scifiknitter

First day back.

2012-01-03T22:00:00.002-05:00

I kind of kept to my new year change resolutions.

Got out to work earlier.

Got home a wee bit earlier. A traffic snarl near the scene of a house fire and the necessity of obtaining gas were delaying factors.

Then I got gobsmacked by one of the many end-of-year accounting scenarios playing out this month. So supper was served an hour and a half later than the plan.

Tomorrow’s another day to try, try again.

Year in Review Part Two: My yo-yo year

2011-12-31T10:25:00.000-05:00

It’s been up and down, but I’m happy to say that 2011 finished with a sharp up-snap, and the yo-yo is in hand, ready to go for another year.

On the work front, my agency faced possible defunding that would have put our continued existence into question. In the end, the funder has budgeted flat funding for us in 2012, not even cutting the amount they give us. Yes, there was wild dancing on desktops when that news was announced. Well, maybe not dancing, but morale is up, up, up and everybody is sleeping much better at night. Helping on the morale front is that we have a new boss, and this time it’s a promotion from within of a well-liked and respected colleague. We have problems galore - oops, I’m supposed to call those nasty pimples “challenges” - but we ended the year stronger, not weaker.

My job is changing for the better as well. I applied for a couple of positions in the course of the year. One would have taken me out of the agency, and another would have kept me in the agency, but added a bunch of regional accounting duties to my responsibilities. I’m happy to report that I was not chosen for either position. What I am doing instead is adding Farm Business Management Educator duties to my job. I get to step away from the computer and work with people, hopefully strengthening a group of local entrepreneurs who are doing work that I believe in - growing the food that sustains us. With this job shift, I feel like my masters degree will be put fully to use. I also get to go to very interesting in-service trainings and to spend time with a whole new group of colleagues. I’ve had this job for 10 years now, and was due for a kick in the pants. It feels great to be excited and nervous and a bit overwhelmed about my job again.

It’s been an excellent year on the fiber front. It seems I may be picking up some knitting speed, because there are a very respectable number of finished items in my project notebook. A quick photo show of the work finished during 2011:

4 shawls, 1 scarf, 3 pairs of socks, 1 pair of mittens, 1 baby sweater, 1 tea cozy, 12 projects in total. A respectable year’s work, especially considering the inconvenient fact that I must work. I even managed to put three knitted gifts under the Christmas tree!

I ended the year with 4 projects on the needles: 2 pairs of socks, a shawl, and a cardigan sweater. If there is a glaring omission in the year’s work, it is a lack of sweaters. I intend to focus on completing at least 2 sweaters in 2012. My wardrobe needs some new material, and a hand-knit cardigan is perfect as both professional and off-duty clothing.

I also started learning to spin. Spinning terrified me but using a wheel is much more natural than I thought it would be, and I think I am turning out some respectable, even usable yarn. Here is a photo shoot of what I spun in 2011, in chronological order, bottom to top:

There will be knit items in 2012 that feature yarn I spun myself. I don’t have a lot of interest in spinning arty lumpy bumpy yarns. My goal is to spin good quality yarn that I can use to make good quality knitted items.

The last accomplishment of 2011: a financial plan for 2012. We have enough to pay what we owe, eat well, stay warm, live comfortably. With some forethought, we can manage our income to minimize financial crunches and even out the flow of money during the year. To quote Dicken’s Mr. Micawber: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” By this time next year, I’ll know if a little planning and monitoring reduce misery and increase happiness.

Simple, satisfying sock knitting

2011-12-27T14:36:00.000-05:00

I am relearning why it is very satisfying to knit a basic sock. Round and round in knit stitch means that the sock grows at the knitterly version of breakneck speed.

I am knitting this without any pattern other than the recipe I carry in my head. This is also very, very satisfying.

I dyed the yarn by painting a sock blank, which consists of 2 strands of sock yarn knit loosely into a rectangle. Once dry, I wound the blank into 2 balls of sock yarn. These should knit into 2 identical socks.

Bonus: the dye did not penetrate completely in the peach sections, resulting in a speckled-with-white effect that is quite nice, and something found in some very pricey sock yarns *ahem Opal ahem*.

Year in Review Part One: My husband moves on (but not from me)

2011-12-18T10:29:00.000-05:00

Late last year I blogged about what was very good news in our household: the passage of a bill creating the North Country Power Authority (NCPA).

The story of this project has become the stuff of novels since then, and there is probably not going to be an ending where the hero strides into the sunset, basking in the glory of a quest achieved. If there is such an ending, my husband is very unlikely to be that hero.

The complexities of human behavior are so much a part of the story that I am putting aside the urges to label causes, cast blame, point fingers. We’ll stick with irony and bemusement, and lift a glass to the prospect of a new year swept clean of the obsession of trying to save a project.

A brief synopsis:

We start with the successful passage of the bill enabling the NCPA. There was a team of people who worked to accomplish this, and there was a plan. The NY State legislature would not have enabled a dream; they passed the legislation because it looked like the new entity had a decent shot at success. The team of people included attorneys from out of state working on contingency, another attorney who had his pulse on the financial markets that would invest in the project, an engineering firm with substantial expertise in municipal utilities, and people from throughout the region, many of them elected officials. By the end of 2010, the outgoing Governor Patterson appointed five people to the NCPA board, so there was a bare quorum available to start work.

R. was one of the prime movers who got the project to this point. As Chairman of the ad-hoc inter-municipal group formed to try to make a regional municipal electric utility, he was the person who kept the team on the same page. Once the NCPA formed, he hoped to stay involved with the project as either staff or as a board member.

The year started with a full-court effort to organize the new power authority. The assumption of most was that the NCPA board would continue working with the same team to implement the plan. It turned out, however, that this assumption was not shared by everyone on the board. What followed was five months of steadily increasing acrimony on the board. Five votes were needed to do anything, and there were only five votes, meaning that all decisions had to be unanimous. In the course of the struggle, there were leaks of confidential documents to a national journal, letters written to Governor Cuomo, and a series of articles in the press depicting an increasingly dysfunctional board. This phase ended when one of the directors resigned, leaving the NCPA board with only 4 members and the inability to take any action whatsoever.

There were a series of meetings in the state capital, urging Governor Cuomo’s appointments office to appoint additional members to the NCPA board. R.’s name was one proposed to help fill the board to its full complement of 9 members. To this day, however, there have been no more appointments.

Meanwhile, the out-of-state law firm that had financed the work to date went into section 7 bankruptcy. Poof. Gone. With them went the work product, the basis of the plan that existed at the end of 2010. Because they were working on a contingency contract, no one had paid them money, so they owned the engineering studies. And they didn’t exist anymore. No tickee, no washee.

A couple of weeks ago, R. made the decision to withdraw his name from consideration as an NCPA board member. He believes that he was seen as too controversial in Albany, and that he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever being named to the board. By withdrawing, he hoped the appointment logjam might start to break, and that he would increase the level of peace and serenity in his life.

Then this news came this week: http://www.northcountrygazette.org/2011/12/15/lower_rates-2/. National Grid, the utility that serves our area, is cutting rates effective January 1, 2012, by a lot - by about the same amount that the NCPA could be expected to lower rates if it got up and running. It turns out that we have all been paying stranded costs, and that those costs have run their course and are expiring. Escaping those stranded costs was a big item in the feasibility analyses. Now we will all escape them, even without a municipal electric utility.

R. got a letter from Albany accepting his withdrawal the next day.

The NCPA now has to start from square one, and would be facing a complete re-do of its feasibility analysis even if the team and the plan had hung together. As the Watertown Daily Times puts it, “National Grid rates leave NCPA uncertain. Authority to determine if need still exists.”
http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20111217/NEWS05/712179923

There are a few lessons to be learned and relearned here.

- A good start is no guarantee of success.

- Rapidly shifting politics are hell on public sector projects that require many people to keep working together.

- An authority seemed like the only possible organizational structure for the project, because it was the only way to cut across boundaries between towns, villages, and counties. In the end, though, it is not a good structure for a project that has a goal of local empowerment, because an authority is a creature of the state, not of the localities it serves.

- Nothing in the events that followed can detract from the magnitude of what R. was able to accomplish last year.

Back off the road again

2011-11-17T19:27:00.001-05:00

I’m home again after three days of traveling. I’ll be taking off for more travels Saturday morning, but that won’t be for work. That will be to visit people I love, and R. will be driving, and I’ll be knitting Christmas presents.

My head is sorting out all kinds of new information. I’ve taken another step towards adding exciting new duties to my job. Both ongoing and new work associates seem quite confident that I will do just fine.

My karma with the universe seems to be solid. At the beginning of two four-hour long drives in the dark, I filled my pink McGill travel mug with coffee, and both times the cashier told me the coffee was free, and to drive safely.

I did.

Now to pay the bills, so that I can enjoy the vacation that starts Saturday morning.

Voting Day

2011-11-08T19:20:00.000-05:00

I love filling in the bubble next to the name of my husband on the paper ballot. He’s running unopposed, but it’s still a little thrill to vote for him.

I was the only person today to ask to see my ballot on the scanning machine before pushing the button that cast my vote. Second happy moment: seeing his name on the ballot scanner.

Dazed and Amazed

2011-11-06T00:13:00.002-04:00

We saw Bela Fleck and the Flecktones in concert tonight, and it was an amazing experience.

On the way home, R. called the music profound. I found myself in tears at one point.

Organized chaos with a strong sense of melody, and an elegant light show. Sound levels were quite good as well. These guys want to hear for a long time, and they want their audiences to hear as well.

There was one sung song, “Sunset Road”, and R. said the simple lyrics expressed perfectly how he feels these days.

I bought 2 CDs - the Flecktones’ newest, “Rocket Science”, and Victor Wooten’s “A Show of Hands”. We didn’t play them on the way home. We haven’t played any music of any kind since we left the concert hall. It wouldn’t be respectful.

There’s lots of time tomorrow for music.

Happy birthday to me.

2011-10-30T21:07:00.000-04:00

I'm 60 years old today. An epic age. A dividing line birthday. As my stepmom said, "wow, that's a big one".

It's been a week that feels appropriate as a lead-up to a big birthday. My husband is battling a nasty staph infection in his arm, the kind of ailment that would lead to dire consequences if we didn't have powerful antibiotics. I got a big award at work, the Director's Award for being the employee who most exemplifies the spirit and ideals of the agency. A sense that I have accomplished some worthwhile work, a sense of the fragility of it all, and the shifting sands that lie ahead for R. and me.

I was good to myself today and went for a walk. The world was beautiful today, chilly and austere in the slightly dimmed sunshine of a lowering sun. As I walked, I thought that perhaps New Year's Day isn't the best day to make resolutions. Maybe birthdays are better, especially an epic one that signals a new phase of my life.

So I have made a few resolutions:

To be a bit more fit a year from now.
To be a bit more slender a year from now.
To get in to work earlier, and to go home earlier.
To spend as much time as possible with people I love, and who love me too. Our best friends came over to dinner tonight, and we all said we haven't seen enough of each other lately. We're going to change that.

Mmmmm, cheesecake!

Yes, I am having a happy birthday, with a touch of joy here and there.

Thinking about Steve

2011-10-05T21:48:00.002-04:00

I'm sad to learn of Steve Jobs' untimely death. Thanks, Steve, for the unexpected beauties; I could always count on you to strive for the elegance that makes my heart sing. You made the computer truly personal - my favorite computer sits in the palm of my hand, and responds to my touch. My condolences from afar to his beloved family.

I join yet another social network.

2011-09-28T19:01:00.000-04:00

I seem to be addicted to social networks. Let’s list them all:

Facebook
Google+
Tumblr
Ravelry
Twitter
The one I’m blogging on right here and now.

Is the list long enough to make you worried about me? I will say that I am not very active on some of these. I spend time lurking, however, on all of them. As a wise person said, time is the only part of your life that is finite, so it is possible that this list represents a woeful leaking away of life energy.

I just joined a new social network that might actually be GOOD for me: Fitocracy.

It’s been closely guarded in beta, but they are starting to loosen up their invitations and are leting the riff-raff in.

The purpose of the site is to keep track of your workouts. As you accumulate exercise time, you level up. As you level up - well, I’m a lowly level 3 right now, so future rewards are yet to be revealed. Gamers love the site. I’m very good at logging knitting projects on Ravelry, and I think I’ll be very good at logging exercise on Fitocracy.

As a side benefit, the iPod genius found an excellent playlist for walking based on Bela Fleck’s “Cheeseballs in Cowtown”. I returned home listening to the Claire Lynch Band’s exquisite version of “The Wabash Cannonball”. If you have not heard it, words cannot describe the beauty and non-hokey interpretation of the tune.

The hardest part is DOING the exercise. I need to make that part of daily life again. It’s the hardest habit for me to make, and the easiest for me to break. Maybe linking exercise to my Internet Jones will be helpful.

Knocking a few words together again

2011-08-16T18:56:00.000-04:00

All at once some voices in my blogroll that have been silent are posting. Believe it or not, I’ve been working up a head of steam to start fitting words together again myself. It must be something in the air.

It’s been a trying year so far. Projects and plans and spirits have unraveled. There’s less walking around money in the wallet, and there are possible unfavorable financial changes floating in the atmosphere just as I am coming close to retirement.

I’m not going to talk about any of it in greater detail than that. My decision that I cannot, that I will not talk about these matters openly has pretty effectively zipped my mouth shut for months.

My response has been to become a sponge. My Google Reader overfloweth with other people’s tasty tidbits. It’s getting a bit boring, though. I’ve also come to realize that the act of writing has had positive effects on my life in the past. My period of most active blogging came when I was working on my master’s degree and working full time. Activity is better for us than passivity in nearly all things, so I want to again become an active blogger, or to turn away and redirect my time to something else.

I have had a productive year of knitting and learning to spin, and have some finished work that I have not shared publicly. I want to still blog about the things I make, but I don’t want to blog only about knitting and spinning. That’s boring, too.

Thank goodness I think we’re starting to reknit the fabric of our life into something that might be sustainable. Partly lowered expectations, partly back to what once was, partly moving towards a new stage of life. This also gives me some energy to write again.

The act of posting is the fitting way to finish this. Lights, camera, ACTION!

Knitting Blog: This one's for me

2011-07-24T08:57:00.001-04:00

Mother’s Day (and Father’s Day) aren’t big events for R. and me. It’s a good year when we manage to get out the cards on time so that they will arrive before the date. We do pick up the phone and call. There’s no tradition of gift giving, however, to teach our daughter that anything special is expected beyond the card and the call.

Imagine my surprise that A. sometimes gives us something on those cultural high holy days. She gave R. a pair of gorgeous gold-edged hostas. She gave me bleeding hearts.

This year, she gave me this:

Dyed by her in complex shades of blue, brown and red on a base of luxurious baby alpaca, silk, and cashmere. She also gave me a pattern to go with the yarn: Trousseau by Carol Feller.

This project was almost instant gratification for a knit object, especially since I am not the fastest knitter around. I did the gauge swatch on Mother’s Day, and cast on the shawl itself on May 29th. It was blocked and on my shoulders on July 8th, 5 weeks and 5 days in the making.

The shawl is elegant, clever and easy. There are only two different line instructions for the main pattern, alternated with plain rows of purling back. All I had to check the printed instructions for was how many plain stitches to knit before I started knitting a simple 8-stitch repeating pattern.

This is my first ever pi shawl. every shawl I’ve knit to date constantly increases in size by a few stitches ever other row. With a pi shawl, you knit over a constant set of stitches for a given number of rows, then double the number of stitches on your needle. The stretchiness of the knit fabric makes it possible to block the final shape into a circle, or a half circle in this case, rather than some kind of stepped polygon.

When working with a limited amount of a precious yarn, my object is to size the project so that I have as little yarn as possible left over. In this case, that meant changing the pattern a bit. As written, it calls for 16 rows of chart B, 32 rows of chart A, and 48 rows of chart B again, then an edging of 18 rows. My handy dandy digital scale let me know that I had enough yarn for 16 rows in the final section before the edging, and that’s what I did. The final result looks balanced because a wider middle section is flanked by two sections of the same size, and I have only a few yards of yarn left over.

I love everything about this shawl. The pattern of the stitches. The softness of the yarn. The subtle richness of the color. The generosity an love imbued in the gift.

On the blocking board:

And on me:

My Ravelry page for the project:

http://www.ravelry.com/projects/scifiknitter/trousseau

Knitting Blog: Maia

2011-06-21T18:41:00.002-04:00

Right now I am putting Elizabeth Zimmerman’s motto to good use: "Knit on with confidence and hope, through all crises."

There is even a finished object to show for it. Maia - a shawl designed by Rosemary Hill, and knitted by me in Moonlight and Laughter’s yarn.

The original shawl is designed to be a small shoulderette, but my version was to be a gift, and I wanted to make a longer, more versatile shawl. Easy to adapt the pattern - just add more yarn than specified. I used nearly all of two skeins of a fingering weight merino/bamboo blend. The yarn was handpainted and it was highly likely that small color differences would create a visual join if I knit all of one skein then added the other, so I knit first two rows from one skein then two rows from the other. The end result was perfect - no pooling of colors, and no noticeable change from one skein to the other.

Pictures, please!

In the knitting. I think this picture captures the lovely interplay of colors in the yarn pretty well. It's surprisingly difficult to photograph the color of yarn.

In the blocking. After soaking for about a half hour, the shawl was very happy to relax into place. I used the wires to shape more than stretch this shawl.

Rear view.

Front view. Thanks to my husband for taking a good picture of both the shawl and of me!

I got to wear the shawl long enough to model it and fall in love with it. Then I showed it to Marilla, the dyer of the yarn. Then I carefully folded it, wrapped it in tissue paper and gave it to my stepmother.

The shawl was partly a birthday present and partly amends for a truly dreadful knitted gift of many years ago - a long, red cotton skirt. It weighs a ton and makes the wearer look like a barn door. The skirt was returned to me last fall, and sits on a shelf, waiting to be unwound, or cut up into towels. Fortunately my skills at knitting items to be given away have improved over the years. My stepmother loved her new Maia.

I will knit it for myself someday, if I don't get too distracted by all the other beautiful patterns that will come my way.

As to what I am knitting through - 2011 is a challenging year in my household on more than one front. I've blogged about part of the story already, a part that is rapidly sinking into relative insignificance. Some of what remains of the story is mine, but not all of it, and I have learned not to blog about other people’s stories.

News of the day

2011-05-26T22:06:00.000-04:00

It’s small. It’s benign. It can be seen on a 2002 MRI so I’ve been living with it for quite a while with no problems. It’s growing - slowly. It can be treated with radiosurgery. It’s my decision and there is no urgency. I plan on talking with my trusted family doctor before deciding anything.

We also swung by Minuet on our way home, and it smells like we are going to win this year’s war against mildew.

All in all, a day with more good news than bad.
Whew.

A Week in Tweets

2011-05-14T17:04:00.000-04:00

For those of us who are addicted to social media, there are Facebook people and there are Twitter people. While I enjoy keeping up with friends and family on Facebook, I’m much more likely to encounter something new and exciting on Twitter. It’s easier to follow a diverse group of people there than on Facebook, where linkages are based on more traditional relationships.

I also post updates more often on Twitter than on Facebook. I’m less self-censoring there.

I’ve had quite a week, and I thought I would tell the story of it through my Twitter posts, with some editorial amplification. Here goes:

May 8: I’m traveling to Rochacha to see my mom & my doctor. OMG spring is finally here in NNY & it’s gorgeous.
        Note: Excellent music on satellite radio makes the mood even better.

May 8: I retweeted a post by Christopher Hayes of The Nation magazine: Great Mother’s Day column from @KathaPollitt : http://bit.ly/knVrFR

May 9: Just had an MRI of my head. It’s a minimalist concert! My fave part: tunktunktunktunktunktunktunktunk DAHDAHDAHDAHDAHDAHDAHDAH

May 9: This MRI machine had the strongest magnet evah. It made my neck & head feel warn during the scan. :-O

May 9: Just saw my brain scan compared to one done 4 years ago. No changes! WOO HOO!!!

May 9: A friend replied to me with the following: :D great news: You didn’t include a pix, guessing yours looked like this http://imaginaryfriends.typepad.com/neuroscienceart/
My reply: Huge smile here at the link. Best news: nothing lit up from the contrast dye so there’s no active MS in my brain, just old news.

May 11: This week I am dealing with a short deadline, complex, poorly explained task. I’m not alone. Lots of crabby accountants with sharp pencils.
        Note: A new mandate with short notice and only a two week deadline. It normally wouldn’t be a bad time of year to have a big job fall out of the sky, but my counterparts and I have also been dealing with the fallout of a mid-year rescission of funds for a program that is very widespread in our group of non-profit associations. It’s been busy at my desk.

May 11: Verily I say unto you: be wary of sale potatoes, for they shall be green and have soft spots.
        Note: All I wanted was two potatoes in good condition so I could nuke them in the microwave!

May 11: I find myself googling “left occipital meningioma”.
        Note: There was new news after all. A radiologist took a look at my brain scan, and s/he found something that the MS clinic didn’t notice.

A Twitter friend then sent me a flurry of messages. The conversation:
Mydogischelsea: um... I hope everything is OK!
Me: Thanks - I think so. What ever it is, it’s small & probably benign. I’ll be finding out more.
Mydogischelsea: I’ll be thinking of you. My mother has a benign tumor in the back of her head. She’s had 2 surgeries + gamma knife.
Mydogischelsea: But she is doing great. Catching it is the most important thing. And small is good!
Me: Thanks for your kind words! It showed up on a “routine” brainscan for my mild MS. Being referred to a neurosurgeon.
Mydogischelsea: Early detection is key! My mother suffered through a *year* of unbearable headaches before having it checked out.
Mydogischelsea: Anyway, good luck with the neurosurgeon. I’ll be thinking good thoughts.

May 11: I retweeted a post by jayrosen_nyu of NYU: This is something you HAVE to see. The Fracking Song, produced by my students at @studio20nyu. It’s a musical explainer. http://jr.ly/b7yp
        Note: This video proceeded to go viral. My feedback: Great job - very professional & accomplishes its goal.

May 12: @indigodragonfly Congrats on making the big move! Your yarn is frabjous, I think you will do well.
        Note: A yarn dyer in Ontario is going full-time. Her company’s wares are truly gorgeous, and I fully intend to buy some of it one of these days.

May 13: I’m trying to tough out a new development with optimism, but I feel cracked open, like when I was first diagnosed with MS.

May 13: A beautiful spring morning and a beautifully written song are both miracles, and both bringing me close to tears.
        Note: the song is “Head Full Of Doubt/Road Full Of Promise” by the Avett Brothers.
        Yeah. It’s getting to me.

A poet I follow sent me the following message after that tweet:
The nearly infinite branching through all time that enabled us to recognize I & Other, makes every breath a celebration of Luck & JOy.

May 13: “@jayrosen_nyu: “There are some people who don’t wait.” This speech by Robert Krulwich is good. jr.ly/b8sx” shout out to @madsamia
        Note: Do you think that Jay Rosen might be one of my favorites? Robert Krulwich is another favorite, and the speech at the end of the link is excellent. I sent it out to the attention of a young woman who is a friend of my daughter’s, and on her way to becoming a science journalist. She writes very well, discerns what is important, and is part of the speech’s target audience. Her reply to me: Inspirational!

May 13: This friday the 13th turned out pretty well - I got my horrible no-good pencil-stabbing project done ON TIME. Time for a drink!

May 14: My first “Noro join” in my Lanesplitter. Could be a lot worse. yfrog.com/h8lqtfuj
        Note: Tweeted in the car while on our way down to the marina in Chaumont. I’m knitting a skirt in Noro Kureyon, the original color-changing yarn and one of the most beautiful. It is also known for color breaks where instead of one color flowing into another, two different points in the colorway have been joined with a knot. At least the pattern I’m knitting can deal with such incongruity more gracefully than most.

May 14: @mydogischelsea Ouch! Much empathy heading your way, I hope your neck pain eases soon. P.s. I have an appt. in 2 weeks.
        Note: She has a kink in her neck that’s been going on for days.
        Yup, I’m following up on my new news right away. The MS clinic booked an appointment with a neurosurgeon within 24 hours of giving me the news.

