Life's a Stitch

Just like a deep tissue massage, sometimes frogging just hurts so good. It seems I’m not alone. Donna has some lovely yarn that is destined to stay a center pull skein, Beth is turning pools of colours into a frog pond, and Blogless Marsha pulled out her hair swing sweater because some unreliable nasty knitter I dissuaded her from swatching. Meet my Sirdar Denim Ultra cardigan. Notice that all but one skein are re-wound:

At least my Midwest Moonlight scarf made it through unscathed and is happily blocking on an old Barney towel. Wet cotton does nothing for its beautiful colours.

While at the Seattle Knitting Expo Blogless Marsha and I took a class on Tunisian Crochet. It’s done on what looks like a crochet hook on steroids – the length of a long knitting needle and the thickness of a size 10 needle (6mm) for sport weight yarn. For worsted weight, the hook must be much thicker unless you want to produce a board. You never turn your work and there are three basic stitches – the simple stitch, the knit stitch, which looks like stockinette, and the purl. It’s supposedly faster and adaptable to most knitting patterns. I’m still pretty slow, but will give it an honest go.

Here is a simple stitch scarf in progress, done in a Fleece Artist smooth mohair, in the Wild Flowers colourway.

A sample with the same needle in Lorna’s Laces Lion and Lamb, in the Vera colourway, front and back:

One more, in a Fleece Artist fine loopy mohair in the Pinata colourway:

Here’s our lion!

This is the boy, who at age six, accompanied us to our high school’s production of Oliver. That night he confidently told us that he was going to be on that stage someday, and here he is. I am so thankful for this school-related positive experience for him, as academics haven’t been his strong suit recently.

There is nothing like a high school musical with an audience as vocal as fans at a basketball game. Can you pack any more smiles into one room? Knitting is going to have to wait, I can only handle so much excitement. So if you’re looking for me this weekend, I’ll be at the Capilano College theatre, every performance except for one.

Not really. We’re eight years from retirement, one of us pensionless, the other with a teensy-weensy one due to the recent sale of the company for which he works. We moved to Canada 24 years ago, young and oblivious to important life implications, simply because it was pretty. It’s been a good life, but we gave up a lot, the worst being proximity to family. It’s hard to raise kids without grandparents, cousins, and aunties.

What we didn’t count on giving up was Social Security. I had heard of other ex-pat’s discovering that they left the US without enough credits to collect SS, and not enough work experience in Canada to collect the full amount of Social Insurance. Being the type that wants to know what I’m in for, I insisted Chuck and I make trek to our "local" SS office, 80 miles away. He could not understand why I wanted to know so far in advance, but I bet you can. Give up? Because I want to know how much yarn I need to buy.

So, the good news is that we both have enough credits to qualify for a partial benefit. The bad news – it won’t start until age 66, well past our planned date. And the US will reduce the amount because we’ll be eligible for a partial Canadian benefit, and neither side can tell us by how much. I’m just going to rely on that blind faith we had 24 years ago and assume that both together will equal a normal benefit. And I don’t have to feel badly about not spending one penny at the two Washington yarn shops we visited that had 20% off everything.

Having camera difficulties, I reached back into my computer’s brain and found this picture of Mari and Ms.Grace. Does this look like a girl who had difficulty with the concept of having an animal living in the house with us?

In Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, Eat, Pray, Love, there is sentence I’m dying to quote, but can’t locate it from memory. It’s about how our culture reinforces hard hard work all week and then the weekend comes and all we can manage is to sit around the house in a semi-comatose state. That about describes me, but I do semi-comatose very well. I even enjoy it.

This week it hit me on Tuesday night. Recently work has involved a lot of public speaking and that particular activity chews me up and spits me out like a flavourless, spent wad of gum. I made myself do 20 minutes on the treadmill just to be sure I was really exhausted and to justify doing nothing for the rest of the evening. This sounds terribly Type A behaviouresque, doesn’t it.

Cooked up a batch of low fat cream of broccoli soup and at 8:15 I announced that I was retiring to the spare bedroom for a glorious night of uninterrupted sleep. Nobody was allowed to knock on my door unless they were bleeding profusely. Even them, 911 would probably be a more effective approach. I obtained commitment from the boy that he would get up on his own instead of the usual drill of me begging him seven times to get ready for school. And you know what? He managed it just fine. For him, it’s not about inability to get in the morning, it’s the payoff of our daily morning battle, but that’s another post.

So, I took a night off from life. Too tired to pick up even the lightest of knitting needles, not enough energy to read, the lights were out at 8:30. Knowing  I would be no good to anyone but myself, I took advantage of an opportunity to take care of nobody but ME. I highly recommend it. There were times in my life where this wouldn’t have been possible, but I guess it’s one of the benefits of getting older.

The next day I was ready to knit again:

These past few days I’ve attempted to leave comments on all you Blogspot people’s sites to no avail. Is the problem fixed? Just know I’m thinking about you: Jayne, I can relate to the Glysomed tube in your knitting basket, especially knitting with seasilk. Marianne, I’m putting that Japanese Feather shawl that you pictured on my must-do list. Mitchypoo, that creepy 13 list reminded me of when I saw rice in the bottom of my carport garbage can, only the rice was moving – maggots! Angie, best wishes, we need more good nurses. Allena, Yumm, I can smell those buns here in Vancouver. There are more but my battery is about to die.

I’m taking Angie’s advice to pepper my projects with some instant gratification. This is a narrower version of the Midwest Moonlight scarf from Scarf Style, a la Blogless Marsha, who alternated her solid squares with stockinette. I’m using the periwinkle variegated cotton yarn from my last post:

What did Blogless Marsha and I forget when we went to the Seattle Knitting Expo last weekend? Why, knitting of course. What were we thinking? We knew we’d have a couple of hours to kill between a visit to the marketplace and our workshop. We made the best of it, though, and hand wound yarn Marsha bought so she could get right to knitting when we returned home.

