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.

Writing by candlelight

This weekend I finally flashed on a way to get my room organized in the way I’d been thinking about. A few packed boxes [of SecondSon’s books] later, I had my own books and items on the tall bookcase and I was able to clear off my writing desk (the one in my bedroom; I seem to have several) enough that I could pull out my journal and start writing. The last entry was dated April 30, but we are not going to dwell on that as we are going to be forward thinking. The new last entry is dated June 11.

The top two shelves.

When I sat down to write, I noticed that I had a small battery-operated candle to my right. I turned it on and felt soothed by the gentle flickering light. The writing-desk corner of the room is somewhat lacking in light after the sun starts to set, and I wondered what kind of lighting fixture I might try to find to put in the corner.

One of my tall Zen square lamps? Don’t have an extra.

Maybe a lamp that looks like a tall pillar candle?

What about just having a tall pillar battery candle? A bunch of pillar battery candles?

So I added “lamp/battery candle” to my Goodwill list for Sunday, and this afternoon I headed off to start the hunt. At the first Goodwill — the Simply Soft Victorian Rose yarn portal — I struck out on yarn but found three battery candles that looked like good candidates. “Ah,” said the cashier knowingly, “candles for people who can’t have candles.” At the second Goodwill there were more candle candidates, but I didn’t feel the need to stock up until I knew if the first set would work out.

At home I cleaned the dust off the candles, replaced the batteries, and fired them up. Unfortunately one of the battery-candle manufacturers missed the memo about how candles provide gentle, flickering light and used an LED in their model. I’m not sure what I’ll do with that candle, but I’m thinking about donating it to the second Goodwill. I could also keep it in the car for use as an emergency beacon.

Anyway, the other candles worked out and now I have a little candle grouping next to my writing desk.

The next journal entry should be June 12, but we will see how it goes.

I also organized a wardrobe that was holding almost all of my CDs, which I finally alphabetized, and some tape cassettes, which I stuffed in with the last drawer of CDs. This freed up the bottom two drawers, which I filled with yarn and project bags that had been sitting in a pile at the foot of my bed. Now other items sit in a pile at the foot of my bed, but not yarn. That’s progress, people.

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Knitwise, I finally got to the end of the current skein of Victorian Rose on the pink project, and I was even able to play a little game of Yarn Chicken to get there.

before…

after!

But the most important thing about getting to the end of this skein was that the measurements of the project would now allow me to calculate how much yarn I would need for the rest of the project. tl;dr — I am going to need one more skein of discontinued Simply Soft in Victorian Rose. The good news is that I can chug away on the two skeins of Victorian Rose that I do have, and it will be a while before I need to worry about finding Skein Five to complete this project. But it sure would be nice if Skein Five turned up before I even had to worry about finding it.

Other than moving the pink project around so I could knit at work and at home, I haven’t done much with the knitting this week. I did recently cast on for a new project, but I didn’t like the feel of the yarn at all (Red Heart Super Saver) so I may look through my patterns and stash to see if I can start something that will actually be relaxing and enjoyable to knit rather than another “I hope it will soften up in the wash” project that I have to slog through. Goodness knows there is enough nice yarn around here that is begging to finally be made into something. Perhaps the current acrylic project could be balanced by a project that calls for, say, baby alpaca. Or cashmere. Or maybe real wool with heckin’ lanolin. I’ll go take a look….