Light and Momentary

The Last First Communion

Stella thought it would be nice if she could take her unicorn to church because he matched her ensemble so nicely, but I told her the unicorn would have to stay in the car. He doesn't seem to have been too terribly lonely there.

The Evens both went through CCD, but all three of the Odds prepared for first communion at home. There are lots of good things about home sacrament prep, but it can be a perfectionist minefield. A few weeks ago I sat down in the adoration chapel and said, "OK, what's the bottom line here? What are the things I must have covered by April 30?" I sat down with her afterward and checked in about a few things. "Yes, Mom, I KNOW," she told me. And she did know.

Something I did not know about getting a daughter ready for first communion is that there are more details to deal with. Seventeen gazillion dress shoe options, all apparently with at least some glitter. A dizzying array of things to perch atop her head, many of them preposterously priced. But at length we got the clothes all sorted out.

I was pretty grumpy about veil/shoe shopping earlier this week on Twitter, and my husband is skeptical about the very idea of veils. But I don't see it as a pig-in-a-poke haha-you-wanted-Rachel-but-it-was-really-Leah-SURPRISE! kind of thing. I loved seeing my daughter as both element and emblem of the Bride of Christ, partaking in the wedding feast of the Lamb and dressed as the bride prepared to welcome him.

When I put on my veil to walk down the aisle on my wedding day I was saying something purposeful: "I am offering you my hidden heart; it is only for you." The greatest blessing of my 24-year marriage is that my husband has come to know that hidden heart well -- every good intention, every irksome flaw -- and finds it beautiful. That's the kind of faith I hope my daughter will find: one in which she is free to bring her whole self to the Lord, and to know that he finds her beautiful and loves her with a love stronger than death.

This weekend hit my BAKING = LOVE switch hard. I was making a cake to celebrate Petely's twelfth birthday and Stella's first communion, and I wanted it to be special. A person with Revelation on her mind can find plenty of twelves there too: twelve gates in that welcoming city, twelve foundation stones for the twelve apostles. So I decided their cake should have twelve layers.

Here they are: six layers of chocolate cake sandwiched together with six layers of ermine buttercream (vanilla, just barely chocolate, and more serious chocolate). It was yummy. I am tired. There are A LOT of clean dishes in my dish drainer. The end.

Umbrella Alert

I used to love storms, but these days they worry me. We're in the path of that giant mass of storms heading across the Midwest tonight. We're not taking the brunt of it, but our Gladlyville storm sewers are not keeping up with the amount of water falling from the sky.

I cannot keep the sewer system from backing up into our basement by staying awake and obsessing about worst-case scenarios. It will not bode well for a happy First Communion day if I try. So I am doing the grown-up thing and heading to bed, hoping for a peaceful night. Stay safe and dry, my fellow Midwesterners. 

Blog Baby Turns 12

I found out that my Petely was coming along in August 2004, early in my second month of blogging. I blogged about the pregnancy test, the nausea, the uncertainty that attended my husband's job change, our move to Gladlyville, the conflagration of nesting energy that swept me through unpacking. I blogged about all of the false labor that plagued me during April 2005. I was watching the saints calendar and timing contractions. Elwood, let's name the baby Stanislaus! Elwood, what do you think about Conrad? Adalbert? (N.B. I was never going to name a baby Adalbert. The baby's name was going to be Benedict. We'd agreed on it in August.)

On my due date I sank into a quagmire of late-pregnancy wackadoodlery. April 19, 2005: Cardinal Ratzinger was elected pope and STOLE MY BABY'S NAME. And ALL OF MY PREGNANT FRIENDS HAD DELIVERED THEIR BABIES. Seriously, my friend Anneleisa called my on April 19 to say that our dear mutual friend had delivered a healthy baby -- and I started to cry. I was trying very hard not to cry audibly, because I knew it was kind of jerky to cry about the arrival of a healthy baby, but I also knew that I was destined to be pregnant until the END OF TIME. I began to ignore every rumble from my uterus. "Talk to me when you've got something worth my time, girlfriend," I told it.

Over the next interminable week it became obvious to me that my baby would arrive on April 28. The other boys' birthdays fell on the 29th, 30th, and 31st of various months. What other solution could there possibly be to my perpetual pregnancy? (If you had suggested that I could also keep the pattern going with a birth on the first of May, I would have been compelled to smack you. You would have deserved it, too.) So when I began to be aware that my uterus had a message that might eventually merit some attention, I knew that I had plenty of time. It was only the 27th.

