Light and Momentary

Finished

Finished Thing #1: Today I finished the file transfer process AT LAST. I don't want this to be a whiny post, but it was so painfully slow and cumbersome. So many clicks and pauses and silly avoidable steps. But HUZZAH it is DONE. I might have to award myself a prize.

Finished Thing #2: Today I also finished the fall semester session of Swole for Science. Back in the pretest week, my trainer took me pretty close to my ceiling on the compound lifts and plugged those results into an online calculator so it could estimate (with variable accuracy, I'd say) a starting one-rep max. Today he asked me to see how many reps I could do in a single set at my original (approximate) one-rep max, and used the new results to estimate an updated one-rep max. For Future Jamie, here are the numbers:

Squats: 115 x 24 
Bench: 85 x 14 (could have squeezed out another one)
Bent-over rows: 95 x 10
Deadlift: 145 x 6
Push-ups: 18
Pull-ups (with 50 pounds offset): 9 (so much arm fatigue by this point-- lats were okay but arms were shot)

I am not accustomed to that kind of repeated max effort on compound movements. I am sure I could have doubled the deadlift reps if it had been the first exercise, but my quads and glutes were fatigued from the squats. And I can definitely do more push-ups than that, but not right after a max effort on bench.

When I said goodbye to my trainer I kinda wanted to give him a hug but I also did not want to make it weird. "You worked really hard this semester," he told me, and he spoke the truth. It was a fantastic experience. 

Finished Thing #3: Today I also also finished NaBloPoMo: thirty days, thirty posts. My brain is tired from #1 and my body is tired from #2, and I think I shall now wobble off to bed. 

Thanks for reading, friends!

More tales of file transfers

I had a caulking-the-tub moment this week, in which a weird urge to complete a task turned out to be totally providential. Although I have to be sure to get all of my content out of our old LMS this week, I thought that I had plenty of time to move my lecture videos. That platform isn't going away until January. But I got into a video-transferring groove a couple of days ago, and I just kept working my way backward in time. 

"Why am I doing this?" I asked myself. "Wouldn't it be smarter to finish up the loose ends in the time-sensitive task first?" But instead I just kept moving videos out of their old storage location and into the new one.

When I got all the way back to the 2018 videos, I found myself flummoxed. In 2018 I taught my first fully online asynchronous class, and so I had made a boatload of lecture videos. But for some baffling reason, the first third of the course wasn't showing up with my other videos.

Had they been auto-deleted, because I'd exceeded a storage cap?

Were they in some secret folder I couldn't see?

I contacted tech support, and they were also flummoxed.

Somewhere in the dim recesses of my brain a faint recollection stirred, and I looked at the course website from 2018. I had totally forgotten: I switched platforms in the middle of prepping those materials. I started out storing videos in the LMS, but bumped up against the limit on data storage for a single course.

If not for that weird itch to transfer my videos ahead of schedule, I would have lost all of that material. Ai yi yi, I am wincing at the thought.

I am feeling grateful tonight for weird providential urges.

28

This is the day of NaBloPoMo on which I say, "Huh, I might be temporarily out of ideas for new blog posts."

Can't have Thanksgiving without pecan pie

"You need to write all these recipes down," Pete told me after Thanksgiving dinner, and then the next day a guest requested the pecan pie recipe. So here's a pecan pie post.

I make a pecan pie that is fussier than the ones I grew up with. I think it looks so pretty and festive that I don't mind the once-a-year hassle. You do have to hunch over a hot partially set pie to arrange pecan halves in concentric circles, so keep on scrolling if that's not your cup of tea. (Pecan pie is at approximately 1:00 in this picture of our consolatory 2020 dessert extravaganza. We had no company; we had so much pie.)

Roll out shortcrust pastry to line a 9-inch tart pan with a removable base. Let it rest in the fridge for about an hour so it doesn't shrink in the oven. Preheat your oven to 400, and blind-bake the crust, anchored by pie weights or dried beans, for 20 minutes.

While it's in the oven, cream together 6 T. softened butter and 125g brown sugar. (I will never again pack brown sugar into a measuring cup with a spoon, but we can still be friends if you hate baking by weight: that's about 1/2 c., packed.) When the mixture is light and fluffy, beat in 3 eggs, followed by 100 ml maple syrup and 150 ml corn syrup. Add a pinch of salt and a spoonful of liquor -- bourbon or dark rum, as you prefer.

Put a tablespoon of flour into a baggie, and add 150 g chopped pecans. (My cookbook estimates this as 1.25 cups; pinpoint accuracy is not essential here.) Shake them around to coat them with flour, so they are less likely to sink to the bottom of the pie. Fold them into the filling mixture.

