Independent author

Last week I started reading The Alignment Problem, a scholarly exploration of the history of neural networks (the ancestors of what we now call artificial intelligence). I have only just begun the book, having read the prologue, the introduction, and the first chapter, but it’s already giving me a lot about which to think.

I started thinking about different forms of electronic assistance in various activities and wondering when certain amounts are too much.

Racers and car fanatics might say that the only real form of driving is with a car that has a manual transmission. But the vast majority of drivers have cars with automatic transmissions. That’s driving, too, isn’t it? What about if you use cruise control on long stretches of highway driving? Is that driving, or is the driver merely managing the driving that the car has now been programmed to do? What if you have a car that can do parallel parking for you? And what if you drive a Tesla and give over your control completely? When does driving a car end and something else begin? And what is that something else?

Let’s think about reading. Many of us still imagine reading as something that’s being done when you’re curled up with a physical book. But many readers use their Kindles and Nooks to read e-books. Others drive (cf. “driving,” above) or work out while listening to audiobooks. Aren’t those books as well? Similarly, music has gone from a live experience to a vinyl record to a tape cassette, a compact disc, and a downloadable digital file. It’s all music, isn’t it?

Two years ago I participated in an online songwriting group. I don’t play any musical instrument well enough to accompany myself while singing, so I opened the Garage Band program on my iPad and used the tools it provided to me. I laid down a percussion track and used a virtual session guitarist that (who?) was provided in the software. I recorded my singing of my lyrics to the beat of a digital metronome, then edited and saved the file and uploaded the link to my file to a shared Google Sheet. I wrote a few songs via this process, but does this make me a musician? A singer/songwriter? Or something else?

Art is another obvious continuum. If I apply pencil or pen to paper, brush and paint to canvas, hands to clay, or chisel to stone or wood, I’m rather obviously creating art. But what if my process is digital, and I can Undo the virtual brushstroke I just made and give it another try? What if I have an infinite number of do-overs in Procreate and can create several layers in my file before I save it to my hard drive? Am I still an artist?

And now let’s look at writing. It would be ridiculous to suggest that the only real writing is done using a dip pen in gall ink on parchment. We accept that writers can write (as I am writing now) their words on a computer and published to the Internet. No paper was impressed upon in the composition of this blog post. But is a blog post “real” writing as opposed to a newspaper column? A short story in an electronic magazine? A printed novel? What makes the writing real?

Must I come up with my own words in that written piece utterly on my own? Am I not permitted to use a dictionary or thesaurus? Can I allude to another work or create a parody of it? Can I use spellcheck or the grammar tools within Microsoft Word, or need I turn those functions off within my Preferences menu? May I tap the center button on my iPhone and use predictive text if I’m in a hurry? Or can I enter a prompt in ChatGPT and still call myself a writer?

Where does it change and where does it end? Who drives and who writes? Who is an artist or a musician? You’ve seen the AI-generated art that isn’t informed by the rules of real life. This is something we’ll have to think about as a society, and something we’ll have to decide — preferably before the artists and the writers lose their hope and creativity.

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Knitwise, I did all of my knitting on the Habit-Forming Scarf during the sessions of the Grand Prix of China this weekend. The scarf is now 18 inches long, so there is still quite a ways to go in the yarn of the first skein.

This weekend I organized my collection of compact discs, which are stored in a cabinet that was also being used to store yarn. Until I emptied out the bottom two drawers, that is, and found evidence that mice had gotten into the yarn stash. That yarn has since been moved to sealed plastic storage (and I’ll probably set a trap in the bottom drawer). I’d better pick up the pace of using my stash or start giving more of it away before it turns into rodentine bedding.

The take-apart typewriter

When I was little, one of my most favorite toys was something that I called the “take-apart car.” Made by Playskool in the 1970s, it was a car with plastic pieces that screwed into wooden slab sides using plastic nuts, bolts, and screwdrivers.

On eBay for $70 plus $25 for shipping. I’m not kidding.

This was not the epitome of technology, but I was thrilled with it. I spent hours taking it apart and putting it back together. My mother was surprised at how much I enjoyed disassembling and reassembling this thing, and talked about it for years. I went on to enjoy other toys that had elements of assembly to them: a Spirograph, a Lite-Brite, and a metric balance that I had to build before I could use.

My fascination with this toy should have been a clue to how my brain worked, but if anyone drew any conclusions at the time they didn’t mention them. (At least, they didn’t mention them to me.) I liked seeing how things worked and how things could be fixed. I didn’t get a lot of chances to do this sort of thing, but I do remember sitting in the high school band room fixing saxophones that were passed down the row to me. I also preferred to do my own work on my touring bike.

One of my mechanical treasures, a 1949 Underwood Leader manual typewriter that my parents had given me when I was eight or nine years old, stopped working in the spring of 1986 during my freshman year in college. By that time I had an electronic typewriter as well, and I switched to it mid-paper to finish an important assignment. I didn’t know how to fix my typewriter then, but I didn’t throw it away.

