Here is the completed Tychus hat. It has a cuff, as does the original in the pattern.

It is not supposed to have a cuff. Last year, #1 son told me that cuffed hats were Not Being Worn, and I made it without a cuff and wrote down how I did so.

This year, I went ahead and made it according to the pattern.

The moral of the story is this: make notes on your projects, and then actually look at them when you repeat the project.

On the table by the hat you can see the redo of Tychus. The finished one is in worsted weight on #6 needles. Last year, I used sport weight on #3 needles to decrease the length, and added white rows in between to keep the width the same. For the redo, I am sticking with the worsted weight and going down to #2 needles. So I guess the other moral of the story is, you'd be surprised how much leeway you have with your gauge.

As for the finished hat, #2 son likes it, but #1 son will not hear of his wearing it. They go to the same school, and it would be uncool to be walking around campus in matching hats.

#1 son has his persnickety side.

I gave one of these to Son-in-law last Christmas. #1 son says I may send it to #2 daughter if I like, since she now lives in another state, and that may be what I end up doing.

Formerprincess asked about the soldering iron -- are they expensive and so on. That is the question. It is possible to buy a cheap soldering iron, but there seems to be widespread agreement that people who do that just have to turn around and buy a better one anyway, making it false economy. There is a site called Volcano Arts where you can get a basic set for half again as much as a comparable soldering iron bought locally. The set includes a stand, rheostat, flux, solder, and copper tape -- I can't get all those things locally for anywhere near the price of the set. There is also a site called Scrappalatte where you can buy a basic set for a bit more than half the price of Volcano Arts (about the same price as the iron itself at my local shops), but the iron is low wattage and the quantities of materials are tiny.

Part of my mind says, "You might not be any good at this -- try it with the cheaper set." Then the other part of my mind says, "If you like it, you will just have to buy the more expensive one anyway. And the small quantities might not be enough to get good at it. You might just have to go out and buy more supplies before you can even tell whether you would like it."

Do you know that there is a mental disorder in which people who get this parts-of-the-brains-arguing thing are completely paralyzed with indecision and just stand there for minutes on end until one side of the brain is able to defeat the other?

Anyway, since this is the week in which we followers of the HGP have to make up our minds and buy our materials, I have reviewed the evidence on both sides. I have reminded myself that I have soldered successfully in the past.

When I was in college, I took a job soldering circuit boards for the engineers. The guy who hired me said that he preferred women for the job. We stared at a little diagram and then took wires and soldered them into the pattern on the diagram. The job was unusual in that it was desperately dull and repetitive but also required full attention. This is a rare combination. I lasted at that job for three weeks. I think I left it for the food service job in the cafeteria, where I kind of enjoyed feeling all proletariat. I put on headscarves to reinforce that feeling. Although, admittedly, this was the 1970s, and Jean Muir and John Kloss were in style and headwraps were fashionable.

Anyway, as I recall, it was not at all difficult to solder. Ideally, as #2 daughter suggested, I would just borrow a soldering iron from someone else and try it. There are two obstacles to this. First, I don't know anyone who owns a soldering iron. Second, when I went to get the copper tape (that was easy and cheap, by the way) I noticed that there are many different types of solder and flux, and no one with the knowledge to help me choose among them. No doubt one kind is more suitable than another, and probably when you pick up the lead-free solder you must have the acid-free flux or something like that.

I am reading a book called The Know-It-All, by A.J. Jacobs, about a man who decided to read the Encyclopedia Britannica. Speaking of boring. This book would make a good blog. It goes in alphabetical order, and offers tidbits of things he learned along with his reactions to them. So far, all the tidbits have been things I already knew, and probably you would also know them. At no point has he mentioned anything useful about solder and flux.

Those of us who are doing the HGP (Holiday Grand Plan) are cleaning our foyers this week. Normally, that is not a big deal for me, as I do not live in the sort of house where the foyer is a large room with a grand piano and a powder room en suite, but this year I have allowed the coat closet to get entirely out of hand. I also want to make a "salon wall." I'll tell you about that if I actually get around to it.

We also put another meal in our freezers. I have put in chili. I put it in a very large freezer container, let it freeze, and then filled the container up with well-wrapped whole-wheat rolls. While making the chili (a double batch, for the sake of the freezer), I also made a lot of meatballs. With a jar of spaghetti sauce and a good quantity of pasta in the pantry, they will make a fast and respectable dinner. The idea is that, when we get busy with holiday parties and performances and stuff, we will be prepared with meals in the freezer, and will not have to resort to carry-out food. I have also found that I nearly always have a friend who needs a casserole at some point during the holidays, or a potluck beginning immediately after I get off work.

You should also put a batch of cookies in the freezer. It is a long time till Christmas, so I put in breads or sturdy cookies like gingerbread that will -- wrapped correctly and left unopened till fully thawed -- keep well for several months. I gradually work up to the more delicate ones. By Christmas, I have a dozen different kinds of cookies, which makes for good cookie boxes and a nice platter on the Christmas Eve table.

