I've been tagged again to list six weird things about myself. I found this difficult the first time, because I am -- I feel sure you will have noticed -- a really normal, ordinary person with no particular weirdnesses about me.

Has it been long enough that I can list the same things? Hoping so, I offer you these weird, or at least statistically unusual things about me:

1. I went to college at 14, and finished my MA when I was 21.
2. I suffer slightly from agoraphobia. This leads to some specifically weird behaviors. My sons suggest that not answering the phone is the weirdest. Really, I answer it a lot more often than I used to. However, I still do not like talking on the phone, so just email me, okay?
3. I read a lot of books. I don't think I actually spend more time reading than other people, so I suppose I read faster.
4. I don't chat with my animals. My daughter tells me this is weird.
5. I get up early, even on my days off. My daughter tells me this is weird too.
6. I started getting gray hair when I was eleven years old.

Mayflower has some more interesting ones up, if you found these too dull.

I am now supposed to tag six more people. Rachelsent tagged me, so she is out, and I do not want to retag anyone. So I think I will tag universehall, rampaige, craftymommavt, dingus6, lostarts, and knitsteel. Tell us your weirdnesses!

The concert was a qualified success. I say a qualified success because there were some real errors. Some people were singing wrong notes. In the church choir, there is a widespread belief that if you all sing the right notes, it is a rousing success, but my view is that anyone who sings in public has to, at minimum, sing the right notes. I was shocked that people were standing up there singing the wrong notes, and I don't know what was wrong with them.

There was also one tenor who kept singing loudly, even in the pianissimo sections, even when the director specifically pointed at him and shook his head and frowned and did everything but yell, "Shut up!" Perhaps this is an odd form of stage fright.

A couple of the poem readers messed up, too. I am thankful to be able to say that I was not one of them. The director introduced my poem by saying that, once love was gone (we had just sung a set of lovely sad madrigals about broken hearts and breaking up), we turned to friendship.

This suggested to me that he did not intend the poem I was reading (by Walt Whitman) to be understood as sexual, so I read out the verses about high-towering manly love with Boy Scouts and hunting buddies firmly in my mind.

It was fun, in spite of the flaws. Thinking about it, I realized that, last time I sang a concert with the Chamber Singers, it was a completely different group of people. Same alto section, and we were singing the right notes as usual, but there have been a lot of changes in the other sections. Perhaps these other folks get nervous and make errors in performance. Or maybe they've been singing the wrong notes right along and the acoustics in the room made it more obvious. Anyway, The Empress said that there were "some nice moments," which is either damning with faint praise or praising with faint damns.

We are planning a concert of masses -- Brahms, Handel, those guys -- for May. I hope we will do better.

Here is a Fuzzy Foot, with pen alongside for scale.

Yes, I am using a circular needle. I am using the "Magic Loop" technique, which is an irritating quirk which slows a person down and probably messes up the knitting as well. I don't even think it deserves to be called a technique, personally. Double pointed needles are much better. However, I just never use giant needles, except for felting -- and not even then, always. I've felted several things made on size 8 needles. Sizes 1 to 6, that's my range. I have lots of needles in those sizes, and just can't bring myself to shell out for dpns in a large size just to make one or two felted objects a year.

Instead, I knit things slowly and crossly with this one oversize needle, pulling on its cable all the time and keeping it looped around so that it wouldn't straighten properly if I ever wanted to knit something large on it. Am I being unreasonable?

I was not chosen for the job I told you about. It was Director of Education at the church I attend, and the other candidate was the wife of their former minister (recently retired from another pastorate), and a deacon in the church. Giving her this position -- and she is well qualified, too -- allows the church to bring a beloved family back to the church, and is a matter of widespread rejoicing. The members of the committee, and some other folks who I suppose had heard about it, made a point of coming up to me to tell me how impressed they had been with my interview, and the pastor wants to talk with me about "other possibilities."

The point here is that I was actually there to get the rest of the story. Usually, when you are not chosen, you never get to find out the very good reasons that you were not chosen, and have to think about that daring answer you gave to that question, or worry that your qualifications are not as good as you thought -- or whatever your personal response is to such things.

