Not-Done

[The Wart] now discovered, with a helpless feeling, that there were no words for happiness, for freedom, for liking, nor were there any words for their opposites. . . . The nearest he could get to Right or Wrong, even, was to say Done or Not-Done. . . . Later on, the Wart discovered that there were only two qualifications in the [ant] language, Done and Not-Done--which applied to all questions of value. If the seeds which the collectors found were sweet, they were Done seeds.  If somebody had doctored them with corrosive sublimate, they would have been Not-Done seeds, and that was that.*

When last you read me, I was Done!  I had just finished some work and was reveling in my freedom, temporary though it was.  Now I'm back to my regular M.O., with heaps of work and projects that are Not-Done  and probably will stay that way, at the rate things are going.  For starters, some sort of voodoo has been worked on my computer and I cannot open my photo library.  I've had to resort to the circuitous and duplicative method of uploading the same  photos to my iPad, using said iPad to magic the photos off to Flickr, and then plopping the photos from Flickr into the blog.  It's like reaching over your head with your right arm to scratch your left ear. Or, to put it in terms of modern travel, flying 600 miles west to Chicago just to catch a flight to Miami, which was almost directly south of us in the first place.

Ridiculous as the method may be, I've managed to jam a bunch of photos into this post so that anyone who cares to may have a good laugh at my expense.  Not that I'm feeling bitter, or anything.

Exhibit A:





An ingenious solution to the Team Hat that was plaguing me in the last post.  It turned out that I had a commercial yarn in the right colors, quantities, and weights to make a non-handspun hat for Isa.  So I cast on for the Turn  a Square hat (see the way-cool squares at the top?)




with the idea that I would make it two layers--meaning I could use two color schemes-- and Isa would have a hat that was reversible, super warm, and color coordinated with her various uniforms. In an unprecedented burst of ingenuity, I cast on using two strands of the yarn (which is black, not blue as it appears in this willfully deceptive photo) and 2/3 the number of stitches called for in the pattern.  After the ribbing, I separated the strands onto two needles, one for the inside layer and one for the outside layer, and increased into every other stitch to get the number of stitches called for in the pattern. Yay me.

 I worked a few inches of the outside in black and gold and found out that my needle size was too small and I was knitting a 14 inch hat for a 23 inch head.  RIIIIIIIIIP.  Second try:  right size needles and marvellously quick progress.  I finished the black and yellow side and  showed Isa the hat for her approval.  Or disapproval, if you prefer, since there were entirely too many yellow stripes for her taste.  Being a kind and generally accommodating child, she said she would wear it anyway, but after I finished the red side--with half as many stripes-- I decided that no girl on the verge of her teen years should be burdened with a hat that looked like the back end of a bumblebee.  RIIIIIIIIIP.  I plowed through the reworked yellow side this morning and tucked in my ends only to find, while stuffing the inside into the outside, that the red side was significantly longer than the yellow side and that the corners (square top hat, remember?) were skewed by 8 stitches because I moved the marker by a stitch every time I hid the jog in the stripe.

RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIP!



And that is where we stand with that: Not-Done, in so many ways.  By the time I finish with this--assuming of course that I don't flush it down the toilet first--I will have knit the equivalent of four hats, with only one head covering to show for the effort.  Wildly amusing, really, since I originally planned to make a double-knit hat and have instead doubled my hat knitting.

All is not regression and despair, however.  Exhibit B is the second toe of the Yellow Socks.  Third toe, really, since I had to knit the toe of the first sock twice, but let's not dwell on that.



It has so far been a lovely and cooperative little toe and I'm beginning to believe that it might, someday soon, grow to be a much more cooperative sock than the first one, which, after weeks and weeks of being Not-Done, is now finished, although I am not yet emotionally ready to declare it Done.

Here is a picture that is close enough to allow you to see the free-range cat hairs that plague all of my knitwear.



And here is a close-up of the new-to-me sole flap with funky heel decrease technique, the one part of the sock that was Done right from the beginning.



See the upside down date in the picture?  It took quite a bit of manoeuvering to photograph the back of my own foot.

Exhibit C?  A mass of nondescript spaghetti-ish, beady-ish knitting.  It is part of a mystery knit along, so all I know is that it will be a shawl and that each row is now somewhere between 600 and 700 stitches and requires my full concentration, which is why this bugger is very definitely Not-Done.



Hang in there, though: we're almost Done.

Exhibit D: Towels on the Loom,



which, after a great deal of weaving last week, are about 45 minutes away from being Towels off the Loom.

But not today; I think I'm Done.

Need I even credit it?  T.H. White, The Once and Future King.

Let There Be Pictures!

Well, it took me an extra day, mostly because we spent yesterday at dentists and lunches and book stores and riding lessons, so that by the time I got home there was neither the will nor the daylight for taking pictures.  

