Another random thought:

After contemplating what coverage of the royal wedding I saw, and seeing it discussed on Ravelry, I have concluded:

I suffer from a severe shortage of events to which I can wear fabulous hats.

(No, I don't mean the oddball "fascinator" types of things like - was it Beatrice? - was wearing. I mean a nice, pretty, tasteful hat, either straw or felt and made by a haberdasher and with either flowers or (sustainably harvested) feathers on it).

I wore a hat a few years as a teenager to church on Easter. (I think I still have the couple of hats I bought over the years at my parents' house, plus a vintage hat I bought at a rummage sale).

Part of the problem with just randomly wearing a hat to church is that no one else would be doing it, and as I said, I don't like too much being the center of attention. But it would be fun to go somewhere where most of the women would be wearing hats, and have a nice one to wear.

Some Friday thoughts

* I'm almost done with the first of the "Elegant" socks (This is a Nancy Bush pattern, from a back issue of Piecework). 78 stitch socks on size 0 needles take a long time to do.

* The copy of Modern Log Cabin Quilting I ordered came yesterday. After looking through it once, I decided I am going to order a copy to go along with the rest of my mom's Mother's Day present - it's a neat book, and it has a lot of the sort of smaller projects (potholders, tote bags, placemats) that she sometimes likes to do as gifts for people. One or two of the quilts are a little bit abstract for my taste, but I really, really love the cover quilt (picture here). I'm thinking actually about going to the little quilt shop this afternoon and getting four yards of some kind of pretty solid-colored fabric (that's what the main part of the top calls for. Maybe a light yellow-green, and then use bright "floral" colors (bright pink, bright purple, bright yellow prints - I have some scraps of Kaffe Fassett prints that would work nicely) from my stash for the crosses. Or get a yellow and use blues. Or a strong dark green and pastel floral prints. I don't know. I will decide when I look at what colors of Kona cotton or whatever solids they have. (The nice thing is the crosses in the quilt take only tiny bits of fabric, so you can use scraps or bits of "precious" fabrics you don't want to use all up at one go).

There's also a quilt in there where you can "frame" important pieces of fabric (things like vintage embroideries, or fabric where you've printed photos on it). And one made from t-shirts. (I have a lot of old conference t-shirts that have gotten kind of tatty and I don't wear any more; it might be nice to recycle them into a quilt).

* I kind of rethought my curmudgeonliness in re: the royal wedding this morning. I had been griping and rolling my eyes because it seemed like the past few days, every time I tried to catch a bit of news or local weather, the people were talking countdown to The Big Day or speculating on the dress or talking about the guest-list. And you know, I have no interest in the whole celebrity-watching, paparazzi aspect of it. But this morning, after my workout, I switched the television on. (There were three choices of programming, pretty much: Royal Wedding, "Paid Programming," and kids' shows). So I watched a few minutes, because by that point the vows had been said and the choir was singing, and I'm kind of a sucker for British choral church music.

And I continued to watch. (I think they played one of Elgar's marches as the recessional. Maybe Pomp and Circumstance #1, if I remember it correctly). And I watched as the new couple left the cathedral.

And then a giant cheer went up from the crowd.

And you know, that's when I changed my mind. I know, I know, not all the Brits are on board with the pomp - probably most aren't. But seeing that crowd so happy at that moment, so excited for a glimpse of royalty (Probably much of the crowd were tourists, at that - from the U.S. or Canada or the rest of Europe or even Australia) that it was hard for me to begrudge them that.

Also, there was tradition and decorum in the moments I saw, and I think in our modern world we're sadly lacking in decorum sometimes. So it's kind of nice to see.

(That said? If I were in Katherine Middleton's place, I'd be alternately throwing up and having to put my head down on my knees to keep from fainting. I do not do well with being that much the center of attention)

(I don't know how the wedding is being paid for. I can say I wouldn't be down with it coming out of the tax coffers, but I kind of suspect it didn't.)

I will say I hope that William and Katherine have a happy marriage, at least as happy as possible given the fishbowl they live in. (And I found it creepy to read some headlines that were trying to compare her with the late Princess Diana - not just creepy from the aspect that Diana died in such a horrific and public way, but also...that's her husband's mother, y'all.)

* Lynn was talking about paper dolls yesterday (in response to my post on stickers). I had paper dolls too, as a child, but as far as I remember, most of mine were ones I made myself. (I did have one - which I actually still have - that was a little girl dress-up doll that must have come off a Halloween card - she had a witch's costume, and a black cat costume, and, I think, a pumpkin costume. And I had a set of Shirley Temple paper dolls (a modern version - I think the copyright date was 1976) that one of my grandmas sent me).

I also had two that I made that were animals. When I was a kid, I had a little golden book called Daisy Dog's Wake-Up Book. (I was able to find the title online; I couldn't specifically remember it). It was about a dog who went around and woke up her animal friends very early on the day of her birthday, to remind them to come to her party...and then, she fell asleep at her own party, because she had been up so early!

Two of the subsidiary characters were a mouse, and a cute donkey who wore round-framed glasses. I drew the donkey and the mouse and turned them into paper dolls - and gave them a whole elaborate story. In my version, they were their more "grown up selves." Donkey and Mouse (at one time they may have had first names, but I mainly remember them as Donkey and Mouse) worked at a big city newspaper - Mouse was a reporter, and Donkey a photographer. (In those days, I didn't think about the fact that people would be very specialized in their roles...so they covered all kinds of stories, from fancy society parties (for which they needed fancy dresses), and county fairs (jeans and turtlenecks) and sometimes they had to go undercover as investigative reporters). They lived in a town on the outskirts of the city; they each had their own little house but on the same street so they could hang out together. They also played tennis, so they had tennis dresses. (I think that was because I was in day camp during those years and learning to play tennis myself).

The fun thing of paper dolls was as you thought up a new adventure, it was relatively easy to make new clothes for them...for "real" dolls it took a lot longer, and in some cases it was hard to have the design execute successfully from what you "saw" in your head.

(Donkey and Mouse still exist; last summer when I was up visiting my parents I was going through one of the drawers in my bedroom and there was the box with them and (most of) their clothes (some of the clothes got too tattered over the years and I threw those away))

Back in time...

(I was going to write about something different this morning, then I saw BigAlice's post).

Big Alice found her childhood sticker collection while helping clean out her mom's house.

Wow, the sight of those takes me back.

I know I've griped in the past about how the 70s - when I was really a kid - were pretty much a drought of good things, kid-wise (YES, there was Barbie, but as I've said before, I was always kind of suspicious of Barbie. And there was Lego, and the Fisher-Price stuff. But a lot of the cool toys seemed to come along when I was a tween and it was beginning to be not-cool to care about those kinds of toys. Even someone as admittedly not-cool as I was realized that).

But stickers were OK for tween girls. Oh, of course, the very COOLEST girls and the "bad girls" had progressed to collecting other things (Hickeys, maybe? ER visits? The big scandal of seventh grade was that a bunch of the "bad girls" tried to get high on diet pills and had to go to the emergency room and get their stomachs pumped...or at least that was the story that circulated.)

But looking at those stickers takes me back. Takes me back to the days of the packages of scratch-and-sniff stickers (there were a lot in a package, and if you were lucky, someone would be willing to trade some of your extras for ones you didn't have). I think Pizza and Chocolate and Root Beer were the favorite ones, but I also remember there was a gasoline (?) scented one, with a picture of a lawnmower on it. (And maybe "rubber tire," also). (And eventually the rumor got started that the scratch-and-sniff smells caused cancer. As did the strawberry smell on the Strawberry Shortcake dolls...there's something sociologically interesting there, I think, that the "OH NOES everything you enjoy will ruin your health" concept may have got started then...)

The real prizes though were the Lisa Frank stickers, or the Mrs. Grossman's stickers (She had the iconic teddy bear sticker). Her stickers came on big rolls that were held by a Plexiglas stand; you either cut or tore off the stickers you wanted.

Stickers were pretty cheap - like, a dime or a quarter a piece. (Maybe some of the bigger, more elaborate Mrs. Grossman's stickers that had multiple stickers to a piece were fifty cents, I don't remember). They were easy to store - most of us either bought or were given photo albums where we kept them. (Funny, but as BigAlice mentions, we never actually STUCK them to stuff....). They were kind of a social currency - a "new kid" could make friends pretty fast if she had a sticker collection and was willing to trade (bonus if she had stickers that other people didn't have).

(I don't know if boys collected stickers or not. I don't remember any of the boys I knew being into that. My brother had some, but then he was five years younger than I was and was kind of in the phase where he wanted to imitate what the older kids did, and it didn't matter as much if it was something that "boys didn't do." It's possible some of the boys DID collect stickers though - maybe focusing on the grosser of the scratch-and-sniff stickers)

I look at those, though, and I admit I feel a little sad...or maybe nostalgic. For a time when things that were so simple could be enjoyed with largely unalloyed pleasure (I was not very big on trading, but I do guess in some cases the trading could lead to High Drama. I mainly only traded stuff I had duplicates of...). It was just simple. And it was a cheap pleasure - even someone with as small of an allowance as I had could add a few new stickers to their collection on a fairly regular basis. And there was the hope and the excitement of hearing that there was a new shipment of Mrs. Grossman's coming in to the shop that had them.

