Snow Art and Knitting Horror

Hello again! Are you ready to be shocked to your core? Or perhaps you need bracing with a snow sculpture from my deck railing first:

This might be the local squirrels' attempt at carving out a winter sleigh or racing animals, but it might also be the product of artistic melt. Either way, I'm so glad I risked crossing the ice early on a cold morning to get this photograph. The whole thing sagged down under pressure from the sun by midday.

I use our deck quite a bit even in winter, just to step out from the kitchen and stretch, and to get a little air when I'm too busy for a walk. It makes a nice break when I'm waiting a few minutes for something on the stove or in the oven, or boiling water for tea, or when my brain is full. Even when it's desperately cold. The key to success here is: just stepping out. If I had to stop for boots and a coat, it wouldn't feel as liberating.

Pete bought me a special red shovel (my favourite colour! so sweet of him) so I can clear out a little space for myself after a snowfall. And quite often he clears one for me, which was very lucky the day a light snowfall turned to ice.

So grateful we re-stained the deck last summer. It's reassuring to know the wood is safe under all that cold and wet.

Since I took the sculpture photo, it's snowed, and now we have a giant fuzzy snow caterpillar instead:

Okay, I should think you're ready for the horror now. Are you? 

I was looking through my old Hugs from 2017, and discovered the hat I am currently not finishing was also being not finished that October:

And frankly, I don't think I've taken it very much farther from when I took this photograph five years ago. How is it possible I have had a hat on needles for five years??  And probably five and a half.

Reading through those old posts it seems like 2017 was a terrible year overall, though we did move back into the house after our lengthy renovation and had a big trip to Germany as well. On the upside, though various events at the time (breaking two fingers at the start of the year, packing and unpacking in the middle, and preparing a rental for a tenant at the end) all conspired to break me of my daily knitting habit, I did manage to get back to writing. And writing is my first love after all.

I read an article about knitting the other day, one of the type you see every so often about how knitting is a feminist or revolutionary act, or that people who knit are all united in some movement or other, and I was struck by how much I don't see it that way at all. 

Obviously it's true in some ways. Many knitters work to donate chemo caps or hats and blankets for preemie babies to hospitals, for example. But to me knitting is like cooking. Not everybody learns how to do it, but we all rely on the product of somebody's labour, unless we live in places where the only necessary clothes are woven. 

Sometimes it's relaxing, sometimes it's a creative outlet, sometimes it's a way to show love, sometimes it's simply necessary. 

There's no rule about who can do it and who can't. There are guides for people who struggle to learn. It never goes out of fashion. It's kind of a core survival activity.

So if you look at it that way, I seem to be going through a period of takeout, combined with eating from a pantry of food I put up earlier.  

Still, I hope I do end up finishing the hat before next winter comes, even if I never bother putting one on when I step out onto the deck.

Man. I never know what to expect when I get out there, but there's always something beautiful.

Hope you have something beautiful this week yourself, and that we get to spend a few minutes together again next weekend!

Blends for the win

Hello again! I decided to open today's chatty and informative hug (of course I'm kidding, it will be all chat) with our resident lilac's spring show, unfortunately lit because it seems I love the lilac more than I do good photography:

I've been doing an art course about how to recognize the colour combinations you like and this is a classic for me apparently. I seem to prefer neutral backgrounds and with a pair of brights in front. If they smell great, so much the better. And lilacs are so, so delicious, aren't they?

Now that the flowers have served their purpose our lilac has gone back to its usual summertime tasks of offering shelter to passing birds, and painting shadows on the deck wall. It does an excellent at both. 

But that's not really want I wanted to share today: instead, I want to talk about - well, I'm going to say tea, but not really only tea.

Allow me to explain. There's this wonderful scene at the end of the film The Cat Returns in which the chaotic main character, whose life is always a disorganized rush, appears calmly at the breakfast table, neatly dressed and sipping tea, when her exhausted professional-quilter mother staggers in for caffeine. She offers her mother some of her tea, which she has blended herself, thereby completing her character arc from utter disaster to On Top Of It All. 

