Light and Momentary

Two steps forward

Last month I posted about our geriatric wheezing car; three days later it was totaled when it slid into a Dodge Ram on an icy night. My husband's employer offers employees the chance to purchase retiring company-owned vehicles, which is a way to get a well-maintained car for less than its blue book value. We bought a car shortly before Christmas. First we decided to pay to have it delivered, but then we got tired of waiting and decided to go get it ourselves.

Today Elwood and I drove off in the winter sunshine to pick up our new car in the next state over. Coincidentally, we traveled the first two-thirds of the route I took in May to go on retreat with my friends. As I drove back by myself I had lots of time to reflect on the last time I made the trip. 

I told you in May about how much joy it brought me when we sat on the doorstep and prayed for each other. I hadn't realized until just recently how much stuff has shaken loose in relation to my friends' prayers for me.

When I was in college and first experiencing intercessory prayer, I think I expected a lightning bolt experience: KERPOW! I will never struggle with this again! But growth in the Christian life is like growth in the corporeal life, in which babies roll over once and we cheer -- hurray! -- and then they don't roll over again for a week. As a new parent I wondered if it was a fluke or if I'd imagined it or if perhaps the baby was suffering from a neurodegenerative disease that would cause him never to roll over again (thanks, postpartum anxiety! Dear 1997 Jamie, there are meds for that and it would be just fine for you to take them)-- anyway, my point is that we expect progress to be linear and predictable but it is just not. We lurch forward and then we stall; we take a few halting steps with our arms held out like Frankenstein for balance and then we prefer to crawl for a while. Walking across the room capably and confidently takes most typically developing babies more than a year to figure out.

There are no babies anywhere who got zapped with a lightning bolt of ambulation at 3 months old and picked themselves up to toddle across the room.

Is this a ridiculous late-night analogy or are you with me?

What I mean is that just as it was normal and expected to take time to build the core strength and the balance and the neural connections that enable babies to toddle, it should also seem normal and expected for spiritual growth to unfurl over time. Slowly, sometimes painfully. But also surely.

I'd love to tell you more but EEK it's after 11. Maybe tomorrow. Good night, all!

Learning to knit

Heather left a comment on yesterday's post, asking about how to get started with knitting. I have an older post about getting better at knitting, and much of that advice applies to newbies as well. 

I advise against a scarf because they take a long time. If you're a brand-new knitter, your knitting will be different by the end of a scarf (looser, most likely, and more even too), and the difference may frustrate you. I suggest that you buy yourself a copy of the first Mason-Dixon Knitting book (hardcovers from $0.28!) and knit up a dishcloth.

You can make an excellent dishcloth with cheap cotton yarn from Michael's, where you can also buy yourself a pair of size 8 wooden needles. Many yarn shops, sadly, are not super newbie-friendly, and many of their offerings are expensive. It's worth seeing if your local yarn shop (known as your LYS in online knitter-speak) is a friendly place, but don't get discouraged if it's not. (I hope I have not maligned your LYS unjustly. Too many yarn shops give me that upscale coffeeshop vibe, where if you have to ask what a ristretto is you're not cool enough to be drinking it.)

The advantages of a dishcloth are many: it's small. It's useful year-round. No one cares if your dishcloth is a little wonky. Is it absorbent? (Answer: yes. See above re: cotton yarn.) Absorbent is all that matters. It will free you from the get-go of the idea that handknits are Sacred Objects that must be treated with reverence. Scrub that pot! It's a portable knitting project; scarves and their ilk get less and less portable as you go (see yesterday's post). It will let you try out new techniques on a small canvas. Does purling hurt your hands? You only have to do it for 45 stitches at a time if you're making a Ballband Dishcloth from the Mason-Dixon book.

You don't have to buy the book for that pattern; it's available for free. You can look up YouTube videos for long-tail cast-on and knit/purl stitches, and you'll be good to go. You'll also need to slip stitches for that dishcloth, but that just means you slide them from one needle tip to the other. (I'm not much of a YouTuber -- does anybody have recommendations?) I love the authors' voices, though, and their perspective on free-range knitting. I'd also recommend Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's Knitting Rules, and Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitter's Almanac. You can find a welcoming community at Ravelry as well as at the Mason-Dixon Knitting site, where you can post a picture of Knitting Gone Wrong and get immediate assistance in de-wonkification.