May 14: Minuet is in her slip & we’re eating lunch at 11:15. yfrog.com/h4fmtefj
        Note: Our sailboat is in the water! We’ll finish getting her ready to sail next weekend - it was raining lightly today, so not good for installing sails. I took lots of pics, and hope to write a post on the launch of ’11.

And how was your week?

Around and around she goes, work edition

2011-04-10T18:12:00.000-04:00

Work keeps spinning around and around. Anyone who pays attention to the news must surely realize that the times do not favor small non-profit agencies that use government funds to deliver services to youth, small farmers, and low income families. Right now we are dealing with a mid-year rescission of funds to a program that used to look rock solid. Today we got news that what looks to me like an accounting error made elsewhere, possibly a long time ago, may turn that rescission from a 40% cut to a 50% cut.

For those in the accounting world, I’ll just say that it looks like we’ve been operating on an accrual basis while the department that cuts us the reimbursement checks has been working on a cash basis. And then there is the question of what basis the department that cuts the check to the department works on, and how arcane its reimbursement rules are. And then there is the question of what basis the department that cuts the check to the department that cuts the check to the department works on. I’m pretty sure they’re on the same basis as us, but you know what? In the end they won’t care, as evidenced by all of the layers between the ultimate source and the ultimate user of the funds.

I have lots of questions.

Beyond that, I will have a lot of work to do this year. Our agency is part of an project to regionalize some administrative functions, focusing on accounting, human resources, and technology. Guess who has primary responsibility for all three areas at our agency? I interviewed for a position as a regional finance specialist, but others were called to serve. I’m not disappointed at all. I don’t know if I could juggle all the balls that would be thrown at me if I had gotten the job. The two who did don’t have to implement HR and tech reforms in their offices in addition to their new regional responsibilities.

On the feeling-like-I’m-effective front, I can put together a mail merge document that rocks! I’m just about ready to send out job offers to 70 summer camp employees. It’s going to feel good to be the bringer of good news for a change.

I was so kerflummoxed by today’s bad news that I shut off my computer at work before 5 PM and was rolling home by 5:30. Ask my husband, that doesn’t happen very often. That was a healthy thing to do. Since coming home, I also took a long walk and snapped some pics of the first spring wildflowers. Next I’ll knit some lace. I already feel better.

Around and around she goes, fiber edition

2011-04-10T17:32:00.003-04:00

It’s been a while since I’ve taken pixel to “paper”. So much has happened recently, and little has happened at all.

Life is quieter right now.

One reason for this is a little less money sloshing about and waiting for transformation. My husband’s work has suddenly changed from projects with periodic largeish payoffs to ongoing, steady work with relatively modest paychecks. We also had a larger than usual tax bill due to both some projects coming to fruition and to the loss of our one dependent exemption. We lost the higher ed tax credit as well. This is what happens when your kid becomes a grad student with a stipend that she can live on, and is one of those really good changes that helps you smile a little as you write a check to the US Treasury.

And work - well, it makes my head spin. Meat for a separate post. My work hasn’t changed that much, though, because my agency has regularly had financial ups and downs in the decade I’ve worked there.

I’ve been knitting away and have added a few finished items to my Ravelry project pages. I made socks for R. that he loves - they are very tall, and probably consumed more stitches than a full sized sweater knit out of worsted weight yarn. I also made a baby seater for a friend and co-worker’s new baby boy. It was also a farewell present, because she no longer works at our agency, and has moved a couple of hundred miles away. Beyond that, I’m still knitting on the same sweater, shawl, and socks that I was working on a few months ago.

There were a couple of other small projects as well - more about them later.

What is new in my life: I have a spinning wheel.

I’ve been terrified of spinning wheels ever since I found out that people still use them to make yarn. I avoided sitting down at one until last fall, when my daughter prevailed upon me to just give one a try at a wool festival. The yarn I made was truly horrible, but I realized that this was something that I could learn to do.

My daughter has longed for a wheel for a long time, and hinted loudly for months that she would love to have one this year as her major gift of the year. So - we did it. We did our research, identified a wheel that we could afford to purchase in duplicate, found the money for the purchase, and bought two wheels in February.

Most spinning wheels purchased by mail order come unassembled. And so my daughter and I found ourselves in February with wood stain, paint, and wood finish, and a pile of interestingly shaped wooden parts. It only took us a couple of days to put together wheels that we are very happy with indeed.

The wheels are Kromski Fantasias. The Kromski company is a family owned business in Poland. The Fantasia is a new, modern design that both A. and I both loved at first sight. I bought the wheels unfinished, saving quite a bit of money. The wheel is made of fiberboard with a lovely walnut swoosh, so we decided to paint the fiberboard, stain the rest of the wood to match the swoosh, and finish everything with a water-based wood finish.

Here staining is underway. “Tiptoe through the wheel parts.”

The wooden parts have been coated with finish, and A.’s wheel is painted.

My wheel being painted.

A.’s wheel is assembled and in use. She is an excellent spinner already, by the way.

My wheel. Isn’t the swoosh beautiful? It also serves to stop the wheel in an excellent position for both resting and restarting the spinning process.

My second spinning attempt, and it was not too bad. I’ve knit the yarn into fingerless gloves for myself. The fiber is Lincoln, and was a beautifully dyed and combed top. The dealer that sold us the wheels gives free fiber with each wheel purchase, and this was one of our choices.

Finally, a felted tea cozy I made in four days last week. It includes some yarn I spun earlier this year with a drop spindle, where I learned some of the basics of handling wool as you transform it from fluff to yarn. I plied the yarn on the Kromski. The cozy is a great success - it keeps a pot of tea warm for a couple of hours.

It is very calming to spin - truly meditative. I’m grateful for the calmness these days.

There is only one problem. I can spin yarn faster than I can knit it.

Ideas that Resonate: "Social Animal" by David Brooks

2011-02-12T09:54:00.003-05:00

A twitter link posted by Jad Abumrad of WNYC’s Radiolab steered me in the direction of this article in The New Yorker by David Brooks: “Social Animal”.

Strands from this article keep floating into my thoughts. It resonates with me because it aligns well with my viewpoint on how humans work. I’m shaped by the work of B. F. Skinner, and anyone who has read his work knows that that statement curls around on itself in a satisfying way. In the smallest of nutshells, I believe that we are who we are not only because of who we are at birth, but also because of the environments we grow up in, study in, work in, live in.

I am one of the last people who would have any interest in the ideas of Ayn Rand. I do not believe that we are individuals who can stand free of connection or culture. I’m with John Donne:

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditation_XVII

So, with that out of the way, why am I so taken with this article by David Brooks?
He looks to science for explanations about why we are who we are. Again and again throughout the article, Brooks refers to research studies, and ties his analysis to what these studies conclude. I look to science for my explanations as to why life, the world, the universe are what they are. Excellent convergence. Note: Brooks unfortunately does not include a bibliography of his sources, which are inconsistently referenced throughout the article. While this is The New Yorker and not a scientific publication, his article would be strengthened if he gave his readers easier access to his sources.

He is interested in the importance of the child’s environment in the first few years of his or her life. The article posits that deep, secure attachments between adults and children are the building blocks for social skills. Our happiness as adults is based upon the richness of our social networks, not on the size of our bank accounts, and our early connections teach us the skills we need to build those networks.

When I look at my own life, it does not seem as rich and full as it did a few years ago. After reading the article, I realize why. My social network has shrunk. I no longer attend our church, and our band has essentially dissolved. Life is home, where there are only two of us most days, and work. And the nature of my work is solitary and analytical. I feel my world shrinking. Ironically, as my world grows smaller, I grow crabbier, more closed in on myself, and less relaxed in my social interactions. My social skills are getting out of shape, just as my body gets out of shape if I don’t exercise.

It’s time for me to put my social network at the center of my life, to nurture it with thought and care. It’s time for me to reclaim happiness.

I have become a polygamist

2011-01-16T15:14:00.000-05:00

Recently, Susie of the blog Knitting Knoobie asked the question: are you monogamous?

Once upon a time I was monogamous. I worked on one knitting project at a time. As a project got close to the finishing point, I would get the itch to start another, and begin my research, lining up pattern and yarn. I might even cast on, and knit a few rows. The new project, however, would then be pushed aside, not to be touched until I had completed the knitting in progress.

As my stash of both patterns and yarn has become lusher and more full of possibility, I no longer keep to this virtuous and efficient pattern. I have become a knitting multi-tasker. Actually, Susie’s characterization of monogamous v. polygamous is more accurate, because no matter how many projects you have going, you can only actively knit on one at a time.

I spent most of 2010 with 3 projects on the needles. Currently I have 4 active projects:

socks for myself. The pattern is Cookie A’s pattern Wedge, and the yarn is a fine, hand-painted merino dyed with natural dyes by Long Ridge Farm. I had a sinking feeling that I should have used this yarn to make a small shawl, but my husband points out that shawls have much more limited usefulness than socks. One could never have too many handknit socks. The pattern is perfect for the yarn, which is dyed in short floats that are tending to create color pools. Wedge’s short rows are breaking up the pools, and shifting the color changes around the socks.

a shawl for my stepmother. This will replace a disastrous skirt made on a knitting machine a couple of decades ago. The skirt is nearly floor length in a bright red. My stepmom says it makes her look like a barn door, and I agree that it is a major fashion mistake. The shawl will hopefully atone for my sins. I’m knitting Romi Hill’s Maia in lovely variegated blues hand-dyed by Marilla of Moonlight and Laughter. I want to get this done by her birthday, in early May.

a cardigan for myself. This is the Sunrise Circle Jacket by Kate Gilbert, and I’m knitting it in a lovely gray shade of Ecological Wool by Cascade. I predict I will finish this as the first really warm week of April arrives, so that I will have to put it aside for months before I get any real use from it. It’s also an exercise in how hard it is to knit perfectly evenly in plain stockinette.

a baby sweater for a friend and co-worker who will be giving birth to her second child in a few weeks. Her first child is almost three years old and is just starting to wear the sweater I knit for her. The new sweater really is baby sized. It’s the Mexican Baby Ole pullover from Knitter’s Summer 2003. My friend does not know whether the baby is a boy or a girl, so I am knitting the sweater in colors that could be worn by either sex. It’s also a pullover, avoiding that tricky question of on which side to put buttons on a baby cardigan. This gift is very time sensitive, because my friend is leaving the area after her baby is born.

Then there are two UFOs hiding in the knitting room... long term unfinished projects. There’s the start of a cardigan with huge intarsia sunflowers that would be totally unflattering on me if I finished it. I have a plan to convert that project into a pillow for our couch. I also have a beaded sweater that needs some careful and extensive redesign work, including chopping off the ribbing at the bottom and figuring out how long the sleeves will be and how scooped the neckline. I don’t have enough yarn to complete the pattern as written.

I suspect that I would cross the finish line more frequently if I could get back to knitting monogamy. But then I also wouldn’t be able to experience the rush of satisfaction I experienced this December, when I finished three projects within three weeks.

I think I cannot allow myself to start anything new until I finish those two languishing UFOs in any case. My self-discipline is weak, and I don’t know if I can hold to my resolve.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that I’m not even monogamous to knitting anymore? I have taken up spinning. A tale for another blog.

Knitting Blog: The best sweater I have ever knit (so far)

2011-01-05T18:57:00.002-05:00

2010 was a bellwether year in the life of this family: our daughter is officially a full-fledged adult. I wanted to celebrate this with a gift from my heart, and offered to knit her a sweater. The offer was for a classic, sophisticated design that could conceivably look good for decades, and there was no doubt which sweater pattern I would use. I would knit Veronik Avery’s Military Jacket, which is one of the designs in her book Knitting Classic Style.

A project like this deserves, nay, demands excellent quality yarn. I chose to knit it in the yarn specified in the pattern: Cascade Yarn’s Ecological Wool. A. chose a rich, soft brown spun from natural, undyed wool. The yarn is two ply and very light and lofty. It was a great choice. The finished jacket is simultaneously firm and soft. It’s a sweater that will keep you warm on a cold day, yet be surprisingly comfortable in weather that is cool rather than cold. The yarn is first class, but the project cost was very reasonable because I was lucky enough to catch a sale at Webs (yarn.com). The whole project, including leather buttons, came in under $70. Not bad at all for a sweater that may well last for A.’s lifetime.

According to my Ravelry page, I knit this sweater between May 17 and December 7 of 2010. I didn’t work on the sweater constantly or persistently during this period. I used to focus my knitting on one project at a time, but I’ve become a multi-tasker, usually with three projects on the needles. (The count currently is five, if you count two long-term unfinished objects). I don’t know what approach is better. My focus on this project grew more intense as my daughter’s winter break approached. When she walked in the door on December 8, the sweater was finished on the dining room table, waiting for her to put it on for the first time.

It fit her perfectly.

Getting that perfect fit was the result of a series of choices, all of which were the correct ones. The pattern was cropped in length, perfect for a short-waisted person. From there, though, it needed some tweaking. My daughter is short with a stocky, buxom, athletic build. The sweater was designed more for a longer, thinner body. I decided to start it as a small and increase to a medium at the waist, and make the armscye match the large sized sleeve. The sleeve was a large width and a small length. It all worked!

Veronik Avery is such a fine designer. The Military Jacket is filled with small details that make the sweater technically satisfying. She has worked as a costume designer, and her experience shows. When I sewed up the jacket, every piece fit together. There was no fudging or tugging or struggling to line up the seams. This is not always the case with knitting patterns in my experience!

I had a learning experience along the way with cabling. A knit cable looks very complex, but is quite simple; it is created when stitches change position in the garment. The traditional technique is to use a small needle to hold the stitches being moved as they shift to a new position. I learned an alternate way of creating a cable from designer Annie Modesitt that doesn’t require the use of a cable needle, and used it for the body of the sweater. When I used Modesitt’s technique for the front placket, however, the fabric did not look right. This placket is a very densely cabled, reversible fabric (that is brilliant in its own right), and it could only be created by using the traditional cable technique. I spent many rows in denial, and had to rip out a substantial piece of knitting to make the placket correctly. What I learned is worthy of a blog post by itself: SIMILAR DOES NOT MEAN IDENTICAL. The lesson: if you are substituting a different technique, knit a swatch to confirm that the end result will be what you want.

And now on to my next sweater - one for myself, different pattern, different color, but in the same wonderful yarn.

Knitting Blog: Beautiful Boy

2010-12-12T20:08:00.001-05:00

I have been following Dawn (The Dawnminator) for about as long as I have been reading blogs. She lives in my home town, and writes in a stream of consciousness style that is very honest. In fact, honesty is what she probably values the most from other people. She’s intelligent and perceptive, and often very, very funny. She also recently announced on her blog that she is expecting a baby. My sense is that this is what she has wanted to happen some day in her life, but she wasn’t sure it ever would.

It’s a boy.

I dropped her a line last month telling her that I would be in her area over Thanksgiving. We made a date to meet for coffee, in a neighborhood that we both used to live in, though decades apart in time.

I decided that I had to give her my own little baby shower. I bought the baby two books, because I nearly always give board books, always with the same advice: you gotta let the rugrat chew on them. One book was about a baby’s nighttime routine, because babies love stories that are about their lives. The second was a book of animals, because babies adore animals, What they notice most when they look out of a car’s window are animals, and other babies.

I also decided to knit a pair of socks for the baby.

These guys knit up in a matter of days, not weeks, even with the distraction of needing to hold down a job. My Ravelry project page says they took just 5 days from start to finish. They are newborn size, because this is a winter baby. By the time he would grow into a larger sock, it will be warm out and he will take those socks off. Socks are the first pieces of clothing that babies figure out how to remove from their bodies, and they are very proud of the trick once they learn it. In fact, they’re happy to demonstrate their ability to take socks off over and over.

The pattern is called Charlie’s Wiggle Socks from Cat Bordhi’s book New Pathways for Sock Knitters: Book One. I’ve raved about Cat’s patterns before in this blog, and I’ll rave again. They’re clever and unusual, and they work.

If anyone else reading this also remembers Dawn, she is indeed beautiful. She’s also got a very generous spirit. The time we spent together flew by.

I’ll end this with some words by John Lennon, who also had a beautiful boy like the one Dawn will be having soon:

Close your eyes,
Have no fear,
The monsters gone,
He's on the run and your mom is here,

Beautiful,
Beautiful, beautiful,
Beautiful Boy,

Before you go to sleep,
Say a little prayer,
Every day in every way,
It's getting better and better,

Beautiful,
Beautiful, beautiful,
Beautiful Boy,

Out on the ocean sailing away,
I can hardly wait,
To see you to come of age,
But I guess we'll both,
Just have to be patient,
Yes it's a long way to go,
But in the meantime,

Before you cross the street,
Take my hand,
Life is just what happens to you,
While you’re busy making other plans,

Beautiful,
Beautiful, beautiful,
Beautiful Boy,
Darling,
Darling,
Darling... whoever you will be.

Upgrades

2010-11-05T08:04:00.000-04:00

We have finally realized that we need to do our part and slow down the selfish jag we’ve been on of paying down debt. We are doing our part to help the American economy by upgrading some of the technology around here.

Upgrade #1: Snow be gone

Snow removal is always of concern here as we go from one imperfect solution to another to keep our quarter-mile of driveway cleared. We’ve hired it done (the good snow plow guy is no longer in business, he’s in charge of the town’s highways), tried to plow with a truck ourselves (long abandoned, we can’t afford to keep a reliable truck going), a big snowblower (a good solution except for the first snowfall of the season), a smaller snowblower (didn’t hold up), and a garden tractor with a plow (passable).

Snowblowing has an advantage over plowing: the snow doesn’t build up at the sides of the driveway. A year with steady snow and few thaws results in a driveway that gets narrower and narrower when we rely on plowing. The edges tend to get soft as well, decreasing the margin for error and increasing the probability that I am going to screw up and get the car stuck.

We’ve invested in the biggest snow blower we could find this year: a 45” Troy-Bilt with dual wheels in the rear. No snow yet, so it hasn’t been taken for a test drive. Here’s hoping that this purchase truly is an upgrade over the garden tractor. A bonus - it was made in the USA.

Upgrade #2: New to us car

Oh, how I love our new car, which is officially the car that I drive to work. Being as cars are not good for the planet, I’m afraid that I love it too much and am going to accumulate some bad karma.

We loved our old car, too, a 2002 Saturn SL. That car traveled over 245,000 miles without needing a major repair and while getting 35-40 miles per gallon. Hands down, this was the best car we ever owned - reliable and cheap to operate. The catalytic converter was failing, however, and small repairs were starting to cost more than they should due to worn parts. For example, its water pump failed very recently, and we had to pay $350 for a repair that should have been $200 tops. We had already decided to replace it before we encountered the dreaded one-repair-too-many syndrome, but we had to make that one-repair-too-many to have a car with a running engine that could take us to its replacement.

Car shopping has been greatly improved by the Internet. We were able to research and define which cars we were interested in, and find out what all of the dealers within a reasonable distance from us had on their lots. We found this particular car and put a deposit on it sight unseen.

We got a white 2008 Honda Civic EX with only 30,000 miles on it. The Saturn was a stripped down car. The Civic is loaded - moonroof, great stereo that we can plug an iPod into, cruise control, remote entry - it’s a very comfortable ride. It also has manual transmission, which we strongly prefer and which is getting hard to find. It’s getting a respectable 35 miles per gallon. You can program the stereo to flash a welcome message when you first turn the car on, and our car now says “scifiknitter”. Yes, it’s a marker to claim territory.

That bad karma from too much car love is lurking, however. First of all, someone keyed it in the dealer’s lot a day or two before we showed up to drive it away, and we have to get that fixed. Second, it’s already been hit a couple of times by stones set aflight by passing vehicles. One of the stones is still sitting in the windshield wiper well. Third, through a mixup it only has one license plate when NY law requires two, and I’m going to have to go to the DMV and spend more money for new plates. Fourth, a large bird flew into its side as I was driving home at dusk on a country road. I stopped, and found no damage to the car. The bird was a sprawled shape in the middle of the road, and as I walked over to look at it, the bird gathered itself together and flew up into a treetop. I drove off hoping that the bird, like the car, had not suffered any lasting damage. I don’t know what kind of bird it was, but it was big, with long wings.

Upgrade #3: An iPhone 4

R. gave me an iPhone 3G nearly two years ago, to mark my completion of my Masters. He upgraded me to an iPhone 4 for my birthday. It’s a great phone, with many improvements from the 3G.

The 3G has already moved to a new owner - our daughter’s boyfriend. He’s in Canada where cell phone options are more diverse than in the U.S., and he can get a very reasonable plan for it that will give him some phone minutes and unlimited texting without a data plan. As a college student who is paying his own cell phone bill, that is a very good thing.

Ironically, the evening I got the new phone, the old phone froze and would no longer turn on. I had an Applecare plan on it, though, so Apple took it back and shipped me a factory refurb. So M. is getting an upgrade, too. The 3G is, in essence, a new phone - shiny screen, shiny case, and, best of all, a new battery.

No more upgrades for us for a while - it’s time to get back to paying the bills, and paying down debt. We have a car payment again, but we should be back to knocking down college debt by the end of the month.

In which the author discovers some of the reasons people go to high school reunions

2010-10-17T17:22:00.002-04:00

On October 9th, I ventured southward to attend my 41st high school reunion. Why 41st? Apparently a few people from my graduating class got together last year, and bemoaned the fact that there was no 40th reunion. They decided to organize one themselves the following year. They did a bang-up job, too; I think they could write a book about how to hold the perfect high school reunion. The main organizing tool was the Web - a website, Classmates. com, and Facebook. Facebook was the most powerful tool for finding and communicating with everyone, though there is still a long list of missing classmates.

The last reunion our class held was our 20th, and I attended it with my husband. I had a 15 month old child at the time, and was just about to quit my job to go back to school full-time to study accounting. Neither R. nor I had a particularly good time. I had few close friends in high school, and none of them were in the room. The party was in a restaurant, and it was hard to mill about and talk to people, and figure out who might be mutually interesting dinner companions. We ended up at the smokers’ table, which made R. happy, as he was still a smoker at the time. This group was in a distinct minority, and feeling a bit rebellious with the format of the reunion, and were kind enough to accept us at their table.

This time, the game plan was completely different. First of all, I went stag. No worries about whether my husband was having a good time, and no safe bubble to escape to. The venue was a large enclosed pavilion in a park in the town where we all grew up, and the dress code was jeans, sweaters and sweatshirts. That alone put everyone at ease.

There were greetings and conversation for a couple of hours, and there was a class picture:

Class of ’69. An epic year, with the inauguration of Richard Nixon as President, the first moon landing, war in Vietnam and protests at home, and Woodstock. There were 361 people in my high school class. About 30% of us made it to the reunion.

After the picture taking, we all went inside, and took care of the business of the gathering. We remembered our classmates who have died - almost 10% of the class. As Dan P. said in the remembrance, you can’t help but wonder what happened to them. We had silent auctions and raffles. The organizers have arranged for all of the money left over after paying the bills to go to fund a scholarship for an academically deserving, financially needy graduate from our alma mater's class of 2011. If I heard correctly, I think we will be able to contribute about $1,500 to someone’s education. That made all of us feel good.

Then it was food time - an excellent buffet. Pulled pork, pulled turkey, salt potatoes, ziti, baked beans, green and fruit salads, cheesy broccoli, and a huge cake. It was delicious.

We did NOT then move on to the obligatory-ridiculously-too-loud deejay. Instead, we were all able to keep talking with each other. The climax of the evening: allegedly there were fireworks, although such doings would have been against the park rules. The possible fireworks were followed by a visit from the local police force, just making sure that we all had designated drivers.

I was amazed at how many people remembered and recognized me. Over and over, people told me that I have not changed much from high school.

I had many enjoyable conversations with my classmates. Topics included what we do for a living (some lucky folks have already been able to retire), sailing and boat building, art history, raising kids, enjoying grandkids, building a business, the future... It was wonderfully inclusive, with everyone making an effort to reach out to whomever they encountered. No snubbing, no cliques. I wasn’t one of the popular people in high school, with lots of friends. I’m remembered kindly, though. I may have come away with a couple of friendships that will grow between now and the next reunion. I’m going to do my part to maintain connection. And I’m resolved to keep working on active listening. The best connections happened when I listened at least as much as I talked.

When I finally got into the car to drive back to my mother’s house, I realized that something inside me felt healed, like a small wound had knit itself up. I felt joyous and reconciled with my past.

Yes, I will be there when we hold our 50th reunion. It will be a great time.

News Flash: The North Country Power Authority now exists!

2010-10-02T10:08:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was a very, very, very, very, very big news day in my world. Here are two news links:

http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20101002/NEWS05/310029965

http://northcountrynow.com/news/politicians-laud-next-step-foward-creation-municipal-electric-system-st-lawrence-county-010769

My husband has been part of this effort since 1996, and has served as chairman of the coalition group for the past several years.

If we were to add up the number of hours, the number of phone calls, the number of meetings over the years... I can’t even hazard a guess as to what the numbers would be.

Almost anyone who pays attention to political news these days must believe that polarization reigns supreme and that collaboration is impossible. This event proves that this state of affairs doesn’t have to exist, and that people can work together across party lines and political boundaries, and that they can be steadfast in pursuing a long-term goal over many years.

This effort has been bi-partisan. It has held together 24 towns and villages in two counties. It built an excellent team that includes committed local officials, some pretty high-powered attorneys from Washington DC and New York City, and a well connected lobbying firm in Albany. The effort has focused on keeping everyone informed (which means many, many nights of traveling to attend town and village board meetings and many conference calls). There’s been a lot of smart strategy and consensus building.

Consensus may seem like a hollow word to some, but it is how you have to operate with so many stakeholders. Ain’t no one happy unless everyone is happy.

Quite a few people have thought that this effort was crazy and not likely to succeed. “Pie-in-the-sky”, “quixotic”, “David and Goliath”, and plain ol’ “unlikely” are words that have come up from time to time. A friend asked me once if this was something that could really happen, or if it was a personal quest. If it was a quest, my husband was not the only person who was on it - he was in some very good company. And the result goes to show that even Don Quixote has his day, once in a while.

Unventing Soup

2010-09-14T20:33:00.002-04:00

Beautiful Soup

BEAUTIFUL Soup, so rich and green,

Waiting in a hot tureen!

Who for such dainties would not stoop?

Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!

Beau--ootiful Soo-oop! Beau--ootiful Soo-oop!

Soo--oop of the e--e--evening,

Beautiful, beautiful Soup!

Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,

Game, or any other dish?

Who would not give all else for two

Pennyworth only of Beautiful Soup?

Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?

Beau--ootiful Soo-oop! Beau--ootiful Soo-oop!

Soo--oop of the e--e--evening,

Beautiful, beauti--FUL SOUP!

- Lewis Carroll

The best part of making soup is that you don’t need a recipe - just an imagination that can combine what you have on hand.

It’s getting cooler here, with night temperatures in the 40s and fog in the river valleys in the morning. It’s time for some soup.

Yesterday was CSA pickup day, so it was also a good day to use as many vegetables as possible, to make room for the new arrivals.

My soup of the evening, beautiful soup:

Saute together 6 slices bacon (cut up) with a huge, sweet golden carrot and a medium mild white onion, chopped.

Add 4 peeled, diced potatoes. One was a Yukon Gold, the others were white potatoes.

Add enough water to cover (about 3 c.) and a can of home-canned navy beans that my mom put up a few years ago (about 2 c.). Season with a little salt, freshly ground pepper, thyme and dill.

Add a small bundle of kale, cut into small pieces and with center rib removed.

Cook until potatoes & kale are tender.

Add a couple of cups of milk.

Eat. We did, and we enjoyed it!

The bacon now has a sad story. It came from a pig raised in Heuvelton, NY, by Clif and Marie Cook. Early yesterday morning their barn burned down, killing 360 animals and destroying their tractor. They lost chickens, turkeys, steers - and their prized pigs, along with the genetics of a carefully bred line of animals.

I take the word “unventing” in the title from Elizabeth Zimmerman, the knitting writer, teacher, and designer. She believed that when it comes to something as basic as knitting (or soup), it’s hard to believe that anyone can have an idea that someone else somewhere, some time hasn’t already tried, given the vast number of people who have lived before us and who share the planet with us right now.

Sailing Adventure sans pictures

2010-09-07T21:43:00.001-04:00

Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main.
For many a stormy wind shall blow
E'er Jack comes home again.

Ah, yes.

Minuet is safely tucked into her new home at the Chaumont Yacht Club, but we had an adventure along the way getting there.

To back up a wee bit, we’ve been keeping our sailboat in Cape Vincent this year. We left Clayton because of low water levels on the St. Lawrence River and because management of our former marina fell apart after the sudden death of its owner. We were also attracted by the lure of more ready access to Lake Ontario.

There was one little issue that we didn’t know about: the infamous waters of Tibbetts Point. You have to go through those waters to get from Cape Vincent to the lake. Tibbetts Point is where the waters of Lake Ontario enter the St. Lawrence River. There is a lot of water pouring in from a wider, deeper place to a narrower, shallower place, with the prevailing winds blowing in the same direction as the current. It tends to be a little choppy, and a sailboat usually either has to motor out or tack endlessly. I’ve been through these waters several times this summer, and discovered that I don’t like it as a regular sailing route.

First, a very nice gentleman at the Cape Vincent marina told us that there were marinas in Chaumont that catered to sailboats, and that were less costly than where we were staying. Then, some weeks ago we were driving from Cape Vincent to Watertown and we saw all the masts sticking up in the air. We drove on down, and talked to some very friendly folks. We found out that we would be able to store our boat for the winter at the same place we sailed from in the summer, and it would cost us less. And the facilities were very comfortable. Much nicer than where we were.

Wow. To not have to move the boat at the beginning and end of the season... to just go there, and the boat is in the water in her slip, ready for us.

A week later we were there talking with the marina manager, and we were in. We made arrangements to move Minuet there over Labor Day weekend, and to keep her in the water there until mid-October. Labor Day is usually still great boating weather, so we figured we would have an easy time with this last end-of-the-season move. It would be an interesting, long sail, with a chunk of miles along Lake Ontario’s eastern shore. The plan was to move the boat on Saturday, then spend Sunday day-sailing around our new watery neighborhood.

Then along came Hurricane Earl.

Saturday, the waves on the lake were 9-12 feet. Sunday they were 6-8 feet. Monday sounded kind of rough but better, with waves up to 3-5 feet. We’ve sailed through waters like that, and knew that both Minuet and her crew could do it.

Much of the trip was pretty decent, but rounding the horn at Tibbetts Point we went through the roughest water we have sailed through yet. We had places to be, so we motored with some sail out to stabilize the boat, pretty much into the teeth of some strong winds. We did encounter some of those 6-8 foot waves, our very first. We had safety harnesses on. We got wet from waves breaking on the boat. I got seasick.

Seasickness is very uncomfortable. It’s not the nausea as much as the feeling of being paralyzed, while the minutes of your life go by incredibly slowly. It knocks out all of the thrill and pleasure of the moment. Life becomes something to be endured.

Eventually we were able to take a course that worked well with the wind. The waves subsided, as did the seasickness. I was able to eat some food at about 3:30. And we pulled into our new marina home at 5:30, where we had a warm welcome. Four guys met us at the dock and took our docking lines, complimenting R. on his skill at the helm. Shortly after that the cold beers came out, and we were home.

Later on the last visit of the night before heading to our home on dry land, one of the men told us he had called up to the manager, telling him we were safely docked. The manager called down “thanks!” Our new friend said he replied, “Thank YOU, for adding these folks to the family”.

Bye, bye, Tibbetts Point. I know I’ll sail through you again some day, but it will be once in a while, not nearly every time I venture forth. In the meantime, I won’t miss you.

Thought of the day

2010-08-23T13:53:00.001-04:00

I don’t know if this thought is original, but it feels like one that arose without outside assistance. I don’t take the concept of originality too seriously, though. I have been haunted for decades by the words of Lenny Bruce: “Believe me, I’m not profound, this is something that I assume someone must have laid on me, because I do not have an original thought. I am screwed. I speak English. That’s it. I was not born in a vacuum. Every thought I have belongs to somebody else.” With that out of the way, here’s the thought:

No matter how you spend your time, each day is full to the brim at its end.

Knitting Blog: Reversing Leaves Socks

2010-08-21T09:48:00.001-04:00

Like many people, I face a constant challenge trying to find ideas for appropriate, thoughtful gifts for my parents. In my case, I like to add “useful” to the criteria, as all of my parents are surrounded by beautiful objects. I don’t think they need another gorgeous vase, and there is no room on the walls for another picture. While once in a while I come up with an idea on my own, more and more I simply ask them what they would like.

Last year, I asked my stepmom and dad what they wanted for Christmas. They answered that they wanted two things. First, they did not think an oak tree growing very near to their house was healthy, and they asked us to take that tree down and cut it up for firewood. This is a particular skill of my husband’s - R. is at one with his tool when he is wielding a chainsaw. My stepmom also asked me to knit her a pair of socks. She asked for black socks that would be taller than the usual 7” cuff, because she likes socks as tall as possible. Other than that, I had discretion to pick the pattern.

With her specifications, I decided that the socks needed to be knit from the toe up, so that I could knit the cuffs until I ran out of yarn. When you knit from the cuff down, you never know until the very end if you will have enough yarn to finish the sock, or if you could have made the cuff just a little bit longer. The other thing I decided was that the socks needed to have a plain foot, with all of the patterning restricted to the cuff. All patterns use more yarn than plain knitting, and I wanted every inch of yarn I could get for the cuff.

Once again, Cat Bordhi came to my rescue. I found the perfect socks in The Knitter’s Book of Wool - the Reversing Leaves Sock. This is a pattern for a short sock, but I saw the potential for a tall cuff. It was easy to make it taller - I just tucked a few increases into the pattern at regular intervals as the cuff got longer, to allow for the fact that the calf gets bigger as it goes from ankle to knee. As with all of Cat’s patterns, this pattern is exquisitely engineered. She works the extra fabric needed where foot meets leg into the patterning over the top of the foot at the ankle, then magically whisks all that extra fabric away so that the sock fits snugly up the leg. She also includes a reinforced heel, not a common feature of toe-up socks.

I also threw in an extra challenge for myself - I knit both socks at the same time on one long circular needle, using the Magic Loop method. I had to deal with a few fiddly bits, but it worked well, and I enjoyed being able to finish both socks at the same time.

We cut down the tree at Thanksgiving, and blocked up part of it before rain settled in. Here’s the tree going down, shot from a bathroom window:

And one pallet of stacked wood next to the trunk.

During our visit earlier this month, we finished cutting up, splitting, and stacking the firewood. My folks now have two large and one small pallet of prime firewood right near their house.

I finished the socks on May 31 as we waited in line for seating for our daughter’s graduation from college. I gave them to my stepmom immediately after trimming off the yarn ends. She modeled them for me earlier this month when we visited. She loves them - they fit perfectly and they are tall enough to make her happy. Perfect Birkenstock socks!

Now I need to think up ideas for this coming Christmas...

Sister time

2010-08-04T15:29:00.001-04:00

Several weeks ago, I did something I have not done before in my entire adult life: I spent a day with my sister. Just us two, all husbands and children off in different places doing different things.

The logistics that made this possible were as complicated as one usually encounters in a 21st century over-scheduled middle class American lifestyle. To summarize as briefly as possible: both of my sister J.’s daughters had nearly-simultaneous events at a SUNY campus near me. M-the-younger was attending two weeks of music camp while M-the-older had freshman orientation that started a couple of days after music camp. Meanwhile my husband had to go to Albany and J.’s husband couldn’t get leave from his job to stay up north for an extra day. He came up with the family to deliver M-the-younger to camp, and hitched a ride back home with the family of another music camper. This left me, J., and M-the-older at my house Monday morning. After we delivered M-the-older to orientation, J. and I had most of a day and an evening to our own devices.

I should note at this point that the college’s orientation schedulers experienced my sister’s formidable determination and persistence in the weeks leading up to her trek northward. The desired orientation session was full, and it was the only one that dovetailed with music camp. J. requested that room be found, and in the end the college agreed to squeeze M-the-older into this particular session. My money was on her all along.

First stop of the day: delivering M-the-older to freshman orientation. Ah, memories - my own freshman orientation was at the same institution more than 40 years ago. Here she is, poring over her schedule in the dorm room. She’s been to music camp there for the past few years, so she already felt right at home on the campus.

After walking M to her first stop, we set off to spend some time together - which meant shopping. J. loves to shop. I do, too, but I look much more than I buy. We did our part to support the local economy, with stops at a couple of stores I especially love. As we went along, I realized that there was a pattern to my sister’s purchases. She bought a couple of items for herself, but they were well discounted sale items. Almost everything she bought was a gift - for her husband, her daughters, a dear friend. She also bought a gorgeous skein of hand-dyed silk yarn for my daughter, as a college graduation gift. So I gave her a couple of gifts along the way - fabric and a pattern to make a patchwork tote bag at the wonderful yarn and fabric shop, and American Gods by Neil Gaiman. She’s a major Neil fan and has a collection of The Sandman comics, but she had never read this book. I also bought some handmade chocolates for us to share that evening.

We also stopped by the public radio station. My sister is music director and classical announcer for a classical public radio station, and she enjoyed talking with her counterparts about what is happening in the world of NPR. I enjoyed listening. She's a pro who delivers quality to the ears that listen in her city, and it's a pleasure to witness a bit of the wheels that turn behind the sound.

What do two adult sisters do on an evening when they are alone together? In our case, we talked. We watched a chick flick (The Namesake, and we liked it. It was good to clear that Netflix pic, which had lanuished by the TV unwatched for weeks). We ate chocolate and microwave popcorn. We talked some more. We stayed up entirely too late.

I hope we get to do this again someday. I don’t quite know why it took us so long to do it for the first time.

I love you, J.

Thought of the day

2010-07-18T01:22:00.000-04:00

No matter how you spend your time, each day is full to the brim at its end.

Iambic pentameter: a snippet

2010-07-13T13:43:00.001-04:00

I would like to feel, before I die, that I can read poetry intelligently. To help accomplish this goal, I’m slowly reading Stephen Fry’s book The Ode Less Traveled. The book is about writing poetry, and I figure that if I learn more about how poetry is written, the fog that descends whenever I encounter a poem MUST lift, at least a little.

I recommend this book strongly after just a few chapters, although it’s not for prudes. Fry mixes elegant language with profanity. I think the result is engaging and lively, plus I get to learn some rude British slang.

The first thing I learned that opened my eyes wide is that poetry is all about meter, or rhythm. As a quasi-musician, I appreciate this deeply. I always read with an inner voice speaking out loud, and now I know I must free this voice to be very emphatic, perhaps even aural if I’m not with company, whenever I encounter poetry.

The spoken voice is the pathway to feeling the rhythm.

Fry starts his exploration of style with iambic pentameter. I’ve been doing my exercises and writing a few lines in this meter, and it has grown on me. It feels very elemental, like it comes from the roots of language. It is very satisfying on the tongue and in the mind. ta Da ta Da ta Da ta Da ta Da!

Here’s a bit of verse. I wrote it out loud while driving to work. I arrived at the door in a much better mood than if I had been thinking about the budget.

I've finally come to understand the lure

Of surgery, which promises a cure

For time and gravity. But yet my skin

Feels soft, despite the cobwebbed state it's in.

The stories that belong to me

2010-06-30T10:08:00.001-04:00

While my blog is personal, it is not private. I've been thinking about what that means. My conclusion: I need to think about whether a story belongs to me before I blog about it.

I'm entering into budget season at work and it's going to be even more difficult than usual. Still, that's not really a story that belongs to me. It involves connections between our agency, a major funder, and a partner agency, and it is not in my job description to publicize the issues. I don't observe my boss talking about the situation publically, so I won't either. It doesn't matter how many waking hours I devote to crunching numbers and projecting alternatives, this is not really my story.

The same line of thought applies to the major project my husband has been working on for so many years. It just passed a major milestone when the New York State Legislature passed a bill this week that makes the project possible. The bill now has to be signed by the Governor, and it won't be sent to him for a while. Even though this project has been a major focus of our family life, it is not a story that belongs to me.

There is a story that belongs to me. For the first time in my adult life, I spent the day with my sister. Just us two. I'll blog about that soon. Right now, I'm in Montreal, and I'm going to focus on that. There may even be a story in it.

Lament

2010-06-09T18:05:00.001-04:00

Sung to the tune The Waters of Babylon, the most beautiful and haunting lament I know.

By the waters and the marshes of the southern coast,

We laid down and wept,

And wept,

At what we’ve lost.

We remember birds, remember fish,

And shiver at the cost.

Graduation Day

2010-06-06T11:51:00.002-04:00

My daughter has graduated from college.

Bittersweet, but much more sweet than bitter.

This event triggered a lot of logistics, because my parents wanted to travel to the ceremony as well. Added into the mix was my convalescence from surgery. Things did not go according to plan, and we all did as well as we could with the problems that arose along the way.

The first event was to be my father and stepmother coming to stay with R. and me for two nights. They would head up to Montreal on Sunday. They arrived on Friday, and I made spaghetti and meatballs, one of my dad’s favorite dishes. As we sat around with glasses of wine after dinner, the conversation wandered to tales of border crossings. At this point, my stepmom realized that they had not brought their passports with them.

An uneasy silence descended as my stepmom and I searched the web. Conclusion: with no passports, they would be turned back at the border. Saturday morning she checked into having the passports overnighted, but the cost would be $800. So, we said a sad farewell, and they headed back home to Cape Cod after breakfast. The new plan: they would drive straight to Montreal on Sunday, passports in hand.

Saturday was very quiet around the house. I did accompany my husband to the town’s Memorial Day observance, which included a walk up a hill to the cemetery. It was a hard walk for me.

On Sunday, my mom arrived. The plan was for her to travel with R. and me. We had reserved a suite at a hotel close to McGill that had two bedrooms, living room, dining area, and kitchen. We would go to Montreal on Monday for the ceremony, and sightsee on Tuesday. I also gave her my old computer, a 12” PowerBook G4 that I had cleaned up for her. We had some computer lessons before bed. I also had the uneasy realization that I was not feeling as well as I had just a day or two earlier. My super-duper pain pills got added to my packing list.

Monday we made great time to Montreal, and although we couldn’t check into our room yet, the hotel set us up with parking. We got over to the university in good time, met up with A., and ate our packed lunch in the shade as happy graduates and their families milled about after the first graduation ceremony of the day. I was working like crazy to finish socks I was making for my stepmom. We met up with her and my dad, and I finished the socks as we waited in line to enter the huge tent where the ceremony was to be held. I was so glad to sit down. My physical unease was increasing, and so was my emotional unease, as I began to worry that something was going wrong with my recovery. It was an effort to put that on the side, and enjoy all the good things of the day.

The ceremony was beautifully done. A faculty brass quintet provided music. Because McGill holds several graduation ceremonies over the course of a week, speechifying was appropriate but not excessive - there was only one honorary degree given at this event. The honoree was chemist George Whitesides of Harvard, and he gave a heck of a speech. For those interested in what Dr. Whitesides does and thinks about, you can check out his TED talk here. A sidenote: my dad is a chemist, and he and Whitesides have met in the past. They were able to talk together after the ceremony.

The tradition at McGill is to tap every recipient of an advanced degree on the shoulder with a red rod, and to cap every recipient of a bachelor degree by tapping the student’s head with the hat of the presiding official. Here is a picture of A. about to be capped.

Here she is, getting her diploma. These diplomas are 11” x 17”, and they were all printed, signed, and sealed in time for the ceremony.

Afterwards, we took family pics. Here is my mom, A. and me.

A. and her proud dad.

A. and my father and stepmother.

A. and her longtime boyfriend M.

We had a most enjoyable dinner afterwards at a Greek restaurant. A. picked the restaurant, and it was a good choice, as the emphasis was on seafood, a big favorite with this particular crowd.

The next day, my dad and stepmom headed back to their home. Meanwhile, R., my mom, and I had to chuck our plans for sightseeing. Neither my mom nor I were up to it, plus it was raining heavily. Mom and I hung out in the hotel room, enjoying some quiet time for conversation, and covering a few serious topics. Meanwhile R. and A. took care of some dad-daughter business and brought us food. The day cleared in the afternoon and I felt a bit better, so we ventured out, visiting A.’s apartment and having dinner at a superb Indian restaurant in her new neighborhood. A. ordered for all of us with great assurance, and her choices were perfect.

Wednesday we drove home. I called my doctor, worried about my symptoms, worried that I had done too much and hurt myself, and worried that I would be unable to return to work on schedule. It turns out that I was just going through part of the healing process. The sutures deep inside me were dissolving. As A. said, “No wonder you’re feeling achy, the only thing holding you together now is you.” The relief I felt at this news was profound.

Thursday my mom left, new-to-her computer in hand. I resumed my last few days of being home before going back to work. Nothing has really changed - except it has. The growth of a child from infant to adult is gradual, and it can be hard to go back and identity the points in time when she moved from one stage to another. This is why we have graduation ceremonies, to mark when our children grow. To understand the relevance of this particular ceremony, just look at her face in those photographs. Our daughter is an adult, living her own life, and those of us who love her were so very happy to celebrate that on May 31.

Coming up: Back to work

2010-06-04T07:51:00.002-04:00

My medical leave is coming to an end - I’ll be going back to work on Monday.

I haven’t done as much knitting, or nearly as much blogging, as I thought I would. Twitter and Google Reader offer so many lovely distractions. I’m well informed and entertained - perhaps too much so.

I do have lots of thoughts that I could blog on, but many of them relate to family or work, and do not seem to be fit topics to expose to public view. So I don’t blog on them. And as I hold my tongue, the practice of not saying anything becomes stronger, and I say less and less.

The highlight of the 3.5 weeks of leave was (of course) my daughter’s graduation from McGill. It was a wonderful day. My husband has the best photos on his camera, and I have started nagging him to download them, and share them with me. The experience deserves a blog post of its very own.

How do I feel? Pretty good, but I am not back to exercise or anything strenuous yet. I had a scare earlier this week when i started spotting, after 3 weeks of no discharge at all. I ended up laying low in Montreal rather than sightseeing because I was afraid I had done too much, and injured myself. When I got back home, I called my doctor’s office and found out that what is happening is part of the healing process. Internal sutures are dissolving, right on schedule. My daughter said it’s no wonder I’ve been a little more achy, as there is nothing holding me together any more other than me. I’m starting to pick up steam, though. The worst of the healing is behind me now.

We have begun to practice earlier-to-bed, earlier-to-rise. I am determined to get to work a bit earlier, focus more intently, and pull the plug after 8 hours and head home. Let’s see if I can muster the self-control needed to establish new, healthier habits.

Baby's got a new ride

2010-05-21T09:03:00.002-04:00

I have a new-to-me computer! And I love it.

We got a new 17 inch MacBook Pro for our daughter as a college graduation present. She needed an upgrade as her computer, a first generation 15 inch MacBook Pro, was starting to struggle a bit when she did statistical modeling on it. We timed the purchase so that her new laptop arrived when she came home for a week after her surgery. When we gave the new laptop to her, she gave me the first-gen MBP. Which, I will have you know, she bought herself. She is not accustomed to getting her computers from Mom and Dad, she has saved up her pennies and bought two Apple laptops over the years. I’m the lucky person who has inherited each of her purchases over time, though I paid cash for the first one. This lappy is a gift.

We don’t think we gave an extravagant gift. For one thing, my father and stepmother contributed towards the purchase, and are official go-givers with us. The new machine is an investment in her professional future. She NEEDS computing power to do her research. This gift fits our budget a lot better than a car would. And she’s earned it - she is graduating from McGill with First Class Honors.