I was puzzled about why I found my children so irritating when we drove to Elwood's office to pick him up from work. (Dear Past Jamie: driving a car while six centimeters dilated = a bad idea.) I was even more irritated with my MIL when she came to pick the kids up after we returned home. (Dear Past Jamie: seven centimeters is not the time for chitchat.) I was worried about getting into the tub-- it was too early, I shouldn't need the pain relief yet. (Dear Past Jamie: not too early.) When Elwood patted me on the arm as I gasped in relief in the tub, he said, "If you have the baby tonight we'll have to have another one so we can hit the 28th." There was a definite edge in my voice as I said, "Don't talk to me about that right now." "Oh, man," I thought to myself, "why am I being mean to my husband when he is just trying to be comforting?"

Dear Past Jamie: don't fret. The midwife is almost there, and when she arrives you will vault out of the bathtub and over to the couch so she can examine you. "My fingers are stretching, stretching," she will say. "Eight, almost nine." This will not compute. You will think for a moment that perhaps Gladlyville midwives use different non-centimeter units, because it is not possible for you to be almost nine centimeters dilated. But then you will laugh out loud with surprise and delight, because you are almost nine centimeters dilated. Of course you were irritated! If ever a person wanted to induce his usually mild-mannered wife to act like a rage-filled ravenous praying mantis, he would talk to her about future childbirth during transition! Luckily for Elwood, you were too busy preparing to expel a human being from your body to seize his head in your jaws and tear it from his neck.

(Maybe, based on my last two birth experiences, I should write a book about childbirth pain management techniques. I will call it Ignore Your Labor For As Long As Possible And Then A Little Bit Longer Because It Will Seem Much Shorter That Way. It will be a bestseller, I am certain.)

Once I knew that I wasn't being a big whiny baby, I settled in to do the work willingly. It was a lovely cozy birth -- such fond memories. And spring is the very best time of year to have a baby. He was such a sweet snuggly little guy -- we all enjoyed the heck out of him. Here he is with my mom at a few days old:

This year he didn't want to plan a party with friends. All four grandparents will be here this weekend for Stella's First Communion, and I have promised to bake a spectacular cake for a joint celebration. For today we agreed on a quiet family evening. He and I picked up Stella at school, and the three of us headed down to the garden store. We spent a happy hour talking about plans and plants, and every time he said, "Could we get this?" I said yes. (He is a frugal kid, so this was a winning strategy. It wouldn't have worked for all of my children.)

We came home and squatted down together by the herb garden. We put paid to the creeping charlie and planted parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, along with lemongrass and mint. He has persuaded me that should elongate the herb beds (surprise, Elwood!), but that's a project for another day. We also have marigolds and pansies and dusty millers, and a new shade-loving thing that will look lovely next to the dusty millers, and a rainbow of petunias -- a riot of color awaiting our attention tomorrow.

For dinner we ate at a teppanyaki place for the first time in years. Onion volcanoes erupted in flames and broccoli bits-turned-projectiles soared across the grill and into our mouths (well, mostly down our shirtfronts -- our guy's aim was not the best). I'm still full. And I'm still grateful. I think I'll always be grateful.

Let's talk about lunch

Do you pack your lunch? One of my perpetual resolutions is Pack More Lunches. I would love some non-sandwich ideas for packed-lunch contents, and any tips you might have on forming the habit of packing a lunch. Mornings are busy around here, and Pack More Lunches just keeps getting bumped down to the bottom of a too-long list of tasks.

That was fast

Totally unexpected answer to prayer today in the form of a message from someone who used to be a close friend. It's been years since I would have described us as close friends, but I think we're going to try to reconnect. It feels very odd, in a good way, to write a blog post saying "I wish I could be completely real with more people in my everyday life" and then 12 hours later to get an email from someone seeking to rekindle a real friendship.