When often there is a good reason to choose the other candidate that is not about you at all.

That's the moral of the story.

The people on the education ministry are now making delicate suggestions about how I can volunteer the skills that I revealed in the interview.

This just shows that I have succeeded, at least in the context of this church, in being as humble and modest as I always try to be and usually fear I have not been 

We haven't had much of the threatened snow; chances are, today's concert will not be canceled.

We have been cold, though.

I stopped to snap a picture of one of the sidewalk ice floes on a walk.

The neighbor bulldog in the corner of the picture has a sweater on.

The bad thing is that it is cold inside as well as out. Here is the ice on the inside of my window.

You are not supposed to notice how long it has been since I cleaned my window sill. You are just supposed to see the ice and feel sorry for me.

Not really. I have Fuzzy Feet.

This is a Fuzzy Foot I made for myself last Hallowe'en. It is still warm and cozy, though now it is insulated further with all the dog hair it has picked up.

Fuzzy Feet are a free pattern from Knitty.com (click on the link to go to the pattern).  Basically, they are a giant simplified sock, which you then felt down to a slipper.

This is in Wool of the Andes, in the color called "Iron Ore."

And here is the leftover yarn from #2 son's sweater, being made into a pair of Fuzzy Feet for #1 son, who has outgrown all available slippers.

You can see the heel and gusset, and I am working my way down the foot.

This is Wool of the Andes "Mist." I didn't check the needle size, as a) gauge is not very important for felted things and b) I have only one pair of humongous needles so it is a moot point.

The key to knitting something for #1 son is speed, so that he has little time to nag and whine.

Fuzzy Feet are perfect for that.

Pipes continues, but ever-lengthening plain navy blue stockinette sleeves are not that interesting to look at.

This is my finished sewing project for the week, a six-gored skirt in burgundy wool gabardine.

The pattern is Simplicity 5914, which includes a trumpet skirt as well. We made that for #2 daughter, and it turned out very nicely.

In fact, this is a TNT pattern. That is sewing blog speak for "tried and true" -- a pattern which you have already checked and fitted and figured out, so that you can just sew it up without any drama or difficulty.

You are supposed to make all SWAP ("Sewing with a Plan") pieces from TNT patterns, but I hadn't done enough sewing to have any when I began the process.

I am now very near to completion of my SWAP, and I have several TNT patterns and like the concept very much. The key, I think, would be to make them in fabrics that were different enough, or to make them with sufficiently different details, that you don't end up always wearing the same thing. The serious SWAP-ers also "morph" them, which is to say they add their own touches to make them quite different. This is a requirement in some of the advanced SWAP challenges.

I am content to have successfully completed my skirt.

I am reading John Grisham's The Broker courtesy of Blessing, who is a fan of his. I had admitted that I am not, and she asked me what of his I had read.

"Skipping Christmas, " I answered quickly, but then I frowned. "Did he write Bonfire of the Vanities?"

The answer to that question is "No." Blessing started rattling off Grisham's titles, and I pulled his screen up on the computer, and it turns out that I haven't read anything else of his. I just had that sort of feeling that I had read him before. That feeling is not uncommon with famous writers, though more often I think it is associated with Thomas Hardy. You just sort of feel as though you must have read something of theirs.

So Blessing brought me a couple of Grisham novels, and I am enjoying them. He is not, like Ben Elton and David Nicholls, a new favorite of mine. I think the reason I am not excited about Grisham is that he is neither witty nor serious. He doesn't trade in big ideas, you cannot luxuriate in the loveliness of the prose, the characters are not so deeply drawn that you begin to care about them as people -- it's just a straightforward, workmanlike story.

Nothing wrong with that. It has made him piles of money and many people love it.

Do you ever look at your footprints? I mean, your xanga footprints. There is a screen which shows the people who came to visit you, and where they are from if they are not xangans.

The non-xangan part is like a site meter. It is sort of fun to see that someone from the Ukraine visited you, or to think "Gee, I am surprisingly popular in California." You can see what people were searching for that brought them to your website -- at mine, most recently, someone wanted to know the name of the theme song of "Monk" -- I am afraid they found no assistance here, but it was Google that deceived them, not I.

There is a good 13 seconds of amusement value there.

The xangan part actually tells you who visited. Like calling cards. Ah, Formerprincess stopped by. Wonder what she's up to? Or, hmmm, I don't know this person. New in town, is he? I'll go visit him.

But I can also see that the fellow my daughter is going out with has dropped by. Hmmm.... does he know of that connection? Have I told any embarrassing stories about her lately, and if so, will he know that she is the one being discussed? And someone from my own county came by -- is this someone I know in real life, and if so, have I written anything indiscreet lately?

And that means that other xangans know when you visit them. So does that mean I can skip comments and still assume that they know I was there, enjoying their posts? I'm not really much of a commenter -- I almost never comment, in fact. But sometimes I feel as though I ought to. I mean, I wouldn't go to your house and poke around and see what you've been doing without leaving a note or something. Since I left a footprint, does that count?

Oh, I don't really go to your house and poke around. I don't go to anyone's house and poke around. But I go to your blog and check it out, see what you're doing, admire your knitting.

And what's bloglines, anyway?

The doctor gave my husband a couple of prescriptions and the nurse told him to eat ice cream. Just for the record, no medical worker has ever told me to eat ice cream.

I went from work directly to the rehearsal. The director handed me a poem he wanted me to read at the end of the program, and I tucked it into my folder and went to my place. After 2.5 hours of singing madrigals I had gotten a bit hoarse. I fished out the poem and read it aloud, as I was supposed to do. It was only at that moment that I discovered it was one of Walt Whitman's coming out poems. (Gentlemen, a comparable experience would be to stand up to do your piece and find that you were singing "I Feel Pretty." Not that you wouldn't be willing, but it would be a bit disconcerting.)

So you have to imagine me, sounding rather like Clint Eastwood, feeling relieved that I had gotten through the word "indissoluble" in the first line, and then finding myself reading about "high-towering manly love." I trust that I sounded convincing.

Let's talk about Tencel. "Tencel" is a brand name for lyocell, just as "Kleenex" is a brand name for facial tissue, and it seems to be used in the same way -- that is, as a generic term, disregarding the trademark issue. Lyocell is, like rayon, made from plant fibers. This puts it -- still with rayon -- in the man-made natural fiber category.

Like microfibers, lyocell is extruded from a teeny-tiny shower head sort of apparatus, and like microfibers, it has extravagant claims made for it. Polyester microfibers want to be classed as "supernatural" rather than "artificial" fibers, though no actual miracles have yet been reported. Tencel actually calls itself a "nanofiber."  We are going for spider web here, I guess. The European Union has declared it an environmentally friendly fiber -- not just because it is made of cellulose, but also because the process by which it is made is clean, something most fibers cannot claim.

But all this, this is mere information. Tencel is the stuff of poetry.

"To wear clothing of TENCEL is to evoke a range of feelings:
a sense of satisfaction, security, sensuousness, but most of all luxury."

"Moving across the body or in harmony with it, TENCEL fabrics caress the contours with an ease of motion that says luxury."

This is the sort of thing the Tencel websites say.

It has become popular in sock yarns, and I have some woven Tencel twill from my favorite online fabric store which I intend to make into another pair of pants, this one having none of the flaws of the first pair. Whether it is real Tencel or generic lyocell I do not know. Judging from a swatch they sent me, I ordered the lovely gray-green of the swatch and some charcoal color with the same name and similar description. The charcoal has odd color striations, so I don't know what I will make of it. But the stuff is very slinky and silky, and I suppose it could conceivably move in harmony with the body, though I am not sure why it would move across the body, unless you were making some enormous bell-like garment that would twine around your legs and trip you up, at which point it might move across your body as you fell.

I am singing on Sunday a song in which the poet asks his eyes when they will cry enough that he can drown himself in his own tears, so I guess I should not be so literal about the wild claims the makers of this new fiber are making. It is, after all, the first new fiber in 30 years, so they are to be excused for getting a little bit excited.