A couple of years later I transitioned to a Mac SE, but computers and peripherals were a lot more mechanical than they are now; when my hard drive platter stalled a friend showed me how to crack the case, remove and open up the hard drive assembly, reattach the cables, and flick the platter into life after rebooting the Mac. I was thrilled to be able to fix it myself.

Many more years passed, and I learned that some things — like relationships, to choose a random example — were much harder to repair. Sometimes they were, in fact, impossible to fix. But one might find solace in tightening the loose cabinet door handles or opening up the vacuum cleaner and finding a way to remove hair and carpet fiber from the beater bar so it would work again and not need to be replaced. And one might show the kids that it’s fun to open up a VCR and see all the parts that are inside it, including the tangled videotape and the plastic toy that somebody pushed through the little flap door.

Only recently have I discovered the soothing effect of taking something apart, cleaning it thoroughly, and putting it back together — usually the vacuum cleaner, but now sometimes the coffee maker I’m descaling or the slow cooker that isn’t working properly. If I have a stressful event on my schedule, I try to add an activity that involves putting something back together again.

This weekend I selected the first typewriter of my little collection to give a good cleaning, and it was a satisfying experience. I must say that the typewriter’s owner and namesake, Carole, made it easy by taking good care of this 1953 Smith-Corona Skyriter. But into every typewriter some dust and eraser shavings must fall, and it was time to clean them out.

Eldest lends a hand.

After watching a brief but helpful YouTube video on removing a Skyriter from its shell, Eldest and I did the same. Then he carefully pulled hairs, fuzz, and and bits of eraser from the typewriter’s innards while I scrubbed the metal areas with a toothbrush dipped in a solution of Simple Green and water. I also used rolls of wide masking tape to draw oils out of the felt that lined the spool cover and the bottom and sides of the typewriter shell.

There were no drastic changes. We just cleaned things up a bit, let everything dry overnight, and then put it all back together again.

Refreshed.

I’m just beginning this journey into typewriter maintenance, and I was fortunate to be able to start with a typewriter that didn’t need much attention and didn’t need any repairs at all. Somewhere down the road sits my 1949 Underwood Leader in its case, with a manila pouch containing the spring that I need to replace. I’ll be able to fix it, clean it up, and start writing on it again.

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Knitwise, I hope you are sitting down because you are not going to believe this. I finished the Thrift Stripe scarf and even washed and dried it. It’s ready to be worn or donated.

I also picked up the Stripe Scarf and knitted on the grey stripe, starting a game of Yarn Chicken that I rightly suspected I was going to lose. I texted the requestor and got permission to add a black stripe that will even things out. If I can ever find more of the Plymouth Encore light grey heather yarn (color 151, if you can help me look for it), I can take the scarf back, undo the bound-off edge, rip back to the start of the grey stripes, and knit on until the scarf is as long as the recipient wants it to be. But if it’s warm enough and long enough now, perhaps no further work will be necessary.

Soon it will be time to choose the next knitting project, but not tonight. Right now my back and shoulders are aching from shoveling snow, and my hands are sore from clenching the steering wheel on a trip to and from the grocery store after our driveway was finally plowed out. If you have been wondering how I was able to do all of this work on the typewriter and the scarves, it might have something to do with the fact that we’ve basically been snowed in since Thursday night. I did have to dig out my car, but — this time — I’m grateful that I didn’t have to take it apart.

Two cartons, 677 pages, and eight pounds

In the past few weeks I’ve been giving my reading journal the side-eye and trying to calculate how many of the books that I started could be books that I finished by the year’s end. Well, here is the year’s end.

Leaving out three books for which I don’t have an accurate count of the number of pages I have read (two are in my office and I returned one to the university library), this year I finished, began, sampled, or completely read 58 books. The page count is at 10,902, or nearly 22 reams of paper. That’s two cartons plus two reams, when I order paper for the department. The uncounted pages are surely less than 500 all together, so let’s call it 23 reams just to be safe.

That’s more reading than I was giving myself credit for, even though it was much less than I had planned. But if I wanted to craft a New Year’s resolution for reading, it would be for me to stop beating myself up for not finishing books. I can see from the notes and figures in my reading journal that I do finish books. Some of them just take more time than others. In fact, I led off the journal with six books that I started in 2022 and didn’t finish until 2023. But I did finish them. Maybe some of the books I started this year will be books that I finish in 2024. Even the ones I abandoned will probably be books that I pick up again when the time is right.

In my personal library is a stack of Zen and meditation books and a special notebook for recording my favorite passages from them. A few years ago I started reading After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path by Jack Kornfield. I knew this was a classic work in the field, and a friend of mine absolutely recommended both the author and the book. But after five chapters of it, I had to stop reading and put it down. I didn’t like it, it bored me, it frustrated me, and it was driving me crazy. So I put it down and didn’t pick it up again until last week, just after I started the Morning Altars practice and wanted to write quotes from that book in my special notebook.

I suppose that I could have just torn some pages out of my notebook, given the Kornfield book to Goodwill, and entered my notes on the new book. But that didn’t seem right. So I picked up Ecstasy and Laundry again, and would you believe it? The writing now seemed clear, sensible, and inspirational. Right away I marked several passages that I wanted to record in the notebook.