Yarn Chicken

It's been ages since I posted about knitting. It is not a coincidence that my last knitting post was two days before the election. In the upper right corner of the first picture that accompanies that post, there is a strange sort of wrap thing. It still looks to me like an insectoid robot, even though it is a much bigger insectoid robot these days. Behold: 

I have been cruising along on it this week because it is fun to knit, and recklessly disregarding its increasingly unwearable nature. I mean, really: unless I am going to a masquerade ball that directs me to dress up as a blue-green robot insect, or swathing myself in wool in my own home where fashion standards are low low low, what am I going to do with that thing?

This unfortunate truth did not hit me until I brought down an extra size 5 needle and spread it out in all its hugeness across the back of the couch. (What is up with those weird pointy bits at the edges of the solid-colored stripes?) I was, in fact, so driven by the fun-to-knit factor that I was cranking along thinking about making the largest of the three sizes*, which would require two additional bands  at the top. I couldn't find my other ball of dark green yarn, though. It wasn't in any of my knitting bags. It wasn't in the right box of unused yarn, and it wasn't in any of the wrong boxes either. 

Over Christmas one of my boys lost a hobby supply item he'd just been given. He scoured the house, he dug through the trash -- nothing. I thought he'd sympathize with me about the frustrations of losing a particular hobby supply item even when an outsider might say that you appeared to have plenty of hobby supply items. He cocked an eyebrow and said drily, "Perhaps you can use it as an opportunity to cultivate detachment? Maybe offer it up for the souls in purgatory?" Ouch!

So the missing yarn was annoyance #1. Annoyance #2 is that I'm having the very same problem I had with the 2012 Westknits MKAL: his yardage estimates are too skimpy. I am supposed to knit one more pale blue row in that top stripey section. It's about 8.5 feet of knitting, and I have about 22 feet of blue yarn. That's a game of yarn chicken I am destined to lose. I am also down to about 35 feet of the apple green yarn, despite the designer's assurance that I should be able to do another section with apple green stripes. What I am wondering now is whether I can pull off the specified I-cord bindoff with the yarn remaining to me. If I do two stripes of green and one of blue, the ratio will be about right. The only question is whether I would run out of yarn 300 stitches in.

That would really give me an opportunity to cultivate detachment.

*This is allegedly a small shawl! A small insectoid robot! Who is going to wear a large one of these? Maybe it would work for Cyborg Gregor Samsa.

#BL05

Lissa Wiley started a Facebook discussion about blogging that seems to have prompted several bloggers to resolve to write more frequently and comment more on each other's blogs. Do you remember the 2005-2006 blogiverse, when people would read thousand-word posts all the way through, and leave thoughtful comments along with 30 of their online pals, and discuss back and forth in the comboxes and then write their own blog posts about the topic? I'm not suggesting that we resurrect the trackback, but I miss those days. 

These days I am as guilty as anybody of reading the first sentence in a Facebook link and skimming the rest of the article. In those years blogging took up a little too much space in my head. There's no perfect solution, then or now, in the quest for online community, but if you have been looking for a nudge to write more frequently and connect more often with the bloggers whose posts you enjoy, maybe this is your nudge.

Say the word if you'd like to be added to the shiny new blogroll in my left margin -- the only requirement is a commitment to reasonably frequent posting and commenting. 

Comments are one of the things I've been thinking about. I don't often reply to comments on the blog, because I have the feeling that people rarely check back for replies these days. If someone requests clarification, or something along those lines, I'll comment here with the idea that it will be useful to anybody else who gets that far. Most often I reply to comments via email, because for me that's the best way to continue the conversation. But I don't know of anybody who says, "You know what I need in my life? More email." Maybe email isn't the best idea.

I'm interested in your perspective here: are you a blogger or a former blogger? If so, what is/was your motivation for blogging and how has it changed? How do you prefer to find out about new blog posts? Where are you most likely to comment -- FB, Twitter, on the blog post itself? What's your preferred channel for responses to comments?

Pockets of Competence

When my oldest son was looking for summer internships as a senior in high school I thought a lot about pockets of competence-- the things kids can do easily, the things that stymie them. I was home during one of his Skype interviews and I was so impressed with his professional persona: they were asking him questions that I found totally baffling, and he was answering promptly and persuasively. I had no idea where he'd learned to negotiate salary like that (we've established that negotiation is not my strong suit). He was presenting himself convincingly as a grownup. I was so proud of the way he was learning to navigate the real world. There was, however, a small voice in my head saying, "You'd think he could also manage to pick up a wet towel from the bedroom floor."