Not that I expect to have much sewing time this weekend. I hope to finish one or the other of my WIPS, and may find the time to cut the Tencel. Unless it really does snow 8", in which case I may have snow days, which I can then declare PSDs.

If the Tencel turns out to be an experience that evokes a range of feelings comparable to ice cream or high-towering manly love, I will let you know.

I interviewed last night for the job I mentioned that I had applied for, and they told me that there were two excellent candidates -- me and another -- for them to choose between. I enjoyed the interview, but things are still as they were: they won't necessarily offer me the job, and if they do, I won't necessarily take it.

My husband has appointments today with both the doctor and the dentist. He doesn't feel the way I do about appointments, but he is very anti-doctor.

My experiences with doctors have fallen into three categories. First, I have been to doctors for simple, treatable things: a torn ligament, mastitis, allergic reactions. They can tell immediately what's wrong, they give some helpful advice and perhaps a prescription, and I leave.

Second, I've been to doctors when I was having babies. Doctors are very useful in this situation. They tell you good news, they have the devices that let you listen to the baby's heart, and they take care of everything at the hospital so that you can just concentrate on having the baby and not worry that the child will fall on the floor or something.

Third, I now go to the doctor once a year to get my birth control prescription renewed. They hold my prescription hostage until I have tests done, and then they either admire my lipids profile or carry on about my triglycerides, a semi-mythological villain that keeps me going to the gym regularly.

Naturally, then, I think of doctors as people who have training and experience that allows them to be helpful. Just as I can be more helpful about your kid's reading problem than a randomly-selected stranger, a doctor can be more useful about some mysterious ailment than a person on the bus. The whole triglycerides thing may not fall into the category of "useful," but it does keep me going to the gym.

But my husband thinks that simply going to the doctor causes you to be sick. Like maybe, before you went, you were fine. And then you walk in there and come out with cancer.

Yesterday I had a call asking for earthquake safety tips. Actually, the caller wanted a book of earthquake safety tips. Having grown up in California, I have taken part in and conducted lots of earthquake drills, and know the safety tips very well, and there really isn't enough there for a book.

The key is to avoid having anything fall on you. Once you've done that, you've about covered it. There aren't any safety tips if you happen to be in the rare sort of earthquake that causes the freeway overpass you are driving on to collapse, and most earthquakes don't require safety tips.

I think that's how it is with doctors. If you have the good fortune to have something they can fix, then they will give you that antibiotic or cast or whatever it might be. If not, then it isn't really their fault.

People with different experiences have different feelings about it. My hsband, shortly after arriving in the U.S., saw his mother go into the hospital feeling a little under the weather, and almost immediately die of stomach cancer. His whole family has always felt that she was fine before she went into the hospital, and should never have gone. They are all quite bitter about this. I do not argue with him about it, of course.

Tonight I have a two and a half hour rehearsal with the Chamber Singers. We are performing on Sunday and I have to work on Saturday (our Saturday worker is taking the day off) so I am not expecting a relaxing weekend. It is, I know, too early to be thinking about the weekend, but I guess it has been that kind of week.

Starter for Ten arrived at the store yesterday in a little box of backordered books. I had ordered it at the request of #2 daughter, who had heard about it on the radio or something, so I was of course intending to buy it and ship it right off to her.

However, it has a street date of 1/23, so I can't buy it (or at least I can't sell it to myself) till next week.

While of course I always respect street dates and would never think of selling or displaying a book early, I have never felt that I couldn't read it before the lay-down date, so I am reading it. And yes, I have read the Harry Potter books early, too.

This is a great book. It came out in the UK in 2004 under a different title, so I am not by any means the first person to read it, but I am ahead of the pack. They are making a movie of it, and I have that on my Netflix list of future DVDs.

Now, when #2 daughter told me about this book, I thought "Hmm.... starter, that means hors d'oeuvres in British..." and had been sort of idly speculating on whether it was ten people eating canapes, or appetizers at 10:00. Instead, the "starter" refers to a game show question. It is true that I am not a game show fan, but I find it highly unlikely that the term "starter" is a customary US term regarding game shows. I mean, surely I would recognize it. So it is unclear to me why the perfectly comprehensible British title, A Question of Attraction, was changed to Starter for Ten for the US market.

I feel the same way about the first Harry Potter book, by the way. "The philosopher's stone" is used in the US just as it is in England, and probably by the same fraction of the population, while "the sorcerer's stone" means nothing.

Anyway, I was reading this book and enjoying it heartily when a customer came in to the hitherto deserted bookstore. Of course, I quickly tucked the book under the counter. He was a fussy little man, with a sad expression, a bit of a troubled frown, and a generally shabby and pathetic air. He asked me for "blue tick tack tape," so I showed him both Blue-tak and Mavelous Tape, and he bought a bit of each. He did not smile or make eye contact, but continued to behave as though he had secret sorrows which he was hoping the adhesives might alleviate at least temporarily, but he didn't hold out much hope.

Then I noticed that he was wearing a hand-knitted scarf. Not well knitted. It was that drop-stitch scarf we were all making a couple of years ago, in muddy variegated yarn. However, the effect on me was striking. I immediately assumed that he had someone taking care of him, someone even who loved him. My husband can look pretty grim sometimes, and yet we know that he is surrounded by people who look after him. I took the man off my "feel sorry for" list right away.

The irrationality of this struck me later. Much later, in fact, as I was dashing across a parking lot in the dark single digit cold with no wooly things on. I happened last night to have two things scheduled at the same time. Fortunately, they were just across the lot from each other, so I ducked out of the first half of one and then raced across in the middle for the second half of the other.

I am not a tragic figure. I am happy and loved. I own several nice wool scarves. And yet there I was, with nothing but a down parka to keep me warm. Was I justified in assuming that the unfortunate man in the store was not unfortunate at all, simply on the basis of his scarf?

Perhaps not.

Chanthaboune was writing about the xanga tags. I'm trying to make a cloud of words from mine, which is rather fun. But she is concerned that hers would make her look as though all she ever talks about is boys.

Fortunately, they are not automatically generated. You don't have to put tags on every entry, and if you did, you could make them say whatever you wanted them to say. I find Chanthaboune's stories about boys entertaining, but she could tag them "restaurant" and "party" and "running" if she felt like it.

But her concern made me think about what mine would be like if they were automatic. I think I would have a large "math" tag, for some reason. I seem to talk about math way more than is reasonable. And of course there would be an enormous "housework" over there, largely from complaining about being behind on my housework, or making excuses for why I haven't done it, or bemoaning the fact that I have to do it. Since I have made my entries in the great Richard Dawkins read-alongs here, I would have sizable tags for evolution and for atheism. Hymns and madrigals and parties would have tags, and garden progress. There would be a lot for choir, the environment, economics, and technology. There would hardly be any point in having tags for books and knitting and music and family, because I write about those things so much that a person could look at an entry at random and find those topics. The gym would get a tag, and nutrition, and agoraphobia.

Actually, I might ought to make a tag for agoraphobia, so I can see how much I have progressed. I want to report that yesterday I drove around in the snow as though it were nothing. Which it was.

Chanthaboune, however, slipped on the ice and sprained her shoulder. You could send her some virtual fruit and flowers in sympathy.

Here's Pipes. I haven't shown you many pictures of this project because... well... it's dark blue stockinette, isn't it? But I have been working on it.

It's time to make sleeve decisions.

I am making this sweater for #2 daughter, and am waiting for her instructions on the sleeves. So far, I've been told to make the sleeves "long. Grotesquely long. Gorilla long," but I was hoping for actual numbers. Inches, maybe. And of course it is necessary to decide very soon whether to narrow them down with ribbing, to leave them loose and finish with a border, or whether in fact I should pull them out and narrow them more from the start.

I am applying for a job today. It has been many years since I have done this, since I have been in my current job for about a decade and a half. But, as I always tell my kids when they agonize over applying for things, they won't necessarily offer me the job and I won't necessarily accept it if they do, so it is no big deal.

I'll keep you posted.

Finished trousers.

There are lots of flaws in these pants.

The pockets are put together wrong. The inside is a telltale record of my errors and re-doings. There are imperfect corners on the waistband.