I think of some of the other simple pleasures of being a child/tween: the penny candy that The Attic (a small gift shop in my town) sold. Smurfs (I didn't have as many of these; for one reason, my allowance was small, and for another, when they were first popular, they could be very hard to find - so having the intersection of Having Money and The Store Having Smurfs In Stock was rare). Those little plastic zoo or farm animals that you used to be able to buy in cellophane bags at places like the T G and Y*. Those little rubber-eraser animals that the Diener company made (A Google Image Search turns up a few examples. I had mostly the animals...that walrus and the anteater wearing a bowler hat and blazer are ones I remember).

(*One of the women in my Sunday School class once mentioned that they always referred to the T G and Y as "Turtles, Girdles, and Yo-Yos.")

And I wonder if maybe a lot of us aren't searching, as adults, for something that gives the same simple unalloyed pleasure as a book full of stickers. ("Everybody wants a rock to tie a piece of string around"?).

To remind myself.

You can make a paper assignment "creative," you can tell people to "have fun" with it, you can try to make it relevant to their career aspirations. And the majority of students will take those ideas and run with them and will have a good experience and learn something. But some won't. And it's not your fault.

One thing accomplished

It's been a rough couple of days. Something happened on Monday that send me into self-doubting mode (and I'm already jacked up with bad allergies and, um...cyclical issues, so everything contributes to sort of the emotional equivalent of having divided by zero)

Also, I had a lot of grading to do. A lot. I know grading and feedback is important and as I've said before, I sort of pride myself on getting exams back within a week of the students taking them. But grading just kind of sucks my energy away. (Also, a lot of people were out sick or had other emergencies and that means make-up tests.)

So most of the day Tuesday was spent in grading. And then it was piano lesson. I GUESS I'm making progress on "Evening in the Country" but it's not as satisfying as the progress on some stuff I've worked on. (I think this piece is right at the very outer limits of my capability to play right now).

I got home, almost just went inside and showered and fixed dinner, and then I looked at my lawn and was all "meh, I need to take care of that sometime." I have one of the old-fashioned reel-type mowers which normally works well, except in the spring when I get some kind of cool season grass (Darnel? Cheatgrass? Tares? Something like that) that grows tall and flowers and sets seed heads, and my mower won't knock it down. (I don't worry TOO much about it, because as soon as it gets really hot, it dies back, and the St. Augustine that's supposed to be there takes its place.)

So I decided to haul out the weed-whacker and do another round of what I did in the backyard on the tall stuff. So I started working. Then I saw one of my neighbors outside. This is the neighbor I think of as my "Martha Stewart" neighbor, because she's so perfect. (Though really, at times, she might be more of a Hyacinth Bouquet type neighbor, because of her predilection for talking at you. At least she doesn't sing at you...)

I started muttering under my breath "don't come over here. don't come over here" because this is someone I've gotten judgey vibes off of in the past, someone who makes me feel like I'm just a PRETEND grownup instead of a real one.

(An aside: If people are going to treat me like I'm just a PRETEND grownup, I feel like I shouldn't still have to be paying taxes or making my own dental appointments or going in to work on Saturdays)

I even ran up to the garage and pulled my push mower out and started mowing the lawn: "Look, look! Look how responsible I am! I'm MOWING ALL THE THINGS!"

Eventually she went in. But I did get the lawn mowed and then I finished up by knocking down the rest of the tall stuff with the weed whacker. I swept up all the bits of grass and very cleverly realized I could just sweep them into the drive, so the next torrential rain we get will wash them down the street and out of my sphere of influence.

I was doing that just as the sky was darkening and I could hear thunder, and I was thinking, "Yeah, it would serve me right if I got struck by lightning right now." But we never even got any rain.

Brilliantly Weird Al

I thought I had seen Weird Al's "Bob" (a parody of Homesick Subterranean Blues) some years back, but when Charles mentioned it in his comment on the Bobcat Dylan post, I went and rewatched it.

If I had seen it before, I had totally forgotten how wonderful and brilliant it was. I love Weird Al. (It amazes me that this guy who started out figuring he'd be more or less a one-hit wonder has had more staying power than many of the acts he parodied - then again, it gives me a bit of hope, because a lot of his humor is pretty intelligent humor, and it's nice to know people appreciate intelligent humor, still)

Anyway, here's "Bob," for your viewing pleasure. (Surprising how well it works.)

Lessons from knitting

I brought knitting with me yesterday while I was invigilating an exam. It was the Lace Ribbon Scarf (which still doesn't look like a scarf yet). And I was reflecting on some of the difficulties encountered in teaching - or, more properly, in the sort of cat-herding that surrounds teaching.

I was also thinking about knitting being taught in schools. Some of the European schools teach it, and the Waldorf (Rudolf Steiner) schools do. I was re-reading part of Bernadette Murphy's "Zen and the Art of Knitting" over the weekend and she was writing about the Waldorf schools. And while some of the stuff about the philosophy behind it seems a bit precious to me, perhaps (The idea that children must needs work with natural fibers, because otherwise they get "fooled" and "don't know what is real and what is not"), I do think there's some sound lessons craft can teach a person, lessons I probably absorbed as a kid without really realizing it.

(That said, I won't get into the discussion of whether craft "should" or "should not" be taught in the schools. As a college prof, I admit I have much more interest in students coming to me being able to read proficiently and do advanced math without fear and know how to cite sources and write a coherent paper.)

But I do think there's value in learning craft.

By "craft," in my case, I mean sewing, crochet, and knitting (which I learned in that order as a child). Other crafts - woodworking, baking, beadmaking, many things - would probably have similar, if not the very same, lessons.

Lesson 1: Following the directions (most of the time).

One thing I hear other profs complaining about again and again - and I know I've complained about - is that some of the students just can't, or won't, follow directions. I don't know if it's fear or laziness or not being used to it or what. But I can write the steps of a lab exercise - say, preparing a soil for pH analysis - in a numbered list, and there may still be someone who either doesn't seem to know what to do when, or who mixes the steps up. (I am exempting people with real and demonstrated learning disabilities from this group; these are people not known to be dyslexic or dysnumeric or whatever). It seems to me - though I could be wrong - that following instructions is not as emphasized as it once was.

One thing I learned early on - and also learned this from experiments in baking as a child - is that steps are usually given in a certain order for a reason. In some cases, you might be able to do the steps in a different order than written, but then again - if you sew the sleeves of a blouse in too early, either it will fit badly, or you won't be able to successfully close the shoulder seam, or it will be a lot harder, or whatever.

Also, sometimes, it's a good idea to trust the directions even if they don't make sense to you. (This is different from the directions "seeming wrong," which I will address later). The first time I turned a sock heel - probably about 15 years ago now - I read the instructions on the pattern, and even though it was a well-known and well-loved and praised pattern off the Internet (Joan Hamer's two-strand worsted-weight socks, and it's comforting to know that pattern still exists in cyberspace), it didn't make sense to me. But I asked my mom - who had knit socks in the past - and she looked at it, counted a bit, and said, "Trust the pattern."

Once I did it, just following along, it made sense to me. (Now, I pretty much have the standard "turns" that I use for a 64-stitch sockyarn sock memorized).

2. Trust your knowledge. And if something seems wrong, there are often ways you can test it. Does the number of stitches to cast on seem too few - or two many - given the suggested gauge of the sweater? Something might be off. You learn to read your knitting - or you learn things like how the basic shapes of a quilt block will fit together. There are lots of little "check yourself" steps you can look at in things, and once you gain experience, you learn things like "an oven at 425 is going to be way too hot for cookies like those; try 350 instead for the first pan."

I think some of the "young'uns" these days don't learn that - they don't learn the confidence with their tasks, or the familiarity, or the ability to go,"Wait, there's a typo here, I know it."

It's like Elizabeth Zimmerman said about knitting: don't be a "blind follower." If something seems wrong, there's a chance it is. Or sometimes, you can figure out a more efficient way of doing something. (Like on the Honeycomb vest I knit; I figured out that at least one of the cable-crosses could be done as a sort of twisted-stitch instead, which was faster). Or you learn what substitutes work in cooking, so you can substitute if you're out of something and don't want to run to the grocery, or if you're cooking for someone with a dietary concern, or you just want to play around and invent.

I often stop and tell my students "checkpoints" they can use on calculations. For a very simple example: you are calculating relative dominance for the tree species in a forest. "Relative" means "What proportion of the total does each species take up," therefore, all the relative dominances together should sum to 100 - or dang close to it. I'm surprised at the number of people who either DON'T do the checkpoint or who do it, find their calculations are incorrect, and just give up.

It's like counting stitches in knitting or crochet. Or like doing that sample block first for quilting. Or, if you're sewing a garment out of very expensive or precious material, making a muslin first of a new pattern to be sure it fits and you can make it go together right.

Or, I suppose, it's like music: learning to improvise (which I am just barely doing) once you know some of the basic rules.

I suspect learning the "basic rules" of how something works are a big part of being able to trust yourself - and being able to do, for lack of a better term, "cross-platform" uses - for example, seeing that a statistical test you learned for one situation also applies to a rather different one.

And I wonder if some folks don't bother to acquaint themselves with the basic rules - or if they're so used to "cookbooking" it that they don't internalize the rules, or what.

