The road behind

Having too many books, too many projects, and too many divergent paths makes it difficult to ascertain what the future might hold. The end of July may seem like an odd time to be getting stressed out about the future, but very few years of my life have not been governed by a school calendar. The end of July means the imminent arrival of August, which means that an amazing number of things need to get sorted out before September arrives and school starts.

I can try to project myself into September and ask myself what I wish I had made sure to do in July and August, but there are sure to be surprises between now and then that will be difficult or impossible to anticipate. If I don’t allow for flexibility, I’ll have to be generous with my self-forgiveness. (Or other-forgiveness, depending upon who missteps.)

School will start for Youngest: the senior year of high school. School will start on campus: the first year for three new hires, some co-workers, several new administrators, and more than a thousand undergraduates.

School will also restart for me at the graduate level after I took the summer off, and when September starts I’ll have a lot less control over what’s on my reading list and when I need to read it. (That thought has prompted some wild end-of-summer additions to my reading stack.) I won’t have any more summers off from graduate courses if I want to stay on track with my program, which has me earning a Master’s degree in Spring 2026. But think of all the books I’ll be able to read in the summer of ’26! Anything I want!

At some points, particularly those of achievement, it’s normal to pause and take a look at your past to discern the path that you took to get where you are now. Sometimes you have an “aha!” moment and can clearly see how doing A led to the chance to do B, then combined with C to produce P. It would be nice to look at that path and see clues to its future direction. If I can figure out how I got from the past to the present, is there a means of projecting which way I should go from the present to the future? And could it please be illustrated in Day-Glo paint so I couldn’t possibly lose my way? Which way will the wind blow, and how should I trim my sail?

This weekend the wind blew harshly in a straight line and caused a lot of damage in the nearby towns. Hundreds of people have been waiting since Friday night for the power to come back on. We were very fortunate here and only lost power for about a second, but it was a scary storm. On Saturday morning we were able to survey the damage: small and large branches knocked down, the old antenna ripped from its base on the roof, the neighbor’s mailboxes topped into the road, and the vegetable garden reeling from the high winds. Across the road, the winds snapped the neighbor’s tree trunk at ground level and just smacked the whole tree over. Fortunately, our houses weren’t damaged and my car didn’t get hit by anything.

Facing south.

Facing east.

I’m very grateful that my life was able to go forward without much interruption at all this time, but it could easily have been a life-changing or even life-threatening event with just a slight change in the direction of the wind.

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Knitwise, there was no knitting this week — not even on last week’s thrift shop score. But I might be able to pair that purple-grey yarn with the bargain I picked up today at a 90 percent discount.

You could knit a blanket with these needles, if you wanted to.

Seriously, for $1.99 I was not going to pass these needles up. Not only could I knit something with good drape, almost lacy, with bulky yarn, but I could also knit the World’s Warmest Blanket with two different yarns. If the upcoming Wisconsin winter will pack the same punch that summer has done, I had better take a yarn inventory and get started. But I may not need to knit an umbrella; my weather app says that no rain is expected in my area for the next ten days.

Mousetified

This weekend’s plans gang agley, as they say — well, as Robert Burns might have said. I’m rather behind the eight-ball now and I hope that during the next week I’ll find some time to catch up.

My plans were simple: review my research paper for the graduate course, look over the professor’s comments on the previous stage, and start making the revisions for the final paper. I finally figured out how to download the annotated version of the previous draft and email it to myself so I could work on it at home, but I didn’t realize that it would come through as a PDF instead of a Word file. No problem: I had printed out a copy of that stage of the paper, and I went through it and added his comments in the margins. My plan was then to read through the paper carefully, all the way through, before making any changes. That part of the plan lasted until I finished reading the first sentence and thought, Oh, my, this needs work.

I did read through the entire draft, but I was rewriting, eliminating, and adding sentences as I went. I made notes wherever I needed a new fact (and its citation). I made notes where I would need to add a table of data (so far there seem to be four of them). I reviewed the references that I hadn’t had the time to check out before the previous draft of the paper was due; I identified 17 of them, and my professor gently urged me to cut them down to the top four. (I picked five, but I’ll swap out one of my previous citations that didn’t relate to my topic very well. Don’t tell him.)

That was the work that I did by hand on Saturday. The plan for Sunday was to start making those changes and produce a working draft to keep revising over the following week. Then there was a livestream of one of my favorite musicians, which would give me a nice break. Then I would turn my attention to working on my congregation’s monthly newsletter, for which I do the layout.

The livestream was almost finished when Eldest came downstairs with a strange look on his face. He noted that I had moved the popcorn popper from the kitchen table back to its usual place on the back left burner of the stove, and he wondered why.

It turned out that, after I had gone to bed on Saturday night, he had come downstairs and seen a mouse sitting on top of the popcorn popper. That’s why he had moved it to the table, and why he had moved the oven mitts to the laundry basket; apparently the mice had been scaling the microwave cart and making their way from there to the stovetop.

Ick! Ick! Ick!

We live in a house that was originally built somewhere around 1860-something. It has been added onto since then, of course, and modernized over the years, but there is no way that a house of this age will ever be hermetically sealed from the critters that live nearby. I understand that, and I have lived much of my life in old houses. But this was too much.

Plans shifted. We needed to do a lot of cleaning and a lot of Moving Things Around. Of course the dining room table is covered again, this time with boxes of pasta, boxes of crackers, partially filled bags of tortilla chips, bags of basmati rice, a teakettle, a coffee mug packed with singles packs of instant coffee, empty Mason jars, and a stack of cookie sheets and half-sheet pans that were still waiting to be washed. The kitchen table was packed with snacks, popcorn-making supplies, and the pots, pans, and lids that had previously been in the drawer beneath the oven (the mice had been there, too).

Together we moved appliances, vacuumed and scrubbed floors and surfaces, and brainstormed where we could safely place the next series of mousetraps. I went shopping in the evening and came home with mousetraps, caulk, a caulking gun, plastic storage bins, and a brand new popcorn popper. It just has to work.

The newsletter? I’ll try to get to it tomorrow night.

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Knitwise, I did get some work done on the sketchbook pouch. It’s now exactly 8 inches deep and I’m beginning to wonder what’s going to fit in it. The space may be too small for a sketchbook, but it could certainly hold my cell phone and the work-wallet I carry that contains my campus ID and my office key. If I repurpose it that way, I’ll need to figure out the “strap and flap” situation. What kind of closure do I want? How long should the flap be? Do I want to knit an integral strap that’s long enough to wear the pouch as a crossbody item?

I’m still thinking that through. In the meantime, I have also been thinking about the new office to which I’ll be moving over the summer. It has a very narrow and very tall window, and it has occurred to me that I should knit a curtain for it. This weekend I found a pattern on Ravelry that looks promising — Crest of the Wave Lace Curtains, designed by Christina Hanger in 2011.

I don’t know what yarn I might use for this curtain, but my stash might yield several possibilities after I measure the window and estimate the yardage I’ll need.

First, of course, will come the Yoga Socks. Of course.

Snow day

This weekend we had a forecast of morning flurries on Saturday. I took the dog outside for a walk before the snow began to fall — and thank goodness, because the expected hour of flurries turned into a snowfall that went on and on and on and on….

…and as the day went on, the wind picked up until the snowfall was simply ridiculous. One inch turned into three. Or five. Or drifts of what the heck is going on out there amounts.

Meanwhile, my phone began to curate photo collections of past snow days. Facebook sent me reminders of every snowy day in the last twelve years. But, as the song goes, I had nowhere to go and all day to get there. All of my tasks and deadlines were tied to one computer or another (except, of course, for the laundry that I did in the background).

Winter 2018.

Winter 2019.

Winter 2023.

It turned out to be a good day to read, to download files, to do page layout, and to write — and to occasionally pull back the curtain and laugh at the snow that kept falling and started piling into drifts. We already had the ingredients for the stew, and there wasn’t anything critical to retrieve from the mailbox. We had heat and power and light and didn’t need to leave the house for any reason.

