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.

Roots and wings

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

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

Here, I’ll zoom in for you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something’s happening here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pivot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wet it and forget it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucky stiff

If you’re one of my Facebook friends, you already know my big news for this week: I missed a step on the stairs at work and took a short tumble. I didn’t break any bones or sprain any muscles, but I landed with enough force to render most of my body sore for several days. Though I’ve never been particularly graceful, I used to be able to recover from injuries more quickly. (Perhaps I’ll take a second look at that AARP invitation, if they ever issue one in my correct name.)

I’m grateful to my “work family” for helping me up, wheeling me back to my office, bringing me ice packs, wrapping my ankle, checking on me, driving me to the emergency room for X rays, and making sure that I (and my car) got back to my house.

As the temperatures rose, it proved to be a good week to be “grounded.” I took my crutches to work with me, but I didn’t really use them. As long as I walked straight ahead on a smooth, flat, level surface everything was fine. Driving wasn’t too difficult, either. By Friday I was feeling confident enough to test the stairs, but I soon realized that both ankles were far too stiff to make that a safe proposition. Back to the elevator for me, even to go only one floor up or down. Outside, I was clinging to the railings whether I was ascending or descending.

My usual plan is to use the stairs whenever possible. Well, plans change. As the school year comes closer and closer, I may be more inclined to stay in one place and let people find their way to my [new] office — where I’ll have my feet slightly elevated. I’m fortunate that my job doesn’t actually require me to move around very much.

I’ve used some of this “down time” to keep reading, mostly about owls and about the history of mathematics and mathematicians. (Don’t worry; someday all of this will [or won’t] make sense.) I also updated my reading journal with regard to a pair of completed books.

Coincidentally, I had a couple of page-layout jobs waiting for me that were the perfect projects to tackle while sitting down. The September newsletter is nearly half done, and I was finally able to get the right Word documents open to start working on the book design for a friend’s third volume of poetry.

In agricultural/environmental news, the wheat that had surrounded our property was harvested over the weekend, and the remaining stalks were subsequently chopped up and turned into the soil. My knowledge of farm equipment is not comprehensive, so I don’t know if any new seeds were sown — though I suspect that may be the case. If winter wheat was planted, we’ll probably see it sprouting in a few weeks.

Photo by Roy Lukes (2016)

We also seem to be the hosts for the pre-flight convention of Canada Goose Local 487. Eldest has counted upwards of 70 geese that peaceably gather in the fields when they’re not making practice flights and getting to know all the members of the new flock. The local Sandhill Cranes aren’t as peaceful; two sets of three cranes have been acting out “West Side Story” for the last week and when they depart for warmer places it will not be too soon for me.

Right now there’s no need for anyone to fly south for warmer weather. We’re in the middle of a heat wave that will see our temperatures peak in the upper 90s midweek before cooling to more seasonable numbers.

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Knitwise, there’s been no action with regard to the requested scarf. (Don’t tell SecondSon.) I plan to do a 1×1 rib stitch in the round and then press it flat and bind off the ends. It should be extra warm, and fringe is always an option. All I have to do is choose the right circular needle, knit up a swatch to make sure the width will be right, and then keep going until it’s done. What could possibly go wrong?

A grand day out

A long, long time ago, in a cold and gloomy season, I made a plan for myself to get out a little more and visit the places in my community — museums, farmer’s markets, art galleries, et cetera. Yes, this was a plan I made before the second semester of graduate school started. How could you guess? I think that in January I did manage to go out to one place that was on my list. (I would check my memory against my list, but my list is in a Very Safe Place right now and we’ll have to look for it check it later.)

Of course, as winter grudgingly gave way to spring and incrementally warmed up to prepare for summer, it’s been getting easier to go out and Do Things. Saturday was a perfect day to go to Madison and get a personal tour of some of Madison’s most-loved spaces that are still new to me.

