For the first time ever (mainly because I didn't have to waste class time yelling at folks to stop carrying on side conversations, or to go over several topics multiple times), I have time at the end of the semester to talk a little about soil terminology.

One of the terms is "pedon." Which the textbook helpfully suggests is pronounced like "head on."

Apply directly to the forehead? (Or maybe, the porehead?)

They say that the average child laughs 400 times a day, and the average adult only 15*

This made me laugh this morning:


see more pwn and owned pictures

Yarr! (I'm not even sure that's a FAIL; I'd laugh pretty hard - with delight, not derision - if someone I knew had modified their car in that way)

(*And that 46% of statistics are made up on the spot)

***
Ah, Mythbusters, how I missed you when you were on hiatus. How glad I am that you are back. Two most excellent visuals last night: the million match heads flaring up in a giant shortlived ball of flame (and I REALLY DO NOT WANT to hear of some idiot trying to replicate that in his back yard), and the giant Lego ball.

Now I want a giant Lego ball. Or heck, I just want half a million Lego bricks.

And that "Oh NOOOOOOO!" you may have heard at about 8:46 pm CDT was me responding to the Lego-ball self-destructing. I really wanted to see that thing smash the car.

***
I made the mantle for the Dumbo octopus last night. (A sentence that out of the context of a blog of someone who likes to knit odd toys would make no sense.) It's very cleverly designed - you do something akin to turning a sock heel to make the little pouchy bit of the mantle and give it shape.

I really prefer making toys that are designed this way - where most of the essential shaping comes from how you KNIT it, not from making a bunch of fiddly pieces and then having to sew them together. (and only part of it is that I dislike seaming).

Part of the reason I like toy patterns that use things like shortrowing - or at least are knit in the round with appropriate increases and decreases for shaping - is that it seems more elegant to me, and it takes advantage of one of the good properties of knitting. Toys that are made by knitting up a bunch of flat shapes and then seaming them is mimicking what you do when you make a toy of fabric - and one of the downfalls of sewn toys is the seams, both in terms of appearance and (if it's a toy for a child or is made of exceptionally delicate fabric) strength.

But a toy that's designed to take advantage of one of the unique qualities of knitting - that you can get nifty 3-D shapes without seams - that's a good design.

I foresee making more Hansigurumi toys. (I bought the book she has out. She has an earthworm pattern in it. An EARTHWORM. I'm really tempted to order Cascade 220 in the recommended colors and make a whole army of earthworms because they are just that cute.)

***

Oh, and if you're wondering if you have swine flu? here's a handy site that can help you figure it out.

(I've already laughed twice this morning now. Only 398 more to go.)

You know, I think I am going to try to find the sheet music to "Love in Bloom" somewhere and teach myself to play that on the piano.

(There is at least one person reading this who will get that.)

Okay, I'm going to break that promise I made the other day. I hope no one minds.

When I walked into the lesson today, my teacher said, "Oh, I'm so glad to see you. I was afraid you were going to want to quit after how you felt on Sunday." (So I guess I'm not fired as a student.)

I think part of my distress was due to the fact that I had some Mean Clarinet Teachers in the past - people who would berate their students, for whom you could NEVER practice long enough. Even one who told me that unless I was aiming to play for a symphony orchestra (and by extension, give up everything that was not narrowmindedly aimed at that goal), that I was wasting my time and his.

So there's an unpleasant past of music-education to be overcome here. (For my part, I didn't start to tear up when she mentioned the recital, so that's some progress)

The post-mortem of the recital, we didn't talk that much about it other than:

1. she knew I was prepared
2. stage fright is unpredictable sometimes (and in the future? I am going to see if I can get into the venue before the recital a couple times to practice so I don't suffer from the shock of being in a new place)
3. the arrangement of people was BAD. Apparently one of the other teachers (she was coordinating for three of them) INSISTED on ranking by age. And she didn't realize how accomplished the people directly ahead of me were, as they were another teacher's students. Next time, she said, she was going to insist on ranking by length of experience.

So, whatever. And you know, there just MIGHT be a "next time." The next recital is a year from now. Perhaps with a year's more experience - perhaps with making an effort to try to play in more settings for more people on a casual basis - perhaps with the additional months of training (because part of it, really, is overcoming some fundamental weakness, especially in my "number 4" fingers) - I will be ready to do it again. Because being able to do a recital successfully after bungling this one is actually becoming sort of important to me.

And it occurred to me, a couple of things:

1. She knows what I can do and that is what is important. The fact that she wants me to continue as a student means I must have SOME potential, even if I never perform.

2. The least said, the fastest mended, or however that old saying goes. In other words: I'm going to follow the WWMPD? idea I had the other day: keep my head up and pretend the bad performance either never happened, or wasn't as bad as I remembered it to be.

3. IF someone IS enough of a boor to mention it (I used to have people in my life - fortunately no more - that would bring up people's failures as a sadistic game, to see if they could upset them or get them to react. Or else, there are some people who have such a giant, hypertrophied, squishy pity gland that they have to exercise it in every opportunity), I will smile broadly and say, "Thank you, you know, I had only been taking lessons for four months at that point?" And then drop the subject. Not try to explain (which I am too prone to do), not try to find blame. But to try, in at least some little way, to OWN my failure. (And I don't think the WWMPD? model - give them a swift karate chop - would be quite as classy.)

4. Because you know what? Even though I failed, I failed well. I didn't start to cry. I didn't throw up. I didn't stop dead in the middle of the piece and sit there (I may have stopped and re-started at one point, but it would have been a "hiccup" of maybe 2 seconds). I didn't scream, I didn't clench my hands in anger as I walked off the stage. I failed, but I looked good doing it. And, if I may use what is my favorite "dirty" word, but that I rarely use because I know some folks are offended by it (even though it does show up on network television now):

I kicked ass at failing.

And you know, realizing that is a new thought for me. I am so entrenched in the paradigm of "Failure Bad!" that to realize it's possible to fail WELL, and in fact, that it's possible to fail in such a manner that it doesn't really MATTER in the bigger scheme of things...well, it's kind of surprising.

Perhaps part of becoming a grown-up involves learning how to fail graciously when failure happens.

5. I can enjoy playing even if I never get that good. Surely there are a lot of otherwise-accomplished people out there who played the piano and were kind of lousy at it, but still enjoyed it. (I thought President Truman was that way - solely based on a cartoon I saw years ago - but the online resources I checked say he was an 'excellent' player, so that one doesn't fit).

And heck, for that matter, I may not even turn out to be a "bad" piano player. Right now I am a "beginner" piano player.

6. No one (other than my teacher) that I have seen in the past three days even KNOWS. I admit feeling almost ashamed walking into my 8 am class Monday..thinking, surely the grapevine that exists in this small town must have passed it along. But nope. I assume no one knew. Or if they did, they were being too classy to say anything. But I really think they didn't. (Another bad mired-in-adolescence tendency: assuming everything is about you. I've just recently got past the "if I see two people I know laughing over some private joke when they see me, they must be laughing about ME" tendency).

7. Once again, I am reminded that I am a lot more resilient than I give myself credit for being. (I think sometimes God or the Universe or whatever you want to call it whacks me upside with a reminder of that from time to time.)

Eight little legs!



All in a circle!

Waiting to have stitches picked up, so they can be joined to a "mantle."

This is one of the Hansigurumi patterns. Not one from her new book; this is the Dumbo octopus which is (I think still) available at her etsy shop.

It's a pretty complex pattern, but is one of those things where you have to just trust the pattern.

(Trust the pattern? Be the pattern? And of course, my mind blips to this:

"Squidward: But, this is my last quarter.
Spongebob: In the machine, Squidward.
Squidward: Ok-ok.
Spongebob: Close your eyes. (Squidward does) Now be the crane. (while Spongebob is telling him this, Squidward is playing the game) Be the crane. Be the crane. Be the crane.
Skill Crane: Winner!")

(Incidentally, while searching for the exact dialog online, I find that they make a SpongeBob cool-mist humidifier. Which I think would give me nightmares if I had it set up in my bedroom (the usual destination for a humidifier; I use them when I have a cold or my allergies are really bad). There's also a Hello Kitty one on the same site. And a penguin, which is actually kind of cute. And a cow, which is sort of inexplicable. I mean - a penguin sort of makes sense because they swim in the ocean, but a cow?)

****

I also started a new quilt. I unrolled the packet of 2 1/2 inch strips (known as a "jelly roll." Similar twee-named fabric combinations include "honey buns" and "layer cakes." I wonder if there is some relation to "fat quarters," which are kind of the grandmama of all pre-cut quilting fabric pieces. And ew, there's something else called a fat roll).