I Zenned up the area around my writing desk by eliminating a lot of visual clutter. I got a newsletter proof sent out. I played my word games for the day. But other than that? No worries.

If the snow had fallen on another day of the week, I would have a different tale to tell. But on this lucky Saturday all we had to do was watch it come down and keep coming down.

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Knitwise, I have pushed ahead on the Blue Blanket. It has travelled between home and the workplace a couple of times, but I actually did knit a few more rows. There’s a psychological advantage to knowing that every row is now shorter than the one before. The yarn doesn’t seem to get used up very quickly, but that will come in time.

At this point there are 72 stitches on the needles, and the knitting is going quickly. This week I watched a couple of F1 session broadcasts from last season to make more space on my DVR for the upcoming season, and it was nice to be able to turn the work sooner than I expected. Pretty soon I will be able to go from 3-4 rows in a sitting to many more than that, and when terminal knitting velocity kicks in and I start to think, I will keep working on this all the way to the end, it will be very rewarding.

This is the inverse sensation of when I was working on the Citron shawlette in laceweight, with finals rows having something like 300 or 400 stitches of what looked like sewing thread. Binding off that project was intense, I-tell-you-what.

Citron from 2012…. with many miles to go.

I haven’t taken any pictures of the Blue Blanket in a while, so I will try to do that this week. I’ll measure it, too, and perhaps sew up some of the loose ends I have left along the way. Then when I reach the end I will be able to sew in just one loose end and call it done.

Off the needles and away we go

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is sounding like a better and better plan.

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

“no dyelot,” my @$$

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

8g actually goes a long way.

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

The 39 Stitches

This week disappeared into books, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I had picked up a copy of Glennon Doyle’s book Love Warrior the previous week, and I blazed through it in three days. That act of speed-reading seemed to jump-start my literary metabolism, and I looked all over the house for other books that I could start reading. I decided, in the name of making progress in all areas, to pick the top book off of each pile and start reading it.

Right now I’m reading:

Learning to Breathe: My Yearlong Quest to Bring Calm to My Life, by Priscilla Warner. I started reading this book a couple of years ago, but I don’t know how far I read. I’m starting over from the beginning, one chapter a day! There are 40 chapters and I will read Chapter 5 tomorrow.

The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, by A. J. Jacobs, who decided to read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. So far I have read through chapter E.

Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion, by Susan Jacoby. This was a top-of-the-pile book I started reading about two years ago. I am not going to restart it; I’ll resume reading with Chapter 6 (page 99), titled “The Inquisition and the End.”

Dubliners, by James Joyce; this is my short-story-a-week summer project. Last week’s story was “Two Gallants,” and I hated the protagonists but was not sure why. I consulted my friend who is guiding me through the book, and he explained that the protagonists are morally reprehensible. I now feel better about hating them.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott. I’m reading this book again because (a) it is so excellent and blunt and full of Great Truth and (b) I don’t know where in all heck my copy is. I have writing books shelved in several locations in a couple of rooms, and I can find this book in none of them. I find it hard to believe that I would have given away my only copy, because I try to keep multiple copies of this book and Operating Instructions on hand precisely so that I can give them away to the People Who Need Them. (Curiously, I can’t find a copy of Operating Instructions either, though I have found Every Other book by Anne Lamott and Every Other writing book I own.) This particularly sucks because I attended a reading by Lamott in Columbus just after Bird by Bird came out in 1994, so it’s probably a signed copy. So today when I was out shopping, I picked up another copy at Half Price Books. I forgot to look for another copy of Operating Instructions, darnit. While I was waiting for ThirdSon to do his own shopping I read the introduction and the first two chapters. The next chapter is called “Shitty First Drafts,” and if this title puts you off at all, you should probably not read this book, especially the chapter title “Radio Station KFKD.” I love this book.

Every day I read the daf of the Talmud to keep up with the Daf Yomi project, where we read two pages (one page, front and back) of Talmud. At this rate we will finish reading the entire Talmud in seven and a half years. This fourteenth cycle of Daf Yomi will conclude on June 7, 2027; the fifteenth cycle will begin on June 8, 2027.

I also keep up with the weekly portion (parsha) of the Torah, but I’m uncharacteristically behind right now. I’ll need to read the portion describing the ritual of the Red Heifer before I go on to the current portion. This year I’m reading the parsha in three translations, followed by commentary. That’s a lot of catching up to do.

That’s probably not everything I’m reading, but it’s all I can think of at the moment.

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Knitwise, I did add a few more rows to the pink project this week, but I’m still not to the end of the current skein.

I did pick up some unused yarn from my stash and try to work out what I could turn it into. The yarn showed up in my Ravelry notebook as part of a previously frogged project. At the time, I noted that perhaps I could turn the yarn into a Stolen Moments Shawl, a pattern that I had already downloaded and printed out for my files.

Shire Silk Stole, with lifeline (2008-2009)

Aha! I thought (and almost said out loud). I know what this will be!

The first night, I cast on 39 stitches and then knitted two plain rows. So far, so good.

The next night, I knitted the four pattern rows, which repeat until you’re almost out of yarn. (Then you knit two plain rows and bind off.)

The next night, I started knitting the pattern rows again, but lost track of my stitches near the end of the row. I tried to tink back but made a real mess of it until I was hopelessly stuck.

No problem, I’ll just rip it out and start over. So I pulled everything out. Cast on 39 stitches. Again. Knitted two plain rows. Again. Knitted the first four pattern rows. Again.

Then I counted my stitches. There should have been 2 knitted stitches on each end, and 35 pattern stitches in the middle. Over and over I counted, but I only got to 38 stitches.

Huh.

I set the work aside for a couple of days. The yarn is 100% silk, and it’s bumpy. It catches on itself and looks like it’s tying itself in knots when it really isn’t.

Well, I thought this evening, maybe this isn’t what the yarn wants to be. I’ll just tear it out again and figure out what it does want to be. But first, I will take a couple of pictures and count the stitches again.

Stolen Moments Wrap (2022-??)

There were 39 stitches. There were also 39 stitches the second time I counted, and there were 39 stitches the third time I counted. Everything looks perfectly fine.

Huh.

The inner dog

Last Friday the day finally came — the day in the spring when our dog Monty gets a complete shave-down and receives all of his necessary annual shots and treatments. As I have previously mentioned, Montmorency Jerome is a rescue dog. Even though he has spent many more years with us than he did at his prior home, some events still upset him. Grooming is one of those events. We tried many different grooming tactics over the years, and what we finally settled on was that once it was warm enough in the spring, we would have the vet sedate him so that the trimming and grooming wouldn’t stress him out. The timing usually works out pretty well.

Monty, February 7.

This year, the morning of the shave-down featured a surprise snowstorm. I’d like to call it freakish, but snow in Wisconsin in late March isn’t exactly unseasonal — it’s just weather that has rather worn out its welcome. (It proceeded to wear out its welcome even more on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Sigh.) The swirling snow did provide some background excitement as I drove Monty the three miles to the vet.

By the time that Monty’s coat becomes this overgrown, he’s ready and willing to hop in the car and have the extra fur removed. (Remember, they knock him out completely.) But also by this time, we forget that Monty is not really a shaggy fellow. We have forgotten the inner dog.

Monty, March 31

The real Monty is small and sleek, and he shivers when he’s cold. And he has been cold all of this long, snowy weekend. He has curled into a tight ball in his dog bed and in the Big Green Chair in the library, and right now he is curled up in a tight ball at my feet. The snow will melt and the weather will become warmer and Monty’s fur will begin to grow out again, and by the time winter comes around again we will have forgotten, again, all about the inner dog.

This weekend has been a good one for music. MiddleSon and I hit the CD jackpot at St. Vinnie’s on the way to the grocery store on Saturday morning, and I picked up a few more albums at Half Price Books when he and I were running around this afternoon. Last night I listened to albums by Tori Amos, Tracy Chapman, and Sheryl Crow. (I couldn’t decide what the listening order should be, so I settled on alphabetical.)