This is also the week for buying supplies for the things we are making for holiday gifts, so I will be making a decision about the soldering iron question. If anyone out there is knowledgeable on the subject, please weigh in with your advice.

We are supposed to divide all those craft supplies into plastic bags for each project. I confess that I have never yet done that. I haven't yet regretted it, either, but who knows? If you do it and find that it is a wonderful idea, let me know.

Now, some people do not have a lot of preparation to do for the winter holidays, because they are too young or too male to be responsible for that stuff. And some people like being insanely stressed in November and December. I know this because I have, when friends or customers complain about the holiday rush, shared with them my secret for complete calm during Advent -- namely the HGP -- and been told that they would hate it. And some people may love holiday countdowns so much that they want more than one.

For all these people, I offer my annual link to X-entertainment's Hallowe'en Countdown. It begins today, which is why I am posting this even though I already posted this morning, thus pretty well guaranteeing that you will not read my earlier post.

It is worth it. You would not find X-entertainment by yourself, any more than I would have, because it sounds like a porno site. But it actually gives daily reviews of weird Hallowe'en stuff that you would not run into yourself. In short, it is an opportunity to glimpse a side of Hallowe'en preparations that people like you and me just don't get to enjoy without assistance. (I first found out about this at a knitting blog. I have forgotten the blogger's name, but she is a rather depressed person with occasional lovely FOs who posted a link to X's amazing and appalling post about making slice-and-bake Hallowe'en cookies.)

The HGP does include preparations for Hallowe'en, by the way. It will tell us when it is time to buy a pumpkin and plan for costumes, and of course we have already planned the menu for Hallowe'en and put the ingredients on our Master Shopping List (from which will be buy two extra canned goods this week, one for the Holiday Box and one for the Charity Box). We will get the word on when to buy our trick or treat candy, too, and when to decorate our porches.

But the HGP will not give us reviews of the special Hallowe'en breakfast cereals or step-by-step directions for putting together cheesy decorations from the dime store. X-entertainment will do that for us.

Yesterday I claimed that I hadn't finished lolling around, and Lostarts asked how I could tell.

Of course, I was joking. Or at least being rather sardonic. And so, I assume, was she. But it got me to thinking. I read not long ago that the average young American woman spends 90% of her weekend resting. I asked around among the young American single women I know, and they agreed. I always do that -- as though the personal experiences of three or four people I know are needed to confirm statistical data.

Last night at the dinner table, #1 son was speaking out against statistical data. His AP Psych class has been looking at how inadequate they are as an image of reality. He was particularly speaking about the claims that a) kids who eat dinner with their families are less likely to use drugs and b) kids who watch a lot of TV are more likely to be obese. In both cases, he pointed out, there are uncontrolled variables. Families that eat together are likely to be different from other families in other ways, he says. Obese kids might not be able to enjoy sports, so they just watch TV instead.

At this point, #2 son assured us that he watches TV all the time. I was surprised at this. He is always out with his friends, he walks and bikes all over town, he is continually covered with wounds -- when is he finding time for this TV watching? But he said that usually when he is at his friends' houses, they watch TV or DVDs or play video games. He would like to do more active things, he says, but his friends don't want to.

#1 son agrees, saying that when he wants to do active things, he seeks out his active friends, but they don't do much else together. He has just returned from a weekend of rock climbing at Horseshoe Canyon Ranch with friends. He is proposing that we go there as a family some weekend, which sounds fun to me. It does not, however, support the boys' claim that they and most of their friends are generally idle.

The boys go to the gym together three times a week for an hour or more of weight-lifting. They have demanding school schedules, busy social lives, and chores at home. They play basketball and go running, and #1 son plays soccer pretty frequently. He also plays music, and #2 son still draws fairly often. I don't think of them as guys who spend all their time lolling around. But, to hear them tell it, they loll around at school, and then they loll around at home or at their friends' homes.

And I do think that I spend quite a bit of time lolling around, although I also work full time, look after my home and family, hit the gym regularly, sing in a couple of groups, take a couple of classes, make a lot of stuff, and am active in my church and community. I can imagine that an observer might not think that I loll around much, just as I don't think that my boys do. But we think we do. This may mean that we loll around just enough: so much that we do not feel overworked, but not so much that we feel lazy.

So how much time is the right amount for lolling around? How can you tell when you have lolled sufficiently? After all, Parkinson's Law says that "Work expands to fill the time available" and Mrs. Parkinson's corollary says that "Housework expands to fill the time available, plus half an hour." Obviously, we can't just wait until there is no more work to do and relax then.

So, perhaps naturally since it was Sunday, I began thinking about the Sabbath. The idea of the sabbath is simple: we work for six days, and the seventh day of the week is for rest, worship, and enjoyment of creation. This idea fits fairly naturally into our lives, since traditionally most of us work or go to school five days of the week, use the sixth day for errands and chores, and go to our place of worship if we have one on the remaining day of the week.

But a lot of us work six or seven days a week. I have been lately. So has my husband. Many students go to school five days and work on the weekend. The labor movement famously insisted on "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will," but it is a rare job that actually lasts only eight hours a day. And few of us manage eight hours of sleep a night. Right now, my husband and I are getting up at 4:00 a.m. for his current work schedule (I am thankful that he was not having these extra hours while I was working insane hours this summer), and you can be sure that we are not going to sleep at 8:00 at night. The average American work week is now 49 hours, and we sleep just under 7 hours a night. Our household tasks are relegated to the weekend, and many of us have kids' sports and other activities to squeeze in. In Hamburger-a-go-go-land, shopping has become the number two pastime, right behind watching TV, and household shopping takes up many weekend hours for most of us. Many of us are working extra hours in order to support the hours of shopping.

Again, this hardly supports the image of America as a nation of slackers which we encounter so frequently. Leaving aside the question of whether TV and shopping are actually a good use of time (they aren't -- I just couldn't leave it aside -- sorry), it is clear that Americans aren't spending many hours in contemplation. Our lives are not, as Sighkey pointed out a while back, very Zen-like. The Sabbath is no longer a part of our lives, even though most of us do go to church or temple, or at least have a church to which we regularly do not go.

Yet the environmental impact of a sabbath day, especially a shared sabbath day, would be enormous. Environmentalists have recently been proposing this, and have come up with some impressive numbers to back up their claim that this would be a good idea. I wanted to find a good link for you to the recent calculations, but all the ones I found this morning were PDF files. Still, we can imagine this. Imagine the effect if all of us determined not to work or shop one day a week. The savings in fossil fuels would be enormous. If we all observed Jewish customs and did not use cars or lights on that day, it would be even more enormous. Here, by the way, is a useful link that I encountered in my search. I was also interested to find, among the religious links I browsed through, a claim that being observant of the Sabbath would naturally lead to greater consciousness about the use of resources throughout the week. I don't know whether that is true or not, but I find it an intriguing notion.

We would probably all be more rested and productive as well. Since there is always work to do, taking a day of rest as a discipline may be the only way many of us will do it at all. Yesterday, as I was lolling around, having already taught my Sunday School class and sung in the choir and done laundry and gone to the pharmacy and put three batches of meatballs in the freezer and dinner in the crockpot and baked bread and cookies and cleaned the kitchen, I found myself jumping up to do more things. Defrost the big freezer. Sort through the boys' outgrown clothes for the church rummage sale. Organize the stored luggage. And all this even though I was reading a rousing good book and being chivvied by #1 son to hurry up with knitting his hat.

It is hard to loll around very much. Yet even the sort of modified Sabbath observance that I manage allows me to rest, to spend time with my family, to give service, to have spiritual renewal, to pay attention to the beauty around me.

Taking a Sabbath could be a very good idea. Here you can find a thought-provoking and informative essay on the Sabbath from a Judeo-Christian perspective. It points out that we are pretty conceited when we think that the universe couldn't manage without our work one day a week. It may be that all of us would benefit from a sabbath, whether it included worship or not. Knowing that the day of rest was approaching would remove that feeling of being on a hamster wheel. It would encourage us to be more efficient and thoughtful in our use of time the rest of the week, since we would no longer be thinking "Oh, I'll get that done this weekend." It would free up time in our lives to do the most important things, rather than just the urgent things. The answer to Lostarts's question might be that we are finished lolling around when we feel refreshed and renewed for the week ahead.

After work yesterday I decided to take some first steps in my new craft project.

I intend to make some microscope slide jewelry. It seems to me that these would make not only cool pendants -- that is how they are usually used -- but also very snazzy Christmas tree ornaments, bookmarks (on a length of cord or something), music placeholders, and so forth.

The basic process is to sandwich an image between a pair of microscope slides and surround the sandwich with copper tape. Then you solder them.

I've done some soldering before. #1 son says that soldering is officially defined as "Adhering metal to metal with heat," which sounds like a good definition to me. I do not own a soldering iron, so I have only taken these to the point of putting on the copper tape. It is presumably the metal to which the solder (another metal) is adhered with heat. Some people who make these things stop right there, but I think the soldering would not only look better, but also make them much sturdier.

These slides are literally experimental: I was experimenting with different ways of putting on the tape, whether it was better to begin with a single surface and fold it, etc. And then they will be experimental as I go through the trial-and-error process with soldering. So I did not put a great deal of effort into the collaging process. The first picture is of the fronts and the second picture is of the backs. Obviously, I haven't yet figured out how to wrap text properly with the new xanga editor.

The woman by whose examples I was inspired had made full-sized collages and scanned them, then shrunk them down to the size of the slides. She came into the shop a month or so ago to get microscope slides and showed me her work. They were so splendid, I would have bought them from her if she had been selling them.

So I am going to try to make some myself.

Now, it is possible that some of these may become Christmas presents, once I get skilled at the process.

There is a dilemma for bloggers when it comes to Christmas presents. We want to post about our progress for all the usual reasons, namely

* We want the feedback and helpful suggestions of our fellow craftspeople.

* We want a record of how the project went for next time we make such a thing.

But of course, we do not want the recipient to see it and have the surprise spoiled.

Fortunately, Crazy Aunt Purl alerted us all last year to the existence of the special gift filter. This automatically protects all posts from the recipients of the gifts therein depicted. Thus, if you see a gift here, you can be sure that it is not for you.

This is a bit of a cautionary tale, the picture on the left. After I had made my slides, #1 son began agitating for me to begin his new hat, so I did. The picture on the left shows my progress up to the point at which I thought, "Hmm... this doesn't look quite right..."

#1 son had said quite firmly that he wanted this hat to be just like the one I made for him last year, but with a paler shade of gray yarn.

The hat is Tychus, from Knitty, and you can see last year's version, below.

This is what happens when you think to yourself, "Oh, yes, I remember how that pattern went.

Plus I was reading the new Terry Pratchett, and possibly not paying sufficient attention.

Anyway, I started over. It now looks very like last year's hat. I really like this hat. It seems quite cool and op-art-ish. I believe I made one for Son-in-law last year as well, and I plan to make one in different colors for #2 son this time around. As I knit, I am thinking of ways that I might make this hat a little different. Multicolored, of course. I can also see it with a plain cuff knitted on after it is finished. And perhaps the solid-color version I started by accident would actually be nice. If you do garter stitch scarves, it would go well with such a thing.

You can find the pattern here. I am making it with worsted weight Wool-ease on #6 needles.

Today is my first day of teaching the high school Sunday School class. Then there is church and I must finish my errands from yesterday. And I never did make a freezer meal last week, so I intend to make both chili and meatballs for the freezer this afternoon.

Once I have completed all of that, though, I plan to loll around knitting and reading for the rest of the day. I didn't complete my lolling and knitting yesterday and feel a need to catch up.

We're having a cool gray morning. I am looking forward to grocery shopping and, if not exactly looking forward to finishing the thorough cleaning of my living room, at least looking forward to having it done. I am also working part of the day, finishing the unpacking of a book order.

But I am relaxing this morning. I got up with my husband at 4:00 to see him off to work and just lay in bed and read after he left, and was able to go back to sleep. Unusual for me, and probably a sign of sleep deprivation. Then I got up and used the eggs and milk #1 son bought last night to make some muffins.

Banana Muffins

3 ripe bananas, mashed
1/4 c sugar
1 egg
1/4 c canola oil
1/2 c applesauce
2 c wholewheat flour
3 T buttermilk
2 t vanilla

Mix everything together gently and bake in a muffin tin at 350 degrees for 25 minutes.

I am reading A Place of Safety by Caroline Graham. This is the second of her books that I have read; I don't know how it is that I had never run into her work before. She has truly interesting characters with believable good and bad qualities, and she is able to make their emotional lives gripping. So often a series detective will be the most important character in the book, and the others are just foils for the detective. That is not the case with Graham's Inspector Barnaby. All the characters are three-dimensional. The plots are suspenseful and unpredictable. With so many mystery novels, I come upon a scene and feel like, ah yes, here is the required violence to perk things up, or okay, there's now going to be 5 pages of the heroine in peril -- I can skip that. Graham's work is more like the classic books of the mystery novel's Golden Age.

Ah, the muffins are beginning to smell very good.

Yesterday a man came into the store with a little boy. He was wearing a bucket hat, an expression of cheerful good health, a polo shirt, khaki shorts that revealed his knees, and black socks and shoes. Somehow, this ensemble convinced me that he was from New Zealand. Sure enough, when he spoke, he had that antipodean accent.

"Look," he said to the little boy, "you can use these to cut shapes when you make scones or something."

The little boy was not a kiwi. Perhaps the American grandchild. He looked solemnly at the cookie cutters. We have recently learned that kiwis say "capsicum" when we say "pepper" and have sausage variations that we can hardly imagine. When they say "scone" (rhymes with "gone" in the U.S.), they mean something rather like what we would call a "biscuit." But when they say "biscuit," they mean what we would call a "cookie." The nice man realized this, and continued.

"Or you could make a cookie shaped like a stah." He said "cookie" as though it were baby talk, something I have noticed before among English speakers not from Hamburger-a-go-go-land. He was also saying "star," but the New Zealand version of that vowel is unlike anything we have in the U.S., or at least in this part of the country. We never make that tense a sound.

But we do sometimes make scones, cookies, and even muffins (which, I would guess, the people in the Southern Hemisphere would call "teacakes." I'm just guessing, though). I believe the muffins are now ready, and I will now go make a nice omelette with peppers to go with them.

And, now that I have a refrigerator, I will stop talking about food all the time. I promise.