Bullets on a Monday

• I am feeling like friendship is harder than it used to be. Or has it always been hard and I've just forgotten? Tonight there were tears at dinner from a boy in the middle of that junior high thing where friendships shift around. I suppose it's not surprising that he's finding it painful. I am just wishing for a magic wand and an incantation like "friendardium leviooosa!" to make it all light and easy for him.
• I also am feeling like adult friendship is harder than it used to be. Is that an embarrassing admission? Do all of the other 40-something ladies have this particular base covered? I am feeling like I used to be better at figuring out how to enrich friendships, how to take things a little deeper. I have a zillion friendly contacts and a very small number of IRL confidants.
• I am reading Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project (because Amazon offered it to me for $1.99) and I am enjoying it more than I expected to. I would bet that you don't have to wade very far into the Amazon reviews to find haters, but I find her voice engaging and her ideas compelling.
• Huh, I just went to the Amazon page to add a link to that paragraph and they directed me to a different interface, one that offered me a list of all my Kindle purchases. (I'm not sure I really want to know how many Kindle books I have purchased over the past 7 years. It will be a large number, whatever it is.) The weird thing is that on the first page alone there are multiple head-scratchers. Did I buy that L.M. Montgomery collection mistakenly? Was it free and I forgot about it? Did the download fail and that's why it never showed up on any of my devices? (Is Amazon billing me for items that are similar to other purchases, figuring I can't care too much about my book budget based on my spending history?) (Don't answer that last question.)
• Huh again, it is not like me to squinch up my eyes and refuse to look at an unpleasant fact like the total cost of my Kindle purchases. I'm feeling kind of like an addict confronting the level of vodka in the bottle that was supposed to last all week. It is maybe a little funny that I am happy to wear secondhand clothes and drive ugly cars but I tend to be extravagant about books. Priorities, man.
• I used to roll my eyes at that Erasmus quote and behold, I have become that Erasmus quote.
• Remember when I told you about knitting a laceweight sweater? I am at the bottom of the second sleeve, knitting on a lace edging. I love knitted-on edgings on principle -- they are always a pleasant bit of knitterly magic. This one is particularly delightful because it's a beautiful lace pattern that will make a pretty drape-y bell sleeve. The visual appeal almost entirely offsets the editing errors in that bit of the pattern: neither the chart nor the written directions are accurate, requiring me to figure it out as I go.
• If I tell you any more about the pleasures of knitting that sweater I am going to pick it up and work on it again instead of going to bed. Really I should go to bed instead. Good night, friends.

Update

The race went really well. I felt undertrained going in but I wound up beating my most optimistic estimate for a finishing time by more than a minute. I ran a negative split by about a minute and finished the race feeling like I had run the best race I could possibly have run, given what the winter looked like around here. Hurray!

I have to tell you guys, though: I have a new contender for Worst Phone Manners Ever. I saw two people carrying on phone conversations while racing a 10K. Two of them!

Every year the bar drops a little lower, right? Every year people are using their phones in more situations where phone use was once unthinkable. Earlier this week I saw a skateboarder rolling down a busy narrow street while looking at his phone, and I thought to myself, "That guy is a candidate for a Darwin Award." I get bent out of shape when people are distracted by their phones on our local multi-use trail, especially if they're moving erratically on bikes. But this takes the cake: when people all around have been working for weeks to get ready for this event, somehow it is a good idea to slow down suddenly and move unpredictably because...this phone call just can't wait? This is a good-sized 10K, with more than 2400 competitors today. This makes for a fun but crowded course. It's not a good place to make unexpected moves, or to be unaware of your surroundings.

I'll mention it along with my positive feedback when the race organizers ask for comments, but they probably could not have predicted that the race rules would need to say, "You can either race a 10K or talk on the phone. Don't do both at the same time."

I told Elwood we should retire to a North Sea island on which only landlines with long curly cords are permitted. He agrees.

Want to talk about the Scourge of Bad Phone Manners? What's your tale of Worst Phone Manners Ever? And what do you think is going to happen here? Surely the pendulum will swing back toward sanity at some point. Won't it? Please tell me it will swing back toward sanity.

Hm, I am putting this in the Fitness category but really it should be in the (nonexistent) Kids These Days Need To Get Off My Lawn category. Except -- both of the culprits were my age! People in their 40s who think it's a good idea to weave around in a road full of runners while having a non-urgent phone conversation-- go figure!

Quickly

As soon as I hit publish I am going to set up the coffee so it will be ready for me at 5:15. I will pull out my long run checklist and line everything up for the morning: clothes, shoes, gadgets (oooh, I almost forgot: I need to charge my watch), meds, race bib with safety pins. I want to be out the door between 5:30 and 5:45. I'm doing the same 10K I've done twice before. (I wrote about the first time in this post.) I'm not very prepared for it, but I'm going to show up and have fun anyway. I used to think that the point of running was to get faster, but I have come to think there's more value in acknowledging where I am and showing up anyway. Goal #1: run joyfully. 

20 days in

Remember how I was doing 30 days of Yoga With Adriene for April? I'm two-thirds of the way through it. I have always been a leetle skeptical about yoga. Part of me says, "Why are we sitting still and breathing when we could be doing crunches instead?!" I think I've mused before in this space about the idea that my extreme flexibility was one of the reasons why I used to be such an injury-prone runner -- I am just more loosely put together than the average bear, and I wasn't sure it was good for me to streeetch those tendons and ligaments further. I liked the balance stuff, and the strength stuff, and although I was on board with the idea of mental presence, the rest of it I regarded with some serious side-eye. My brow chakra looked out on the world in a permanent state of askance-ness, you might say -- doubting its own existence, if a thing that might not exist can be said to doubt.

So it has been a little surprising for me to enjoy this yoga series as much as I have. Some of it is the teacher's style-- a little quirky, a little goofy. A lot of it is that this is the time of year when I always have some ugly unbloggable stuff going on in my life, and those daily yoga sessions have been a place to say, "Okay, Lord, I am going to feel this suffering and hand it over to you. I am going to choose peace today." 

It's been good for arm and back strength, and it's also been good for tackling tensions I didn't know I was carrying around. (In my feet, of all places. She keeps setting my feet on fire.) The weirdest thing is that it has been great for my mental focus at work. My capacity to go into my office and sit down and work patiently has been amped up considerably, which is unexpected and very welcome. I find that I look forward to it more than I would have expected-- today I was a little bummed when I thought to myself, "I already did my yoga for the day." So hey-- if you are looking for a way to boost strength/balance/stress management/focus, I can recommend Yoga With Adriene.

Crowlin ferlies

There's a lice outbreak at the parish school, where the Girl Scout troop is based. The troop leader is worried about spreading them far and wide at a campout, where people are sleeping in close quarters and where it's easy to share a pillow or a brush even accidentally. She postponed the campout. Unfortunately, she moved it to the weekend of the men's retreat, and to a site twice as far away. I can't go overnight while Elwood is away on the retreat team, and I am not enthusiastic about driving out there for part of Saturday. Maybe I should suck it up and go, though. Hmm.

Planning

This weekend is the Girl Scout campout, and I am in charge of music. I'm playing for our Mass, but I'm also the person who's leading all the rest of the music. 

Leading music for Girl Scout campers used to be my Thing. When I applied to college in the winter of 1987, the essay I used most often was one that talked about the experience of coaxing girls to sing until they discovered how much fun it could be.

Thirty years later I remember a lot of the songs we used to sing, but lots of them have faded too. And some of them don't hold up very well. I can still recite the words to On My Honor; I just don't want to.

So I'm trying to plan: I need a list of upbeat songs and a list of mellower songs. For upbeat songs it will be easiest to do call-and-response or highly repetitive songs, like Princess Pat and The Bear Song (the other day / I met a bear / a great big bear / away out there) and An Austrian Went Yodeling. Do girls still sing Sipping Cider? Accidental kissing leading to 49 children seems like a suboptimal message here in 2017. And I used to love the song Dem Bones (The Lord, he thought he'd make a man / took a little water and he took a little sand), but I am worried that the chorus sounds racist. That d/ð substitution is pretty specific to African-American English, is it not?

Some of the songs I loved most as a girl were songs with complicated lyrics, like Green Grow The Rushes, Ho. I'm not sure that one would fly at the campout, but it is SUCH a fun song.

I really don't know about the mellow songs. We used to sing Today, and I loved it, and we used to sing Girl Scouts Together, which I think is a dreadful song, and we used to sing On The Loose, which has a whole lot of lyrics. I am not excited about making song sheets.

I guess I am not sure how much patience the girls will have with unfamiliar songs, or whether they will be able to sing rounds, or how to balance repetition versus variety in a campout that will span less than 24 hours. It was different when camp lasted for a week. I'd love some input if you have thoughts to spare.

Guest Post

I, Bunyip, have been seen in these pages before. In my most recent appearance I snarfed up Jamie's bathing suit, but it was not very filling. I have been living lean, getting by on the ductwork's baby spiders and dust bunnies, but TODAY oh FRABJOUS DAY I had a most delicious mouthful.

Jamie appeared in the living room with a mysteriously colored ovoid object. She put it in the shoe basket. She came back with another, which she stashed in the magazine rack. Then she put a third one under the armchair's cushion.

I sniffed a cautious sniff and realized: despite the peculiar colorations, these objects were FOOD. Jamie put one on the CD shelf and taped another to the underside of the coffee table. And THEN -- oh THEN -- she put an egg where I could reach it. I snaked a long and hairy arm out of my duct and I SNAFFLED myself some FOOD. It was crunchier than I expected on the outside, very crunchy, even a little disagreeable in its pointiness, but the inside was GLORIOUS. It was more filling than a thousand spider nymphs. Mmmmm, I wondered if I could find MORE of the FOOD things.

Then there came a thumping of many feet. This house has so many thumping feet. It is a sad place for a bunyip like me, used to the wide open spaces and silences of the outback, but at least the Gladlyville spiders are less likely to be poisonous. The kids came in and -- can you believe it? -- they started searching for my FOOD. My. Food. Even worse, they were counting the food things. They counted to 17, and then they began to be puzzled. Where was the 18th food thing?

Desperate times call for desperate measures, they say. With a cautious finger I reached inside Jamie's ear. With the greatest delicacy I scooped out her memory of the food thing's location. I breathed a sigh of relief when she looked perplexed. "I...don't know, kids," she said. I know there were six in the living room, but I can't remember where I put the sixth one."

With a sulfurous burp I departed, wriggling back into the bowels of the house. The next time she has the ductwork cleaned she may marvel at the trail of food thing pointy bits inside my duct, but I am safe for today.

We who are about to dye salute you

(pun courtesy of my husband)

Still stubborn after all these years

One of the things nobody tells you about academia is that it's really more about stubbornness than brains. You have to hold fast to your determination that you have a good idea, one worth getting into print. Or pixels, these days. Earlier this week I had a manuscript accepted after two previous rejections. I didn't find a very prestigious home for it, but I found it a peer-reviewed (and non-predatory!) home. Today I sent off a shiny new manuscript, the one I mentioned to you already this week. If it gets rejected, I have a backup plan. I'm stubborn like that.

Today I also sent off the Heartbreak Paper to get some input from a new set of eyes. It's been a while since I posted about the Heartbreak Paper-- much-needed topic, rock star co-author, mismanaged review, crushing rejection, followed by another rejection last summer. But do you know, my friends, it is a really good paper and by hook or by crook I am going to get it published. Here's hoping that this new contact has some good ideas for me.

I was lying next to sleepy Stella earlier this evening and thinking about how hard we work to teach our toddlers not to be stubborn. We do this even though 90% of what it takes to reach difficult goals in later life comes down to stubbornnesss.

That's a little weird, isn't it?

Sunday's coming

What are you cooking for Easter, my friends?

Redefining "long"

One weekend morning in 2012 I got up and said to myself, "I am going to run farther than I have ever run before." And I did: I ran 4 miles. It felt like An Accomplishment. It feels odd to type that sentence, because now 4 miles is no big deal. A 4- or 5-mile run would be longer than average for a weeknight run, but the idea has lost its novelty. And along with the novelty, much of its difficulty has faded away as well. (I mean, mostly. I have certainly done dumb and painful 5-mile runs. It was a big deal the day that I decided I was going to do 5 10-minute miles, because I am too slow for that nonsense. I finished the run, but I wobbled miserably off the treadmill afterward.)

A couple of years ago I posted about how six miles felt like A Project, but I wished it didn't. About ten days ago I went out for a six-mile run, and it wasn't a big deal. "Hurray!" I thought to myself. "Progress!" But then on Sunday I went out planning to run 7 miles, and discovered that 7 miles is the beginning of Long and Painful territory for me. It was partially because I didn't eat enough breakfast, but it was also partially because 7 miles is kind of a long way to run. It was probably mostly because I just haven't done as many 7-mile runs. The novelty remains, or at least some of it does. So does the difficulty.

I was counting on my fingers, trying to figure out just how novelty ebbs. I've done 15 runs in my life that were 6 miles or longer, and 10 that were 7 miles or longer. I guess that tells me: the spot where recalibration from "long" to "not actually all that long" happens is somewhere in the low double digits.