Clearly, the book didn’t change: I did. My heard and heart were now in the right space to listen to what the book had to say. I have nine chapters left, and I’m looking forward to moving through them gently and thoughtfully. And I’ve added two library books to the TBR stack that sits under the special notebook. It’s a short stack of five, and they can be read in their own time.

Now that I have summed up my reading for 2023, I have a few hours to prepare for the start of The Impossible Read. I have decided to log my reading times, quotes, and notes in artists’ sketchbooks so that I have plenty of space to write, sketch, and add other items if I feel the urge. And if I can stay awake long enough, I would like to ring in the new year by starting on the first book on my list: The Once and Future King, by T. H. White.

Ace Fantasy, 1996.

Feel free to read (or re-read) along with me. I’ll check in with reports and notes from time to time as I make my way through this massive TBR. I promised myself that I would not add up the page count until after I finished the books, but maybe it will work to keep a running total as I finish each book. (Spoiler alert: this edition runs 677 pages.) Maybe I’ll just weigh them.

Helping me with this mathematical task will be a little piece of hardware I treated myself to this holiday season: a “Numkey” to go with my Qwerkywriter Bluetooth keyboard. It sits there as if it has always been there, looks beautiful, and works perfectly. It’s plugged in to the iMac right now, but now that it’s charged up I can just flip a switch and operate it via Bluetooth.

Finally, I would like to introduce you to my latest acquisition on the other end of the technological spectrum, a 1953 Smith-Corona Skyriter. This was a rescue from the estate of a local woman who recently passed away at the age of 86.

The Skyriter is in the category of “ultraportable,” a stripped-down and lightweight model of typewriter made for travel. As pictured above, without the top of its metal snap-on case, it weighs about eight pounds. And even with the case attached, it’s only about ten and a half pounds. This series of Skywriter was produced from late 1949 through about 1955.

This one, which I will name “Carole” after its owner, is a good little typer and still has a good ribbon. It just needs some cleaning up, and I will be happy to learn how to do that properly. I’m grateful that I can give this lovely typewriter a new home. By next week I should be able to display it and use it on another desk that I’m setting up for typewriter use.

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Knitwise, there’s not a lot going on. I’ve been more focused on finishing books than on finishing scarves. Under those conditions it didn’t seem like a good idea to start a new project, either.

Keep reading and keep knitting, and I’ll see you on the other side.

Digging deeper

While you were looking the other way roots have been growing, wings have been stretched, and new connections have been made. Don’t worry, though; I wasn’t looking, either.

Let’s begin with the roots and work our way up. Last week I had a rooting peach seed that was almost large enough to plant in a pot. Other tasks and deadlines intervened and I put off the task until, look at the time, here we are on Sunday afternoon and I should take another look at that seed. I was delighted to discover that the tiny roots had grown through the damp paper towel, just as they had on the video I had watched all those weeks ago to learn about this process.

I gently pulled away the paper towel, but not gently enough to keep from breaking off one of the tiny roots. Oops.

The other five seeds still had a bit of slow action going on, so I tucked them back in for another week.

Now it was time to finally get out the pot and the potting soil and plant the seed. After I rewatched the first video in the peach-seed-germinating series, I watched the second video for the first time. In that video, the gardener re-potted his peach sprout in more soil so it would sit higher up in the pot and get more sun. So I put in a lot of potting soil for such a tiny sprout.

We’ll see what progress it can make in that window by this time next week. If it needs more sun I can take it to work and rest the pot on a sunny windowsill.

This week I added another typewriter to my collection, which totals seven unless we find my Smith-Corona electronic typewriter (“K9”) from the mid-80s. I took it to college with me in the fall of 1985, and it saved me (despite some professorial grumbling over the aesthetics) when my manual typewriter broke a spring halfway through a 20-page English paper in the spring of 1986. A few years later I acquired a Macintosh SE and a DeskJet printer, and now I’m not sure what happened to the electronic typewriter.

Editing with K9 in 1987.

Anyway, I found this Smith-Corona Sterling advertised on Facebook Marketplace marked down from $40 to $35. I made arrangements to pick up the typewriter at the seller’s house after work, but when I arrived she wasn’t there and neither was the typewriter. After some hasty communications between me, the seller, and the seller’s husband, she offered to bring it to my house that night and drop the price a bit more. I wasn’t in that much of a hurry, but I agreed. When she got there the price became $30 until she pulled the typewriter out of its case and a piece of tape fell off with $25 written on it (the price she’d put on it, and forgotten about, at a rummage sale).

It’s a wonderful little typewriter, especially at that price, and after I fiddled with the ribbon a bit I saw that it types smoothly. Its serial number places the date of manufacture sometime in 1947. Since it’s very clean, it will be a good typewriter to start with as I learn how to do basic typewriter maintenance and repair. I now have three Smith-Coronas, so that will be a good make to focus on for now.

I also joined two sister Facebook groups: one for collectors of antique typewriters and another for maintenance and repair of antique typewriters. This isn’t a change of career, but since many other folks have gone before me to preserve and digitize so many typewriter manuals, I’ll have something I can read and learn from if I get snowed in this winter. (Because, you know, I don’t have enough books.)