Today I will have not merely a working refrigerator, but a new refrigerator, courtesy of my parents. My dad went and bought it and arranged for delivery. We would not have given up anything like this soon. "Use, it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without" is our motto, and buying new stuff is a last resort.

Plus, you know how I am about shopping.

However, it is a great relief. I didn't have to shop (and I wouldn't have found this good a bargain, I assure you. My dad is an Olympic-quality shopper), I didn't have to be the one to suggest that my husband couldn't fix something, I can pay for it gradually, and I will have a working refrigerator. It will probably be more energy-efficient as well, seeing that our current, broken fridge is older than I am. I base this dating on the color, Harvest Gold. I think I was born during Avocado. I could be wrong, though.

Anyway, I am actually looking forward to grocery shopping.

I appreciate all the good refrigerator advice, and I will have opportunities to try it all out, as the refrigerator part is out of stock at the factory. I said to the nice man at the appliance part store, "I work in retail, so I know that sometimes 'backordered' means it is never coming. Can you suggest an alternative, or get any further information? Because if it's going to be months, then we need to do something different." He promised to call me when he has some further information.

Now, I do feel the need to say that I realize that most of the people in the world don't have refrigerators, or didn't until quite recently. And I know that there are plenty of people who would appreciate my Knorr's instant just-add-water potatoes with mushrooms more than I do. And I should quit complaining about it.

It's the way that I cook, though. I am supposed to eat only these things: fresh fruits and vegetables (most of which require refrigeration, or at least buying fresh daily), whole grains (many of which require eggs and milk for their preparation as baked goods), nonfat dairy products (all of which require refrigeration, though I am keeping grated cheese in the freezer), and lean meats (which I am keeping in the freezer -- that is working out okay, as long as we correctly estimate how much everyone will eat in one meal). So I go out in the morning to make a nice omelette with mushrooms, tomatoes, spinach, and green pepper, to serve with a fruit and yogurt smoothie, and instead I get instant pancakes. Or of course oatmeal with a side of complaining boys.

Okay, I am through discussing that.

Formerprincess asked about quick, healthy meals. I have argued before in these pages (screens?) that healthy food is not more costly than unhealthy food, and I certainly stand by that with my recent experiences in mind. But I can't claim that it is quick. Cutting up all those fruits and vegetables takes some time, and making your own sauces and breads and stuff does too. But you can put brown rice in the rice machine in the morning before work, spend 15 minutes chopping stuff when you get home, and have a good stir-fry within half an hour. Or marinate fish or chicken during the day and put it into the oven or onto the grill while you fix vegetables. Or start some whole-grain pasta as soon as you get in from work and make the sauce and a salad while it boils. I also rely a lot on the crock-pot, and often leave a pan of enchiladas or something similar in the refrigerator for the kids to put into the oven. It's all still quicker than waiting for pizza delivery.

Yesterday contained some new things. Our new worker, Blessing, joined us and whipped right through the June accounting backlog (yes, June. It has been rough out there). I met with my co-teacher for Sunday School. She is a globe trotter, on behalf of the One Book Foundation. Her experiences should make her an interesting partner. And I started Spanish class. The teacher wrote "thought" on the board in the International Phonetic Alphabet and asked what it said. I answered, of course. I don't think she wanted that to happen, though; she seemed disconcerted. Maybe she had a whole dog-and-pony show planned based on nobody's being able to read it. Anyway, we just learned the alphabet. And then came choir practice, which had as usual a very high talking-to-singing ratio. But the time has changed, which no one had grasped, including me. And the times of the services have changed, a fact which everyone had to remark upon. Once we got beyond the schedule issues and all their ramifications and started in on the new piano player's sex life, the director just had to call us to order. We got busy with Handel, which can distract anyone from anyone else's sex life.

On the HGP, I haven't made much headway with cleaning the living room. I have done some things like dusting the books, which needs to be done sometimes but is usually too fiddly to bother with, and sorting the papers in the computer area, but I may end up doing most of the cleaning on Saturday. I have gotten all my lists made. I plan to make most of my gifts as always, but there is not much knitting on my list. #1 son is agitating for a new hat, but he will not want to wait till Christmas for it, I am sure. I am considering a new craft for my gift-making, what with having a goal of newness for the fall, but I have not yet determined whether the investment will be a wise one or not.

The thing about taking up new crafts is that there are new tools involved. When I make something with an old skill, I have my tools at hand, and am reasonably assured of success, so the cost is no more than the materials to make the thing. But a new skill is not like that. When I took up soapmaking, I had an initial investment of a couple of hundred dollars over my first two years. Since then, I have kept my family in luxurious bath and body products and my cost-per-item is now very small. But that was a successful example. I never did succeed in making that chaise longue I was attempting earlier this summer. Fortunately, I had only to borrow tools for it from my husband and my dad, and the wood was free. If I put my holiday gift funds toward new tools and materials and then find that I am no good at my new craft, I will have to turn around and buy gifts instead.

Still, there is the benefit of elasticity of the brain.

One more new thing I am contemplating is the 6 a.m. class at the gym. I know that xanga thinks I am already late for that class, but xanga has always been confused about my time zone. My husband has been going to work at 5 a.m. and I don't need to make breakfast for my kids till 7, so I could just leave a little bit early from the class and fit it in. The cardipoump class I was sporadically attending has been replaced by "Xtreme Abs and Glutes." I am not sure that I am up for anything Xtreme, as the cardiopump class was already plenty Xtreme enough for me. The 6:00 class is called "Rise and Shine." That may be just the ticket.

The refrigerator part did not arrive. My menfolks assure me that it has been two weeks that we have been without a refrigerator, though to me it seems like a lot more.

Now that I have a reasonable work schedule again, I have the option to go buy food and come right home and cook it and eat it, so fresh foods are not entirely impossible, though this is an expensive and inconvenient way of doing things. Especially for nights when I have rehearsals and stuff soon after work, and for breakfast, this is a non-solution (or, as Mr. Bush would put it, "not an anecdote.")

So I went ahead and bought some foods that can be kept in the freezer or on a shelf and prepared without the use of milk or eggs. Hot cereal is a perfect choice for breakfast, of course, but my boys will not eat it. So I wanted some alternatives for them. This involved some standing and staring, trying to guess what might taste good.

Because this -- in addition of course to the cost, ecologically unsound packaging, and nutritional emptiness -- is the problem with these foods. They do not taste good. They do not taste like food. If you look at the labels of these convenience foods, you find that they have, say, 7 grams of fat and 14 grams of sugar, less than 1 gram of fiber, and 2 grams of protein. Instant potatoes, pasta sauce, cookies, breakfast foods -- it hardly matters what the product is, because they basically all are composed of sugar and fat, with tiny bits of protein and fiber left over from the original foods. We have meat from the freezer, and apples and carrots and potatoes in the pantry, so I do not expect anyone to actually succumb to kwashiokor in the near future, but still.

When eating these things, I cannot help wondering "Why bother?" After all, if there is no taste and no nutritional value to speak of, there is little point. In particular I often find myself thinking that -- if I am destined to eat simple carbohydrates and saturated fats -- I could be eating Chocolate Nemesis or apple pie. There is not much nutritional difference between a processed breakfast food from the grocery and a good pastry from the French bakery. The only point of eating convenience foods is in order to stop being hungry. So, if we end up without a refrigerator for another week, we could just pick the non-perishable things that taste best and eat those. If this means we ate nothing but chocolate and Triscuits, it wouldn't be any worse than instant pancakes.

Our local paper has a column which reviews convenience foods. The author usually tells the price of an item and then describes it as "tasty" or "filling." This doesn't really help, does it? Herewith, some reveiws of the convenience foods we have tried out during our three-week sojourn in the land of processed foods.

Betty Crocker just-add-water muffins and biscuits, which #2 son found and was rather excited about. These do not taste like food, but like sugar and flavorings, and their texture is like cotton balls. They contain lots of sugar and both saturated fats and trans-fats, but no fiber and little protein.

Bisquik just-add-water biscuits. I used to use Bisquik -- up until a couple of years ago, in fact -- and I like the taste. But these are even worse nutritionally than the just-add-water muffins. They are worse than the Biquik you buy in a box and use in combination with fresh ingredients, too.

Nutrigrain Waffles, which I have eaten before, taste quite a bit like food. They cost a lot more than homemade, but they are also much faster, and with 3 grams each of fiber and sugar, they are not all that bad.

Brown and Serve sausages are nasty. Their flavor is unlike anything real. This may not be fair. I read in The Smithsonian magazine recently that human flesh tastes like young cassowary, a description that I found pretty meaningless. And recently, when my husband and #2 son were talking about eating live creatures, #2 son asked, "But don't they move around in your mouth?" and my husband responded, "Not after you bite them." So it may be that this sausage tastes like something else that I have never eaten. The trouble is that real sausage comes in quantities that are more even than my boys can eat at one meal, so I wanted something that would come out of the freezer in small quantities and be eaten straightaway.

Schwan's Beef Taquitos. I like these. They taste like real shredded beef and corn tortillas, which is I think what they are made of. If served with fresh salsa and a nice fresh salad with avocado and some beans and perhaps a bit of cheese, they would be a good fast dinner. The other frozen meals we tried from Schwan's were not as realistic.

Frozen ravioli tastes fairly good. Spaghetti sauce from a jar is good with them, even though it contains as much sugar as ice cream. With salad and fresh whole-grain bread, this could be a thing I would eat from choice. Canned ravioli is not good. I ate this as a child, and fed it to my own children when they were little, but it does not taste like real food. It is sweet and mushy, not something you really look for in pasta.

Luzianne Jambalaya mix is something that we bought, but which the boys have so far refused to try. "I just don't think it would be good," says #2 son. I gave it to #2 daughter.

Aunt Jemima Complete pancake mix makes pancakes that my boys like, though to me they do not taste like real food. They are composed mostly of sugar, but they do have some protein.

Frozen vegetables. Thank goodness for them. We eat these anyway, since we have a short growing season here. Not compared with Finland, I suppose, but still. Canned tomatoes are also useful, and dried fruits. See? I am not completely prejudiced.

I am fantasizing about nonfat yogurt, whole-grain muffins made with fresh milk and eggs, salads...

Okay, now that I have finished whining, I think I will look at the health food store for better choices. Health food store convenience foods are expensive, but maybe they are made of things other than sugar and hydrogenated palm oil.

I read something recently that talked about how September is "back to" month. We get back to school or schoolday routines, back to sports or performance schedules, back to the gym or volunteer work that we gave up while the kids were home for the summer.

And most of the things I am doing are "back to"s -- back to the gym, back to eating right, back to Tuesday class and Sunday school, back to Chamber Singers. But I think it is also important to do new things.

The research that shows that people's brains continue to function well as they get older if they do crossword puzzles was a great boost for the producers of crosswords. But it turns out that doing the crossword every day of your life won't actually do the trick. You have to change it up. Crosswords, yes, but also sometimes sodoku and chess and charades. Elasticity of the brain demands new thoughts and attempts at new skills, not just repetition of old ones.

So my decisions about my schedule for the fall have been made, with this in mind.  In addition to the things I have mentioned, I am also going to do a conversational Spanish class that is being held at the church in the half hour before choir practice. Half an hour a week will probably not allow for much progress, especially since I already have a little bit of Spanish. But it might be fun, and I might end up better able to talk with the increasing numbers of Spanish-speaking customers at the store. Spanish would not be my first choice for a language to study, and Chinese would actually be more useful at the store, but the Spanish class, like Everest, Is There.

And I am going to improve my dressmaking skills. I would like to take a tailoring class, but there doesn't seem to be one around, so I am going to do some diligent self-study. The book I have on the subject said to practice the new techniques on a skirt or vest before attempting a jacket, so I let the skirt I made over the weekend be a practice piece for some new techniques.

First, darts. Not that darts are a new technique for me, but this time I endeavored to do them right. I used the correct methods for fitting and marking and sewing them. Over the summer, I actually did three items with darts, and had to do a lot of taking out and redoing each time. This time I was completely successful. This picture is supposed to show one of the nice unobtrusive darts in the skirt, but it may be too unobtrusive. It's up there at the top. This is Simplicity 4950, by the way, a plain straight skirt with no waistband. Marji has an impressively comprehensive review of this year's pants and skirts over at her place, if you want to see some more interesting silhouettes.

I also did the hem with a new technique. Having learned about hem tape from a fellow Sew?I Knit member, I moved on to hem facing. A deep hem often has to be eased at the top, which I have never really liked. The facing also has that nice row of motifs at the top, which I found helpful in making a really even hem stitch. I like the lace, myself, being a fan of lace, but you can get this stuff in plain versions as well.

Then it was time for edge finishes. I was going to use all the different edge finishes on the various edges. Sort of a sampler. I had overcast the edge of the waistband facing, so then I could do a Hong Kong finish on the right side seam and --  I caught myself in time. Thinking like a dressmaker, I overcast all the edges, and was pretty good at it by the time I finished.

I am very happy with this skirt. The next piece for my SWAP is a matching jacket. Considering the construction of the jacket, I recognized that I was going to have to get better with set-in sleeves before I could make one, so I sewed up another SWAP piece I had cut out, a sweater-knit top in a heathered charcoal gray. This was my fifth piece with set-in sleeves this year, and I have to say that I still had difficulty with them, but again -- with diligence and the closest thing to precision of which I am capable -- I was successful.

Frankly, I have trouble with set-in sleeves when I knit, too. However, in knitting, you can rip back the sleeve cap and make it fit the armscye better, not an option in sewing. Or at least not for me.

The other thing about jackets -- besides hems, seam finishes, and set-in sleeves, I mean -- is the interfacing. I may make a vest in order to practice that before I actually undertake the jacket. However, fresh from my victory with the tailored skirt, I believe that I will make a jacket in September.

Yesterday was a very relaxing day. In a few minutes here I will head out for the gym, or, given the remarkable loveliness of the morning, a walk in the park. It is possible that when I come home tonight we will have a working refrigerator.

The Pirates by Gideon Defoe, and all its sequels, are fun books, but I wouldn't bother to read more than one. Please let me know if I am in error here. They seem fun but very light, in fact light enough to be completely transparent. The best part about the books is the story that the first was written by Defoe to impress a girl.