I had never been to one of these knit junkie conferences before and this one won’t be the last. We were on a one day plan, but you could have been there for three days of yarny heaven. We chose a three hour class on how to knit and purl in Tunisian Crochet. More on that another time.

I took Amtrak down and the bus back. As we were crossing the border back, and going through customs, the officer saw that my declaration card indicated I had spent $195. He asked why I was in Seattle. I looked him right in the eye and said I was at the Knitting Expo. A stifled snort of laughter escaped his lips. Or did that sound come from his nose? He couldn’t contain himself, giving me the "now I’ve heard everything" look. I know better than to argue with customs officials, but my ‘I’m over 50 and I take no shit attitude’ slipped out. If Chuck had been present he would have given me a swift nudge to keep my mouth shut."Whatza matter," I snapped, "it’s good clean fun." He replied " And I suppose that $195 is a suitcase full of yarn."  He pondered my fate in a pregnant pause and thankfully let me pass through the door without a potentially bus-missing search. About that suitcase? Wishin. This is all the yarn I bought, three skeins of amazingly coloured soft perle cotton:

In my non-knitting life, part of my job involves writing a weekly newspaper mini-column for parents and kids. After 400 of these it can be difficult to come up with a new topic so sometimes I go to the news for ideas. This weeks tragedy in Virginia gave me plenty to work with:

Kids and Crisis

Natural disasters, war, and school shootings are in the news every day.  Even those not directly involved can be affected.

• Be prepared for disaster and how your child might react.
• Children want to know they are safe. Reassure them that the adults around them are doing their best to keep them secure.
• Do not lie; provide simple facts to young children, more details to older ones.
• Avoid overexposure to repetitive media coverage and disturbing images on TV, radio, newspaper or the internet.
• Look for physical symptoms of stress: nightmares, head and tummy aches, irritability, sleeplessness, changes in behaviour, refusing to go to school.
• Respect their fears; giving them ways to express their anxiety through talking, creative or physical activities. Before they can feel good, the bad feelings need to come out.
• The Chinese word for crisis means “dangerous” and “opportunity.” Use a crisis as an opportunity for preparation for the future.

Same goes for grown ups. Tragedies of this proportion can rock the foundations of your faith. We were talking at work about the existence of God. A book for troubled times, When Bad things Happen to Good People, is as relevant now as when it was published by Rabbi Harold Kushner in the 80’s. It has seen many people through very rough times.

I remember this interview with him on CBC, a couple of years back, when his book on coping with life’s disappointments was released. This is a gentle, intelligent man, who has experienced tough personal loss. He’s written over ten books with interesting conclusions: Even God cannot solve all of the world’s dilemmas. Sometimes decisions made at the time of crisis aren’t the best ones. Wait for things to even out before giving up something as important as your faith.

It’s not knitting but it was comforting for me and I thought I’d share it.

In anticipation of his birthday, my boy has decided he doesn’t want to turn 17. After discussion we agreed we could pretend, for now, that he is still 16. It reminded me of a friend from way back, whose daughter was eleven, and asked her mom when she would get breasts. Seizing this teachable moment my friend explained to her daughter that first she would probably grow some pubic and underarm hair. "Yukk!"  exclaimed her pre-teen in disgust, "It’s gross, it sounds funny when you scratch it, and if I get any of that I’m shaving it off."

When I was a kid all I wanted to do was grow up so I could eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. The thing I wanted to eat daily was cantaloupe, followed by butter lettuce with olive oil and salt, and then chocolate cake, not necessarily with icing. In college, my roommate and I were a good match, she liked the frosting, I liked the cake, and we’d trade off my icing for her cake. The same held true for oreos – I ate the cookies and she ate the cream.

Food has a scary influence in my life. I’m beginning to believe, however, that yarn is taking over. Funny thing how both, for me, require a well developed adult sense of self control. I’ll let you know how successful that sense is when I come home from my weekend at the Seattle Knitting Expo. I could be like a kid in a candy shop after selling a substantial part of my stash at our yarn swap last week.

A member of our Chicks With Sticks group, who was at the swap, is seeking to purchase an out-of -print magazine.If you have: Piecework issue Sept/Oct 1994, and are willing to part with it for a price, please let me know.

More Print O’the Wave in Seasilk in progress:

This blogger is tired from just too much going on, so I’ll opt out of any creativity with a list. Nothing like point form to get the job done:

• At work we’re recovering from a visit by a federal cabinet member. It was an honour albeit from the wrong political party. This minister seemed too nice to be in politics.
• Full weekends ahead: this coming Saturday with Blogless Marsha at the Seattle Knitting Expo, the 21st at an all day watercolour class, and the following two weekends will see a Boesen invasion of the Minnesotan kind. Two SIL’s and a BIL coming to YVR just in time to see their nephew as the Cowardly Lion in the school play. Can’t complain about an entire month of weekends filled with good times including a couple of birthdays for my resident Taurus men.
• On the home front there’s paperwork – taxes, insurance claims, and bills. And the never ending cleaning and organization that doesn’t get any better even with fewer people in the house. I know this belief is in contravention of every positive thinking organizational life skills expert on the planet, but I am certain that it will take me two years into retirement full time to get my house in order, and I’m a long way from that day.
• On to knitting, I taught an entelac class last week. That was fun. This week’s knit night will include a stash sale, that will be really fun. I hope to leave there with less than I arrived with. And I am trying hard to remain faithful to Print O’the Wave (a beautiful, but repetitive slow go) and Marina (take two on picking up the sleeves due to yarn weakness and breakage), with little progress on either: