Monday morning stuff

* One thing I did yesterday was to clean out the fridge. It had been a while, it had gotten bad. (I had a couple of incidents recently where I bumped/knocked over something with some liquid to it, was in a hurry/feeling very meh/flustered by other things and didn't do more than mop up the worst of it.) Luckily, all the shelves (they are glass) lift out and can be washed in the sink. I also got rid of a boatload of old jellies and stuff where there was a tiny bit left and in some cases I figured it had gone bad. (I don't know if jelly can go bad, though I once did have some of the lower-sugar kind mold.)

Now my fridge looks very shiny and very empty. I should probably go ahead and fill a pitcher with water and put it in there, as we're entering the summer season where the water is kind of lukewarm (ugh) coming out of the tap. (The water lines here are very shallow, partly because of our shallow soils and partly because the soil almost never freezes. So in the summer the water comes out of the tap warm-ish, which is far more unappealing than it should be.)

* I also started Queen Chrysalis. This is going to be a long-term project: I got about halfway through the head, which is one of the easier parts, last night. (I think I've figured out how you do the "holes" in the legs. There is an option to do solid legs if you prefer, but since the holes are a possibility and don't look THAT much harder....) I am using a size G hook although the pattern calls for an H, because dark yarn + stuffing often leads to show-through, and really tight crocheting prevents that. (I may go up a size for her mane and tail, so they are more drapey.) If anything, the smaller hook will make a slightly smaller Chrysalis, which is not a problem, as the pattern says finished size is about two feet tall (!)

* And I pulled out the stalled Belvedere Cardigan and added a few more rows. I'm almost up to the "bind off/decrease for the armholes" part of the back.

* I'm still plugging away on "The War that Ended Peace," which is an account of the various idiocies/misunderstandings/broken alliances/belligerencies/nationalisms that lead up to WWI. Parts of it I find slow going; I knew very little about, for example, Austria-Hungary of that era before. (Balkanization is not just a phenomenon of the late 20th century). I guess over the weekend was the 100th anniversary of Francis Ferdinand's assassination? (And the ironic thing? Apparently he was actually a guy who could have calmed down some of the nationalisms in Austria-Hungary and prevented some of the fractioning of it. I'm not quite to the detailed discussion of his assassination yet but as I remember it was an anarchist that did it.)

It's weird to think that we're closing in on the 100th anniversary of World War I. I knew people growing up who either experienced the war first-hand or who had relatives who fought in it. Also, someone commented that we are now farther from WWI than it was from the American Civil War.....again, that's just weird to think because I think of it as "Happened in the same century as when I was born, therefore not that long ago" about WWI, even if it was over some 50 years before I was born.

As I learn more about it, I think I understand better why it wasn't really covered in much detail in grade-school history: It is a hard war to understand from the modern perspective. It seems to me, not to belittle the sacrifice of all the men who died, but it seems like it arose largely out of several separate hissy fits had by European rulers, coupled with some encroachment on territory they had no right to encroach upon. Mainly what I remember learning is about the horrors of gas and trench warfare, and the early aviators, and the assassination of the Archduke as a precipitating event, and the Treaty of Versailles. (And Charles Schulz' gags about Snoopy as a WWI aviator from Peanuts.)

It's not a war of independence, like the American Revolution. It's not seen as a "push to defeat evil" (which is usually how the US involvement in the European theater of WWII is seen). It's not even an internecine fight among two competing ruling factions like the Wars of the Roses. It's more like a land grab coupled with people getting REALLY insulted about various things. (Sometimes I think what will finally end the world will be the wrong person getting really offended over something that is comparatively small in the grand scheme of things. Kind of like the gang wars that start because someone "disrespected" someone else by looking at them funny.)

* Moment of Zen (or maybe not) for the day: