Hip checked

I’ve made it through a week filled with hip pain. If you’re the praying type, could you pray that my doctor’s office would return my phone call regarding my physical therapist’s request for me to start a new PT series that will fix the issues I’m dealing with? Apparently I didn’t use the correct key words that would have let them know how much pain I am in. Thank you.

I don’t want to be an old grouchy lady. But I certainly feel like one at the moment. (After this paragraph, I will try not to be one.) But holy carp, it’s tough to not be able to sit for very long or to stand for very long. Alternating the two troublesome activities doesn’t work as well as I had thought that it would. One thing that would help is if I had less clutter in my house and therefore had fewer objects around which I needed to navigate. But bending over, crouching, and lifting things just got terribly painful, so it hurts to make things less painful for myself. Add to that a dog who prefers to stand just in front of me (alternatively, to lie down right next to me), and I feel as if my passage is blocked before I even try to start to move.

Enough with the old grouchy lady. I’ve been spending the first part of December trying to catching up on my reading journal for 2023. In a few cases (well, seven) this means writing up a reflection on a book I finished reading earlier in the year. I also need to do the layout for any books I started to read in December (there is one so far, which I will discuss later), and I would like to create lists for the books I purchased this year and the books I thought I would read but never actually started. And then there are a few books (well, fourteen) I did start but haven’t finished yet.

Today is December 10? Plenty of time! In another universe…

The book I started reading today, Writers Workshop in a Book: The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction (2007), is one of a few books on writing I found at recently acquired from Half Price Books. I’ve been thinking lately about writing and blockages and getting unblocked, and it’s probably time for me to plan another Long Weekend Writing Retreat for myself in late December or early January. Maybe I’ll even limit myself to longhand and typewriter composition. Leave a comment if you’d like to see the slide deck that I create for it.

The other books were Time Travel: A Writer’s Guide to the Real Science of Plausible Time Travel, by Paul Nahin, and Inviting the Wolf In: Thinking About Difficult Stories, by Loren Niemi and Elizabeth Ellis. That’s a lot to read and digest, so we’ll see how it goes.

I haven’t added any more typewriters to my collection since last week, but I did create some really cute luggage-tag cards that I’m going to use to identify each typewriter while it’s resting in each case. (I made them for the caseless ones, too, because I just couldn’t help myself.)

Test print on regular copy paper.

Design credit for this two-sided card goes to the creative folks at Avery Labels, who actually offer a free template containing an image of a manual typewriter as well as a typewriter-y font. This saved me SO much time. And I just ordered the luggage tags online, so this project should be wrapped up by sometime next week.

I also filled myself with lovely music over the weekend by attending a local concert that included Peter Mulvey, Katie Dahl, and two new performers, the stunningly talented Carissa I-Don’t-Know-Her-Last-Name and Matthew Sanborn. All I can say is Patreon, folks. Patreon. Set up an account and keep the local live music flowing. Then show up at the local concert, enjoy, and buy the CDs and the merch!

Pre-show, with great anticipation.

At this show I sat in the same row as a lovely lady who told me that she didn’t have a way to listen to the music that was offered at the merch table. WHAT? Honey. Go buy a nice turntable or hie thee to Goodwill and pick up a CD player and speakers for a few bucks. The musicians need you!

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Knitwise, I cranked out a few more inches on the Thrifted Stripe Scarf or whatever I’m calling it this week.

Then I weighed the remainder of the yarn, as well as the project itself (trying to keep the circs themselves off the scale, as I didn’t know their weight), to help me figure out whether or not I had enough yarn to finish the scarf at a proper length. Well, if I did my math properly, I have enough yarn to create an uncomfortably long scarf. So I did more math to estimate how much yarn (well, how many pattern repeats) would be needed to finish a Scarf of a Proper Length. I might have enough left over for a matching hat or a similarly patterned cowl.

Clear as mud? (Lori, check my math.)

The other Striped Scarf is at a standstill because I can’t find a yarn store that sells Plymouth Encore, which I used to be able to find seemingly everywhere. I even went to an LYS I hadn’t visited in years to try to find this yarn, and they were amazingly unhelpful. I will blame the change in ownership. But if this yarn simply doesn’t exist anymore, please drop me a line and let me know.

That’s all, folks. I’m tired and this rabbit needs to go to bed early tonight.

