Light and Momentary

September in the rearview

September 30 already -- can you believe it? These are the things I was going to do in September, though I planned to give myself some wiggle room around the weekend of the retreat:

• Try a couple of new recipes each week, with a focus on eating a little lower on the food chain. Take leftovers to work for lunch. Done! Fun and successful. I should reboot this resolution for October.
• Run for at least 20 minutes 3 days per week, and lift twice a week. I did well with this one until the week of the retreat. I didn't post about it in this space, but Elwood was gone for a chunk of September, helping out at his parents' house while his dad recovered from surgery. I slid out of the exercise groove and have not found my way back in. But exercise is so helpful for my anxiety. Must make this one an October priority.
• Make the recording for the women's retreat team already. Done! Stella helped me out and added some lovely harmonies to the song I wrote for the weekend.
• Finish Trollope novel #24 and two Allingham novels. Done! In October I'm going to start Trollope novel #25 and read Allingham novel #10.
• Finish the utterly bananapants mystery knit-along project. Done! It's loud, strange and itchy, but it's done!
• Start every workday with 30 minutes of writing. I hit this goal every day until the retreat; I did not write much last week in the middle of the re-entry whirlwind.
• Post at least ten times this month. This is post #11 for September.

Trade-offs

Here in Gladlyville there are two yarn shops, each with a pleasing selection of yarns. One has a smaller downtown location and a correspondingly smaller inventory, nicely organized into tidy shelves and bins. But the owner, you guys— she is so unfriendly. It's not actually called Emerald City Yarn Shop, but it feels like that.

The other shop is in a dying strip mall, and it has a stunning range of yarns. The owner dyes her own yarns and she sources a ton of gorgeous options from around the region and around the world. She is warm and friendly every time I go in, even if I am dithering for a while about what to buy. She is happy to look at pictures of completed projects or listen to tales from the knitting trenches, and she is welcoming to Stella as well. Stella loves to stop in with me, because it's such a pleasant place. Or at least it's very pleasant for the first 10 minutes.

Unfortunately, there's a hoarder vibe that becomes overwhelming. It's not a temporary issue; it's not that the inventory got out of control briefly and she just needed to find a good storage option for the excess. Every time we go in there, we see thousands of dollars' worth of yarn sitting on the floor in open bags with no place to go. It doesn't feel quite right to turn to the owner and say "CAAAAARPET BEEEETLES!!!" so I will say it to you instead: CAAAAARPET BEEEETLES!!! Chaos!! Aaaaiiieeee!! Stella has asked me more than once if she could volunteer to go in and tidy things up.

I keep wondering if I offended the grumpy store owner somehow. Once when I was there a member of her staff invited me to knit night, and I took my then-current project. Was it inexcusably bad manners to take a project made with yarn from an online source to her store's knit night? I have spent plenty of money in her store since then, so that would be a weird grudge to hold. Did I say something so egregious at one of those gatherings in 2018 that she's still holding it against me in 2024? I assure you— I promise you— I did not shoot off my mouth at a table crowded with women who already knew each other.

And yet— something is not right. Sometimes she is just chilly and distant; sometimes she is nakedly passive-aggressive; sometimes she ignores me entirely. I have watched her be interactive and patient with plenty of other customers, so it does feel personal. I don't go there very often, but periodically I think to myself, "Surely I'm being overly sensitive about this. Why would a business owner be deliberately rude to a customer? It's good to support local small businesses! I will pop in while I'm downtown and pet some pretty yarn." I did it today, and it was the same old thing all over again.

Note to Future Jamie: I don't think we're being overly sensitive about this.

Oats and Beans and Barley Grow

If the title of the post made you burst into song, your kids might be the same age as my kids.

I've been thinking all year about eating a little lower on the food chain, ever since I watched the Netflix documentary about identical twins who were randomly assigned to eat either a vegan diet or a nutritious omnivore diet. My LDL has been a little too high, my blood pressure has been drifting upward, and the calendar only scrolls by in one direction.

Younger Jamie never paid attention to sodium, ever, at all, despite all of her focus on whole grains and vegetables and unprocessed whatnot. Younger Jamie got a little annoyed with Laurie Colwin's salt-free recipes, because salt is delicious. But 2024 Jamie was advised in May to keep an eye on her blood pressure, because maybe it would ease back down after that visit but also maybe it might be time to think about intervening. And 2024 Jamie was appalled a couple of weeks ago to see some blood pressure readings at the gym that were clearly in the nope range.

Cardiovascular disease is the #1 cause of death, and high blood pressure is a major contributor to cardiovascular disease. You have to play the long game to protect your arteries if you want to enjoy a healthy old age.

(This particular long game does not sound like a super-fun game, I have to say.)

When I finally decided to look squarely at my sodium intake, I thought, "...Oh." I thought, "...Duh!" I have known my whole life that Americans eat too much sodium, but I had never paid attention to the sodium in my own personal diet. I looked up the nutrition information for the two sandwich shops closest to my office and I was astonished to see the numbers there in black and white. If a person eats 1800mg of sodium at lunchtime, she is not going to stay under the 2300mg recommended daily limit. It's just not possible.

The good news is that my blood pressure floated right back down to the normal range when I started paying attention to sodium. The bad news is that it requires planning (and home cooking) to avoid sodium. 

I checked out Dr. Greger's How Not To DIe cookbook via Kindle Unlimited, and I am dipping a toe into his recommendations. I find them pretty extreme, honestly; I decline to live on unsalted beans and oat groats.

I do, however, own some oat groats as of this afternoon. One of his staple recipes is BROL: barley, rye, oats, and lentils. I ordered the grains; we always have lentils. His recipe doesn't say to soak them overnight but that's what I'm doing. (My logic: something-something digestibility / nutrient availability / enzymes (though, okay, I'm just going to destroy any potentially useful enzymes in the Instant Pot tomorrow.))

WILL Jamie develop a dazzling glow of oaty-groaty good health? WILL rye berries be delicious, disgusting, or something in between? Let's hope for a flavor profile closer to delicious than disgusting, since I...ah...bought 3 pounds of rye berries. Stay tuned, friends, and I'll tell you all about it.

99%

I have finished knitting my giant shawl, even though the last step, involving multiple feet of attached I-cord, tested my patience. I showed my husband this picture, in which it is drying on an upstairs bed after its bath.

"It could be a blanket," he said hesitantly.

"It would be a weird and unsatisfying blanket," I told him, because although it's blanket length it's not blanket width.

"I...hope it's not unsatisfying as a... a...." he trailed off. Shawls and wraps and stoles and capes and pelerines are not part of his wardrobe, so I think he was a little vague on the best ending for that sentence. 

The designer released photos of the finished product when she released the finishing instructions, and some of them are very striking. I think you can view this one whether or not you have a Ravelry account; it shows the whole thing draped across the model's shoulders. This one shows it styled less dramatically; mine will probably look something like that when I eventually wear it. But you guys, even in the professionally styled and edited pictures, I still look at the junction of the first two squares in this picture and think, "Huh, that is unexpected."

Well. The designer does not need any advice from me on the appropriate level of mystery for a mystery knit-along.

After it dries I will have to weave in something like 20 ends, which is not bad when you consider the number of color changes in that puppy. Perhaps Stella will be willing to do a fashion shoot. I'll have to practice staring moodily into the middle distance.

Queen of Crime

I'd never heard of Margery Allingham before I signed up for this summer knitting community, but I've read 8.5 of her books since May. If you enjoy Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie, you'll like these too.

I read a boatload of Agatha Christie as a kid. I enjoyed the tidiness of her books -- the way the loose ends were squared away in the final chapters -- and the glimpses of a different world. They haven't aged very well, I don't think. (The last time I flipped through one at the library I said to myself, "Hercule Poirot is totally on the spectrum and I wonder if he's also gay." This made me think that Sherlock Holmes and his brother are probably also on the spectrum, which led me down a rabbit hole. I am not the only person to think these thoughts, apparently!)

I didn't read any Dorothy Sayers until I was in my 40s, and then I binge-read all of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries within a few months. I enjoyed them; I might reread them at some point. But he's not my favorite fictional detective. Sometimes I want to give him a brisk shake and say, "Lord Peter, put that in plain English with no obscure quotations, please." (You know, that relentless propensity for literary allusions makes me think about echolalia in movie-quoting kids on the spectrum...)

Margery Allingham was writing detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s and she's considered one of the Queens of Crime from the golden age of the genre. But she kept writing detective fiction long after the 1930s, and her detective character, Albert Campion, ages across her novels. I don't know why she's so much less familiar to US audiences, but I like her books better than either of her more famous counterparts'. She creates an atmosphere without overdoing it; her characters are enjoyable enough that it's fun to see them reappear in later novels. The plots are paced well, and the conclusions are satisfying. 