This summer I'd probably like to do the half-marathon training program at my local running store again, which will require me to do another 7 runs of 7 miles or more. I'll have to report back about how my perception of "long" changes.

In which I rhapsodize about my job

This week I have nothing that needs grading and a paper that needs writing. It's a happy combination. I'm submitting a manuscript for a special issue of a journal in which I'd love to publish. Normally I'd think it was out of my league, but I have a dataset that's a good fit for this special issue.

I love writing papers, you guys. [she said geekily] The cadence of a scholarly paper is familiar to me now: here's what we know, and here's the question I am asking. Here's how I investigated the question, and here's what I found. Here's what it means to the wider world. I often start in the middle, because the method section is a way to establish momentum. I usually write up the results next, splashing around in my data like a pig in...Wilbur's buttermilk bath.*

*What is up with the buttermilk bath in Charlotte's Web? Doesn't that seem like a terrible idea, coating a pig in a dairy product in the heat of summer? What gives, Mrs. Fern's-aunt-whose-name-escapes-me?

My very favorite part to write is the discussion section, where I get to be Queen of the World with my Idea Scepter, telling my hypothetical subjects how it ought to be. I am only a temporary Queen of the World, because the reviewers are probably going to disagree with some of my vision. (Maybe I should biff them with my Idea Scepter next time. Who needs a scholarly community when you can have brute force instead? Concussion, not persuasion!) It always feels a little intimidating when I think about writing the discussion, where I have to spell out clearly why my paper matters without over-extrapolating from my data. But once I get the ball rolling it's a delight.

Tomorrow I have to finish the introduction, along with one last discussion paragraph that occurred to me right before I needed to leave today. It's maybe a little weird to write the beginning last, but it works for me. I have to add standard deviations to a table of descriptive statistics, and plunk in some references, and send it off to my GA for proofreading.

I am so lucky to have a job where I get paid to be curious. Wish me luck!

Sweater tips from me to you

Salome Ellen did not actually ask me for any tips on making adult sweaters, but I am going to offer some anyway. If you have never made a sweater for an adult and you would like to make a sweater for an adult, here are some ideas for you:

First, consider your materials carefully. I recommend Aran-weight wool. The Aran-weight part will make for faster knitting, because there is a whole lot of surface area in any sweater that will fit an adult. I have made adult sweaters with 22 stitches per square inch and adult sweaters with 56 stitches per square inch. One of those requires more resolve than the other. I recommend wool because it is forgiving. A sweater back presents a large expanse of stockinette, and minor variations in your gauge will be more apparent in yarns that are not made from pleasantly sticky animal fibers that bloom up nicely when blocked.

Second, consider a top-down pattern. You can check fit as you go with a top-down pattern, and fix any disasters before it's too late. I've only used Ann Budd's book for one project, but I'm sure I'll do so again in the future. The spiral binding is a particularly nice touch.

Third, don't do raglan sleeves. The standard raglan sleeve recipe leaves too much fabric under the arms, so you wind up with a garment in which you could stash an extra breast or two if you found them lying by the side of the road. (Here again we sample the weirdness that arises when Jamie attempts to blog in haste. I am zipping through this post quickly, see, so I can do my yoga video for the day. In the pursuit of inner peace I am going to natter on about dismembered body parts. Right. Moving on now.) I like a nice set-in sleeve myself.

This is really a postscript to the first paragraph even though it is the fourth position counting from the top, so what does that make it? Firth? Fourst? I suggest that you not succumb to the variegated yarn temptation and even that you think carefully about the semisolid yarn temptation. Fabric made from variegated yarn will have a serious "made by hand" look to it. The world is full of beautiful variegated yarn; I get it. But I have come to think that it is most suitable for patting fondly in yarn shops and then returning to its hanger. Semisolid yarn will be less emphatic in its "my mother made this for me" proclamation, but it will proclaim nonetheless.

Fifth, I find sweater knitting most fun when I can clear the decks and just make that sweater. Long lingering sweater projects create all kinds of avoidable hassles. Moths. Lost materials. Surprising changes in gauge from one year to the next. Bulky sweater pieces lying around in overstuffed project bags. My favorite way to knit a sweater is to find a pattern that totally sucks me in and then run with it. There are so many fun ways to make a handknit sweater distinctive and beautiful. (I still love this back detail.)

But also, sixth, don't settle. If you aren't happy with that bound-off edge it will bug you every single time you wear the sweater. Ask me how I know. A sweater is a substantial investment of time and often of money. Leave time to get the finishing right.

Seventh, on the subject of just-right finishing, I have a BO recommendation for you. A knitted BO will be too firm for a buttonband but Jeny's Surprisingly Stretchy BO will be too floppy. Instead of going up a needle size I have just discovered something that works nicely: I bind off the knit stitches traditionally and use JSSBO for the purl stitches. I avoid the awkward reverse YOs and the floppiness at the same time. Try it and tell me what you think!

It's a knitting conundrum

There's a Jodie Gordon Lucas design I have wanted to knit for ages, but it's a daunting project. I cast it on last summer and made one shoulder + sleeve, but it sat in a project bag all winter because I thought I had to graft in pattern to finish the cuff. When I pulled it out again last month I realized that it was plain vanilla stockinette grafting, a 20-minute task at the outside. I knocked it out and cast on the second shoulder.

I suppose it's inevitable that a laceweight sweater will be A Project, but this one is a Really For Real Super-Gigunda Project. (Huh, spellcheck balks at laceweight but passes meekly by super-gigunda. Go figure.) The pattern is 11 pages long, with 5 separate lace charts. There is grafting in pattern all over the place. For the non-knitters, if you have not already gone skipping away to read about something more interesting like drying paint, that's hardcore. The construction is different from anything I've ever made before: first you make yourself a suspender, and then you knit a little jutting bridge out from one side of the suspender, and then you graft your bridge (in pattern!) to the far side of the suspender to make an underarm. After you unbend your brain, you pick up stitches from the underarm piece and knit yourself a sleeve. Here, look:

That represents a lot of hours of my life right there. (It will be prettier once I block it. Lace always looks like a crumpled heap of nothing in particular before you block it. It will be considerably longer once I block it as well, because it's alpaca yarn. Alpaca grows like nobody's business.)

Today I was planning to graft my underarm bridge on the other side, but I discovered that I did not follow the pattern when I made last summer's underarm bridge. I am trying to remember: did I think it was a good idea to make a shorter bridge? Was I so focused on GRAFTING IN PATTERN FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER that I hyperventilated and forgot how to count to 29? I think the answer is probably B.

At first I thought I might just leave one underarm bridge longer than the other. No one is ever going to walk up to me and say, "Please, may I count the rows in your underarm bridge?" And unpicking rows in laceweight alpaca is not my favorite task. I thought at first I'd rather live with a minor asymmetry, but I think I've changed my mind.

The thing I can't quite predict, the uncertainty that's making me a little reluctant to proceed, is how to optimize fit for a sweater with such an unusual construction. I am still wondering if I should have opted for the second size instead of the first. (I am still having the same problem I always have with sweater fit.) (Oh, goodness, look at baby Stella in that old post!) I don't know if you can see the brighter yarn at the edge of the shoulder/sleeve piece, but it's a provisional cast-on that I will unpick later. Because it's a crochet chain, it doesn't have the same amount of give as the knitted fabric, making it harder to estimate how the fabric will lie once the crochet chain is out of the picture. I can't quite tell if I am going to need more coverage. I could conceivably make the turtle lapel a little wider, (conceivably) (maybe) (with a shot of vodka under my belt except that would probably be a bad idea given the demands of this pattern) but the prospect of modifying this particular complicated pattern makes me nervous.

You know, maybe I should just email the designer. We've been on an email list together for years and years now, and if I say, "Jodie, what would you suggest that a busty person with skinny arms do about making her Tortuga fit nicely?" she will probably have good ideas for me. I'm sure you can't wait for me to report back.

All unhappy ladies are alike

Stella was grumbling tonight about the PE teacher at her school. This teacher has been there for many years now, and every year she seems to get a little less tolerant. She was looking out the window at our one cranky neighbor while she was telling me stories from PE. Although I complain now and then about neighborhood goings-on, we get along well with almost everybody on our half of the block. There's one exception: crabby Miss Becky.

"Hey!" said Stella. "I wonder if Miss Becky and the PE teacher are actually the same person!"

These women look nothing like each other -- one is probably six inches taller than the other. But it makes me chuckle to imagine a world in which perpetually grumpy people are so rare that they have to masquerade as each other.