Preparing for winter

It was a productive weekend in all sorts of ways, except for the amount of pleasure reading — sorry, Tolkien. But I am slowly making my way through The Two Towers. I’m not to Isengard yet, but a lot of folks are on their way.

Most of the work I did this weekend was in the house. Earlier this year — spring? summer? — I may have mentioned a cedar chest that we acquired when Eldest was able to unlock it for the previous owners. We didn’t necessarily want it, but we couldn’t find anyone we knew who wanted to have it. So we stowed it in the garage until this weekend.

Saturday was the last warm day that southern Wisconsin might have until…May. The high temperature dropped 20 degrees between Saturday and Sunday, and I have to assume that literally everyone I knew was spending Saturday doing those final chores before the approach of late fall and early winter. I can’t verify that because I was at home doing some of those very chores.

I had thought about using the chest in my bedroom, but it was a bit too wide for that. After I spent more time thinking about it, I saw that I could put it at the upstairs landing and use it to hold the extra blankets that we might need in the winter.

The only (!) problem was that the upstairs landing was already completely packed with all sorts of things. I would need to remove and triage all that, as well as vacuum the stairs and landing, before I could put the cedar chest there. Which was…dusty and needed to be cleaned inside and out.

It was a multi-phase process over the whole weekend, but on Saturday we were able to move the chest from the garage to the deck, where it could get a quick cleaning and dusting. While it aired out, I moved everything from the landing, treated and vacuumed the carpet, and started laundering the blankets that were being stored in boxes and bins. Before the sun set, we were able to put the chest in place.

Kind of invisible, isn’t it? That is a LOT of woodgrain. I thought about hanging something up behind the chest to break up the colors, but since there is an overhang that wouldn’t be the easiest thing to do. But I remembered that I had a metal quilt rack I was using downstairs.

And that’s kind of…blah. Maybe I have something else I can put there to break up the woodgrain and create some [calm] visual interest.

That’s more like it.

Since then I have refolded the quilt (which has one made for my grandmother, but not by me) so that it no longer shows a binding on one side and a fold on the other. And it now contains several freshly laundered blankets.

I’m still trying to figure out what to do with everything that had previously been stacked at the top of the stairs. But that’s a matter for another week (or so).

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I’ve been doing more steady work on my research project. Right now I’m taking genealogical data gleaned by the prior biographer and using it to fill out family history and five-generation charts. This gives me a better way to visualize the family — or it will, when I can add all the members of the families to my records. The prior biographer had a habit of writing things like “she was about three years younger” or “he came from a large family” without actually specifying the birthdate or the number of siblings in question. I think I’ll need several sessions with the library’s Ancestry account before I can collect all the data that she didn’t share in her book. I realize that she was focused on our mutual research subject and the direct family lines, but I sure wish that I had access to her notes. I want to take a wider and more comprehensive view.

Last week I watched a Zoom webinar about a printing press that was donated to a museum. It had been used for decades in a family printing business, and the owners had kept copies of hundreds of the posters, invitations, and other items they had printed for their community. Recently, some graduate students reverse-engineered the picture of a vibrant multicultural and multilingual (English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Spanish) community from the events for which printing had been done.

I would like to do the same thing with genealogy to solve some minor mysteries in my research subject’s ancestors. Why were he and his siblings born in a small town in Scotland when his father had lived near London? Well, his mother’s family lived in this small town, and she had two sisters and probably a raft of cousins. Something about the structure of the extended family made this something sensible instead of unusual.

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Knitwise, the rows of the Palm Frond scarf have gotten so wide that I only found time to knit full repeats on the weekend days. On both days, I knitted while watching YouTube videos about working with analog planning systems (shoutout to Rachelle In Theory). After knitting two more repeats I measured out the rest of the yarn, and only half the cake is left. But I also have just four 10-row repeats left before I bind off the project. That’s how quickly it’s getting wider. When I wear it, that width will become length… oh, forget it. I’ll just show you a picture.

I was a little bit more diligent at working on the Cottontail scarf this week than I was the week before. In the photo below I have folded the scarf at the halfway point, where I joined the second ball of yarn. Though I didn’t measure the work, you can see that I’m a bit more than 75 percent done. It’s not close-to-done enough to check my stash and see what I might work on next, but it’s close enough that I’ll have a warm scarf to wear while it’s still cold.

The spike inexplicable

We’ve been at this blog for a while now – writing it and reading it – and by now some things have become rather predictable. Around the time of a new secular year I’ll come to the blog and write a post. I’ll ruminate on the past year and speculate upon the next year. I’ll continue to blog on a regular schedule, which after a while will switch to irregular and then to sporadic. (If you’re lucky.) Back in the early years (when I didn’t have a day job) and in some of the more recent years (whenever I came up with a strong theme for the year’s posts) I wrote regularly or effusively. But no matter how the year ended, whether with a bang or with a whimper, I’d come back to the blog again on New Year’s Day and re-initiate the cycle.

One of the things that charms me about coming back to the blog is what I see in the Site Statistics when I return. Usually I see that, on average, a few people have stopped by a few times a week, throughout the year, to see if there’s anything new. (If you’re one of these people, you should just Follow me or the blog. I think you’ll get some sort of notification when I publish a new post, and you can save yourself some trouble.) Now, realistically, this low-level perpetual traffic is probably not coming from real people like you and me. It’s probably mostly bots, or spiders, of electronic what-have-you. But I do like to think that at least a couple of the visits come from my cyber friends who miss Chocolate Sheep and would like to see a new blog post. (If you’re one of these people, you should comment to that effect on the most recent post. I think that I’ll get some sort of notification when you comment, and that might encourage me to do more blogging.)

But sometimes I look at the Site Statistics and don’t know what the heck happened. A few years ago I was writing at another of my myriad blogs, Beth’s Bagels. Nobody knew about it and I wasn’t publicizing it. All of a sudden the traffic spiked tremendously and I couldn’t figure out why. It turned out that a recipe I had baked (without a great amount of success) for gluten-free bagels at Passover had been shared on Reddit. As far as I could tell some whole subreddit had come over to take a look at it, and then left forever. How fleeting is fame.

This year I noticed a brief spike on Chocolate Sheep, and I’ll need your help to figure out why it happened. I hadn’t posted anything since March, or May, or whenever, but around November 22 – well, take a look for yourself.

Here are the non-clues: I hadn’t posted anything, most of what was viewed was my “about the author” page, and I have no data to indicate that an outside site (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) referred anyone to my page. But apparently a lot of people stopped by my house while I was away, and I can’t help but wonder what they were looking for. The influx began three weeks before the week I have highlighted above, and by the end of November most of my visitors (but not all) seem to have wandered away. Any ideas? Put your thoughts in the comments and let’s play a little Sherlock Holmes.

Why were they here? ‘Cause they were here, roll the bones.

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Knitwise, I haven’t really been doing much knitting. Last year was a really slow year for it. Early in the pandemic a friend asked me to knit a very special item for his wife, and I was thrilled to be asked to do so. They provided all of the yarn as well as the pattern, and about three rows into the pattern everything came to a grinding halt. I couldn’t follow the pattern, and I didn’t understand the technique. I consulted more experienced knitters, I watched the tutorial video, I tried again. It was a hopeless mess. To cap it off, all the colors of the yarn were not only similar, but dark – and I didn’t have much available morning time in good light. Finally I set aside an afternoon (seated next to a bright lamp) in which I tried to get to the heart of the problem. That’s when I realized that not only was I trying to learn a difficult technique, I was trying to learn a specialized variation in which the pattern designer added a little something extra to make the pattern reversible. That made me feel better. But it also made me realize that I would need to rip the project out again, cast on for it again, and use a technique that I might actually be able to learn. I haven’t been blessed with a lot of free time in the morning with good light, either, so everything is still sitting in the project bag waiting for a miracle to happen. I really do want to finish the project, especially since this would be my (already somewhat belated) wedding present to the happy couple. I’d like that to happen before they decide not to be friends with me any more.

I have been doing some very simple knitting in the last month or so. I had a garter-stitch scarf at hand for working on during Webex conference meetings, when nobody could see what I was doing. This morning I sewed in the ends of five dishcloths that I had knitted up some time ago – maybe over the summer? Last spring? And at the end of November I seamed, washed, and blocked a simple shawl that I had knitted a year ago, finishing it in time to give it to a December graduate.

Now I’m combining two partial balls of yarn – one with its ball band, the other a complete mystery – into a striped scarf that I’m making as a gift for a May graduate. I can’t knit on it when I’m reading, but I can get several rows done while I’m listening to podcasts or watching movies. It’s extremely simple, but would you like to see a picture?

Oh, I forgot to mention the One-Row Handspun Scarf that’s also blocking here. Merry Christmas, Mom, whenever I manage to get it in the mail!

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I’ve also been trying to do more writing. I designed a writing retreat for myself in November (to make up for my inability [due to finances and the freaking pandemic] to spend a weekend holed up in a cabin somewhere), and I’ve been pretty good since then about journaling, doing reading research for a long fiction project, and doing writing connected with the planning of that project. Today I finished the first of several books that I’m reading as research, and after I publish this post I’ll get started on the next one.

Back to the books!