoing of the discovery method as to the test-driven panic over long lists of things like having kindergartners say "rhombus" and practicing all possible varieties of graphs each year in case one shows up on the test.

Education is very fashion-driven, and it is usual to behave as though every new thing were New! and Exciting! when it's really just the hemlines going up and down.

Then Knitsteel was saying that geometry was the most important thing. If you are only going to teach your kids a little math, she said, let it be geometry.

The combination of these two discussions have made think about what little bit of math would really be the most important.

I have to say that I don't ever favor knowing just a little bit. We live for a long time nowadays, and we ought surely to be learning every day, so we have time to learn a lot of things.

But if you were only going to have a little knowledge of math, for the sake of argument, what would you pick?

Now that Blessing (That Man's new assistant) is on the force at work, there are accounting conversations going on. When That Man and I have conversations, they tend to be about music, politics, where mislaid items might be, and things like last week's "Did you throw away the giraffe's bottom, by any chance?"

He and Blessing say things like "So they overpaid #42763, but underpaid on the 9th, so they have a credit of 12 cents, reflected in the $10,724 on the second page." I say, "What's 12 cents between friends?" and they look at me uncomprehendingly.

Perhaps knowing about money would be handy. The accountants always use calculators, of course, but the way they throw around the names of all those numbers shows that they could do without them if they had to. Faced with piles of papers and people overpaying and underpaying, I would probably just cry. Is this a specialized skill, or something we all could benefit from?

Music involves math, of course. Our director once announced that it was "just math," as thought that would make it easer for the choir to get the syncopation accurately. Our director loves syncopation, and works diligently toward crisp rhythms. And knitting is all math, in exactly the same way that music is all math. In both cases, it is probably mostly ratios and measurement of various kinds.

So we need to be able to calculate, estimate, measure, and comprehend ratios.

You need fractions for cooking. Sometimes for knitting, too. In fact, fractions and decimals are required for most calculations in the real world. Things are rarely so tidy that you can just go with whole numbers. And we have to be able to tell time and to work with time a little for cooking and for scheduling.

It seems to me that percentages are key for understanding the news, determining whether the latest Huge Sale is actually all that, and estimating sales tax accurately enough that you won't be startled by your totals when shopping. They are also handy for reading in the social sciences.

For reading in the natural and physical sciences, you sometimes need quite complicated math, but that may be optional for daily life. Those who need to be able to do the calculations involved in reading about advanced chemistry probably have studied math more thoroughly than the rest of us anyway. 

So, let's see, we need basic operations, the math topics, some geometry, a bit of algebra... Pretty much the usual elementary and middle school math syllabus.

Not that all of us in Hamburger-a-go-go-land leave middle school knowing all these things. But that is another subject entirely.

Those of us doing the HGP will, this week, clean our bedrooms thoroughly. We will put a meal and a batch of "goodies" in the freezer. We will begin spending an hour a day working on homemade presents, and buy 1/8 of our store-bought presents. We also check our towels and table linens. I had planned on making some for my SewRetro project this month, though I notice that the month is slipping away without my having done so. Maybe this is the week.

Hqwanda has a countdown that involves buying massive quantities of luau foods. Sounds a bit jollier than the HGP.

  I am reading the very interesting book Hungry Planet by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Alusio. This is the sequel to their amazing book Material World, which asked families to bring all their household goods out to be photographed.  In this book, they photographed a week's worth of food for people from 24 different countries.

Since I had just done grocery shopping for the week, I thought I would do the same. Here it is: food for the week. We are a household of two adults and two teenage boys, 15 and 17.

#2 son and I went to the farmer's market, the health food store, and the grocery store. We bought local fruits and veg and honey, ham, beef, chicken, molasses and raisins and oats, milk, cheese, eggs, butter, bread from a local bakery, juice and Perrier, canned tomatoes and broth, brown rice, pasta, protein powder for the boys, and responsibly-produced chocolate. Not in the picture is some food we had on hand: corn given us by The Empress, coffee (from the church's fair trade program), tea (from England by mail order), herbs and peppers in the garden, my husband's enormous containers of rice and noodles, and staple baking supplies and spices.

My photo is not as good as the pictures in the book, but I was interested to see how it would compare. We don't look like the developed world pictures, actually, because we don't have many processed foods. The amount of food we have is not large relative to most of the pictures, but we have only four people, and some are feeding 12 or 13.