But today is not only a new day, it is a car-free day.  El-Husbando took his car to the shop and then took my car to work, so the rest of us had no choice but to lounge around the house in our jammies.  I was supposed to get a whole bunch of stuff done this morning, including exercise and a massive clean out of the basement, but instead I read my book.  So there.  

I also snapped a few pictures, and here they are.

First up, my new sweater.  I had a lot of yarn left over from my not-a-clown-sweater (which, incidentally, is now one of my favorites).  So naturally I ordered a few more skeins of the red and made another sweater:

I love this one too; the lite lopi is toasty warm, but no so bulky that I can't move my arms around once I've put my winter coat on, so that's perfect.  Unfortunately, there's still a heap of the lopi left, and I'm now considering making a series of felted bags to use up the rest.

I started these socks (True Love, by Chrissy Gardiner) right after downloading the pattern, which was a valentine's day freebie.

I had no business starting a new sock, and I haven't gotten too far anyway, because I still have a heap of other projects to finish, including these socks:

They were supposed to be Turbo Toes, until I realized that I had changed everything in the pattern and had better call them something else.  I think of them now as Yellow Socks, which is a bit more encouraging than Irritating Socks That Have Had Two Different Toes and Three Different Heels and Will Probably Never Be Finished Because I Can't Work on Them Without Crumpling Under the Burden of Impending Failure.

When I wasn't busy knitting either the Socks that I Shouldn't Have Started or the Socks  That I Really Should Finish, I took some time to vandalize these poor things.  I knit them for a class and chose the yarn its for beauty and softness, rather than for its ability to last for more than one or two wearings under my nasty feet.  The construction of the sock allows you to replace just the sole.  I hope.

This, of course, is a mitten, a Super Mitten, to be precise, from the book Weekend Knitting. It's one of my favorite mitten patterns: quick, easy, and, if you line them with alpaca, super warm.

There's been some weaving going on too, or at least preparation for some weaving.  I bought these two color combinations in the fall

and today, since I couldn't drive anywhere, I finally put the finishing touches on my plans for the cloth and started winding the warp.

 It's going quickly, but my loom is set up for some towels right now and, unlike knitting, you can't just stick your current weaving project on a stitch holder so that you can use the loom for something else.  There's no way out but through, so I think you'll be able to guess what I'll be doing this weekend.

I did some spinning too.

 These lovely yarns are my kids' school colors (if you are willing to accept that the bottom one is more black than blue) and they were intended for a double layer hat for my daughter to wear for softball since a spring sport around here automatically means a lot of people standing outside for a long time in temperatures that are one step away from winter.  At least that was the plan right up until she told me that the hat was supposed to be her school colors (black and gold) on one side and her travel team colors (not black and gold) on the other.  Oh.

To ease the disappointment of having finally purchased fiber and spun yarn for a specific project, only to be thwarted by a misunderstanding, we baked cookies

and scones too, just in case.

I think the muscle burn from winding the warp has finally worn off, so its time to go and finish that task.   Just as soon as I have a little snack to sustain me in my labors.

Happy Thursday!

In which I am Free, and a Bit Giddy

Wheeeeee!!! I'm done!!! ImdoneImdoneImdone!!!! I have been working almost non-stop for days and weeks and months, culminating in two marathon work days at the beginning of this week and FINALLY I have gotten myself just far enough ahead that I can take the next few days off while the kids are on break from school.  Want to know a secret?  I might also take next Monday off, especially because even though they will have gone back to school by then.

All this work stuff means that, even though I have been knitting, I haven't been taking pictures so there isn't much to show here.  As a substitute, please enjoy the following pointless images from my (limited) non-work life:

1. This is Timmy.  He is close to 15 years old and likes to eat and lie on things.  Here is he telling me, via feline ESP, that he would like a snack.  Now.



The reason he is standing on the washing machine and asking for snacks is that I keep the kitty snacks in the laundry room.  The cats only ever ask for snacks while I am in the laundry room folding the laundry.  Either they are not bright enough to realize that they could ask for snacks in another room, or they think I'm not bright enough to understand them unless they ask while I am in the same room as the snacks.  Either way, it's a reasonably workable system.




Here they both are eating their snacks.  The picture I meant to take was much better than this, because the cats were standing in exactly the same pose.  But Tim moved, and that was that.

Sometimes the dog, who is foolishly optimistic, comes to the laundry room to beg for cat snacks too, even though we never share with him.

Here is Timmy in his most common non-eating position, i.e., snoozing on the chair in my office with the heater warming his old bones.  I think he's dreaming that he's SuperCat, flying through the skies to protect the innocent.



Here is what my van looked like a few weeks ago after it overheated while we were 15 miles from home with a trunk full of groceries. Again. It's been fixed and, because we are even more foolishly optimistic than the dog, we like to believe that now the van will run without problems for the rest of the year.