However, I am very pleased with them.They are recognizable as pants. They fit. They are comfortable. With a sweater or jacket covering the badly-done pockets, and no one having the opportunity to see the inside because I am wearing them, they will look like very nice pants.

They have some good points, even. I was surprised at how good the top-stitching looks. The paired back darts are a stylish detail. My hems are downright elegant.

I cannot undo and redo the pockets. This is because I put them together as the first step.

This is a sensible tip that I read online. You do the pocket assembly (in this classic pair, that means six different pieces of fabric) first, and then the zipper and fly. That means you do all the tricky bits on the flat. Of course, that did not keep me from making errors. Still, it is easier than doing it the usual way, with the pants mostly put together before you put in the zipper. Presumably, next time I will have a clearer idea of what I am aiming at, and will not make that mistake.

Then, once you have that bit done, you simply do the long straight seams, and you are ready to put on the waistband. It was only once the whole thing was constructed that I saw that the pockets were wrong. They do not lie flat, either when being worn or when merely hanging on a hanger. Upon closer inspection, I found that the length of the pocket insets simply doesn't match the length ... Well, I don't know. I am not sure what they need to match the length of. Possibly some portion of the pockets escaped into the fourth dimension while I wasn't looking.

There was a point, early on, at which I thought I had sewn the side insets backwards and I undid them. I think perhaps I was right the first time and wrong when I put them back together the second time. By the time I discovered this possibility, though, the whole pocket assembly had been so thoroughly sewn into the whole of the pants that repair was impossible.

In any case, I photographed them with their matching jacket when both simply needed buttonholes.

I then managed a respectable couple of machine buttonholes (I like a second, inside button on the waistband) on the pants.

My sewing machine does not have automatic buttonholes, as many modern machines do. I used a scrap of fabric to figure out what stitch width and length approximated buttonhole stitch and what directions to go in, and then chanced the real ones. I tidied them up by hand, and they look fine.

 I may be bold enough to do the buttonholes on the jacket today. If not, I still have my FO for the week.

If so, however, if I have actually mastered buttonholes, then great new vistas open up to me.

I will be able to make shirts (since, as you may recall, I have already tamed the wild Set-In Sleeve). I can make tropical print shirts in defiance of my kids' assurances that they are completely inappropriate. I could finish the Rosie the Riveter shirt I said I would make for the Sew Retro project last summer.

Here the trousers are completing the three-piece suit which is a foundation of the SWAP, and then below with some other pieces of the SWAP to show how the colors work.

The pattern is McCall's 3740, a Palmer and Pletsch pattern which includes very simple pants with a back zipper, a flat-front pair with no pockets and a lapped front zipper, the ones that I made, and a pair with cuffed hems. The ideal approach would probably have been to make them in that order, honing my skills.

The version I made has, I read on the internet, "Escada style pockets." This may have been my difficulty. I do not know what Escada is, and only know singing Italian. If they were pockets to do with God or love, I might recognize the allusion. Perhaps that would have made all the difference.

The pattern includes a lot of fitting information. I tried them on as instructed and found that I did not have smiles, frowns, or the dreaded Camel Toe effect (I read the sewing blogs; I know the lingo), so I guess the fitting directions work.

I sewed them in a grey microfiber that #2 daughter and I bought a whole bunch of when it was on sale for $3 a yard. One of the benefits of making a three-piece suit is that you get to use up all the little bits of extra fabric rather than cutting the small parts from large swathes of cloth, and can do the whole thing with much less fabric than you would calculate by adding up the yardage for the jacket, the skirt, and the pants.

I also used this fabric to line the bag I made last week. I really like this stuff, but I think I will have to send the rest (and there is some left) off to #2 daughter before I end up with any more garments made of it.

I may watch for other colors of it, though. The makers claim that it maintains its lovely feel and pretty sheen through many careless washings. They want it to be called a "supernatural" fiber rather than an artificial fiber.

Good luck to them on that.

So I will now go don my new pants and a nice sweater that will cover all its flaws, and get ready for church. More buttonholes may be in my future today, unless I decide to be sensible and clean house.