The scene has stayed in my mind ever since I saw that film ten years ago or so, and yet, it's only occurred to me in the last week or so that

ANYBODY CAN BLEND THEIR OWN TEA!!

Gah. I've been so, so bored with my decaf tea options for months now, only able to get loose Assam, and a blend of Darjeeling and vanilla. The vanilla one is nice, but lacks something, and the Assam is kind of flat. But one day I was looking glumly at the tin holding my current favourite caffeinated tea, knowing I wouldn't be able to handle it, and I suddenly registered the subheading - 'a blend of Assam and Darjeeling teas'. 

Did I already say Gah?

Turns out, decaf Assam and Darjeeling with vanilla combine to make a really nice tea. And blending a little full-caffeine Darjeeling with decaf Assam is very manageable and full of flavour. I don't bother pre-mixing any of this. I just put half as much as I normally would of one tea, and and then as much again of the next, into an empty tea bag.

 

It's official: I can drink tea I blended myself.

(Also, I finished the writing part of my current book project and am on to editing, which I can do in far shorter bursts, allowing me to tidy up the house and catch up on laundry. I'm sure the timing of all these developments is a complete coincidence.)

And now that I've written this down, maybe it won't take me so long to notice simple and obvious solutions to the next of life's tinier challenges. A girl can hope, right?

That's me for today - stay well, and I'll see you again soon!

 

Learning from dirt

Hello again! I know I've been VERY quiet here but trust me, I've been super noisy working on a new book project. It is difficult to juggle both so I'm going to try something new, again: small posts more often, instead of long posts not nearly often enough. Let's begin with this treasure:

I couldn't paint something as delicate as the abstract art in the middle of this beautiful Wedgewood plate if I tried. Do you find it as compelling as I do? 

(don't answer that.)

(unless your answer is your jaw dropped in admiration, like mine.) 

It's almost sepia, one of my favourite colours to work with, and the lightning bolt coming down from the centre is just wow. That thing looks good sideways, too.

 

Background: 

I rescued this plate many summers ago from a sort of performance art event where visitors could smash plates in a safety booth, so the artist could add the pieces to a growing pile of broken pottery stretched out over a very long table. 

It was an interesting idea for sure, and she explained that plates are made excessively and with no recycling plan, as they can't be composted once they have been glazed. All true and worth thinking about. But if you're an old-school Hugs reader from before my regular posting routine got interrupted, you know I have a huge passion for old plates, which are some of the most basic artifacts of social history, and affordable examples of graphic design history too.  It was basically a "heart meets melon baller" moment, watching those plates smash.

(disclaimer: I house five sets of dishes in my kitchen, at the expense of food storage space. I'm not exactly level headed on this subject.)

 

So: I rescued this dish and two or three others to use under plant pots. And for the last few weeks/months this plate has sat under a pot with a drainage hole in the bottom after the pot's original matching saucer broke. It was the perfect size of pot to display the floral border of the plate and nothing more, and also, it's fired with black enamel, so they looked great together. But while I was reorganizing my indoor garden today I dismantled that part of the setup and discovered a sad truth:

 

 dirt
sifting through the rocks in the bottom of a pot
is a better artist than
me

I have since washed the plate. You'd think that was just a single dusting of dirt but you'd be wrong- there were layers and layers of it. It was really thick! I am totally learning from the dirt and doing tons of layers on my next abstract effort.

And that 's me for today. Hope you're well, and I hope to see you again here soon!

Caffeine Day

Every week or two there's a magical day at my house, in which I consume caffeine and my housemates are filled with joy. It's not that I'm cranky without caffeine. I gave it up as a daily event a few years ago, and there are no withdrawal symptoms if you're not reliant. The difference is energy. 

 

If it's my turn to make supper on Caffeine Day, it will be delicious and served in coordinated fashion, just before everyone is starving and not an hour afterward.  And if it's a haircut day (because yes, scissors and clippers and combs are new creative tools I have been enjoying since last spring) the chances of my co-habitants getting out of the chair looking ready for a Zoom closeup increase dramatically. I can't say they get to 100%, not after the time I cut the front of somebody's hair a whole lot shorter on one side than the other, but it's better than average. 

