Dog days and cat afternoons

Recently I started a house-sitting gig which includes feeding and hanging out with the four cats of a faculty member in my College. I’ve done this gig before, and the cats are sweet and friendly. Only one of them (I’m talking about YOU, Nathan) can be a handful, and even he has mellowed out from his kittenish times of last summer. I mean, he has only jumped onto a refrigerator shelf once this week. Clearly, he is maturing.

I’ve taken a couple of typewriters with me so I can do typing tests on them, evaluate what needs to be cleaned or adjusted, and do some free writing in the evenings. Last summer the cats were interested in the typewriters and wary of the noise I made with them. This summer they couldn’t care less.

To balance this gig with my canine-oriented responsibilities, during the work week I drive home for lunch, visit with Eldest and Dog, drop off yesterday’s clothes for the laundry, pack up the next day’s clothes, and exchange information about the state of American politics, the local weather, and the shock sacking of Christian Horner from Red Bull. So much is going on these days that it’s hard to keep up! But I make an effort.

I haven’t acquired any more typewriters, but I have made an inquiry about one. Alas, I go unanswered. Which is probably a good thing, since I’m not sure where I would put another IBM Model D. But this one supposedly works, which gives it the advantage over the one I currently own. We’ll see.

IBM Model D (non-working)

The Impossible Read? Haven’t opened The Bright Sword yet to keep going. But I intend to, and that’s obviously the most important thing.

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Knitwise, I’m relieved to be nearing the final stages for two of my three projects. For the shawl, I have one short lace section to knit (just six rows!) before I knit the usual eight rows of stockinette and then switch to a longer lace section that will run until it’s time to bind off the whole thing. After that, of course, I’ll need to weave in ends before washing and blocking the finished product.

This weekend I reached the point at which I had knitted up all of the yarn barf that had come out of the centerpull cake. The yarn attached to the cake had received an extra amount of tension and twist, and when I tried to un-twist the yarn it simply popped apart. Fortunately, I had [JUST] enough working yarn to make it to the end of the current row. Then I spit-spliced the ends together and kept knitting, which should be enough to anchor the yarn into the work. (I’ll remember to wash it with extra care, though, so I don’t risk pulling it apart.) After that, I pulled out all the rest of the yarn from the cake and rewound everything into a neat ball.

Just to give you an idea of how well named this colorway is, I also posed it with a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

Anyway. On to the Stolen Moments wrap, which just today reached the point of adding the third [and final] ball of yarn. The work is folded here; it’s about 50 inches long from the working needle to the cast-on edge. Based on my calculations (because of course I have calculations), I should be able to knit 20 more four-row repeats before I knit the garter-stitch edging and then cast off.

I am Not Sure how I will block out this wrap. I have extra leaves for my dining room table, but it still may not be quite long enough. I wonder if I can pin it out at work and leave it to dry over a weekend. Or I can block it in a really long hallway at the pet-free house of a friend. Suggestions are welcome.

The blanket has gotten past its first pattern section and border section. It’s still not big enough to lie flat, and won’t be for a while. But you should be able to see how this is going. There will be twelve more repeats of the pattern you see here, then the border at the other end.

This project should be considerably easier to wash and block than the other two. It’s also a lot more social than the others, for which I am very grateful.

In a different light

I’m back from a week of traveling, visiting with friends, and doing some research for both of my Primary Projects. I now find myself printing out Wikipedia pages, re-checking passages in support texts, listening to new music, wondering how to plant a backyard garden in the shade of a forest, reviewing and updating my notes, looking up mathematical genealogies (it’s really a thing; have your college math professor’s name handy to plug into the search bar, but only if they finished their dissertation), and ordering mid-1940s science fiction from Amazon.

The annotations that I’m re-checking are the things that I need to see in the best light (which I don’t always have) with my best eyes (these days, I remove my glasses so I can see better). After requesting, receiving, and beginning to read Detecting and Deciphering Erased Pencil Writing by the magnificently named Ordway Hilton, I have already found new ways to look for erased annotations in my Marginal Mystery text. One of my tools is a vintage desk lamp that can deploy an incandescent bulb, a fluorescent bulb, or BOTH bulbs. Now I’m seeing things that I didn’t see before and getting a better look at the things I did notice on my first pass.

I thought I would be double-checking my original list of annotations at this point in the summer, but now I’m adding to it. So when I’m done with this round, I’ll need to triple-check what I have before moving on to another part of the project. One of the reasons that I want to do this section rather completely is that I’d like to be internally consistent with how I’m recording the marks and annotations in my own records. Then, when I move on to other libraries’ copies of the same book, I will be in the habit of recording things in the same way.

Last week I was able to see that the copy of Development of Mathematics owned by the UW-Whitewater library has many more annotations than any copy held by the Ohio University System. Perhaps that says more about the means by which it was acquired. More to come….

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I’m delighted to report some major progress with the Impossible Read. I have crossed the halfway point of The Mists of Avalon and I’m now on page 474. It’s becoming a story that I want to sit with and really pay attention to; many of the things it has going on are very different from the events in The Once and Future King. Of course, these authors and their audiences are also extremely different, and perhaps that’s all that I need to say about that. The same will probably also be true of Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword when I’m able to start it.

But before I take on something so contemporary, I will have a copy of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to read. It shouldn’t be hard to find ways to view its 1949 and 1995 film adaptations. Then it will be time for The Bright Sword, which should close out our section on Arthurian legend.

What’s next? I shall consult with the members of my department (they do teach, write, and appreciate literature, after all), but right now I think the next book up is The Epic of Gilgamesh. If we start it before 2025 I will be absolutely stunned.

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After a closer examination, I can state with some confidence that the Sears Achiever I acquired last week (via a friend of my mother) was manufactured in 1977 or 1978. It’s a nice little typer with a good ribbon, and just needs a cleaning. It came in a tidy little case that will also receive a light cleaning.

I have also come into the possession of an IBM electric typewriter dating from 1972: a Model D. I made the offer on it because of the seller’s memories of typing on it at his father’s office. (I had similar memories at my father’s office, but I was instead enthralled with a manual staple remover. Maybe my ownership of a manual typewriter made me less inclined to seek out other typewriters during those tender years.)

Unfortunately, the machine (“Rodger”) did not power up when I plugged it in. That’s one of the reasons I have chosen not to collect electric typewriters: the extra variable about which I know nothing. This past weekend I encountered two electric typingwriters at two different Goodwill locations, and I was satisfied with tucking them back into their plastic cases for some other collector to discover. But I would like to get this one up and working, if it’s not too much trouble. I have already lugged all 40 pounds (or so) of it to the office. [GOSUB “sunk-cost-fallacy” / RETURN]

It has a 0.5 horsepower motor, from what I can see in the owner’s manual. Typewriter repairmen learned to fix those back in the day, and I can learn, too — if I can find a copy of the service manual.

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Knitwise, I didn’t take any knitting projects with me on vacation. But I did dart into a big-box craft store and pick up a pair of US 8 single-point bamboo needles so that I can move on to the next stage of the pattern. One does what one must.

I also spent some time picking out machine stitches of my mother’s quilting project. Dazzled by the softness of a microfiber flat sheet, she used it as the backing of a hand-pieced quilt top. When she saw the error of her ways — the sheet shifted under the machine stitching — she was too frustrated to think of how to take a step backwards and release the backing from the top. Before she was able to resort to using a pair of scissors, I intervened and sat down a couple of times with a manual seam ripper and picked out a few sets of stitches. The rest is up to my mother and her patience.