February 19, 2007

• The sermon yesterday was about embracing change. The specific example was the use of the internet. “The decline was good,” the pastor said at one point, “because otherwise there would have been no change.”  I am not much on signs and omens, but I will not reject a good omen handed to me on a plate.

  So I am entering the work week with lots of ideas and enthusiasm, and we’ll see what happens.

  Following the sermon, there was a baby shower which was a bit odd because the mother-to-be was not present. Showers are not my favorite form of entertainment, though I do go to several of them every year. You sit around in a circle, essentially, eating cake, and then you watch while someone opens presents. This is very dull, to my mind. The only charm in it is seeing the happiness of the recipient. Watching someone open presents for someone else is way too dull. I stayed enough for politeness’s sake and then left.

  I was intending to get some needlework in.

  My guys were watching this show called “Man vs. Wild.” A fellow named “Bear” is dropped into the wilderness and then must make his way back to civilization. His camera crew follows him as he has all these dangerous scrapes. If he doesn’t have sufficient dangerous scraping going on, he creates some. He flings himself into quicksand in order to demonstrate how to get out of it again. He gets all dirty and removes clothing to reveal his manly form, which is surprisingly free of sunburn and scrapes. He catches a fish and eats it live.

  My husband remarked solemnly that that was the wrong kind of fish for that mode of preparation. “You should only do that with bite-size ones,” he said.

  If you ever do find yourself in the wilderness, you should have someone like my husband along, especially if you don’t have a camera crew handy.

  I think that the program seeped into my needlework somehow, because I kept having little crises. The buttons for the jacket were too big for the buttonholes.

  And you know how much trouble I have with buttonholes. There is no way I will be altering them. I will have to use these buttons for Erin, and buy another, smaller set for the gray jacket.

  Then the sleeves of Pipes, which I am making longer — and therefore, since you decrease as you go on a sleeve, narrower — got too small for my sleeve needle. I had to switch to dpns, but could only find three in the right size. So I had to knit with three dpns and a sleeve needle.

  This is my workbasket, with Pipes out of it, but the colors seemed perfect for SWAP Part II.

  I was inspired.

  I pulled out some fabrics with similar colors.

  These could be good for spring, with a couple of blouse fabrics in the “watercolor” shades that are being recommended for the season.

  I decided to make up another turtleneck to keep my sewing on schedule — I could have finished it yesterday and had my completed sewing project for the week. I laid out the purple fabric.

  However, I discovered that I had a few inches too little for the sleeves.

  There is, therefore, no completed sewing project for the week.

  I continued knitting.

  I also continued reading. I am reading Snow Flower and the Secret Fan for book club.

  It begins with the narrator’s realization that she has always wanted love and never gotten it, and then moves right into a long, detailed, and disgusting description of footbinding, complete with the death from blood poisoning of a six year old girl.

  I don’t know why we always have to read this kind of thing for book club.

  Granted that this really happened, it is not the sort of thing I would read off my own bat on a Sunday afternoon, with the TV displaying one hairbreadth escape after another and my needlework foiling me at every turn.

  So I am alternating with Sophie Kinsella’s The Undomestic Goddess. It deals with expectations of women’s lives, notions of feminity and power, and love. So the two books complement one another well.

  That’s my story and I am sticking to it.

   

  • 8:07 am
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