I find now that I've gained more familiarity with chords on the piano, I can kind of mess around and find chord progressions that sound good. Or that surprise me. (My teacher had me working out chords for the praise song "Like the Deer" and I realized that it was only one or two chords off from the chord progression of Pachelbel's Canon in D).

And there's a certain joy in that discovery - in the fun of messing around and in the surprise of "Wait, wait, I know that tune."

(Also, playing around just with a progression down from, I think it was A major? I wound up playing a bit of the chord progression to "O Sanctissima")

And I think people who don't learn the rules to the point where they can maybe begin mixing the rules up a little - or begin departing from them - they don't get that joy of discovery.

3. Be patient. Learning stuff takes time. One thing I've really had brought home to me with the piano lessons is how much time it takes to get good. But, if you work at it, you do eventually get good. I can do things now on the piano I never thought I'd be able to do.

I think a lot of "young'uns" either don't have patience, or haven't learned it yet. Knitting, quilting, sewing, crochet - they all take patience. Different levels, perhaps: it can take a year or more to knit a sweater (especially if you're a busy person). You might be able to make a blouse in a couple of days if it's a simple pattern that you already know well, and if you don't have much else to do. But it all takes time. And also, learning a skill - it takes patience, because your early efforts typically are not that good. (I tend to forget that, because I've been sewing/knitting/crocheting for so long).

4. Concentration. You learn that some tasks require full attention, and others you can do while distracted. I think this is something some people don't learn. (I know when I was a kid, studying in front of the television was forbidden, and I also learned that if I was studying with the radio on, it could not be to music that had words, or I'd listen to the words and not pay attention to what I was studying). With craft, it's the same: if I'm knitting complex lace from a chart, or doing shaping of a sweater where I have to do the dreaded "Left side: work as for right, reversing shaping" where you have to think of everything the opposite way, I can't be watching television or talking to someone. But knitting on a plain sock, or doing a simple pattern - I can knit and read (if I don't have to look at my hands too much) or knit and invigilate an exam, or knit and talk to someone.

5. It's good sometimes to be still and be quiet. I wonder if we're losing that as a society. When I go out across campus - either to walk to a meeting or to take something that needs to be dropped off at an office - I'm relieved, because that's five or ten minutes I can be alone with my thoughts. But I see so many people who have to be plugged in some way or another. (Or at the grocery store. I get frustrated at the cell-phone talkers at the grocery store, because they often don't pay attention to where they're walking; I've nearly been bumped into a few times). One thing I think the pursuit of some kind of a craft does for a person is that it does seem to build that appreciation of solitude (Though I could be wrong on that; it could be the other way 'round - that people who like stillness and quiet tend to pick up hobbies that allow it). The focus required by handquilting - or doing elaborate lace - or embroidering sort of allows a space to open up in your mind. Sometimes I've solved problems I was mulling over, or had insights into stuff, when my hands were occupied with some kind of handwork. (For me, it's kind of like driving out on country roads - I think I have an excess of mental attention, or something, and I need something to occupy the "worry centers" so I can really think.) But listening to music or watching tv or talking banalities on the phone doesn't allow for that same kind of reflection.

made me laugh

For various reasons, this day is shaping up to be a clustermuck. But at least this made me laugh.

"Bobcat Dylan."


see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!

(It's a riff on Subterranean Homesick Blues, for those of you too tragically young to get it. Go to YouTube and search it.)

Quilt top finished

A blessed Easter to all who celebrate.

Over the weekend, I did finish the quilt top. It's been overcast/rainy (I guess we are also under a severe thunderstorm watch right now), so the colors in this photo aren't as vibrant as they might be.



I think the colors blended a lot better than I thought they would when I first started breaking down the Jelly Roll to make the quilt.

Here's a close-up of it:



Just simple four-patches, but the way they're set, it makes a very effective quilt top. I can see doing this pattern again with different fabrics; maybe colors that are more blendy/monochromatic, or something like Civil War-era reprint fabric, with each four-patch made of a "dark" color (that dark red or blue that was common then) and the other two squares in the patch being a shirting print (white or off-white with small red, blue, or black figures on it).

I did also take the time to run down to Twin Oaks yesterday. I got a few shade plants for the garden on the north side of the house, and a few more herb plants, and a few more tomatoes. (The tomatoes for sale right now, though, look kind of manky compared to the ones I bought earlier. I suppose they have gotten potbound or something. I hope the ones I bought - I picked the four "best" looking ones I could find - do OK. I got two Rutgers, and had thought I got two more Arkansas Travelers, but it turned out one is actually a variety called "Sugar" - no idea if that's a grape tomato or what (I'm not that fond of either cherry or grape tomatoes; too much skin in proportion to the flesh). We'll see).

This is the best-looking part of the garden right now, an area where I have most of the herbs planted. (The yellow flowers in the back are coreopsis; I bought them to attract bees.)

One more garden

Got another garden patch - the one under my east-facing bedroom window - cleared out yesterday. (I also found, and "re-homed" yet another rough earth snake. My yard seems to be full of those little guys. Well, they supposedly eat slugs, so they're more than welcome).

I also used the weed-whacker to knock down all the tall grass that had gotten established in the back yard, that I knew I wouldn't be able to mow down.

I decided not to go in and clean my office today - for one thing, I have a couple hours Monday morning before I give an exam when I can work on it, and for another, I want to do more yardwork. (There were severe storms all around me last night - my weather radio kept going off - but none here).

I'm contemplating whether to spend the gas to go to Twin Oaks to have a shot at a bigger variety of plants. Today would be the ideal day for it; next weekend I anticipate being too busy. I'd really like to have my front gardens cleared out too (that will be a couple more hours of work).

I don't know. I'll have to think about it. The upside would be that it would be fun and nice to get out, and I'd be able to get some nice shade perennials for that garden on the north side of my house, plus tomatoes and flowers for the newly-cleared area (I want to put in a couple of tomato plants, but then surround them with marigolds - and there's a reason for that - and then maybe plant some other flowers around them.) And I have one more "box" of my raised beds I've not filled yet; I had been thinking of doing sweet potatoes but could not find starts. (I suppose it's possible Twin Oaks would have them.)

A day off

I probably teach at one of the few "state" schools that actually gives Good Friday as a holiday. (I don't think my grad school did, and I am SURE University of Michigan did not, when I was there).

(My church tends more to have Maundy Thursday services - which they did last night. There is a Good Friday program for children - mainly aimed at introducing children without a real knowledge of the events to the history (in a child-appropriate way) this afternoon.)

I had thought of going in to clean my office but then decided I could do that tomorrow instead.

So far, today, I have

Gone grocery shopping
Done my piano practice
Done an hour's workout

and as soon as my body temperature drops back to normal after the workout, I'm going out to do yardwork. And then this afternoon, I'm going to try to finish the current quilt.

I did pull out a long-stalled project - the Lace Ribbon scarf I had been working on - and I've been picking away at it. One of the frustrating things about scarves (which Lydia alluded to on her blog a while back) is that it takes quite a while before they start to "look" like a scarf, where they get long enough that their proportions suggest a scarf rather than just sort of an overgrown swatch.

I'm also looking at my sock books and wanting to start something new. But not until I finish something at this point, I think.

Another entertainer/scientist

I posted about Alexander Borodin the other day, and how he was a research chemist in addition to composing.

Well, I also have to mention the (perhaps better known to Americans) scientific work of the actress Hedy Lamarr. With a co-worker, she helped do research in radio frequencies that ultimately led to an improvement in secure military communications. (Apparently she had no formal scientific training, but learned some of the stuff from a husband? (She was married six times)). That's kind of amazing to me because I tend to think of that kind of engineering stuff as something you have to have years of training to be able to do.

(I was hoping to find a list of other people, who were known from the world of arts or entertainment, but also had science background/worked in the sciences, but there doesn't seem to be one out on the Internet. Surely there are others than Borodin and Lamarr who worked "behind the scenes" at some kind of scientific pursuit, but were (perhaps) better known in the world of arts or entertainment? I know Danica Kellar wrote books on math and is apparently quite a math genius, but I think she's pretty much retired from acting now...)

This and that

We actually got a little rain overnight, and it's misting this morning.

(And it's a LOT cooler out. I would like to have died on Tuesday in my office and lab, it was so warm AND SOMEONE TURNED OFF THE VENTILATION SYSTEM. But yesterday, it was actually kind of chilly out - not so good for the bug-catching lab, but a lot more pleasant to be in.)

It actually feels and looks a lot like fall today. I wouldn't mind it at all if we had a cool, damp summer (Not that I'm expecting that). Maybe not a repeat of 2007 with flooding, but if we had a number of what the Irish call "soft days" - where there's sort of a mist and we're getting rain without really feeling rained on - I wouldn't mind at all.

I'm looking forward to this summer. Tuesday, when my back was bothering me and I didn't feel up to doing the last soil samples (which will get processed today, actually, as soon as I get done here), I rewrote some of the research plan. I have a couple students who want to work with me and hopefully their schedules will be such that we won't have to restrict fieldwork to Fridays and Saturdays as in the past.

I plan to take at least one full day off each week this summer and do NOTHING. Or rather, not do NOTHING (because I'm bad at that) but stay home and quilt or knit or work in my garden or read or play the piano or more likely do all of those things.

I think one of the problems this past year (especially last summer, when I was teaching a real overload...and an overload that included a couple of people who had a personality conflict, never pleasant) is that my life has gotten a little unbalanced toward the work-end of things. And so thinking about a summer with long, empty days where I can decide what I want to do - rather than fit my schedule around a "forced" schedule - seems really appealing.

Even with the fieldwork: if it works out the way I hope it does, we'll be going out around 7 am and working until noon or so, and then taking off the hot part of the day...so I can go home, shower, eat a leisurely lunch, and then spend my afternoon doing something else.

Two more socks

I do have a lot of socks I am working on.

(I know this photo is dark, I didn't realize I had the flash turned off)



Elegant Socks - a Nancy Bush pattern based on an old pair of Norwegian stockings in the Vesterheim (? I think) museum. I'm using an alpaca sock yarn. They're knit on size 0 needles, which means it makes a very dense fabric, but also it takes a long time. I just started the heel flap last night.

And these are a pair of "just simple socks" knit of some self-patterning yarn. I'm a big sucker for the self-striping or self-patterning yarn. These are Opal, which is not the nicest softest sock yarn ever, but the colors are interesting:



This is from their "rainforest" line (I think they are defining "rainforest" increasingly loosely now, though). Supposedly these colors were inspired by the coloration on a giraffe. (All the "rainforest" patterns are inspired by animals). I think it's a little darker than what I think of as "giraffe colors."

But still, I'm thinking of them as my "tiny little giraffe socks." Because of that Direct TV ad...the one with the Russian guy who has "opulence" and who owns a tiny lap giraffe. (It's funny, almost everyone I've mentioned that ad to has exclaimed over the tiny giraffe. There is just something very appealing about that tiny giraffe. I was actually thinking the other day if there was some way a person could make an amigurumi tiny giraffe...I think a big part of the appeal, though, is the giraffes in that ad were not at all cartoonish, just (whatever the video equivalent of photoshopping is) scaled-down real giraffes. I could kind of see modifying the "tiny pony" pattern (smaller head and longer neck) but it still would be fatter and clunkier and not quite as delicate.)

Also, this could apply to the printer in my department:


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It seems that something always goes wrong shortly before exam week.

Interesting little fact

Alexander Borodin was a research chemist in addition to being a composer. I didn't know that until I was flipping through a booklet I have of information on various composers.

That booklet - also this site mention that his chemistry career left him less time than would be ideal for composing.

Heh, I kind of know that feeling. Even though I would in no way consider myself an artist, I can see how having a career in the sciences - and with teaching - cuts down on the time you can spend on other pursuits. So I can sympathize with poor old Borodin.

(I also admit I feel a bit sorry for him that he's mostly only known second-hand now, that the adaptations of his music for the musical "Kismet" is how most Americans know his music - if they know it at all. (When was the last time "Kismet" was produced? I mean, other than maybe as a high school spring musical). It's hard to hear that bit from "Prince Igor" and not start singing "Stranger in Paradise" in your head.)

Interestingly, the website I linked to above noted that he was also a champion of women's education in 19th century Russia. (A couple other sites I looked at noted that too).

Speaking of pursuits outside of research and teaching, I finished the leg of the first Butter Peeps sock and began the heel flap. I enjoy knitting socks - and I knit a lot of them - partly because they're modular. When you get bored with one part, it's time to do something else. Cuff, leg, heel flap, turn heel, foot, toe...there's enough changing in what you do to keep them interesting.

Also, I think turning the heel - essentially, making knitting change direction - is one of the cleverer human innovations in craft. But sadly, I cannot think of too many other clothes-applications for it. (And I tried to think of them last night...shoulders on a sweater are done differently, even bust-darts on a fitted piece would probably be done differently). I remember years and years ago, the "old" Threads (before they went over to being a purely sewing-oriented magazine) had an article titled something like "If you can turn a heel, you can knit anything you want" though the focus was more on knitting sculptural forms than knitting clothing.

I suppose you could argue that plain-old shortrowing (with or without the "wraps and turns," which I always have to look up to remember how to do - the way I turn heels is the old Dutch or old French way, and you don't have to wrap and turn for that - could be thought of as kind of "half turning" a heel. And wrap-and-turn shortrowing is often used to shape shoulders of sweaters - or put in bust darts - things like that.

I do wonder who was the first person (if there was a "first" person, and it wasn't some kind of a, to use an evolutionary term, polyphyletic development) who figured out how to turn a sock heel.

I'm still waiting.

Next week is the big "Faculty Appreciation Dinner." (I normally don't go, but signed up this year just in case).

I still haven't heard the final word on the Full Professor status. That makes the Paranoid Parrot in me go, "That means you're not getting it, and they're just being too chickenlivered to tell you right away."

I'm trying to ignore that thought.

The reason I signed up for the dinner is that there's an off chance they will decide to announce those things there, and it would be embarrassing for me not to be there and have them announce it. (And also, again, the paranoid part of me wonders if they might consider revoking it if you're not there and they announce it).

I don't know. I am SO not into dinners of this kind. But I'm still going.

One more thing...

There's a new television ad for Dove chocolates, and the voice-over starts something like this:

"I confess, I'm not perfect. I can't sew, or knit, or crochet..."

And I was all: "Wait, I can do all of those things...is that all being perfect really takes?"

(Of course it doesn't, but still, the ad made me laugh. Would that knowing how to do those three things was ENOUGH.)

a layabout Sunday

I did go to the trash-off yesterday. A couple of my students showed up, they will get their bonus points. (I offer a small - truly laughable, in the broad scheme of things - number of bonus points in my environmentally-related classes for people who do this. Usually the people who show up are people who already have an "A" in a headlock, but whatever.)

It went all right. It was cool-ish (probably a bit cool, in retrospect), not too windy, sunny. I just told myself to think of it as a very bad sort of Easter egg hunt and went to it. (I worked alongside one of my students: she had walked to the event, leaving her car at home for her husband's use, so she rode with me to the pick-up site).

We did one of the major roads in town, but out near its western end - much less traffic, much quieter. At one point an older man drove by, slowed down, rolled down his window and waved and thanked us for cleaning up. So there was that. (Probably it's less than 10% of the population that litters...but boy, do they have a big impact).

Part of the area was already clear - there are several "ranchettes" along that road, and obviously the owners kept their own frontages clear. But even with that, for a span of maybe two miles (counting both sides of the road), we filled a dozen garbage sacks. Mostly with plastic bottles. Some containing substances that were not originally placed there by the bottler, and which I tried really hard not to think about. (We did have latex gloves for protection)

I say it may have been a bit on the cool side for ideal work - this morning, my lower back was VERY sore. More than I remember it being in the past after these things. So I wonder if the cooler temperatures made my muscles tense up more. I remember being sore in this way after spending multiple hours in my office when the heat was out last winter. (And it didn't help that in church, they had the air conditioning cranked way up - though there was a reason, it was the Holy Week cantata and the choir was standing, in their heavy robes, for maybe a half-hour or so. But it was tough on those of us in the pews, who had dressed for a day of maybe 80 degrees).

So I didn't do a whole lot today. I had planned on more gardening but decided that was inadvisable given how my back felt. I did clean house a little bit but trying to scrub the kitchen floor (I couldn't stand how bad it had gotten) probably wasn't the best idea.

I did add a couple more repeats on the Butter Peeps socks (they almost certainly won't be done by Easter, but that's OK) and I also worked some on a large square shawl - the Miss Marple shawl made from a pattern reprinted from the old Weldon's. I'm almost to the point of starting to decrease for the second side of the square (and am halfway through the yarn I have, so that works out well).

Lots of talk both in church and on the local news just how bad it is in Tushka, where the biggest tornado hit. One of the women, who is a manager at a home-health firm, had photos of their Atoka office, half gone. (The good news? No one was in the building - the one employee who had been going up to catch up on late work, her husband called her and told her to come home, so she was at home in their storm shelter).

One of the local girl scout troops is collecting "hygiene kits" (things like toothbrushes and soap and facecloths) for people who are in the shelters or are having to stay with family or friends.

Once again, I guess we dodged something very bad where I live.

You know what?

Forget coming back this afternoon to sort soil. I'm tired, I will be busy most of the morning tomorrow, and my allergies are really flaring badly. (I'm back on Zantac + Claritin to try to deal with hives brought on by trying to trim back evil, evil nandina - apparently I'm allergic to the sap; it makes me get what looks just like a poison ivy rash)

Heh. They call it "heavenly bamboo" or "sacred bamboo." I'm inclined to think it comes from The Other Place. (It's also harder than That Other Place to get rid of; I think I've been hacking at it since I moved into the house and it only shows signs of spreading more. Also, it is NOT a bamboo; it's in the Berberidaceae. Not even a monocot! I get unduly annoyed when a common name of a species implies that it's something it's not.)

It's also considered an invasive in Florida. I wish I could just wave a wand and get rid of it and replace it with something nice and friendly and native, like American Beautyberry (which can be a gorgeous plant and really should be used more as a horticultural specimen around here).

Also, I have to go to the grocery store, and there might not be time before the trash-off tomorrow morning. And I WILL NOT go to the "big" grocery in town on a weekend afternoon. (Friday early afternoon is bad enough, especially with today being a payday for some)

But I really need some time off, and as I won't get it tomorrow....I suppose the soil will wait for me.

A tiny memory

Charles' comment on "the best distance to see tornadoes" reminded me of when I was a freshman in college, living in the dorm. Tornadoes were rare in Ann Arbor, but that weekend we were under a warning. We all dutifully trooped to the interior hallway designated as a safe spot.

The sky was that freaky green that it sometimes gets before a bad storm, so we all assumed that a tornado was on the way.

One of my friends had her fiance visiting that afternoon; he was in the hall with us, but then he got up and started moving towards the door.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"I want to see it!" he responded. (Meaning, the putative tornado).

"No, you don't. And you're not going to," she responded.

He sat back down. (Granted, she had grown up in Nebraska so she knew from tornadoes, and her command was said in more of a shaky-scared "I don't want you to die" voice than a "I will control your every action" voice)

(They got married a few years later...and, from my last contact with her (she teaches now at A and M, Commerce - not that far away - they are still married, more than 20 years later. Perhaps the "happy wife, happy life" saying that someone I know claims is actually true...)

Why the bathroom

With tornadoes, the best place (safest) to be is underground. But many houses in the south-central U.S. don't have basements (we have a shallow depth-to-bedrock here, and it would be expensive to build a house with a basement).

So the next best thing is to put as many walls and sturdy stuff as possible between yourself and the outside world. And in most one-story houses, that's an interior bathroom. (The bathroom in my house is entirely surrounded by other rooms). Supposedly the bathtub is safe - if you're covered by a mattress or something - because it protects against flying debris.

They do have storm shelters on campus, and I went to them a few times when there were alerts and I lived in an apartment...but after dealing with the crush of humanity there, the crying babies, the people who wanted to make me their New Best Friend and tell me all about their gallbladder surgery...I decided once I moved to a house, I'd take my chances with the bathroom.

A lot of people also have storm shelters, which are small (smaller than a basement) underground spaces you can go in. I don't have one, and besides, someone I knew who had one said his got full of brown recluse spiders - so unless you sprayed for spiders on a regular basis, your choice was tornado or venomous spider bite.\

I forget that people outside the central U.S. don't have our level of experience with tornadoes...

Last night's weather

I finished up the "knowing what to do in an emergency" federal training thingie.

My assessment: most of the stuff was the common-sense stuff I'd do anyway (or saw people on Criminal Minds or NCIS doing - like "reading in" people who are new to a situation). I doubt, however, that I'll remember if the person in charge of Operations or Planning after an "incident" is called a "Section Chief" or a "Section Leader" or what.

(Like a lot of governmental things, they seem to be awfully fond of their terminology. I think in a real emergency if I were, I don't know, applying pressure to someone's sucking chest wound, and I saw the person who was in charge of me walk by and I needed to speak to him, I'd either call him by name or go "Hey, you!" than try to remember if "Chief" or "Leader" or "Boss" or whatever was the correct term.

And you KNOW there will be some people, even in a serious incident, who will get their backs up about being called "Team Leader" when they're really a "Section Chief"...)

***

It was ironic I completed the training yesterday. We were scheduled to get bad weather. Nothing really until about 5 pm, then they started talking on the local news about storms off to the west and north of where I live. I kept waiting for them but they never materialized right here. (I had a pile of quilts and blankets in my bathtub, just like last year, and I had moved my battery powered radio, and a battery powered camp lantern, and some good sturdy shoes, and other stuff, into the bathroom, just in case).

They pre-empted the prime-time programming (until at least 8:30; it's been a long time since I saw that) to cover the weather.

There were some tornadoes discussed - shortly before I went to bed they said there was a large one near Tushka, which is about 25 miles north of me.

I didn't realize how large. This morning they are saying there are two people dead, more missing, and the school there (Tushka is not a large town and I guess they had just one school) was destroyed. Apparently it is very bad.

(And here's something that makes me sad: repeatedly they felt they had to say on the news: unless you are a first responder called there, or you have loved ones you need to go and find at the shelter, STAY AWAY. Apparently they have problems with people wanting to rubberneck situations like that. Ugh.)

There was also a small tornado near Madill, which is much closer to me, but apparently it only damaged some sheds and outbuildings and no one was hurt.

We got about a half inch of rain. We really needed more rain but I'm glad we dodged the really severe weather.

Something just snapped

This has been a busy week - evening meeting all evening Monday, evening meeting all evening last night. (I'm not going to get down to Twin Oaks tomorrow: I had no time at all to work in the garden, and I won't today, because (a) I have to do some kind of Federally mandated "incident response training" (It's an online thing, I've been warned it can take up to six hours) and (b) it's very likely to be storming - and hailing - by the time I get off campus. (And if my car gets dinged by hail because I'm tied to the computer getting my NIMS certificate...well, I will be very displeased).

Anyway, I think I'm feeling it. (Also, my allergies have kicked up for another round. Something new must be flowering. Pecans, probably.)

I was driving over yesterday to pick up the van to take half of my ecology class out into the field (It's a long story.... I have to split the class in halves because I have no one else who is free who is "certified" to drive the big vans. It's a major headache.)

Anyway, as I was driving over, I saw a fast-food restaurant bag in the middle of the street.

And I just snapped.

You have to understand: this Saturday is the city trash-off day. I participate in it because I am at least nominally a member of the city beautification group and it's the one form of "Civic Engagement" that I do (another long story there about Civic Engagement and the expectation that we do it, but I won't go into it). So, on top of a long and frustrating week, I get to spend half of my Saturday picking up trash.

The thing that frustrates me a bit about the trash-off days is that the population of people who PICK UP trash, and the population of people who TOSS OUT trash from their cars are two different populations. So no one ever learns the lesson that there is someone out there arduously picking up their old Sonic drink cups, or their empty cigarette boxes, or the beer bottles they decided they had to ditch before getting home...

The other thing that frustrates me is that there can be something like 300 man-hours (100 people working for 3 hours) spent picking up trash, and in two to three weeks it can look like no one ever picked up any trash.

So anyway, seeing that bag out in the street, I just snapped. And I apostrophized to the (absent and unknown, of course) people who threw that bag out of their car:

"Oh (not very nice word). That's right, just throw your (another not very nice word) trash out of your car. Go about your (yet another not very nice word) merry lives; there will ALWAYS be someone who comes behind you and takes on the (and another not very nice word) responsibility and picks up your trash, both literal and figurative, for you."

I think my responsibilities are starting to wear on me more than a little.

"It's like butter!"

Even though I have a lot of projects going, and I have little time (especially this week - have more meetings tomorrow night) to work on stuff, I wanted to start on something new.

So I pulled out a sock pattern I've been hanging on to for a while, and the yarn I bought for it. (I rarely buy yarn specifically for a certain pattern, but in this case I did. Usually I buy the yarn in a color I like or yarn that is a particular fiber combination I want to try out, but this time I saw the pattern, had seen the yarn for sale somewhere, and realized I needed THIS yarn for THAT pattern.)

The pattern is from a back issue (May/June 2008) of Piecework. It's been reprinted in their "Knitting Traditions" special issue for this year, so you can get it there if you want it and don't have it.

It's called "Lace socks to knit" and was designed by Ann Budd. It's a cabled-and-lace pattern, very pretty, very feminine. In the original issue, the socks were in a pale pink, but I wanted this very light yellow for them.



Not the best representation of the color, but at least the stitches show up nicely. The color is called "Butter Peeps" - it's a very soft, very light yellow with a little pink shaded on it here and there. (It's one of the Dream in Color yarns - they tend to be somewhat idiosyncratically named. I presume the Peeps part refers to the marshmallow Peep chickens (which some people absolutely loathe but which I am really rather fond of - and as candy goes, they are not even all that high in calories! And, if you don't like Peeps "au naturel," try putting them on a plate and zapping them in the microwave for 5 or 10 seconds...they soften up and have a very different texture, and, I think, more flavor))

This is about one repeat (plus a couple more rows) of the main pattern, along with the little bit of the top-of-the-cuff pattern it has you do. This represents an hour's work from last night, and maybe 15 minutes from Monday (if you were wondering how long socks take to knit...) I like patterns like this, though, where you keep track of where you are by row number, rather than being told "Knit plain for 3"" or some such. (Part of it is that being told to "knit plain" means it's just kind of uninteresting, but also part of it is that with a row-by-row lace or cabled or even just knit-and-purl pattern, you can see the pattern develop, and that motivates me to keep knitting on them).

The biggest check

I just wrote the biggest check of my life ever to the IRS. (I converted an IRA from standard to Roth this past year. Now watch as the tax code gets replaced with a national consumption tax the year I decide to retire...)

This is the largest check I've ever written that didn't result in my driving off in a new car. (And this is the second-biggest check I've ever written, period).

It's actually kind of painful to think about. I have a feeling I'm going to have a few weeks of beans and rice for dinner in my future...

Some oddball holidays

Last night was the monthly CWF meeting. (Which is also why I didn't do much after work, other than get my piano practice in...)

The lesson for the month had, as some of the sort-of discussion prompts, some unusual holidays. (The idea behind the lesson was building people up by celebrating small things with them - or, really more, I think, reassuring people that they matter*)

One of the holidays was October 15: National Grouch Day. The woman doing the lesson said she had to laugh - because that was her husband's birthday (And we all roared with laughter - we all know her husband and yes, he is kind of a curmudgeon and a grouch, but he's also a fairly likable person, or so I've found, and most of the "grouchiness" is in the service of doing what's right for students or for the church - I've served on committees with him, both at school and at church. And also, I suspect the curmudgeonliness is at least partly an act...he's not mean or anything, just kind of terse and prone to speak his mind)

Also, this month is National Grilled Cheese Month. Which makes me want to go and find an old-fashioned coffee shop or diner and have a grilled cheese. Sadly, those are hard to come by any more. And the last few times I ordered a grilled cheese "from out," one time they didn't tell me it was a "grilled cheese Florentine" and it came with a layer of cooked spinach on it...which would have been fine if that had been what I wanted, but I wasn't expecting it and didn't want it. And another place, I found out, didn't really grill it so much as grill the bread and slap the cheese on later. (And they put mayonnaise on the sandwich. Mayonnaise and cheese together just seems wrong to me...but then again, I eat pimiento cheese spread, which is sometimes made with mayonnaise. But that's different.)

For years and years, when I was a kid, grilled cheese was the fall-back choice at restaurants. For one thing, most of the places my parents took my brother and me out to were pretty basic, and they were unlikely to dude up a grilled cheese into something terrible. And for another - grilled cheese from a place with an old-fashioned flat-top grill is just better than what you make at home. (I've never succeeded in making a good "true" grilled cheese; if I want toasted bread and cheese I am much more likely to make an open-faced cheese sandwich under the broiler. Usually when I try to make a "real" grilled cheese, either I butter the bread too much and it gets soggy, or it burns, or something. As good a cook as I am with other things, I kind of fail at grilled cheese.)

I was kind of a picky eater as a kid, which is one reason why I went for grilled cheese: you could pretty much count on it to be uniformly good. (Which is why the "grilled cheese Florentine" and the one duded up with mayo were such disappointments). Two slices of white bread, some butter, a slice of American cheese or two...not that hard, and you knew what to expect.

I'm still a fairly picky eater. I'm less vocal about it now. (Because adults "don't" complain about food touching on a plate, or start to tear up over something not being served the "right way.") I didn't send back the "grilled cheese Florentine" (though I probably would have been within my rights to, as it did not mention spinach OR "florentine" on the menu) but I didn't eat much of it. And I still don't like food touching, or the juices from one food (like green beans) getting into another (like mashed potatoes). I don't say anything if I'm at someone's house or a restaurant (but at home, I do have small separate bowls for things I don't want to mix - and when I visit my parents, my mother still serves the vegetables or cranberry sauce or whatever to me in small separate bowls, because she knows I don't like the juices of foods mingling on the plate).

I miss having a nice coffee shop/diner that I can go to for a grilled cheese, though. There really aren't any in my town. (We didn't have the traditional diners where I grew up - we had coffee shops. I think the diners, especially the trailer-type, are much more a big-city and/or East Coast phenomenon). Also, I remember when I was growing up, it seemed like most of the coffee shops were owned by people of either Greek descent, or recent Greek immigrants (or immigrants from that part of the world, like the Montenegran part of Yugoslavia...). (Then again, there just were a lot of people from that part of the world where I grew up, so it might just have been a factor of the population make-up**)

There is one coffee-shop type place in my parents' town where they frequently eat. (But people from Jordan - I think that's where they said they were from - run it now. It used to be Greek-run and they still have gyros and flaming cheese and spanakopita on the menu, along with all the American dishes). Funny, I don't think I've ever gotten a grilled cheese there, though - then again, it's harder for me to find a good gyro than it is to find a grilled cheese, so I guess I usually go for the gyro. Which actually, is something I wouldn't have eaten as a kid - too many vegetables on it, and the meat would have been too spicy for my taste)

(* I do think that one of the most important things people need is reassurance. Reassurance that they matter, reassurance that they're doing a good job, reassurance that what they do is appreciated. And I have to admit, I spend a lot of time during my work-life reassuring people (mostly students, but there is the occasional colleague who seems in need of it) that sometimes I kind of run out of reassurance...and sometimes don't have it for myself when I need it. If that makes sense. And I don't feel comfortable asking for reassurance...)

(**It's funny how you assume things that are true about the town you grew up in are true about everywhere. I didn't realize that not every city in the country had a radio station totally devoted to polka music until I moved to Michigan to go to college...there were at least two Cleveland-based stations that played polka a lot of the day, and broadcast for part of the day in Slavic or Polish. (In addition to lots of Greek/Macedonian/Lebanese immigrants, we had a lot of people from what used to sometimes be called "Mittel-Europa").)

Thank you, Bess

Bess, over at Like the Queen, nominated me for a Stylish Blogger Award.

Like me, she's a blogger who tends to "write more." I know sometimes in the earlier days of blogging I'd get dismayed when I ran across someone who wrote on their blog how they liked "all pictures all the time" and didn't like those "wordy" blogs.

But "wordy" is what I'm good at - most of the time - and it's how my mind operates.

(Also, I'm busy enough that I don't finish stuff all that often to have pictures. And I don't really design, so I don't have shots of the design process, and I don't think I could teach beginners any better than what's already out there...) So I use words instead.

One of the requests of the nomination is to share seven things about you people might not know. That's going to be difficult, because I think I've shared a lot of the stuff I feel comfortable sharing already. But anyway:

1. I am a very picky sleeper. I sleep badly a lot of the time; I require a dark, quiet room - ideally cooler than 72 degrees F - in order to sleep well. I don't sleep well in unfamiliar beds, which may be why I'm not so crazy about travel. Also, it's a big part of the reason I don't camp - the few times I've been camping, it seems that I wind up setting out my sleeping bag and camp mattress and a large stone seems to appear in the middle of the night right in the small of my back.

When I do travel anywhere overnight, I always carry a dark eyeshade and earplugs. I've spent nights in hotels where the curtains weren't really light-blocking, or wound up somewhere off the highway where there was traffic noise all night long.

2. I have an excellent auditory memory, in the sense that I can remember pieces of music well. (This doesn't translate as well to being able to play piano by ear as I had hoped). It makes for some odd moments when a snippet of a popular song is used on a commercial when the song is incongruous to the product or how it is being used. (See: "Little Bitty Pretty One" repurposed as a Zen-style chant to sell a brand of iced tea). I'm also pretty good at playing "guess the composer" when it's an unfamiliar piece, though I do sometimes tend to mix up Brahms and Dvorak.

3. I sometimes "run out of words." It's not by accident that I usually write blogposts first thing in the morning, or, if I write them late in the day, it's typically on a weekend. During the week, when I teach and counsel students and talk with colleagues and go to meetings and all that - there just comes a point where I don't want to talk any more. I refer to it as "running out of words" though it's really more just not wanting to talk. I think that also may be why a lot of my hobbies tend to be visual (knitting, quilting, embroidery, gardening...) rather than word-related. (I have a colleague who writes fiction in his spare time; I don't think he quite gets the "run out of words" concept).

4. I don't get very angry often, and I have a hard time getting angry at people to the point where I would go and talk to them about it. When I do get very angry about something, my usual response is to get up and walk away from the situation for 10 minutes - to just go and walk, even if it's just walking across campus and back. Usually that calms me down enough to be able to deal with whatever the problem is. I also get angry less often than I used to; I don't know if that's a function of age or the fact that I've been taking a B vitamin complex for a couple years (Supposedly the B vitamins can affect mood).

5. I tend to remember where stuff is by "landmarks." I'm good at reading maps but if I've been to a place even once, I can usually remember how to get back there - or how to get around in the place - based on landmarks and a general sense of spatial relations. It's similar with stuff - I remember where I put stuff on my desk, even though my desk is a giant mess, because I remember where something was "last." It's only when I clean and move a lot of stuff around that I forget where stuff is. (Which is why I usually only clean my desk between semesters....)

6. I've always loved small cute things. I had a dollhouse (well, several, actually) when I was a kid, and actually kept the dollhouse going fairly late into adolescence (Well, really: it could be argued that "miniatures," in the sense of doing scale-correct, historically-correct stuff, is as much an adult hobby as a child's play). I still like small cute things, which is why I have such a collection of Re-Ment food. I keep thinking I'd like to get a small dollhouse or a shadowbox for the little toy tardigrade (Wilbur) I made some years back.

7. One of my big, and probably irrational, fears is that other people find me boring. Probably it's because I often don't fit in that well with peer-groups. (And right now, when most of my peers are in the middle of raising families...that's still the case). And it's also a side effect, I'm sure, of my people-pleasing mentality - I want people to "like" me, maybe even people that aren't worth my tying myself into knots over.

And then, three other blogs.

I'm going to go a different route with this and choose blogs that are image- heavy: where I envy the blogger's ability to take good photographs, or where the layout is nice, or whatever.

1. Doe-C-Doe,, which is largely devoted to embroidery and thrift-store finds. But she takes such great photos!

2. Comfortstitching. This is a fairly new one to me, but lots of quilting stuff, lots of nice photos of fabric.

3. And Yarnstorm An old favorite (originally published under a different name), but I really love her photographs. And I kind of envy her life.

A weekend off...

Well, mostly.

I feel a lot better than I did after Friday afternoon. Part of it was time away from campus, getting out of the one-inch picture frame I sometimes get stuck in. (Anne Lamott talks about the "one inch picture frame" in the context of writing. Sometimes it's a good thing - getting that tight focus on something you need to do and forgetting your other responsibilities until the work is done - but it can also work against you. I tend to fall too much into the "your work is who you are" trap, not having a spouse or children or even nearby family, and sometimes I just need to leave work behind for a while and do something else).

So, as I said, I spent a while Friday night clearing out the rest of the herb garden and what I call the "north garden" (it's a narrow strip - maybe four feet wide - on the north side of my house. It's hard to know what to plant there because it's mostly shaded).

Then I went to Lowe's. Bought a few more herbs to replace the herbs that had died off because of either the cold winter or my neglect of weeding. Also, I went to one of the small, local garden centers and found some different things there - including Arkansas Traveler tomatoes, my favorite variety, so I bought three of those and brought them back home to plant.

I didn't find scarlet runner bean seeds anywhere and was kind of vexed as to what to do - I had kind of had my heart set on those but figured as it had gotten pretty hot already, ordering them from Burpee's or somewhere and waiting a week or two, it might be too late. And I knew I didn't want to do morning glories, because you NEVER get rid of morning glories once you plant them.

I decided to go back out and just look for some kind of pole bean (after verifying with my mother - who has far more gardening experience than I do - that pole beans would climb like runner beans). I found Kentucky Wonder, which, in its bush variety, was one my mom used to grow many years. (Funny, I never appreciated the garden fresh beans much when I was a kid.) I also bought a few packs of nasturtium seeds, so most of the area along the chain-link fence is now planted with Kentucky Wonders, and the rest of the area is planted with nasturtiums. (Some varieties of nasturtiums will climb, but I don't think either variety I found is a climbing type. I was also careful to plant them in the areas I had NOT top-dressed; nasturtiums often don't flower as well if the soil is too rich).

And I realized, perhaps the gardening is a way of reliving a bit of my childhood. When I was a kid, my mom didn't work outside the home. But she did a heck of a lot AT home - she baked the bread we ate, and cooked nearly everything from scratch, and in the summers she had huge gardens. I think part of that was just her personality - I am like her in the respect that it's hard for me to just sit still and "do nothing," - and part of it may be because it was a way she could contribute to the family budget in a way (remember, this was the inflationary 70s) and still be home for my brother and me. And also, I think she just likes gardening - her grandparents had a 'truck farm' and her mother grew some vegetables in their small yard.

I remember following her around in the garden a lot as a kid, she would tell me stuff about the plants and the bugs. (And I would get paid a penny bounty for every Japanese beetle I caught, or for every potato bug, or for every cabbage moth caterpillar). And some years I got my own little garden plot, and either got to plant what I wanted, or got one of those one-penny seed packs one of the companies (Burpee's, I think?) used to do for kids. (I think they were probably the seeds that fell off the tables and got all mixed up, the packet was always a mix of different vegetables and flowers).

I wasn't a terribly eager gardener as a kid - I didn't like vegetables all that much (And despite the claims of some, having your kid help raise or cook vegetables does not necessarily make them more likely to want to eat them). And I didn't like weeding (it was often, in fact, doled out as a punishment - or as a remedy for me moping around and complaining I was "bored.")

But things change. Now I like weeding, provided I can make time to do it. It's peaceful and it's productive and you can look back over your shoulder and see what you've accomplished. And I like green beans, at least, out of the garden. (Some of the other prime garden vegetables - like carrots - I cannot eat (I have a sensitivity to carrots, also to celery), and others, like cabbage, I've not quite sussed out the correct season for here yet. (I think I might try a fall planting of cabbage and beets, though, this year). And I don't have enough space for corn, and also I think it's a little much in the water requirement for my climate. (And it's mostly too hot here for lettuce. I'd love to be able to grow my own lettuce for at least part of the year but I'm never thinking about it at the time it would be time to plant it. Again, maybe do an early fall crop). And melons and squash, borers always seem to get them, and that's a huge disappointment.

So anyway: beans, and tomatoes, and lots of herbs and flowers. (I might try eating the nasturtium flowers in salad if I get some. I understand they're kind of peppery tasting. Maybe use them with cream cheese in finger sandwiches...)

I think I am going to try to break away early on Friday afternoon, if I can, and go to Sherman to Twin Oaks, which is a huge nice garden center. I have room (if I can get it cleared out) for a couple more tomato plants, and I want a few more flowers, and they often have some nice shade perennials - which I could use in that little north garden.
***

I did finish some knitting this weekend. I got the second of the Serendipity socks knit up:



It's hard to photograph them. The lace doesn't show up that well - it's kind of chevrons of eyelets - and the color is dark. You can kind of see some of the purple highlights in the photograph.

I do think I will need to wash these socks before actually wearing them a full day; the dye "crocked" off a lot on my hands (and on the bamboo needles) while I was knitting the socks.

I also added a couple more rows on the Knickerbocker Glory quilt top. And I planned another quilt - this one will be entirely from the stash. I had about a dozen bright-pink and lime-green fat quarters, and I found a pattern called "Citrus" in the February issue of American Patchwork and Quilting, and thought it would be ideal for those fabrics. (The original quilt has black accents and sashing, but instead I'm going to use green accents with the pink fabrics and pink with the green, and use a very large-scale pink-and-green print as the sashing on it. That way, I can use entirely stash fabrics without buying anything new - I may even have a piece that will work for the backing (or be able to piece one).

I think I want to start challenging myself to doing entirely-from-the-stash tops for a while, both to use up accumulated fabric and also to save money.

And I hand-quilted some. I can see that I am getting really close to done with the current quilt; I should pull out the backing for the next quilt I want to do in that frame and seam it up, and also get out the batting and let it "breathe." (Most of the hand quilters I know say you need to let the batting "relax" out flat after being rolled up in the package, for a day or so before you layer and baste the quilt).

Breaking on through...

Yesterday was not a very good day. I gave two exams and struggled to get them graded. I wound up spending a good half-hour being an unwilling party to a heated discussion/gripe session taking place outside my (closed) office door. Just as I was getting up to poke my head out into the hall and ask them to move, I realized one of the people was talking about me, and felt all weird about it (it goes back to an old incident in high school where I inadvertently heard people I thought were kind of friends of mine talking about me) so instead I stuck my fingers in my ears for a while. (FWIW, what I overheard this time wasn't all that negative)

Then, just as I was getting ready to bail and go home around 4 pm, one of my colleagues stopped me to ask if I had ever caught a student in my ecology class fabricating data.

Because, his TA in one of his classes came to him and said she caught several people fabricating data for the semester-long project done in his class.

This is like the biggest no-no ever in science. (Well, plagiarism might be bigger, but in a way, data fabrication seems worse to me). If I ran the circus, any kind of data fabrication in a class would be grounds for expulsion. (But I don't, so it isn't.)

I realized: no, I've never caught anyone. I did have one case of a plagiarized paper, but that was different. And then I realized: if the person were good at fabricating data, like they had a fake data book and everything, I'd never catch them. Even photographs can be faked. If I see data that seem a little wonky, I think, "well, the person collecting it is not an expert, and the data I collect sometimes seem a little strange." (I'd actually be more suspicious of data that were "too perfect.")

And that made me all depressed. I don't like to think of students figuring it's OK to cheat their way through a class. It's hard for me to really put my finger on what bothers me the most - whether it's that word may get around that I'm blind to that particular form of cheating, so "Just go ahead and do it" or that the students who DO do the work, their grade and their degree is somehow worth less because there are people who obtained it fraudulently, or that we may be sending people out into the workforce who figure cheating is OK as long as you get away with it.

(I also remember now that I had an issue a couple summers ago of a student who received a poor grade on his project, trying to intimidate me into giving him a better grade because he said "I have evidence that other people made up data." My argument was that if he had that evidence, he should have come to me as soon as he had it, and not "saved" it for a contingency. Noises were made about a grade change protest being filed, and I braced myself for things to become really ugly...but then nothing came of it, so either he had no evidence, really, or someone told him that he couldn't protest his grade on those grounds. I will say I found out a semester later that he tried to pull a similar stunt on one of my colleagues, which makes me think HIS claim was fabricated. Also, ironically, this was someone who had ambitions of going to law school. All I can say is, if he ever got there, I hope they had honors codes they made him sign...)

I posted in dismay on an internet forum I frequent, and got some sympathy, but also a somewhat-stern reminder of "YOU NEED TO BE TEACHING THEM THIS IS WRONG." Oh please. These students are 20 or 22 or some even older. If they haven't learned right from wrong - or if they've gotten so good at justifying what they're doing - there's nothing I can say (short of catching them and failing their sorry butts, and that will only teach some of them, "Be more devious next time"). I think there are two deterrents to this kind of cheating. The first one is simply, "Because it's wrong" and the second is "I might get caught." For a lot of students, the first one is the foremost, with the second one maybe being there somewhere in their minds, but the first one is the important one. But for a few people, it seems like only the second one is the deterrent. And if that's the case...well, that's where the "evolutionary arms race" of cheating establishes. The profs figure out a way to bust one type of cheating, the devious students figure out a new one. (My colleague proposed requiring the students to photograph themselves collecting the data and I pointed out that my plagiarist had included staged photos of herself "collecting" the "data").

And that just kills me. It really does. It kills my spirit and optimism about teaching. I don't want to be a cop. I don't like having to think about all the ways a person could cheat, because it just makes me sad and paranoid and angry at humanity. (Ironically: last night while doing the last bit of grading, I had a re-run of "Criminal Minds" on in the background and at the end of the episode, Hoch was making a similar observation: how much depravity could his team see, and still be able to retain the "pieces" of themselves that kept them whole? While what I deal with on campus is nowhere NEAR what someone in law enforcement has to deal with, still....it seems that in every profession there are things that conspire to steal your soul, and you have to work very hard to hang on to what keeps you, you, and to hang on to whatever misguided optimism you may have)

(Another person on the forum went into a philosophical discourse about how "corruption" is probably the default condition for humanity. Yes, and you could argue that from both an evolutionary and religious perspective....but I don't want to believe it, really. Or I want to hope that people in college would be striving to do something a little better; we're not just cavemen grubbing in the dirt any more...)

So I don't know. I just know I was very sad when I got home. And it was one of those wharrrgarrrbllll after noons: I had to go to the bank (and more: had to transfer a big chunk out of savings so I could pay my tax bill for the year. I do not like depleting my savings account because that's my emergency money, if the airconditioner dies or something like that). And I still had to practice piano. And I had a whole class' worth of tests left to grade. And I had wanted to do an hour's work in the garden...

So I ran to the bank (before they closed for the day), and then when I got home, I decided I'd work in the garden.

That was probably actually the best choice. I finished all the area in the garden to the north of my house, cleared out the rest of the herb garden. I noticed that the little beans I planted last week are beginning to germinate - I can see the little "crooks" of the stems poking up through the soil.

And now, after I get done with stuff this morning, I can go and buy nasturtium seeds and scarlet runner bean seeds and some more herb plants (A lot of the herbs didn't make it through the combination of being covered with weeds and a cold winter, I guess). (However, my balloon flowers are still there, which makes me happy)

And I am going to move next to the little area under my east-facing bedroom window; there's enough space there for a couple tomato plants, maybe. I'm going to try to keep motivated for weeding - maybe not work as much as I did this past week, but maybe try to accumulate an hour or so of work a week, and then keep up with weeding as the season progresses.

I felt a lot better after working in the garden. I went in, took a shower, ate a quick dinner, did my piano practice...and it was still early enough that I managed to get the second set of exams (this was a class only half the size of the class I graded this afternoon, also, it's a more advanced class, so there's less staring at the essay-question answers and trying to suss out what the person meant vs. what they said). So I got those done.

This morning, I need to enter the grades and sort soil, but then I get to go and have a weekend.

Weekend is here

For what it's worth. (I have a truckload of grading to do, and I also need to come in tomorrow and sort soil).

The quilt kit I requested for my birthday came yesterday. (I knew it was going to mean a wait until sometime in April; the kits weren't ready yet). It's a fairly simple kit, it uses a "layer cake" (10" squares) of a line of fabric called Sherbet Pips. It's sort of an unusual set of colors: red, gray, pale turquoise, and pink. Kind of a vintagey feel, I guess. I like the prints because there are a number of novelty prints. (You only use 30 of the 42 squares in the quilt; I am definitely using all the pieces of the novelty prints). (And the same line, on the designer's blog, where she writes a little about it)

I'm not sure if this will be the "next" quilt top I do, or if another one will. I have a lot of projects in mind. I always have more things I want to be doing than time to do it in. (Though perhaps, really, that's one of the keys to being happy - having more things that interest you than you have time to spend on them. Certainly it's better than the alternative of running out of things that interest you).

Brilliant little idea

I didn't think of this, but now I'm glad I clicked on the link (from Not Martha): using a vintage drying rack for herb drying.

Several years ago, I bought a rack (not identical, but similar) from Victorian Trading Company and put it up in my kitchen. It's been really useful - I hang delicate (ahem: lingerie) type items on it to dry. And I dry socks on it. And sometimes, when my jeans come out of the dryer not-quite-dry, I'll just hang them on it by a belt loop until they're dry.

I hadn't thought of drying herbs or flowers using it. What a good idea. I'll have to remember that for this summer...in fact, I have a lot of herbs I COULD be drying, I could trim back the rosemary bushes quite a bit. (I don't really cook with rosemary - it's a bit strong for me - but I could see using it as potpourri. Or mixing it in with a salt or even sugar scrub to scent it....or mixing it in with Epsom salts to scent them for the bath). And if the lavender I planted flowers successfully, I could dry lavender flowers. (I admit it: one of the "alternate careers" I daydream about is having a lavender farm)

I might also have to think about planting some strawflowers; dried strawflowers last a long time and are kind of pretty in a Victorian-cottage sort of way.

I almost forgot

While I was working in the garden, I turned the sprinkler on to give my tomato plants and little beans some water. And then I got to watch the birds.

("My sprinklers bring all the birds to the yard." Heh.)

The cardinals (and I do think there's a pair that's staked out my yard as a territory) would fly through the sprinkler, kind of like how kids run through a sprinkler. And the robins did that, too, or they'd perch on the fence and wait for the sprinkler to cycle 'round and spray them, and then they'd fluff their feathers like they do when they bathe.

And the chickadees came, and sat up in the redbud, where the water would just gently spray them. And they were singing. I know animal behaviorists say birds don't sing just because they're happy, but sometimes I kind of wonder with chickadees: they seem to have kind of a sense of humor about things.

It's been really dry here and I guess the birds were trying to get baths when they could. I'll have to remember to see to it that I keep the birdbath filled and cleaned for them.

A good start

(Heh. It makes me think of the old zombie-invasion joke: What do you call wiping out 200 zombies in a day? A good start. Or maybe that was space invaders, I don't remember...)

Anyway, I worked more on the garden when I got home this afternoon. (Can the key to getting stuff done REALLY be as simple as not watching television when I first get home? Somehow I feel like this is a charmed week and I will not get as much done some other week...)

I spent about another hour ripping out all the darn tree seedlings (and the blackberries) and also clearing out leaves.

Here's where I am so far:



The few plants I left in the cleared area are either fennel that seeded in (and I don't have the heart to kill...I ripped out a few of the smaller ones) and some sedums that have been in there for a few years. There are also a few small remnants of balloon flower and dead-nettle that I'll have to work around once I get up further. (The big patch of dark-green foliage way in the back is one of several very large rosemary plants...they were one of the first things I planted when I moved in here, because it delights me to live in a climate where rosemary is a true perennial and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger each year.)

I think another hour's work (I should be able to do that Friday afternoon, if it's not storming) will get me to the point where I can really think about planting. I think I'm going to do a mixture of seeded things (buy seeds of basil, which grows fast, and the scarlet-runner beans, and nasturtiums, which don't transplant well) and a few already-started plants (whatever kind of pollinator-friendly flowering things I can find that will do all right in a situation where most of the sun they get is early in the morning, and it's not a LOT of sun).

There is something satisfying about working in the garden...it's destruction in the service of creation, so you can be all "RARR SMASH KILL DESTROY" and work your frustrations out, and then you can look back at what you did and think, oh, this will look SO good when there are pretty things growing here.


And another "good start":



I started sewing the quilt together last night and added a couple of rows today. You do have to pay attention to what you're doing: I made a mistake on one row and had to take it apart and insert a missing block before I could get it to fit on with the previous rows.

I think the background fabric was a good choice. It was hard to know what to use as there are so many different colors of fabrics (one of the drawbacks, sometimes, to using jelly rolls: if it's a fabric line that comes in several "colorways," you get all the "colorways," and they may or may not work that well together). I planned the quilt to as evenly as possible space the colors: there are more blues and greens than everything else, and there were two sets of red blocks and two sets of pink blocks, and only one of yellow....so the yellow will be the very midpoint row, and then the other colors will be in order, "reflected" around that row, something like brown-blue-green-pink-green-blue-red-blue-green-yellow-green-blue-red-blue-green-pink-green-blue-brown. Or at least that's what I think I have; I wrote it down so I wouldn't mess it up.

It's an on-point setting, which makes it a bit more challenging to sew together....

Wednesday morning random

I didn't work in the garden yesterday afternoon; I had piano lesson and also got my weekly allergy shot and figured it probably wasn't advisable to be digging around in leaf-mold after getting an allergy shot.

Instead, I finished sewing up the last of the four-patch blocks for the current quilt top, and then cut the setting squares, and figured out a layout that should work. I also sewed the first couple of rows. It's a set-on-point quilt, so it takes more attention (the rows are done diagonally instead of straight across). I think I'm going to sew a row together and then immediately attach it to the quilt. I may have a picture of the quilt in progress in another day or so.

***

Speaking of piano: Bartok frustrates me. One of the pieces I'm working on now is "Evening in the Country." (From "Ten Easy Pieces." Oh, easy for Leonardo!)

It has some atypical rhythms in it - at one point there's eighth note, dotted quarter, dotted quarter eighth note, and then that repeats in the next few bars, and I just can't get it. At one point my teacher told me essentially to "stop counting and just feel it," but I can't, quite. (And I'm not going to "cheat" by looking it up on Youtube or somewhere).

Also, it has places where you're playing a four-note chord in the left hand - first time I've had to do that, and also you have to move pretty fast between two hand positions.

Oh well. I read somewhere that "learning is persistence through failure."

***

Another silly site: Cats for Gold is back! I know there were a number of people who were sad when it went away, but now it's back. Got gold? Turn it into ccccccaaaaaaattttttsssss!