The framework of the journey was the opportunity to drive SonThree to a friend’s house so he could hang out (and sell him a piece of gaming equipment). We originally planned to meet up at a record store after a couple of hours, and I assumed that we would then go on to make our usual raids of every Half Price Books location, stop by the Goodwill store to look for old electronics for Youngest, and maybe pick up one of the new fancy freezes from Taco Bell.

When I was on my own, my first stop was Wisconsin Cutlery to drop off a couple of knives to be sharpened. These knives were purchased in the early 1990s, and I’m sorry to say that they had never been professionally sharpened. I did my due diligence with a sharpening steel before each use, but recently I read that sharpening steels don’t actually sharpen the blade. Uh-oh. Fortunately my friend Elizabeth had just posted favorably about Wisconsin Cutlery, so I had that on my task list. I dropped off the knives, met up with my friend Marj at the coffee shop at the other end of the strip mall plaza to pick up iced coffees, then I picked up my newly-sharp knives and a new pair of kitchen tongs before Marj and I headed out to explore a bit of Madison.

Marj showed me the route that she uses to bicycle to her work teaching English classes at UW-Madison. She’s been teaching there for one year after many years of teaching in my department at UW-Whitewater, but the job is very much a homecoming for her because she did her graduate work in Madison. She seemed to know the history of every old building we passed as well as every new building that was under construction.

And she took me to the zoo! Over the years each of my kids had gone to the Henry Vilas Zoo for a school field trip, but I had never gone. Well, ta da, now I have. It looked a bit like the way the Columbus Zoo was organized in the 1970s before the enclosures were redone and expanded (I wonder if there was some sort of shared plan used for the construction of city zoos back in the day), but the animals seemed pretty chill. Except for the flamingos, actually — some of them were fussing at each other, perhaps over access to the few small puddle-ponds that some of them were sitting in. Flamingos attack each other by weaponizing their own beaks and necks. It was like watching two children fight using only paddleballs. You have to see this to believe it.

The flamingo enclosure was near the children’s zoo, where I saw this sign:

It was only warning us about one goat, but we kept our distance anyway. Just to be safe.

Then we were off to the Arboretum, which Marj described as “right next” to the zoo but seemed to be just a bit further away. Of course she knew the history of this place, too, and you can go here to learn all about it for yourself. It was incredible. We hiked and hiked through groups of different species of tree plantings, careful to avoid what looked like at least two groups gathered there for weddings, before we turned back to hike through everything all over again and check out the gift shop. (Marj, shoot me your Venmo so I can pay you back for the Mary Oliver book I bought, and the owl notecards.)

That was a lot of walking, and by the time we were done I wasn’t sure how much more I would be able to do in the rest of the afternoon. Fortunately, SonThree and his friend had already visited the record store and we didn’t need to meet there. I picked him up, we visited one Half Price Books location (and the Penzeys next door), and then we were on our way home — with a small detour to pick up a couple of those new Taco Bell summer freezes. Yum. Thanks, Marj!

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Knitwise, what is knitting? Do I still know how to knit? What I do know is how to get back on a bicycle. This afternoon I went on a six-mile ride, the first ride I’ve taken in about two years. It felt great. We’ll see if I am able to move at all tomorrow. At least I will have an extra day to recover before going back to work.

Stay safe out there, my friends, and go easy on the fireworks. They hurt my dog’s ears and reduce his brave soul to a quivering mess.

My life as a cat

Recently I’ve been catching up on a podcast to which I haven’t listened for over a year. Now that my morning and afternoon commutes have been somewhat lengthened by the lateral journey to Youngest’s high school and back again, I’ve been firing up the Bluetooth speaker (thanks, Sheila!) and listening in for at least thirty minutes a day. The episodes vary in length but average 20-25 minutes each, so I have been clipping through them fairly quickly. I started re-listening about a year further back than I needed to, but it’s been rewarding to hear the episodes again (occasionally hearing [again] the answer to a question I had submitted — which, ironically, which was about what other podcasts I should listen to when I had finally caught up with this one).

This weekend I caught up to where I had left off almost exactly a year ago. A few minutes ago I listened to the last five minutes of an episode I started this morning, which turned out to be largely about, of all things, the philosophy of mathematics and its relationship to Talmud study. And right at the end of the episode, host Xava made the comment, “I can’t live all of the lives that I want to live.”

I may have mentioned one or twice that my house contains the necessary items for living several lives. Since I don’t know yet which life I’ll live, I don’t know yet which items will prove to be necessary and which items I can sell, throw away, or hand off to others. As my offspring make their own decisions, I can reward their decisiveness by letting them raid my stores. Over time, that will help me to narrow my own choices. (Mama can’t go first. That would be rude.)

Do I have enough items to live for a thousand lives before using them up? Not quite. (And would I want to live like The Doctor, outliving everyone I love? No. But I can’t get rid of my Tardis full of time-travel items — no, not yet. Somehow I might find the time to read and watch them all….)

But perhaps, just perhaps, I could narrow my lives down to nine.

There’s a life where I can finally set up my Macseum, creating networks of similarly aged Mac hardware and installing each piece with the optimum operating system. The laser printer and the DeskJet can finally come up from the basement and be used again, and I can write (and print out) stories on everything from a Mac Plus to an iMac or MacBook.

There’s a life where I can learn all the languages I want to learn: Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino; Spanish; American Sign Language; Latin. And why not French and German and Arabic, too, while I’m at it? Japanese? Afrikaans? Sanskrit? No problem! I remember checking out, when I was in about the fourth grade, a library book about the way basic Chinese characters were created. The character for “house” actually looks like a house, if you know what you’re looking for.

There’s a life where I have the time to read all of the books I have accumulated over the years. Fiction, essays, nonfiction — all of them, in any order I want.

There’s a life where I draw, paint, and just plain create all the things that flash through my mind. I take my own photographs, develop my own pictures, and design the house I live in.

There’s a life in which I do nothing but write, with pencils, pens, fountain pens, typewriters, and computers.

There’s a life where I travel the world, using my languages and my art to get around and meet people, discover and tell their stories, and find out who I am.

There’s a life where I cook my way through every cookbook I own, and I master the techniques of Jacques and Julia, of Anthony Bourdain and Bert Greene, of the Top Chefs and the anonymous cooks representing a thousand years of Chinese cuisine. I bake every loaf and cut out every cookie, and there are fresh loaves of challah on every Shabbat.

There’s a life where I’m just the wacky old lady who lives next to the middle school, pointing my finger at the kids who struggle to pedal the ill-fitting hand-me-down bikes of their older siblings. “Come here,” I say. “Let me fix that for you. You can pick it up on your way home.” While they’re in class I check the brakes, adjust the gearing, put the seat at the proper height, fill the tires to the right pressure, and lube the chain. I get to make something better, and they get to have something that works better — something that might bring them freedom rather than frustration.

That sums up eight lives, leaving only one in which to do everything else I’d like to do. Is the ninth life the one in which I knit, crochet, make quilts, rehabilitate owls, foster cats, dogs, horses, and alpacas, research genealogies, and finally learn to play and write music for the piano, guitar, and accordion? When do I study geometry, astronomy, and mathematics? When do I set up my invention lab? When do I meditate and do my yoga? And when can I just be?

I may need to rethink this plan.

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Knitwise, there hasn’t been a stitch of work going on. Knitrino did recently email me about my last chance to purchase a pattern for knitting a smol apatosaurus. It’s tempting, I tell you.

New angles

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you can probably tell that I love a good new year. (With Judaism, you get several extra!) I’m not into the whole Going Out And Drinking thing, especially when it’s dark and the roads are icy, but give me a fresh start any time you feel like it. When I get to decide on the parameters of my own fresh start, that’s even better.

First, though, let’s review the blog stats for 2022. In the course of the year I published 51 posts that got about 800 views, 360 Likes, and 4 comments. About 765 visitors came from 31 countries, and 278 people (since 2006) have signed up to get RSS notification whenever I publish a new post. And it turns out that I wrote about 45,000 words!

I don’t plan to change much on the blog in the new year, but if I can find where WordPress has hidden the word-count feature I will try to bump my annual word count to 50K. I’ll still sit down at my computer (or iPad) each Sunday evening and try to publish something worth reading by 9 pm Central time. I’ll still divide the content between musings on my life (or whatever strikes my fancy) and the knitting I’m working on or I am planning to do.

Last night, though, I started a new blog. It will be a one-year project to document my reading through, and cooking through, a fascinating cookbook published in 2018 by chef Alon Shaya. The book contains food from Israel and the Middle East, Italy, the American South, and New Orleans. As I found out when I Googled Chef Shaya earlier today, his life has been a long, strange trip that took a difficult turn just when the cookbook was published. I’m going to concentrate on his writing, his story, and his food as I make my way through the book. I plan to write those posts on Saturday evenings, but that may change as I go along. If you’re interested in viewing that blog, let me know in the comments and I’ll add a link. There’s nothing to see right now….

I did, of course, make some resolutions to change some of the things I will do in the new year. There are the usual health-related resolutions that turn me into my own drill sergeant. Do your situps every day. Take care of your feet. Eat more salads. Go for more walks. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

The better resolutions are the ones that let me have more fun and encourage me to be more creative. I have finally started writing in the lovely turquoise Rhodia date planner, with my fine-nibbed fountain pen. (As it happened, I could have done this a few weeks ago as they had included some December pages. OH WELL.)

I also had some fun setting up a reading journal/log for myself this afternoon, starting with creating pages for books that I started last year and am still working on. (Six, why do you ask?) After that I will start a section for the books that I’ll start this year, and include some lists of other books I would like to read. I think it will be a nice artifact by the end of 2023. And if I don’t quite fill up the book I can just drop in a 2024 cover page and keep going. It’s not as if I will decide to stop reading or as if I will run out of books to read. It also allows me another space for being creative, since I can use whatever colors I want, make sketches, or even do some watercoloring. Speaking of which….

This would be the broad side.

Another journal I plan to set up is a sketch journal. I want to do a quick sketch every day and eventually be able to sketch out images that I will render in watercolor. For now I plan to study the watercoloring and the sketching separately. (Yes, I ordered a book….) I didn’t get to sketch outside today (it feels much warmer because the wind died out, but it’s still in the mid-30°F range), but I did look at the scenery with a different eye today as I walked the dog. This morning we were behind the barn (see above) when we heard a squirrel scramble through the end of the gutter. That got Monty’s attention; what I noticed was the confluence of roof angles at different sections of the barn. The wooden section just holds hay and straw, but the cinder-block section, now storage, used to be a milking parlor. I went out later to take some reference photos.

What will happen if I don’t keep up with all of my New Year’s resolutions? I’ll just keep trying. I don’t make changes to my life in order to beat myself up — I do so to give myself a chance to become more relaxed, more skilled, or just happier.

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Knitwise, I haven’t gotten anywhere with the slouch hat and I’m not sure if I did any work on the scarf. But this weekend I knitted on the Blue Blanket as I played back some F1 sessions from last year (free practice 2 and 3 from the French Grand Prix at Paul Ricard) from the DVR before deleting them. (The new season starts in just 60 days, so I need to free up space.) I used up almost every inch of the partial skein before knotting it to the full skein and continuing on. The work is now 34 inches from the cast-on point to the live stitches.

Over my lunch hours at work last week, I did the knitting portion of a small potato. I still need to add eyes (thank you, Deborah) and do the seaming and stuffing before I will have anything worth photographing, but it looks as if it will be a cute little spud.

The knitting itself, though, on worsted yarn with US 2 needles, is awfully tight and hard on the hands. There’s not much I can do about that, as I don’t want the potato stuffing to fall out and it doesn’t make sense to knit enormous potatoes. I will just have to do this kind of knitting when I’m able to and let the other knitting be the relaxing kind.

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.