Anyway, I have to admit except for my misgivings about sewing with un-prewashed fabric (which just feels wrong but there is NO way to prewash the strips without distorting them or making them fray), jelly rolls are kind of nice. They're great for people who are pressed for time because part of the time-consuming part (the initial cutting) is already done, and so you can get to the fun part of planning out the quilt and sewing.

I'm doing a very simple pattern from a "jelly roll" book I have (it was very cheap at JoAnn's with one of their 40% off coupons, and of course, you don't have to use the pre-purchased Jelly Rolls, you can cut your own 2 1/2 inch strips, and they tell you how much you need of a fabric depending on how many strips you want from each.

The pattern is called "Sparkling Gemstones" or somesuch; it's a modification of the four-patch. The fabric line I am using is "bright pastels" (It's called Swanky). I'm not very far yet, just sewing 1 1/2 strips of white to the bright colors.

(I know this is a terribly dark photo but none of the ones I took with flash were any good).



The Miss Piggy cameo came in the mail today. It's tiny - much more delicate than I envisioned it (they gave the dimensions on the site but I didn't really think about them). So it's really kind of cryptic - you have to be almost right up on it to see that it's Miss Piggy.

And one last thought (I promise) about failed performances: WWMPD? (What Would Miss Piggy Do?) - she would probably flip her hair, walk off stage with her head held high, and then WILL herself to forget about it.

(Amazingly, there are others who have considered this very topic. Though most of those tend to lean towards using well-placed karate chops.)

I read somewhere once that Frank Oz said he tried to create the character that "has a lot of vulnerability which she has to hide, because of her need to be a superstar."
And here is this character who really, on the face of it all, doesn't have all that much talent - she's not much of a singer; onstage, she chews the scenery; she doesn't know how to dress with understatement or even much taste...and yet she pulls it off. (Of course, not being actually REAL helps).

But I admit, sometimes I do wish I could channel a bit of that bravado, that ego, and convince myself that not being perfect really doesn't MATTER as long as I am doing whatever it is. To be able to convince myself that I am fabulous, no matter what the more-critical parts of my mind may be saying.

So, what did I do next?

Well, first I sat down and had a little cry. I don't care what some of the pop-psych types say; sometimes having a tiny little meltdown in the privacy of your own house is what you need.

Then I changed my clothes, washed my face, put on new make-up, and went out to teach Youth Group. (And ironically enough, the lesson I had chosen (earlier in the week) was on "running the race." Paul uses lots of metaphors of running footraces to explain the life of faith - including the idea that you keep going at it, even (presumably, though I don't remember Paul explicitly saying this) when you screw up sometimes.)

And I tried to remind myself of something someone once said to me, but that I tend to forget, because, really, a part of my psyche is still mired in adolescence:

Q. What do most people think about you?
A. They don't.

The truth is, most people are focused enough on themselves - or their kid - or their being bored - or that thing that Judy said to them last week - or how they will get the car into the shop in time to get to work tomorrow morning - that they really and truly don't pay a whole lot more than passing attention to what's going on with the people around them.

I suspect a month out, relatively few people at that recital would even recognize me, let alone remember how I played.

Or at least I hope so.

I was able to play the piece, at the urging of my co-leader, nearly perfectly for her and the (small) Youth Group, even on a rather out-of-tune spinet piano that has washed up in the Youth Room. (We have a piano in nearly every out of the way room in that church; it seems that there was at one time a real necessity to have an abundance of them. Most of them have not aged well). So it's not that I totally can't perform for others; it was that being on stage, under lights, in a room where SERIOUS musicians were supposed to play (the fact that it was in the "Little Theater" on my campus did not help) made me too nervous.

The thing that gets me - and yes, I realize, these things don't equate - is that I have absolutely ZERO public-speaking fear. You could shove a poem into my hand, and provided it's not embarrassing subject matter, I could get up and read it to a roomful of people. You could ask me to expound on nearly any topic on which I have even a tiny bit of knowledge and I'll get up and cheerfully tell what I know, and sometimes what I kind-of-sort-of THINK I know but what might actually be wrong. Heck, I make my living standing up in front of groups of people and talking about stuff. I can even pray extemporaneously in public (I am an elder in my congregation) and I have been told by a number of people that this is not something people are commonly comfortable doing.

But performing, I guess it is different.

(I will admit to the frighteningness of stage fright: how it is something seemingly from outside, something unexpected, something that seemed impossible to control at the time. Perhaps had I been permitted to get up, walk off stage, and walk back on, it might have quieted, but I didn't feel like I had that option).

Since I am (perhaps overly) fond of extracting lessons from life events, what can this teach me?

(Again, the mired-in-adolescence part of me speaks up, huffily crossing its arms and pouting: "It should teach you NEVER to do THAT again." I envision my inner adolescent as sort of a wanna-be Goth...maybe not the full black-and-white makeup, but heavy eyeliner and dark lips and hair down in front of her face.)

I suppose the main lesson is this: I cannot be uniformly good at everything. That comfort in one public area of my life does not automatically translate to the other.

And I suppose, as the wise-beyond-his-years Linus informs Charlie Brown in the segment just after the one I linked to yesterday: The sun came up again today. I screwed something up, and the world didn't end. Because I kind of tend to feel that way when I mess something up. Not so much that the world will end, but that everyone is looking at me differently, everyone knows how I screwed up. Which makes me want to stay in bed, in the dark, like Charlie Brown did.

Then again, if I did that, maybe my baseball team would finally win a game.

(See? Humor persists).

So, will I try public performing again?

I don't know. I really don't know. I think for me to be able to do it, I'd have to get a small group of people I KNOW are supportive (rather than indifferent) and put them in the room I was to perform in, and run through a few times in a non-recital situation before I could do it again "for reals."

But do I want that? I don't know if I even care about being able to perform. I will NEVER be as good as some of the people I heard perform today - so what is the point of performing for other people? And for that matter, going to the recital and hearing someone play the Bach Minuet in G I had been working on "in my free time" on my own, and hearing her play it better than I probably will ever play it...well, that took away a little bit of my enjoyment of playing the piece. Yes, I know, I'm too competitive. But I'm afraid that hearing too much of other "amateurs" who are so far better than me will awaken that old feeling of "why bother?" in my mind.

I get it about everything, sometimes: I know I've nattered on here about my teaching and how sometimes I feel like I'm no good at it, and about the whole question of why keep knitting or quilting when all I ever really do is follow patterns other people have written, when the (apparently) "real" craftspeople are out making stuff up totally from scratch and writing books on it and getting all kinds of adulation.

Sometimes I wonder if it would be preferable to be really outstanding, I mean really amazingly good, at one thing, and not that great at others, instead of sorta-good at a lot of things. Because being "sorta" good is unsatisfying sometimes when you see someone who is really good.

Would it be better to be, I don't know, an amazing poet and yet be incapable of doing math well enough to balance a checkbook? Or to do incredible glassblowing, but be tone deaf and have no head for science? It almost seems a Faustian bargain: give up all your skills at other things, in return for this AMAZING skill in one thing. Would I take it, if it were offered? I don't know. Some days, I think I would, just for the simple security of knowing that THIS (whatever the skill was) was what I was meant to spend my life doing. (I admit, with some embarrassment, to taking a wide range of undergrad classes, and each time I started in with a new one, holding out some kind of vain hope that, if not a dove descending and settling on my shoulder, there would be some kind of a sign: This Is What You Are Supposed To Do With Your Life. No, I never got it.)

Oh man.

Oh, I wish I could tell you that the recital went perfectly. That I played the piece the way I wanted to play it.

The only thing I can say in my defense is that the teacher arranged us by age, rather than by skill level/level of experience.

So I was very nearly at the end. After two lovely young women - much younger than me - who played complex Bach pieces flawlessly. And I shouldn't have thought it, but I did: my little piece is going to look mighty simple next to these.

Then I got up there. And my hands started shaking. And I could not stop them from shaking. And I played - bungled my way through the piece. I stopped counting at three mistakes. I somehow made it through. But I felt like an IDIOT. The worst kind of an IDIOT. I feel like those people who go on American Idol and can't sing would feel if they actually had some sense of their own lack of talent.

I'm going to tell my piano teacher on Tuesday that if she wants to fire me as a student, I will understand.

Walking out of there, I felt exactly like Charlie Brown did - in that special ("A Boy Named Charlie Brown," I think) where by some fluke he winds up going to the national spelling bee - and then totally messing up and being eliminated. And that one shot, of him walking back to the hotel, all alone, defeated - and the way it's animated, so he's very small against a looming gray background of the city - that's exactly how I felt. All alone. I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could, in the hopes that people might just forget how badly I played. (There were a couple people there I knew; one person from my AAUW group there for her granddaughters. And, worst of all, one of the music profs. Gah. I really do feel like one of those American Idol rejects who gets up and screeches or has no sense of rhythm or anything, and yet they have somehow convinced themselves that they could perform.)