(okay, I admit it: I've made that mistake twice now. On two different people. And yet every few weeks I'm still asked to turn the kitchen into my my amateur hour hair salon. I don't think ANYbody looks that trustworthy, but here we are.)

On Caffeine Day, it's likely that everybody will get some quantity of clean laundry, neatly presented. Random neglected corners are dusted or tidied or made beautiful and suddenly noticed and admired. Orders get placed for things somebody wants and I put off coordinating. Sometimes, there's even a random act of luxury baking. And because I make progress on my own work as well, coming close in this case to finishing a sock...

 

... I'm happy all day long. Always infectious!

I don't think it's just the drug, though obviously that has an impact. I think it's just the sheer number of hours I have to work with. On a caffeine day, I get up early so I can finish my morning tea at least 14 hours before I expect to be asleep again, and from there the whole day feels like a never-ending gift.

Also, tea with caffeine in it tastes SO MUCH BETTER. (With the notable exception of Harnet & Sons' wonderful Vanilla Comoro, highly recommended and available in big bags of loose tea as well as sachets.) Who isn't going to be extra cheery with a delicious cup of tea in hand, rather than a sad cup of brownish water?

 

This week, I timed a Caffeine Day to fall on the first Monday after the time change, a twice-annual event I personally would like to see the back of. I dragged myself downstairs early enough to see sunlight pouring in through our back windows onto the fine spray of crusty-loaf breadcrumbs that covered our kitchen counter, but had been invisible to me before. While the water boiled, I swept them away and wiped down the counters. 

See? Just thinking about imminent caffeine offers a power boost. And as we slog through a pandemic I'm not too (house)proud to consider wiping down a crumbly counter a heroic achievement.

The best piece of that Caffeine Day's magic was figuring out how to solve a problem with my current writing project that has eluded me for weeks. But I also painted a get well card for a friend. These are the rejects and I wish I could say the final choice was an improvement. 

 

Still, finished!

And I used the leftover paint to set up backgrounds for future doodlings, as I learned watching a video interview with a commercial artist who does this every time she finishes with one palette and begins another.

 

I have since started The Doodlings. They don't have to be good to be a satisfying break between other mentally taxing things. And somehow, the messy colour at the back and the unskilled drawing on the front usually adds up to something I might see on an actual greeting card. I am now kicking myself for not pursuing this avenue for the get well card I did send.

 

The trouble with Caffeine Day is that it never seems to end at midnight. That means the day after is always Groggy Day, in which I flail my way forward till bedtime. So I have to ask myself, does one day of super productivity result in enough to cover two days' worth of requirement? And also, does it matter, if I manage to enjoy both days regardless?

I still don't know the answer. I just know it was hard work to free myself of caffeine in the first place, and I sleep better without it. I guess everything in life is a balance. 

 

Hope you've had a good couple of weeks, with or without a good strong cuppa tea or coffee. And I hope you're not as disappointed as I am that I still cannot paint a plausible flower! Soon. If persistence is enough to make it happen, then maybe next time we meet there will be one at the top of the Hug :^)

A lot of nice things

Well I've been a pretty terrible internet friend, haven't I! No new hugs for months. Rest assured though, any hug would have been the same as the hug from the day before, because things here are much the same as ever. Perhaps with more plants in the windows, art supplies on every horizontal surface, and cans in the pantry. Which is to say, the sock obsession continues.

I've been knitting this particular sock while watching our endless supply of pre-taped episodes of Escape To The Country. If you don't know this show, it goes like this: home buyer/s longing to get out of the city go along with a charming host to look at three houses in the UK region of their choice. This might not sound absorbing until you consider all the staggeringly beautiful landscapes you get to look at while they explore their dream destination. I put it on par with the countryside views in All Creatures Great And Small, which you may also find yourself watching these days.

The plant obsession is newer. I have only ever been able to keep one plant alive - this gorgeous tall sun-dappled monster, grown from a cutting twenty years ago when the man who looked after my then-office's plants gifted one to me and two other employees from an 8-foot tall tropical tree we all admired. 

 

(sidebar: two summers ago I ran into one of those two friends and mentioned that my cutting was doing really well. She had NO idea what I was talking about, even after I reminded her about that wonderful day and the secrecy we were sworn to by the plant man and the fact that I'd actually seen the cutting still in water and growing nicely on her windowsill a few months later. So I'm thinking it's even more astonishing that mine survived, because hers had to have died.)

My plant has absolutely loved its new home in this window our much-loved contractor Ray suggested we add, when we renovated the house. In its old configuration, the rooms were so dark the plant survived but stayed pretty compact. Since we moved back in to the more sun-drenched version, it's doubled in size and produced a cutting which is also pretty good-looking. I'm getting worried, actually. In another twenty years, I'm going to have to live in a house with enough space for a tree. Or else get rid of things to make enough space for a tree. Or maybe find someone who will take the tree and give me a cutting so I can start over.

In November I had time to catch my breath after the long recovery from my ankle sprain, which I might possibly have milked to eke out more writing time. While taking said breath I decided we could give more plants a home here, and I ordered eight small pots to be delivered before the weather got too cold for them to spend even ten minutes unattended on the porch.

There's ivy and parlour palm and a baby Monstera Deliciosa with glossy, intact leaves (my favourite, but don't tell the others) and a few other varieties.

(whispers: I might have taken this portrait of Baby Monster with the cute cup I use when watercolour painting, because I love that plant so much.)

Most of the new plants have been a delight, growing very slowly and politely, looking adorable and respecting their companions' needs. Not so the golden pothos, which is putting out new leaves every few days. Even on the cuttings I've already had to take and put in water. 

 

I have no experience with random plants that do this well on my watch. Should I be grateful, or just make sure I don't give it a bigger pot before it's absolutely necessary? Is it cruel to send out an e-mail blast in spring, offering cuttings to my neighbours before it takes over our house entirely?

Of course, another daily thrill here is cooking a meal. Again and again, and again. Sound familiar? One recent discovery at my house:

I really like anchovies!

Well, I like them melted into a mixture of shallots and garlic and olive oil and brick-red tomato paste, and served over pasta (thank you, Alison Roman, for inventing Caramelized Shallot Pasta and sharing it with The New York Times.) I am craving that dish most days, but spacing it out by two or three weeks so we don't lose the sense of being in a good restaurant as valued guests and devouring an amazing meal we could never possibly produce at home. Here is a pot of pre-caramelized shallots and garlic:

 

Another new craving is Italy's apparently famous Rio Mare tuna. I heard so much about this tuna I had to give it a try, but was a little daunted when mine came out of the can looking like something you might not be inclined to feed the two-legged members of your family. Valiantly, I kept faith with the positive reviews and gave my dining companion the larger pieces to eat as is, while smearing the olive-oil-soaked shreds left behind onto toast for myself. We ate in silence, sneaking looks at each other between bites. 

We had one opinion immediately after the meal: that looked weird, but tasted all right. 

An hour later, we had another: how soon can we open another can?

As I type this: how many more hours now till Wednesday?

But enough about fish. Let's talk art supplies! 

As you know, I am no artist, but hope springs eternal and I still try most days to do something, even if it's just the odd doodle, such as this one of a head of garlic having a chat with an onion. And yes, I did specify what they are just now because I can't imagine it's easy to guess.

Trust me, it looked almost convincing when I drew it in its original tiny scale.

Unfortunately, access to creative space has become a problem since my non-plant companions in the house are all here all of the time now too, and hunting for quiet places to work or Zoom without interruptions. Over the first few months of this strange year-plus yuck, I did add a total of six new desks to this house, plus two generous work pads on the dining room table, allowing all of us a dedicated space plus a few shared options to drift through for variety. But... 

... my cute tiny office, the room subcontractors kept asking when the plumbing was going into during construction, had to be sacrificed to the needs of others.

