Monk's cord is a twisted cord. The typical way of making it is to take two, three-strand sections, loop them around a doorknob, and twist them clockwise - kind of like making rope. (There's also a way to do it using an electric hand mixer or an electric drill to do the twisting but that's living a little dangerously for me. It seems to me that Fiber+Mixer=big tangled mess.)

*****

I'll talk about the birthday "haul" as this is one of the crazybusy weeks where I'm going to be out of the house four evenings out of five. (Well, two of them were sort of my choice: the dinner with the candidate and the concert last night).

The clothing-package turned out to be a cardigan from L.L. Bean. It's cotton, and sort of a pale leaf green marled yarn. Reverse stockinette stitch (although it is machine knit). It's a good color for me and a color that will go with a lot of things I have.

I wear cardigans a lot - we have rooms with unpredictable heating and a/c so I need things I can put on or take off as the temperature dictates (We're suppose to be near 90 today and it's already close to 75 in my office...). I have a few blazers but I find that they are more constricting - a couple of them are more of a European cut which means if you tend to flap your arms about hyperkinetically like I do when I teach, you run the risk of blowing out an armsceye.

I also received a sleepshirt printed with petroglyph-esque cats. It was wrapped in a piece of fabric (my mother tends to do that with packages for me). It was a 70s era print that she said she had bought with the intention of making me a dress (obviously when I was a little kid, there's not much there). It's dark blue with one of those sort-of ethnic Mexican inspired prints that were popular then - white flowers and stylized white bulls. (I guess they are - it's some kind of ungulate with at least one horn, so that's my guess). It's not as ugly as my description of it makes it sound. I'm unsure of what I will do with it - it might make a nice short-sleeved blouse if I have enough. Otherwise, it'll wind up in a quilt sometime.

I also received a present from my parents' cats. (Although I'm not totally surprised one of them was able to get a credit card in her name, I'm still unclear on how they managed to type in the order on the computer*). It was stuff from KnitPicks: the new little book of bug finger puppet patterns (Definitely want to make the luna moth), a WPI tool (which will come in handy as I have some handspun yarn I've bought that's not clearly marked as to weight), and the box of portable Kris Percival patterns. (I only had time to give that sort of a cursory look, most of the garment patterns seem pretty basic and sort of cry out to me to be prettified with stitch patterns or cables).

(*and before you think I've gone 'round the bend, that WAS said with tongue in cheek)

I also received - from a faithful reader whom I will thank properly as soon as I can get out to buy some stamps - a copy of "I Capture the Castle" (no, I haven't read it yet. I remember reading "The 101 Dalmations" by the same author as a kid, but I haven't read this one) and "Polkas for a Gloomy World" (a Brave Combo CD. Why hasn't polka music had more of a renaissance? Almost anybody can dance to it, if you play it fast enough it is a pretty good mimic of thrash-rock, and a lot of the songs are about beer. I just don't see why it doesn't have a broader appeal...).

****

I think I commented once that I grew up in Northeastern Ohio - which was actually a pretty interesting area to grow up in, culture wise. There were a lot of Polish/Slavic immigrants in the Cleveland area (people used to tell "Parma jokes" - Parma was one of the areas where a lot of people settled). There were a number of polka-oriented radio stations. It wasn't until I was an adult - and moved away from the area - that I really realized that not every metropolitan area has polka stations that broadcast for at least part of the day in a Slavic language. (Down here, we have conjunto stations that play polka, but broadcast for at least part of the day in Spanish. And we have a station out of Dallas that broadcasts in either Arabic or one of the various languages of India depending on the time of day).

In the Akron area (the other metropolitan area close to where I grew up), there were a lot Greek, Macedonian, and general Levant-area (do people say "The Levant" any more?) immigrants. When I helped my dad out in his office in the summers, a thing we used to do regularly was go to the nearby Greek Orthodox church on Thursdays for Gyro Lunch. (They sold Gyros and salad and soft drinks and pastries to raise money). Mmmm, Gyro Lunch. (It makes me a little sad that they don't have that here. Once in a while a place will have an Indian Taco lunch, and that's good, but it's not quite the same as it being a weekly thing.)

*****

Went to a Mozart concert last night. I guess I'm poorly schooled in Mozart, because the first piece they played (a Divertimento, and no, I can't give the Koechel number, I'm not Alternate-Universe Otto Man) and most of the last (a Quintette) were unfamiliar to me.

But one of the movements of the Quintette was - as they started it, I thought, oh, that's one of the pieces on my "Classical Songbirds" album. (yes, it's one of those recordings that purists probably think is horrifically gimmicky; music played along with nature sounds. But I will protest that this one is done better than most - they mute down the birds and the sound of running water during the music, and somehow it seems to be chosen to complement the pieces played, so rather than having the sense of "oh, they took a public-domain recording and overlaid it with stuff from the Cornell lab" you get the conceit of some kind of Maxwell Parrish-esque world where musicians are playing out of doors and very nature itself seems to sort of accompany them).

I found myself comparing the two renditions - I could expect each of the little subthemes before they came, and I could tell when there was a little extra flourish or two, or when someone was a quarter-second late relative to the "familiar" version on the recording.

Do other people do that? Do other people have "auditory memories" that let them do it, or is this some kind of freaky Rain Man thing that I do? (Another one of my party tricks: being able to identify most music - at least most music with which I am familiar - to composer/group and give the title within a few bars of the piece starting). I'm also able to tell when an old pop song has been "repurposed" in an advertisement where it has no relation to the product being sold. (the most mindbending example being Thurston Harris' "Little Bitty Pretty One" being used as a Zen-esque chant to sell iced tea).

I suppose my prodigious ability to quote Simpsons lines, or bits of Pinky and the Brain, is tied up with it. (And I will say: it served me well in college and grad school, especially when I had profs who liked people being able to reproduce what they said almost verbatim on tests).


*****

And Now It Is Lent. Kinda snuck up on me this year, and frankly, I'm kind of at a loss of how to mark the time. I suppose I could once again do my "no unnecessary spending" bit, but as I give myself permission on my Spring Break to take a vacation from that, it's not as meaningful. And as for committing to charity knitting - this week, that seems to me an operation doomed to failure, because I'm so busy. A month of vegetarianism has its interest, but then again, I don't know - I'll be traveling and will be in a few situations where saying "I gave up meat for Lent" will inconvenience the host or hostess.

And honestly, y'all? I'm TIRED. I feel like I've been giving 110% lately - that I've been preparing a lot of food I won't get to eat, running around like a headless chicken (and not Mike, either), doing stuff for people who don't even make a pretense of appreciating it, forcing mass amounts of vegetables past my protesting tongue in the name of health, getting out of bed at 5 am when my body wants another hour of sleep, and my body and soul kind of just turn themselves inside out with revulsion at the thought of giving up something else, or taking on another other-centered task.

So I don't know. I suppose some would argue the "turning themselves inside out with revulsion" is the very evidence that I SHOULD do one of those things. But I don't know.

What I'd like to do is spend more time in quiet and in contemplation. To be able to set aside 1/2 hour a day when I am not doing anything else, and be able to hold that half hour sacrosanct - and not even knit during that time, spend it instead reading something spirit-challenging or uplifting, or listen to some of the old "sacred music" cds I've collected.

Perhaps - if that does not sound like too selfish of a thing - perhaps that is what I will try to do. Because I have a feeling that taking on something I will just come to resent will not be in the sort of self-examinatory spirit of Lent.

Edited to add: I do multitask too much. I do spend too much time when I am doing one thing, thinking about the Next Thing I must do. And maybe spending a half hour focused on ONE THING and one thing only a day would be good training for trying to track myself into a more focused life, where I'm not sitting in a seminar and planning how I will get the laundry AND the marketing AND my bill-paying AND the Sunday School lesson done in two hours on Friday afternoon... But I don't know. I still feel guilty...I feel like I should give up chocolate (like my friend D., but she "lawyerballs" the system a little, which seems a little cynical). Or meat, as my brother and sister did one year, and as the Orthodox Christians I know do. Or limit my computer time, like Catherine is. Or shopping. Or something.

It doesn't seem penitential enough - and too selfindulgent - to me to airily say, "oh, yes, well, for Lent I'm taking a half hour a day and listening to Bach and reading Henri Nouwen." Like, this is something other people would like to be doing, and instead of saying "no" to doing things for them so I have time to do this, I should be saying "yes"....I don't know.

So I still don't know. I think it's because I'm tired right now. And suffering from the monthly anxiety. (My brain is running on warp speed right now. And no, I don't consume enough caffeine - I don't drink coffee and rarely have time to make tea these days - that giving THAT up would be a viable sacrifice.)