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Knitwise, I frogged the striped scarf that was too wide and cast on again with US7 straight needles. After about 4-5 rows it became rather crowded. I was at a craft store this morning to look for a few other items, so I picked up a set of US7 circular needles while I was there and moved the work over to it when knitting the next row.

This looks more reasonable for a “not too narrow” scarf, and I’ll aim for each stripe to be two or three inches deep.

If I finish the scarf too soon (what does that mean?), I can switch to this book’s patterns to use up some of the scrappier parts of my stash.

Pictureless

At the start of the weekend my mid-2017 iMac, on which I had tried in vain for several months to install an incremental system update, suddenly decided that it was time to heed the call of Cupertino and get completely up to date on its system software.

This evening I sat down to assess the damage, and since the iMac has slowed to some motion slower than crawling, I’m composing this post on my Qwerkywriter Bluetooth keyboard in combination with my iPad. Perhaps this week I will be able to figure out how to put my iMac in retrograde and give it an operating system that will actually work; after that, no further updates will be possible.

It’s time to upgrade my iPhone 8, too, perhaps to an iPhone 12. I have never enjoyed injuring myself on the cutting edge of technology, so now I’m aiming for a spot in the middle — somewhere between too new to be compatible with anything and too old to be compatible with anything.

This means that, unless I install and access my Flickr account from my iPad, which is also not the latest version of the technology, all you will get this week are my words. (I could stretch myself or limit myself to a thousand of them if you like.)

If I set aside my concerns about the utility (or lack thereof) of my primary home computer, I’ve had a pretty good weekend.

On Friday afternoon I received a new fountain pen that had been shipped from Istanbul less than a week before. Freakin’ Istanbul! And the company tucked in so many extras — two hand-stitched leather pen cases, a teabag, a citrus-scented moist towelette, a zippered pen case, and an amulet to protect me against the Evil Eye — that I feel that they must have adopted me somehow. They also included a 10 percent coupon towards my next order. I filled the pen with a special ink called Diamine Writer’s Blood, for which I had voted during the pandemic days as part of the r/fountain pens community.

The pen came with a medium nib, so it flows a lot of ink. This ink varies from dark red to black, and the effect is pretty cool. I’ll have to work up some writing samples and photograph them for next week’s post, assuming that I will have gotten my hardware in better working condition by then.

On Saturday morning I picked up the meat for our weekly slow-cooker beef stew, then visited the thrift store next door and bought a stuffed bunny and several “Peter Rabbit” books and related stories. I have an idea. (Be afraid. Be very, very afraid….)

By Saturday afternoon I finished a book that I had been reading off and on — mostly off — since I purchased it almost a year ago. That was pretty satisfying, and I also recorded my thoughts about it, and another recently finished book, in my reading journal.

Oddly enough, this is the first year I have ever used a reading journal. I have found it harder to keep up with than I had imagined at the beginning of the year. Two of the books that I finished had been passed along to other readers before I even started writing their entries in the journal. I guess that fact is another thing that can go in the entries. And I read, or started reading, several books in May without writing down all of the titles. Just this morning I finally created the title page for the May section of the journal, and I’m trying to hold off starting any new books in June until I have saved enough space for all of the May books.

Perhaps it’s a special talent to make so much work out of what should be my leisure time. If there’s a way I can monetize it, drop me a line.

Most of what I did this weekend, though, involved making just a little bit more space for myself, or my self. I eliminated some of the clutter in my bedroom by hanging up my clothes, organizing my art supplies, and switching out my bedding from winter-warm items to a light set of sheets and covers more appropriate for the low-90s temperatures we’ve had this week.

I signed up for a couple of art-related webinars that will take place this week: learning brush lettering, and incorporating watercolors into my bullet journal. I can’t actually attend them because they’re being held during work hours, but I can watch the recorded sessions at my convenience.

And then there was the Spanish Grand Prix to watch. Eldest inquired about the possibility of Spanish cuisine to accompany the race, and I found a couple of wildly different recipes for chicken with Catalan picada. This evening, though, I ran out of the steam required to prepare the dish; instead, I oven-roasted a batch of asparagus and put off the chicken until, perhaps, tomorrow.

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Knitwise, I bought a book about knitting prayer shawls. It was written by the folks who founded the Prayer Shawl Ministry several years ago, and I was glad to have it in my hands. Last week my cousin Tesia passed away after a valiant three-year fight against colon cancer. She was just 32 years old and leaves behind a devoted husband and a 6-year-old son. Our extended family is swinging between numb and devastated at the unfairness of it all. Prayer shawls, whether for myself or for someone else, sound like a pretty good idea right now.

I’m not quite up to starting something yet — and it would certainly be unfair to all the the projects-in-waiting — but I do have some yarn given to me by a friend, and partially knitted up. It didn’t work out for her and it might not work out for me, either, but perhaps pulling it out and winding it up will be a useful and healing task that I can do for myself and my self.

Miss you, Tesia.