Among the nations studied, the cost of the food ranged from $1.23 for a family in Chad to $500.03 for a family in Germany. I was startled by how much Europeans spent for food. I wonder whether it is that food is a great deal more expensive there, or if the families are just very wealthy. There are three American families represented, including a Southern family with two teen boys like ours. They spend over three times as much as we do. The California family -- if we count in the Schwan's man's visits and the boys' school lunches -- spends about the same as we do.

Having considered the shopping aspect, I then thought about the cooking aspect. I would be fine in Guatemala or Egypt or China, I determined, but if I were presented with the foodstuffs for Greenland or Mali, I would be at a loss. As for eating, well, I whined enough at having to eat prepared foods that you can imagine I am not wishing I had the opportunity to try deep-fried starfish and mutton-tail-fat dumplings.

The book includes recipes for exotic foods, gorgeous photographs, and details of shopping, cooking, and eating in the lives of people all over the world. There are also essays on global economics, but I keep finding myself distracted by the photographs, so I am saving those for later.

Once I completed my long list of chores and errands yesterday, I set out to make my jacket as planned. I traced, pinned, fitted, made samples, and did my absolute best to cut accurately.

Then I marked with great care, sewed, and pressed. There was some aggressive easing involved, but at this point I have the front and back done and sewn together at the shoulders. It appears to fit well and looks good, though I must of course finish the seam edges. The next step is to do the collar and facings, which I expect to be difficult, so I am leaving that for the afternoon.

In the lap of the jacket is Tychus, which is coming along pretty well. #1 son nags me about it quite a bit. I think that I said last year that I would never make anything for him again. Not sure why I gave up that sensible plan.

Today I am teaching Sunday School, and there is church, and we are meeting my parents for lunch. Yesterday was the last day for cleaning the entry way, and I did not complete the coat closet, so I hope to fit that in today. I did make my "salon wall," but I am not happy with it. You are supposed to take all the art pieces for the wall and lay them out until you have a pleasing arrangement, which you then transfer carefully to the wall.

I had a couple of cross teenagers clambering up atop the organ bench and hammering nails into the wall  haphazardly, so the arrangement is perhaps not the best possible one.

So what with one thing and another, I may take this afternoon to finish up the entryway. I hope also to do the collar of the jacket, and some baking. However, I also reserve the option of postprandial lolling.

My list of five books for the RIP challenge:

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
E. F. Benson's Collected Ghost Stories
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
On the Night of the Seventh Moon by Victoria Holt

I may throw in some Lovecraft, too, but I didn't find any at frugalreader or on my shelf (where I found my grandmother's copies of several Holt and Du Maurier books which I may fit in someplace). The link to the challenge is just below, at the beginning of yesterday's post.

Okay, the Summer Reading Challenge was one thing, but what has possessed me to consider joining the Autumn Readers Imbibing Peril challenge? I am not quite sure. Partly it is because this challenge -- 5 gothic novels between now and October 31 -- involves a genre I don't usually read, so it seems like a real challenge. Partly of course it is the excellent Gorey button.

But I actually have a bunch of things I intend to read in the next couple of months. The new Dawkins book, of course. My Book Club books. Whatever Booksfree sends me. Hungry Planet. The Omnivore's Dilemma. The Bujold books Lostarts recommended to me. The Cather that Dingus6 recommended to me. Wide Sargasso Sea -- kind of gothic, that, actually.

That's not too many. I should be able to fit in some gothic stuff. I can read Frankenstein early (it is the KTC book for November), and count Wide Sargasso Sea. I haven't read more than a couple of things in this genre per year since I was a teenager. Then, of course, I read the classics: Poe, Stevenson, Wilde, Eyre -- those guys. I also read the Had-I-But-Known books, the oneheys in which the heroine inevitably goes, in her nightie, down to the smuggler's cave, Bluebeard's locked room, the idiotic rendezvous in the darkened boathouse. DuMaurier, Holt, and Seton are the authors I remember in that group. I might re-read some of those in front of the fire, when it gets to that point in the year. Phillipa Gregory does some of that, too, though hers move past deliciously creepy to downright depraved.

Fellow readers, can you recommend a couple of others for me?

Yesterday was a quiet afternoon at work. I had gotten the entire store looking decent, including the math area, which tends to be challenging. So in between customers I read Gary Paulsen's new young adult book, The Legend of Bass Reeves. Very good, and it is about a historical figure we don't often hear about, a slave who became a marshal on the frontier. If you have kids, or even if you don't, you might check your library for this one.

Then, along about 4:00, everyone decided to come in and shop. They had been massing in the parking lot, I guess, waiting. There were numerous children, many of them screaming. There was a woman who wanted me to get her 3 yds of each color of bulletin board paper, one who wanted help arranging a schedule for her special-needs child, one who needed to do calendar work with three year olds. There was a woman who had come quite a distance to pick up her order, which wasn't in yet, and she would not leave. I kept darting off to help the others, and then coming back to her and saying, "What can I do for you? What would be helpful?" The Mennonite school had all been in the day before, and one of them returned for more paper.

Once it quieted down, I spent a little time wondering about their outfits. They have outifts, of the "I see by your  outift that you are a Mennonite" variety. It is clear, when these ladies all arrive in a group, that they are all using the same dress pattern.

I understand the caps, and I understand the modest dresses with two layers of cloth covering the torso, but what is there about sneakers and ankle socks that seems more holy than other shoes? I can'rt recall any biblical injunctions about that.

Enough idle persiflage. I have an unusually long list of errands to run today, and I am determined to have a PSD (Personal Sewing Day, as Susinok puts it) afterward, so I must get my skates on. Enjoy your weekend!

Encouraged by Marji's words, I have determined to declare tomorrow a PSD and make the muslin for my jacket. Then I can hold my head up again among decent non-wimpy seamstresses.

Actually, I was somewhat encouraged by this photo. The woman who made this ended up with the sort of wonky collar I fear I will make, and was so intimidated by the buttonholes that she embroidered fake ones on and wore the thing open all the time. I can't do worse than that, can I? And yet, she wore hers to a wedding, and looked quite nice in it, too. I am going to run down to Hobby Lobby in the morning and see if they have anything on the clearance table from which I could make a "wearable muslin," a popular concept among the sewing bloggers. #2 daughter found a really nice wool and rayon flannel for her wearable muslin dress last week, and I might be equally lucky. The idea is that the fabric is so cheap that you don't mind using it like muslin, and if by some chance it turns out well, you can finish it up and wear it. If there aren't any snazzy fabrics for $2 a yard or less, I will take advantage of their muslin sale and grab some of that.

Now, if you have been reading my blog every day for a year or so and have total recall, you will remember the Great International Richard Dawkins Read-Along of 2005. I am a big fan of Dawkins, but for some odd reason I don't seem to know anyone who wants to talk about him in the physical world.

In The Know-It-All, the hero tries to share the nuggets of information he has mined from his reading of the encyclopedia with other people. He goes out of his way to manufacture opportunities to do so. No one responds well. This is probably why he started writing the book. Plenty of us knitting bloggers started because the people in our physical milieu are just so patient when we talk about cabling.

Anyway, I have this experience when I try to discuss Dawkins with other people, even on topics which might be thought to have broad appeal, such as the correlation between testical size and monogamy, and whether music can be considered a by-product of biological processes.

#1 daughter, another Dawkins fan, had the same experience. Her social circle consists largely of drunken sailors, and the selfish gene had no charms for them. I doubt she even considered bringing up the question of monogamy and testicle size.

So we began the online/telephone discussion group. It was fun. For me, it had the serendipitous counterpoint of a study of Genesis with a bunch of fundamentalist Christians, which I undertook at the same time.

This year, I am doing a study of Romans, the book in the Bible in which Paul begins by telling the guys in Rome that they have no excuse for refusing to believe in God. Right on cue, Richard Dawkins is coming out with another book, The God Delusion, in which he evangelizes for atheism.

I think I have mentioned before how loony that seems to me. I understand evangelism among religious people. If you sincerely believe that your words to another person can prevent them from an eternity of torment in Hell, you would have to speak up, I think. Not to do so would be like watching someone set off on the path that leads through the enormous poison ivy thicket and saying nothing, maybe just chuckling cruelly under your breath.

But evangelism for atheism I just don't get. What does Dawkins care if people believe in God? Religious people are, statistically speaking, happier and healthier than irreligious ones. They do good works and write some fine music.Why not just accept it as a little pecadillo, like wearing gloves, and ignore it? No doubt the book will answer this question.

#1 daughter called yesterday to discuss her job hunt, and I told her about the forthcoming book. She suggested that we each buy a copy, read it together, and discuss it here at xanga. I thought this was a capital idea.

Perhaps you, too, are a Dawkins fan. Perhaps you had heard about the book, and were just saying to a friend, "That scamp Dawkins! I bet he'll be foaming at the mouth in this book -- you should see how worked up he can get over people's failure to understand mathematical probability!"

Your friend looked at you with that blank gaze, and turned the conversation to football.

If so, then you should also get a copy of this book when it comes out next month, and join us.

So that you won't be behind, I'll tell you the rest of our conversation.

I expressed my opinion that evangelizing for atheism was loony.

"Well, evangelical Christians want to save people from Hell, but Dawkins wants to save them from ignorance," said my daughter.
"This is totally outside his field, though. He's no more qualifed to write about religion's effect on history than you or I," I objected.
"That's what I like about him. He goes off on wild tangents."

I agreed that his passion is a likeable quality, but remarked that early reviews said he was a little hysterical in The God Delusion.

It should be fun.

Immediately after writing that, I happened upon a forum at Amazon where people are discussing this forthcoming book. Within two posts, the whole discussion turned into obnoxious attacks. And the book hasn't even come out yet. This is why I like small private discussions on these subjects among people who can talk about ideas without getting nasty.

#2 daughter's job hunt caused me to muse on the job-hunting experience, and then we went through the hiring experience at work, and now #1 daughter's job hunt is causing me to think on it some more. Her situation is very different from #2 daughter's. #2 was just out of school, with lots of stuff on her resume. #1 has been a Navy wife for three years, and married quite young, so all the impressive stuff on her resume is a) old and b) from when she was a kid.

When she said "I have no qualifications," I immediately suggested that she go for jobs where looks are a factor. In general, I tend to think that jobs like those should be left for people who really don't have any other qualifications, but this seems like a case in which she should get off the internet and walk into places. Places like fashion retail or high-end office buildings where they might value a gorgeous receptionist (#1 looks like a young, Eurasion version of Catherine Zeta-Jones). Her efficiency, intelligence, and perceptiveness can then come as a pleasant surprise to the employer.

People seem to believe that online job searches work well, but #2 didn't actually get work that way, either her Day Job or her performance stuff. It will be interesting to see how #1's search works out.

Last night was the second Spanish class. I had gotten the impression that the class was only half an hour long, but apparently it goes on for an hour. I only get half an hour of it because I have to go to choir practice. So maybe I am missing the best part. While I was there, the teacher chattered about herself in English most of the time. I do not expect to learn much Spanish. I did, however, learn the difference between "soy" and "estoy," which I had not previously known.

I knew "soy" because a couple of young men from Mexico once taught me to say "No soy insecto" and "No soy quadrupedo." They also taught me to dance the ranchero, which was vastly more useful information.

In the new Spanish class I am taking, I have learned to say "Soy ---" my name, which seems pretty useless. I already knew "Me llama ---" my name, which I think is how people actually introduce themselves. I have also learned to say "Tengo dos perros," or "I have two dogs." I guess once  I develop some vocabulary, I will be able to announce that I am or am not or have or have not various things. And I can still recite the alphabet from last week.

This is not how I like to teach a language. I taught English as a Second Language for many years. I like to begin with lots of vocabulary and then move directly to practical patterns like greetings, offers and requests, stuff like that. I show the students how to plug the new words into the sentence patterns and let them talk a lot. They can all practice in pairs at the same time while I move among them and help those who need help. Our Spanish teacher presents a sentence, has us all repeat it -- "Tengo una uva" -- and then rattles on in English for ten minutes before getting to the next bit of Spanish.

Ah, well. I am hoping that I will get to know the people in the class a bit. Tonight I have Chamber Singers, which is not at all a social opportunity for me: it is all about the music. In fact, by Thursday evening (since we are getting up at 4:00 a.m. and I am out on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights) I am tired and don't want to go at all. I force myself, though, and I enjoy it once I get there.

