Light and Momentary

guest post

Hello it is Laverne friends it is my last night here friends. I am trying to write while getting belly rubs so pardon any typos. Wait, Joe has a dirty forehead and I must lick it clean before I continue.

Honestly, these people and their insufficiently licked faces. What are they going to do without me?

So these are things you might not know about the Gladlys' House:

1. They have a Beeping Pot. I can almost reach it friends if I stand on my hind legs but then they say things like DOWN LAVERNE and OFF LAVERNE. Really though would you stay down and off if you lived in a house with a Beeping Pot full of good-smelling things? Today Jamie gave me some nibbles from the pot after they cooled down maybe there will be more nibbles tomorrow. 
2. Across the street there is an Evil Minion of Satan. They laugh when I get worried about her but friends I think you would be worried too because do you like Evil Minions of Satan? (Answer: no. You are a sensible reader. I can tell from here.) Jamie says, "Honestly, Laverne, you could eat that dog up in about four bites," but is Jamie eating any Evil Minions of Satan? No she is not.
3. I have a strategy for avoiding the EMoS do you want to know in case you need it for the future? Here you go: first you whimper very loudly in place and then you pull hard to the left for 25 yards while looking over your shoulder followed by a hard pull to the right while continuing to whimper. I have been doing this for five days now and I have not yet been eaten OR possessed by the EMoS so probably you should try it too.
4. In the back yard they have a Boing Machine and it is interesting also scary. Joe likes to boing very high on the Boing Machine and I cannot decide whether this is more interesting or more scary. I think he should stop doing flips though and give me more belly rubs.
5. People in this house think they can stop giving me belly rubs before I give them permission to stop. I am working hard to teach them better manners than that but some of them are kind of slow learners. Luckily for them I am a patient dog.

I am very sleepy friends very sleepy. For my first few nights here I needed to make sure that no one was breaking in and also that my other foster family was not waiting for me in the yard. So I would go to the front door and cry for my family and then I would go to the back door and whine GO AWAY to the intruders. The Gladlys did not understand that I was being Appropriately Vigilant and they said silly things like "Laverne lie down it's 1 in the morning" (see above re: slow learners).

But you know constant vigilance makes a girl pretty tired and I think I scared off all the intruders with my fierce relentless midnight whining. So maybe I will say good night friends it was nice talking with you let me know if anybody has any dirty faces at your house.

November 27

It turns out that today is the day of November on which I say to myself, "Huh, 30 posts in 30 days is a lot of blog posting."

If you read this blog in an RSS aggregator, has it been messed up? Feedly recently burped up 6 days' worth of posts as if I had written them all at once, but my RSS feed seems to be working okay for Ravelry. I don't know if that's a me issue or a Feedly issue.

I suppose if your feed reader isn't working well, you're not going to be able to tell me because you won't see the post. 

Pie

Probably four desserts for six people is a bit excessive.

Thawing

Laverne has decided that this is not a terrible place to be. It took her most of the day to reach this conclusion, but she is seeking out affection and accepting belly rubs a little gingerly. She isn't eating or drinking very much and she seems reluctant to do her business in front of people she doesn't know very well yet (I mean, I can sympathize with that feeling), but she is doing so much better tonight.

Today I finished my portion of the revisions for paper #3. You guys, I feel SO RELIEVED. It is likely that my co-author will recommend some minor final tweaks, but we're almost there. I told a friend tonight that I feel like a crane came along and removed a house from on top of me. I have been so squashed down by the weight of that task. It was so much work! Yikes! Academic publishing is a weird little ecosystem, because it is entirely possible that the editor could look at our stevedore-esque efforts to address every single concern raised in the review process and say, "...nah, reject." But I'm not going to think about that right now.

Today I made the Penitential Cranberry Sauce and the cornbread for stuffing, and whoops, I should have turned off the stock in time for it to cool. I'm not sure there would have been room for it in the fridge, though. Hm. Maybe I will put it in the Instant Pot overnight on the slow cooker setting.