They are available inexpensively in Kindle format, though some of them seem to have been shoved out into the Kindle market with dubious production values. I bought an edition of The Beckoning Lady with a conspicuous typo on the cover: the title is rendered The Becokning Lady. My edition of Hide My Eyes has the wrong author's name and photo on the cover! You have to wonder who oversaw those decisions, don't you? 

But the content is pleasingly diverting despite the bungled details. I'm going to keep reading them, even though the summer discussion group is winding down. 

Plum cake: easy, tasty, seasonal, beautiful

Stella and I picked up plums at the grocery store, and tonight she asked me if we were actually going to make the plum cake I had mused about when I put them in the cart. "Yes, we are!" I said, and we baked up those plums after dinner. You should bake up some plums too -- this cake is delicious and straightforward.

Take about a pound and a half of plums; cut them in half along their meridians and pit them. Preheat your oven to 350 and hit an 8- or 9-inch springform pan with nonstick spray. Cream a stick of butter with three-quarters of a cup of sugar (or a little more if your plums are very tart). Beat in two eggs, followed by a cup of flour, a teaspoon of baking powder, a wee bit of salt, and any suitable flavorings your heart desires. We added a sprinkle of almond extract, because almond goes so nicely with stone fruits, and a sprinkle of orange flower water.

Scrape this speedily assembled batter into your springform pan and nestle the plums into it. Sprinkle with a spoonful of sugar. Add a dusting of cinnamon or cardamom if you like that idea. Bake. Give it an hour in an 8-inch pan. Our 9-inch cake was the tiniest smidgin underbaked at 50 minutes. Adjust accordingly.

The batter will bloom up and over the plum halves, and you will have a glorious assemblage of golden cake and deep deep purple plums. You could serve it with vanilla ice cream but it is fabulous all by itself.

And done, mostly

Phew, the retreat is over and it was mostly lovely. Those retreats are so much work, my friends. Two weeks ago I was telling myself I would never do another one. (I'll probably do another one at some point.) I am still not caught up on sleep.

I've had all kinds of blog posts swirling around in my brain, waiting to be written. Potential topics:

• Things I Have Been Reading That Are Not Trollope
• Related: My New Fave Golden Age Detective Fiction Author
• Adventures in Lower-Sodium Eating, or Dang, There is a Lot of Salt in Restaurant Food, Who Knew?
• Jamie Continues to Battle Perfectionism in Volunteer Activities 
• Exciting Updates on That Post About September Goals
• It's All Over But the I-Cord: The Very Mysterious MKAL Concludes

I'll be back soon!

Just a little more Trollope blogging

My husband used to trot out the name Trollope as a metonym for overrated Victorian fiction: dull, overlong, irrelevant, generally unpleasant. In consequence I had very low expectations of Barchester Towers: I did not have any idea that I would love that book. Yesterday I was telling Stella about the Kindle Unlimited report on my most popular and most obscure reading choices. "Let me guess," she said. "Trollope is the most obscure?" (Trollope is indeed the most obscure. Is He Popenjoy? is not getting a lot of love from Kindle Unlimited users.)

It is true that Trollope revisits a lot of the same ideas across his books, but who among us could write 47 entirely distinct novels in the early morning hours before we went off to our real jobs? I am going to make a list of what I've read so far to minimize the memory blur.

1. Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite. Short, sad, just blogged about it yesterday.
2. The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson. A haberdasher goes out of business, as told from the perspective of the partner in charge of publicity. Wince-inducing, with some zingy and still-relevant thoughts on advertising. I was glad it was short.
3. Is He Popenjoy? My favorite of the six I've read in 2024. The second son of a noble family has a title and land but no money. He marries a young woman with money but no title. Will she be faithful? Will he be faithful? The older brother is a memorably ignoble noble, a recurring Trollope trope.
4. Lady Anna. A wicked old nobleman leaves his widow and daughter in penury. The daughter wants to marry her first love; her mother has higher aims. Like Marion Fay, it illustrates the toll parental ambition can take on parental character.
5. Orley Farm. A second wife desperately wants her son to inherit a place to call his own. A deeply unlikable eldest son and a slimy solicitor are in the right under the law. If we hope they lose, are we in the wrong? One of my favorites. 
6. Cousin Henry. A squire with no son faces hard decisions when he writes his will. Like Sir Harry, he has a winsome daughter and a clever solicitor.
7. Marion Fay. A tale of two engagements that cross class boundaries; feels like an overly sentimental rehash of familiar characters and ideas. Reminiscent of The Duke's Children but we have less investment in the characters.
8. The Fixed Period. Very strange dystopian fiction; predicting the future is hard.
9. The Three Clerks. Early and autobiographical, funny and perspicacious. Infighting and moral dilemmas in the Victorian civil service, plus hopeful love stories.
10. Dr. Wortle's School. Like Orley Farm, this one looks at the question of well-intentioned people doing illegal things. Do they deserve opprobrium, sympathy, assistance? Does our perspective shift if the people who are technically in the right are icky and unpleasant?
11. Miss Mackenzie. What happens when a poor spinster inherits some money and becomes marriageable? 
12. The Way We Live Now. Justly famous, but painfully long and crammed full of unlikable characters.