Everything works better for me on my new machine. No way around it, machines using Tiger, the optimal operating system for my old computer, are struggling to keep up these days. We cloned my old machine to the newer one, and there I was - my bookmarks and settings, my files, everything that is me in my digital identity. The only program I had to upgrade was my accounting software. Today’s adventure will be podcasts, which I had given up on, they loaded so slowly on my old computer.

I spent the day yesterday cleaning up my old computer to give to my mom. The machine is a 12 inch PowerBook G4, and this baby has been a trooper for 8 years now. Mom currently uses WebTV, and her digital life would be enhanced by a computer. I’ve cleaned out my files and bookmarks, and left her an assortment of family pics in iPhoto and a collection of classical and folk music in iTunes. Still to be done: installing her printer and configuring her email, and buying a new battery. Mom will be here in about 10 days time. I hope to set her up with a Gmail account and hope she’ll have fun playing with it on our wireless network. She currently plans to stick with dial-up, and the PB will meet her needs with aplomb.

Off I go to download podcasts!

Knitting Blog: Brandywine

2010-05-19T19:07:00.002-04:00

I have become a big fan of the work of Rosemary Hill. Romi designs beautiful knitted lace (plus sells handmade shawl pins that are elegant and unstuffy). I’ve now knit two of her patterns: the Ice Queen, and Brandywine.

Brandywine is a very special pattern. When you create a bit of beauty for a friend, a loved one, or yourself, you are also contributing to a long term project. When you buy the pattern for Brandywine, $5 of the $6.50 price of the pattern is donated by Romi to a group doing relief work in Haiti. She hopes to eventually contribute $50,000, and has already given $10,500. It feels good to have a piece of the action.

This project started with both a lovely pattern and gorgeous yarn. I used about half of a skein of Silk Noir, a 100% silk yarn dyed by the Great Adirondack Yarn Company.

From 05.2010 Brandywine

This yarn has so many short lengths of different colors, it would sound like a mishmash if I listed them all. Combined, the overall effect is a brownish-pinkish-purple. The colors never pooled as I knit a triangle that continually shifted the relationship of the colors to each other - a remarkable feat of very talented dying.

This was one of the two yarns my daughter and I selected as our prize for winning TAUNY’s hat competition earlier this year. I’ve given her the other half of the yarn, and can hardly wait to see what she makes with it.

It didn’t take long to be satisfied that I had a very harmonious combination of yarn and pattern working together on my needles.

From 05.2010 Brandywine

And now I’m done! And I have a beautifully light small shawl that I will be able to enjoy all summer.

From 05.2010 Brandywine

A pause in my life

2010-05-14T13:56:00.001-04:00

A law of blogging: the more you have to blog about, the less likely you are to have enough time to blog.

My life has been very full with work and preparations for surgery. The surgery has now happened and I have recovered to the point of being out of pain with no pain pills required. I will be out of work on medical leave for three more weeks - a pause for some reading, some knitting, and some thinking during the glorious days of May.

This past week I went to Fletcher Allen Health Center in Burlington, Vermont, and had a laproscopic hysterectomy. As usual, immersion in the alternate culture of modern medicine was an interesting experience. Every hospital is different, and FAHC is my favorite one so far.

The hospital is a full fledged teaching hospital, rife with med students and residents, but without the underlying feeling of stress that I sense at Strong Memorial Hospital, the other teaching hospital that I know. Every contact that I had with every level of staff was friendly, polite, and kind. The courtesy wasn’t just given to me, either. My roommate was recovering from cardiac bypass surgery, and didn’t seem to completely understand her care. She also was impatient with the pace of her recovery, fretting that numbness in her leg now meant she might lose the ability to drive. I listened as staff explained and reassured over and over, and never once heard anyone lose patience with her.

Then there was the menu. Instead of a xeroxed piece of paper on which you circle the most attractive (or least unappealing) choice, there is room service. Seriously. You pick what you want from a standard menu, phone in your order, and a half hour later your meal is delivered to your bedside. The choices include pecan crusted trout, seafood risotto, vegetarian lentil soup, mushroom ravioli, roast turkey, cream cheese brownies, and homemade pumpkin custard. My roommate didn’t like the choices, her comment was “the menu never changes.” I was sad that I was only able to try a few of the items. My verdict: quite good for institutional cooking.

The pace of my recovery is amazing. Be operated on one day, go home in relative comfort the next. I have three small incisions on my belly that are sealed with a clear glue. The internal work is also sealed up, and I’m not using any pads. Now that I have stopped taking the narcotics, my thoughts are clear. I’m sleeping well. I’m eating well. I’m feeling pretty darn well.

Meme of the Day: First order from Amazon.com

2010-05-03T22:24:00.003-04:00

From Ezra Klein comes this meme (and of course he got it from someone else): "go to your Amazon orders page, and see what the very first thing you ordered from Amazon was."

It looks like my first purchase was December 5, 1998. I bought an imported recording of "J.S. Bach's Preludes & Fugues V.2" performed by John Lewis as a Christmas present for my father.

I don't know if I ever heard that CD. I bet it's a good one.

Wow. 1998. That's a pretty long-term relationship with a company.

Another milestone of parenthood: Moving day

2010-04-29T21:16:00.000-04:00

R. and I just took two days away from our workweek to go to Montreal. No hot jazz music or luscious dinners out or very comfortable hotel rooms this time. We were there to do a job: to move our daughter from one apartment to another. This job had another dimension besides the physical labor. It marked the end of an era.

A. has been living in above-average student housing. For three years she has rented a space in a building that is in essence a private dorm. It’s been very convenient, only a few minutes from campus. The building is well-maintained and fully equipped with recycling facilities, laundry room, and a full-time manager-in-residence who has a real talent for judging people accurately on first contact. Jill decided right away she wanted A. in her building, and made it possible to rent a tiny studio that first year, plus matched her up with a roommate and a bigger, better place for her second and third years.

Now that A. is moving on to grad school, she felt ready to move out of the McGill Ghetto (yes, that’s what people call her former neighborhood). She and a long-time friend, also a soon-to-be McGill grad student, decided to find a place together in Notre-Dame-de-Grace, a lovely residential neighborhood west of downtown. They struck gold on their first look around on Craigslist. Let me describe the place: three bedrooms, large living room, refinished hardwood floors, freshly painted and patched walls, new kitchen, new appliances, all for $850 per month INCLUDING heat and hot water. Plus the bus stops right in front of the building, and a lively commercial district with a good supermarket is only a couple blocks away.

Everything worked out. Jill found new tenants for A.’s old place, releasing her from her lease on May 1. The new landlord said she could move in a few days early. So the evening of R.’s birthday and A.’s last final of the semester, we drove up to move her.

We got one unpleasant surprise on Tuesday when we reconnoitered the new place: the renovations were not yet complete, and the kitchen was still completely gutted. The contractors seemed to be milling about rather aimlessly as well. A. let them know that she was moving in that day, and we took off to pick up the rental van.

I have certain anxieties that I cannot shake. One is driving in urban areas, especially congested ones with crazy drivers. Montreal meets all of those criteria. So when it fell to me to reserve a rental vehicle for the moving, I decided the thing to rent would be a cargo van, like plumbers and the like use. And that is what I thought I reserved.

What I actually reserved is a panel van which is one of those U-Haul type trucks with the huge box on the back - in this case a 12 foot box. I was immediately horrified, convinced all sorts of calamities were imminent. Fortunately R. seemed to be OK with driving it, which was good, because I had no intention of driving anything if I could get someone else to take the wheel.

It turns out that renting that truck was the most brilliant thing I did for this particular adventure.

First of all, when you are driving a big truck, everyone stays away from you.

Second, you don’t have to worry about the fact that there is practically no legal place to park in the area where A.’s old apartment is. When you are driving a vehicle that says “moving day”, you can park anywhere you want, and no one tells you to leave.

Third, we were able to move all of the furniture and practically everything else in one trip. If we had had three more boxes, we could have moved everything. Getting it done in one trip is especially good when you are moving during a slushy late spring snow storm and are relying on friends to help. I must say, A. makes friends with some very good people.

After unloading the truck, our intrepid group found a safe place to stash the truck - hooray for Walmart parking lots! - and filled ourselves up with very good pizza. The day was not over yet. We managed to buy a new bed, collect the remaining items at the old apartment, pick up the cat, turn in the keys, and go back to the new apartment, where the three of us collapsed.

We managed to wake up on Wednesday before the contractors and landlord arrived. By the time we headed home, we had assembled two beds and a small desk, and had pushed some of the chaos into a more seemly shape. Only so much could be done, though, with no kitchen in place. By the time we headed home, the contractors had installed a kitchen floor and promised that the cabinets would be installed the next day. What was left to do was all the putting away that A. would want to do for herself. Let’s face it, most of us want to put our clothing and dishes away ourselves in the places we choose for them, and we don’t want our mothers swooping in and organizing our possessions for us.

It all went really well. R. and I were both able to butt out - to let A. make the decisions, and to let her deal with the situation with her landlord and the tardy contractors. We were there to support our daughter in her life, and she is perfectly capable of making good choices. It truly is her life now. I’m so glad that she wants us to be part of it.

Workin' on it

2010-04-03T10:02:00.000-04:00

The word is out: to maintain weight, women need to exercise one hour per day. This is especially true if you aren’t going to live on a perpetual diet.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/03/23/health/AP-US-MED-Middle-Aged-Spread.html
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/303/12/1173?home

I’m a foodie who watches what she eats, but who wants to eat food that is delicious. I’m relatively slim for my demographic (late 50’s). I’m the person this study is talking about. And I have watched the pounds steadily increase, and the excess fat start to cluster in my midsection.

An hour of exercise per day is daunting, but it is a goal that is easy to measure. It is also a goal that sets healthy priorities for my life, from work to play.

Once upon a time, I used to get my exercise over my daily lunch hour. When I worked at a small conference center, I took my dog to work with me. He and I would go for a long walk together at lunch. Later, when I worked in town, it was easy to go for a walk through village neighborhoods, or to do errands on foot. These days I work in the country along a road that terrifies me when I think of walking along it. Shoulders are narrow, there is no shade, and there is a steep drop-off from the road to swampy lawn. Traffic comes hurtling down the road at 50-60 miles per hour. Add to that my MS, and the weakness I develop when I walk in the heat of the day. There is no way that I am going to take lunch hour walks along State Highway 68.

R. and I have been pretty consistent at starting our day doing 20 minutes of yoga along with Rodney Yee. When I feel the cumulative difference those simple exercises make with how my joints feel, I consider this exercise to count towards my daily goal. So 20 minutes are done before breakfast.

I insisted upon getting a Wii Fit for Christmas. We are both using it more consistently. R. thought it was silly at first, but he has programmed a yoga and strength building workout that he likes, and does it almost every day.

As for me, my goal is to alternate Wii Fit workouts, Pilates, aerobic dance, and walking to fill out my hour. The Wii Fit works well on a workday, and weekends will be for variety.

My variety yesterday came from firewood moving. We are moving wood put up two years ago in our storage woodshed up to the woodshed on the back of the house, and stacking wood cut this year in its place. There will be more of that today. I hope I hold up better today. Yesterday I felt like a golem from David Brin’s Kiln People, running out of elan.

As for the Pilates: I am having surgery next month. The better shape my core is in, the quicker I will recover. Pilates is on the menu today, and on as many days as I can fit it in.

An hour a day. Measurable. Attainable in a healthy way of living, where there is enough time to do your work, have some fun, and take care of yourself. An hour a day.

Knitting Blog: The Stained Glass Shawl, Finished

2010-03-27T20:54:00.001-04:00

I use Ravelry.com to keep track of my knitting projects. Each project has a series of pages, with information about the yarn used, the needle size, photos, rating of difficulty, and comments. You also can record the date you start and the date you finish a project. That is how I know that I started this shawl on July 2, 2009 and finished it on March 18, 2010.

That’s 37 weeks, exactly - I started and ended on a Thursday. That’s a long time for me to have one project on the needles.

I already knew that knitting means math. Awareness of math can certainly help you look ahead in a project, and know what is coming. The end of this project drove that point home. I started with 6 stitches. Due to the inexorable growth that results from adding 6 stitches every other row in the body of the shawl and 178 stitches every other row in the ruffled edge, I ended up with 2,497 stitches, give or take a few.

This is what it looks like to work on a project that has a couple of thousand stitches or so.

I confess, I was happy to come to the last stitch.

It took a long time to do the final cast-off, longer than it should have. I didn’t do the math. The math of a cast off is that one wrap of yarn around the needle equals approximately the yarn needed for one cast-off stitch. If you are running low on yarn, it is wise to wrap the yarn you have left to see if you have enough; you wrap a goodly sized sample, say 25 stitches or so, measure the amount of yarn used, and calculate if there is enough yarn left. If you are doing a picot cast off, which adds little points to the bottom edge, each picot needs the equivalent of about 4 stitches worth of yarn. If you are doing a picot every four stitches, you double the yarn requirement needed to cast-off.

I didn’t do the math, and TWICE I found myself realizing after I had bound off part of the bottom edge that I did not have enough yarn. Each time I unknit one row. It was a hard moment when I realized that second time that I STILL did hot have enough yarn. If I had done the math, I would have unknit two rows in the first place, and saved myself a *few* hours of my life.

The shape of the shawl is a half-hex fichu, which consists of three triangles side by side. It’s a Victorian style, and very flexible. It can be worn draped over the shoulders and open in front or can be wrapped around the shoulders. The wrapped style is great worn on the outside of a jacket.

This shawl is worth every minute of time I devoted to it. The fabric is heavenly. The yarn is 70% alpaca 30% silk, and is dreamily soft. The shawl is almost weightless, and surprisingly warm. And the ruffled edge is to die for. I may never make another one on a fine gauge shawl. but I am very glad I stuck to the pattern and made this one.

Here it is, blocked on wires. It’s rather uncanny that the colors of my blocking mats happen to be the same colors in the shawl’s colorway.

And here it is on me - front, back, and draped across the front.

I wore it to Montreal last weekend when we went to the Louis Comfort Tiffany exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. So appropriate - the name of the colorway is “Stained Glass”. I felt like a work of art worthy to be in the same room as Tiffany’s exquisite objects.

The pattern was designed by Jane Sowerby, an expert on Victorian lace knitting. It is published in the Summer 2008 issue of Knitter's Magazine as the "Curacao Blue Shawl". There are two more half-hex fichus designed by her in that issue, and I want to make both of them.

Education: Response to Twitter Conversation

2010-03-13T19:25:00.000-05:00

A few days ago my Twitter friends Lenore_Happenstance, Booalready, and ailec were bouncing some thoughts around about education on Twitter. The thread was sparked by the news of the draconian budget cuts and school closings about to happen in Kansas City, Missouri. Ailec challenged us to suggest what we think could improve the state of education in this country.

My thoughts on education are difficult to compress into 140 characters, even if I were to generate a stream of updates.

I believe in public education. I believe that it is appropriate for our society to educate all of our children in safe, technologically adequate schools staffed by well trained and dedicated teachers. I believe that teachers should be paid salaries commensurate with investment of time and expense we demand they make in their education. I pay my school taxes each year without complaint, and believe that whether or not I have a child attending school, I benefit when children are educated. They are the future of our civilization and culture.

The local school has a good reputation in our area. It’s a small school with fewer than 700 students and a student to teacher ration of 12:1. We’re not an affluent town (almost 60% of the students get a free or reduced lunch) and we are not diverse (about 98% white). A statistic of importance: 35% of the local high school graduates go to college. That is not a thrilling statistic when, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national rate is 68.6%, almost twice the rate our school produces. The kids that go on to college, though, hold their own at very good schools. I’ve met several of them over the years.

So, what did we do when it came time to educate our child? We opted out of sending her to the local public school, and kept her at home. For the most part, her classroom was our dining room table. The first time she set foot in a formal classroom, she was 16 years old and a junior in high school, and that classroom was at a local university. We didn’t do this because we knew the statistics I list above, it was simply what we wanted to do, and we thought we had the skills and time needed to pull it off.

A. had a rigorous education. We enrolled her in accredited distance learning programs, and she had teachers, assignments, and grades. She studied all of the subjects included in a classical education - English, literature, history, mathematics, science, art, and music. She learned to diagram sentences and wrote her first research paper in sixth grade. She wrote, and wrote, and wrote, pages upon pages every week. Her school day was shorter but more concentrated than schools can manage, and her school year tended to be longer. She had quite a bit of unstructured time most days to pursue her own interests.

What did we give her? A lot of attention, and standards. Mistakes were OK (I think, I hope), but sloughing off was not. We also gave her the opportunity to spend a lot of time with adults. We were involved. Our goal was to teach her how to teach herself.

My answer to the question about how we can fix our schools begins with the proposition that we have everything we need right now to do so. We don’t need lots more money or technology. What we need is parental involvement. Not adversarial involvement that says “my kid’s always right” whenever a child comes a cropper in some way, but attention to the skills needed to learn anything, interest in the work that children do as they learn, and standards.

As Diane Ravitch has discovered, our schools are not marketplaces. She is giving interviews saying that schools need to be like families. I think our schools need families, too, that value education and make it a priority in life at home as well as in school.

Check-off list

2010-03-07T19:21:00.000-05:00

Taxes finished and filed - check!
Reservations made for A.'s graduation ceremony - check!
Laundry done - check!
Exercised twice this weekend - check!
Spent time having fun with family - check!
Caught up on my sleep - check!
And, 70 sections of ruffle (about 1,960 stitches) left to bind off, which means 19 sections done. That's over 20%. I'll get some more knitting time in tonight as well.

Two days of sunshine - check! It's so early to get a taste of spring in these parts, but there is no doubt that a change is coming. For one thing, the maple syrup makers are having a glorious run, and are boiling sap. It seems early for maple season to be happening. Could we really be having an early spring this year?

All in all a very good weekend, though not one that leads to deep thoughts. I could use a few more days like this.

Time is ticking along

2010-03-02T22:07:00.000-05:00

Life truly abhors an empty moment, and if you spend less time writing, very soon you will find that you have less time to write.

What have I been up to in recent days?

I've been diligent at work. This is easy to do at the beginning of the year, when year-end closing tasks lie thick all around me, and I add free tax preparation to my other duties. My ongoing struggle to get in earlier and get out earlier is starting to get easier. I find it easier to get in earlier than to shut down the computer and get out of the chair at the end of the day, but working late isn't as QUITE late as it used to be.

I was finally casting off the stitches of my shawl. This project grew in scope when I decided, at the point the pattern said to add the ruffled edging, to make it longer. I'm knitting at a tighter gauge than specified, which seems to suit the yarn beautifully, and there was too little shawl and too much leftover yarn at the designated ending point. I say "was" casting off, because at about the 25% mark, I realized that I was going to run out of yarn. So it's tink, tink, tink back a row - which is undoing stitches one by one, the opposite of knit, knit, knit. Because I kept the ruffled edge in the original design, I am experiencing the consequences of what happens to a bottom edge when you increase each section of ruffle from 6 to 28 stitches over 22 rows. When I finally resume actually performing a picot bind-off, I will be working 2,497 stitches. Epic!

This is why applied mathematics is a useful skill. Several other knitters took the time to do the math, and decided to omit the ruffle. It is only now that I understand why.

A. was home last week for Reading Week, McGill's version of winter break. She had lots of studying to do, and kept hard at it all week. We did make a foray to Fiber Options to pick up our prize for winning "Most Fun" in the TAUNY hat competition. We were expecting a gift certificate for $20-25. What we were given was a princely gift of $50 worth of anything in the store. We found two skeins of very lovely yarn as our prize. One is 900 yards of fingering-weight hand-painted silk noir from the Great Adirondack Yarn Company, and the other is 875 yards of a lovely green lace-weight 70% baby alpaca, 30% silk from Alpaca With a Twist. Each of these is enough to make two smaller scarf-size shawls. The plan: we'll each knit a scarf, then swap yarn. I'll start with the silk, and knit the Brandywine Shawl designed by Romi. I'll knit the famous Ishbel scarf designed by Ysolda with the green yarn. I bought both of these patterns very recently because the designers gave most of the money from my purchases to Doctors Without Borders to support relief work in Haiti.

The week ended with my recognition that R and I are almost all of the way through one of those major life changes that come with the passage of time. We realized with a shock that we will never claim our daughter as our dependent ever again on our income tax return.

Darn. Just when the income tax credit for education expenses improved.

Ah well, we'll still have the memories of childhood, the boxes of art work, and the student loan interest deduction... and no wish to turn back the clock. Every stage of my daughter's growing has always been my favorite one at the time it was happening, and now my favorite one is her observant, funny, smart, skeptical, and focused adulthood. She understands why I love beautiful yarn.

Knitting Blog: Dragonskin Socks, a free pattern!

2010-02-17T23:04:00.006-05:00

And now, I am proud to present: my very first knitting pattern.

These were knit for a friend. I'm pleased to say that they fit him perfectly. R. was kind enough to model the socks for the photos.

I learned one thing: it's best to avoid bright colors if you want to patterned knitwear. I fiddled with the contrast in PhotoShop, but the pictures are far from perfect. I hope that you can see the patterning on your monitor.

Many thanks to my daughter A. for creating the chart in Illustrator for me!

Dragonskin Socks

Sock design by Anita Figueras. Dragon Skin stitch pattern from page 136 of Barbara Walker’s A Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns (Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY, 1970).

Size: Men’s Large, for a foot that wears a size 11 shoe. A closely fitting sock about 8” in circumference at the instep and about 11” long at the foot.

Materials:

2+ skeins of Regia 4fædig Fingering Weight Yarn, 75% wool 25% polyamid, 50 g., 210 m. “+” means I had to use about 24” of a third skein of yarn to finish the second sock; I had 8” of yarn left over with the first sock.

Needles:

Size 1 U.S. (2.25 mm), two 16” circular needles or size needed to obtain gauge.

Gauge:

32 stitches and 46 rows to 4” (10 cm) over stockinette stitch

26 stitches of dragonskin pattern = 2.75” (7 cm)

The sample socks were knit on two circular needles. The pattern can be adapted to double-pointed needles or the magic loop method.

I used the M1 method of putting a twisted loop on the right hand needle because I found that it distorted the pattern less than making a stitch from the ladder between stitches on the previously knitted row. You, the knitter, have the freedom to choose the increase method that gives you the result you like best.

For those who hate to purl, you get a lot of rich patterning here for just 4 purl stitches every other round, excluding the obligatory purling encountered at the creation of the heel flap and turning of the heel.

Men’s size:

Cast on 72 stitches using long tail cast on. K2P2 rib for 1 inch, approx. 12 rows. On the last row of ribbing, shift a purl stitch from the right-hand end of each needle to the left-hand end of its neighboring needle, so that the first pattern row begins with a stitch whose parent is a purl stitch. The parent of the second stitch will be a knit stitch.

Begin the pattern, starting on row one of the chart. Repeat pattern until sock is about 7 inches long, ending with either Row 1 or Row 7.

Work heel over half of the stitches (36 sts), and hold the instep stitches.

Heel Flap:

Row 1: *Sl 1 purlwise, K 1*, repeat over half of the stitches, increasing 1 st as a K1 stitch at the center of the heel, K last stitch – 37 sts total.

Row 2: Sl 1^st stitch purlwise, purl 36 sts.

Row 3: *Sl 1 purlwise, K1*, repeat until last stitch, K1.

Repeat Rows 2 & 3 for 48 rows until heel flap is about 3” long, ending with Row 2.

Turn Heel:

Continue in Sl 1 K 1 as established on outer side, purling inner side. This continues the reinforced heel stitch around the bottom of the heel.

Row 1: S1 1, work in established pattern for 22 sts, SSK, K1, turn (12 sts left unknitted).

Row 2: Sl 1, p 8, p2 tog, p1, turn (12 sts left unpurled).

Row 3: Sl 1, work in established pattern till 1 st before the gap left by the turn on R1, SSK, K1, turn. Note: if 2^nd stitch is also a SL 1 stitch, you will have to K 2 sts, then resume the Sl1, K1 pattern.

Row 4: Sl 1, P until 1 st before the gap left by the turn on R2, P2tog, P1, turn.