I am enjoying The Know-It-All, as well. I have learned a few things from it, though not very many. For example, I had not previously heard of Farinelli, a castrato who apparently spent the last years of his life singing the same four songs to King Phillip every night. The same four songs. It boggles the mind, doesn't it? However, The Know-It-All is extremely short on plot. There is a bit of a thread there about the author's infertility, which may turn out to be the plot. If he and his wife are expecting a baby by the time he gets to "zygote," then that will perhaps turn out to have been the plot of the book. However, a book which causes its readers to wonder whether there might eventually turn out to have been a plot can fairly be said not to have much of one.

It would make a really good blog.

So I am beginning to read my Book Club book for the month. I had tried to persuade the ladies to read The Time Traveler's Wife. That is the book for Knitting the Classics (not sure why they are calling it a classic) and I already had it ordered. But there were not many copies in the library, so we are reading The Little Friend. A child dies horribly in this book. For me, this is a reason not to read it. In fact, I would like to see the publishing industry develop a special rating system which would have a warning on all books that involve violence to children, and then I would just not read them.

Of course, I will read my Book Club book. I am the Slave of Duty. But The Know-It-All will provide respite from The Little Friend, just as it will provide respite from the excessive lightness of The Know-It-All. I have it all planned.

Life has returned to normal. You may remove your seatbelts and move around the cabin.

Actually, life never left normal for quite a lot of you, and others may not have established yet what normalcy consists of, but I was just thinking yesterday that life really has returned to normal for me and mine.

This is an annual event. Some years the summer is more abnormal than others; this year both my daughters had crises and/or major upheavals in their lives and both my sons had major transitions and of course we had the Great Appliance Plague of 2006 (I whined a lot about the refrigerator and a little about the computer, but we also suffered the deaths of our coffee pot, garage door opener, toaster, and two of the burners on our stove; I don't know what was up) and the opening of the new store.

But yesterday I returned to my Tuesday class. With this milestone, we are completely in the fall schedule. School for the kids, classes and rehearsals for me, the HGP... life is real, life is earnest. There are hints of color in the trees and we had a low temperature in the 60s last night, plus there is something about the angle of the sunlight that makes me believe that fall will arrive.

Yesterday was a day of small tasks. I sorted out all the coats and jackets in the coat closet and made people try them on and decide which ones could go to the rummage sale. (BTW, Pokey, if you don't want your yellow jacket any more, I am going to wear it.) I made some bubble bath in summer scents -- honeysuckle and lettuce -- to celebrate the end of the season. I'll be making fall ones next. I rearranged the social studies section at work and packed up the latest order for our old lady in the hills.

This is a woman who buys all her books from us -- she lives in the hills and doesn't get out much. She has sounded ancient since the time ten or fifteen years ago that she started calling us for books. She reads very interesting things -- this time, it is The Fair Tax Book and Robert Sabuda's pop-up Castle -- and some day I would like to meet her.

Partygirl and I did some planning for The Princess's bridal shower. I mended #2 son's backpack, which lost its straps because he still hasn't been able to find his locker after three weeks at the high school and therefore has to carry all his books around. I rejoiced with #1 daughter on her purchase of a car and the beginning -- now that she can walk on her ankle again -- of her job search. If you are thinking that I just had a daughter buying a car and doing a job search, you are right; this is the other daughter. Laundry got done and Frugalreader books got packed up for mailing.

I made one of the three orders that comprise my shopping for holiday giftmaking supplies. This place was the easy one. If you are the sort of crafter who likes bits of ribbon and buttons and ephemera, go click that link. If you are the crafter who only orders stuff like 20 skeins of Silk Garden, skip it.

By the end of the week, following the HGP, I will have made the other two purchases. One will be a soldering iron. Having received much useful advice, for which I am grateful, I will be doing a bit more scouting before making a final decision on that. The other is my annual soap order. I know what I need for my household, but haven't quite decided what I might want for gifts. Is it time to do lotion bars and lip balm again? Will I try that new men's fragrance recipe? Should I use up that lye and coconut oil in my cupboard at last? These are the weighty decisions I must make before pushing that button. Here is where I get my soapmaking supplies.

Today I will go to the gym, finish cleaning the coat closet, pack the online orders and redo the math section at work, have Spanish class and choir practice, work on a duet I'm preparing with Jannalisa, and perhaps make gingerbread for the freezer. My Tychus hat redo is progressing too slowly for a picture to be worthwhile. Pipes and Erin have to wait till the weather moves closer to an autumnal briskness.

Ah, ordinariness!