Today I picked up the 1967 debut album by age-15 Janis Ian (on vinyl!), and I had to listen to the second side of the “Mason Williams Listening Matter” before I could put her album on. Boo-freakin’-hoo. This is definitely a “top of the first world” problem. My ears are grateful that I’m filling them with such nice things.

I need more music and words in my head because I’m continuing to write in the songwriting group. (Even though I haven’t cleaned off the desk in my bedroom so that I can work there, I have bought a fabulous new hardcover journal. And some 0.5-mm black pens. And two more bottles of fountain pen ink, to be delivered next week. Hush, this is Serious Writer Stuff™. I totally deserve it.)

I received some enthusiastic feedback for my March song, and I have a pretty complete draft of the lyrics for the April writing prompt (“war”). All that I might have to do is figure out the melody, create a rhythm track in Garage Band, and learn how to strum my guitar. Oh, yeah, and record the vocals after I figure out what they are. No prob, Bob!

Can we write it? Yes, we can!

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Knitwise, I wove in the ends of the turquoise scarf last week. The next steps will be to gently wash it and block it out. It measures about 52 inches, which is long enough to be functional but rather short for one of my scarves. It may be a different length after the washing and the blocking. Do you want me to document those steps in the finishing process? I will be happy to show you what that looks like, if you want to see it.

This afternoon I did manage to acquire four skeins of out-of production yarn at a Goodwill store. Two skeins were Lion Brand Thick & Quick Chenille in the colorway called for in a particular Doctor Who scarf pattern. I suspect that Orange is the color I really need, not having enough in the project bin, but I grabbed the Purple that was available. (Because I could.) The other two skeins were Caron Simply Soft in Victorian Rose, to complete a project that I started when I was visiting my parents as my father was fading. The end result should be a sort of stole that will drape across the foot of my mother’s bed. I started the project, which I made up out of my head, with some yarn that she had on hand. Little did I know that the color wasn’t being produced any more. Now I may (or may not) have enough yarn to complete the project if I can figure out the stitches I used to start it, since apparently I did not write down what I did almost two years ago. (Can we re-create it? Maybe we can…)

And I did pull out (before I went on the shopping trip that led me to Goodwill) two skeins of Red Heart TLC Essentials that I am thinking of combining into a striped variation of the Age of Brass and Steam shawl that you might find on Ravelry. I’ll take a look through my pattern collection to see if there is a more appropriate semi-lace triangle shawl pattern that will show off the colors (Robin Egg [pale blue] and Surf & Turf [the same pale blue, dark chocolate, and caramel]).

There is music, and language, and knitting in my future. Last week (the week after spring break) finished in a flash. This week might go the same way. Maybe I can sing my way to the next weekend.

Goals and approximations

It’s been a good week for reading. I’m about two-thirds of the way through Tombstone, picking up the pace in The Development of Mathematics, and I finished one biography of a mathematician (the charming and generous George Pólya) and started on another (the eccentric Paul Erdős). In Mathematician’s Delight I got right up to some problems I really wanted to take a crack at solving before every other deadline in the universe seemed to come crashing down upon me. My weekend was an attempt to meet as many of these deadlines as I could, and I hope that I did my best.

Now, here we are on the cusp of July — June always seems to pass in the blink of an eye — and with the new month will come a new set of priorities. Plan for a trip to Ohio and West Virginia and back again. Create a writing weekend. Donate a few carloads of items that I don’t need. Start working on my cardio. Reinvent my identity. Practice my Hebrew. Get my father’s photos scanned. Lay out another month of my bullet journal. Keep reading. Go to a local concert for the first time in about 18 months.