Repeat rows 3 & 4 until no sts remain unworked at the end of a R4 – 23 sts total

Create gussets and resume working instep:

K 10, K 2 tog, K 11, pick up and knit 24 sts along edge of heel flap, M1 at the join of the instep and heel sts.

Switch to the needle holding the instep sts and knit across the instep, resuming pattern at R2 or R8.

With needle holding heel sts, M1 at join of instep & heel sts, pick up and knit 24 sts along edge of heel flap, knit across back of heel. 108 sts total.

Continue sock by knitting all heel and gusset sts and knitting instep in established pattern. Decrease gusset by SSK the first two sts and K2tog the last 2 stitches of the needle with the heel sts every other row. You will be either decreasing on the pattern row of the instep, or on the plain knit row; if you have followed the pattern exactly so far, your decreases will happen on the plain knit row. Which one isn’t important, but knowing which one will help you keep track of whether this is a decrease row or not. Continue gusset decreases until 36 sts remain on heel needle (72 sts total).

Knit in established pattern until sock is about 2” shorter than the desired length, ending on either Row 1 or Row 7 of the pattern. Sample was 8.75” at this point.

Toe Decreases:

Row 1: K 1, SSK, K till 3 sts remain on needle, K2Tog, K1, repeat on second needle. 4 sts decreased.

Row 2: K all sts

Repeat rows 1 & 2 until 12 sts remain on each needle,.

Graft toe using Kitchener stitch.

Weave in ends.

Know Hope?

2010-02-05T00:25:00.000-05:00

What an interesting week it's been.

It started with a call for help. A family member needed to go to the hospital, and so I cared for another household for several hours, bringing pizza, helping with homework, and keeping the home's fire burning. I'm hoping that this intervention happened at the right time to do some long-term good, but the healing (and growth) will be over time. Mo miracle pills here, although meds will surely be given.

That same evening I learned that another person who has become a member of the family has come under fire from a group of Internet trolls because he does volunteer work for a website that they despise. I've followed the tale on a public forum, and watched the trolls get breathtakingly close to pinning down their quarry, only to head off in the wrong direction. The whole story has played out with the rudeness and vindictiveness that I find nearly everywhere on the web where there is a forum or a comment box. This same rudeness and propensity to stick a blade in can be found on the back pages of the very website that is the focus of my friend's hard work, and the trolls' contempt. It fascinates me, and it turns my stomach. To quote my daughter, "I hate people". We certainly treat each other poorly, especially when we don't think we will be found out.

Then I listened to "New Normal?", a podcast published by RadioLab. Listen to this. Just trust me on this.

And I remembered Walden Two, a book with very profound influence over how I see the world and think human society functions. B. F. Skinner studied how behavior changes, and discovered that punishment doesn't work particularly well. Imagine a world where we didn't use punishment as a basic tool of social control. John Lennon sang about such a world once.

The very existence of RadioLab gives me hope for us all.

Tech Nattering

2010-02-02T21:33:00.000-05:00

I'm quite taken with the iPad.

I'm positive that if I had one in my hands, I would know just what to do with it. My dear husband also knows that, without me saying so to him.

I am currently suffering from technological obsolescence. My beloved PowerBook G4 just can't keep up anymore. The "whirling beachball of death" makes ever more frequent appearances and the fan runs as the machine struggles with the demands I make of it. Poor thing. Doomed to a life with Tiger, never to know Leopard. I carefully monitor the dock, knowing that it's important to run as few programs as necessary (and to keep the number of tabs in my browser down to the bare minimum I need for happiness).

There are plans afoot for an upgrade this spring. We will buy our daughter a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro as a graduation present from college, and she will give me her first generation MBP. I can look forward to a bigger screen, faster processor, more RAM. Like mine, her machine runs hot, but it will handle the load I put upon it quite nicely.

But a whole new paradigm is starting to gel, and I wonder if the MBP will be the last computer with keypad that I own.

I would love simply touching that cool, smooth glass, and watching it respond.

And R has lust of his own for that MBP, and suggested that maybe, just maybe, we should buy me a iPad, and let him inherit the MBP. So loving of him to make the offer, don't you think?

The technology hasn't moved to the sweet spot I need to make that choice - yet. I still need to keep a set of books and prepare tax returns. The iPad will have some work-like applications, but it's not yet fully equipped to take on the work of a digital life. I don't want two computers, just one (plus my iPhone) and I don't want to borrow R's computer whenever I have a serious bit of work to do.

Someday the MBP will struggle to keep up, the way the PB G4 does now. Maybe by then the iPad will have evolved through a few generations, and be ready for me, the way I am even now ready for it.

Knitting Blog: The Ice Queen

2010-01-20T21:07:00.003-05:00

I have been more persistent and consistent at my knitting endeavors. Two projects are lined up, jostling each other for blogging rights. Eenie, meanie, minie, moe... and I pick the project I finished last night at just about midnight, and wore for the first time today.

Enter: The Ice Queen.

This pattern was designed by Rosemary Hill, who is becoming a favorite designer of mine. It was published in the winter 2007 issue of Knitty.com, a free online knitting magazine of excellent quality. It's been a hit, with 1,277 project pages on Ravelry. First my daughter made it in a lovely gray, then she twisted my arm and made me buy the yarn to make one for myself. She also gave me the silver-lined beads needed to give the finished product the look of having been dusted with ice crystals. How could I say no?

The yarn is Kidsilk Haze from Rowan Yarns, and it's a blend of 70% super kid mohair and 30% silk. It's a premium product, and I am going to enjoy this piece. I'm also not going to rush out and buy more. My eyes itched and my nose ran while I knit this object. I won't say that I'm allergic to this yarn, but I suspect it sheds fine, irritating fibers.

It's warm. So very warm. So very pink.

My poor pashminas are wondering if they will end up languishing in my closet as I go out with the Ice Queen day after day.

Update Mid-January 2010

2010-01-16T13:45:00.000-05:00

I've been blogging lots about knitting things. It's time to take a break and talk about the rest of my life, with a little knitting still thrown into the mix.

*** WORK ***

It's January, and I'm an accountant, so I'm busy contending with multiple screaming deadlines. And I'm just fine.

I started the year with a resolution of sorts. I've become a drift-in-kinda-late-stay-even-later kind of employee. My resolution has been to get in earlier, spend less time being distracted during the work day, and to leave the office at a reasonable time each day. I am doing better! I'm still putting in 9 hour days, but that's hard to avoid this time of year. I am getting home early enough to feel like I have a life at the end of the work day.

My desk has never looked neater during year-end.

The uncompleted boxes on January's checklist are still numerous, and I have to put a chunk of work ASAP into getting our VITA tax prep program up and running. I'm confident, though, that I'll make my deadlines with some room to spare.

As to VITA, I can't do it alone. I've done what I could to inspire others to work with me on the program. If no one ele is able to make it a priority in her or his schedule, so be it. If all I can put together is a mediocre program as a result, I can live with that. The amount of training - on personal time, not paid time - that the program requires is daunting, and I cannot fault anyone who does not want to take on the commitment.

*** HEALTH ***

The bad habits I got in to with my work schedule have had a ripple effect. Getting home late means exercise gets short shrift and supper gets eaten at a late hour. Getting myself HOME at a reasonable hour will help me move my bones more, and feed us early enough so that dinner is digested before we go to sleep.

We got ourselves a Wii Fit for Christmas, and it's helping, and I like it. It may look kind of wimpy, but the exercises focus on balance and posture, and that's just what this 58-year old MS-affected body needs. So far it's fun, too. I do work up a sweat, and I'm feeling changes that tell me that muscles are toning up. We'll see if I can keep it up. Regular exercise seems to be the most difficult habit to make, and the easiest habit to break.

*** FAMILY ***

R's new duties as Town Supervisor are underway. I am amused that both of us are doing much the same kind of work, as he processes vouchers for payment and enters journal entries into the town's general ledgers. He's also just made a trip to Albany for the municipal power project. He's busy, busy, busy, and looking forward to when he gets settled into a new routine.

A is back at school, living the good life. She is waiting now for acceptance into grad school. It looks almost certain that she will be staying at McGill for a PhD in statistics. She has been told that her tuition will be paid and the department will find work for her so that she has a roof over her head and food on her table. It's a sweet deal, and she's taking it, and she's not going to fret about her bachelors and grad degrees all coming from the same institution. Who's going to look down their nose at a degree from McGill, any way?

Time to set up plans to get together with son and family. We had the best Christmas eve ever with them, and we need to spend more face time with them this year.

*** MY DIGITAL LIFE ***

I love my digital life, but find that it can distract me from things I need to do in my tangible life. Anyone else have that problem? I am spending less time on the computer (although between work and play, I still stare at a screen many hours a day), and I'm compartmentalizing my computer time. Less overlap between work and play. I'm trying not to circle around and around the same places.

What I want to read is authentic, honest material. This includes fiction clearly put forward as such; I love a good story. What it doesn't include is drama created to pull on my heartstrings and put forward as biography. This seems to me to be a type of stalking, one that thrives on unearned empathy.

*** KNITTING ***

I finished a pair of socks that are the very first design I've created. Their new owner has them, and they fit! I've written up the pattern, and will be publishing it as a gift to the world in the near future.

The process of creating the design was a fusion of a knitting pattern found in a book of stitch patterns published by Barbara Walker 40 years ago, a sizing template published by Cat Bordhi a couple of years ago, and everything I have absorbed about knitting socks by knitting many pairs over the years. I became unafraid of calling it "my" design when I discovered a stitch pattern in Walker's book that is the same as one used in a pattern published by Cookie A last year.

The nature of design is a melding together of many influences and past learning. Originality lies in the unique nature of a particular fusion, not in any uniqueness of any facet of the design.

My design is my melding, and I can raise my chin and claim it as my own.

*** LOST IDEAS ***

Lately a thought runs through my head, and I think "I should blog on that". Instead I do my work, or read Google Reader, or go to bed, and the thought does not get written down. Just like dreams, such thoughts tend to slip away.

Oh well, I'm no cosmic level thinker, and my thoughts have little power to change the world for the better or the worse.

One thought I do remember right now: perhaps Obama and Palin are two sides of the same coin to a certain extent. They are charismatic leaders, each of whom inspires trust in those who agree with their way of thinking, and distrust, even fear, in those who do not. Obama's way of thinking is based on scientific and scholarly thinking, and Palin's way of thinking is based on "common sense" and on religious precepts.

Because Palin makes me afraid for the future, I can understand what others feel about Obama.

Knitting Blog: Dying for Yarn Edition

2010-01-09T11:09:00.000-05:00

Parents are always happy when their kids end up liking what they like. One of the joys of 2009 for me is that my daughter has taken up knitting. In her case, she is focusing most of her efforts on the art of the sock.

A. has always been a person to dive into a pursuit completely, so she probably already understands sock patterns better than I do. I recently gave her some patterns. I look at them and say "ohhhh, pretty", she looks at them and says "this one creates a men's size with a cheat, this one needs to be resized...". After 25 years of knitting, I am learning from my daughter.

A. is interested in how sock yarns are dyed. While sock yarns do come in solid colors, there are lots of multicolored yarns out there as well, some of which create patterns as they are knit. Because she wants to take control of as many aspects of a pursuit as possible, and loves finding a cheaper way to acquire materials, she became interested in the idea of dying her own sock yarn. She asked us to give her a selection of Jacquard acid dyes and as much undyed "bare" wool sock yarn as her main Christmas present as we could afford. We were happy to oblige. She got one box with 11 jars of dye, and another with 8 100-gram skeins of sock yarn - 100% merino, 75% superwash merino with 25% nylon, and 70% merino with 30% silk.

And somehow Santa saw fit to put three skeins of bare sock yarn in a box under the tree for me, as well!

On the day after Christmas, the dying began. Our basic tools: freezer paper, plastic wrap, sponge brushes, mason jars, aluminum pie plates, latex gloves, white vinegar, and a large kettle.

A. calculated how much dye to mix for each batch of yarn. First, we soaked the yarn in water with some vinegar added. When the saturated yarn was taken out of the soaking water, it was placed in a colander set in a large bowl. A. measured how much water dripped out of the yarn as it drained and changed from soaking wet to damp. This amount of water is the amount of dye liquid that the yarn will be able to absorb.

First step in the process: lay out freezer paper where you will be mixing and applying the dyes. I also laid sheets of plastic wrap on the freezer paper where we would be laying out the yarn.

We then decided on our colorways, and A. mixed the dye in the mason jars. We used foam brushes to apply the dye to the yarn, squeezing it with our gloved hands to spread the color.

After we applied the color, we sprayed the yarn with a heavy dose of white vinegar. We folded the plastic wrap around the yarn and rolled each hank up into a spiral. The dyed yarn was then steamed for 30 minutes in a large kettle.

After steaming, we rinsed the yarn, spun it out in the washing machine, and hung it up to dry. And gloried in our results.

A.'s masterpiece is a hank of rainbow yarn. Here it is, from dying to dry to winding into a ball. My guess is that this yarn will knit up in narrow stripes of color, 1 to 2 rows per color.

My masterpiece is in tones of black, vermilion, and sky blue. It's the third hank of yarn above, where I show us applying color.

Will we dye yarn again? Most certainly. It was fun, and we love the finished product. Do I NEED to dye any yarn in the immediate future? NO! My stash of sock yarn officially overfloweth. I need to get some serious knitting done, and put these yarns where they belong, on some feet.

p.s. A signed copy of the book Teach Yourself Visually Hand-Dyeing by Barbara Parry was also under the Christmas tree for A. Another goodie that I picked up at Rhinebeck.

Knitting Blog: Gift Edition

2010-01-02T12:34:00.005-05:00

Usually I DO NOT knit many holiday gifts. I learned long ago that deciding to create gifts rather than buying them leads to lack of sleep and fevered behaviors as the deadline approaches. I don't avoid it entirely, but limit my goals to, let's say, one scarf or maybe a pair of socks for one family member.

This year I did more than usual. It was all set off by T (my future DIL), who said she only wanted one thing from me this Christmas - a neckwarmer. Neckwarmers are small scarves, usually buttoned, that nestle nicely into necklines and have no surplus fabric spilling over onto the bodice. She sent a picture of a suggestion, but I ended up settling on a completely different project after an hour or two of pattern searching on Ravelry.

FLOWER SCARVES

The pattern I chose is the Flower Scarf by Robyn Diliberto, and it has elements of strong appeal to me, as everything is crafted from yarn, even the button that holds it together. It is also lighthearted, dare I say cute. I knit three - one for T., one for my niece, and one for an Internet friend.

These are the ones for T. and my friend. The yarn was purchased at Rhinebeck from Autumn House Farm. T's is pure silk, and the other yarn is a cotton/merino/silk blend. They are hand-painted yarns, and the color patterns were a surprise.

The yellow version is for my niece, and is knit from a hemp/cotton/modal blend called Hempathy.

Making the flower was a fun exercise in math. I started with 9 stitches, and within 8 rows increased to 243 stitches. I divided the stitches between 3 cable needles; any fewer needles, and the stitches became so packed together, they were almost impossible to knit. The stitch count increases from 3^2 to 3^3 to 3^4 to 3^5 stitches in such a short distance, the fabric distorts and ruffles. The picture is right after the increase from 3^3 to 3^4 stitches.

A couple of pics of the projects installed on their new owners:

FRENCH PRESS FELTED SLIPPERS

Just to prove that I am not immune to knitting fashion, I also make a couple of pairs of felted slippers designed by Melynda Bernardi. This is one of the most downloaded patterns on Ravelry in recent weeks, and there are over 1,500 finished projects listed on Ravelry.

I gave one pair to T's daughter A, my newest grandchild. I was thrilled when they fit her perfectly!

The other pair is in the mail to my niece, and I am confident that they will fit as well.

Ms. Bernardi did an outstanding job of designing a pattern that fits the foot well. She also suggests using puffy paint on the soles to make them less slippery and this idea works like a charm!

Now that the holiday knitting season is officially over, I can resume the socks and shawl that wait patiently for me. Oh yes, there is also the deep pink Kidsilk Haze from my Christmas stocking that is longing to be transformed into a lace cowl - that will be pushed up in the queue, so I can enjoy the results while it is still cold enough to wear mohair.

Christmas Blogiversary

2009-12-25T18:40:00.001-05:00

It was on a Christmas day a few years ago that I wrote my first tentative blog post. As quiet as I have been of late, I cannot let the day pass without writing a few words.

I'm two days into my longest vacation break of the year - a week and a half off. Not that this break is totally free from work-related obligation - I have to study tax law and re-certify as a VITA tax preparer to get ready for another year of volunteer tax preparing. I am not sure if I will sign up for another year. I have few other volunteers to assist this year, despite my efforts to recruit others, and don't know if I really have the time and energy to squeeze this in to my schedule over the next few months.

This is cutting in to my knitting time! And after opening packages today, I have even more yarn to transform!

I'm still basking in the glow of one of the most wonderful Christmas Eves in many years. We went to our son's house for dinner and presents with him, his girlfriend, and all four grandkids. The felted slippers fit the 16-year old who is the most recent addition to the family, the kids played with their presents, T. loved her neckwarmer, and we gave our son an Apple iPhone Developer license so he can now go to town with the apps he wants to write. This is the first Christmas Eve we have ever been able to be together as a family. I hope there are many more ahead.

We are roasting a chicken for dinner. A. studded it with slivers of garlic and sage. We'll cook the giblets as a Christmas treat for the cats. Also on the menu: a brown-wild rice blend, salad, and pumpkin cheesecake.

Now we wait to see if we will have an ice storm tomorrow. Just the threat of ice brings back memories of Ice Storm '98 when we were trapped by downed trees for 2 days, and had no electricity for 19 days. The weather forecast is becoming less alarming, so with luck, we will have less ice than originally predicted. In any event, we have lots of food and fresh gasoline for the generator, so we will be comfortable. Very, very comfortable.

A Poem

2009-12-13T10:35:00.001-05:00

I understood something last night, and I wrote a poem. Yes, I see myself here. Maybe not forever, though. From understanding comes change.

She's there.

Like a spider,
hands touching the webs,
alert to any disturbance,
to any renewed presence.

Every time
Every time
You open your electric door
to greet your friends,

She's there.

Reflections After a Week of Brushfires

2009-12-12T08:22:00.002-05:00

I'm up much too early on a Saturday morning, in a good cause: feeding my niece pancakes. My brother-in-law drove through whiteouts to bring M. north so that she can audition at a local college's excellent music department. (I went there myself many moons ago, as did R.). They are off to the adventures of the day, and R. has gone back to bed. With coffee in my veins, sleep would elude me, so I will grab the quiet moment to reflect on recent events in writing.

Work, work, work. It has demanded much of my energy and focus for quite some time as we have grappled with a reduction in funding and a structural deficit. This week, the board of directors affirmed the path we think will lead the agency through hard times, "we" being the six-person leadership team. I have to deal with the hardest task that is at hand: the elimination of a half-time custodial position. I am the direct supervisor of the individual who will be laid off. Alas, he is poorly prepared in many ways to deal with the consequences of losing his job with our agency, and I am concerned by what he is saying to me. My ability to give him real help is very limited. Compassion is a tricky thing - empathizing with someone's plight does not mean that I have responsibility for his or her poor decisions. Nor does it mean that I should feel guilty when I cannot do what I cannot do.

I've had to have a fire extinguisher by my side at all times this past week as one brush fire after another burst into flames. I badly need a low pressure weekend to chill my jangled nerves. The "Dilbert" comic strip depicts accountants as trolls, and the field does tend to attract a certain personality type that is comfortable with the concepts of "enforcement" and clearly defined limits. That outlook doesn't work, though, in an organization in flux where everyone is making sacrifices. No raise in 2010, and we have to clean the bathrooms ourselves. The hammer is not an effective management tool in such times, not if you want positive morale, creativity, and forward thinking.

But the hammer is so close at hand, and it's so easy to think of it first when you think something, or someone, needs to be straightened out, or put into place. I admire the management skills of my boss more and more. He's able to stay calm (mostly), to listen, and to wait. Waiting is highly undervalued in the culture of the day.

At least even the routine at work seems fresh again, seen through new eyes and a spirit of renewed dedication. Yes, for all that I struggle to get myself in the door of office each morning, I am dedicated. Yes, I go through periods of slackness, but I am able to pull myself together and deliver what is needed when it is needed. I am very pulled together right now. May I hold on to this focused energy as I move through the busy weeks that lie ahead: tax preparation and year-end closing are coming soon.

And, may I blog next on a topic other than work.

December 4 Blog: Best Book

2009-12-04T15:34:00.000-05:00

December 4 Book. What book - fiction or non - touched you? Where were you when you read it? Have you bought and given away multiple copies?

I need to divide this blog into two parts: knitting and non-knitting. I'll take the non-knitting book first.

The best non-knitting book of the year for me is Lila by Robert Pirsig.

One reason is that it is the only non-knitting book I have read for pleasure this year. Indeed, it is the probably the only one since I started grad school in the fall of 2006. This is such a sad statement. It turns out that one of the downsides of working on a masters in public administration is that I had to read page upon page of dry, horribly written dreck. By the time I finished, I lost my joy of reading. It took the urging of a friend for me to open the pages of this book, and it took me months to read it.

Like Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the book is two journeys in one narrative. Phaedrus continues the philosophical journey he began in the first book while traveling towards the ocean on a sailboat. On the way, he lays out a fully developed metaphysics, tries to save a woman, and explores the nature of madness.

I can't seem to describe the metaphysics that Pirsig builds like an elegant stone wall without making a hash of it, so I won't try. I still have the book at my beside, and I will read it again in 2010 so that I can get a better grasp on the ideas.

There is an excellent description of the sensation of sex from a man's point of view, fascinating for this woman to read. There is also an amusing takedown of the way universities teach philosophy. Pirsig points out that what is really taught is philosophology, or the study of what philosophers have thought, with no room for students to engage in original thought and analysis.

The book left me feeling hopeful at the end. That alone means I want to wrestle again with its ideas. It has also been a private pleasure.

I spent more time with knitting books than any other genre over the past year. The best book of the year for me in this category is a kind of philosophical treatise itself: New Pathways for Sock Knitters, Book One by Cat Bordhi.

Take a look at your foot. If you were to measure it, you would discover that the widths are about the same around the midpoint of the foot and around the lower calf. This would imply that you could knit a tube and be done with it. The trouble is that the ankle in the middle is a lot wider, and requires extra fabric for a good fit. The traditional sock pattern solves this engineering problem by adding a wedge of fabric at each ankle, which also turns the sock and makes it L-shaped. Cat discovered that you don't have to add the extra fabric at the ankle - that you can add it on the top of the foot, on the bottom, all on one side, or evenly distributed around the sock. In this book she creates eight different sock architectures that play with the form of the sock and open up many creative possibilities for the adventurous knitter.

Bordhi, like Pirsig, is a truly original thinker. To encounter her ideas is to breath deeply of fresh air. I gave a copy of this book to my daughter.

December 3 Blog: Best Article

2009-12-03T07:51:00.000-05:00

December 3 Article. What's an article that you read that blew you away? That you shared with all your friends?

I've searched my bookmarks and blog posts to see if any article hit me hard this year, and came up with nothing.

The question implies to me an article that would change the way I see the world, or how I understood something. I don't think I encountered anything quite like that The bedrocks of my world view are what they were at the beginning of the year.

And what are they?

We live on a planet with a limited supply of everything, and have almost surely reproduced beyond the carrying capacity of the earth. I'm lucky, I'm going to be safely tucked away in my grave before the shit really hits the fan.

Everyone sees the world in the same way. Each of us is the center of the story that every human lives. Each of us has to learn to see how what we do affects everyone and everything else.

Actions have consequences, and those consequences shape future actions.

Change is possible, but it is hard work and is usually made up of tiny little steps that don't look like much when examined singly. It also usually takes longer than expected.

I am one of the most fortunate people ever to be born on this planet. I live in a peaceful place with clean air and clean water. I have a warm home and more of everything than I need. Medical interventions have saved my life twice, and a miracle drug fends off my MS. I am living at the cusp of the fossil fuel economy, where energy is cheap and plentiful. To sum up in six words, "Right time, right place, sheer luck".