A 16-pound turkey awaits my ministrations. I didn't get around to placing my turkey order until later than usual, and the butcher shop couldn't get me a fresh turkey smaller than 16 pounds. Nobody wants big turkeys this year, the guy on the phone explained. All right, I said, 16 pounds it is. It will be fine. We go through an astounding quantity of food when the college kids are home. If they're scrounging around for snacks tomorrow night I'll tell them to go gnaw on the turkey carcass.

Tonight's burning question: will Laverne finally break down and pee before we go to sleep for the night? Tune in tomorrow.

Laverne

We have a new foster dog. She is far and away the shyest of the dogs we've had here.

Her owner surrendered her to the shelter a couple of weeks ago, and she has been living with a foster family that had planned to leave town for Thanksgiving. We told them she could stay here with us over the holiday, and they dropped her off this afternoon.

Well. Laverne had some Thoughts about coming to our house. She growled at me when I tried to take her leash from their son, so I gave it back. They wound up carrying her up the porch steps (she weighs 50 pounds, so this was not like tucking a little purse dog under your arm) and plunking her on our welcome mat. We got the storm door closed behind them, and Laverne sat there, immobile and tense, for a solid hour.

We tried the treats they brought; we tried our peanut butter-oat dog treats. We tried peanut butter on a spoon. I scrambled her an egg, which they told us she loves, and she just looked at it, like, "Haven't you ever heard that you're not supposed to eat any food when you visit hell? I'm Laverne, not Persephone."

Slowly she let us pet her, and after that first hour we got the front door closed. But things didn't really improve from there. She spent the next two hours in the same spot, waiting forlornly for her family. At one point after I thought she and I were on petting terms, she told me to back the heck off.

After a little walk she came back inside more willingly, and parked herself on the steps for half an hour or so. Our steps are not the place I would choose to park myself if I were a 50-pound dog. She did not appear comfortable, but she was also not willing to move. 

As I wrote this post she eased cautiously down the steps and took up her station on the welcome mat, right by our drafty front door. With some coaxing she consented to move a foot or so to her dog bed, and she fell asleep there. I guess there are some tenuous good signs so far: she made a small effort at grooming herself, she gave Pete's face a tiny lick (he is her favorite so far), and she relaxed enough to fall asleep. 

But man, you have to wonder what could be in this dog's past to make her feel this anxious. I hope she is not having sad dreams about her other foster family.

Speedy speedy key lime pie

Four of my five children are home this week and Alex assures me that I do not have to send him mashed potatoes in the mail. I know, objectively, that he is in Manhattan, able to obtain any quantity of any type of food his heart desires. But I cannot shake the certainty that he will be pining for MY mashed potatoes.

I am holding out hope for a spectacular Easter.

Stella is suggesting that we mix it up a little this year, since this will be the smallest Thanksgiving dinner of her entire life. She wonders: is pumpkin pie truly necessary? She suggests that key lime pie would be a better alternative.

We will of course be eating pumpkin pie on Thursday. (Side note: in another year I would have ended that sentence with "because we are not heretics." But this year I am so troubled by the conflation of heresy with political affiliation that I can't make that little joke any more. Serve pumpkin pie, or don't serve pumpkin pie. No skin off my nose. In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.) But this key lime pie is so easy and our Thanksgiving is so much smaller than usual that I am perfectly happy to make a pre-Thanksgiving pie.

Here's what you do: make or buy a graham cracker crust. If you make it, let it cool. Combine a can of sweetened condensed milk, 1.25 cups of heavy cream, and key lime juice to taste. It should be tart enough to make you wince a little bit. Whip with an electric mixer until it holds its shape. Plop into the crust and chill. I think most key lime pie recipes require eggs and baking, but we love this no-bake version at our house. If you are looking for low-stress alternatives to more conventional Thanksgiving dessert recipes here in this most unconventional November, Stella thinks you can't go wrong with this one.

A 2020 Ornament

This morning I was talking to an old friend who is in the middle of some hard things. I cannot do anything about the work stuff or the family stuff or the health stuff, but my ears pricked up when she said she had been looking unsuccessfully for a Christmas ornament: she wanted a Santa Claus wearing a mask.