Do not neglect this next step, even if you are feeling lucky: set the tart pan with its parbaked crust in a rimmed baking sheet, on which you have set a foil square that will cup the sides of the pan and contain any oozing pie filling. You are now going to pour most of a pound of sugar into that crust, and if you have even a small crack in the crust you will make a disastrous mess in your oven floor as the filling seeps through the removable bottom of your tart pan. If you are baking the pie while you eat your Thanksgiving dinner, the dining room will be filled with acrid smoke and the shrill voices of angry smoke detectors. (Why, yes, this is the voice of bitter experience! Learn from my mistakes, friends!) Don't overfill the crust, or you'll get overflowing baked-on goo gluing the pie to the pan. If you have extra filling, bake it until it's set in a separate little dish, like the white ramekin in these pie pictures. Turn the oven temperature down to 350 and give it 15 minutes.

Here is the fiddly part: scoot your oven rack out and place pecan halves in concentric circles atop the lightly set filling. Slide it back in and bake until it's completely set. Check it after 30 more minutes; if it's still jiggly in the middle you might need as much as ten more minutes. Cool it on a wire rack until you can slide it out of its pan and onto a pretty plate. Cut it in small slices so you will have leftovers.

This is a recipe from Barbara Maher's Ultimate Cake, the book behind many of our celebratory desserts over the years.

Alas

I was going to make a nice cozy pot of turkey-barley soup tonight. Just the thing for a cold night, I thought to myself, with the added benefit of getting rid of some of the stock taking up space in the fridge. A few days before Thanksgiving I like to serve roast chicken for dinner and make stock with the carcass, so there's plenty on hand for moistening stuffing and making gravy. But I often make more than I need, which means the extra stock is competing with the Thanksgiving leftovers for fridge space.

I minced an onion and a stalk of celery and set them to browning in a mix of olive oil and butter. I cubed up a few small carrots and added them too, and once everything was turning golden I added some slivered garlic and sprinkled the veggies with salt. I poured in stock and added a couple of handfuls of chopped leftover turkey, and then I grabbed the quick barley. We had an open box in the pantry, left over from last soup season, and I tipped it all in. It seemed a little clumpy, but I told myself it looked fine. If you are reading this post in hopes of finding an actual recipe for turkey-barley soup, you're almost done: simmer until the barley is tender and check the seasoning. Easy, cozy, golden, frugal -- who could ask for anything more? But this is not primarily a recipe post, because the story takes a sad turn:

Fifteen minutes later I peeked in and discovered an armada of little cream-colored crescent-shaped items afloat in my soup. 

For a moment I thought optimistically that all the broken bits of barley must have been crescent-shaped. And then my heart sank, and I pulled up the magnifier app on my phone to survey a few ships from the fleet, kind of like Gulliver in Lilliput if Gulliver had been an iPhone user preparing to eat the Lilliputians.

It turns out that boiling one's specimens in chicken stock does not assist in the process of accurate entomological identification, but the miniature navy in my soup pot looked an awful lot like these little guys. (Don't click that link if you're an easy-queasy person.)

"Hm," said Elwood, when I asked him for a second opinion, "that doesn't look right." 

He was less grossed out by the weevil picture than I was, pronouncing our visitors "free protein." "We didn't even have to pay for it," he added cheerfully. "Joe's always trying to eat more protein. And you! You want gains too, don't you?"

I don't want gains enough to eat larva soup, I assured him.

I need to find out who the patron saint of pantry infestations is, so I can pray earnestly: deliver us from weevils.

Succinctly

Kids' return from Germany: safe and timely

Belated Thanksgiving dinner: tasty and abundant

Number of dinner guests: 14

Dirty dishes: plentiful

Ability to form complete sentences: temporarily fractured

Eighth time is the charm, maybe

I am determined to finish The Game of Kings. I keep hearing that it's amazing. Just give it time, people say. It's worth it, they tell me.

I am almost 200 pages in, feeling impatient.

There are spots where I can tell it's supposed to be funny, but I am not invested enough in the characters to be amused. It seems willfully esoteric in a way I find irritating.

I keep telling myself that it's probably like Master and Commander, which I also found a little irritating. I didn't even pick up the second book until a few years later. But then I galloped through the whole series, cheering and chortling.

Let's hope I'm enjoying it more a hundred pages from now.

Just getting started

This has been the quietest Thanksgiving day I've ever had.

Pete and Joe have been in Germany this week, and so we've planned for months to have our Thanksgiving celebration on Saturday. We'll have about a dozen people here to eat turkey, but right now the turkey is still hanging out in the fridge, uncooked. 

Today I made the cranberry sauce and the stock and the pastry. We had Indian food for dinner, which felt pretty weird.

There will be lots of cooking and cleaning to do tomorrow. Here's to uneventful travel for all the travelers, and smooth easy cooking and cleaning for those of us at home.

For the curly-haired people

I've been using Shea Moisture hair products for years now, and I'm usually a coconut-hibiscus person. Last month I was at CVS looking for a replacement tub of my old standby, and they didn't have quite what I was looking for. I tried a new-to-me product line, the Jamaican black castor oil.

It's not a fabulous name, to my ear -- I associate castor oil with sad children's literature characters from the 1950s and earthy-crunchy moms trying to kick-start labor. But it is a fabulous cool-weather hair product. This is today's zero-effort hair, curl definition courtesy of the smoothie cream. 

With any product for curls, there are tradeoffs: crisper curl definition usually means more residue. That's true of this one, too, but I like it anyway. And this is probably a niche issue, since I don't know how many people with fading red hair read this blog and also buy curl products, but I find that thick and opaque curl products like this one mute the color of my hair. I'm a fan, though. I'll definitely buy it again.

Easy, happy, fresh, local

I always forget how much I like potato-leek soup until I am actually eating potato-leek soup. We get CSA leeks regularly in the late fall, and tonight I made a pot of soup that we all enjoyed. You can make this soup with any quantity of leeks or potatoes, really, but I had four medium leeks and two medium potatoes.

Chop up the white and pale green parts of your leeks into bite-sized pieces, and soak them briefly in cold water to get rid of any lingering dirt. Toss them into a heavy pot in which you have melted a half-stick of butter. Season them with salt and pepper and let them stew on medium-low heat for about 15 minutes.

Sprinkle a quarter-cup of flour over your softened leeks and stir it around for a few minutes. Once it's nice and hot, whisk in about 3 cups of stock, starting slowly to avoid sad lumpy soup. Chuck in your peeled and cubed potatoes at this point, and about a cup of milk or cream or a combination thereof. You are the only person who knows where you like your soups to fall on the soup-stew spectrum, and the only person who knows how much butterfat is the right amount of butterfat for your palate, so do what works for you. You'll probably need more salt. Tonight I chopped up some leftover sausage that was lurking in the fridge and added it to the pot, but it also makes a nice meatless meal.

When your potatoes are tender, taste again for salt and serve it forth. 

I love the squeak of a leek between my teeth-- don't you?

cp

Somewhere on the Gladlyville U servers I have a folder filled with hundreds of quiz questions. Somewhere else on those servers I have a folder filled with gigs and gigs of video lectures. One of my tasks this week is to move them to different folders on those same servers.

We are changing over from one LMS to another this semester, and the painful level has been fairly high. Compounding the pain is a deadline: everything on the old LMS will go away at the end of the month. I have eleven years' worth of stuff stored in that old LMS, and moving it over is a big job.

There are some elements of the task that are straightforward. It's only mildly frustrating to copy over the folders where course readings and lecture materials are stored. (The process derails when it encounters links, but I can mostly work around that.) Unfortunately, the assignments and quizzes have to be copied one by one. And according to the instructions for saving my videos, I ought to download them all and then re-upload them to a new site.

Somewhere behind the curtain there are directories from which all of my quiz questions and all of my videos are accessible, and SOMEONE on campus has write permission for those directories. SOMEONE on campus could type a line of code that looked something like this--

> cp /old_lms/dr_gladly/quizzes/* /new_lms/dr_gladly/quizzes

-- and save me hours of work.

But for whatever reason, that option is not on offer. 

I am trying not to be too whiny about it. I have 15 courses with materials stored in the old LMS. I've finished transferring five of them. I have big chunks of three other classes done. I have to get it done, so I'll get it done.

It would be much nicer if there were a more efficient option available, though.

That was weird timing

Yesterday morning, twelve hours after my happy dog-walking post, something unexpected happened: Sandy and I were three-tenths of a mile from home when she slipped her collar and ran away from me like she was possessed. She's fine, but it was a little scary.

We adopted Sandy on August 12, and she's been such a good little dog. She almost always comes the first time I call her name, she responds to "sit" with reasonable consistency, she never chews anything she shouldn't or gets into the garbage or begs at the table. One day earlier in the fall her leash got disconnected when we were walking, and as soon as I called her name she turned around and came right back to me so I could clip it again. Another time Stella and I were going on a Non-Dog Outing and Sandy slipped out the back door with us, hoping for a Dog Outing. She came obediently back to the door and went in immediately, disappointed but cooperative.