If a relative of mine were to call me up this moment and ask me if I'd ever consider giving them the piano, I'd ask them when they could get the movers here.

Gah. I suck. I wanted to do such a good job but my damn brain sabotaged me despite my telling myself that my mighty powers of kinesthetic memory would override any nervousness I had.

The thing that kills me? Just to convince myself I didn't have, I don't know, a stroke or something while I was sitting waiting to play, and totally lost whatever dexterity I had, I tried playing the piece when I got home.

Dammit, I could play it. I could play it just fine.

So: recital - something I am never ever going to do again. Not even if my teacher promises to rank people by years of experience rather than age.

(ETA: Here's what I was referring to. I guess he was heading back to the bus, not the hotel. And the tiny-figures-against-huge-buildings is just a split second shot, but I guess it must have affected me, to bore into my memory like that - it's probably been 25 or more years since I saw this particular Charlie Brown special.



I suppose I can at least take comfort in the fact that I did not scream, "AUUUUUGGGGH!" at the end of playing the piece badly.)

Something nice, for the weekend.

There's a whole "channel" on Youtube of a man who does acoustic guitar (mostly "fingerpicking") solos of different pieces. His work is very beautiful:



There's another one I love, Till there was You but he's disabled embedding (possibly a copyright question), but you can still go over there and hear it.

Or, if you don't like those, you can hear some Super Mario Brothers. (I know I've had this on here before, but I just love it so much:)



He also has done the MacGuyver theme song, among other more, shall we say, eclectic, pieces.

OH! And I never told you about my dogsitting experience last week.

First off, I was a wee bit nervous...the only other animal I ever cared for for its owners DIED on my watch. (Granted, it was a rabbit, and it was 7 or 8 years old and died of old age, apparently, but still, it was upsetting to say the least). So I was concerned that somehow Sweeti would go to the big Milkbone factory in the sky while I was supposed to be watching her. Of course that did not happen.

My second concern was that she'd get so bored/lonely/upset when there wasn't someone there, that she'd piddle on the carpet. That didn't happen either. (But when I was there, I was adamant about letting her out and seeing to it she stayed out for a while, to do whatever she needed to do).

The first time I went over, the dog didn't seem all that pleased to see me. "Yeah, yeah, I know" I said, "You were expecting your owners. But you've got me." Eventually she warmed up to me and let me scratch her ears and she went outside when I suggested she do so. I sat with her for maybe a half hour just to keep her from being too lonely.

The second time I went over there, she was more eager to see me (it was getting later and maybe she was getting more lonely). I sat on the glider swing in the backyard with her for a while, then when I started to get cold and went back indoors, I sat and read and she sat with her head on my knee and looked up at me. Periodically I'd scratch her head or pat her back to remind her that I was (at least marginally) paying attention to her.

About 10 pm that night her owners called me at home - they were back successfully, and "She didn't look too lonely or too sad so you must have done a good job"

Oh, the other thing - the woman told me there'd be "something on the kitchen table" next to the dog's treat jar for me. I thought, "Oh, that was nice, they got me a thank you card." Because that was really all I expected - it's not a big deal to go over and pet a dog for a while and make sure it can go out to tinkle.

But apparently it was a biggish deal to the people.

Because there was also a $50 gift card ($50! I really didn't want to accept it but I felt like it might be churlish not to do so) for Dillard's in the thank you card. I was pretty floored, as to me, $50 is a LOT of money (I probably would have baked a loaf of bread for the person in a similar situation) and really, I felt like what I had done was not that much.

(Dillard's, for those unfamiliar, is a semi-upscale department store. Kind of like Macy's.)

But when I mentioned it to my friend, she was all, "Oh, but making sure our dog was cared for was very important to us" and she didn't think the card was at all out of line. So okay.

So I'm thinking I may go down and spend the gift card tomorrow. I don't know. I still feel like I need to practice up more for my recital (even though I can play the piece mistake-free about 90% of the time). But it's been a LONG time since I've been out of the house to do more than grocery shop. So I'm thinking of taking tomorrow morning to go there, and to the JoAnn's (just to see if there's ANYTHING I want that's not on sale, so I can use a "50% off any one regular priced item." Clever JoAnn's. They put the pricey stuff on a lesser sale, then give you a good coupon that is only good on non-sale items) and to the "real" grocery store and to the Target and such. Because I think it's been since the end of Spring Break that I was really out for much shopping.

Besides, you never know when those gift card things start running out. I know some places they start to 'decay' the longer you wait to spend them.

Not sure what I'll get - I'll probably look at the clothes but if I can't find anything there, I may spring for some new towels. I bought one set of towels there a while back and am reminded that good towels (and good sheets), while expensive, are one of those things that make life a little nicer.

Spike: dare taken.

Actually, that was how I originally intended to wear it - with an otherwise perfectly serious skirt and blouse (I actually have a rather nice blouse with a ruffle around a plunging (well, for me) neckline that would look good with it).

I will think of it as a wee experiment into how perceptive people are. I suspect 95% of the people who see it will go, "oh, cameo necklace" and very very few will go "Wait...that's Miss Piggy!"

(Though it might be interesting to note if, say, males happened to notice it more than females...just testing to see if they're observing that general area. And yes, I have my suspicions, but never enough to go, "Hey, my eyes are up here." Of course, if I really wanted to test that, I probably would also need something surprising to stick on my rear end, too.)

Besides, I've concluded that anyone who would think less of me for wearing a Miss Piggy pendant in otherwise semi-casual circumstances (I would not, for example, wear it to a relative's wedding) is not someone whose approval I need. On the other hand, I suspect that there ARE people who would think more highly of me for wearing - either because they are also a Muppet fan or they appreciate humor and a bit of guts in clothing choices - and they are someone whose approval I would welcome.

There are a lot of things that I see and I want, but I can't quite justify buying for myself - either I'd never really wear them, or they cost more than I think I should pay for it.

I will admit to being tempted by the Miss Piggy cameo pendant It's like a parody of a serious, "grown up" cameo!

Still, I'm not quite sure I'd be brave enough to wear it.

(ETA: I broke down and bought it. It's cheap enough and wearing it might give me a laugh on those days when I don't otherwise feel like laughing.)

I finished the Ooh La La fabric quilt last night! All that remained after last Saturday was sewing on the "big" borders.

My camera so does not like the sun (vampire camera?) but here are some kind of washed-out shots of it pinned up on the clothesline in my back yard. (It's too big to easily display somewhere in my house and get far away enough from for a good photo)





It's also hard not having someone to help hold the quilt:



I really, really love the focus fabric.



I'm not sure what kind of a backing I will use on this one yet. I'm thinking of maybe one of those allover-texture patterns, like a Moda Marble. Maybe in a lighter shade of the blue I used for the sashing (if I can find one) or maybe an ecru with just the barest hint of yellow to it.

The piano books I learn from have all kinds of unusual stuff in them. There are some bits that are heavily-arranged classical themes (this week I have a snippet of the "Can-Can" from "Orpheus in the Underworld," which is actually kind of fun to play on the piano).

And then I got this other piece. And I was all, "Darn, that's *familiar.*" Until the words 'arky, arky' popped into my mind. Oh, it's this old Sunday School (or Vacation Bible School, where I think I actually heard it) song.

But I had either never heard, or had forgotten, this line, about the animals finally leaving the ark:

"The animals came off, came off in threesies, threesies
The animals came off in threesies, threesies
Must have been the birds and beesies, beesies"

AH hahahahaha!

I felt a lack of toy-making of late in my life.

So I fixed that, with a project begun over the weekend and completed last night.

Meet Albert:



Albert is knit from the "Albert the Absent-Minded Monster" pattern from Dangercrafts. (The pattern is very simple, very easy to follow. I used dpns for the whole thing though as I don't really care for the Magic Loop technique).

I used some Rainbow Boucle that I got very cheaply at JoAnn Fabrics (I bought it with toymaking in mind but never used it for the intended pattern).

At first, I was not so sure Albert would come out so well - the yarn striped and ombre-d in an odd sort of way. But you know, I think he turned out very cute. That stripe over where his eyes are reminds me of the Naugas. (I always kind of wanted a Nauga, but I can't quite justify the expense to myself.)

I had all these ideas of giving Albert some kind of a grand name - maybe doing some kind of play on words and naming him "Woodbine" or some such (Albert Campion...and woodbine is another name for the campion plant). Or I thought of taking one of the many aliases Campion used.

But in the end, the monster looks like a just-plain Albert to me. So Albert he remains. (Though I have to admit, "The Honorable Tootles Ash" would be an excellent name for a toy. Just one a bit grander than this monster.)

Albert seems like a rather happy little monster to me, despite his alleged absent-mindedness. The sort of monster who's quick with a silly joke when you're down, or who maybe laughs a bit too hard at cartoons, or who just enjoys pottering around the house or garden.

