So, hear me out. There was this desk on Marketplace that I thought was a steal at $40, and I picked it up on Saturday morning after it popped up in my feed a week ago.
I have a new philosophy with regard to Marketplace listings. If I see something interesting, I message the seller to get in touch with me if they still have the item in a week. In this case it worked out perfectly for me. When I picked up the desk at the seller’s house, he told me that several people had contacted him about the desk, criticized its condition, and tried to talk him down to half the listed price.
Anyway, here is the desk, all closed up:
And here is the desk when it opens to reveal its secret writing surface:
My mother, who has done countless furniture refinishings over the years, has given me suggestions for the stages of this restoration project. I’m currently at the stage of looking for tools that I may already have, like rubber gloves, chemical strippers, rags, scrapers, and putty knives. She has advised me to scrub it with soap and water before I start experimenting with the chemicals to remove the weathered stain, peeling paint, and cracked varnish.
The legs need some repair, but I’m leaning towards replacement. We’ll get there when we get there.
At long last, I have an Impossible Read update for you! After getting out of my own way (with a little help from my friend Rick) I have been able to get back into the habit of reading. Just reading. No notes, no Post-It flags, no multi-volume reading journal — just reading and thinking. If I see something that I really really want to mark, I tell myself that I’ll flag it the second time around. (Sometimes I’m concerned about how easy it can be for me to trick myself.)
(Should I start a new blog just for the Impossible Read reactions after I finish each book? Well, I can just hear Rick saying No! You’re making more work again. Okay already. I’ll use this blog to record my reactions/reviews and I’ll make sure to add the Impossible Read keyword and tag.)
Sir Launcelot versus Sir Mador (art by N. C. Wyeth).
I’m still reading The Once and Future King, which is divided into four books; last night I finished Book Three, “The Ill-Made Knight.” That makes 544 pages down and about 120 to go. After I publish this post I’ll read a few chapters in Book Four, “A Candle in the Wind.” Hmm, I have heard that title somewhere before. Do you think that Sir Elton John may have possibly read this book as a child, or heard it read to him?
Knitwise, I had time during ThirdSon’s choral concert on Saturday night (which I watched live via YouTube link) and this weekend’s Miami Grand Prix qualification, sprint, and race sessions that the Habit-Forming Scarf is now 22 inches long. That leaves eight inches to knit from this skein, in case you lost track.
This is an honest measure. I’m not just moving the tape measure around to fake my progress, I swear.
I haven’t started any new knitting. Last week’s urge to do so may have just been restlessness. I’m not sure it would help me at this point to cast on for another project unless it was an extremely quick knit and I had an extremely good reason to knit it. Since I have so many other things going on these days, it might be better for my knitting if I stuck to one project and finished it before moving on to the next one. (Brandy, can you believe I’m saying this? I’m back to the way I thought when I was just learning to knit: I’m becoming a product knitter again! But I have much more yarn now than I did then.)
This week, otherwise known as Spring Break, I concentrated on research for a primarily nonfiction writing project. Or at least I tried to.
Almost as soon as I had scheduled the appointments with the University Archives, my brain rebelled and thought it would be much more exciting to focus on the fiction project and research the history of bluegrass music. (Not to say that it was wrong…)
It has been a revelation to discover that, instead of beating myself up for not correctly identifying the One Best Thing that I should be working on at any given time, it has been much more productive to work on two projects at the same time and let themselves fight it out for priority. That way I always have something to do.
The result is that, rather simultaneously, I am listening to CDs of bluegrass music, accumulating more histories of mathematics, figuring out where and how to print and laminate large topographic maps from the early 1960s, updating my spreadsheet of the UW-Whitewater Math Department roster, learning about GM models of the 50s and 60s, thinking about the post-World War II market for math textbooks, and wondering if someone (Casey?) can lend me a mandolin. You know, like you do.
