Roots and wings

It’s been a busy week full of brainstorming, reading, thinking, and meeting. I’m not caught up on everything I would like to be doing, and I am coming to terms with the fact that there might not be time enough in the world to accomplish that. So I’m trying to reschedule, delegate, and just plain let some things go.

One of the very enjoyable tasks I had this week was to drop off some items with a local framer. I had a 30 minute appointment and we chatted for just over an hour about the layout, the colors involved, and which items might be included in the final framed piece. It’s a joy to work with this artist. Yes, I could use a coupon and drop off this work at a Michaels. No, I don’t want to do that. This particular artist did such an excellent job framing up the TYPEFACE poster that you saw in last week’s post that, of course, I couldn’t wait to work with her again.

Here, I’ll zoom in for you.

I’m trying to place more emphasis on events and tasks that restoreth my soul. One of these was going to dinner on Wednesday night at a local bar that hosts live Irish music every Wednesday. Two (so far, Casey) of the musicians work in my department at the university, and it’s easy to see that this night of music restores their souls, too.

I don’t have a video of last week’s jam, but here’s a link to one of the last songs the group played in last week’s session. It’s a group favorite, and I never knew its name until now (John Ryan’s Polka). This isn’t a video of our group, but the instrumentation is roughly similar. The song gives individual performers the opportunity to play (or decline) a solo. https://youtu.be/qqUhF5xzWRE?si=IpU07uZ07OJuYHNU

One of the musicians, Colleen of the tin whistle, said that she expects to see me in the musician’s circle within the next two years. While Irish music allows my heart to dance, it isn’t exactly scored for the alto saxophone. If I’m going to perform with this group — and it’s important to note here that I wasn’t asking to do so — I would have to learn how to play a different instrument. We’ll see how that goes. Currently I possess a piano, an electric keyboard, an alto sax, a tenor sax, an acoustic guitar, an accordion, and several abandoned grade-school recorders. And perhaps a trumpet? I don’t remember, though I’m pretty sure that I gave away the flute and delivered the clarinet to my mother. I hope I’m not missing something obvious besides the standard and chromatic harmonicas.

But you’re probably curious about why I titled this post “roots and wings.”

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. 
One of these is roots, the other, wings. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Today I checked on the peach seeds, and found that one of them had begun to create roots in the course of another week. Other seeds had split apart in the little plastic incubator but not gotten to the rooting stage; I’ll give them more time.

I’ll have to watch that YouTube video again to get the details of how I should plant this sprouting seed. Peach pies, here we come!

Those were the roots, and here are the wings. This summer I’ve been collecting most of the feathers that I’ve found in the yard while walking the dog. While we host quite a wide variety of birds on the property, from hummingbirds and house sparrows to Sandhill Cranes, crows, and hawks, I’m not always sure which feathers came from what birds. This afternoon I found the tiniest feather yet, and I imagined it as the quill pen of a studious, literate mouse. (Perhaps this is how the Country Mouse in the fable wrote his correspondence.) In the next photo it’s compared to a much larger feather that likely came from an owl or a hawk.

This weekend I finished reading a wonderful book about owls (The House of Owls by Tony Angell) and am poised to read a book co-written by the same author, In the Company of Crows and Ravens. Maybe I should wait to start reading it until after I’ve recorded my impressions of the first book in my reading journal.

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Knitwise, I have cast on for the Striped Scarf but think that 15 inches might be wider than the recipient would like. I have queried the Facebook Friend who supplied the pattern, and I plan to treat this effort as a swatch. I’ll frog this effort and cast on again in accordance with her advice, perhaps with a smaller needle and surely with fewer stitches.

Maybe I should have measured the scarf-start against the owl-feather….

Something’s happening here

So many things have changed in a week’s time that it’s impossible to know where to start. Of course, some of those things are private. Instead of trying to describe everything, I’ll share the image that Eldest came up with: it’s like working one of those 4×4 (minus one piece) tile puzzles after someone has opened up the frame and taken out the tiles. At that point it’s super easy to solve the puzzle. Well, someone I love broke that frame and gave me the ability to rearrange the tiles any way I want.

I have been living in this house for 16 or 17 years (I lost count), and this weekend I finally started to feel as if I knew where all of my things were supposed to be. Not only that, but it’s gotten much easier to know what things I can finally let go of. (You’re welcome, Goodwill.) This afternoon I rehomed a drafting table that, in spite of its being a drafting table, had not inspired a single person to create a single piece of art in, what, ten years? It’s now in the home of a student artist who already makes art, replacing a broken drafting table she never got around to fixing.