The week of no easy answers

I’ve spent this long week struggling with logistical problems embedded in other logistical problems. To skip to the end, my beloved 2002 Forester is no longer drivable due to the condition that eventually slays all noble Subarus — a failed head gasket.

Apparently it’s been on the verge of failure for quite some time, as I struggled with coolant-related problems on a long trip I took last summer. We thought the problem was something else, but now we know the truth.

Fortunately, the day before I drove my 2002 to my mechanic’s garage he had purchased a 2011 or 2012 (I forget which) Forester from another customer after its engine failed. It’s exactly the model I was looking for, I love the color (pale teal), and the price is right.

Meet Kinga Forester! My former/current Forester, Clayton, is in the background.

What I don’t know is when my new old car will be ready. I’m hitching rides to and from work (thank you, Rick), wondering how I will get to my PT appointments, and doing errands like grocery shopping only when they dovetail with the schedules of others (again — thank you, Rick). The situation has added a level of complexity to my everyday tasks in a way I could not have imagined.

The next puzzle will be how, exactly, I will pick up my new car when it is ready for me. I don’t exactly live in a Lyft zone, as the Lyft app informed me when I searched for a way to get my dog to his vet appointment on Friday morning (thank you, Carol).

On top of that, although a new well was dug for my house last Tuesday and the electrical work for it was prepared on Thursday, the well itself won’t actually be connected to the house until sometime this week. I’ve gone to a friend’s house a couple of times to wash my hair (thank you, Sheila) and to another friend’s house several times to do my laundry (thanks again, Carol).

The same level of complexity has been present in my tasks at work, too. A particular question might seem easy, but the most appropriate answer depends on a lot of context. At one point I needed to get some money from one of my bank accounts to a friend (for whom I was raising the money), and I could think of at least four ways to make the transfer. When the time came, I just walked into the bank, told the teller what I wanted to do, and let her pick the procedure.

A few days ago, though, I discovered a free app that is literally making a game out of keeping me organized and on task. (There are paid versions, but how much fun would that be?)

You make your to-do lists, your habit lists, and your daily task lists, and you get little boosts when you do them. And sometimes you get an egg to hatch, a sword, a potion, or a food drop. So far it’s a fun way to be accountable to myself. I’m getting my chores done and I have a Skeleton Dragon, a Base Dragon, and a Cotton Candy Wolf.

Princess Peachtree hasn’t shown any growth but she doesn’t seem to be dying. Maybe I should add “water the Princess” to one of my to-do lists.

When I’m not doing my chores, I’m trying to read and to catch up on putting entries into my reading journal. Over the past few weeks, I read the entire “Ramona” series by Beverly Cleary. During this process I realized that I had only read one of the books as a child. So it’s more of a new read than a re-read. I had thought it would be something of a tomboy read, but I was surprised to find a lot of passages that had to do with more autistic/sensory processing issues. Ramona is texture-averse to certain foods, particularly slimy ones, and she often self-regulates with physical actions such as smashing bricks on the sidewalk, or squeezing all the toothpaste out of a tube. There’s so much reality in these books, and the new illustrations help the books to keep up with the times. And now I have eight more book entries to create for my reading journal. There is also a lovely large book called The Art of Ramona Quimby that I’m working though. So that will be nine books about Ramona Q, one of my favorite fictional characters.

If you have any suggestions for my Tomboy Bookshelf, let me know!

No new typewriters were acquired this week. But I’ve been working on the logistics of picking up a 1934 Royal from a small town in West Virginia. Stay tuned…

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Knitwise, the Stripe Scarf is now at 42 inches long and I’m more than halfway through a grey stripe. I have just 12 grams left of the grey yarn, though. When I have finished this stripe I’ll weigh the remainder again and do a little math to help me see whether or not I will have enough yarn for another grey stripe. (I have 36 grams left of the black yarn, so no worries there.)

I don’t think that I’ve done any work on the other two current projects, though I’m sure you can understand why. We’re heading for a chilly week, so it will be good to concentrate on this one and get it to my son before he gets too cold.

Happy campers

I spent part of this weekend at a retreat, held on the grounds of a rather historic summer camp in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. It still gets a lot of use even though it’s not summer now; in fact, two other groups besides our own had events there on Saturday.

