I spent several hours yesterday scrubbing things and a couple of hours working and sewed a pair of pants (all but hems and fastenings, and then I decided to have a look at the knitting blogs of yore.

“Knitting blogs of yore?” That’s worse than “astronauts in the old days,” which   #2 son once said.

I just mean that five years ago or so I spent August reading all the knitting blogs in the knitting blog ring to which I belonged at the time, and I linked to the good ones here at my xanga. So I went back there and clicked on a bunch of links to see what the knitters are up to these days, because I am not only out of the ring, but out of the loop as well.

Mostly, they have stopped knitting. A lot of them have also stopped blogging. Generally, if they aren’t just showing pictures of pets, they’re cooking.

So I begin this post with cooking, not that I can honestly claim it’s a matter of peer pressure. That’s just my segue. Last night’s dinner was chicken with almond-mint pesto, roasted butternut squash, and assorted fresh produce.

This is from the magazine Every Day with Rachael Ray, which has a feature this month where you cook five things for the freezer and end up with basic “building blocks” for lots of fresh meals. Chicken and roasted vegetables are two of them, and I now have them in the freezer. Today, I intend to get the others into the freezer, and perhaps this will help me be better about dinner.

I have a tendency to feel that there is no point in cooking just for myself, now that all the kids are gone. This is a bad tendency which must be overcome. But my husband comes home from work  around 4:00, which is way too early for me to eat dinner, and he eats when he gets home, so it’s just me.

This shouldn’t mean there’s no point in cooking. It should mean that I can have all the vegetables I want without fear of whining. That’s what I’m aiming for.

The other picture here shows my new trousers with one of the tops from the Summer Top Project. This is the same pattern I used for the coffee brown pair (no pockets) in a cotton and Lycra twill which I quite like. There was enough for a skirt, too, so I hope to get that made today in order to get back on schedule with my sewing. I also have more things to scrub and more work to do.

It was cooler here yesterday — really gorgeous in the morning, in fact, and not bad at all in the afternoon, so I spent some time outdoors. The Four o’ Clocks bloomed for just a few minutes, showing their pretty freckled throats — not long enough to catch a photo, but for a little while at least. It was nice.

Last weekend, I said that since I had partied and conferenced all the previous weekend, it was imperative that I have a completely domestic weekend.

Instead, I went to the Big City for a long weekend and did nothing domestic. It is therefore absolutely imperative that I be domestic this weekend. I have a couple of hours of paid work to do, but otherwise, this is my list:

• grocery shopping and similar errands
• cleaning
• cooking (putting things in the freezer)
• baking
• sewing (in order to stay on track for my travel wardrobe, I must complete one garment a week, so I need to do two this weekend)

I also have to do more stuff for the FAFSA verifications. Next year, I swear, all this stuff will be done early even if I have to hire people to do it for me.

All these things are more urgent because we are in the throes of Back to School. This is less a big deal now than it has been at times in the past. However, I’m taking an online class that begins next week, choir will be starting back up, the chorale ditto, and I have to get the classes I’m teaching online as well. A week from Monday is the first day of classes for me as a teacher and also for both my sons. I don’t have to pack their lunches, but I do have to get their financial arrangements completed.

So a clean house with food in it seems like a must.

This weekend ended up quite differently from my plan. We got a call saying client meetings had been set up in the Big City, and zoomed up there. Just got back, so I have a lot to catch up on, and will just post some pictures for you.

Concrete outdoor furniture at the marketing company where #2 daughter works.

Sewing needles from a sunken steamboat. Life was hard in 1856.

They did, however, have very cool buttons.

The thread dissolved, what with being under water for a century and a half, but the other items were fine.

dinner

Some timely advice.

The heat has been excessive. I’m just staying inside, the same way I do when the cold is excessive. My electric bill is also excessive, but I’m a human being with a computer, and neither of us is designed to live in temperatures like 110 degrees. My husband works in a factory, where the thermometers have shown temperatures like 134 degrees, which might as well be an oven.  The workers fight over the portable fans and wear wet rags around their necks.

Last weekend was all party, so this will be a domestic weekend. I’m going to clean house, pay bills, do the grocery shopping, clear up my office which is still a mess from its guest room duty last weekend, and catch up on the laundry. I also plan to take advantage of the Vogue pattern sale at JoAnn’s, and sew a bit.

I cut Simplicity 2127 from this rayon print last week, so I’ll sew it up, but I also need to make another piece of my travel SWAP. I’m not sure which one. I have all this wool in my plan, and it’s hard to embrace sewing with wool in 100+ weather.

It might be a blouse this week. Or I could cut everything out, like a proper SWAP-er, which rhymes. Cutting things out doesn’t involve as much interaction with the fabric as sewing does.

I also have been knitting some. Again, there’s the wool issue, but I picked up a project from the distant past, a possum fur scarf I was making in lotus stitch.

Since last I worked on it, someone has posted a nice scarf pattern combining the traditional  Lotus pattern with a simpler lace called English Mesh. You can see it at Elann if you register. It’s quite pretty.

Lace is perfect for summer knitting, even if it is fur,and there are things to be said for really easy lace, so I’ve been finishing up the Lotus part and will soon move on to the Mesh. Since it’s lace, it looks like a squashed up mess, but I will show you a picture of the Lotus pattern from its early days, when I stretched and pinned it for the purpose.

Like a baby picture of the knitting.

The yarn is made from the fur of the New Zealand possum, a horrible   pest who nonetheless has fur with a hollow structure like a polar bear’s fur.This gives it a remarkable insulating quality. The yarn doesn’t feel the least bit furry, but is soft and lovely.

If I continue knitting at the current rate, I should be able to knit this thing on the plane to Rome as well.

Ah, yes, back to the SWAP. I have 10 weeks left till travel day and I have completed one piece, so I am on schedule. I’m going to base it on Vogue 1100 (hence the taking advantage of the sale part of my day) and  Butterick 5470.

In other news, we’re planning a dramatic video with a bunch of other local web folk. We do lots of videos, but just screen casts and straight talking to the camera, so this is a departure for us. I had the idea at the after party for last weekend’s conference, and one of the people there took it up and decided we should actually do it. I’m looking forward to it.

I’ve written the script and we’ve rounded up the actors. I guess the next step is the props and locations. I may spend part of the day going through my collection of sound clips for suitable music and sound effects.

However, I am determined to be mostly domestic this weekend so next week will have a more civilized feel to it.

  Here it is: my picture from this weekend that has no recognizable people in it.

We enjoyed the conference this weekend. It was a good time to touch base with local colleagues and professional contacts. Quite fun, with good learning sessions and friendly conversations and stuff like that.

Now I’m tired. Tomorrow I’ll be writing pithy blog posts about things I’ve learned.

I will tell you all the things I wouldn’t mention in a blog post with my name on it.

Such as, my kids and my serious strategic partners flicked ice at each other and played silly games with their phones.

We were once again the cool kids’ table.

There was one conference attendee who greeted our friend Fedora with obscene gestures. I never did get what was wrong with her.

One fellow wore rubber shoes with toe divisions and told me at length about his play about a slug and a saltine cracker.

“Has the play already been written?” I asked. He admitted that it had not. “Then there’s still time not to write it, ” I assured him.

People kept talking about bathrooms.

At one point, a whole crowd of us got helplessly giggly over this video.

Julius Caesar, after conquering Gaul, got interested in Germany. He expressed this interest by building a bridge across the Rhine. Having done this in a mere 10 days — something engineers tell us can’t be done now — he took his legion of soldiers across the bridge, tramped around a bit, and then went back and dismantled the bridge.

This, according to the History Channel, made it pretty clear, even without Twitter, that the Romans were people to be reckoned with. “If we want to come and conquer you,” this said to everyone, “we bloody well can.”

I don’t how it was that I never learned this before now.

I tried to do some work yesterday, but just couldn’t bring myself to. I guess the idea that summer is meant for lolling around is too deeply ingrained in my psyche.
So loll I did, sewing up those pants while watching old movies on Netflix. The grasshopper at left joined me at one point, possibly intending to make a point about the ant and the grasshopper. Fiona, the dog whose nose you can see at the edge of the picture, made short work of the grasshopper.

Chastened by this example, I got up really early this morning and at least got my Aussies written for.

I finished those trousers yesterday. It wasn’t difficult at all. I think the reason is that they have no pockets. After all, the legs of pants are no great effort, being just plain old tubes of fabric. The waistband of pants is no more complex than the waistband of a skirt. I’ve gotten quite good at darts in the course of the STP. The fly-front zipper is a bit of a challenge, but I did much of it by hand, so that was okay.

So I think it’s the pockets that are my Waterloo when it comes to sewing trousers. These pants, from the pattern Butterick   5470, have no pockets, so I didn’t have the opportunity to put them in upside down or whatever it is that usually makes my pants sewing such a failure.

I’m wearing these trousers, the first in my item-a-week travel wardrobe, today for church, and they’re comfortable and really nice. My next step ought to be to make these trousers in all the suitable fabrics in my stash.

However — they have no pockets. Are pants really useful if they have no pockets? For church, sure, or for sitting at a computer typing, but for real life?

Where will I put my keys? My phone? My change? My hands when I’m listening to somebody? Pockets are an important part of pants, aren’t they? One might almost say that pants are just a pocket delivery vehicle.

I can’t make a pair of ordinary trousers (or as ordinary as they can be with no pockets) in coffee brown polyester of the kind usually called “bottomweight” in fabric stores look interesting in a photograph. That requires skills I don’t possess.

I am therefore showing them to you with my green embroidered satin top. It is embroidered in brown, so this should be a perfect combination. Also both are polyester, so they should travel well.

I don’t usually use polyester at all. The brown fabric was given to me, and the green I bought online without paying proper attention to the content. Artificial fibers are supposed to travel well, though.

I did grocery shopping and laundry yesterday, went to Jo Anne’s Fabrics for brown thread and roamed around the store a bit, and went to the bookstore as well and checked out current knitting magazines. I was determined to make it a non-working day, and I think I succeeded. I even made pastry, which you can see below and to the right.

Today, #1 daughter is coming over to make some bubble bath and shower gel and stuff. This is slightly easier than coloring, so it’s a good project to take on when you mostly plan to talk.

I intend to make Tandoori Chicken, couscous with carrots, and Pineapple Upside Down Cake.

#1 daughter is a good cook, but she tends not to bother. I think it will be good for her to have some Real Food.

First, though, I have the second round of church. In the early service this morning, the Children’s Minister said, into the microphone during the Children’s Message, “I don’t want to show everyone everything I’ve got.” This may be the first occasion on which those words have been uttered during a Children’s Message. She was sitting down on the steps at the time, so I guess it was just a case of stream of consciousness speaking, but it still caught my attention.

The message was about enthusiastic prayer, and the children entered right into the spirit of the thing. It has been in the 100s for some time, and they have a lot of pent up energy from being kept indoors, probably. Can’t blame them.

I don’t seem to have any energy to speak of, pent up or otherwise. After the family lunch and crafting session, I plan to loll around some more, reading detective novels and probably not even sewing.

In our last thrilling installment about Extreme Money, we saw the financial players gathered around the economy they had created out of debt and bravado like the scene in Peter Pan where the whole audience just has to clap if they believe in fairies. If they clap, then Tinkerbell lives.

However, in this case, people quit believing in fairies. The guys who had bought stuff with other people’s money, and in so many cases with nothing at all, since they were borrowing money from people who had borrowed the money from other people and so on, either cashed out in time or went down with Tinkerbell. Unfortunately, many of the Lost Boys were banks and Tinkerbell was the global economy.

The author reminds us of all the other economic bubbles in history, and suggests that this was just another bubble, a bit of extreme money that rose and burst and fell while the real economy kept going beneath it in the usual way. #1 daughter has always had that position about the recession of 2006-2010: it didn’t, she said, make much difference to most people. It just gave excuses to those who had been greedy or lazy.

Two thirds of our family got laid off during that recession, and sure enough, we’re all going ahead with our lives just fine. My husband went back to the same job with a pay cut,  my younger daughter got a better job, my older daughter and I went into business. We have the same house, the same lifestyle, the same occasional money worries.

There were other people who suffered more, and I’m not prepared to say they were all greedy or lazy. Extreme Money looks, though, at the ones who created the bubble. The book reprints a striking email apparently sent by one of the players in the drama, in which he says that he’s not worried at all about the future. He says that he and his cronies are used to working hard and being aggressive, so they figure they can teach or tend gardens or check people out at Walmart just fine when their jobs end. “We don’t have to worry about our jobs,” he snarls to the masses of people suffering in the recession he and his kind created, ” because we’ll have yours.”

I didn’t go get the book to make sure that I quoted that correctly, I admit, but that was the gist of it. Are you thinking of Marie Antoinette right now?

It’s a pretty exciting story.

I’m putting pictures of the ebooks we’ve been working on into this post, because I haven’t made anything else new since last time. These are pretty cool, right? Today, as soon as I finish this post and my smoothie, I’m going to go out and get brown thread and groceries, and sew up a pair of pants. I haven’t had much luck with pants in the past, frankly, but I’m feeling optimistic. I have no reason to feel optimistic, I admit, but that doesn’t keep me from doing so.

Speaking of which, I have a bunch of bids and proposals and stuff out there, and my regulars are beginning to wake up and stretch and send me little bits of work to do, so I’m optimistic about that as well.