Almost as soon as the drafting table was out of my bedroom, I could see where I would put my chair, where I would move the plastic drawers containing yarn and knitting projects, and how I could once again have space in my room to meditate or do yoga to videos or even just do a few situps. Then I could see where I could hang a couple of things on the wall, so I could see them when I sat there to knit. (They’re not on the wall yet, but the important thing is that I know where they’re going to go.)

Then I was able to see that my second desk in the dining room would not be an Art Desk where I could intimidate myself out of creating Art Objects, but a desk where I could do stamping projects or create scrapbook pages. And I could put my scrapbook supplies closer to the desk if I moved that small bookcase with all the books about Africa to the other wall, between the two tall bookcases. Of course, the artwork on the walls would need to make the move, too….

Last week I finally called the trash company to schedule a bulk pick-up of a small mountain of items that were taking up space in my garage. I have been putting off making this phone call for at least a year. I called on Wednesday morning, got everything to the end of the driveway on Wednesday night, and watched in glee on Thursday morning as a truck pulled up and two men loaded two mattresses, two box springs, parts and hardware of a loft bed, a desk, and a broken office chair into that truck and drove away. I felt so much lighter.

The last two weeks have shocked me into a hard restart of my life, and I am grateful.

In peach-tree news, something is definitely happening here, too!

Let’s see what’s happening by this time next week. I like the looks of this.

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Knitwise, I have sorted through a couple of bags that held remnants of prior projects. I found my knitting toolkit and my tape measure, and I put them back in my main knitting tote. I found a darker grey yarn, so I added it to the project bag for the Requested Scarf, moving to storage the lighter grey yarn I’d had in there. In fact, I emptied an entire bag and was able to — get this — fold the bag up and put it away.

So I have everything I need to start the scarf (including a pattern, thanks to Facebook Friend Gail Fraleigh), as well as a couple of nice-looking skeins that seem to want to be turned into simple shawls.

I don’t have any confidence that I’ll be able to meditate every day, but alternating meditation time with knitting time might be a more reasonable goal. And simple knitting can be indistinguishable from meditation.

Pivot

For reasons of privacy, and from my belief that people should be free to tell their own stories, I will not go into detail about some of the things that happened this week. I have had some bad weeks, but this has probably been the worst week of my life.

I can say that, just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, I tested positive for COVID on Saturday morning. I spent an hour or so texting everyone I’d been in contact with in the previous 48 hours or so, then settled in to rest in isolation for the first of five days. Fortunately, I don’t have a fever, my symptoms are treatable with over-the-counter medicine I already had on hand, and I have the ability to work from home this week as I continue to recover. But, heck, there was no need to kick me while I was already down.

This week I have done a lot of reading (my sickbed resembled a bookshelf with blankets) and a lot of thinking. There are things in my family, in my house, and in myself that really need to change. In many ways I have continued to be stuck in parts of my past. I’m beginning to feel ready to make changes and start to move forward into an uncertain future.

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I had hoped to have some peach-seed roots to show you by now, but they haven’t started to do that yet.

I’ll check back in another week to see if anything has started to happen. If not, then maybe it’s just not going to happen. But since this is an almost zero-effort project, I can keep it “going” for as long as I want to. It’s not hurting anyone to let them sit there.

I mentioned that I have been doing a lot of reading; I have also been trying to update my reading journal. Right now there are only 4 books that I have read this year and not completed an entry in the journal. (Let’s not go into how many books I’m still reading but have not finished yet, or how many titles have just plain fallen off the book-cart. That’s not important right now.)

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Knitwise, I thought about the scarf I’ve been asked to make. I logged in to Ravelry and I did a Google search to see if someone had already written up a pattern for the scarf (it’s based on the celebrity photo I included in last week’s post). I came up empty, though, and when I have the time I’ll just cast on and forge ahead, and see if what is in my mind is something that will work.

I’ll write it down, I promise. But it’s basically a 1×1 rib that I want to knit in the round, then close off at the ends with fringe. The problem is that I’m a thrower and my “lateral gauge” will be inconsistent as I go between knit stitches and purl stitches. It will also be slow going for me.

Knitters, if you have any suggestions please put them in the comments. My brain is too occupied with other matters right now to think clearly about how this scarf should be made.

Wet it and forget it

After one week spent in a moist environment, the peach seeds softened enough that it was easy for me to peel off their protective layers. (No, there are no peaches yet).

These bits of seed-skin are resting on the top layer of damp paper towel. I covered the “naked” seeds with a freshly dampened piece of paper towel and tucked them back inside their plastic container. I’ll check on them again in another week, and I’ll be looking for tender little roots that should start growing from the seeds’ pointy ends.

We won’t have peach trees or peaches any time soon, but this is about as relaxing a gardening process as I can possibly think of. Any other plant I ignore for a week at a time is likely to be crispy when I finally remember it, and its only fruits are guilt and shame.