I started my Trollope adventure in 2014 with the Barsetshire Chronicles, which I will reread someday. There are six of them, and I finished #6 in 2017. They are probably the best point of entry for the Trollope-curious. They can stand alone; I read #2 before #1 and it wasn't a problem at all. I read the six Palliser chronicles between the beginning of 2020 and the middle of 2022, and then resolved to head off into the depths of the back catalog.

Wish me luck! Only 23 novels to go!

In which I cross the halfway point

Today I finished Trollope novel #24, which means I have read more than half of the 47 novels he wrote. It feels like a bit of an accomplishment.

This was a small novel, less than 160 pages long, but I will remember it. Trollope writes a lot about marriage: what's it for, and what happens when people have competing ideas about it? How much should you marry for financial stability vs. companionship vs. capital-L Love vs. political or logistical reasons, in a culture where marriage and biological children determined the future of titles and estates? 

We're still chewing on some of these questions 150 years later, right? If you marry somebody from a wildly different background, is heartache inevitable? If someone's engagement seems to be a colossal mistake, what's the best response? 

Novel #24 was Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite. It follows the trials of Sir Harry, "a mighty person in Cumberland," as his daughter bestows her affections unwisely. In some ways it is very much a Victorian relic. These days a parent would say, "No, you cannot marry your second cousin, because consanguinity is a terrible idea," rather than wondering if it might be a good idea to invite the second cousin for consideration as a marriage prospect. The unspeakably shameful acts that put the second cousin beyond the pale are lying and card-sharping, neither of which would be viewed as absolute dealbreakers in the 21st century. (In fact, James Bond plays the Duke of Cumberland bridge hand in one of the Ian Fleming books, and in my memory it's presented as proof of his versatility and ability to keep a cool head.)

The parts that I'll remember are the timeless bits, though: who can decide when a person is irredeemable? What happens when we pray for a person who appears irredeemable? Why do some people choose alcohol over the ones they love, and how should we respond to them? 

Trollope is much funnier than I expected him to be. He is said to have laughed himself to death, by reading a book he found so funny that he laughed until he had a stroke. This is a sad book, though. Sometimes you appear to have it all, and you wind up losing what's most important. Sometimes you do the best you can, and it's still not enough.

My invisibility cloak

This is the current state of my MKAL project:

It's quite something, isn't it? Stella is used to seeing it wadded up, with only the last bit poking out of my knitting bag, and as she watched me take this picture she said, "When you see it all spread out, it's very.. a lot." She's right: it is VERY a lot. I have one more fan wedge to go on the right side, and then probably the finishing instructions will involve a lot of I-cord edging.

I was manipulating the gradient of the self-striping yarn in one of the wedges, and I was fretting about whether I had changed the color too abruptly. "I might have made it look weird," I said plaintively as I surveyed the transition from dark blue-green to lighter blue-green. "Mom," said one of my children, gently and accurately, "you don't have to worry about making this thing look weirder than it already looks." We're pretty much at maximum weirdness here, are we not?

It is bigger than I am. It is vast-- an ocean of weirdness, a sea of strange. I will be able to swathe myself in it on the snowiest of days, as long as I wear sunglasses to protect myself from the blinding brightness of the colors.

I am calling it my invisibility cloak, because look:

(my arm is fully extended over my head in this picture) (but you'd never know that because I'm invisible)

It is so visually unexpected that if you saw it in the wild you wouldn't say, "Hm, is that a person behind that invisibility cloak?" No, you would just say, "Wow, that is a painfully vivid Thing over there and I don't have eye protection. I'd better look away now."

The pictures cannot begin to convey the brightness of the lime green. If I wear it outside, I might be deemed an environmental hazard. Picture me walking along the Gladlyville thoroughfares on a sunny day, blinding its citizens with my invisibility cloak. "Aaaiiieeee," they will shriek, fleeing to save themselves. "Out of my way!" I will thunder. "I spent all summer working on this thing and I'm going to wear it, dern it!"

(Except it is actually pretty itchy. We shall have to see how much wear it gets.)