Because my upbringing was not Jewish, I imagined that everyone else at the retreat had gone to a camp like this one (or specifically this one) for many of their childhood summers. That was where they learned all the songs and melodies I don’t know, made memories, and deepened their traditions. As it turned out, though, most of the women there had not gone to summer camps in their youth. Maybe just their brothers got to go, in their generation? At any rate, summer camp apparently wasn’t the universal experience that I had imagined it to be.

The setting — by a lake, surrounded by forest — reminded me of the day camps and overnight camps I had attended when I was in Camp Fire Girls, and of the 4-H Camp I had attended after we moved to the country and discovered that Camp Fire Girls didn’t exist out there. My choice was between Girl Scouts and 4-H. It was farewell to Wo-He-Lo and hello to figuring out what the four H’s stood for.

If I remember correctly (and it’s quite possible that I don’t), Camp Otonwe was the day camp for the younger girls and Camp Wyandot was a day camp with one overnight before the last day’s events. Where these camps were in Central Ohio I don’t know; I got on a school bus and went there and came back. My senses of time and distance at that age would not have been reliable. Riding a school bus was exciting enough, since I normally walked to school or rode my bike.

I loved hiking through the woods, looking for birds and animals, and doing all of the crafty things we did. I still have a beaded bracelet for which I did the macrame work, and a candle I dipped at camp. Socially, I hung out with more girls than I usually did — I lived on a block where the school-age kids were almost exclusively boys — and I learned some of the camp songs of the time: “There’s a Hole at the Bottom of the Sea” and “John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt” are the ones I remember.

4-H camp, of course, had both girls and boys, though we were housed in separate cabins at Tar Hollow State Park deep in the Hocking Hills. I knew a few people from my school but not very many. But there was hiking and swimming and canoeing, and there were songs around the campfire at vespers. I spent most of the week hanging out with the camp’s conservationist and his wide array of critters in cages and aquariums.

A few years later I went to a weeklong camp at Miami University. Back then the camp was called the Institute for Tomorrow’s Leaders, and I sure hope that it has a different name now. We campers probably would have called it Geek Camp. We spent the week immersed in science, math, and computers — though we also wrote and performed skits and paired off into couples by the end of the week.

My father used to tell me about a whole summer he spent going from camp to camp. After school let out for the summer there was church camp, then baseball camp, then Boy Scout camp. Before he knew it, it was time for school again.

It’s been eye-opening to talk with some friends about camp experiences, especially when it turns out that I have had more experiences than I’d thought that they’d had! On that horrible sentence I should go to bed. If I find any camp photos this week I’ll add them in to illustrate.

Oh! Peach update: the sprout is still growing!

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Knitwise, I worked on the Stripe Scarf and the soft purple shawl. I’ll take photos of those, too — later.

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.

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!

Pre-schooled

It’s finally time to head back to school. SecondSon is back for a second year of college, and Youngest will start his junior year of high school on Tuesday. (He should have gone back last Friday, but he’d been exposed to someone who came down with COVID, so it seemed wise to let him stay home for a couple more days before hopping on a school bus and spending the days with hundreds of people. He seems to be feeling fine.) The other two kiddos are hard at work in the School of Life; one is making pizzas and the other is taking apart lawnmowers.

Of course, Tuesday will also be the first day of classes on the campus where I work to support about 45 college instructors, and it will be the first day of my first class in the graduate program.

To prepare for this auspicious day, I spent the weekend overpreparing for the program. I made progress in a recent book on demographic projections and their relationship to future college enrollment, and I read the entire Manga Guide to Statistics so that I could start becoming familiar with the formulae and terminology. (I have two more cartoon guides to statistics checked out from the campus library, so this should start to sink in fairly soon. When it does, I can move on to the text-based classic Statistics Without Tears.) I watched a 40-minute video about the 175-hour practicum I’m not scheduled to take until Summer 2024.

I also recalled a visit to Office Depot earlier this summer, in which a particularly enthusiastic employee showed me where their project planners were stocked, admitted that the selection wasn’t that great, and then encouraged me to design my own planner pages and have them printed and bound at the store.

This morning I started working out a design, and after a bit of fiddling I was able to come up with something that I liked. I designed a two-page spread for each day, where I could block out my time for grad school tasks, leave a space for recording important reminders or due dates, list the text I was reading and my notes on it, sketch out ideas, and list the steps I had taken towards planning my future practicum course. Then, thinking back to my days of working at a copy shop, I sketched out a thumbnail layout for assembling the “book.” Title page, blank page, start of two-page spreads, double-sided page section (and the number of double-sided pages in the middle), end of two-page spreads, blank page at the end.