I admit at times I have misgivings about my fondness for, and tendency to hang onto (and to make new, and even at times to buy) toys. I am, after all, 40 years old. And almost none of the "real" adults I know seem to admit to hanging on to even a childhood toy. But then again, this post does seem to encourage me a bit. If she can hang on to "Boosin," perhaps it is not so odd, not so deviant, that I like to have my own little army of toy monsters hanging around.

And it's funny - making monsters is really fun. You don't have to worry about verisimilitude (or at least I don't, not in the way I worry about it when making animals representative of "real" animals).

I was never afraid of monsters as a child. (At least not when I was old enough to be laying down memories). I guess for one thing, I had kind of concluded they were imaginary. (Even my imaginary friends, I knew were imaginary.) And also, I figured there were more urgent things to be afraid of - the dentist, for example. And fires. And tornadoes. (I was just old enough in 1974 - when the bad, deadly outbreak happened in Xenia, Ohio, to understand what was being discussed on the news. Xenia was considerably distant from where I lived but it still did scare me. And a couple times every summer, we would all have to troop down into the basement when they called a warning - me usually clutching my Snoopy doll, and, if the warning came in the middle of the night, the pillow off my bed.)

So monsters, if I ever considered them, I tended to think of them more as a funny and rather benign thing - perhaps that was influenced by early watching of Sesame Street, where none of the monsters (not even Oscar) was really scary. (Though The Count did kind of scare me, with his ability to summon lightning. And I think his weird counting compulsion scared me, too). I guess I envisioned the monster-world as being more like the way it worked behind-the-scenes at "Monsters, Inc." (which is a lovely funny movie and not just one children will enjoy) - "regular guys" (and girls) who kind of went about every day lives not unlike our own.

So I have a certain fondness for monsters, whether they are big and furry like Sully, or lovable screw-ups like Grover, or the many funny creatures I have knit or sewn or crocheted over the years...

I have to talk today about one of those little modern annoyances. I know at least some of you are dealing with it as well. And while it is a MINOR annoyance, compared to disease or famine or other issues those of us who have a decent income and live in the developed world don't really have to deal with too much, it is still one of those things that drives me crazy.

Because it is something that should NOT be. It completely destroys my ability to accept, Professor Pangloss-like, that this is the "best of best possible worlds." It intrudes upon my free time, shatters my concentration, and makes me angry.

It is, if you haven't guessed already, those poxy plaguey pre-recorded calls selling either extended car warranties, or warning that the interest rate on credit cards is about to go up.

I KNOW these are scams. You do not need to tell me. I am on the Federal Do Not Call list, which means that the ONLY businesses allowed to call me should be ones with whom I already do business, charities, and political organizations. (Oh, and poll-takers.) So I figure any business that is breaking the law (granted, a law lacking in any teeth whatsoever) and that is going DIRECTLY against the wishes of a particular person (because honestly, how much more clearly can you say "I do not want to be cold-called at home" than by putting your name on that list?) has to be doing business in an illegal manner.

I also figure it must be like that old Nigerian 419 scam - enough people fall for it, enough people are foolish enough to send money in, to make it profitable to keep going. (Fools. And they are making it worse for the rest of us. The tragedy of the commons, indeed.)

I get three or four of these a week, sometimes more, sometimes one or two a day for a while. Most of the time they come when I'm not home and click over to my voice mail, where I typically delete them upon the first few words of the message. (though that may change).

But last night - last night, at 5:45 pm, when I had FINALLY got home from a long day at work that included a tensemaking lab involving hazardous chemicals, when I had FINALLY sat down at the piano to practice, when I figured I could JUST squeeze in an hour of practice around the other things I had to do that evening, the phone rang.

I know, I know: I should just turn the ringer off, and I think I will be doing that in the future.

But I answered - not knowing who it might be (I don't have caller ID, and it wouldn't be that useful to me: I'd still have to get up and go to the phone to see who was calling).

It was some call claiming my credit-card interest rates are about to go up.

(Like the old joke about the hillbilly kid and the Thermos bottle: "How do it KNOW?" I have not received any notification from either credit union that I have a card through - and I know they would notify me, they are very good about that sort of thing. So, once again: SCAM)

At that point, I was fuming. My concentration was shattered. (I had been right at a tricky part that I had kept messing up). So when it said, "Press 1 to take advantage of this offer!" I pressed 1.

And waited through a minute or two of elevator music.

And then, when a woman came on and asked me if I wanted to take advantage of their EXCITING OFFER, I said:

"No. My number is (redacted). I want you to put me on your Do Not Call List. I have received three and four of these calls weekly, sometimes more than one a day. I often work at home* and I do not like having my privacy invaded and my concentration interrupted by a scam artist trying to sell me something. I regard this as harassment. Take my name off your list and never call me again."

She had no response, by which I assume she had either hung up, put the phone on speakerphone/mute and she and her cronies in the boiler room were making the universal Crazy Lady symbol next to their heads**, or she had muted the phone so if necessary it could later be claimed she never heard my request.

(*yes, grading is technically work.)
(**If not wanting these calls, and getting angry and fed up with them means I'm crazy, then I don't want to be sane)

Later, I looked on line and found that there's really nothing to be done.

Which is what makes this so infuriating, and makes me feel so helpless - apparently the scammers often spoof the numbers called-from, so if you have caller ID, you get a fake number showing up - when you report it, you're told it's not in service.

Asking for a company name and address either gets you hung up on, or if the company gets shut down, another one under a different name opens up soon.

It's like athlete's foot - you can't get rid of it. Infuriating.

And what's worse? Apparently some folks who use cell phones get these calls on their cell phones - coincidentally my soils lab folks and I had been talking about this while waiting for the sulfur test to develop and several of them said they'd gotten the scam calls on their cell phones. Which is even worse, because then YOU'RE paying for someone to try to scam you.

So, last night, at the end of my rope, sick and fed up with these calls, I considered the options.

Caller ID, while it might be useful otherwise, really won't solve the problem of "have to jump up and run to the phone" because I'd still have to go and see what number. And I think - though I could be wrong on this - someone calling from an unlisted number would show up in the same way as a scammer would - "Number blocked."

There's also something called Anonymous Call Block, but that's only useful (apparently, according to the AT &T website) if you happen to have a human stalker right in the same town where you are - it does not block "out of range" calls, and most infuriatingly, it does not block telemarketers.

I could also simply change my outbound voice mail message to something like, "You have reached (number redacted). Because of the high volume of telemarketing calls I am receiving - in direct contravention to the federal Do Not Call list - I am no longer answering my phone. Please leave your name, your number, a short message, and I will get back to you as soon as I check my messages." And then turn the ringer off on my phone.

While I don't LIKE that - because sometimes there are calls you really do need to take as soon as they come in - it would keep me more sane. And it has the added bonus of not announcing in any way, "I am not home right now." (because sometimes would be burglars call houses they are casing to see if someone might be home)

The other option - which only occurred to me this morning, and which I think I may use - is much simpler and less passive-aggressive. I will just do what I did in college - turn the ringer off on the phone during the times I don't want to take calls, and then turn it back on (I'd have to make myself some kind of a reminder note so I don't forget) when I'm done grading, or practicing piano, or reading. (One year when I was in college, my phone number was one digit off from a pizza place that was open late into the night. You can imagine the types of calls I got at 1 am until I realized I could turn off the ringer on my phone.)

But, the thing is - I should not HAVE to do that. But I guess I will.

Though I admit sometimes the activist part of my brain gets tripped a little - like last night when I took the woman to task for calling me - and I become tempted to NOT delete the messages left on my phone, to listen to them through and take down the number they suggest calling, and then call them. Multiple times. And do things like play a recording of the SpongeBob SquarePants "F.U.N. song" when someone picks up. Or read German poetry (my German pronunciation is atrocious, but whatever). Or tell them that God's gonna get them. Or something. Some kind of semi-surreal protest against being called at home.

Or call them back and ask the telemarketer for his/her home number, so *I* can call *them* at home when they're trying to, I don't know, read to their kids or cook dinner or some such. (And yeah, I know - the people who work in call centers, often that's the only job they can get, but still. And maybe I could ask for their manager's number.)

Or call the number, ask for the name and address of the business, and even though I know it will do no good, report them to the BBB and the FCC and anyone else I can think of who might crack down on them. Because this is so totally unnecessary. These businesses are doing something illegal - granted, they're not raping or robbing (well, except from the people who send them money) or anything like that - but still, it is frustrating to me that they stay in business.

I finished the Lace Ribbon scarf that I've been working on for (I think) over a year.

(July 12 of last year, based on what I said on Ravelry).