We had a pleasant day yesterday. #2 daughter's solo in church was excellent, and made #1 daughter cry. She was ready to cry anyway because she sprained her ankle on her way down the steps that morning. Fortunately we had a pair of crutches at the house, so we went ahead with our plans for the day. We had #2 son's excellent beef stew for lunch after church (there was none left for the freezer meal, so I will have to come up with something else for that) and then headed to the airport. The people there were all kind and helpful, and they put #1 daughter into a wheelchair. It was sad to say goodbye to her and to Son-in-law, but it was wonderful to have had them home for a visit.

We stopped at a couple of bookstores on the way home so we could spend $50 on AP study guides (the boys have to have them tomorrow or there will be severe consequences, so they couldn't wait for me to order them at work), and then dropped in at the fabric store's Labor Day sale. #2 daughter was able to pick up a very handsome gray rayon blend on the $1 table to make a wearable muslin of her Vogue dress. I say wearable hopefully, because this will be a very pretty dress if it turns out well, and will fit well into her SWAP, and will have cost her a grand total of $8 counting the fabric.

She washed and dried the cloth preparatory to cutting and sewing the dress, and while she was doing so I sewed together the straight gray skirt I had already cut, and she put in the zipper for me while her fabric was drying. By the time the fabric was ready, it was too late to cut the dress, so she has packed up the fabric and the pattern and some pins and will do it herself in her new apartment. I plan to give her a sewing machine for Christmas so that she doesn't have to wait to sew until she comes here for a visit, though I will miss sewing with her. Maybe she can still come down for sewing marathon weekends.

We also packed a mattress into her little compact car. My husband kept saying, "It won't fit. You'll hurt your car," and showing various things around the house that she could take with her in lieu of a mattress. The window seat cushions struck him as a possiblity, or the family collection of sleeping bags. "We'll just try it, " I said, because I know that determination can overcome the limits of mere space, and we did. I am very thankful for this, though I was also very thankful that her grandparents had given her an air mattress. I think that she will soon have a liveable apartment.

The gray skirt is, while unquestionably a useful thing to have in the wardrobe and a fashionable choice for this fall, too boring for a picture. It is my opportunity to begin applying the lessons from my book on tailoring, though, so I marked and fitted the pleats with great care and it fits very well. Today I may apply hem tape and hem it and practice some seam finishes on it.

I do have some pictures of knitting for you, though. This is #2 daughter's sweater, the second she has ever made. It is a pattern from The Yarn Girls, to which she added an asymmetric cable. Since it is a Yarn Girls sweater, it has been made at an enormous gauge which keeps it from having a very distinct shape of its own, but it looks very nice on #2 daughter, You can, I think, see her wearing it over at her xanga. Not a clear or recognizable picture, but it's there.

Below, you may be able to see some detail, including the giant cable. This was a thick New Zealand wool, and is very soft, but at this giant gauge it is also fairly light weight. The insulating qualities should be such that it will make a good layering piece for the winter. It also works well with her SWAP, a bit of serendipity since she started it several years ago. It was not till she graduated that she had time to finish it.

I have also made some progress on Pipes. Sweaters done in the round are of course bunched-up limbless objects for much of their evolution into sweaters, but I think the form is beginning to become clear on this one.

I knitted one sleeve till I ran out of the ball of yarn I had begun it with, and then moved over to the body, and am about to run out of its first ball of yarn, at which point I suppose I can go over to the other sleeve and use up that nice fat ball of yarn in the picture. Having done this in such a haphazard way, I am no longer sure how many balls of yarn I have finished, but I rather think I am on the last few yards of the fifth ball.

This is Telemark from Knit Picks on #1 needles -- this information for any knitters who happen by, as I always want to know that myself. 

And I have some garden pictures to show you, just because I haven't put any garden pictures in for some time.

Here is some happy bushy basil. Of course it must not be allowed to flower, but it is growing so exuberantly that I have to pinch off its flowers every day, so there are a few here that haven't yet been pinched.

My mother tells me that it freezes well. I had read that you should chop it and puree it with olive oil before freezing, which was fine in terms of flavor, but produced excessively oily soups when I used it, so I gave that up.

My mother says that you can just put the leaves in freezer bags and throw it into the freezer. I will definitely try this, as it does not dry well.  I have a lot of mint and thyme and stuff to harvest and dry, as well.

Then there are the peppers. We harvested all the mature ones last week, and the cold front (low 80s) has perked the plants up and they are now all covered with blossoms and new baby peppers.

Do not look at the weeds in the picture. They sprang up suddenly right before I snapped this.

No, that is not true. I have neglected the garden along with everything else during back to school. In fact, my lovely roses have become a jungle.

This would be a great day to work in the garden, and I might do that. On the other hand, I might not, because I sent #2 daughter off at 6:00 this morning, a couple of hours after my husband left for work, and -- with the boys still asleep -- I am reveling in having a quiet morning with nothing scheduled.

So I am planning to read and knit and enjoy my day off, and possibly to do some sewing and housework if the spirit moves me, and maybe to work in the garden and do some baking, but maybe not. There is a real deliciousness to the idea of doing only what I feel like doing at that moment.