Here is what the world looked like not too long ago.  We haven't spent the winter covered in snow, but when it has come, it has been impressive to look at.



After we shoveled the top of the driveway, I made my husband take a walk so we could appreciate nature, etc. etc.



Here, apparently, is what the inside of my pocket looks like after a snowstorm.  Who knew?



Now that you've seen the inside of my pocket, I think we can all agree that we've probably seen enough for now, right?  Anyway, the kids are clamoring for dinner-- even though I will surely make it only to have at least one of them say "we're having that  again?" --and I don't know what I'm supposed to make tonight because I can't find the shopping list.  Hopefully, now that I'M FREE!!!!! tomorrow will bring better organization and a few pictures of knitted things.

Winter

Brrrr.

We're just a little cold here.  Today we started off around 9 degrees and we've topped out at 15.  Tonight we should be at 6.

Yes.

 Six. (If you like to measure things in Celsius, that's -14.444 degrees, according to the nice people at Google.)

Which is, in my book, bordering on unreasonably cold. But not quite cold enough to encourage teenage girls to wear mittens and hats.

I'm not complaining.  This is what January should be like here and I get spooked when the month fails to live up to my meteorological expectations. Plus, it's much colder in other places.  And it's sunny and clear here, even if it's cold.

Last month it was not sunny and clear.  It started off that way (probably), but around 2:00 one afternoon, the snow started coming.  By 5:00, we looked like this:

See the pumpkin in the corner?   Not anymore:




By morning, we were good and covered and it took us a few hours to dig ourselves out.




Actually, I did the shoveling.  The boss-man hopped in his big-old manly-man truck and plowed and plowed and plowed until the driveway was passable, and then he thought he would plow a little more.

The big-old manly-man truck thought otherwise.

We've had this truck for a few years and in that time we have come to realize that it has some independent notions about stopping and starting.  It is also not road-worthy, so it is not registered with the authorities.  This is not really a big deal since we use it only on our private property, except for that moment of thrilling lawlessness when we have to venture out into the public road to turn the thing around.  But it has, naturally, become our fear that the truck would suddenly decide to make an unscheduled stop while we were practicing our lawless ways.

And so it did.

But it didn't just stop in the road.  It, being a vehicle of independent and contrary ways, stopped across the street:



Of course.



In the hour before the tow truck came (impressively fast for a stormy morning), we learned (1) how to unhook the plow from the truck, which involves an unfortunate amount of scrabbling around on the dirty snow under the truck to hammer rusty pins out of sticky spots, but which had to be done before the truck could be towed away, and (2) that we have neighbors who are willing to spend that hour out in the snow with us, sorting out the plow removal, providing moral support, finding chains and trucks with which to haul the plow back up the driveway, and not laughing at us too much--at least not to our faces.

I think we'll be hiring someone else to do the plowing now.

The storm raised another important question:  What do the chickens do with all the snow?

The answer?  Not a whole lot.

While I was out with my shovel, I cleared a path to the coop and then, in a fit of industry that turned out to be entirely wasted, I shoveled the snow out of half of the run  so the chickens could come out and play.



Which just shows that after three and a half years of living with these birds, I haven't learned a whole lot.

They looked out the door



and they ate whatever snow they could reach







but they refused to come outside.  For days.  Even though the temperature was in the 20s and 30s and even though I shoveled a path for them. Fifteen degrees and wind, though?  Doesn't bother them at all.  Go figure.

A Tale of Two Loaves

This

 

 

is an unbaked Challah.

 

So is this:

 

They look lovely, don't they?

Here they are all baked for our (rather late, as usual) dinner last night.

You might think that two loaves of Challah is a trifle decadent for a family of 6 and I would normally agree, except that the first loaf is actually an Emergency Backup Challah, which was a necessary precaution given that the second loaf contains fig paste.

I kid you not. Fig paste. I baked it on a whim, which is a complete and total lie since I am not the kind of person who keeps figs in the house just in case I am suddenly seized by the urge to surprise my family with figgy baked goods. What really happened is that I pre-ordered the Smitten Kitchen cook book last spring. The book contains a recipe for this avant garde Challah and I immediately ran to the store to buy figs so I could make it. That's another lie: what really happened is that I put figs on the weekly shopping list, forgot to buy them two weeks in a row, and then, after I finally remembered to buy them, stuck them in the baking cabinet and forgot them for two months. Kind of like I forgot about the SK cook book and was therefore completely freaked out when Amazon billed me for it in October.

Getting back to my point (which was not to demonstrate to you that I am a compulsive liar), yesterday I finally made the figgy challah because (a) I had time and (b) I needed to score a major culinary hit in order to restore my self-respect as a cook after Thursday's little "incident."

 

(Really? Do we want to know about this? Here goes: I promised my family--in particular EH who has grown disillusioned with the pizza available for take out in our tiny town-- home made pizza. I found a reliable recipe, messed with it as little as possible, and made two perfect pizza crusts, which I topped with a nice sauce and exactly the right amount of pizza cheese. Then, still following the recipe, I put the first pizza in the oven and burned it to a crisp. Fortunately, I had the second pizza. I reduced the oven temp by 50 degrees, lowered the time by 3 minutes, and baked it to perfection, which made it all the more painful when the pizza pan caught on the edge of the oven door and dumped the pizza face down on my kitchen floor. So now you know how I have come to doubt my skills as a cook and I think you'll understand why I needed to stage a culinary comeback.)

So getting back to the point for real this time, I made the figgy challah and I made a standard challah because I knew that dining among us would be those who would fear and resist challah innovation, seeing in it the the abandonment of all standards of decency and, probably, the end of civilization. And in defiance of those hyper-conservative diners, the figgy challah was lovely to look at.

Here it is again, in case you forgot

See? Here it is again so you can gaze upon it with awe.

It was also lovely to eat, kind of the upscale city-dwelling cousin to the raisin challah. Well worth the effort and sure to impress the guests, should we ever invite any.

Or at least the corners were. You may have observed its square-ish shape, which provides such striking visual contrast to the reliable oblong braid of the traditional/emergency backup challah. This is an exceptionally fun shape to braid, but if your dough is--just to give a random example that has nothing to do with me--a little less elastic than usual, and if as a result--again I'm not drawing from any recent personal experience at all here-- you stretch the fig-filled dough ropes out to their full length only to have them snap back to their original size so that you can only shape a squat and heavy loaf, you may find that the outside bakes beautifully whereas the inside remains somewhat gummy. Pudding like, if you will. Not that I would know; this is merely speculation.

Fortunately, there was the reliable, traditional, emergency backup challah, which was excellent at dinner and again as toast today. And just to preserve me from the ego-shattering effects of a third dud dinner, EH has kindly said that I am under no circumstances to think about making dinner tonight; he will take care of the whole affair by bringing some food in from a restaurant. He was very charming about how it would be his pleasure to get dinner and I shouldn't even think of cooking.

In fact, he was quite firm about it, and I'm beginning to wonder if I'm not on to something here . . .

 

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101 Reasons Why I am Missing my Deadline

#53: The Fat Cat Sat on the Manuscript

Okay, so maybe 'manuscript' is over-glorifying my work a bit, but when I sit down to work on a Saturday morning, this is not what I want to see:



I don't think people--by which I mean me-- should have to work on a Saturday if they have been working all week, so I like to just sit down, get the stupid work done, and get on with the fun part of the weekend, which is pretty much everything that isn't work.  In this way, I am a much better worker on a Saturday morning than I am any other day of the week.  Except maybe Sunday.

So I asked the cat if she would mind moving her  furry butt off my work as it was making it difficult to see the words, much less write on them with red pen.

She moved:




It might interest you to know that I had been editing the bottom left corner of the page, so it would seem that I was better off before I opened my big mouth.

I explained to the fat cat that I didn't want to be working in the first place, but that due to one thing and another I was past my deadline and needed to get things back on track and I was really very sorry that she couldn't spend the morning lounging on my pieces of paper, but there it was and why didn't we both make the best of it.

She was not impressed.

 t

 So I told her that she could stay on the paper for three more minutes while I went to make my coffee, but that after that she really would have to find a different seat.

She did.




Now at least we are both warm, even if I can't reach my papers to edit them.

My Kind of Day

Today is National Cookie Day.

I will be celebrating with these,



although I will, of course, be turning them into actual cookies first.

I was supposed to add these to the mix:



Unfortunately, in a moment of wild abandon, I ate most of them and will have to buy a new bag.  You can tell that there aren't enough chips left for the cookies because the bag is (a) open and (b) suspiciously flat.  This happens now and then (if by "now and then" you understand that I mean with clock-like regularity), especially if shopping day and cookie baking day are too far apart (i.e., not the same day). You might be tempted to suggest that I buy two  bags of peanut butter chips--one for me and one for the cookies-- but to buy two bags of peanut butter chips would be to concede that I have no self control and I refuse to believe this.  So I carry on in my ways, buying bags of peanut butter chips (chocolate chips, too, if you must know), pretending I can save them for baking, and gobbling them anyway.  But only one bag at a time.

Off to the store to buy some more (if only it were national poetry day as well!).  I promise this time that I won't eat all of them before I make the cookies.

p.s. Lest you think I am a complete pig, I should note that the bulk of the cookies will be delivered to El Husbando's hockey team.  They have won their first two games and are most deserving.