I finished and blocked it Saturday night:



It's Fleece Artist "Sea Wool," a wool and "seacell" (fiber made from algae, don't ask me how they do it) blend. The color is called "dandelion."

I tried it on to see how it looked. Granted, a deep-purple skirt is not the best match with this, but here it is:



When I saw the finished picture, I had to kind of laugh. No, not over the (empty) tea mug sitting on the side table, or the pillowcase that I am still embroidering on (that's what that white thing is) next to it. I had to laugh because the picture looks so very *Victorian* to me - both the way I am sitting (I guess I do tend to sit pretty demurely) and also all the framed family pictures up on the wall all around me.

I got to thinking that I should take another picture, using the 'sepia' filter on my camera, but meh, that would take more work. So instead I used my rather-cheap photo editing software (Pixela, which came with my camera) to crop, make black and white, and blur a little, part of the photo.



Hah. I could almost print that out, frame it, and hang it up with the similar photos of my maternal great-grandparents. (they have a similar slightly blurred effect to them, at least the "casual" photo of the whole family sitting in their parlor). Or it looks a bit like one that might show up in the old, old yearbook of a ladies' seminary...the Botany professor at home in her living room or somesuch.

Mah Major Award!



Let me show you it!



Hahahahahaha. This is from the town trash-off day they do a couple times a year. The spring one was today. I had a couple of my ecology students come out (I offered extra credit) and we picked up the road leading up to the Bio building and also a small chunk of the main road that that road turns off of.

The "major award" was one that the head of the Solid Waste department had made up - at the urging of those of us on the local beautification committee - to hand out. I think they're wonderful. (He also had ones for the biggest group that came out, and I think for the individual who picked up the largest number of bags).

Oh, why did I get the award?



You probably can't read that, but it's the award for finding the most unusual item. (They do an "unusual item" award every year). I found an inflatable raft, which was deemed most unusual. (Actually, one of my students found a thong - NOT the kind you wear on your foot - but I think he was too embarrassed to enter it).

And yeah, I think I'm going to hang the award up in my office, and tell people what it was for if they ask. Good advertising for future trash-off days, maybe.

I've received a couple pieces of advertising from OG and E, pushing their new "Average Pay" (or whatever they call it) plan - this is one where your electric bill is the same amount each month, so you don't (I presume) get freaked out in the summer with a high bill when you're running the a/c.

The thing is...they give you a comparison of the "average" of what you pay now, and what you would be paying, on average, for this "we'll predict what you use over a year and divide it by 12." And in my case, what I pay now is cheaper - by $5 - than their estimated average. Which means if I took the plan, I'd be sending them $60 more a year than what I do now, if everything remains the same.

At first I thought, "It would be a simple matter, wouldn't it, for them to program the computer that is doubtless generating these things, to have a line that said something like "IF NOWBILLPAY < NEWAVERAGEBILL, STOP PRINTING NOTICE" (or whatver. I only ever knew BASIC, and it's been a good 25 years since I used THAT).

Then I thought again: but people being what they are, you KNOW there would be someone yammering because they didn't receive the offer, even if their bill would continue to be cheaper under the old, "pay for each month as it comes" system.

I suppose the averaged-out system would work well for someone on a really strict budget, but then again, I know roughly what my electrical bills will be for a given month (about $30 in the winter, between $70 and $100 in the summer depending on how much I have to run the air conditioning) so I can plan ahead.

(I have a fairly small house, I'm not home a whole lot, and I tend to be pretty conservative of electricity. I think in the winter much of my bill is because I have an electric stove and also an electric clothes dryer - appliances that heat require more electricity)

Too funny: Free pattern for a crocheted Earl Lenmeyer the Flask. Just in case you want to influence your kids in a particular career direction. Or make one as a lab mascot.

I kind of want one myself. When I get some time, I should make one.

"I love the whole world, in all its craziness" part I-don't-know-how-many:

vampyrellids (you need to scroll to the bottom)

Soil protozoa that, like their namesake, punch holes and "suck out the good stuff." Only they do it to fungi, including a disease of wheat roots.

"The perfectly round holes drilled through the fungal cell wall, much like the purported puncture marks on the neck of a vampire’s victim, are evidence of the presence of vampyrellid amoebae. The amoebae attach to the surface of fungal hyphae and generate enzymes that eat through the fungal cell wall. The amoeba then sucks dry or engulfs the cytoplasm inside the fungal cell before moving on to its next victim."

I bet the USDA person had fun writing that up.

I didn't even know of the existence of these things before doing a little additional looking-up of soil protozoa for my soils class.

Friday random:

1. Lydia: yes, I have seen Commonplace Books and have at times thought of starting my own. But inertia tends to get to me.

2. I received a piece of spam this morning from someone named "Sally eww." Heh. It was allegedly (as per the subject line) offering "Offshore printing services." (Huh? for counterfeit money? a cheap way to make books? I didn't open the spam - I never do, lest there be something bad in there - but it seems one of the odder things to offer).

3. We are fast approaching the compassion-fatigue part of the semester. I had four (at my best count) people miss an exam yesterday. One had food poisoning (and no, he wasn't playing me; he showed up at my office looking all ashen and clutching his stomach to see if he needed to take the exam at the scheduled time or if he could take it later); he will take the exam today (if he feels better) or Monday. Another called me after the exam - he had been in court (I cannot ask why and am frankly glad I cannot; this is also someone who referred to his "baby momma" earlier in the semester so I really don't want to know any further details) and the judge was late. He is also taking the exam today.

But I have two unaccounted for, and what is typical for this class is that they will call me up in a panic next week and either have a doctor's note (meaning I probably NEED to do a make up test) or not, and get belligerent when I tell them they can't make up the test.

Oh, and I also had someone show up for an exam without a writing utensil. Blows my mind.

I keep reminding myself one of the people from CAT (Center for the Advancement of Teaching) at my grad school used to say: "Professors were atypical students." Tends to keep my head from exploding.

4. It's the scarf that never ends....I thought I'd finish the Lace Ribbon scarf yesterday, based on how small the remaining part of the yarn cake was. But yarn cakes are deceiving - it seems they shrink more slowly as you get down towards the center. One of the challenges to this is that I have to watch the yarn dwindle; the pattern will really only work if you stop on row 24 (of 24) so I have to try and judge whether there's enough left for another repeat or not. (The scarf is not long enough. I sort of mis-read the pattern...it's really calling for 2, 450 yard skeins of sock yarn, and I had but one. It says that one skein will make a 60" long scarf, but I'm not there yet...)

Two utterly and completely unrelated thoughts:

On the pin-up girl issue: I really don't mind that I might be yoked, in some designer's mind, to the pin-up girls of old. I don't know a WHOLE lot about them, but from what I know, it seems like they had sass and a sense of humor about what they were doing and I can appreciate that. It was like, what they were doing wasn't (generally) really dirty, it was maybe at times a bit racy or bawdy - but somehow, raciness or bawdiness can be funny and a celebration of life, but the real down-and-dirty dirtiness that is in some realms of pop culture today is just kind of tawdry and defeated.

I'm not saying that at all well...but maybe you get what I mean. I remember reading (this may be an apocryphal story) that Betty Grable or someone, while having a cheesecake picture taken, made the comment, "Let's remind the boys what they're fighting for!" (Or maybe that was from some old movie I saw). Almost a sense of being not-exactly-sexy-but-I-can't-think-of-a-better-word as a civic duty or out of a sense of patriotism...

(and yeah, yeah, I know, some of you are muttering "heteronormative" and other things under your breath, but this is my imagined reality we're talking about here)

I may not look like the traditional pin-up girl (then again, I don't know; what was considered "hot" in the 1940s was a little bit more generously proportioned than what's considered "hot" today.)

(And I will say, as yet another aside - I put on a dress this morning I had not worn in some six months. Back then it fit, but tightly. Now it fits comfortably - it's not LOOSE but neither is it as tight as it was. And since it's linen, I doubt it stretched out any hanging in the closet. And I do think my legs are taking on a more pleasing form, thanks to the large quantities of exercise I do currently)

And the other, unrelated thought:

Another sampler-motto, that I like even better than the Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka quotation, comes from Jane Austen:

"Ah! There is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort."

Because I tend to believe that. And I don't get to be home nearly as much as what I'd find ideally comfortable these days.

I should get a little notebook and write these mottoes down, for someday when I may have time to stitch them all up.

On the "granny or pin-up girl" issue:

Technically, chronologically, I COULD be a grandmother, if I had had a child at 18 or so, and my child had had a child at 18 or so.

That thought scares me a little. Considering how immature I am in some ways.

And to continue the whole "things designers say you don't need to wear" - I also almost always wear a slip under a dress or skirt, unless it is either lined, or is an extremely heavy (like denim) material. But I've read that some designers think you are like 120 years old if you still wear a slip. Whatever. All I can say is that at times, I'm standing with the sun at my back, and I really don't like the x-ray specs effect.