What did I actually do this weekend? Attend online services, exchange texts with my mother, drive my son to work, shop for groceries, attend my final Torah cantillation class, help to prep beef stew, do laundry, do dishes, pick up my son from work, fill the gas tank, shop for books, pick up some free custard, watch qualifying for the Styrian Grand Prix, lay out several pages of the congregational newsletter, attend a retirement picnic, transfer a loaner car from one loanee to another, drive my son back to his father’s house, get pulled over by a deputy sheriff for non-display of plates, drive home, locate and install my front license plate, do more dishes, watch the Styrian Grand Prix. For some reason it does not seem like enough. I intended to relax on my birthday, but didn’t relax enough. I intended to get things done the next day, but didn’t accomplish enough.

What is enough, really? Do we ever catch up? Lately I’ve been chasing the goal but it’s tough to tell whether or not I’m making progress. Sometimes the proof is external and sometimes it’s internal. Externally, perhaps I did all of the things I could do. Internally it “hits different,” as my kids say.

This summer will be one of transition, for many people in my immediate circle. Transitions aren’t easy and we’ll need to find a way to show each other compassion and grace as we move through our changes. What can I say? Show your love to the people you love. Maybe that’s enough.

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Knitwise, I haven’t been doing any Actual Knitting™ in the last week but I did come across a link to a free download for an Interweave e-book that contained two patterns I want to make. One is for a triangular shawl made with a bit of openwork but NO PURLING, and the other is for a scarf/stole with a simple lace panel, made with bulky yarn of which I seem to have a sufficient amount. So if I find the time to knit, I’ll be ready to cast on.

110 percent

After my productive and relaxing weekend, I may not have done quite enough to prepare myself for the full-time work week ahead. By the end of the work day Monday I was so tired that my eyes were watering, and I had a few major things left to do on my own time. Today felt like more of the same, but I was able to escape to a quietly sociable knit night and start getting back to my usual routine.

After a meeting this afternoon that ran a bit long, a friend commented, “Even though you feel like you’re back to 100 percent again, a busy day can wear you down.” I agree. At the time my day felt like 200 percent, but I will give it the benefit of the doubt and retroactively assess it as a 110 percent day. (Monday may have been 200 percent.) That’s still more than the 100 percent I’m bringing, but I’ll get up again tomorrow morning and give it all another shot. I must do the things which must be done. (If not me, who? If not now, when?)

To recap: spent the weekend happily working on the house. Spent the workdays Doing Stuff and keeping a list of everything I’m working on. Spent the evenings reading, writing, knitting, and getting my taxes done. And starting tomorrow night I’ll have more kids in the house. This weekend I’ll have three, maybe four, and will have to do some driving around to get them where they need to go. Will I be able to continue the reading, writing, and knitting? Well, we shall see.

Remember this shawl, which I finished knitting in late November?

I blocked it on Sunday night and it…grew a little.

I need more blocking mats!

I’ll be able to present the shawl to the recipient next week, which gives me time to do the “show and tell” routine with every knitter I know. I may never see the shawl again, so I have to do what I have to do.

Now I can turn to the other knits-in-progress, which include slippers for my grandmother, a scarf for whoever, and two lace shawls. And a sock, and a blanket, and another blanket, and nothing to see here, no need to list everything in progress, let’s move along.

Or I could turn to my writing in progress, which includes a scholarly article, two novels, and a list of ideas for short stories.

Or I could turn to the books I started reading, the nine books I have checked out from the university library, and….

Knitting. Let’s knit, shall we? Let’s make a shawl.

Outside influence

Today I made the kind of incremental progress that doesn’t result in anything being finished. I feel closer to several of my many goals, but without the satisfaction of actual achievement. Huzzah.

Mostly, I managed being confined* at home for another day. There seems to be a different, at least two me, between being told that I should stay home to recuperate and being told that I should stay home so that I don’t make anyone else sick. Maybe I just got used to the idea of recuperation; now that I’m almost done with it, being kept from work feels like a punishment, seasoned with a bit of guilt for having gone into the office yesterday.