If I find an article that changes any of these beliefs, you can be assured that I will come back and blog about it.

#best09 on Twitter

December 2 Blog: Best Restaurant Moment

2009-12-02T22:03:00.001-05:00

AiiiYiiiYiii. What a day. Such a mix of effectiveness and ineffectiveness. I'm starting to get some of the computers at work ready for the great email migration, and getting a whole lot of work done, and spending very little time bonding with my iPhone, so there I am, feeling effective. And then I go to do a tax preparer training for the VITA program I am coordinating, and *ONE* person shows up.

Plus there are additional revenue cuts, this time from NY state, on the horizon... that news has been expected, and it came down today.

So it is a pleasure to turn away from my workaday world to:

December 2 Restaurant moment. Share the best restaurant experience you had this year. Who was there? What made it amazing? What taste stands out in your mind?

I was so lucky to have some great restaurant meals. It's hard for me to settle on which one was the best.

Was it the meal at Aroma Restro in Kingston, Ontario, with R. and Sharkey? I am remembering a salad that was chock full of macadamia nuts, a perfectly cooked piece of pickerel, and a very nice Ontario red wine - I so wish I could remember the name of the variety, but such details escape me.

Was it the meal at an excellent restaurant in Cape Cod, where we celebrated our daughter's impending majority with my father and stepmother? A. wasn't quite legal yet, but she sipped at a glass of excellent wine. The server was very impressive, able to rattle off long lists of details about elegant food. It's the kind of restaurant that serves lamb. I remember a fish cake with wasabi mayonnaise and mango salsa.

The best meal was probably when we took A. to The 1844 House after she turned 21. This time she proudly presented her driver's license to prove that she was eligible to have a wine glass in front of her plate. The meal was excellent, a tasty red wine, perfectly cooked chicken with fiddleheads, a salad of greens with the right amount of bitterness, a dessert of peach cobbler. We ate it outside in a screened porch, and basked in sunshine and warmth. The strongest flavor was the sweetness of having raised our daughter to adulthood, and feeling like we have done a pretty darn good job of it.

We won't have another chance to taste that particular flavor again in that particular way.

#best09 on Twitter

December 1 Blog: Best Trip of the Year

2009-12-01T23:03:00.003-05:00

I may have found a way back into writing again. I can't or don't want to write about much of what I am doing right now for several reasons. My poor brain isn't coming up with other subjects. I can take inspiration from Gwen Bell, however, and write about the best parts of my 2009.

December 1 Trip. What was your best trip in 2009?

To be a really good trip, there must be an element of challenge. The trips we make over and over, to work, to parents' homes, to visit children, become more comfortable as they become more routine, but there will rarely be enough excitement to lead a trip to rise to the top of the experiential heap.

Sailing to Kingston at the end of August started out with much of the comfortable routine of driving to visit family. We have spent a lot of time on the Canadian Middle Channel, and sailed to Kingston many times over the past five years. This time was special.

We went to the Limestone City Blues Festival for the first time in three years. Just give me some live rowdy music and I'm very happy.

We were social animals, hanging out with a group of boaters and their extended network.

I met Sharkey, and discovered that he is great company on an adventure.

Finally, we pushed our limits on the trip home. We sailed on the lake on a blustery gray day, and spent many hours with the elements, trusting our sturdy boat to get us back to port safe and sound. It didn't hurt that Robert is an excellent skipper and that Sharkey is a natural at the helm. We had a snafu or two along the way, and I have to repair a torn sail this winter because I didn't pull on a sheet at the right time. We got to experience boredom, excitement, an adrenaline rush or two, and righteous exhaustion.

And we saw a rainbow on the way back to the house, after Minuet was safely tied up at the slip.

I think back to that trip, and realize again that successful sailing does not mean that you prevail against the elements. It means that you learn how to work with the elements to accomplish your purpose.

It's a lesson that can serve me well as I cope with the storms I'm sailing through in other parts of my life right now.

Tagged on Twitter as #best09.

An offering: Holiday Bread

2009-11-24T18:29:00.001-05:00

I am struck dumb these days. Most of what busies my days either cannot be talked about in a blog, or has already been talked about by me in previous posts. I am not about to start whining, so it's easiest to remain silent. Suffice to say, the work is going as well as could be expected under the circumstances.

I can't write about my knitting either, since I am mostly knitting gifts for people who read my blog. Posts will have to wait until after the items have been finished and given away.

I do have something to offer, however: my recipe for holiday bread. I am making a batch tonight to take tomorrow to Cape Cod, where we will celebrate one of the best holidays of the year with my father and stepmother. I do love Thanksgiving, because all we need to give is a hearty appetite and appreciation for the wonder that is our lives, right now and right here.

This recipe has evolved from the one my mother used to make a wreath kuchen every year for Christmas breakfast. Once I learned how to make bread and had a kitchen of my own, I asked her for the recipe. I immediately started tweaking it. The recipe has evolved from all white flour to half whole wheat, from candied citron to dried fruit, to different spices, to more fruit and nuts and less fat. At this point, I feel that the recipe is my own contribution to the world of eating. We eat it every year for Christmas breakfast, and I bake it as gifts for friends. I offer the recipe as my gift to the world at the beginning of this holiday season.

Ingredients:

2 scant Tbsp rapid rise yeast
1 c. warm water
1/2 c. butter
1/2 c. sugar - I prefer brown
2 eggs
1 tsp salt
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground ginger
2 Tbsp lemon juice
2 1/2 c. unbleached flour
2 c. whole wheat flour
1 c. chopped mixed dry fruit
1 c. chopped mixed nuts

Step 1: Make a sponge.

Whisk together warm water, yeast, and one cup unbleached flour. Cover and put in a warm place to rise for about one half hour.

When it's ready, it will look very bubbly, like this:

Step Two: Chop fruit and nuts.

Chop up whatever appeals to you, or whatever you have in your cupboard. The mixture this year: organic raisins, dried cranberries, dried figs, walnuts, almonds, and pecans.

I tend toward a polyglot little-of-everything approach to fruit and nuts. Sometimes I wonder if simplicity would yield an interesting, more focused flavor. What about dried cherries and almonds? Or cranberries and pecans? Maybe I'll try that next year. This year, I am into diversity.

Step Three: Mix and knead the dough.

You can start this step while you are chopping the fruit and nuts if you are using an electric mixer.

Beat the butter until soft.
Beat in sugar gradually.
Add eggs, one at a time.
Add salt, ground coriander, and ground ginger.
Add lemon juice. Note: the main purpose of this is to acidify the dough, and enhance the development of gluten. This helps the bread to rise, especially when using whole wheat flour.
Add the sponge. Beat until all ingredients added so far are well blended.
Gradually add 1 1/2 cups unbleached flour. Beat for a while after all has been added, until you can see strands of gluten forming.
Gradually add whole wheat flour.
Add fruit and nuts.
Turn out on a bread board and knead until the dough is smooth, and the fruit and nuts are evenly distributed. The dough should be slightly sticky. Try to add as little additional flour as possible.

The finished dough:

Let rise, covered, about 1/2 hour.

Step Four: Shape and bake loaves.

The recipe makes two wreathes, four loaves, or one wreath and two loaves.

For a wreath, divide in half, then divide the half into three pieces.

For loaves, divide in half, then in half again, then into three pieces.

Roll each piece into a long rope with your hands. When you have three ropes, braid them together. Try to tuck pieces of fruit on the surface underneath, so that they do not overbake.

For a loaf, tuck the ends of the braids under to make a smooth finish at the ends.

For a wreath, bend the braid into a circle, and join the ends together. If you are careful, you can join the braid so that the join is not noticeable.

Place the braided breads on greased cookie sheets.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

When the oven is hot, in about 15 minutes, put the loaves in.

Bake thirty minutes, rotating the loaves half way during the backing time for even browning.

Remove and cool on racks.

Here is the finished product! First, the loaves:

These are great for gifts for friends with small families, or as hostess gifts when going to a party.

And the piece de resistance - the wreath:

The original recipe glazed the bread with a powdered sugar glaze. I prefer to give and eat the bread without the frosting. It pushes the flavor away from sweetness, and towards richness. You can eat it with brie, with cream cheese, with butter - and with nothing added.

I am thankful that I will not show up at the feast empty handed. I will take bread with me as well when we visit our family in Rochester next weekend. I hope that the pleasure of eating matches the pleasure of making and of giving,

Challenged

2009-11-11T22:40:00.001-05:00

My professional life is rife with challenge right now. There be snakes hiding under rocks, and much need for discretion.

A few years ago I joined the board of a non-profit, and promptly was asked to be treasurer, as no one else knew anything about money. I contributed a lot over the years, and often felt that what I have learned was actually helpful to the organization. All for naught in the end. The agency lost the funding that was its financial foundation, and the board voted unanimously to dissolve. I am truly ambivalent about this decision. We finally found a talented Executive Director and with just a little more time, she may have dragged the organization (kicking and screaming) into organizational stability and a more secure future. We all ran out of time. And now I'm the one who is digging into what bills must be paid first, and thinking about how to responsibly dispose of all that paper.

At work the budget is still uncertain, as we still do not know how much we will be cut. The leadership team met for hours and hours last week, and put together a list of recommendations for our board that go beyond band-aids. We have band-aids upon band-aids right now. We are thinking about how we can restructure for sustainability.

One consequence of our discussions: we downsized our administrative assistant team from three to two people. And the consequence of that is that Accounts Payable is back in my desk drawers, and I am once again processing invoices for payment. All well and good, I have done A/P for so many years that I can practically do it in my sleep. It takes time, though. And I took on additional responsibility for technology coordination when a big chuck of A/P was assigned to another person. My tech duties are not going away.

Meanwhile, I have a big tech plan rolling right along. A consultant looked at our computers, and found a mishmash of operating systems installed on woefully underpowered machines. By the end of the year, everyone will have computers with 2 GB of RAM, be running Windows XP Pro, and will have Office 2007 installed on their computers. I've arranged all this for much less money than buying new computers, and most of it will be paid by grants.

My big challenge is not to do more with less. It is not to work more hours to get everything done. It is not to let this job continue to grow like topsy. Rather, it is to identify the parts of the work I do that can be pruned away. I must figure out how to do this job and still go home at a decent hour, so I can get some exercise, cook supper, read, watch a movie, knit, write.

Believe it or not, I think that this is a start.

News Flash from the Campaign

2009-11-04T08:26:00.000-05:00

R. won the race for Town Supervisor - 328 votes out of 639 votes cast.

The current Town Supervisor staged a write-in campaign in the last week before the election. Our county just switched to a scanned paper ballot, so write-ins are very easy. He got 202 votes, and was the second place finisher.

The conclusion must be that the insurgent campaign guaranteed R. the victory.

The insurgency in the NY-23 campaign had the same result, where Democratic candidate Bill Owens won. This result is gratifying to me; I couldn't do a lot to help R. in our town, so I worked as a volunteer in the Owens campaign.

The overall conclusion: if you are going to play with the fire of mounting an insurgent campaign, you had best be prepared to be burned.

RHINEBECK!

2009-10-25T09:03:00.004-04:00

A week ago, I was lost in the altfiber paradise affectionately nicknamed Rhinebeck (the official name is the NYS Sheep and Wool Festival). It is a huge event, so big that I have to break down the experience into subtopics. I still have a bit of glow left from the experience.

Getting There

The treasurer of non-profit I work for went last year, and wanted me to go with her this year. I told her I was in. Then I learned a few months ago on the Ravelry forums that a local woman was organizing a group trip, complete with chartered bus and a block of reserved motel rooms. I told my colleague, and she agreed that this was the way to go. So I contacted the organizer, reserved 2 spots on the bus, and reserved a room for two nights.

Close to the last minute, my colleague was no longer able to go. She asked me to find someone to take her place, saying that she did not expect reimbursement for the bus. She suggested that I take my daughter. A. would have gone in a flash, but she had two midterms coming up on the heels of the weekend. During the family Canadian Thanksgiving celebration, I had a sudden flash of inspiration, and invited our son's GF to go with me. T. agreed immediately. I now knew I would be traveling with a congenial companion, and a person who I wanted to get to know even better.

A chartered bus is the way to go if you can manage it. I traveled with a lovely group of knitters, spinners, and sheep people. We knit, chatted, and watched chick flicks on the bus's video system (The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood and Mamma Mia!. Meryl Streep is my hero.)

Staying There

We stayed at a lowish cost chain motel. It was fine for our purposes. Microwave and fridge in the room, comfortable beds, a coin operated laundry, and a decent free breakfast in the morning. At a killer price, too - on Saturday I reserved two rooms for next year, and the cost will be about 25% higher.

The motel was in Kingston, NY, about 20 minutes from Rhinebeck. On Friday, T. and I took a long walk together through town, and loved it. I think that economic developers need to rename their cities "Kingston" because now I know of two cities named Kingston that are fun to visit. Safe, too - there are sidewalks everywhere, even from the motel to a shopping mall. The downtown shopping district has lots of interesting stores, including a toy store (those are getting to be hard to find).

Eating There

T. was on a tight budget, so Friday night, when we still had energy, we went to the store and bought food for dinner for both nights we would be there. We stocked up on Kashi frozen dinners (delicious!), bananas, milk, iced tea mix, and plastic sliverware. When you are on the road, it feels pretty darn luxurious NOT to go out, and to eat dinner while stretched out on your bed in your jammies, watching something on the tube.

From the Ravelry forums, I knew that Rhinebeck has certain status foods. People wait in line for an hour for chicken pot pie, and the ultimate prize is the artichoke booth, which often sells out. I work for Cooperative Extension, though, so there was only one place for me to eat: the 4-H booth. On Saturday I scored lamb chili in a bread bowl, and I waited way less than an hour. On Sunday I was running low on cash, and settled for a cheeseburger. Next year (geesh, already I'm talking about next year) I will stick with the 4-H for Saturday, and do one of the legendary foods on Sunday, when crowds and lines are smaller.

Budget!

People spend gobs and gobs of money at Rhinebeck. I saw drop spindles costing more than $100, and then there are spinning wheels, drum carders, hand blown glass knitting needles, muskox down yarn (Qiviut goes for $70-90 for 25 grams, about 200 yards, enough for a small lace scarf. Sarah Palin wore a scarf made of this stuff during her campaign.)

Knowing what I would be stepping into, I decided how much I would allow myself to spend, outside of the bus and room, and took it out of the bank in cash. When I ran out of money, I would stop buying things.

I got plenty of goodies, including gifts for others. And I came home with $10 in my purse.

The only thing I felt bad about was finding Heifer International's Keep the Fleece project on Sunday after most of my money was spent. I gave a little, and felt like an over-privileged person with my bags of pretties.

Photographs

I didn't take many. A few are coming up. Mostly I just experienced it all. Also, temps were in the 40's so my hands stayed in gloves, and camera and iPhone stayed in their respective places.

Silly Souvenirs

Buttons were the thing, and I collected these (with the exception of Pride of NY, which I brought with me). The sheep pin was my admittance badge, because I took a course.

I am scifiknitter everywhere!

People

Festival means lots of people, and there certainly were so many people, especially on Saturday. Here are three special ones:

Annie Modesitt. I took her combination knitting course. What I learned is material for a blog all on its own.

T. on the bus on the way home, working on a computer project. I was totally comfortable with her all weekend. In fact, I love her. So does just about everyone else who meets her.

Me, working on "The World's Biggest Sock", which has traveled cross country once already. There is a lot more to do before the heel is turned.

Loot!

Unfortunately I cannot show all of the loot I bought, as some of it is gifts, and I would like them to be surprises.

Books - the two large ones are signed by the authors. Confessions of a Knitting Heretic is a complete treatise on combination knitting.

Yarn: First, my bargain - some yarn straight from the producer at an incredibly reasonable price. Caveat: it has a strong odor. One washing with a gentle yarn soap has not removed the odor, so I will have to procure some Dawn, the yarn soap of choice for those washing away lanolin (which I believe is the source of the odor).

And the rest of the goodies:

from left to right:

- an indie dyed yarn from Creatively Dyed Yarn, intended to knit a studly lace scarf for trade.

- some silk yarn T. picked out. She has asked me to knit her a neckwarmer for Christmas.

- a hank of naturally dyed sock yarn from Long Ridge Farm.

- sock yarn from Sox that Rock, currently a hot brand in the world of knitting.

- a hank of cotton/merino/silk, also destined to become a neckwarmer.

And that's all for now. I came back from my sojourn into the altfiber universe feeling excited, relaxed, refreshed. I am ready to do some serious knitting, and to have fun doing it!

Real life in ascendency

2009-10-16T11:07:00.000-04:00

I have been a sorry excuse for a blogger lately. Real life has been requiring my attention.

My husband's campaign is going well. He has a game-plan, and he's sticking to it.

My daughter is working on grad school plans. She procrastinated long enough to make it difficult to take the GRE, so she is applying only to Canadian schools. I suspect that this was her gameplan all along.

The budget at work is under attack. We are in a holding pattern until our finders decide just how deeply they want to cut us.

I've been able to spend time with family during the past few weeks. Father, stepmother, mother, daughter, son, son's GF, grandkids, in time order.

I have two big projects breathing down my back at work - a migration of the email system to a new platform, and expansion of the tax prep program.

But right now I am taking some time for myself. I'm on a chartered bus heading towards Rhinebeck for the NY Sheep & Wool
Festival. And i'm writing a blog post on my iPhone.

Writing is something that I am missing. There is nothing like a wee drought to make you appreciate the rain. Fortunately I live in a part of the world where droughts tend to be brief. So may it be with my writing, as it is with the rain.

Knitting Blog: For the men in my life

2009-09-26T07:34:00.001-04:00

Two projects are featured here. One has been done for a while, but I didn't have a good picture of it on its recipient. The other project is one I finished yesterday, just in time to give it away.

The Studly Lace Scarf

This project is a combination of a pattern I liked and a hank of yarn I happened to have in my stash. The pattern was a dropped-stitch basketweave scarf in the spring/summer 2009 issue of Vogue Knitting, and was designed by Laura Bryant. The magazine shows it as a wide scarf, almost a shawl, in a delicate pink. The pattern has a cool feature: you deliberately drop certain stitches and let them run down from the top to the bottom of the scarf. A dreaded mistake is transformed into a design element.

The yarn I had was dark, shot through with yellow, reds and greens - a very different feeling. I also had only one skein. I decided to make the scarf narrower than designed, to make sure it would be as long as possible. I also knew that as much as I liked it as I was knitting it, this was not going to be for me, but for someone else. I just didn't know who.

Then one day, as I was knitting the scarf in the car, R. asked me quietly, "Will you knit me another scarf?"

The back story: twice before I had knit scarves to order for R. Both times he lost them, within weeks of receiving them. I had vowed I would never knit him another scarf.

As soon as he asked, though, I knew this scarf was for him, and christened it The Studly Lace Scarf.

Some details:

A close-up of the completed pattern, after the stitches are dropped.

Being blocked on my new blocking mats. I wet the scarf and stretched it to within an inch of its life, using metal wires and pins to pull out the fabric.

All nicely blocked.

And proudly modeled by its new owner. I'm hoping this one does not get lost! It is very fine and light, adding just a bit of extra warmth, so I hope R. simply leaves it on. It's when he takes the scarf off that it gets forgotten. Somehow my handknit scarves never seem to make it to the lost and found bin...

The Studly Socks

My other completed project is a pair of socks for my father. This project also has a back story. A couple of years ago I made him a pair of felted clog-style slippers.

And he hated them.

So this spring I reclaimed them, and told my father that I would replace them with a pair of handknit socks. I am visiting him next weekend, so I have been diligently working to get them done.

I have given the scorned clogs to my son's GF, who appreciates fuzzy warm things.

Here is a pic of the finished socks:

And a detail of the patterning:

They are called Cauchy Socks, named after a French mathematician. Very appropriate for my dad, who is a chemist. They were designed by Cookie A, and are found in her book Sock Innovations, one of the hottest knitting books to come out this year. This woman uses traditional construction techniques to create the most lushly patterned socks around. This pair is quite conservative, i.e. studly. My feet will be graced by some of her more ornate patterns in the future.

It's back to the endless shawl I've been working on. I'm also going to be swatching for another pair of socks. I'm joining Abhorsen327 in sock obsession. Socks provide so much knitting goodness and satisfaction in a small package.

Hope is hanging in there in my little town

2009-09-17T23:30:00.005-04:00

Did you feel the earth shift at 9 PM on Tuesday night? Because the techtonic plate of the politics in the town I live in shifted when the polls closed.

Tuesday was primary night in New York, and there was only one race on the primary slate here: Republican candidate for Town Council. Three candidates were running, and the two getting the most votes would get to be on the ballot in November and would go on to almost certain victory. The candidates:

- The woman who is a farmer and a county worker who has served on the Town Council for almost 8 years. She has been a sensible member of the board.

- The newcomer, a woman who belongs to one of the two fire departments and who first ran a few years ago as a write-in. This time she did her legwork, and filed a Republican petition, got the Democratic nomination at the caucus, and filed an independent petition to boot.

- The grande dame (EDIT: from the French, meaning "great lady") of our town's politics. This candidate is 88 years old, and has been involved in the town's government and politics for decades. She is renowned for her ability to get re-elected, and to make or break other candidates by working for them, or working against them. In the past she has actively worked against my husband.

And guess who is not going to be able to run for her umpteenth term on the council? Yes, the grande dame lost.

Meanwhile, campaigning is going well for my husband. People here want to improve things. They want to clean up the river, and are talking about installing a waste treatment plant, and most of this talk is coming from downtown, where they would have to pay the rates. They want a playground for the kids. They seem to want less negativity in general. They seem to be sick of the feuds.

That feeling of hope that ran strong in the 2008 election is still running strong in this town. Stay tuned, because I think some good things are going to happen here.

EDIT:

I have received an anonymous comment that says "The Grande Dame you are referring to has given 30 years of service to the Town Board and she cares more for the Town of Russell than anyone else does. She knows the voters have spoken and excepts that; she does not need to be made fun of and put down by you."

There is nothing in my words above that puts the particular lady down. The definition of "grande dame" in Webster's New World College Dictionary is "a woman, esp. an older one, of great dignity or prestige." I chose my words in my post above carefully, and knew the definition of the phrase when I used it.

The lady certainly has great prestige in our community. I believe it likely that she has given service to our town for longer than 30 years. She has also been one of the most politically powerful people in our community, and she does not hesitate to take sides on issues. I think it likely that she will continue to be involved in the community - there is one project in particular, the revival of the Opera House, that seems to be very close to her heart.

I was as surprised as anyone in town when she lost, and have great admiration for her energy and her dedication to the town.

The Real Deal

2009-09-05T10:27:00.003-04:00

It's kind of nice when things work out as well as hoped.

It started with a message: "So when are you going to invite me to go sailing on Minuet?" Which made me realize that a real-life invitation was in order to my digital friend Sharkey. After some date juggling back and forth, we settled on a plan: a sailing trip to Kingston, Ontario and the Limestone City Blues Festival.

Sharkey arrived on Thursday evening, and he was - ta da! - just like I pictured him! Of course, there have been some messages, some videos and a couple of phone calls along the way to flesh out his self-portrayal in pixel form. He had less to go on, mostly words both written and verbal, but I am happy to say that I portray myself honestly, and I was much as he expected.

The mystery man in all this was R., who neither blogs nor reads blogs. I've filled him in from time to time with information about the friendships I have made in my on-line world, but they are my world and my friendships. And Sharkey knew little about R. The two of them had no problems in finding topics of mutual interest to talk about. This particular friendship has now grown to include all of us.

The trip from Clayton to Kingston was an easy sail, four hours of sailing with the wind. We got down to Kingston in good time and set up our home-away-from-home at the day docks at Confederation Basin Marina. That's Sharkey clambering on board.

The view from the stern of the boat. Those windmills are going to be part of the landscape in this part of the world for the rest of my life.

We enjoyed some music in the park on Friday afternoon. A band I love, Hard Pushin Papa, was the first one we heard. This band is a trio led by Pat Johnson, a songwriter who specializes in a 21st century mentality - he has written blues about Internet addiction. You can here some of his tunes here. We also heard Agent Blue, Sharkey's favorite band of the weekend.

There was also a foray for baked goods and cheese at Pan Chancho, and a wonderful dinner out at Aroma Restro and Winebar. Mmmm, I had Ontario wine and grilled pickerel, and was a very happy lady. R. is looking pretty happy here, too.

Lots of rain Saturday, and the afternoon concerts in the park were cancelled. We went out for lunch at an Irish pub, Tir Nan Og, in a large company of fellow boaters. We have been meeting up with a couple named Sam and Neil for years now at various marinas in the area. We sailed past them earlier this summer, circled around each other and called out from our boats, and confirmed that we would all be at the Blues Fest this year. Sam is a networker par excellance, pulling together groups of people where-ever she goes. I knew why we have always like each other so much when Sam and I met up in the park and both pulled out iPhones to exchange information.

Saturday night was the big concert under the stars. The sky cleared, and the party was on. The headliner was Shemekia Copeland. Earlier that week I had heard her tune "I'm Never Going Back To Memphis" on The World Cafe, and thought Wow, she is gonna be good. She was, though just a few clicks too loud. If these bands could just dial it back a wee bit, their sound would be much clearer and less distorted. She did the Memphis tune. Yeah. Her climax, though, was the tune "Ghetto Child". At the end, the band took it down low, and she stepped away from the mike, and wailed the chorus to the sky above. We heard every note.

We then trucked way down the road to hear the Chris Chown band. We try to catch him every time we go to the Blues Fest. As we walked into the bar, a couple of women outside told us, "the guitarist in this band is HOT!". R. and I said, yeah, we KNEW that. This young man has been playing professionally for more than a decade, and is totally at one with his guitar. He can do Jimi Hendrix tunes with style, conviction and credibility, and has some stunning parlor tricks with his guitar, like playing it behind his back. I bought a CD during the break and asked him to sign it. He said he recognized me from past audiences. Well, that just about made the whole weekend for me. Sam later said in an email, "Chris is a charmer", and that took me down a peg. It could be he says that to all the ladies who ask for his autograph who tell him they have heard him in the past.

Sunday we decided to take the long way home, via Lake Ontario and entering the St. Lawrence at its mouth. The weather was gray and windy and cool and threatening rain, and the guys in the party were in the "bring it on" mood. We beat our way through the chop and into the teeth of the wind to get out onto the Lake. I would have been just fine, except I had to go below to use the head. Motion sickness took the edge off the thrill for a while for me. I did recover as we had a fine sail on the lake, where we got to enjoy a beautiful long reach. We sailed 42 miles.

Sunday evening the mood was tired and happy. Even the two chatterboxes were quiet. Guess who they were? And we saw a rainbow on our way home.

And Monday morning, we all returned to our regular lives.

In my own mind, and miscellaneous updates

2009-08-21T10:52:00.001-04:00

I'm still blogging in my own mind as I drive to work in the morning. The words don't make it back to my fingers and a keyboard, however. No big losses, I haven't come up with either a good solution to the world's problems, or with a good question about them. I'm thinking right now of the lyrics to a song that Stringfolks sang last night, "In My Own Mind" by Lyle Lovett:

VERSE 1
I get up in the morning
I drink a cup of coffee
I look out of the window
I try to get it started
I turn it all over
Plow it all under
I plant 'em in the springtime
Pick 'em in the summer

CHORUS
I live in my own mind
Ain't nothin but a good time
No rain just the sunshine
Out here in my own mind
I live where I can breathe
Ain't nothin but a cool breeze
Nobody that it won't please
Out here where I can breathe

There is some news around here.

In the "wife of a politician" department, the planned Stringfolks gig in October to raise money for local candidates and the Russell Opera House renovation fund is off. The people who led the opposition to my husband during his first go-round as Town Supervisor control the committee that controls the Opera House. Very friendly as long as we were only writing nice checks for the project, but no so much now that R's hat is officially in the ring again. A private meeting outside of the regular committee meeting set a policy that the hall cannot be used for politics. It's aggravating, and amusing, and the first shot in a campaign that assuredly will be at least partly negative. The word out is that the current Town Supervisor did not file his independent petition in time, and is not running after all. R. finds out today.

In the "mother" department, our daughter is home for an unexpectedly long visit. Alas, dental sealants fail and wisdom teeth grow, and a routine checkup uncovered work that needs to be done. She looked at her schedule and realized that she didn't need to travel back to Montreal, only to come back a few days later for her follow-up appointment, especially since she had her computer, her Wii, and her knitting with her. She has found clothes in her closet that fit, is borrowing a few things from me, and is hanging out with the hot tub and the kitties. I'm taking the day off today to hang out with her.

In the "musician" department, we gigged last night at the Psych Center. A small audience, but very engaged, singing and drumming along with us. My ears are ringing today, though, due to the volume of sound in a space with nothing but hard surfaces. There is a lot of hearing loss in my family, and I'm afraid that I am doomed to be another person saying "could you speak up?" in the future... I will have to speak to the leader of the band (and controller of the volume) about this.

In the "work" department, I am chilling before a very important meeting with our major funder next week. I have dissected and analyzed our budget, digging deep. It's amazing how much you can still learn about a piece of work you have been doing for nine years, and it takes only a hard question or two. There will be more hard questions, and possibly a hard announcement, next Thursday.

In the "knitting" department, I have had material for another knitting blog for some time, but need to take a better picture of the finished project on its recipient. I have two projects on the needles right now, socks for my father and a shawl for me. I have made plans for an exciting excursion into the alternate universe of the completely fiber obsessed this fall - I will be going to Rhinebeck! I've signed up to take a cool geeky course from Annie Modesitt that may change the way I knit. I need to save my pennies, because there will be many opportunities to buy luscious yarn.

In the "sailing" department, we hope to get out on the boat with our daughter this weekend, and have a fun, fun, fun trip planned with a friend next weekend. We are sailing to the Kingston Blues Festival. Woo hoo! - our first trip to the festival in a few years, because this year we do NOT have to schlep a kid to college over the last weekend of August. There is gonna be good music, good food, and good company.

Yes, there is much good in my life right now. No need to do a lot of work on the questions and answers to the problems, except in my own mind as I drive to work

Full Circle and Resurrection

2009-08-13T22:37:00.000-04:00

It's official as of tonight: my husband is running for Town Supervisor.

In New York, a Town Supervisor is a unique position that is simultaneously chief executive officer, head of the legislature, and chief financial officer. It may not pay particularly well, but you have to go all the way up to President of the United States to find an elected position with as much authority and scope for action (within the relevant jurisdiction).

He's had this job before. He served from 1996 through 1999. It was a roller-coaster ride and a half. The day after he was elected, the outgoing Town Supervisor and town council passed a budget with a huge tax cut and increase in spending. Essentially they dumped everything in the piggy bank into a massive spending spree. The reason: to deny R. the cushion of a cash reserve, and to ensure that he would have to raise taxes. The trouble was, their books were so poor that they didn't know how much cash was in the bank, and spent more than they had. As a result, the first day of office, R. inherited a $50,000 budget deficit - that was hidden in unfinished books so bad, they had to be reconstructed by a CPA.

What happened after that is much too complex and rich a story to be told in a blog post. There is material there for a novel - and maybe I should write it someday.

The leader of the opposition during R.'s term of office ran against him in 1999, and defeated him. This same long-time opponent announced recently that after 10 years in office, he would not run again this fall, and another man secured the Republican nomination. R. decided that the time was right for him to run for the office, especially after many local supporters contacted him urging him to run again. Since learning that R. is running, the incumbent has now decided to run after all, on an independent line. There will be three candidates, and R.'s odds of winning have probably not been damaged at all.

The entry of the incumbent has fired R. up, in fact. There is a smell of vindication in the air.

In our county, Democrats select their candidates for local offices in caucuses. Tonight's caucus was well attended and positive. People are excited about the prospect of change in our town government. Many people spoke about the good work that the current highway superintendent is doing. They also spoke about the good work that R. is doing with the municipal power group that he leads. We left the meeting with the words, from an attendee: "Now we all have to get out and work."

And when we got home, the best words of all were from Robert: "I feel normal again."

Homegrown Tomatoes

2009-08-11T00:01:00.002-04:00

It's been a cool, rainy summer this year. Right now it's 70 degrees outside, and raining again.

The height-of-summer veggies have been slowed by the lack of degree days. Last week saw the very first tomatoes in the CSA box - two tiny little things, not much bigger than grape tomatoes. I believe, though, that the box tomorrow will have more. The week after that should see the first local sweet corn of the season at Farmer Bill and Annie's.

One of the best songs that Stringfolks does is "Homegrown Tomatoes" by Guy Clark. We have killer 3- or 4-part vocal harmonies (depending on how many people in the band can make it to the gig), and begin and end a cappella. If there is a song we should have recorded, this is one - and alas, we have not.

HOMEGROWN TOMATOES (Guy Clark)

Ain't nothin' in the world that I like better
Than bacon & lettuce & homegrown tomatoes
Up in the mornin' out in the garden
Get you a ripe one don't get a hard one
Plant `em in the spring eat `em in the summer
All winter with out `em's a culinary bummer
I forget all about the sweatin' & diggin'
Everytime I go out & pick me a big one

Homegrown tomatoes homegrown tomatoes
What'd life be without homegrown tomatoes
Only two things that money can't buy
That's true love & homegrown tomatoes

You can go out to eat & that's for sure
But it's nothin' a homegrown tomato won't cure
Put `em in a salad, put `em in a stew
You can make your very own tomato juice
Eat `em with eggs, eat `em with gravy
Eat `em with beans, pinto or navy
Put `em on the side put `em in the middle
Put a homegrown tomato on a hotcake griddle

Homegrown tomatoes homegrown tomatoes
What'd life be without homegrown tomatoes
Only two things that money can't buy
That's true love & homegrown tomatoes

If I's to change this life I lead
I'd be Johnny Tomato Seed
`Cause I know what this country needs
Homegrown tomatoes in every yard you see
When I die don't bury me
In a box in a cemetary
Out in the garden would be much better
I could be pushin' up homegrown tomatoes

Homegrown tomatoes homegrown tomatoes
What'd life be without homegrown tomatoes
Only two things that money can't buy
That's true love & homegrown tomatoes

I urge you to seek a version of your own - there are recordings by Guy Clark, John Denver, and Jay Unger & Molly Mason. In the meantime, go out and find yourself a homegrown tomato.

A landmark in time

2009-07-30T08:40:00.000-04:00

Today is my daughter's 21st birthday. She is officially an adult in every way there is to be an adult.

She came home this past weekend for a family weekend on the boat, and she already has her gift from us - grown up clothes for her grown up work as a researcher this summer. I baked her our favorite carrot cake before she went back to Montreal.

It's been a busy few weeks. I've been concentrating on The Budget at work. It's never easy, and there is always red ink in the initial budget. This year, less grant funding and flat funding from our core funders meant there had to be some significant cuts. There will be no raises for anyone in 2010, but everyone still has a job. Not all non-profit agencies are as fortunate. I think that the portents for 2011, however, look pretty grim unless we can win a couple of grants.

We had our first annual family weekend on the boat. This was never possible in the past - our son's ex refused to go sailing. There was enough room on the boat to go sailing, but not enough for everyone to sleep on the boat, so we rented a room for our son and his GF. On Sunday we went to the Antique Boat Museum, where we got to tour a real plaything of the rich and famous, one of the largest houseboats ever made, formerly owned by the McNally family (of Rand-McNally). It was like walking through a human sized doll house, and utterly enchanting.

I've restarted work on the boat canvas project. The dodger is starting to come apart in the forward section with the zippered windows, and there is some sudden urgency to get on with it.

The CSA boxes are evolving through the season - fewer greens, bigger vegetables. I must do something with those beets that are piling up! I wonder if I could slow roast them on the grill. One of these days I will post pictures again.

Off to my first day in many years as an adult with no minor children.

CSA Week #5, Good Music, and Good News

2009-07-17T08:19:00.002-04:00

Once again, my refrigerator is filled with goodness:

The list of vegetables included in this week's box is long, and we need to step up our eating pace.

We got:
Salad makings - lettuce, radiccio
Greens - rainbow swiss chard. kale
Onions big and green, a leek, and a head of garlic
Shell peas, sugar snap peas, and wax beans
Roots - carrots and beets
Red cabbage and broccoli
Tender baby summer squash
Fennel and Herbs

I've been focused on work and deadlines - July is budget season. I'm making progress, though I don't know what the bottom line is going to be yet. All of the routine work of the week is done, I got the financial statements out for next week's board meeting, and I completed a redo of a major grant, so today will be budget, budget, budget.

Last night we took a break to go hear some live music - the Clair Lynch Band at the Norwood Village Green Concert Series. It was fabulous! Four musicians on stage with lots and lots of talent, and not a lot of ego. They all gave each other lots of room to stretch out, and there were some moments of sheer beauty.

As we left the concert, Robert got a call with incredibly good news. I can't talk about it yet, as it has to be officially announced by the right person. I'll just go over in the corner over there, and do a happy dance.

Milestone

2009-07-13T22:43:00.001-04:00

My diploma arrived today.

Sailing to Gananoque

2009-07-12T22:05:00.003-04:00

It's hard to believe that it's two weeks already since we spent a few days on Minuet, sailing from Clayton to Gananoque and back again. Life has proceeded at full tilt boogie speed ever since we reentered the flow of our daily responsibilities. I took pictures, though, and my memories haven't yet been completely submerged by the forward rush of our lives.

Originally this was to be the year when we would take a full week to cruise on Lake Ontario. Then our daughter asked us to visit her during the Montreal Jazz Festival, which would be occurring at the same time as our week of sailing. We shortened the planned trip to five days, allowing enough time to also fit in a trip to Montreal. Then the meltdown of the NY State Senate affected one of my husband's projects, and he needed to be close to a phone and Internet for a few days. In the end we had five days on the boat, which meant three sailing days. We juggled plans again, and decided to go spend a night in Gananoque. We have sailed by Gan several times, but we have never stopped there before.

We have been missing a treasure.

First, there is a municipal marina that has wide berths and well maintained facilities. Some very well-heeled people must be very happy with the facilities, because there were many beautiful and expensive boats in the seasonal slips. The water was deep and clean. The view from Minuet, aft and fore:

This ship was tied up near us. While I wouldn't want to pay its diesel bills, I'm certain that it is an ocean- worthy vessel. It's unusual to find a steel hulled vessel in a pleasure marina.

Gananoque is a beautifully manicured village that loves life on the water. The homes near the waterfront are well maintained, and many have gorgeous gardens. The commercial real estate favors attractive, comfortable looking restaurants.

This view from a bridge felt like a peek into a series of backyards, but these backyards include water, boats, and boathouses.

I spotted this mural, which puts me in mind of Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte as a celebration of the joys of spending a pleasant day outdoors in a civilized place, but this mural glorifies water rather than a park.

Gananoque is home to the Thousand Islands Playhouse, and we got dolled up and went out to a play. It reminded us of going to summer stock on Cape Cod - in fact, Gan as a whole reminds us of the Cape. The theater is a gem and the production of The Summer of My Amazing Luck was excellent. As I looked at the audience, I was struck by how a high percentage of the theatergoers were not young people. And then I looked clearly at Robert and myself and had to admit that we fit right in.

Waters with islands are more unpredictable than large lakes and oceans. In the case of the Thousand Islands, there must also be at least a thousand shoals and upcroppings of rock where a boat with a fixed keel that draws four feet eight inches of water cannot go. The trip from Clayton to Gananoque is pretty straightforward when going upriver to the Wolfe Island Cut, then across the Canadian Middle Channel. Once you turn towards Gan, you enter a section of the river that has many smaller islands and many shoals. You have to keep a close eye on the chart, and a sharp lookout for navigation bouys. Water, water everywhere, but many areas are not navigable. We did not retrace our breadcrumbs going back, but sailed downriver and through channels between islands, coming into Clayton downriver on the same course we were on when we left. One landmark on the trip back was the Gananoque Narrows, where you must sail in a narrow channel between the red and green bouys to avoid running aground.

Ooo, I think something lives here!

That weeklong sailing trip will have to wait until next year, I'm afraid. I'm satisfied, though, that we were able to sail between the raindrops, and that we finally visited a place we will surely return to when we crave a day or two in a peaceful, beautiful spot.

CSA Week #4

2009-07-07T23:47:00.002-04:00

Farmer Bill and Annie have gone to the banana box model - a banana box of food each week. The take this week is luscious:

In the box were the following veggies:
- carrots
- green onions, both large and small
- one head of very fresh garlic
- one leek
- a good sized bag of shell peas. Shell peas - be still, my beating heart.
- a bag of mixed young lettuces
- a cabbage
- a big bunch of beets with perfectly fresh greens
- garlic scapes
- parsley and basil
- kale
- 3 cucumbers. Robert just made yogurt, and I'm thinking raita.
- collard greens

It's a long list, but I think we will be able to eat it all by next Tuesday. The biggest challenge is the onions, because Robert is not an onion lover. He will eat them cooked, however, so I will be able to use them.

Tonight we ate the collards. "Simply in Season" came to my aid again, with a recipe for greens with peanut sauce. I was able to use up an onion as well. I thought they were heavenly.

Tomorrow we will eat the peas, because they MUST be eaten while fresh. Right? I performed a simple test to make sure that they are shell peas and not sugar snaps: I bit into one, and tried to chew the pod. Not exactly edible, although it didn't taste bad. They might be good if one was low on fiber. Fresh shell peas are a treat, not usually eaten more than a couple of times a year, so I think I will put on a party hat tomorrow when I sit down to eat them.

Backlogged Blogger

2009-07-06T22:29:00.001-04:00

I'm home after a wonderful week of vacation that has much to write about. Robert and I cleaned the house, we sailed, and we went to Montreal. I've also almost finished a knitting project that just needs blocking to be done, made progress on another project, and started a third.

I also have a new project in the wings. My son set up a Blogger page for Stringfolks and linked it to our URL. I am going to become the official webmaster for our band, and will be developing our webpage to something better than the pitiful thing it currently is.

Today I went back to work. Ah, the joys of Real Life™. Only 60 email messages and 4 voicemail messages, however, in a week's time. I have disposed of them, and taken care of all of the bills and purchase orders that accumulated in my absence. I'm ready to move on to the budget work that is the heart of July in my life.

I will be writing after I have shrunk pictures to a size that is uploadable, transferred pictures from iPhone to computer, and weeded the gardens. Oh yes, I also need to pick up our CSA share for the week tomorrow. Eeeeeek, more blogging material!

It's a clear case of Real Life™ trumping the Internet.

In a different place

2009-06-29T11:50:00.001-04:00

No CSA for us this week - we are on the boat for a few days. We thought we would be taking a longer trip on Lake Ontario, but our plans have had to change to make room for a rehearsal and for some business that R. has to do. Our son's GF will pick up this week's veggies.

It's changing here at the marina. Mike, the owner, died suddenly this past winter. His family is operating the marina, but we all miss the presence of the man with a large voice, an endless stream of stories, and a passion for opera.

The radio in the main building is tuned to a commercial station playing popular music, not to the classical music station. Soon there won't be much of Mike left here. It is becoming a different place.

CSA Week #2

2009-06-23T21:11:00.002-04:00

There were peonies in my CSA share this week. After a long day of work after a long day's drive the day before, seeing and smelling the flowers as I opened the cooler made me gasp a little, and break into a smile. This is definitely the best purchase I have made this year.

Also included in this week's batch of good things: lettuce, spinach, green onions, garlic scapes, a cucumber, kale, herbs (dill and cilantro), and beets.

I decided tonight on my strategy for eating what we receive: whatever we would be most unlikely to buy for ourselves will be the first item eaten, with adjustments for perishability. That means that the dish for the night is beets, because I have thrown away more fresh beets than I have eaten in my lifetime. Also, the greens are perfect tonight, and they won't stay nice for long. Simply in Season will be one of my go-to sources of recipes. Tonight I am making a whole beet skillet that uses every part of the beet, and seasons the dish with lemon juice, ginger, and honey.

I can smell the peonies as I write this, and cook our dinner...

Postscript: the beets were delicious. My advice is to always eat them first, while they are fresh.

What else have I been up to, besides eating beets? Work, enjoying the hot tub, and a fast trip to Cape Cod. This trip wended from the western foothills of the Adirondacks through Montreal to the Cape. Our trip out was bedeviled by a series of detours, some expected like the closed border crossing at Massena/Cornwall, and others that took us by surprise, like the closed bridge to Ile de Montreal on Quebec Route 20. Our trip back handled all detours skillfully, but was just plain long - 12 hours. I'm tired tonight. It was worth it, though, to spend the weekend with my father, my stepmother, and my daughter. And Robert, too!

CSA Week #1

2009-06-17T01:50:00.004-04:00

Once again this year, I was not able to get my little raised garden plots ready for planting in time to do serious vegetable gardening. Two years of neglect due to doing grad school on top of a full-time job means a garden overgrown with weeds.

About the time I realized that my dreams of a veggie garden were not going to happen this year, I got a postcard from Farmer Bill and Annie, a small farm that I drive by nearly every day. I have bought a lot of veggies from their farm stand over the years. Their postcard offered me a share in their CSA.

CSA = Community Supported Agriculture. I, the consumer, pay upfront for a share of the farmer's production. The farmer gives me fresh food every week. The farmer has a guaranteed, stable income and can plan what to plant. I have guaranteed fresh food with less work than tending a garden, and I am keeping a farmer in business.

CSAs are being offered by several farmers in my area. Some offer a very wide range of food, including meat, poultry, veggies, fruit, and honey. Some require the purchaser of a share to also contribute labor. In my case, you could not beat the price - $300 for fresh food from mid June until mid October, and no work on my part except for returning the bag or box that my food comes in. And, do you remember, I drive right by the place almost every day!

Today was week one of the 2009 CSA, and this is what we got:

Three heads of lettuce and a bag of mixed greens. Swiss chard. Green onions. Herbs. And a cucumber from their greenhouse. Plus, they included a couple of recipes and a food preservation tip.

I'm going to like this a lot!

We're headed out of town Thursday night to visit my folks in Cape Cod, and there is no way we will be able to eat all this before we go. I talked with my stepmother today and offered to bring the bounty with me, and she was happy to say yes. Hooray, I can share!

I think we will be eating a lot of vegetables this summer...

Applied Chemistry

2009-06-11T22:23:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I took a little trip to a brand new type of store for me to frequent: the pool and spa supply store. (Up here, they all sell woodstoves, too.)

The reason: we are installing a hot tub in our solarium tomorrow. And hot tubs require chemically treated water.

I learned quite a bit about our water yesterday. First of all, it will take all this to manage it:

I learned that spa water needs to have a certain level of alkalinity and hardness to stabilize it, so that it is not subject to rapid swings in acidity and doesn't suffer corrosion of metal parts over time.

I learned that our water, which comes from a drilled well that is at least 80 feet deep, is too soft and acidic to be used as is in a hot tub. I didn't expect that. We will have to add calcium and sodium carbonate to the water whenever we fill the tub.

I also learned that there are lots of systems for managing spa water. The store I went to carries four product lines - chlorine, bromine, baguanide (a peroxide based system), and mineral systems. I chose the mineral system. With this system, a cartridge containing silver and copper is placed inside the filter. A very small amount of chlorine is added when a new filter is installed, and an oxidant is used regularly to destroy the oils and other goodies we leave behind us when we use a hot tub. The sample hot tub in the store uses this system, and the water was beautiful, clear and odorless, much nicer than the sample tub in another store we visited recently. At the other store, a miasma of chemicals almost knocked me over when the clerk lifted the cover on the spa.

There is one other system out there that adds salt to the water, and uses the chlorine in salt and a catalyst to disinfect the water. There are lots of salt water systems available for swimming pools, which require treatment of tens of thousands of gallons of water, but apparently only one for spas that use only a few hundred gallons. I think I will wait until there are more choices out there. Competition can be a good thing.