 I know! Heartbreak. It's the only room we have with soundproofing in the walls, and a door. It was inevitable.

I thought I could still write or paint in the office sometimes but the good feeling I had there is gone now that I'm finding random pencils on the sitting desk, or a stack of books for their laptop camera to be at the right height, or a random power cord.

Thankfully, nobody at all was interested in the 5' wide, 16" deep console table I shoved under our dining room window. I can't imagine why. It is the perfect place for watching the world go by when taking a break from staring at a screen and typing. (during my breaks from typing this, I am seeing runners, walkers, and dog-walkers, some of whom are also running - dogs and dog-walkers both.)  

This picture has terrible exposure, but it's so sunny today it's impossible to get a better shot. 

 

Sitting here is a lot like sitting at the window ledge counter on a barstool in a coffee shop in the Before Times, but on a shorter chair with back support. I sometimes make a decaf Americano (sad, at-home, pour-over version) to strengthen the similarity. And since two of my housemates are currently baking chocolate-chip cookies - I wish you could smell what I do! - I think today needs to be one of those days.

Wondering about that horizontal box under the plants? It's a Tombow marker case, unfolded and laid flat. I'm so proud of myself for thinking of this arrangement, which allows me to see exactly what I want to use without interfering with my plants' daily sunshine feast. I did worry about the surplus lid being a space hog, but I couldn't have been more wrong.

And when I'm not using it as a desktop sorter, it tucks neatly onto this very small bedside table we snapped up years ago in a charity shop. It's turned out to be a hugely versatile piece, its scuffed surfaces mattering not at all since it's usually against or under something. Or both.

I keep my watercolour paints in the drawer, and tucked between the right side and the table leg, two black cutting boards large enough to protect the surface of the table. The other day I set up a watercolour tutorial on a screen in the little gap on the windowsill, thought I'd like to try it, and in less than two minutes had the table set up and ready to go thanks to everything being organized and close at hand.

(whispers: I think this might be even better than my little office??)

Actually, I can see this being the office of the future, for me. I never intended to use our dining room for dinner parties, though we have done that once or twice: what I see is an excellent work room with a long table, ample cabinet storage that passes for china cabinetry but actually holds office supplies and sewing/knitting gear, and bright overhead light. Already, I have started swiveling my chair around to the dining table immediately behind me to reach things I've set there, credenza-style. It doesn't feel weird to share this area like it does in my actual office, and when somebody else needs to have it to themselves I'm usually ready to shift to another location anyway.

Unrelated news: I have now eaten two of the cookies baked by Not Me. They are delicious. Do you think I can have more with the coffee I'll make as soon as I finish typing this?

(whispers: say yes!)

 

Now that I'm writing a hug, I find I have a million other trivial things I'm longing to mention, but I'll save those for another day, which I hope won't take months to pin down next time. For now, I hope you like the way the sun painted the fence behind our lilac tree as much as I do.

 

And until we meet again, stay well and please do take care of yourself!

Finding beauty where it lives

Let's mark this reunion with some eye candy, shall we? Unfinished socks, meet mantelpiece.

I never get tired of the way plain knit stitches look up close, so neatly arranged. Orderly. Predictable.

Maybe even a little fluffy, like these ones, which are made from a mohair/wool blend.

You may recognize this as the farm yarn I love which is no longer in production (but thankfully and for reasons I can't imagine, ahem, I still have a substantial supply). It's a heavy, warm, hardwearing yarn that makes excellent wintertime socks. Unusually, I find they are the pairs I am turning to most often in these springtime weeks, even though some days the temperatures are warm enough to set trees to bud. The wool breathes well, so they're not too much, and the heft of the fabric is so comforting.

And boy, do we need comfort right now, don't we? Wherever we can find it.  I write this as a healthy person sitting in a comfortable home with people I enjoy enormously, very conscious that too many others are not nearly so fortunate. I hope you are doing okay, wherever you are right now, and that the people you love are doing okay too. I am going to cram as many hugs into this post as I can. I wish I could do more.

Socks, not quite crammed into a carry basket for easy Netflix knitting

*

It really is spring here now. I can tell because the leaves are starting to come out on the mystery tree in our back yard.

They are so incredibly green and perfect for the first two months or so, before they go patchy and brownish in July. You have to admire their resilience. This tree was old when we bought the house and that was a pretty long time ago, but it hangs on, as should we.

 

*

Those of us lucky enough to face the question of how to spend all our newfound indoor time are addressing it in different ways. Some are productive, and others are nurturing. In my case the answer is: run just fast enough to stand still.

I am on a crash course in keeping more than two or three days of food in the house at a time, cooking everything myself instead of relying on intermittent takeout, establishing multiple work areas that can shift from standing to sitting to video conference to workout coaching to writing or accounting, and sourcing technology to do these extra things.

Another urgent task: reorganizing and replenishing my tea drawer and cupboard, because in this house tea is an essential worker. Here is the cupboard, in case I haven't shown you before.  Two Unikitties, one at each corner, are ready to greet me every time I visit.

I highly recommend keeping a Unikitty on a cupboard shelf because it guarantees you a smile at least once a day when you open the door and see it again. (in case you can't read it, that mug in the middle reads, "All you need is tea & warm socks", which is almost true.)

There are usually more tea mugs on that bottom shelf.  I suspect they were all in use or in the wash when I took this. There is a lot of tea and coffee and hot chocolate happening here.

*

This weekend, the card house I built with these all my new skills looked steady enough to let me step back and take care of the clutter building up while my attention was somewhere else.

Isn't this a much prettier landscape than piles of art supplies and heaps of knitting and mending? It never occurred to me before to colour-coordinate my project bags, but I find this really soothing and will be doing it from now on.

I especially like that shallow bowl on the right hand side, holding socks I'd just finished running in ends on but haven't washed yet.  In March, right before things closed down, a friend came into the city to meet for lunch and gave it to me with waaay too many super-delicious brownies on it. She told me to keep it, that it was just a cheapie she'd found at a dollar store, but I love the way it looks and I think it's perfect for a small shelf like this one.

Check out the reward I got for cleaning up my tiny office:

Yep, more farm yarn socks. And they're all but finished!  That has to be the fifth or sixth pair I stumbled across this month knitted all the way to the toes and then left to wait for the future me.  I don't know what I was thinking. That knitting is more fun than finishing, maybe?

I must have started these while we were still back in the condo, before the house was ready for us to move back. They went into a basket which went into my office, where it had various things piled on top of it, some of which must have stayed for two years or so because it was only this weekend that I dug back down to the Unfinished Sock layer. 

Boy, was I glad to find them.  And also the needles they were packed with, because I can't buy this kind any more.  I was getting worried over their whereabouts.

*

I wanted to show you our mantel, which I switched over from 'winter' (the plaid blanket shown at the top of this post) to 'spring' (white cotton/linen fabric cut from an old French sheet)

yarn scrap parfait!!

... and then to 'Easter' (egg hunt)

You know, we pretty much never have either of our fireplaces on, but I couldn't function without the mantelpieces over them.  I have so much fun with them.

*

There is sourdough starter in my house now. I've been interested in baking sourdough for years, but we have an excellent bakery in the neighbourhood that specializes in sourdough and after all, there are only so many hours in the day. Even after they reduced the number of days each week that they're open, I didn't feel sure I would have enough unbleached flour to maintain a starter of my own. Thanks to Costco, I now do - hence the sourdough baby.

I don't have pretty mason jars for the baby's cradle... these are two vintage milk glass bowls nested together in case of overflow. I put an ill-fitting plate on top to keep the dust out, between glamour shots.

So far I've discovered that the baby prefers me to de-chlorinate the water I feed it by letting it sit uncovered on the counter for 24 hours, rather than boiling it and letting it cool.  Also its scent has shifted from 'dirty diaper' to 'fresh bread and apples'.  I'm kind of in love!

And very much looking forward to sourdough pizza. We'll still buy bread from the bakery because we want to do all we can to support them and also, I am guaranteed to burn myself at the high temperatures sourdough loaves require. But they don't sell pizza dough.

*

A couple of weeks ago we tried to go for a walk and realized our usual routes were too crowded to be viable. So Pete drove us over to an underappreciated section of our neighbourhood industrial park. That's where I got the idea for the title of this month's post. Beauty lives everywhere, and you'll find it even in the most unlikely places if you have a moment to look.

I mean: it's an industrial park. We drive through past it regularly and think of something else the whole time. But it's got trees - it runs alongside a ravine that stretches into a valley. It's got a lot of sky over it. It's not all bad. This tree is definitely not all bad.

And soon I was able to frame other images I found incredibly interesting.

Light and shadow...

Textural contrast...

Symmetry...

A symbol of hope alongside a cracked wall...

It was a good walk.

*

One thing human beings are really good at is adapting, and I am confident we will adapt even to this strange and terrible time and come out the other side with new ideas and values and skills to get us through what comes after.

While you're adapting this month, I hope you're able to find small beautiful things, or something to make you smile.

(yeah, we're not eating so many fried eggs on toast since these two came to live with us.)

Thanks for coming to see me today - I really appreciate it. Take care and stay healthy and I'll see you here again in a few weeks!

Inside Things

It's looking and sounding like spring here at Hugs - the birds are excited and cheery and there's a stiff breeze shaking off any dead leaves left in the trees. The sidewalks are clear and any stubborn snow is just dotted around like tiny islands. It's outside time! And yet...

There is a lot of inside time happening, or potentially happening.  Time that will need to be filled with inside things.

Last night I turned back to my sock. Spending so much time writing lately, I had stayed away from it long enough to forget that I'd come to an unusual break in the yarn.

(in related news, I was trying to solve a New York Times Crossword clue recently. Four letters, clued as 'knit and ...' and I was stumped.  Knit and sew? Knit and b****? wrong letter counts! Also, the second one would have read "STITCH and ...".  When I finally went to answer key and discovered the second word was purl, I knew the world had shifted on its axis and I am no longer the woman I was.)

On my initial discovery of the break in the yarn, I couldn't decide how to deal with it. I just put it aside.  Surprisingly, it didn't mend itself! So I decided to pick a solution and go with it.

I held about 3 inches of both sides of the break together and kept on knitting. It's the top of the leg - I won't even feel the double thickness, and I think 8 stitches in a non-stress area is probably enough to keep the yarn from running, don't you?

Okay, maybe you don't. Maybe I should rip out again and do 12 stitches.

Either way, in the predicament we all face as I type this, it seemed like an interesting lesson. Sometimes there's a gap between how things were and how things can be, and you just have to improvise.


Meanwhile, I'm looking at interests that haven't gotten much love lately but still love me.  Like my ukelele!

Did I tell you I bought one last fall? I don't think I did.  I was in a music store for something else and there were ukeleles in the Impulse Purchase zone at the checkout desk.  I was a very good girl and went home and worked sensibly for several hours before racing back to the store to buy one.

My thinking was, I've never been good with stringed instruments or chord-reading. Ukeleles are for cool people or musical people or people who are into folk or bluegrass or collective music, or some combination thereof. They are not for me. Also I have no space for more stuff in our house; I am still working through my yarn stash.  AND I want to be writing all the time now. When would I do anything with a ukelele?

Then the other half of my brain said, hello, two broken fingers still not fully mended? The cost of the ukelele was less than one physio session and might get me using those fingers better. And several-hour obsessions don't come from nowhere.  Obviously there is a hole in my life only a ukelele can fill.  Anyway, they're small.

So the ukelele came home.  I quickly discovered that yes, if I use my two previously broken fingers to make chords, they absolutely loosen up. They feel almost normal again! I also discovered you can play a ukelele in a soft, meditative way as well as in a STRUM STRUM STRUMMA STRUM way.  You can use your fingertips or your finger pads or a pick. You can thump on the body of the ukelele for percussion. I gave up on the chords my fingers couldn't hold properly and made up some that they could. I started composing my own tunes. It was very exciting. Pete even had to ask me to stop playing at one point because he was trying to sleep. He was mostly polite, too.

Then I realized that I couldn't sleep either, because the music was all up in my head and I was hearing it even without the instrument in my hands. So I slowed down, and the writing ramped up, and the ukelele has been sitting by itself ever since.

Maybe now is the time for it to come back out for a while?


Or maybe I should dig out some fiber and sit on sunny landing halfway up the stairs where my spinning wheel gathers dust, and make some yarn while listening to a really good audiobook.  At the moment I am in the middle of Lucy Worsley's Jane Austen At Home which is just so good. Normally it only gets airtime while I am folding laundry - it's amazing how much a good audiobook eases drudgery - but I could branch out.


Spinning would definitely be more fun than finally reorganizing my closet.  I've been quite interested in the idea of the 'capsule wardrobe', in which you whittle down your clothing to just the things you love and wear a lot, and which coordinate nicely. It's perfect for travel, obviously. But I like the idea for simplifying my everyday life.  I don't think I'd go to the extreme of 7 white shirts, 4 pairs of black pants, and 1 black jacket, but I can definitely do better than what I'm living with right now.  Also, I can see creating a few different capsules and swapping them out periodically by mood or season.  I have purchased some SKUBB storage things from IKEA to aid in pursuing this idea. Now I just need to make myself use them.  And - yay! I have time now!


I am easing into considering these possibilities while I also consider cooking. Specifically, what interesting meals to make from what's in the house. I am especially interested in learning to soak beans overnight and then cook them, and I'm hopeful that the dried beans I purchased when I first got the idea are not too old to taste nice.  I've been wanting to pursue this interest for some time and beans only wait for you for so long apparently.

I'm strongly inclined to make Joe Yonan's book, Cool Beans, my companion in this journey.


While I'm talking about books, did you know Tracy Chevalier came out with a textile-centric novel??  I don't know how I missed A Single Thread when it came out a few months ago, because I love Tracy Chevalier. Also this book is set after WWI, a period I find fascinating.

A few years back I read about how women's lives were impacted by that war, with so many men killed and a vastly lower chance to marry: Singled Out, by Virginia Nicholson.  Leaving aside the loneliness some of them must have felt, marriage was such an essential part of the social fabric then.  I had been so focused on the drama of the war itself when I studied that time, and then the weirdness of the 1920s, I hadn't thought of all those women who didn't marry, or else married differently than they would have otherwise. (that's also a fantastic read, if you're so inclined.)

So, I am buying A Single Thread as a reward, just as soon as I do something that warrants one. Which might be learning how to cook beans deliciously. I mean, even the cover of that book is so beautiful!
 

I am fortunate to be able to take long walks outside if I want, and I am taking the opportunity to do it. These pictures are from an amazing walk I had the other night.  The sky was just dark enough to make me feel sure my little phone camera wouldn't pick up the branches of the trees around me, but I shouldn't have underestimated it because they came out so nicely. No comments on these, I'm just clipping them all in and hoping you have the same shoulder-loosening sensation I do when I look at them.

This is getting to be a long post and I don't want to keep you from whatever amazing things you've thought of to do during this time, but I can't leave without showing you two last pictures from earlier this winter.

The first was taken about 5 minutes before the moment I discovered why one really should not sling one's backpack over the back of a chair in a coffeeshop: my wallet had been stolen. Spoiler alert: I do not carry ID in my wallet, so I only lost cash, a cancel-able credit card, and my faith in humanity. (temporarily!) (but not temporarily enough to go back to a regular wallet.) Anyhoo: I had to grab this wonderful view of the place where, long ago, I learned to skate backwards.  At that time it was a simple round rink not surrounded by condo towers. This new layout is pretty impressive, don't you think?

The second picture, and this really is the last for this month, is of animal tracks I found in the snow one morning. Bunnies? I don't know. I hope so. Anyway, I felt loved, and I hope you do too.

Take care till next time!