That is a problem I can solve.

I am going to add a pompon to the top of his hat, and I have a bunch of ends to weave in. But he's almost done.

Pete wants me to make one for our tree too, and I think I will extend the mask a little higher (even Santa needs to cover his nose) and make it slightly less rectangular.

I started to write out the pattern, but I got to the short-row section of the beard and the pattern degenerated into "and then I kind of wung it; you can too." I'll pay closer attention next time.

This is not a post about baby hiccups

I had planned to post about knitting progress today, but I accidentally posted a time capsule instead. I republished a post from 2004 when Miriel asked on Twitter for cranberry baking recommendations. Instead of "publish on..." I clicked "publish now." This resulted in a post dated today, chronicling my trip to the zoo with friends and speculating about whether Pete was already having in utero hiccups. As you might imagine, a post about my 20-week pregnancy sparked some confusion. So! If you need cranberry recipes, they should now appear in the correct decade's archives. (I can recommend both the cranberry cake and the cranberry-dried cherry bars (scroll down to #7).) Let us now discuss knitting progress.

Do you remember that I was doing a Stephen West mystery knit-along? I should have known that it would be hard to keep up with the weekly pattern releases, because he told us up front that we needed 500g of fingering weight yarn. That is 1.24 miles of yarn, worked on 3.25mm needles. I was never going to get that finished in a month.

This pattern seems to be focused on exploring fun if not especially cohesive things you can do with slipped stitches. The middle section was a blast, but it has become less fun. The thing about big shawls is that the further you go, the more endless rows of purling are required. Current stitch count: 467 and growing. It's a lot of acreage.

That honeycomb section in the middle is supposed to lie flat, but it is rolling like the dickens. I suspect it will continue to roll even after I smack it around with a steam iron, because it's all stockinette. This is the downside to a mystery knit-along; you can't say to yourself, "You know, I'm going to edge this section with garter stitch so it doesn't roll like all the ones I'm seeing on Ravelry."

Its recipient is enthusiastic, even if its knitter is a little less so at the moment. I still have to finish the checks, the triangles, and the chevrons. I am trying to decide whether the hot pink should reappear for the triangles, the chevrons, or maybe both. I will report back.

A public health ditty

Look, it's a silly song about the pandemic. Lyrics follow.

Chorus:
It's not that hard to cover your nose
Inside your mask is where it goes
The COVID case count grows and grows
So please take care to cover your nose

Verse 1:
You wouldn't wear your pants below your privatest of parts
You care about your neighbors' lungs; you care about their hearts
You can spread the virus long before your very first symptom shows
So please take care to cover your nose

Verse 2:
Your doctors and your nurses are among the hardest hit
Spare a prayer for long-term care workers; they're in the thick of it
Pneumonia is no picnic and a vent just straight-up blows
So please take care to cover your nose

Bridge:
We are all in this together, friends and strangers
So we all must work together, no Lone Rangers
(though even the Lone Ranger wore a mask
I suggest you do the same)

Verse 3: 
It's not a magic bullet but it cuts the odds you'll spread
the virus to your neighbor, who might wind up all too dead
A quarter-million deaths and counting; here's what I propose
Let's all take care to cover our nose

Even in Australia

On this day my two youngest kids resumed online learning. It went fine for one of them. The other-- well, I'm pretty tired right now. In August it got better after two weeks. I will keep saying this to myself. (But you guys, those two weeks were bad.)

Also on this day my husband returned to working at home; his office is closed indefinitely. 

In between interruptions I contrived to lose all of the work I did in my stats program today, and learned that a collaborator thinks we should redo all of the quantitative analyses for our paper.

I know that people have no-good very bad days in Australia too. But if I had had this bad day in Australia, it would not be pitch dark at 5:08pm. And huh, I just discovered that the total number of COVID cases reported in 8 months across the entire continent of Australia is less than the number of new COVID cases in my state this week. There's something to be said for Australia.