Rah, ray, ree, row, rue and sometimes rye

The title sequence came to mind while I was working on a tight deadline for another project. That often seems to be a requirement for creativity. Anyway, I decided to just go with it and see where it led me.

The vowel sequence probably came to mind because I have been reading aloud the same page about Hebrew verb formation for the last week. The information is starting to sink in, but it won’t make sense until I understand the undefined grammar terms that the author is using (sometimes in abbreviation). I suppose that the author thinks he’s starting at Point A, but for me without a background in formal grammar or linguistics it’s more like Point G or H, and I must retreat to understand before I can advance.

By the weekend it finally occurred to me that I’ve been trying to absorb an outline of all possible combinations of stems, prefixes, and suffixes by reading the language used by professional linguists and grammarians. On Saturday afternoon I picked up the grammar text that all of the other authors referred to as the standard, and it’s been much easier going ever since. (Not that he defines his terms, either, but he’s starting from the sounds of the consonants and vowels and working his way up to syllables and sentences. It’s as if I’m now trying to jump onto a moving train that isn’t moving quite as fast. [At least it’s good cardio.])

Rah

With everyone (including myself) getting sick lately, there is not a lot to cheer about. But herbal teas are something to celebrate, as well as friends who keep you in their thoughts and check on your health from time to time. Everyone should have such friends! Unfortunately, some of my friends have COVID. Won’t you keep them in your thoughts?

Ray

Over the weekend I noticed that my social-media friends in Wisconsin have used the same word to describe this weekend: perfect. There is something about the blue sky vibrant behind the yellow and orange leaves and brown tree-trunks, set against the still-green grass, that brings people outside just to gaze at the loveliness.

Of course, it is Wisconsin, and we’re well aware that this won’t last much longer. In the space of a week, we could receive any weather that’s possible to describe — and then its opposite. We will take a perfect day and appreciate it. That includes the low fog that settles over the harvested fields in the morning, the rays of first light piercing the fog, the rich early sunsets, and the magical time before sunset when all the wild animals are invisible and cross the roads with impunity. Watch for deer.

Ree

The only usage I can think of for “ree” is from a cheer that was performed at my high school. I heard it in the early 1980s, but the cheerleaders could have learned it from their mothers, cheerleaders of two decades before. Who knows how old it is? Yes, it is violent; yes, it is funny.

Rah rah ree, kick him in the knee!
Rah rah rass, kick him in the other knee!

Row

I haven’t done any rowing lately, but my collection of canoe paddles remains available in my entryway/laundry room. It’s possible that they have been collecting dust for the last 15 years. My Mad River canoe was sold while I still lived in Stevens Point. I guess we needed the money but I wish I still had it. The cedar-strip canoe my father constructed for me is still in Ohio. My late friend Bonnie’s aluminum canoe, dating back to her late son’s Boy Scout days, was re-homed to a water-loving friend last summer.

It sure would be nice to dip one of these paddles in the water again, but I’m not sure when that might happen. If anyone is at all interested in seeing the paddles, I will try to remember to take a picture of them the next time I reorganize the laundry room.

Rue

One definition of rue is “to bitterly regret.” It’s also a plant used in some traditional medicines. I could quote the wiki I just ran across, but I have friends who will know much more about rue from their own experience. (I suppose that could be true for either definition, but I was thinking about the plant.) Feel free to share information in the comments!

Sometimes rye

The fields that surround my house were planted in rye last fall. After the snow melted off in the spring, they grew to a lovely height before they were sprayed and flattened to become a sort of mulch for a crop of soybeans. I’m no judge of soybeans, but they were taller than any soybeans I’d noticed before. (I’m from Ohio. I have seen a lot of corn and a lot of soybeans.) A week or so ago, the soybeans were harvested. Now I can see tiny green shoots coming up in the field. I thought they were another crop of rye, but after a discussion with the landlord (who leases the fields to the farmer down the road) I discovered that they’re wheat. The crop will be harvested next year in time to plant alfalfa and, literally, make hay.