The fun part was explaining this setup to the copy clerk. But after a while he was finally able to visualize it. You could just see the light bulb go on above his head. Eldest and I shopped around for a bit, and by the time I returned to the front of the store I had an idea.

“I hope it’s not too late,” I said, “but maybe you could copy the title page onto a sheet of bright green paper that would match my textbook.” (I had, in fact, brought the textbook along as a visual aid, hoping that the binding could be done in that color [it couldn’t].)

It took him a while to work out what I was saying, but then the light came on again and he picked out a paper that would work.

The deadline to put the planner together would have to be Monday, as classes started on Tuesday and it would be Saturday before I’d be able to swing by and pick it up. So the clerk took down my cell phone number, and Eldest and I headed towards home. As we drove west I realized that we hadn’t talked about whether or not the planner would have plastic covers. (If you’re of the generation that bought Kinko’s packets for college courses, you’ll realize that plastic covers would not necessarily be the default.) So I fussed about this a little bit.

After we were home for an hour or so, my cell phone vibrated at me. Office Depot was calling.

“Would it be a good idea,” the clerk asked, “to make the last blank page of the planner be the same green as the title page?”

“That’s a great idea!” I said. (A lightbulb may have turned on over my own head.) “Thank you for thinking of it. That will look really good.” Then I paused. “After I left, I realized that we didn’t talk about whether or not the planner would have a plastic cover.”

“Oh, yes, of course it will,” he responded. “And your order should be ready to pick up tomorrow.”

Only one more day to overprepare: what else shall I do? Oh yes. Clean the bathroom, every inch of it. I just can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it.

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Knitwise, I’m right on track with the pink project. Is this because I took the project out and knitted a row every night as I had proposed to do? Oh no oh no oh no. (If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, I must say that you can’t have possibly imagined that I would actually do such a thing.)

But I did knit eight rows earlier today while I was watching the Dutch Grand Prix. It was an exciting race and my gauge probably got a bit tighter than usual in the last couple of rows. No worries — next week’s race is at Monza, and there shouldn’t be any drama there. #Eyeroll

2021. Top: Verstappen; bottom: Hamilton.

And just as soon as the dining room table is empty, I will have room to set up my umbrella skein winder and my ball winder, and then I can turn those skeins of handspun Shetland wool into little cakes that will be knitted up into the Lauren-approved™ simple cowl as my fall project. Yep, just as soon as that. Yep, really really soon. I promise.

Talking of Michelangelo

It’s been a summer of change, with several work-friends in the process of coming and going. Not all of the changes were expected, but of course I hope that all the arrivals and departures have put each person in a better place to live the next stage of their life. Onward and onward, further up and further in! It’s all good. We’ll catch up on Facebook or LinkedIn or Academia.edu someday.

One of the new members of my department noticed a sonic screwdriver in my office, and another one spotted the TARDIS magnet on my car. I’ve been fielding questions ever since about my various geeky interests, which is a different experience for me. (My current acquaintances already know all about my geekery.) I suspect that I will become much less interesting when the semester begins and there are 100-125 students for each of them to get to know.

One of the people who left the campus last year has returned this year. Welcome back, Lori! (When do you want to get together to knit?)

And of course there will be hundreds of new students on campus soon, trying to find their classrooms and their professors and the department offices. May each of them be on their way to a better place.

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Knitwise, I used my Formula One viewing time to regain the momentum on the pink project. During August the series takes three weeks off and calls it the “summer break.” Everyone has to take a vacation and the teams aren’t allowed to develop the technology on the cars. For my part, I tried to use some of the summer break to view (and delete from my DVR) the early practice sessions that I hadn’t been able to watch on the race weekends.

The pink project is great for TV knitting since it’s a one-row wonder. It is getting a bit long, however, and when I have to turn the work it becomes a major effort.

Going into this weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix I thought that if I knitted on it during every session I would surely get it to the decrease point. I did try. After the end of the race I folded the work at my halfway marker, and counted. I should have about 34 more rows (17 ridges) to knit before I start the decreases.

Maybe I shouldn’t have counted. Now I know that if I knitted one row a day for a whole month, I still wouldn’t be at the decrease point.

That shouldn’t matter because my goal is to finish the whole project before Thanksgiving. On the other hand that will entail knitting 34 more rows, knitting the second decrease section, binding off, weaving in all of the ends, washing the work, and drying the work. (Because it’s acrylic, I won’t be blocking it.) So all that is going to take a while.

One row a day, and everything will be okay….

Leveling Up

This week was full of forward progress, but most of it wasn’t mine. I did finish reading Bird by Bird and I kept on track with my other reading (except for the James Joyce short stories; I’ll get back to you, Mr. Joyce).

My friend Mary and I started a 30-day yoga series and we’ve been keeping even with each other — which means that neither of us moves forward before the other one has caught up. Sometimes one of us just can’t fit the yoga in, which means that the other person has time to catch up or rest. But as of this evening we’ve finished more than one-third of the program. Being gently accountable to each other seems to help.

I also received my official acceptance into the graduate program to which I applied, and I’ve already met (virtually) with my academic advisor. With the course rotation at hand she was able to plan out each course I would take in each session, until I should complete the program in — get this — fall of 2025.

But the biggest progress of all was made by MiddleSon, who moved out this weekend. Today, in fact. He’s snagged himself a full-time job with a former employer (rhymes with Meatza Butt) and he may train to become a store manager. To make that work he’s moved in with his father, whose house is within walking distance of the store if it should come to that. In addition to this, he is considering when to attend technical school (after “making bank” for a while). It’s a huge step forward, and I’m so proud of him. I wouldn’t have been capable of such a thing at 18 years old.

Of course my heart hurts a little, but it’s the nature of children to grow into adults and take their own steps, make their own plans, and become independent of their parents. The way I think of it, he needed me for 18 years and has 100-percented this level. It’s time for him to jump into the next world and experience all that it has to offer, good and bad. He knows that he’s always welcome in my house.

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Knitwise, I accomplished a few rows on the pink project during this weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix. Our house favorite, George Russell, had his first career pole position so I was knitting to settle my nerves after everyone made it safely through the first several laps. George drove well and eventually had a podium finish — well done, lad!

Last week I met a new member of my department, and she let me know that she has wanted to learn to knit. “Don’t buy any knitting supplies,” I told her. “We got this. And have you heard about the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival?”

Forward, forward, forward.

How you do go on

In the last few weeks I have been reminded, yet again, that I have too many things. I did not receive this epiphany while I was happily lounging in my home. It came to my attention after traveling and returning. I have experienced the same sensation after living in a condo that had, for a while, 13 cats living in it, then leaving for a while and returning to realize that THERE WERE SO MANY CATS IN ONE PLACE AND HOW DID I NOT NOTICE THIS BEFORE? The cats situation dates back to 1995 and you would think that I might have learned from this experience. Evidently I needed more than one lesson. (For those of you new to the blog, this is an example of Sarcasm Extreme Understatement.)

Not my cats.

My house contains My Stuff, and My Kids’ Stuff, and My Dog’s Stuff. It also contains Stuff That Everyone Has, like a television set and a telephone and kitchen appliances and beds and tables and chairs. But there are also areas filled with School Art By the Kids, and Books I Intend to Read Someday When I Have the Time, and Miscellaneous Things Belonging to Deceased Former Husbands. And there are stacks of Paperwork That I Really Should File, and boxes of Old Photos, and a drawer full of Fountain Pens and Related Fountain Pen Supplies (thanks to the global pandemic, a work-from-home edict, and the cultured and helpful enablers at r/fountainpens).

You get the idea; at least, I hope that you do. We do not have Enough Time in the Day to list all of the categories of Stuff.

I’m not worried about the amount of My Kids’ Stuff nearly as much as I should be. My attitude is that the house contains five times the amount of Stuff that it should have, and that this will be corrected for when the Kids age out of my house and move away to Places of Their Own. At that point, each Grown Kid has license to scour the house and remove everything that belongs to them, after which time they may use it, rehome it, or dispose of it as they wish. This process is almost ready to begin. After this process has been completed, I will be left with My Own Stuff.

Mostly. Even after the Grown Kids move out and move on, I’ll still have quite a lot of Miscellaneous Things Belonging to Deceased Former Husbands. When I think about the next house I’ll live in, I’m tempted to set up a room for H2 and H3 where I can keep their books on the shelves and their art on the walls. That might discourage guests, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It could also be an appropriate location for what H2 called my Macseum, the display of all of the Macintosh hardware I have acquired over time. It’s okay to set up a vintage Mac lab running on 1990 specs, right? Yes? If anyone wants to run Quark XPress 2.0 or play Duck Hunt or Shufflepuck Cafe, come on over. I’ll hook up the 1200 baud modem if you want to access the collection via dialup.