With any luck, we’ll have had a little slow spell just long enough to get my summer class tidied up and our ebooks done and our teacher resource site cleaned up for back to school, and will have our usual steady flow of work again just in time to pay the boys’ tuition for the fall.

#1 daughter’s plan is that we’ll keep a little slow spell in the summer, during which people will buy stuff at the educational site while we go on vacation. How cool would that be? I figure we can come back with excellent stuff for the education site (we’ve done FreshPlans Goes to the Museum, FreshPlans Goes to the Zoo, FreshPlans Goes to the Battlefield, FreshPlans Goes to the Rodeo — why not FreshPlans Goes to the Beach, FreshPlans, Goes to the Dude Ranch, FreshPlans Goes to Big City Restaurants…) and make it tax deductible. I’m seeing super cool travel videos with important educational points of some kind. We’ll practice in Rome.

You’ve been wondering how Extreme Money would tie in the global economic downturn, right? Well, it seems to have been all about the housing.

For a while now, people have been selling financial products, basing the price on the faith that people in the future might pay more for them. No objects were involved, not even money, and all the players understood that they were playing. Electronic claims for wealth flicked back and forth, but it all mostly affected the very people who were making it all up in the first place. X borrows money from Y to buy stock A, and when stock A goes up a little bit, sells it and earns enough to pay Y back with a little interest, and still to keep a little profit. The price went up because more players have bought stock with borrowed money for the same purpose. No real world things are being sold and really not very much real world money is involved, because it’s all being done with debt. It’s like an electronic game of hot potato, and the losers are the ones who get stuck with stocks they can’t pay for — but they just default, declare bankruptcy, and get back in the game.

Then mortgages became one of the things being played with. I’m inclined to think that the houses were the problem, since they exist in the real world and people actually want to live in them. But people used borrowed money to buy houses, and in some cases they flipped them, paid back the debt, and made a profit. In many cases, though, they couldn’t pay, lost their homes — and the lenders had houses. They didn’t want houses and didn’t know what to do with them. The game got clogged up with real stuff.

It all fell down.

I’ll let you know what happens next. In the meantime, having completed the Summer Top Project, I’ve decided that I will continue sewing a garment a week and end up with a travel SWAP for my trip. I’m including some tops from the STP and probably won’t actually take exactly these things with me (I don’t think wool skirts pack that well), but my fabric collage turned out pretty well and I’m going to give it a shot. I’m also working on Italian with Rosetta Stone, and as long as we only need to talk about children, cats, and eating, I’m going to be fine. However, since I’m only on lesson 2, I assume that I’ll gain more facility before I leave.

Extreme Money has moved on from ontology to economics. The big question over the past couple of centuries, apparently, is about whether an economic system can take care of itself or not. There are those who believe that the occasional recession or depression, like forest fires, is needed to clean up the economic ecosystem. The weak are removed and what’s left is stronger, which is better for everyone.

There were certainly elements of that in the recent economic downturn here. Walmart took the opportunity to clean out poor performers who might otherwise have stayed on board forever, doing little, and other companies probably did the same. People lost jobs and moved on to things that suited them better. It was like the Google Panda update.

On the other hand, there are those who believe that part of a government’s job is to keep the economy stable. These folks felt that there is now enough knowledge about economics that we should be able to predict and control market fluctuations. Allowing people to play fast and loose with money — and there’s a lot of that going on — causes extreme peaks and valleys in the economy. The peaks make the governments look good, so they tolerate them even though they lead to the valleys.

It was interesting to me to read about how much of the cut and thrust of high finance is entirely about money, and not about business at all. Apparently, people buy a company with borrowed money, squeeze enough cash from that company to pay off the debt, and then sell the company again at a profit. For the five or ten years during which the debt is being paid off (and investors may not even wait that long to sell), the company is run at minimum cost and maximum production.The authors suggest that this can be good for a company, making it clean up its act. However, this isn’t a long-term view, and companies that experienced this often go under completely and get sold off in bits.

So much of modern finance is like this, at least in the U.S., that we end up with much of our economy being completely separate from anything we produce — anything with value at all, in fact. Our economy is now based almost entirely on people’s faith that people in the future will pay more than people in the present for financial products like bonds and shares. I didn’t know this. Apparently, the butchers and bakers and candlestick makers are almost completely insignificant in economic terms. This doesn’t sound like a good thing.

#2 son is studying economics, so I plan to discuss this with him once I get far enough into this book to feel as though I really get the idea.

The picture here is of summer top #10, completed. This brings the Summer Top Project to a close, with ten new summer tops for just under $60.  Financially, nothing at all compared with a leveraged buyout, but at least I produced something.