****

I said earlier, that although the outlining process (done in backstitch) is kind of time consuming on embroidered things, it's what really makes the picture "come to life." Evidence of that:



The thing begins to look "finished" when you are doing the outlines.

I also added a few more repeats to the feather-and-fan scarf:



Feather and fan is my favorite simple lace pattern. It's so easy to do but it looks so good.

I'm also thinking about lace scarves a little more. I proctor an exam this morning and I'm going to work on the long-stalled Lace Ribbon scarf. It's getting close to done, at least somewhere close.

Also, I decided I HAD to have some of the new "Dream in Color" yarn that comes with silver fibers worked into it. So I ordered a very dark blue shade (the color names are very idiosyncratic so they're not immediately evocative of the exact color). Looking at it, I decided that I felt like the silver fibers (which are not worked in all that tightly) wouldn't last well on socks...so I'm going to do a scarf of it instead. Probably I'm going to do Crest of the Wave, another old old Shetland pattern. I think it will look good in the dark blue yarn with silver flecks.

Cute, or weird?

I can't decide.

I also do have to note that this is the first dental check up in a year that failed to turn up any problems. Which is a giant relief. Last May, I had the first crown preparation, and then had a second one in January.

This time, everything looked good. (Well, it darn well better, now that I'm timing my tooth-brushing AND using the horrible-tasting fluoride rinse). The hygienist did warn me that I have two more "large" amalgam fillings that, if they go bad, will need to be replaced with crowns.

But at least they don't need replacing YET.

Yesterday was a challenging day. I helped do a lunch for a group of college kids, then I had to get the allergy shot, then had the piano lesson, and then had the dentist appointment. I hate days like that where you're running all over the place.

I did, at the end of the day, run by the quilt shop and pick up a skein of the color 676 floss...I do think it will work better than the brighter color I had pulled out of the floss "stash."

Then I sat down to work on the (sort of stalled) Feather and Fan scarf. And found I had dropped a stitch somewhere, which I couldn't see in the fluffy yarn. So I had to un-knit several rows until I found it.

I hate having to rip back. I briefly considered ripping the whole thing out and re-starting.

Huh:

supposed quotation from "designers" (seen on Craftblog):

"Hosiery is for grannies and pin-up girls."

Well, I'm definitely not a granny...But I do wear hose, at least until it gets so unbearably hot here that it's unpleasant. (And even then, if I'm wearing a shorter skirt, I still will wear them...it's sort of a modesty thing, a throwback to the days when you wore shorts under your skirts on the playground so you could do "penny drops" on the monkey bars without people chanting that "I see London, I see France" rhyme).

So by someone's strict logic, that means I'm in the same category as Betty Grable and Lili St. Cyr. (And even Sophia Loren, who, were I given the choice of any woman on this earth to look like, I would choose...)


People who make broad generalizations. They're so cute.

I've been playing around a bit with Google street view.

My house is on there. The car must have come through sometime in the winter, I think, the lawns aren't very green and it looks like my Christmas wreath is up on the door. It must have been in the last year or so, because my white mailbox (the THIRD replacement mailbox I've had to do) is there already. And my porch light is on, very likely meaning it was either at the end of last year's Daylight Saving time or the start of this year's, because I have to put the light on so I don't break my neck falling down the porch steps when I leave the house at 6:45 am.

My parents' current house is not on there; guess the car didn't go through their neighborhood yet. But the house I grew up in is. And it makes me a little homesick, though it's been 20 years since I've been back there. Everything is so green! They get so much rain! The yard is so big! and Oh, look how the sad little street trees have grown up nice and pretty!

(This will also serve, if anyone who is reading this knew me "back then" and was wondering...could it be the same girl, I used to know? Yes, maybe it is)

The house was up for sale at the time the photo was taken (I knew that - one of my mom's friends who still lives back there told me).

I also found the apartments I lived in for a few years when I lived in Ann Arbor. That also seems like a long time ago...I guess actually it is, now, nearly 20 years.

I'm not nearly so homesick for old Maynard House. Too much concrete, too much noise, too many self-absorbed self-important people around.

***

I did a tiny bit of work on the pillowcases last night, but as I had a late lab and an evening meeting, free time was almost nonexistent. I decided though, rather than doing the "efficient" "recommended" way of working - of going ploddingly through each color until every part of the pillowcases needing that color is done - I will do what I feel like, color-wise, when I feel like it. If I happen to run short of a color, I can always buy more - floss is cheap.

I also found that I'm missing the "gold" color I need (I think it's 676). I think that was because the place I bought the pillowcases and floss originally was out of it, and I just figured I'd buy it when I got around to that part. (A quick search of my box of floss fails to turn up that exact color). I'm debating whether to run over to the quilt shop after my piano lesson today and pick up the EXACT color, or to do what I thought I might last night, use a similar color (444). The compulsive part of me wants to insist on getting the EXACT color, but the sort-of-lazy, sort-of-frugal part wants to go "Meh, 444 is close enough." So I don't know.

I don't do counted cross-stitch, but I love this sampler.

"Thank you, Internet, for letting me observe so many crazy people at a safe distance" HAH hahahahaha.

I've thought of doing my own embroidered "mottoes" - like the Victorians had up on their walls. But mine would be different. One I have (somewhat seriously) in mind (I just need to draw it out and figure out the "decorations" that would go around the outside) is the quotation from the end of the 1971 Willy Wonka movie*

"What happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted? He lived happily ever after."

(Supposedly that's the right quote; I remembered it a bit differently)

I also have others in mind but that's the main one that strikes me. It's just inertia that keeps me from actually doing it.

*Which is, IMHO, the ONLY movie that's been made of the book. You may say otherwise but Gene Wilder was the PERFECT Willy Wonka for me.

And it's funny - having watched a bit of it over the weekend again - Wilder's portrayal of Wonka is just "off" enough to keep it interesting. There's an underlying sarcasm there...there were moments where he said things, or had an expression on his face, that oddly enough reminded me of House. I wonder if that's why some people respond negatively to the movie - and why some people love it so deeply. (And I wonder what it says that I find a level of sarcasm in my movie/tv characters appealing that I probably wouldn't like at all in real life. Maybe it's the piercing blue eyes that do it, I don't know.)

Two half-pairs of finished socks.

First, the "simple" sock - I always have a pair of "simple" socks on the needles. This one is made from the Opal Rainforest line (#4, I think?). The colorway is representative of some tropical bird and is "Proud Harald" or more literally, "Harald the Proud."



I used a 7x1 rib on the body of the sock to make it more fitted without compromising the color patterning too much. And for a change, I maintained the ribbing all through the toe decreases. One of the things I like about socks is that there are all these little things you can change up so even "simple" socks don't have to be multiple identical pairs.

I cast on for the second sock - making an effort to start at the same point in the patterning so that they will be identical. (I had to wind off a fair amount of yarn and remove it from the ball in order to make that work; I hope that doesn't come back to bite me at the end of this sock).

I also finished the first "Pele's Sock"



It's interesting how the stripes are narrower and more frequent on the foot. I think that's because on the leg, the pattern is the lacy rib all the way around, and on the foot, it's only on the instep.

I really like this yarn. The coloring amuses me, but more than that, the yarn itself feels very nice. It's from an online shop called Rock Creek Yarns. (Based, you might guess, in Washington DC).

Happy Easter to all who celebrate!

One of my great memories of Easter is the Sunrise Service that used to be held on the village green in the town where I grew up. The town I grew up in was, in some ways, a midwestern town trying to be a Ye Olde New England town (it has to do with the history of the place, so they come about it authentically). Anyway, we had a village green with a bandstand and a clock tower.

And most years, there was an Easter sunrise service. I don't remember if different churches ran it year to year, or if it was just the one my family and I belonged to that did it, or if it was kind of a generalized Protestant Easter service. But I remember it as being very special.

Now, this was northeastern Ohio, so lots of years it was kind of cold Easter morning. I remember some years being a little disappointed about having to wear a heavy coat over my Easter dress (and not knowing what to do with the corsage - many years my dad would by my mom and me orchid corsages to wear on Easter).

But it was still special being outside for the service. Usually it really WAS a Sunrise service, held very early in the morning. (I remember the pattern in my family was that my brother and I were allowed to look at our Easter baskets briefly, but not really dig into them until after we got back from services. And somehow, the Easter bunny always knew to wait to hide the eggs until after we got back...I think it must have happened while my brother and I were standing out on the porch while my dad took pictures of us).

But it was special, standing out in the wet grass, singing the old hymns, hearing the same words I had heard every Easter morning probably since before I was old enough to know what the words meant. And to rejoice again, to feel like the world had been made new again. To sense the sigh of forgiveness again, and to be reminded that everything would, somehow, eventually be OK. That good would triumph over evil, in fact that it had already, evil just didn't know it yet.

It's funny that the really harrowing aspects of Good Friday never really hit me - I never really understood them until I was an adult. Perhaps in a way that was a good thing, to protect me from them when I was young. Of course, with no Good Friday there is no Easter, but I think as a kid I understood Easter better than I did Good Friday.

At some point they stopped doing the sunrise services - I don't know if it was after a couple of years of it being rained out, or if the people who organized it didn't have time to plan it any more, or if too many people complained it was too early (and I still think that was part of the specialness of it), or what - but I still think an Easter service in a church is not quite the same as one outside, in the cool damp of the morning. It somehow made hearing what Mary Magdalene and the other women saw seem more immediate, more vivid.

Most years after the service we'd go home, hunt for the dyed hard boiled eggs (and neither my brother nor I liked hard-boiled eggs. My parents must have been very patient to let us dye a dozen of them, knowing they'd be eating egg salad or eggs cut up on sandwiches for days), look at the stuff in our Easter basket, and then either go out to brunch/lunch somewhere (if we could get reservations far enough in advance) or have something at home (if not, or if we decided we'd rather eat at home that year. I know a lot of years we had the traditional ham on Easter).

Easter candy tended to hang around for a while. Usually the "Peeps" (those marshmallow things - it seems people either love them or loathe them) got eaten first (I love Peeps and always wait for them to arrive in the stores every spring. And yes, I still buy them as an adult) and the chocolate went, but some of the other stuff hung around for a while. And if I was particularly lucky in a given year, I'd get a small stuffed toy rabbit or chicken in the basket. Not always, but it was nice when it happened.

Now as an adult, I go to church. That's the important thing. I didn't have a new dress this year, or an orchid corsage, or an Easter basket for that matter. But that's not what's important - just as now for me Christmas seems to really come during the Christmas Eve service, the important part of Easter is being in the big church and singing the familiar hymns and hearing yet again the words that I have heard, as I said, every year since before I was old enough to know what they meant.

And once again to sigh that sigh - that things WILL ultimately be all right. Maybe not here, maybe not right now. But they will be.

The rest of the day is a fairly quiet day. I'm doing some hand quilting and thinking about sewing the rest of the current quilt top together.

Yesterday was a good day. I seem to be happiest on days when I do a bunch of different stuff - I guess I feel like I get more done than on days when I work on a single project.

I did sew a few more of the blocks for the ongoing quilt - and I planned out the remaining six, so I just have a few more seams to do this afternoon and I can think about laying out the blocks.

I also knit a bit on a pair of simple socks from one of the bright Opal colorways. ("der stolze Harald" - mostly yellow with some pink and peach)

And I did my hour of piano practicing - I try to do an hour a day, I figure I'll get better faster if I can do that much.

And I did 45 minutes of a workout.

And I mailed my tax forms in. I'm getting a nice little federal refund (though not for such a happy reason; capital losses in the past year lead to it in part) and had to send a check to the state, but the federal refund more than counterbalances that).

And I met a dog belonging to friends. A couple in my church are going out of town the end of next week and wanted someone they "trusted" to check in on their dog (they're really only gone one day, but they don't like to leave the dog more than 3 or 4 hours alone because she is very attached to them and I guess they are afraid she might pine.) It is a very friendly little dog - some kind of a terrier mix - but I still wanted to meet it in my friends' presence so the dog would accept me as OK.

I'm really more of a cat person (though I don't have any pets myself) but this is such a nice, well-behaved little dog that I could see having a dog like her. (Perhaps the fact that after "greeting" me she ran, got one of her toys, and dropped it at my feet helped charm me into liking her).

Then, in the afternoon, I decided I needed to do some work outside. I was concerned about my garden - I never got beans planted and really it's too late here now because it will get hot soon, and beans don't deal well with hot (at lest in my experience). But I at least wanted to put in some tomatoes, and maybe some winter squash. (I don't even know the right time to plant winter squash in Oklahoma. Maybe it's not yet, I don't know. I couldn't find any at the two places I tried. Maybe I could still start it from seed).

I had heard on the news that "OH MY EVERYONE IS TRYING TO GROW THEIR OWN FOOD NOW" and they had comments from store clerks saying things like, "All the vegetable seeds have just FLOWN off the shelves" so frankly I was a bit apprehensive about whether I'd find much at the garden center.

Hah. Typical news hyperbole designed to whip people into a frenzy of OH NOES! There was plenty of stuff. Especially Arkansas Traveler tomatoes, my favorite variety of all time, so I bought four of them, two Romas, and two of some hybrid proprietary to the Bonnie plants company. (It claimed to be indeterminate, which is one thing I tend to look for in tomatoes - well, Romas are determinate, but it's hard to get around that if you want paste tomatoes)

(Indeterminate: it will keep blooming and bearing until frost. Determinate: tends to stop bearing, and all fruit ripen at about the same time. Though I will say now when I think about it, I've had Romas that behaved almost like indeterminate tomatoes, where once you picked off all the ripe fruit, they started bearing again)

So I hoed up the entire back garden (and I must be getting fitter; I'm not sore today like I often am), top-dressed the soil with some high-organic matter stuff, and planted my eight tomatoes (plus a lot of marigolds; that's a cheap way of preventing nematode attack and I figure since all the "old timer" gardeners here do it, it's probably a good idea). I also put in two lemon basil and a German thyme that I bought at the same time.

Then I "bushwhacked" the side shade garden - birds come and perch on the fence and their leavings contain a lot of mulberry and other seeds, and I usually have to cut out lots of tree seedlings. This year I'm also having to deal with wild blackberry. And not the kind that makes good to eat fruits, or I'd leave it. (The wild blackberry around here have disappointingly tasteless fruit. The first year I was here I was doing research out at a site covered with them, and I got all excited as I saw the fruits ripen. "I could make jam!" I thought. Then I tasted a few. And I saw why the birds left them largely unmolested - there are far tastier things out there for birds to eat.)

One frustrating thing about gardening in the South is the sheer abundance of weeds. The climate is so favorable that if you don't keep on top of things, your garden can get overrun very rapidly.

I still need to decide on the front flowerbeds. I had thought of doing marigolds like I often do, but then I saw some really nice red salvia, which should do well in the bright/hot conditions there. (Also, don't hummingbirds come to red salvia?) But I'm not sure what to put in with it. White would be the most logical choice, but petunias do very badly in that garden and most other white-blooming things I have ready access to are more of a shade/mixed-shade plant. Maybe dusty miller for the foliage, I don't know.

It's important to start the day with a good breakfast.

It's even nicer to have a new mug to drink your breakfast beverage (in my case, skim milk...I do not tolerate coffee well) out of:



Thanks, Diann! It came yesterday.

(The mug shows the fillyjonk - here she is cleaning house (not an atypical pose). Perhaps this is the angle at which I most resemble a fillyjonk...though I think proportionally I am "narrower in the beam" than this one)

The other side of the mug also has a picture:



This is the fillyjonk with her three children (who look rather like weasels to me). This is why I think Jansson meant the fillyjonks to be a species rather than an individual - none of the fillyjonks in her books have children (and in fact, seem to be spinsters). But the one in the comic strip has children (and is also, as I observed before, less "willowy" than the ones in the books).

It's fun to have mugs like this. (I also have one with a gnome on it).

The bread is Orowheat "Health Nut," one of the few grocery store breads I actually like.

I have today off (we are one of the relatively few, I think, public universities that gives Good Friday off) so I am doing a few other things - preparing my Sunday School lesson for this week, finishing up and mailing off my taxes. And hopefully finding some time to work more on the quilt I posted about on Monday.

Oh, and thanks for the nice support about the recital. I'm still thinking about what to wear. (I don't think this quite rises to the occasion of "go out and buy a new dress" for me). Shoes will not be an issue (as I originally thought) because the piece I am playing does not use the pedal. (Certain of my shoes are easier to work the pedal in smoothly than others).

I may just wait and see what the weather's going to be. It's April 26, which means it will probably be fairly warm. I have a nice navy-blue with lighter-blue-queen-anne's-lace-like-designs dress - it's fairly plain, but I could wear a lightweight shawl over it - that would probably be good. (Navy blue is a color that has always suited me particularly well).

The polishing up of the Ecossaise is going nicely; I'll probably be pretty confident about it. And I'm really not that scared - if I make a mistake, what's the worst that can happen? My piano teacher won't fire me. No one will laugh at me, or if they do, that's them being a jerk.

I had to take my car in for new tires yesterday. (I noticed they felt bald - nearly hydroplaned a few times - in the last bad rainstorm, then did the "penny test" and concluded that it was time).