Doing the keyboard shuffle

Last week I returned to the university library the Macbook Air that I had checked out a couple of months ago. I needed to borrow a Macbook for some in-class work for the graduate course; neither my iPhone or my iPad could really do the job. I’m also in a situation where I can only do some of the tasks needed for graduate school on my home Mac because it refuses to perform an incremental operating system update. (I’m not sure why this is so; I asked it politely, several times, and it declined.)

So I checked out some of the University’s own hardware to do the job. The thing is, it’s set up to access the campus networks only when it’s on campus. That helped me stick to my promise of not using my work computer (and work time) to do graduate school work, but it didn’t really help me out at home. So back to the library it went, and my daily bag is now much lighter to carry.

At home, Youngest has been working to make his bedroom more his own place and less like the archive of his older brothers and their cast-offs. This weekend we went out thrifting in search of an HDMI-equipped television that he could use as a computer monitor. By golly, we found one at the first place we looked. (Actually, we found three — one that was laughably small, one that was impressively oversized, and the one we took home, which was Just Right.)

Several weeks ago, Youngest eliminated our need to share the downstairs PC after he discovered a laptop in his closet (cf. archive, above) that was mysteriously able to meet his computing needs. I use the word mysteriously because I purchased this laptop at a campus sale of technology surplus somewhere between 2017 and 2019, and it was considered obsolete at the time. How it does now what he needs it to do is beyond my understanding.

At any rate, now he had a large monitor and the old laptop was serving as the computing power. What he needed now was…a keyboard. He appropriated the gaming keyboard and gaming mouse from the downstairs PC, and informed me this morning. I wasn’t upset because, frankly, the gaming keyboard and mouse gave me fits. They were backlit with colors that changed in a way I never quite understood how to control. The mouse had more programmable functions than I would ever need, and the keyboard was designed in a way that always left me in doubt about which symbol I might get when I used the Shift key (for some reason the designer thought it was cute to put the primary symbols on top and the secondary symbols on the bottom, contrary to everything I had learned since acquiring my first [manual] typewriter in about 1976).

I wasn’t going to shed any tears about “losing” the gaming keyboard. It didn’t take me long to realize that hooked to my iMac was a Dell keyboard and a wireless mouse, and I managed to hook them to the PC without having to consult anyone younger than myself.

What to do for the Mac? Actually, we may have more Mac keyboards in this house than we have anything else, from the Mac Plus keyboard with its phone-jack connection to a handful of Apple Wireless Keyboards. I weighed my many options and decided to re-connect the Qwerkywriter Bluetooth keyboard and an Apple Pro Mouse I had sitting around.

Here’s a picture that I took in 2018 of this keyboard. Another room, another desk, a glass of white wine.

New room, new desk, same wineglass, red wine. Same bamboo computer stand, technically different (but identical) computer.

This mouse (as I confirmed during the course of writing this post) can’t right-click and doesn’t have a scroll wheel. I suppose that, somehow, I’ll manage to get by while proceeding slowly and intentionally. I’ll consider it to be a meditative exercise.

What else did I do this weekend? I started reading a novel, The Bone Orchard by Paul Doiron. (I should really be reading the first book in this series, The Poacher’s Son, but there’s a 6-week wait for the book through my library system.) I did all the laundry and most of the dishes, and I had a terrific Mother’s Day during which I talked to all of my kids and, yes, called my mother.

What’s in store for the week-to-come? Work, a work-related get-together, an appointment at the vet’s, and various driving-around on behalf of the Offspring. I’ll try to make the most of it.

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Knitwise, I acquired two skeins of Lion Brand Thick & Quick in Wine while I was thrifting this weekend. This is discontinued yarn that is one of the colors called for in the Season 18 Doctor Who Scarf I have partially finished (but not worked on since 2011 because, as I may have mentioned, the yarn was discontinued). The colorway I really need to acquire is Terracotta, but maybe these can serve as a bargaining chip in that regard. Ravelry says a full skein weighs 141 grams, and each of these skeins is over 154 grams. Call me. Let’s make a deal.

Sit, Ubu, sit

As the semester rolls along and spring draws nearer, all of my work is getting more complicated — even the home work. My grad professor’s words echo in my ear: “Scale it back, scale it back.” He also says things like “That is a fabulous idea, but I need you to work on something you can finish by the end of April.” The word “March” at the top of every calendar is beginning to suggest to me that this is Not a Lot of Time.

I have the work work, which is preparation for advising season, registration season, awards seasons, and evaluation season. It’s also the provision of random emergency services for 45 increasingly stressed-out faculty members whose workloads, activities, and anxieties are even greater than mine. I’d better stay close to my office, so others can find me.

I have the class work, which is keeping up with the weekly readings and weekly reactions to these readings, special preparation for the in-person classes, and work on the project (now a research paper) that will be by far the biggest part of my grade in the course. “Don’t worry about your grade in this course,” says the professor. I miss a step in a small assignment, lose half a point, and worry. I’d better download the next week’s reading assignments and keep my reaction journal up to date — and keep developing the draft of my paper and following the references where they lead me.