I’m leaning into a lot of neurodiversity here and hoping that I can figure out what works best for me. Oh, and I made another pizza on Saturday. With all sautéed sweet onion slices and half portobello slices. And a homemade whole-wheat-blend crust this time, not a mix from a box. I’m trying to learn one little thing about pizza-making each week.
The next thing I need to learn is who would like some leftovers, as Youngest didn’t take those away at the end of the weekend. More to learn, more to learn.
Knitwise, I added a few more rows to the Habit-Forming Scarf this week. I know that I added eight rows during the Yarnhawks get-together on Monday, because I warned the others that I would probably fall asleep after six rows. But I vowed to push on.
The project is now exactly 12 inches long. I weighed the remaining yarn in the first skein, and was able to estimate that one skein will yield approximately 30 inches of scarf. This makes it a two-skein project when I have three skeins of the yarn. I don’t really want to turn this into a 90-inch scarf, so what should I do with the third skein? A matching cowl? A hat? A brooch? A pterodactyl?
Part of the reason this project is a bit of a trudge (though I’m sure it would go quite quickly if I were able to knit Continental) is that it’s grey. It’s almost spring now: I should probably be knitting a project with an Actual Color™. What would you suggest? Don’t be shy; I have a rainbow of colors in my stash. Whatever you name, I probably already have it.
This week I came up with a new plan to trick myself into doing more writing. I bribed myself with new pens — Pentel EnerGel 0.7mm pens in purple and blue liquid gel ink — and gave myself permission to start using a journal that proclaims on the cover that “Anything is Possible.” So far, the plan is to only allow myself to use the pens and the journal on the weekends, until such time as I truly can’t take the wait any more and insist on having half-hour free-writing sessions during the week.
We’ll see how it goes. And for those whose neurology is as unconventional as mine, you may be intrigued to know that the blue (cyan) EnerGel pen is made in Japan, while the purple (violet) EnerGel pen is made in Mexico. I am not making this up. And now you know, too.
Zoom in for more similarities and differences!
I don’t have any progress to report on actual typewriter maintenance. I did purchase a can of something called PB Blaster that is supposed to help with loosening the tight screw on the spool cover, but I haven’t had enough time to devote any of it to the Galaxie II. Maybe next weekend — or maybe not, if I have to go out of town (see below).
I haven’t found any time to do any reading for the Impossible Read, either, but this weekend I purchased two of the books on the list (The Old Man and the Sea and A Tale of Two Cities) and two of the movies I’ll watch between groups of books (The Sword in the Stone and Aladdin). That doesn’t really keep me moving forward on the project, but it does make me more prepared for forward progress when I have some. It will be a long time before I need a copy of the next text, which is Grendel by John Gardner, which I am reluctant to purchase because I think that I already have a copy that I can’t find.
I’m also collecting DVDs for a Kevin Smith movie watchathon over spring break at the end of March. At first I thought I would watch Clerks-Clerks II-Clerks III, but now I’m wondering if the order should really be Clerks-Mallrats-Chasing Amy-Dogma-Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and then Clerks II and Clerks III. What do you think? What do you think Kevin will suggest? (I’ll ask him.) For this project I’ll blow the dust off one of my other blogs, Take Five Movie Reviews, and link to it from here.
Knitwise, I cast on for a new project this week. The yarn is Patons Classic Wool, worsted weight, which I bought three skeins of by mistake when I was searching in vain for Plymouth Encore last fall to use in the recently finished Stripe Scarf.
This pattern, by Madison knitter and knitting designer Elizabeth Morrison, is called “Habit Forming” and is modeled on the pattern sheet by Friend-to-All-Knitters Franklin Habit. The pattern, which is a free download on Ravelry, was designed with Noro Kureyon in mind — whether or not you choose to edit the colorway — but I think this grey wool will look rather elegant. I have been finding it easy to sit down and knit two rows of the pattern at a time to take a break from the other items on my task list, so it’s slowly growing. I’m finding that breaking some tasks into tiny chunks is allowing me to devote larger chunks to other tasks. Imagine that.