The word “confined” in the previous paragraph carries an asterisk because I did, in fact, leave the house today after working from home all morning. Ostensibly a quick trip to Wal-Mart for soda and orange juice, my excursion became an excuse to do all the things. I brought two plastic bags stuffed with all the other plastic bags for recycling. I bought a box of the Milk-Bones that the dog prefers. I purchased a Blu-Ray edition of a TV series I would really like to watch again (even though I know I probably won’t do that anytime soon). Then I got to the grocery side of the store and went completely off-list.

Don’t panic.

Milk, sure! Oh, I wanted bagels, too; why are there absolutely NO bagels at this store? Cheese, yes, we need cheese. Hot dogs. MiddleSon wanted hot dogs and I have no idea why, but here you go, hot dogs. Oh, look! The special cookies that Daughter will enjoy when she’s here this weekend. And the little chocolates I keep in the candy dish at work; I must restock!

By the time I got to the register I had the soda but not the orange juice, everything MiddleSon needed to make strawberry smoothies, plenty of treats for the office and the weekend, and some cash back for the trip I planned to make to the McDonald’s across the street. I go to McDonald’s on the average of once a year, but I wanted a hamburger and I wanted to take back a surprise treat to MiddleSon. Mission accomplished.

Since then I have been back to working from home, spending too much time on Facebook, reading, knitting, practicing the keyboard, and pacing about the house and wondering if I would ever finish anything I started.

In other unfinished business, I sent a friend a copy of an unfinished fiction manuscript of mine after he offered to read it and give it a free critique. He sounds as if he’ll do it, too, which makes me think that I should finally get started on (a) the research for the content of the next section of the story and (b) some idea of where the plot is going. It’s been sitting around for a few years; perhaps now it the time to blow the dust off the hard copy and figure out where this story may be going and start getting it there.

That brings up a point of order related to the blog. Since the beginning of the year, when I had so much time at home, I have been writing and publishing blog posts six days out of every seven. I doubt that I will be able to maintain that frequency of publication when I go back to work full time next week. The actual schedule may be in flux for a while, but I would like to devote a couple of those nights-per-week to working on my fiction projects. If nothing else, it may give me another topic about which to write.

Knitwise, I decided today to start a quick giftknit project as a surprise for a friend. Then I couldn’t find my copy of the pattern I wanted to use. I eventually found a different copy of the pattern, but then I couldn’t find the yarn. (I think you can see where this is going.) I took a deep breath, found the lace shawl I started last month, and knitted four rows without an error (after I almost started on utterly the wrong row).

So there’s a little bit done here, and a little bit done there. I still need to work on the notes of the bass clef and I still need to review my Spanish. I still need to do a lot of things. But the subtle pressure created by external structures and other people’s deadlines is creating (or inspiring) some forward movement — just not outside, because now we’re in the middle of a late-night ice storm.

Blocked

My days have about half as much time as I’d like them to — maybe that’s because I haven’t made a habit of meditating and then planning out my day. In the morning, my mind whirls with everything I think I’d like to do; by mid-afternoon I’m scrambling to take care of what must be done. In the evening I’m in a panic at the “lost” day as I think of all the tasks I didn’t even start.

That’s just something I’ll have to get over. I’ll work on it.

In the meantime, I’ll tell you about what I did do, and not fret about what I haven’t done yet.

Today I worked a little, read a little, and drove a little. Our high schools have really strange exam schedules that are nothing like the exam schedules from my day. The length of the class time varies, the length of the school day varies, and I don’t have a handle on it at all. Eldest went to a different high school than MiddleSon does (and Daughter goes to a third district with which I rarely interact), and I have never figured any of them out. I am constantly taken unawares. That’s the long way ’round of saying I found out at 1:20 that I needed to pick up MiddleSon at 1:20.

I have a long history of being taken unawares by school deadlines and timelines. But that’s not important right now. Moving along, nothing to see here….

A little thing I did today, which is really more of a big thing, was to light a candle and do some reading in memory of a friend’s sister’s dog which ended its 14 years of life today. Losing any companion makes for a sad time. And if you have a pet, give them an extra treat tonight.