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Knitwise, I made steady progress on the narrow triangle. And I found the sketch!

Simple but elegant.

The first night, when I started the piece, I made 8 inches of progress. After the first three days I was tempted to name it “Zeno’s Shawl” after the math/physics/philosophy problem where each step only goes half as far as the one before. I have been knitting on it every day (!) for a week now, for just over 100 rows, and it measures 17 inches. Out of 50 grams of wool, I have 16 grams left to knit up.

But that’s okay. All it aspires to be is a knitted object made from random Noro. It will be a triangle, and this being Noro yarn, there will probably be one more orange-y stripe in there somewhere. But it’s fine, it’s really fine. The work is keeping my hands busy when they need to be busy, it’s making my mind work at bare minimum while I’m passively watching something else (such as the Grand Prix of Mexico), and it’s giving me something made from Noro. (“Is that Noro? For me? Oh, you shouldn’t have.”)

Honestly, if I keep knitting on this every day I should have finished it in the course of the upcoming week. Then it will be time to find another ball of skein of yarn to work up into something. (And/or I could finally wash and block the Leroy Cowl, but let’s not go rushing into things.) I should probably start on the earwarmer/headband project before I dig up anything that could become more complicated.

Week One of Hebrew Homeschool

As you may (or may not) know, a new Hebrew year has begun and with it comes a fresh cycle of reading through the Torah, also known as the Five Books of Moses. (If you weren’t raised Jewish, you may know these books as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.) For the last several years I have chosen different ways to read through these texts — sometimes with one translation, sometimes with all the translations I have at hand. This year I decided to do something different.

“Big plan” seems to translate to tachnat gadolah in Google Translate, which doesn’t tell me which vowels I should be using. So I’ll just stick with English for now.

Anyway, this year’s big plan is to study Hebrew using the first phrase or sentence of each weekly reading. Last week this looked like a really good idea, when the phrase was In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. This week’s selection is…a bit longer.

So, you may ask, how do I propose to overdo this task? Well, I look up the first phrase/sentence and then I hand-write it in a special notebook, complete with the vowel and cantillation marks. Those marks tell me not only how to pronounce the words, but how to chant the phrase in case I were called to do so during a service. (If I were asked to chant Torah I would be given more lead time, but this part of the effort will allow me to become more familiar with the phrasing so that it wouldn’t be as much work to learn another portion of the text.)

This part was originally supposed to be a copy-and-paste from the text in Sefaria.org, until I found out that I’m not able to copy and paste it. Okay, fine, I will handwrite the Hebrew. I need practice doing that anyway. That brings me to the next step: practicing my Hebrew letters. I purchased a particular handwriting book for this, which allows me to trace over the shapes. I’m trying to do that with a calligraphy pen so that I can make the letters look more like typography.

Another thing I’m doing in my special notebook, after writing out the whole phrase, is writing each Hebrew word on a separate line. Then I write the transliteration, then the translation as I work it out. At this point I have to learn to look up words in a Hebrew dictionary, which is considerably harder to do when you don’t know the order of the Hebrew alphabet. (Ask me how I know.)

After I have done this step (which may also involve looking into a particular verb tense to see what it means and how the prefixes and suffixes work), I practice writing a key word from the sentence — over and over until my lettering improves.

And, of course, I am looking at the cantillation marks to figure out how to chant the sentence, and then I am practicing my chanting until I’m confident with it.

When I was not doing these things for the first week’s lesson I was reading some books to support my effort. This weekend I finished reading Hebrew for Life: Strategies for Learning, Retaining, and Reviving Hebrew by Adam Howell, Benjamin Merkle, and Robert Plummer. I’m also reading Building Your Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary: Learning Words by Frequency and Cognate by George Landes. Before he gets to the section with the vocabulary lists, he has a 39-page section called “How Hebrew Words are Formed.” I’m now on page 9, having read each paragraph over and over until something, anything, sticks long enough to let me feel that it’s safe to go forward. Page 9 out of 39 may sound pretty good, but this section actually starts on page 7.

I’ve actually been doing a lot of things to keep from purchasing more books. Over the weekend I reorganized my Hebrew-related books to bring the dictionaries, grammars, and language-learning volumes closer together. And while I was sick in bed (thank you, semi-annual sinus infection), I looked up the suggested references in Hebrew for Life, read the reviews of them that I could find via the university library, and decided that I didn’t need to expand that particular part of my library at this time. (In fact, I discovered that I already own some of the recommended resources for learning Aramaic. So there’s that.)

All of this really takes more time to describe than it does to do, and it helps me to have multiple approaches to becoming familiar with the letters, the words, the meanings, and the tunes. The only other aspect I’d like would be to have a study partner who’s doing the same thing, but that seems unlikely. In their absence, I’ll walk my own path.

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Knitwise, I have made theoretical progress on the next project. Having discovered a rewound ball of Noro in one of my yarn bins, I decided to turn it into something just to use it up. There isn’t very much of it (just over 50 grams), so I didn’t want to play the guessing game of using a pattern and wondering if I had enough yarn to finish it. On the other hand, I have been knitting the same two “one-row wonder” patterns over and over, and wanted to try something slightly different.

If I knew where I had put the pattern sketch I made, I would show it to you. But for now you’ll have to make do with a verbal description. I plan to knit a narrow triangle, with the increases on one side only, and eyelets/yarnovers on every other right side row.

This pattern (algorithm, really) might look like:
Cast on n stitches.
1. Kf&b, k to end
2. Sl 1, p to end
3. K1, YO, k to end
4. Sl 1, p to end
…but we will just have to try it out and see how it goes. After I have knitted for a few inches it should be an easy piece to “read,” which means that I will be able to tell what I should do next just by looking at it instead of consulting a formal pattern.

I ran the logistics of this pattern past a couple of more experienced knitters (the kind who remember which way the increases lean, for example) and they nodded their heads and said it should work as I imagined. (I didn’t ask any follow-up questions, like How many stitches should I cast on to start, or Should I slip the first stitch on the wrong side? I didn’t want to take up too much of their time, and how will I ever learn if I don’t spend enough time bumbling around?)

I did take the yarn back home and rewind the ball so that the current working end was on the inside and the old inside became the new working end. Evidently I had tried to make something with this yarn many moons ago — probably many dozens of moons — and then ripped the project back and wound the yarn around the outside of the ball.

One reason that I rewound the ball was just to redistribute the tension in the yarn. This is probably nothing more than BethScience,™ but it felt like I was doing something useful. I also wanted to “turn the yarn around” to rearrange the color sequence. Now that I am able to start from the other end, I’ll be able to make a long and narrow section with a pale green that doesn’t last long in the skein; I’ll be able to end with a very rich and bright green that should last for a few rows and look like a deliberate color choice for that end of the piece.

Sure, it doesn’t look like much now.

There isn’t any other yarning going on right now; the Leroy Cowl is still waiting patiently on the dining room table while I find time and the wool-wash. While it’s waiting I will move the US8 needles closer and closer to the Noro so they’ll be handy when I’m finally ready to cast on for my triangle.

Moving the tiles around

About a week or so ago I had the need to clear the clutter from the dining room. I managed this not by throwing away everything that was cluttering up the dining room (goodness me, no). Instead I moved some items to the library, some other items to the Brick Room, and a few other things to my bedroom. The clutter was out of the way, and we got used to not having to perform a tango just to get from one side of the room to the other. It was nice, and we bumped into the furniture a lot less often.

However, I had in mind some changes I wanted to make to my bedroom. Instead of having a desk there, which I was not using so much as a desk to sit at and write, but more as a horizontal surface to fill up with stuff (and a chair with clothes draped over the back), I wanted to have a drafting table. It should come as absolutely no surprise to you that, in fact, I already had a drafting table. For the last few years it has been positioned in the front entryway, at the bottom of the stairs, and bordered by a row of boxes and bins.

Before. (July)

Making the switch involved a multi-step process that went something like this:

1. Remove items (empty journals, in-use journals, Hebrew typewriter, desk lamp, decorative elephants, et cetera) from desk.
2. Move boxes (of books, yarn, office supplies, and miscellaneous objects) from floor to bed, until bed is almost completely covered.
3. Move jars of pens closer together to create shelf space, then put journals on bookshelf.
4. Remove sewing machine from typing table to bed, then move Hebrew typewriter to typing table.
5. Remove yoga books from top of dresser to piano bench. Move desk lamp to top of dresser.
6. Move side table from corner of room to dining room.
7. Move trash can from top of typewriter cases between dresser and wall; place side table on top of typewriter cases. Put decorative elephants on one shelf of side table.
8. Hang up clothes that are draped over chair.
9. Unplug computer that I was using (three months ago) to watch yoga videos.
10. Move plastic drawer unit, filled with yarn, on which the computer had been sitting.
11. In dining room, remove items from director’s chair at desk 2. Fold up director’s chair.
12. Move desk-chair from bedroom to desk 2. (Chairs at desks 1 and 2 in dining room now match except for height.)
13. Put dog in crate.
14. Drag empty desk from bedroom to dining room.
15. Ask Eldest to back car away from garage, open garage door, and help to carry desk from dining room to garage.
16. Move row of boxes and bins away from drafting table in entryway.
17. Ask dog to stop whining.
18. Wipe dust off of drafting table.
19. With Eldest, move drafting table from entryway to bedroom.
20. Clean cobwebs from drafting table and dust again.
21. Sweep entryway.
22. Ask dog to stop whining.
23. Decide to put dog’s bed, dog’s towels, and dog’s stuffed-animal “friends” into wash cycle while dog is in crate.
24. Ask dog to stop whining.
25. Move old books from side table in dining room to top of bookcase 1 in dining room.
26. Move side table full of fountain pens and ink to bedroom, next to bookcase.
27. Move typewriter table to space where side table used to be.
28. Decide that this was a Bad Idea, and move typewriter table back to original position.
29. Move rolling hanging-file cart to space where side table used to be.
30. Move typewriter table to where hanging-file cart used to be….

Honestly, this went on for at least 20 more steps. Eventually I was able to get things pretty much where I wanted them, and I was able to clear off my bed in time to be able to sleep there on Saturday night. The price to be paid was that the dining room once again has a row of boxes and bins stacked in front of the console (as well as in front of one of the bookcases), and the library is more cluttered than before. But I can sleep in my own bed and the dog now has his bed (and a canvas bucket of freshly washed “friends”) taking up the whole front entryway instead of being squished into a smaller and smaller space in the library.

After. Or, as I call it, “for now.” (October)

Checking out the new location.

On and on it goes, as the boxes move around in an endless game of Musical Chairs. But every so often, a box is opened and we find that its contents can be discarded, recycled, or redistributed. Slowly, slowly, we lighten the load and make the present house into a semblance of the house-to-come.

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Knitwise, I have another finished object (FO) to my credit this week. After having marked the “halfway point” on the Leroy Cowl, I had more yarn in the second pair of skeins so I knitted around for a couple of extra rows. After I had done four rows of ribbing I added one more round and then cast off.

At the halfway point.

Finished! Yeah, it’s upside down.

Ta daah! After weaving in the ends, I slipped the cowl around my neck, took a selfie, and texted photos to Lauren of the LaurenSpun. We agreed that I should wash the cowl in a wool-safe wash and then let it dry out naturally. I didn’t have enough free time to do that this evening, so I’ll have to work it into the schedule another night. Tuesday is my night class, I often do grocery shopping on Wednesday nights, and I pick up Youngest from school on Thursdays after he’s done with e-sports. So…Monday or Friday, I guess?

(This might be one reason that it takes me a while to finish a project. Another reason would be that I will have to clear everything off the dining room table. See above.)

I have about 50 grams of Leroy-wool left over, and I’ll probably just felt-join the ends together and create one ball. The natural wool would make a good contrast if I made a dark hat or a set of mittens and wanted to add some sort of colorwork motif. We’ll see.

The next project may be a headband made from 35g of leftover Manos de Uruguay wool in purples and lilacs, trimmed with 25g of black worsted-weight mystery yarn.

Yeah, the light is terrible.

It would be nice to stay on this finishing kick for a while and free up some room in the house, but I just have So. Much. Yarn. Oh, well, one gallon-sized Ziploc bag at a time, I will do what I can.

Rain delay

Last week was exhausting, in part because my preparation for (and anxieties about) Yom Kippur had me waking up before my alarm every morning, fretting about the details. Finally, on the last morning of early waking, I told my brain don’t worry about it, it will be fine. I’ve been gradually getting back onto my sleep schedule ever since, but I have had some odd dreams. One was about a friend giving me a haircut and partially shaving my head down to the scalp. No thanks, I think I’ll go to the salon instead.

The end of the Jewish year also marks the end of a cycle of reading the Torah, with which I was, mostly, keeping up. I did read to the end this morning, which gives me more than a week to decide what kind of regular reading I’d like to do for the upcoming year.

I’m brainstorming now about establishing a reading pattern that will have me not just reading a small portion each week — just the first sentence — but studying the grammar of it so I’m actually learning some Hebrew. I’ll also practice chanting it, which may have me learning some new cantillation marks and will certainly give me lots of practice with the marks I already “know.”

And because I didn’t have enough projects this week, I spent part of this afternoon cleaning the upholstery in my car. I’ll backtrack to how it all began. Our boy Montmorency Jerome had a “senior checkup” at the vet on Friday morning. One of our concerns was that he has started bumping into things around the house, so the vet gave him a little trim around the eyes. She was very pleased at how well he tolerated this, and she was ready to award him a gold star for this part of the appointment.

However, it all went downhill when it was time to trim his nails. I had let this go for too long, and the quick had grown to the end of each nail. Which meant that every time a nail was clipped, it bled. And he writhed and wailed and whimpered with each snip, with the vet daubing a clotting solution on the end of each cut nail. We were all glad when this was over.

We entered the lobby, and there was a gentleman holding onto the collar of a large and enthusiastic yellow lab. No problem, I thought; I’ll leave my purse here and put Monty in the car and come back in to pay. But when I got outside I saw that there was a man sitting in the car next to ours, with a tiny yapping dog. Uh oh, I thought, this won’t work either. The man took his small dog inside, solving the problem of adjacency to Monty.

By the time I got back inside, the man with the eager yellow lab was on one side of the room and the man with the tiny dog was on the other, stroking it between yaps and growls and saying, let it go, let it go. I sat halfway between them, giggling. The vet’s chaotic-neutral cat, meanwhile, strolled through the lobby as it pleased, clearly embarrassed by the dogs’ uncouth behaviour. At last the cat was removed, the yellow lab was brought in for her exam, and I was able to pay my bill.

I went back out to the car, and Monty was sitting in the driver’s seat, his leash snagged on the center console. His claws had continued to bleed while he scampered across every seat in the car. It looked like a crime scene, and all I could do was drive back home and think about how to minimize the damage.

I laid towels across the seats until Sunday afternoon, when Eldest and I applied an industrial carpet cleaning solution to the bloodstains. It now looks like… less of a crime scene. Monty has his next “pedicure” appointment in another month. Please remind me to bring the towels with me when we’re on our way to the vet’s office so I can put them on the seats before Monty’s nails are trimmed.

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Knitwise, I was able to finish the next step of the pink project: weaving in the ends. As Eldest and I got ready to watch the Japanese Grand Prix, I didn’t think that I had an appropriate knitting project to accompany my viewing. But it was raining in Suzuka, and after three laps filled with one- and two-car incidents, the race was red-flagged until the rain might let up. (Eventually, it let up just enough. No spoilers from me.)

This was a perfect time to pick up the pink project and carefully weave in all of the loose ends that had been left when I transitioned from one skein to another. Some of the tails I left were quite long, which explains why I had gotten tangled up in the project the last few times I’d hauled it out. After the ends were in I removed a stitch marker and the twist-tie that marked the halfway point. It’s done, for now.

The last parts will be washing it — does anyone think that washing it in hot water might encourage the colors to bleed together? — and blocking it out at Mom’s house. At Thanksgiving. So I’ve actually finished a knitting project a month ahead of deadline. Gad freaking zooks!

The rain delay was quite long, so I picked up the project bag for Leroy’s Cowl, cast on 76 stitches with the wool held double, then knitted 4 rounds of 1×1 ribbing before switching to plain knitting in the round for another inch.

I haven’t knitted anything held double before and this yarn was bulky to begin with, so this was a big workout for my hands. On the other hand, it looks to be a very quick knit if I keep at it. The only tricky part will be guessing when it’s time to switch to 1×1 ribbing on the other end. But, you know what? If my estimate is off it will hardly matter. It’s a warm cowl I’ll wear around my own neck and it’s not a museum piece.

Maybe I’ll give my hands one day off before I start knitting on it again. I can use the time to find another quick knit to do — or to sort through my unfinished projects again. After all, it is Socktober and I have at least two unfinished projects that fall into the “sock” category. Which shall I finish — the socks for myself or the socks for a friend?

Off the needles and away we go

I spent this week reading and thinking and problem-solving, so it was a good week. Problems were solved, keys were loaned, tasks were crossed off, services were attended, books were purchased, research articles were read, and, in general, Stuff was Done.

Let me tell you about the books I purchased. Our university library keeps a cart out of books for sale, and they are $1 each. Except for the end-of-the-month sale, when each item is 25 cents after the 25th of the month until the first of the next month. Last week I discovered a two-volume set called Writers on Writing. I’ll have to take my own photo of the books at some point, because it’s apparently quite common to title a book “Writers on Writing.” The books I have are not the ones associated with the New York Times or the Bread Loaf Conference. They are what they are.

This is a genre to which I am addicted. Show me a book of writers talking about their writing processes, or (be still my heart) photographed in their writing-spaces, and I’m likely to rip it from your arms. (At least, I will want to. If I don’t grab it from your arms I may drool on it just a little.) I don’t know if this has something to do with Imposter Syndrome, where I’m looking for the rules of Real Writers so I can follow them, or if it serves as a wormhole into the Fellowship of Authors, to which I would be delighted to feel that I truly belonged. I have several such books on my shelves, no matter the reason, and now — at work — I have two more. Even better: the first volume has 31 interviews with writers about their processes, and the second volume has 23. That gives me 54 interviews for 50 cents, and you can’t beat the price.

It got even better when I realized that I didn’t even have to copy what these authors have done. I can still go my own way and travel my own path to writerly productiveness. But I get to see how they did it, too — for less than a penny a writer.

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Knitwise, I finished the knitting on the pink project! I have several ends to weave in, then I will need to wash and “block” the whole piece. That’s probably going to require that I clear off my dining room table, put in both of the leaves, put together the blocking pieces (interlocking foam mats), cover them with towels, and spread the piece across them, pinning it down with dozens of T-pins.

Or… I could do the washing and blocking at my mother’s house. She already has a long table or two. And then I can take the finished piece upstairs and “install” it on her bed.

This is sounding like a better and better plan.

When I started the final stint of knitting during the Singapore Grand Prix this afternoon, there were 44 stitches between the 3-stitch borders. Even with taking several what the heck just happened and omigosh he went straight into the wall breaks during the race, the knitting itself went very quickly. I was binding off while the winners were still on the podium.

“no dyelot,” my @$$

Of course there was a small element of Yarn Chicken involved in the bind-off. I was very happy that I had enough yarn to make it to the end without having to graft from another skein. Is it cheating at Yarn Chicken if you do have another full skein — or two — of the yarn you need?

8g actually goes a long way.

So, it’s time to put something else onto the needles. Should I start something simple, start something elaborate, or dig through the works-in-progress to complete something that has been languishing? Goodness knows there are many such projects tucked into drawers and bins. But there are also many lovely hand-dyed skeins of laceweight wool just begging to be turned into shawls. What to do, what to do?