The peach seeds are developing in the background of quite a few other things I have going on. Let’s make a list, shall we?

1. Work. New office, new supervisor, new semester in about 36 hours as I write this. (To my colleagues: no pressure!) I’ve been doing the daily tasks of monitoring enrollment numbers for the fall semester, combined with helping those last-minute enrollees get into the classes they need to take, helping instructors get everything they need to be ready to teach on Tuesday morning, and getting next spring’s classes entered into the system. I’m also on University Staff Council and an Audit and Review committee, so there are meetings to attend in addition to department meetings. On the plus side, there is good coffee every day.
2. Home. This weekend, a major clean of the bathroom was an absolute must. We took down some loose shelves, tossed the old shower curtain rod and rings and bought new ones, and threw away many expired items from the family first-aid kit. Nobody wants corn remover tables from 2009 or Oragel from 2015. I also bought a couple of new shelves that won’t quite work, and I’ll return those while we think about how we’ll now fill the wall space above the toilet (Eldest and Youngest have some pretty strong feelings about what they *don’t* want to see there). I’m also washing off a collection of dubber duckies that I had not remembered was so extensive. They’re destined for Goodwill unless someone else wants to adopt them.
3. Health. I’m making a very slow recovery from my misstep on the stairs a few weeks ago, and last Friday I also banged up a finger. Everything is sore, all my leg muscles are tight, and I can’t climb stairs. Please pass the ibuprofen. I’ll need to check in with my doctor soon, and the best-case scenario would be to get referrals to a physical therapist and a good foot doctor.
4. Graduate school. That will start next week Monday. I know the instructor and I already have the textbooks. The deadline of my first paper is September 26, and now that I have double-checked my syllabus I see that I need to read 50 pages in Student Development in College: Theory, Research, and Practice and another article on our Canvas module before the first class session. I also need to customize my Canvas profile. I hope that I get access to the Canvas module soon.
5. Research project. With the start of school imminent, I’ve run out of “spare” time to research the UWW Math Department’s personnel history. However, I’m continuing to make gradual progress on reading through a key work of the author I’m studying. Last week I finally received a copy of the first edition of one of his works. Oddly enough, the first two times I ordered it via Amazon sellers, each one substituted another title — the one I’m currently reading. Now the library can have their copy of Men of Mathematics back, because I now own it in hardcover and paperback. But now I own a gorgeous, almost-never-touched first edition of Development of Mathematics. (When I tell people this, they say, kindly, “That’s interesting.” I always reply, “It really isn’t.” What’s interesting is that nobody ever asks me about this project twice. HMM.)
6. Jewish holidays. The coming months will have several major holidays, each of which calls for reading, introspection, and communal activities. I’ll also be working on the October issue of my congregation’s newsletter. Last month I hit a distribution-related snag when Microsoft flagged my newsletter’s email address as a spammer after I had sent out only one-third of the newsletters. Obviously we’ll have to do some things differently, so I’ll work with our temple’s tech guru and hope that doesn’t happen again.
7. Senior year. While SecondSon and ThirdSon are off at college, Youngest has already started his senior year of high school. One more year of the drop-off line, just one more year of the drop-off line….
8. Other reading. Shoot, it’s a new month and I need to update the reading journal again before it gets completely away from me. Just before September began, I started reading a book on trauma that a friend recommended highly. I’m going in small segments so I have time to think about what I’m reading. I probably have a dozen texts that I would say I’m reading right now, but there’s not a single book that’s going to command my full attention — at least, not until I start doing the readings for my graduate course. Every other book will have to be read in tiny increments of free time.
9. There’s probably some other thing that I’m forgetting to mention. Keeping up with the Formula One season? Triaging all my surplus belongings and getting them out of my house? Learning Ladino? Getting back to exercise and yoga? Fixing up old typewriters? Worrying about my aging dog? Learning how to play (or just practicing) the accordion, guitar, keyboard, piano, or saxophone? Writing fiction or poetry? I’ll let you know when I remember what it is.

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Knitwise, I made good on last week’s promise and started a project bag for the scarf for SecondSon and I added a circular needle of the right size. I’m really on a roll here and maybe I should take a short break before my productivity gets completely out of hand. I mean, nobody needs a warm scarf while it’s hot outside, right? I’d better pace myself.

I don’t remember if I mentioned here that someone had written a book of patterns for crocheted succulents. Well, now there is a book on crocheted houseplants. There is also this book if you insist on trying to raise real plants. If the peach seeds never develop into fruit-bearing trees, I may seriously consider turning to crochet to decorate my home and office. Maybe I could even craft something to fill that wall space in the bathroom.