I have the home work, which is keeping my family reasonably fed, keeping the house reasonably clean, and paying the bills reasonably on time. It also includes the leisure reading that I want to do and can’t find time for. Add art and drawing techniques, new recipes, hard-core cleaning, donating things I don’t use and don’t need…you get the picture. Better log in and write those blog posts for the week.

I also have the internal work, as I question how I got here, who I am, and what I think I’m doing. Or what I think I should be doing, which is a more philosophically oriented list than the prior ones but just as important — if not more so. Better make some time to curl up in a comfy chair and think things through.

That’s a lot of work, and if it involved a lot of running around to get it all done I would probably be in better shape. Unfortunately, much of it involves sitting in front of a computer in one place or another, and driving from place to place. So, sitting on the way from sitting to sitting. Better get on the road again!

It could be worse — I could be wearing out my body with my work instead of wearying my mind. I could be digging ditches somewhere to make a living, and I’m grateful that I don’t have to do that. Instead I’m looking for a small pocket universe in which I can do some of the work, so I can take little breaks here and there to enjoy the warmer air and the clamouring birds.

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Knitwise, on Saturday I finally made it past the halfway point of my green yarn for the Vintage Packer Scarf. I beat the yarn chicken by about a centimeter, but then decided that I had better un-knit the last six stitches and attach the next skein of green yarn. Because I’m using Lion Brand Wool-Ease, I made a tight knot at the very end. If it were 100 percent wool, I would have spliced the ends together. The join is right on the edge, so the future wearer shouldn’t feel the knot when the scarf is worn. The alternative joins might not have been very strong, and might have made a lump or bulge in the center of the scarf.

The scarf measures 52 inches from cast-on to the join, and the total length after that knitting session was 54 inches. At that point I weighed the remaining yarn, and I had about 24 g of gold and 85 g of green. I need twice as much green as gold because of the way I’m doing the stripe pattern, so I will have about 30-35 g of green yarn left over; I will probably make fringe.

Here is this week’s story problem: the current scarf weighs 150 grams. We have used one full skein of Wool-Ease in green (85 g). How much gold yarn did we use? And how can we use these figures to determine the length of the finished scarf (without fringe)?

I’ll skip to the end: my math indicates that I’m now actually about 70 percent done with the scarf, not 50 percent. The length estimate (before fringe) is now 72-73 inches.

After knitting through the first Formula One race of the 2023 season, I have added 2 more inches to the scarf. I made an error that forced me to un-knit two rows and reknit them before I could go forward again, but everything is in good shape now. Onward!

Más complicado

It’s been a long, stressful week topped with a day’s helping of Winter Storm, so I’m glad to be on the other side of it. We’ll find out tomorrow whether I’m ready for another round. At least the dryer is still working.

This week I discovered that certain parts of my worksite aren’t as accessible from home as they had been. For example, my work email account with its multi-factor authentication. While my cell phone is just current enough to work with the system, my Mac apparently isn’t, and its operating system needs to be updated. When I ask it to, however, it can’t — the little gear just spins and spins and doesn’t get back to me one way or the other. I suppose that it’s still checking for updates.

After the email, the next module to go was one through which I access university data that I need for my graduate course. But I found a workaround!

I can’t use the iMac to access the data, and the iPad… I wasn’t even sure how I could get the iPad to connect. So I logged in using my iPhone 8. I pinched and pulled to zoom in and change the parameters for the data, and when I had the chart or graph I wanted, I took a screen shot. Lots and lots of screen shots of tiny little graphs.

Then I remembered that the photos I put on the iPhone would also be accessible (and bigger) on the iPad. I opened the Photos folder, selected the set of photos, and shared them to a class folder on my Google Drive.

Now on the iMac, I opened the Google Drive folder and opened each image to see what I had. At that point I was able to rename all 16 images so that I knew exactly what data I had and which sets I needed to compare.

You’d think that things would be a little easier to do than this… but that’s not the way the technology seems to be going.

I’m taking some of my technology back a step or two, that’s true. This year I’m using a lovely turquoise-bound Rhodia planner and a fountain pen to write down my daily tasks, and I have a different fountain pen that I use for writing in a hardbound journal every night.

Many of the old ways are simpler. If you want to get better at something, like writing, you just do it over and over again until you’ve done a lot of it. Paper. Pencil. Brain. Repeat. Over time you do pick up some skills and get some guidance. Then you move on to paint and brushes. Wool and needles.

On the other hand, over the weekend I took a great leap forward and purchased an Apple Pencil to go with my iPad. (Best Buy was having a bit of a sale.) Granted, it’s a first-generation Apple Pencil, and the iPad is a 3rd generation model that I bought reconditioned from Apple. So I’m going forward in technology on my own timeline, and back in time compared to everyone else. It’s a lot of fun. You can even get a cute little cover for it.

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Knitwise, I’ve put my Blue Blanket to use a couple of times to warm myself up. I haven’t yet found the free time to concentrate on the pattern for the Yoga Socks, but I have knitted another stripe or two onto the Vintage Packer Scarf in the last week. It’s not enough progress to be worth taking a new photo, so you’ll have to trust me on this one.