Getting the hot tub has been a catalyst of sorts for us, resulting in a great deal of work being accomplished in a short time on a project that we started years ago. That is worthy of its own post.

Something else to think about: we probably need to add calcium to our water supply as a whole. As we think about it, our water appears to be corrosive. Those green stains in the bathtub? Not copper in the water, but copper being leached out of our pipes by our water. I think I have more applied water chemistry ahead of me.

A rant on the structure of our economy

2009-05-28T22:47:00.000-04:00

This is a rant. While it may be based on some articles that I have read lately, don't expect me to link to references.

I believe that we have a severe structural problem in our economy and as a result, people are not getting value for their money, specifically for their tax dollars.

In my opinion, we have become a two class society, but it's not the classes you might think, rich and poor. It's people with security and people without.

I think of the people at the auto shop who repair my car. They do excellent work. Whatever health insurance they have, though, is whatever the business owner can afford to buy in the private sector. And whatever retirement they have beyond Social Security must be financed with money that they invest themselves.

Good luck with both of those things.

Meanwhile, I have a defined benefit government pension and a decent government health insurance plan. I pay for part of my insurance, but the rest is paid with tax dollars. Tax dollars paid by me, but also paid by everyone who works at Boyden Brook Body Works.

I've read a couple of articles lately about structures of economies in some European countries. It turns out that some of the most highly taxed people are also the most contented. Everyone has healthcare, adequate paid time off when babies are born, access to child care, paid vacations - everyone has security. The taxpayers get value for their money.

No wonder we have tax revolts in this country. It boils down to value, which is wildly uneven.

I figure we need to go one of two ways. One direction is to follow the model of the European nations where contentment is high. Provide everyone with health care, child care, security. And find a model to have all of us pay the taxes required to give us security, be it an income tax increase, a VAT, or whatever.

The other direction is to identify what only government can do (national defense) and contract everything else out to the private sector. No government health insurance or retirement for anyone, even government workers - the soldiers, cops, and teachers can buy their health insurance on the open market like the auto mechanics do, and can open IRAs to save for retirement.

In the meantime, you will never hear me complain about the taxes that I pay. I am one of the lucky people who is getting value for my money.

Summer is icumen in

2009-05-27T00:11:00.003-04:00

Ever so surely, the good weather is coming. It's still pretty cool - those who have planted their tomatoes and basil are covering them nearly every night up here, and we had a fire in the woodstove last night. When it is still light out at 8:30, though, you know that the warmest part of spring should arrive soon.

I spent several hours during last week getting our sails ready for use. Both our mainsail and our primary headsail are getting a bit long in the tooth, and usually need some repairs before sailing season starts in earnest. This year the mainsail passed inspection, but the genoa needed long stretches of new edge facings on both of the edges that are exposed to wind and wear. The genoa is a huge sail, and very heavy, so sewing the facings on is arduous even though the sewing itself is very simple. I folded the sails after inspection and repairs - the only time they will be neatly folded all year. Assuming that we don't need to take them down during the summer, they'll be wadded into the bags in the fall when we take them down.

We spent much of our long weekend on Minuet. Saturday was supposed to be devoted to cleaning, but we arrived at the marina to find that there was no running water to be had anywhere on site. There were lots of other chores to do - hooking up electricity, waterworks, and the head, and stowing all the things that were in the wrong place. It was also dead calm, perfect for putting the sails up. As evening approached, we decided not to generate more things needing washing and headed to the mall to grab a light supper and do some shopping.

At the mall, we had a remarkable experience: we bought a suit for Robert the way that people used to buy suits. A salesman who knew every suit on the rack and how a suit is supposed to fit a man helped us find one that Robert really likes. He is a man who obviously loves his job. Besides helping customers and keeping the stock well organized, he chooses shirts and ties to go with the suits on display. You have never seen a person select ties to match a suit as quickly as he could.

It turns out that he owned a funeral home for decades, and has dressed many a man. That is an interesting way to learn to become a suit salesman, and it was excellent training. When we checked out, we raved about the service he gave us, and the front desk people told us that they often receive compliments about Bill.

We woke on the boat the next morning to find that there was water. We spent the morning cleaning. I tackled the inside while Robert washed the cockpit and topdecks. After lunch, we started up the motor, and headed out for our first sail of the year. Not a technically perfect sail, but good enough. We found time to play with our newest piece of equipment, a Garmin handheld GPS. By the end of the trip, we were starting to see how the GPS could improve our sailing. As you travel, the GPS shows a track of where you have been; the dashes marking your track are called bread crumbs, a term I find to be very endearing. I'm imagining Hansel and Gretel throwing crumbs behind the boat to mark the path. Seeing a visual record of the boat's movement lets us know if we are tacking effectively, for one thing. Here is a record of our trip, including our very first waypoint, marking our dock space.

Robert loves flying flags on the boat. We found an Ontario flag last summer, and are currently flying three flags off the backstay. When the flags go up, we are announcing to the world that we are home. Minuet is indeed our second home.

One reason we love our marina and our slip so much is that we have a perfect view of the sunset. After dinner and cleanup, we were treated to a glorious vista.

Sailing season is off to a good start. Now we just have to keep pushing back on all of the events that can fill the weekends, and keep us from going down to Clayton. We've started scheduling sailing trips with family and friends. Having a full schedule is the best defense against the events that can deflect us from where we need to be.

Knitting Blog: Kimono Jacket

2009-05-17T22:25:00.004-04:00

Whew! I just finished the kimono sweater that I started in January. Of course, I finished it just as the weather is getting so warm that I will hardly be able to wear it for months. The weather took pity on me today, though, and brought us a very chilly and windy day. So, instead of moving our sailboat from its winter to its summer home, I wore my new sweater.

One of the dilemmas of knitting for me is choosing a pattern. I collect patterns by the gross, with subscriptions to three knitting magazines and regular purchases of pattern books. Sifting the wheat from the chaff has been a problem for me, though. Over the years, I have probably knit at least as many duds as flattering sweaters for myself. I finally have figured out what looks good on me. It must be pretty closely fitted, and I look best in colorful clothes.

The new sweater is no dud, I am very pleased to announce.

The sweater was designed by Celeste Pinhiero and was the cover sweater for the Fall 2006 issue of Knitter's Magazine. I purchased the yarn from Knitpicks, so the entire project was very reasonably priced, less than $40. I stuck pretty closely to the original color scheme of the design, though I believe that the colors of the Wool of the Andes yarn that I used are more saturated than the alpaca that was used by the designer.

The sweater was knit in two pieces, starting at the bottom of a cuff facing and ending at the center front and back. As a kimono-inspired design, it drapes from the front over to the back, with seams in the center back, on the sides, and along the underside of the arm. Here is one half of the sweater:

After I got well along with the first piece, I discovered that I had made a mistake. The blue balls on a green background have a total of 5 rows. I had forgotten a row on my first set, so the balls at the bottom of the sleeve looked squashed. No problem, though. I know how to graft! So, I cut the yarn at the middle of the offending balls, unraveled one row, and ended up with the bottom of the sleeve and one set of stitches pointing up on one needle, and the rest of the sweater piece as another set of stitches pointing down on a second. I then knit the missing two rows, and used blue and green yarn to graft the two pieces together.

Except: it wasn't that easy. I learned that when you take color work apart, some of the stitches seem to disappear at the places where the colors change. I had to do quite a bit of fudging to get the two pieces grafted together, and it didn't look quite right to me.

Later I had an "aha!" moment. I realized that I needed to take it all apart again, and this time knit the entire five rows of the circles. Then I could graft it all together using just one color, green, to attach the partial sleeve to just one color, green on the other piece. Yes, I did take the sleeve apart into two pieces again, reknitted the circles, and regrafted the two pieces together. It came out so well, I am not sure which sleeve had the error. They look identical.

After the pieces are knit, they have to be blocked before sewing them together. The blocking flattens the knitting and evens out the stitches. I wet block, which means that I wash the pieces, then pin them to shape while damp and let them dry. This process took a technological leap for me several years ago when I bought blocking wires. These are fabulous. I run stainless steel wires through the edges of the pieces, use a tape measure to pull them out to the proper measurement, and pin the wires in place. I end up with nice straight edges and very even blocking.

The two pieces barely fit on my blocking cardboard:

Here is a detail of how the wires look.

After blocking, there were a few more steps. I had to sew the sweater together at the back, sides, and underarms. I had to add a garterstitch edging at the neck and bottom. I had to knit and attach cords to tie the sweater together. And I had to sew in many yarn ends. The downside of colorwork: lots of ends where the colors change.

The finished project, from the back:

And here's the satisfied customer, from the front:

I am mostly a textural knitter, and haven't done a colorwork project in a long time. I will surely do more in the future. The color changes keep things interesting even when using a simple stitch. And I received so many positive comments from others as I worked on the sweater. Everyone else enjoyed watching the colors change, too.

Change in policy

2009-05-07T20:52:00.001-04:00

I have changed my comment settings to make it much easier to make comments. No need to have a Google account. No moderation. I have set it up so that there will be a captcha.

Let's face it, I don't get enough comments to make it hard on anyone who does wish to take the time to leave a few words behind.

Sweet Surprises

2009-05-05T22:35:00.003-04:00

My daughter was home last week. The time flew, with a trip to visit my mother, epic shopping for summer clothes, movie watching, and other fun family busyness. She and I also collaborated on a project: baking massive amounts of cookies to share with friends.

Some of my Internet friends have added her to their friends' lists since both she and I joined Twitter. And some of our friends have been going through some major life changes of late. We decided to send out some boxes of cheer to a few folks who we thought could benefit from a smile.

Inspiration for a gift to Internet friends came from the Internet, specifically the blog of AnnaTheRed. She makes amazing bento boxes for her boyfriend's lunches. A sample:

She has made several bentos based on a movie that A. and I truly adore, My Neighbor Totoro. This is a movie directed by Hayao Miyazaki that is pure magic, set in the Japanese countryside. I suspect that the rural Japanese landscape and way of life it depicts have become hard to find. I wish that the love that imbues the movie was part of everyone's life.

Our baking choices, after much research:

- coconut-carrot cookies with orange icing (not pictured).

- ginger cookies (not pictured).

- Mario Meringue Mushrooms, fabricated from meringue and marshmallows. These were a direct steal from AnnaTheRed, and the recipe can be found on her site. These come from the world of video games.

- little white ghostie Totoros and big blue Totoros. A. put a lot of time into decorating the blue guys, dipping a toothpick into melted chocolate. She also put rum in the frosting. :D

- soot sprites. The family in the movie moves into a house that is infested with these little critters, because it has been empty for a long time. The father and the two girls chase the soot sprites away with laughter as they take a bath together.

It all took more time than expected, but the reward from making our friends happy has also been greater than expected. And now I more fully appreciate everything that was in the box of cookies that my Internet friend Boo sent me at Christmas.

A. is back in Montreal now, starting work on her summer research project. She took cookies with her to give her boyfriend and one of her other friends, another student at McGill who loves video games and baking cookies. The sharing and the good feelings continue, and we even have some left for ourselves.

Making his way through the useful and the question marks

2009-04-22T22:24:00.000-04:00

My husband is mostly self-employed, with many steady and semi-steady sources of work. He's done a lot of different things over time, but the strongest thread is housing. Currently he is a code enforcement officer, an administrator of a housing rehabilitation grant, and an EPA certified lead paint risk assessor. So when I learned that the local technical college was giving a course that would train one to become an energy auditor, it seemed like a perfect fit with the rest of his skills.

He checked out some information on the web, and was going to pass on the course, because the certification process seemed very expensive. He talked to the man who would be teaching the course, though, and was encouraged to attend. The initial certification would not be expensive, and he could get 100% of the course fee reimbursed by the NY State Energy Development Authority (NYSERDA). So he pulled out our credit card and signed up.

He has learned an awful lot about housing through the years, and he was a prize student in the class. Much of the material in the course was not new to him, though he picked up some interesting new information. On the first day of class, though, he came home irritated. He learned that the path of being certified as an energy auditor is a twisted one in this state.

The certification is not issued by a governmental entity, but by a private company. The initial certification is not too bad. However, they require you to buy all of the equipment you need to do an energy audit from them, to the tune of about $7,000. They also require a second course and a second more expensive certification to be able to perform followup audits after energy conservation work has been done. By the way, the procedures you do for an energy audit after rehabilitation are the same as the procedures you do to diagnose the problems in the first place. Also, you are supposed to refer all energy conservation work to contractors who have been certified to do energy conservation work. And who certifies them? The same private company.

To us, it looks like there is a real sweetheart deal going between NYSERDA and the private company. NYSERDA controls much of the funding available in the state for energy efficiency improvements made by homeowners and businesses. And NYSERDA is requiring privately certified auditors and contractors to be the people doing the work before it will dole out any funding. NYSERDA is not actually funded by tax dollars, but rather by fees we all pay when we pay our utility bills, so it escapes close public scrutiny.

As much as some folks might not like government control, it seems to both my husband and me that if there is to be certification of any kind, it should be issued by a government, not by a private company.

We've also learned that the insulation in our roof isn't nearly as good as we thought it was. By the time 20 years have passed, the insulating value of fiberglass is 25% of what it was at installation. Foam loses some insulating value in the first few years after installation, but it stabilizes. Guess how old our house is? One half is 20 years old, and the other is 30. There is a lot of degraded fiberglass over head. Plus, our tongue-and-groove wooden ceiling may be leaking air like a seive.

Next year we won't be paying tuition, but we will be putting a new roof on the house, and it will be a major job that will include removal of fiberglass and installation of blown-in foam insulation. Better start saving a few pennies where I can. We've got a start on that - my husband is not going to become a certified energy auditor.

Boat Canvas Project #1: Mainsail Cover

2009-04-19T16:10:00.003-04:00

We have been itching to replace our boat canvas ever since we got Minuet. Someone in the boat's past had decided to put blue canvas on a beige boat with brown trim. The finished look did not appeal to our sense of aesthetics.

Even a bad color choice tends to hang around for a long time, because boat canvas is durable, custom made, and very expensive. I know how to sew, however, and invested in a Viking 5530 sewing machine a few years ago. This is a 40 some year old machine that has a powerful motor and a low gear that can punch right through heavy duty projects. There is also a company, Sailrite, that sells kits and materials for those who want to make their own boat canvas and sails. Our canvas needed more repairs than usual at the end of last season, so we decided this was the year to replace it.

We saved much money by buying kits for a new mainsail cover and dodger, especially since we got 10% off everything. Gotta love a sale. For those who don't know boat lingo, a dodger is tent-like, and shelters the companionway, which in turn is the entrance down into the boat's cabin. A dodger materially increases comfort on a boat, keeping water out of the living quarters and providing shade and a windbreak.

Project number one was the mainsail cover. Much bigger pieces of fabric, but all straight seams. I finished it last weekend, and am very happy with how it came out.

Here is the project in progress. I'm pushing about 13 feet of canvas through the machine in this pic. The kit comes with clear double-sided tape, a godsend for holding a project like this together. No way are you going to stick pins through material this thick!

Everything has been sewed together. The next step will be to install the hardware. The project stretches from the dining room table across the kitchen floor. Did I mention it is 13 feet long?

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Here is the finished sailcover, with hardware and decal installed. To the knowing, the decal says "I made this myself. Installing the hardware took a soldering iron, to burn through the big holes, a drill, to make the small holes, and a mattknife, to make the narrow slits. All holes had to go through 3 layers of fabric.

Some additional project notes:
- The material is Sunbrella, an acrylic canvas with good resistance to sunshine.
- The thread is V69 bonded polyester.
- The sewing machine needles are size 120/19.
- The Viking 5530 can sew through 9 layers of Sunbrella, but not happily. Considering that the machine does have some plastic gears, and I am on my second low gear assembly, I am going to try to not have as much bulk in the finishing details on the dodger wherever possible.
- We used the old mainsail cover as a pattern, so we are confident that this will fit well.
- I used NO velcro. I hate velcro. It does not hold up over time. When you are building a heavy-duty fabric piece that will be used for many years, velcro just doesn't make sense.

Onward to the dodger! We will be taking apart the old one to use as a pattern. I plan to take lots of pictures and draw a lot of diagrams during the deconstruction, as a dodger is a more sophisticated piece of sewing.

Miscellaneous Update

2009-04-09T00:27:00.003-04:00

I haven't done one of these in a while, and thought some readers might enjoy an update on the tales of my life.

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D • I • V • O • R • C • E

I have finally learned how a couple get divorced, once the case has ripened to the point that it actually goes before a judge.

Step one: The attorneys for the plaintiff, defendant, and children huddle with the judge, and hash out a deal. Plaintiff and defendant are not invited to this confab.

Step two: The attorneys for plaintiff and defendant urge their clients to agree, saying in unison, "This is the best deal you are going to get." They do.

Step three: The judge reads out the settlement, which is recorded and transcribed by a court reporter. The attorney for the plaintiff is given the task of writing out the final judgment, for signature by both parties.

Step four: The attorney for the plaintiff allows the settlement to age, so that some final points can rise to the surface. This period of time also allows many points that seemed very clear in court to become vague and subject to more than one interpretation when the transcript becomes available.

Step five: The attorney for the plaintiff presents the final papers to the attorney for the defendant. The defendant then refuses to sign, because she has not regained possession of a stepstool, some plastic jugs, and a manual can opener, all of which have sentimental value, and because she has realized that some points of the settlement could be interpreted to be more in her favor.

Step six: The parties reconvene in court, where the mushy points are reclarified by the judge, and the defendant bewails her missing can opener.

Step seven, the actual divorce, has not happened quite yet. Our son can smell it, however. It sounds like this time, his attorney types up the final settlement and the judge signs.

Step eight will then happen: the submission of the final legal bills to the plaintiff. Here's hoping that the retainer covers most of the tab.

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FAMBLY DINNER

We hosted a happy meal tonight. Our son and his GF came over with ALL of their kids, five in total. The GF's teenagers are spending a week with her, the first time they have been together in some years.

Everyone was getting along, especially the GF's son (13, size 14 shoes, gonna be a giant of a man) and our grandson (8, and one of the smaller kids in his class). Five kids makes for a lively crowd.

We ate a mountain of spaghetti and a vat of meatballs and sauce, and finished off the evening with ice cream.

Even the cats came out to play. Our son did not bring Zoe the wonder dog this time - no room in the car!

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EMPTY NEST - HIGH FLYING DAUGHTER

The nest will be empty this summer. Our daughter has been funded to do research in Montreal - twice.

Two profs are sponsoring her, and helped her to write two grant applications. One is her statistics prof, and the other is his wife, who teaches epidemiology at McGill's medical school. The topic: a statistical analysis of survivability in MS patients. It used to be that a diagnosis of MS meant a shorter life expectancy. A. will be investigating whether or not this is still true.

McGill's research program accepted the proposal in short order, so A. knew that she was funded some time ago. Word came today, however, that she has received a MS Studentship from the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada. This will be the funding that she will accept, as it is the more prestigious of the two.

This is a big deal. Apparently there are only two of these awards given each year. And they are not usually given to statistics students, but to medical students who are aiming for a career in research.

She will probably publish her second paper at the end of the summer.

The bird is in flight, and I can barely perceive the landscape that she is flying over...

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IN THE MAWS OF MODERN MEDICINE

I had a major biopsy done yesterday, and am now waiting for results.

For more than two years, my pap smears have been getting increasingly abnormal. It reached a point where a biopsy was in order, so I went under the knife yesterday.

I was warned that I might have cramping, and that some women need a couple of weeks of recovery before going back to work. So far, though, it's a piece of cake for me. 600 mg of ibuprofen twice yesterday, and 400 mg this morning, and nothing since. Energy levels are up, and spirits are high.

It helps that the doctor talked to my husband while I was in recovery (they prefer to give the news to sentient people), and said that he did not see anything abnormal in the tissue. He is hopeful that I will not need further surgery. I'll know more in two weeks.

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TECHIE ADVENTURE, CONT.

I met with a tech consultant this week. If we let her through the door, life will change at the agency.

Right now, it's the Wild West, and every man for himself on an unmanaged peer-to-peer network. She would put in a server, and have all Internet access managed by the server. We would all have secure passwords, and they would not be the names of our pets. People would have a place to back up important files. We could set up a library of shared resources, so that fact sheets are available to print or email. We would also be able to monitor computer use.

She looked at a lot of our computers, and saw some spyware, and evidence of some persistent network problems. She listened to harddrives. I was impressed.

Next week I find out if we can afford her. Maybe we can't afford NOT to hire her. When it comes to safeguarding the agency, I suspect tightening down our technology is more important than an audit by a CPA.

OMG. I'm a techie.

2009-04-01T21:31:00.000-04:00

It is official now: I have new responsibilities at work. I am now Finance and Personnel Manager PLUS the Technology Coordinator.

My boss has noticed how comfortable I am with computers, iPhones, etc., and thinks I am a good fit for the job. My new duties are supposed to phase in, while the person who has been in charge of the job phases out. However, I am seeing distinct signs of him abandoning all concerns with the health of the network. Time for me to get stirring and to take command of the situation.

What have I inherited?
- A WAN/LAN spread between four buildings on two facilities.
- A peer-to-peer network that hooks us up to the Internet.
- A workplace that has become as dependent on Internet access as we are on drawing breath.
- Closets full of wires labeled with the names of people who have retired or moved to different offices.
- A system that is persistently giving out bad IP addresses when people boot up in the morning. It sounds like a wireless router is hooked up incorrectly. The one I suspect most is in a closet that looks like a plate of spaghetti, it has so many ethernet cables. I will have to trace out where the equivalent of the wall jack is to know if it has its wires crossed.
- A storage room full of disassembled computers, strewn across the floor. These are all ancient beasts, long out of service. The outgoing tech guy has resisted throwing it all out for years, saying there are useful parts in the chaos. He has gotten his way, partly because there is no place in our area to responsibly dispose of old computers.

What have I done so far?
- Picked up a shipment of 6 HP computers from a GM plant that is closing in May. These puppies have very decent operating speeds, a small footprint, and they are all alike. If all goes well, we will have 4 or 5 of these in use by the end of the month. These computers are a gift to us, as GM does not want to ship them back to a warehouse in Michigan. Just think of how many excess computers they have right now... They may be able to give us an identical computer in late May.
- Picked up two networkable laser printers from the same donor. They are also checking out a networkable color laser printer and an additional B&W printer. I'm going to be able to set up shared printer stations throughout the facility, and finally get rid of all of the inkjet printers. IF I can get the IP address situation solved. The networkable printer in my office has not been able to pull down a valid IP address in two weeks.
- Started a technology plan, complete with goals and a SWOC analysis (strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/challenges). Golly, I am actually using stuff I learned during my masters program!
- Communicated with the department heads, asking what they need. Now let's see when and if they get back to me.
- Contacted a technology consultant who works with a counterpart agency in another county. She will understand how much of our setup works.

I have always been a fast learner when it comes to software. I'm going to have to add more than a dab of hardware expertise to my portfolio now. I am hoping that the consultant will teach me. Thank goodness my boss is willing to invest in some expert help.

After eight years of journal entries, accounts payable, and grants billing, I was feeling a bit bored with my job. I suspect that the next few months, traditionally a slower time for me, are going to fly by as I get a handle on all things techie.

Telling stories to myself

2009-03-25T00:42:00.000-04:00

Truly, I have the power - the power to make myself unhappy. The most effective way I do it is by telling stories to myself.

I've been a daydreamer all my life, spinning tales that I tell only to myself. There is a common pattern to these stories: I am nearly always a central character, and they don't really end, they just peter off. Events in the stories also do not go well for me. Relationships sour, people die, projects remain undone, deadlines are not met. And the stories leave a bad after-taste in my thoughts and emotions.

A while ago, I went through a period of contentment. It happened to be a time when I was blogging more actively. One day as I drove to work, I realized that I had stopped telling stories to myself. Telling stories to the world in written words seems to clear my thoughts of the dark tales, and to help prevent me from making myself unhappy.

Isn't this the heart of meditation - to not tell stories to oneself, to not cling to those dark tales, to let them drift away?