I do almost all of the haircuts around here. Elwood goes to the barber (I cut his hair exactly one time), and anyone who asks can go get a professional cut, but it's usually easier and more convenient for me to pull out the clippers before bed one night. My high school boys are heading back tomorrow, and they needed haircuts for dress code compliance. I didn't realize that one of them had never had a professional cut in his entire life.

This is a boy who would manage himself just fine, I feel certain, if I plunked him down in the middle of Montreal with $10 in his pocket. But he was talking about a barbershop as if it were alien terrain. "How specific should you be about what you want?" he asked. "Are all clipper sizes the same?" He thought for a minute. "Do you pay before or after?" I have a mental list of things they should all learn before they leave home: how to swim and tie their shoes and write a thank-you note and figure out a bus schedule and parallel park and clean up after themselves. I never realized that barbershop behavior needed to be on the list.

Disciplined Enough

I was surfing through my archives recently and I came across a post from September about time management. I expect we all have ups and downs with self-discipline, yes? If you are relentlessly resolute in your wee-hours wake-ups and your tenacious tickings-of-boxes, you probably have better things to do than read this particular blog. I wrote that post when I was in a good groove: waking at 5 and immediately spending a chunk of time in prayer, working out 6 days per week and training for a half-marathon, prepping a new class but staying on top of things at work, and still making time to read good books to Stella and get Pete to soccer practice on time and provide concrete support to a struggling teen and also knit and post frequently.

It is not coincidental, I don't think, that I had just finished doing the Whole 30 at the end of August.

I have an ongoing problem with saying, "This amount of productivity is enough productivity." If I get into the office and check off all the things on my list, my temptation is to say, "Tomorrow's list should have more things on it!" rather than "Today's list was exactly the right size!" Maybe that's a good work goal for 2017: to figure out the right-sized list for me, with the right mix of short-term and long-term priorities.

I guess the more times I do the Whole 30, the more obvious it becomes that I am better at life when I am eating that way. I say this with a little reluctance, because the Whole 30 is kind of ridiculous.

But I'm going to do it again for January, and direct some attention to right-sized lists instead of super-sized lists, and see where that takes me. I'll report back.

Begin as you mean to go on

I re-read my 2016 goals before I wrote my 2017 goals, which was a rather depressing exercise. Although-- maybe that's me being hard on myself again. You know what I think it is? Instead of tickable boxes, I wrote my 2016 goals with a focus on habits and attitudes. This was probably a good focus but it does leave me with fewer boxes to tick.

Good things from 2016: I finished my first triathlon! (which required me to swim, in a race, in a quarry with actual* krakens!) and also my first half-marathon! and stayed injury-free the whole year!

*actual ≠ literal

Also in the physical realm: progress on the food front. Lessons learned from the Whole 30 have allowed me to stay in my preferred weight range consistently, but I've also made some headway in figuring out the art of occasional moderate indulgence. I finished Melissa Hartwig's Food Freedom Forever last night, and I plan to keep thinking about her recommendations.

Spiritually: I was immensely challenged and encouraged by Understanding Scrupulosity and it has had a significant impact on me. I've hardly blogged about it all because it feels a little scary. But I should blog about it. I met my goal of reading the Bible and the CCC in a year, and I'm glad I did. I took on a stressful task for the spring women's retreat team, and I'm glad about that too. I foresee more of the same in 2017: I am going to re-read the Bible and the CCC, and I'm on the team for another spring women's retreat, and I have to keep feeling my way forward with the scrupulosity question. I also need to take some steps forward with the ministry I mentioned back in the fall. I guess ideally I'd like it to have another leader at the end of the year, and be a regular helper instead of the motive power.

In the office: this year I had three papers accepted for publication, and more presentations than ever before. I taught 6.5 classes, and they mostly went well. (That spring semester grad class remains a tender spot.) Hm, I am realizing I need to do more thinking about work goals, because unrealistic work goals contribute directly to apathy and demotivation in the office. When I'm not teaching it's too easy to plan to Write All The Papers, but Writing All The Papers is not really consistent with the flood of grading and student email that will re-enter my life in a couple of weeks.

This is sort of a hodge-podge-y post but I think I will hit publish instead of tweaking. I would love to hear your thoughts on 2016 accomplishments or disappointments, and 2017 plans or hopes. If you are a resolution sort of person, are you a habits/attitudes sort of resolver, or a tickable boxes sort of resolver?