A big thing I did today, which is really a little thing in the scheme of all things, was to block the Kindness KAL Shawl. And I took pictures! I you are a yarnie and you haven’t blocked a finished piece yet, this should help to put you at ease and give you the confidence to do it yourself.

DISCLAIMER: Not everything has to be blocked. For wool lace shawls it’s a must. Cotton won’t block, alpaca cares about blocking almost as much as a honey badger does, acrylic requires a special steaming process called “killing,” and blends can usually be tossed in the delicate cycle and just come out soft. But I have made a wool shawl that needs blocking to create the shape it was meant to have. So, here we go!

First, you’ll need to get a set of foam mats. These are interlocking mats you can find in the “workout” aisle of a department store, and they usually come in sets of four. (You can also find them in the “preschool” aisle but they will be different colors and have letters in them. They work, too. Wait for a sale and you can sometimes get them at 20 to 50% off. This pair is a bit the worse for wear because they usually sit in front of the washer and dryer. I wiped them down briefly before putting them on the dining room table (with the extra leaves in). I should have used two more mats for this project, but they were in the garage, combined with others, under a weight bench with at least 200 pounds of weights. So sorry. Will make do with two.

Next, cover the foam mats with an old towel. You’re going to wash your knitted object by hand or on the delicate cycle in the washing machine with a gentle soap, and when you lay it out to dry you’ll need the towel under it to absorb the moisture.

Here I just dumped the shawl onto the towel, right out of the washer. I did have the shawl in a mesh bag while it was in the washer, because I didn’t want it to get snagged in the agitator. But you can see here how the ends of the shawl curl dramatically. This curl would have been less dramatic if I had used larger needles, but we have what we have. Blocking is the only thing that will straighten them out. The blocking wires, or pins, that I am going to use are visible just below the mats.

Here I have threaded the first blocking wire through the garter stitch bumps of what is actually the cast-off edge. Yes, I was actually knitting a triangle, so each side has to be straightened with a stiff wire.

Now, for the long edge. This one showed the most curvature, so it was the side about which I had the most concern. This took two blocking wires because of the length. At this point I wasn’t sure that I would be able to successfully block the shawl into the triangular shape. Look at all that extra area, bunched up in the middle!

All the edges have blocking pins now, but this is not the final shape we want the shawl to be. The stripes aren’t even and the edges aren’t straight. And you can see why I would have wanted to have two more of the foam mats (and another towel) at this point; I would have used quilting pins to lock the blocking wires in place through the foam mats.

After a tug here and a massage here, this is the triangular shape we were looking for. If this were summer, I would have brought a floor fan downstairs and trained it on the shawl, oscillating until the shawl had dried. With this week being so cold, that seems ridiculous and counterproductive. I’ll just leave the whole setup in place until the shawl is dry, and deal with the inconvenience.

Wool is an amazing fiber, and one of the qualities it has is called “memory.” That means that when my shawl dries in this position, it will STAY in this position after I remove the wires. If I have blocked it incorrectly or sloppily, it will show in the finished shape. To change that shape I would have to wash it and block it again. (This may also explain why the care instructions for woolen handknits are often simple “don’t get it dirty”.)

Even as I write this, the shawl is “drawing in” as it dries, and I had to adjust the two wires that are threaded along the longest edge.

Another way to block a shawl is to use straight pins rather than wires; this uses a LOT of pins but is very helpful when blocking out shawls with picot or scalloped edges. The following example is a shawl I knitted a few years ago.

Shaelyn shawl, before blocking.

Shaelyn shawl, pinned out over beach towels.

Shaelyn shawl, detail.

Blocking is not hard at all. It’s really just a process of gentle washing, pinning the project out to the desired shape, and allowing it to dry with that shape. Having the right materials on hand makes it so easy! Mild disclaimer: I do not have a cat, and my dog is neither able nor tempted to jump upon the dining room table to disturb this shawl as it dries. If you do have pets that might interfere with the blocking process, you may want to do this in a spare room or at a kind friend’s house.

Tomorrow beckons. Maybe I’ll do some knitting while you are treated to a guest post from MiddleSon!