There are so many things I just can’t get rid of, things that could never be replaced. I do have an emotional attachment to the books, music, writing, and even the clothes of these men who I loved (and lost). No one else would save and honor this stuff, so here we are. Or — here I am, anyway.

Now those stacks of books and photos contain items that once belonged to my father. (Maybe the guest room will host his books and art, too.) I don’t understand how other people can let go of the family items. Perhaps it will be that my Grown Kids will take possession of these items after I have left the earth, and they will pass along the items that have no personal meaning for them. I’m fine with that.

Until that happens, does anyone have a special interest in bridges? If so, I have some books for you.

I suppose that I’ll go on by carrying these things with me as long as they have meaning for me. Isn’t that what all of us do?

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Knitwise, I made good progress on the Pink Project last week. I’m almost done knitting up the current skein of Victorian Rose, and the project is approximately 75 percent complete.

It really is pink….

I still hope that the slightly different colorways will somehow meld into each other after the work has been finished and washed and blocked. If not, there will now be two cats who will sleep on this item and add their own personal colorways — white and calico — to the base color. My inner Bill Murray chants, It won’t really matter, it won’t really matter. But still I knit on, stitches against the current.

The longest week

This week began with the death of a friend, a school parent and sports parent of several years. Two pairs of our kids were on sports teams together, and I saw her at every game I attended because she was at every game there was. She was a humble and private person, and she was even more humble and private about her brief battle with cancer — and I will honor her privacy here, too. The shock of her passing colored my week, which ended with her funeral mass and burial on Friday. I took that day off work to be able to prepare myself for these events, but nothing truly prepares you for a sudden and untimely loss. (Don’t ask me how I know.)

It was also the last week of classes on my campus, and on Thursday I had rather emotional goodbyes with two graduating students, both employees of my department, whom I had known for three or four years. Just after I had audibly despaired of having endured so many goodbyes, a departing faculty member walked into my office to ask how she should turn in her office key. So by the end of the day Thursday everything was a little too much to handle, and Friday was completely over the top.

The turnout for the funeral was probably overwhelming for the family, but it’s a good overwhelming (I hope). Having been at a simple funeral for Third Husband ten and a half years ago, I can affirm that a low turnout is also overwhelming in its own way. When just a handful of people show up to commemorate a life, you remember the words that were spoken. You also think about the people who ought to have come, but didn’t. But when a whole town is present, it can be a balm to your grief or it could turn into an overwhelming pressure. Either way, the loss will affect them forever. I hope that time brings peace.

I really don’t know what else I did this week. We had our last department meeting of the academic year, and we had a departmental picnic; in between I baked a pan of brownies that was out of this world (Ghirardelli really does know what they’re doing in the recipe department). Other than that, I just remember events in bits and pieces: I went to physical therapy appointments, I cancelled a hair appointment, I didn’t lay out any journal pages. I practiced the piano once, I think. Yesterday I baked a pan of macaroni and cheese made from a cookbook written by Paul and Linda McCartney’s daughter (I want to name the recipe McCartney and Cheese, but MiddleSon says we should just call it Macca).

This morning I wrote a song about my friend’s funeral. This afternoon I bought an ink cartridge for my printer, purchased some time-travel comic books, and watched the Miami Grand Prix. I probably did other things, but they may just be lost to time. I did see each of my children on Mother’s Day, and I hugged them. After the events of this week, that was the most important thing to do.

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Knitwise, I brought the pink project home this weekend because I had intended to keep myself occupied during the Prom hours so that I didn’t worry. However, there weren’t many Prom hours for me to be concerned about, as it happened, and I never even picked up the project bag. MiddleSon looked great in his formalwear but dances just aren’t his thing. I was relieved to have him home early (not least because I didn’t know how I could manage to be a safe driver for him at midnight), and we got to spend a lot of time together this weekend. He’s great to drive with, go shopping with, and go thrifting with.

What I learned this week is expressed in a line from the song I wrote: “Eat the chocolate! Dance! Drink the wine!” I hope that you will hug your loved ones and do just that.