I did mention earlier that the Stripe Scarf was finally completed. After I found the Perfect Box™ it was also shipped, but unfortunately I didn’t have the apartment number for my son. USPS returned the package to me, I obtained the apartment number, and I re-shipped the package. It arrived today (!) to some acclaim. Or perhaps it arrived yesterday and the acclaim was sent today. ANYway, the scarf has made it to its requestor. Will it snow again this winter? Who knows, but it sure has been cold. I do like knowing that Liam can now be more bundled up against the cold and the wind.
I think the Habit Forming scarf will be for me. The knitting itself is therapy, and it’s been a little while since I intentionally made something for myself to wear. (As you can imagine, I already have several hand-knitted shawls, hats, scarves, cowls, and pairs of socks.) Lately I have been trying to find patterns that will give me some pleasurable knitting and allow me to use up bunches of yarn. “You know, I could make myself a scarf” hasn’t exactly been the first thought on my mind. But now I’d like to give myself a nice cozy gift.
This week’s post has been brought to you by the memory of my grandmother, Elizabeth Christine (Chris) Walker, who departed this world earlier today at the age of 101-1/2. She was a force of nature and there will never be another one like her. She also loved the slippers I knitted for her over the years; I stopped making them because she became unsteady on her feet and I didn’t want her to slip. On Ravelry, where I haven’t updated my project records in several years, I found photos and notes for ten pairs of slippers that I knitted for her — so there may well have been more. She did wrap herself up in a throw that I knitted for her. Rest in peace, Grandmother.
It’s been a long week of bearing the bitter cold and snow, checking various tasks off my list, and finding peace and relaxation where I can. The spring semester begins tomorrow and I may not be able to take a deep breath until Friday afternoon.
This weekend I finished reading Uncommon Type, a collection of short stories written by Tom Hanks. Yes, that Tom Hanks. Each story refers to or features a typewriter in some way, but other than that the stories are quite diverse. They’re all very well done. I’d be proud of myself had I written any one of them.
Hanks’s work gives me encouragement to allow myself to work on a variety of writing projects. My head is full of story ideas, but sometimes I limit myself by worrying about what kind of stories I “ought” to be writing. (Finished ones, self. Finished stories are what you should write.)
I have book after book after book about how other writers write: what their libraries and writing areas look like, which computer or typewriter or fountain pen they use, when they sit down to write and when they rise up. I suspect that my attraction to these books was the hope that whatever routine and process worked so well for, say, Ursula LeGuin, would be the process that worked for me — if only I could copy it.
Of course, I am not Ursula LeGuin. I have led a different life and have a different mind and very different circumstances and resources. The lesson that I wish I had absorbed decades ago was to keep writing, try everything, and keep doing the things that work for me. So I guess I’ll have to take it to heart now, start writing, try everything, and find out what works.
Impossible Read checkpoint: The Once and Future King, Book 1, Chapter 16 of 24.
Knitwise, I have found a recipient for the finished Thrift Stripe Scarf. Eldest told me to take it to work and find out who it belonged to, so I did.
MUSIC: SAX SOLO
I was alone in my office that day. The ownerless scarf was draped over a chair. That’s when SHE walked in — the dame who needed a scarf.
MUSIC: FADES OUT
Anyway, they’re such a good match for each other. I’m now in the process of using the rest of the yarn to create a coordinating cowl for her.
In person, it doesn’t actually look like a terrified Muppet.
The Stripe Scarf is waiting, with a few other items, for the Perfect Shipping Box to come along so that it can be sent to its recipient.
I’m thinking of frogging the very narrow shawl — or whatever I had named it — made from the wonderfully soft lavender yarn I found at a thrift store. I now think that a traditional prayer shawl or wrap shape would suit the yarn (and me) better. If the events of the coming week make me want to tear something apart, I’ll do the frogging then to settle my mind.
And then I’ll be thinking about casting on for a new project: whatever works.
Chocolate Sheep 