However, when a friend texted me with a progress photo of an item she was making for a mutual friend, I did get an idea of another project to start. (It’s small! It’s small!) One of the lovely yarns she was working with happened to be Malabrigo, and I sort of text-out-loud to wonder if I had any Malabrigo in my own stash so that I could make a little something for myself. I supposed that I probably did, but I really wasn’t sure where it might be. It’s not as if I have the stash sorted into piles of Malabrigo and Not-Malabrigo.

I decided to open up the closest drawer that held stash yarn. Lo and behold, what was on top but an already-wound cake of Malabrigo Rios in the colorway Cumparsita. The colors look to me like winey reds and browns, but I’ll take another look tomorrow under different light.

When did I pick up this yarn? What had I planned to make with it? Why did I wind it into a cake? Nobody knows.

Anyway, I’ll be eyeing this yarn as I ponder how to turn it into some sort of pouch into which I can tuck a sketchbook and a few pencils, nothing major. I only have the one skein, so there are about 200 yards of worsted weight to play with. I’m certain that I have some black wool of the same weight with which I can do some edging or seaming, or perhaps add some colorwork or stripes. I want to keep the design and construction as simple as possible. Goodness know that everything else seems to be getting more complicated.

If you have a pattern you can link to, please add it to the comments!

Wait, this isn’t Sunday night?

Last night before bed I wrote a short reflection on the occasion of having missed my self-imposed every-Sunday-night deadline for publishing a blog post. In that reflection, I was filled with self-compassion. But in the back of my mind I was wondering, How many Sunday nights in a row have I actually posted?

Of course, it isn’t that simple. The time zone that determines whether my posts were published on Sunday night or very very early on Monday morning isn’t one that I live in. I live in Central US time, the same time zone as Chicago, and if my post isn’t published until after 10 pm my time, it usually gets credited as a Monday post. So there’s not actually a good way to check on my broken streak without taking that into account the publication times of each individual post.

Technically, though, I’m still publishing once a week. And right now I have neither the time nor the ‘spoons’ to embark on such a quest that will return so little of value to me. (If anyone else wants to take it on, though, do let me know the answer!)

This week I’m immersed in the Days of Awe, the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when it’s time to take stock of your life and your self, atone for whatever might require atonement, and set a slightly different course for the next twelve months. When I’m not busy reading for that, I’m busy reading for the graduate course and, occasionally, reading for — gasp! — pleasure. That’s been a lot of working and reading combined with the necessary driving and the bare minimum of sleep. By the end of last week that included worrying about a sick kiddo (COVID-negative) and then worrying about my sniffling, sneezing self. Today was planned as a personal day so that I could attend services in person; it became a sick day on which I attended services via Zoom and then took a nap. That will make tomorrow a long day indeed, as I will be on campus for about 12 hours before driving home in the dark.

One of the components of the graduate school program involves setting myself up on social media with a more professional profile, and in the last couple of weeks I dusted off my LinkedIn profile (seriously, in my profile picture I had short hair and was wearing my Robert Kubica BMW shirt from 2008). Considering I am scheduled to complete the MSE in Fall 2025 if everything goes perfectly, I’m a bit reluctant to list a Bachelor’s degree that I received in 1989. If I’m getting more views with the new profile, so be it.

I don’t actually have a profile at Academia.edu, but apparently I did set up an account at some point. My interactions with Academia.edu usually follow this pattern:

1. They email me to ask if I’m the author of an impossibly technical medical publication.
2. I click “no,” which takes me to their website.
3. They ask why it isn’t me, and I click on their button labeled “I am a non-publishing author.”
4. They ask me which name I publish under.
5. I leave the website, delete their email, and shake my head.

Yesterday I had better luck at ResearchGate. I was following the trail of publications that referenced each other, and finally the site invited me to set up a free account, which I did. The first step was to review a seemingly endless listing of publications and indicate whether or not I was the author. Oddly enough, an article appeared that I had actually written. In 1993.

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Knitwise, I finally figured out that if I am using the large monitor of my iMac for reading articles, I can knit at the same time. I’ve gotten a lot of work done on the pink project, which now has just 72 stitches in its center section. That does mean I’ll have about 72 more rows to knit, but each one will be a stitch shorter than the one before. At the end, it’ll fly by.

I may decide to take some time to weave in the ends before I finish the knitting part. The project is so long that it’s awkward to handle, and the ends are getting tangled up with everything else.

Last week I dug through my stash to prepare some donations of yarn, patterns, and supplies to a student group. In the course of that search I uncovered a small project I began several years ago, at the start of my Jewish journey. I’m not sure why I left the square unfinished when I was so close to the end, but it’s finished now.

My thought at the time was to knit a square for each symbol that had a special significance for me. I hope that I wrote down somewhere which symbols I thought were the most important. I’m sure that they’d be different now! Anyway, this one is off the needles.

WordPress is telling me that I’m not authorized to post as “this user” and that my drafts aren’t updating. So let’s see what happens. I may need to start all over again.

The 700 Club

Before you read this post, you might want to read this one. And this one. And this one.

Ready for another Big Plan? This one will take it to the next level: graduate school.