It's always a bit of a production getting anything done with the car. Because I live in a fairly small town, none of the places (as far as I can tell) have twigged to the idea of giving out loaner cars while yours is being worked on. (I think the expectation is that every adult is paired off, like on Noah's Ark, and OF COURSE there is a spouse with a car who can come get them and take them back. But anyway. I have to wait there).

So I waited. I had a book with me (didn't have time to run home and get a project) but it was hard to read. I've said before that I find auto-place waiting rooms just slightly less depressing than waiting at the hospital when someone you love has been admitted? I stand by that.

There were a couple other people in the waiting area apparently engaged in what was on the television or I would have looked for the remote and shut it off. It was one of the news channels. They were running a show where the MO was apparently to find two people with THE most diametrically opposed opinions on a topic possible, and put them together in a room. And bonus points if one of the people will stoop to ad hominem attacks.

So that was what was going on over my head as I was trying to read a book about C4 and CAM photosynthesis. And I could feel my blood pressure rising - not out of anger, because I actually felt somewhat detached from the issues being discussed, but out of stressed sadness.

I fear sometimes, when I hear people arguing and talking over each other like they were on this show, that we may be headed for some kind of a civil war in this country. Perhaps not a "hot" civil war in the sense of people firing guns at each other, but a war of sorts nonetheless. And it seems so stupid. I'd rather see two people with somewhat different points of view present those points of view, try to find points of agreement, try to discuss the sticking points without attacking each other, and maybe generate a little LIGHT on a subject, rather than just generating HEAT. But I guess I expect too much.

And I'm reminded of why I strictly limit my exposure to news channels.

Finally they had the tires all on. The one bit of good news is that it cost less than what they originally quoted to me; apparently there was some promotion going on for tires (Or perhaps they knocked a few bucks off because the tires hadn't come in on the day they PROMISED me they'd be in and I had driven out there for nothing).

I guess my other frustration with the whole news-channel-people-talking-past-each-other (because that's really what it is; people are talking PAST each other, with no attempt to listen to what the other has to say other than to maybe hunt for errors or statements that could be twisted around) is that in my opinion, arguing is not very productive, especially when there is stuff a person can be DOING. I would rather go out and pick up trash off the roadside than sit in a meeting for a couple hours and try to suss out WHY people litter and HOW to persuade them to stop - because I have no good answers for that. Or I'd rather go cook at a soup kitchen than sit in a debate about the root causes of poverty. It's just who I am. I'd rather shut up and DO something, even something very small, EVEN something that really doesn't attack "root causes," because doing something makes me feel better, makes me feel useful, and hearing problems that really have no good solutions argued just makes me feel worse.

Well, I made the decision yesterday.

I will be taking part in the spring piano recital. My teacher doesn't require it of her adult students (apparently she does of the junior students). But I decided I wanted to.

Because I find it moderately amusing to think of participating in my first-ever recital at 40.

I'm going to be playing the Ecossaise in G. We had originally thought of a more modern piece I was working on - a piece by Robert Vandall (funny, he looks different than I would have pictured him). It didn't have a title; it was just known as "18."

But I'd rather do the Ecossaise; I always found it hard to figure out the best interpretation for "18" - how fast to play it, how to make it sound. It was a piece much more dependent on individual expression than on technical ability (which the Ecossaise requires). Also, I think my feel for the classical piece is better; it's like I understand better what it "means." It's supposed to be a Scottish-style dance, you play it lightly and perhaps with a bit of a sense of humor. The Vandall piece at times sounded melancholy to me; at others, quiet and peaceful. I tried to envision waves lapping on a beach as I played it (the only thing it really put me in mind of). But it was hard for me to get it to sound consistent, and that kind of bothered me.

So I'm going to go back to work on the Ecossaise. I hadn't been playing it in as heavy a rotation because I figured I was essentially "done" with it, but really all I need to do is polish it up and be sure I have it fully memorized.

The question does come up of how one dresses for a recital. I'm thinking a plain dark skirt and white blouse. (No, I won't go out and buy a frilly recital-dress like the little girls learning piano might wear).

Heh. Lynn is talking about the alleged "next big thing" after Twitter - something called "flutter". (And a commenter on the site she links to proposed "Bitter," where you can only post a 0 or a 1).

(Incidentally the site linked to - the video is pretty hilarious commentary on the "faster bigger newer" mentality. I was reading somewhere the other day about how people are complaining about stuff that "never even existed" 20 minutes ago. That's kind of like people complaining that a Tweet takes "too long to read.")

And I realized just one of the reasons (other than my self-conscious, "I'm not one of the cool kids and don't want to be" pose) I don't Twitter (or is that Tweet) is that I cannot constrain myself to 140 characters.

And I almost said, "Heck, I can't use WORDS of 140 letters or less." And then I thought, no, that's not true. Well, maybe it would be if I were a biochemist. The longest word (technically speaking) is 1,913 letters long. It's a protein name*.

(And I HAVE a copy of that "Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary" somewhere. I bought it years and years ago - I remember bringing it to school in 5th grade so my friends and I could snicker over some of the words using "procto-" and "copra-" as a root. And there were a few words in there the definition of which I would not understand fully until I was in college [and then I will admit I was moderately horrified when I figured out what they REALLY meant]).

(*Wikipedia - which I don't think one can always believe, even on matters of trivia - claims there is one even longer ("Not to be confused with Tintin" has to be one of the odder disclaimers I've run across)

There's also "antidisestablishmentarianism" (though Mrs. Byrnes, as I remember, also lists "ultraantidisestablishmentarianism") at 28 and 33 characters respectively.

And the wonderful word floccinaucinihilipilification (clocking in at 29 characters), which apparently means "estimating as nothing" and which was playfully coined from some Latin roots that were apparently lying around.

And Shakespeare used honorificabilitudinitatibus (27), the state of being able to achieve honor.

So I'm a little sad to see that there are, apparently, no existing words of exactly 140 characters. But there are a couple of long words that perhaps deserve greater usage, if only for comic effect.

I suppose if I spoke German (or one of the Scandinavian languages) where those portmanteau nouns are more permitted, perhaps I'd be faster to think of some really, really long words.

I mentioned the pillowcases that I was embroidering (well, mostly NOT embroidering; I have a lot of projects and some get pushed aside).

I decided to pull them out and do a bit more work on them.



On this one at least (they're an identical pair), I'm almost done with the cross-stitching. Of course, there's most of the outline work (which takes a while but which is what really makes it look good) still left to do.

I enjoy doing this - it doesn't take a huge amount of concentration but there's something satisfying about watching the cross stitches march across the fabric as you make them.

Fascinating:

Jim Loy's Language Pages. I found this while looking for the "full" version of the "I before E" rule (I knew there was something in there about i before e not applying with words where it sounded like a long a, like neighbor and weigh.

Turns out weird also is an exception (as is seize and neither) though none of those have the "atypical" pronunciation of the ei diphthong.

I guess I might as well share the first image that came to my mind when the person at my ISP suggested the "power suckle" - since it seems to have put strange images in some people's brains.

My parents, when I was a kid, had a cat that had been taken from her mother too soon. The phenomenon is called "delayed weaner." Apparently a cat with this condition will seek out teat-like objects and try to nurse on them.

At the time, my parents had a comforter on their bed that was tied. You know, with the little tufts of yarn? So the cat would try to nurse on those.

So I had this mental image of this cat - which has been dead more than 30 years now - "power suckling" on that old comforter.

(I also once used the "delayed weaner" description in front of a guy I was in grad school with - another student and I were discussing her cat. Immediately he looked down at his crotch and started to laugh. "Not THAT kind of 'weiner'" I remember saying in disgust)

I got a start on putting together the blocks for the County Line quilt - these are the ones using the Ooh la la vintage-inspired Parisian scene fabric.

(The file linked is a .pdf. It's a free quilt pattern, but it uses the alternate colorway - the one I do not like as well. You can see my preferred colorway in the photos below)



These are nine (of what will eventually be twenty-four) blocks. They will be set together with the same dark greenish-blue fabric (1 1/2" sashing, which is not a lot of fun to cut). The pattern is called County Line, I used it for a quilt made with poppy print fabric.

I like the pattern for large-scale prints (or, here, for the sort-of-1950s-feeling abstract-art inspired prints; there's a vaguely Mondrian quality to how the pieces are set together).

There are only (really) five different fabrics in the line - the main street-scene fabric, some butterflies, a floral, a stripe, and tiny multicolored circles. So I added in a bunch of other fabrics that have the same colors and general "feel."

Here's a close up of one of my favorite bits of the "main theme" fabric (the street scene - this will also be the wide border on the outside of the quilt)



It's a rather concerned looking poodle. (You can't quite tell the expression from the photo, but the expression has the same worried dubiousness to it that you see on some of Tove Jansson's drawings of the fillyjonks. Which is probably why I like it.)