Ever since I started and abandoned graduate school oh-so-soon in Fall 1989, I have wondered, off and on, if I would ever return. Would I go back for an MFA in creative writing? An MA in literature? A Master’s in Library Science? What degree would make sense? What field would be worth the time and the expense? And what would I gain with the additional degree?

Last month I started to entertain the notion again, this time with a degree focused on higher education. I remembered my previous experiences with Big Plans, so almost immediately I started reaching out to friends who would be able to tell me if this were all folly. So I do prove to be a heuristic creature, and I will benefit from their feedback.

I’m in a good place with a good job and surrounded by good people who appreciate the work that I do. No regrets there! But I would like to be in a position to make a difference, to effect lasting change. Taking the next step might make that happen — even though it may mean three to five years of next steps, one step at a time.

It’s probably needless to say that this path, even after I decided where I was going, has not been short and straight. Yes, I quickly updated my resume. Yes, I found two enthusiastic co-workers to write the necessary netters of support. Yes, I figured out how to place the online order for my 33-year-old undergraduate transcripts.

What I didn’t anticipate was that my alma mater would cancel my transcript order without telling me why.

So I called them. I gave “Brian” enough information they they could see, yes, there was my undergraduate record. The problem was that my name didn’t match the name on my records. At some point I had sent in a name change request to a former married name. That was quite some time ago, as I have been divorced for about ten years now. My name is now the same as my maiden name which is the same name I had as an undergrad. (The Social Security system knows all about this.)

That didn’t matter. My name was different in their records, insisted “Brian,” and I would NOT receive my transcript until I had provided sufficient documentation to make the name change in their records. I would have to do that, and then I would have to place a new order for a transcript.

I was flabbergasted. I was speechless (though I may have actually sputtered with frustration).

“Brian” didn’t seem happy about it either, and he didn’t seem inclined to explain how I was supposed to provide this documentation or what documents he needed to see or where to send them.

“Okay,” I finally said. “Okay. Okay. Okay. Thank you.”

I hung up and composed an email to the office where “Brian” worked, explaining the situation that had developed and asking them how to resolve it. I took a deep breath and clicked “send.”

In a minute I had a reply. It began: “We have received your request, and we will respond to it as soon as possible….”

The following day I received an email from “Mike” saying, “Sure! Just submit the Name Change Form and we’ll take care of that right away. Here’s a link to the form!”

I filled out the form as completely as I could, but there was a part that asked for a “Unique ID.” Now, because I went to college while dinosaurs roamed the earth, my student ID number was actually my Social Security Number followed by a random one-digit number, which was thought sufficient to make me unique in all the earth. (Also embossed on the card were my name and birthdate; my photo and signature were also present. All that was missing was my blood type.) ” ‘Mike’,” I wrote, “do you want me to use my SSN as the Unique ID?” I clicked “send.”

In a minute I had a reply. It began: “We have received your request, and we will respond to it as soon as possible….”

I poked around on the college website for a while, and found that the Unique ID is the first part of the university-assigned campus email address. I wrote on the form “no Unique ID (Class of 1989),” scanned it, and emailed it away.

But I didn’t want to wait until the name change issue was resolved before ordering a new transcript. I had no idea how long that would take, and I was right on top of a deadline. I decided to go back into the transcript order system and see what would happen if I clicked on Yes, My Name Has Changed instead of No, My Name Has Not Changed. Maybe the form would give me a place to enter extra surnames so that they could find me, know it was really me, and authorize the transcript order.

Reader, it did not. I took a deep breath (but I may have rolled my eyes first).

“Okay,” I told my alma mater, “You know what my name is? FINE.”

What is your name now? I entered my maiden/current name.

What was your name as an undergrad? I entered the married name I took 13 years after graduation.

I placed the order. Then I received three emails in quick succession, titled Consent Form Received, Order Confirmation, and Electronic Transcript Sent. Victory!

The following day I received an email from “Mike” saying, “Sure! Use your SSN!”

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Knitwise, I did have a chance to move forward on the pink project while sitting in a dental waiting room for about an hour and a half on Monday. (We arrived early and the dentist was running late.) I also knitted a few rows while watching the French Grand Prix this afternoon, but the events of the race were suspenseful enough that I put the project away with half the race left to go.

Simply Soft claims not to have lot numbers, but the color and texture of the yarn differ quite dramatically from one skein to another. I do hope that the washing process will even this out somewhat, but I also know that if my mother’s cats sleep on this project they’ll either tear it up with their claws or cover it in white hair. So it’s a good thing it’s not going to be a museum piece. (If you’re planning on making a museum piece with Caron Simply Soft, at the very least you should use yarn from the same manufacturing generation.)

I’m about five inches of really wide knitting before I reach the part where I will decrease the work by one stitch on each row.

Okay, six inches. Women lie, too.

This is still a hunk of work to do, but it’s much more likely to get done more quickly if I refrain from casting on anything else. So I’ll lug it to work and back and try to do a few more rows at lunchtime each day. If that doesn’t work, there’s the Hungarian Grand Prix next week. Maybe it will be boring.