So when she first slipped away yesterday I wasn't worried. Right after she poops she prances around as if to say, "ah, I feel so much lighter now," and she always wants to run as soon as possible after I get things cleaned up. I thought she'd come right back as soon as she realized I wasn't with her.

But she didn't.

I abandoned the mess temporarily and sprinted after her, calling her name again. She didn't slow down; she didn't look over her shoulder. She just ran, hell bent for leather. "At least," I thought to myself, "the students are mostly gone for Thanksgiving break, so there will be fewer distracted drivers speeding through the neighborhood." Just then, a car turned a corner, driving right up the route she needed to follow to get home.

"SANDY, WATCH FOR THE CAR!" I bellowed. I don't know whether the driver heard the bellow or saw the dog or both, but it stopped before they could collide. After Sandy ran in front of the stopped car and up our street, the passenger hopped out and tried to catch up with her while the car followed them slowly.

At this point I'd covered about three-quarters of the distance and I was out of steam. Later I understood why: my watch told me after the fact that I was running at a 7:15 pace, and I am not a 7:15 kind of runner. But it felt urgent to catch the dog before she encountered another car, so off I ran again. 

When Sandy got to our driveway she wasn't quite sure what to do. The guy on foot didn't know it was her house, obviously, and was still trying to contain her. She ran back down the sidewalk to me, and I quickly leashed her and thanked the guy on the sidewalk. I wobbled inside, gasping and adrenaline-raddled.

The whole thing only took a few minutes, but it shook me up. Why had my sweet cooperative dog lost her mind like that? 

I wondered if she wanted more running time than she'd been getting, but she hasn't wanted to run any more than usual today. I wondered if she was unexpectedly hungry after a long walk (she usually beelines for her bowl right after our morning walk), but she went straight to the couch and curled up with Stella; she didn't eat anything for a while afterward. I wondered if I'd totally misread my dog and actually she had needed me to teach her to heel and generally discipline her with a firmer hand. I was feeling pretty bummed about the whole thing.

Today, though, I am wondering if I might have scared her.

We don't know much about Sandy's background, but she seems to have had some experiences that left her cautious about people and particularly fearful of men. For weeks and weeks she wasn't sure what to make of Elwood. She'd approach him to be petted and then flinch away for no reason. It was like she was saying, "I want to trust you, but is this the day when you kick me in the belly?" Since she's been here we've had one day with some brief kid drama, and she ran as far away from the yelling as she could possibly go, all the way to the opposite corner of the house.

Yesterday might have been the first time she'd ever heard me raise my voice. Is that why she kept running, maybe?

I tightened her collar, which had loosened itself up. I kept her closer to me during the post-poop prancing today. I gave her some extra opportunities to go fast, in case she needed to burn off some energy. But I'm still confused about why she did that, and a little worried about what might happen next time.

Progress!

Three years and seven months after I started them, I have finished knitting my flip-top Broughton mittens. They spent the afternoon and evening taking a bath, which I hope will smooth out the colorwork and magically enlarge them. (One of those outcomes is likelier than the other.)

I still have to do the finishing, which will require me to sew the linings in place, find or purchase correctly sized buttons, tighten up some gaps around the thumb openings, and weave in a whole bunch of ends. It's at least one GBBO episode, and that's if I have the right buttons in the house.

But still! Let's hear it for progress!
 

Friluftsliv

One of the unexpected perks of having a dog is spending more time outside. I wouldn't have guessed it would make a big difference, because I commute on foot, I walk around campus during the day, and I participate in outdoor sports like running and biking. 

But having a dog means spending time outside in a specific way that I am really enjoying. I'm not telling myself that I have to walk faster because my meeting starts in six minutes. I'm not pushing myself to hit a particular pace or distance. I'm just-- being, outside.

Sandy likes to go fast and then stop to sniff, which is usually pleasant for me too. We often do a bit of running, interrupted when she gets a whiff of something interesting. A couple of times a stranger has watched us running and said to me, "Who's taking whom for a walk?" I love it, though -- 30 seconds at an 8:30 pace is fun and invigorating, and also I'm not going to complain when we stop to catch our breath. There's evidence that even short bursts of running have health benefits, but I'm not doing it because of the science. It's just a happy way to start the day: running, pausing, running again, and then catching our breath in the morning sunshine. Not since I was a kid have I lived a life in which I routinely stand underneath a tree and turn my face up to admire the sun shining through its leaves. 

There are some dog owners who are emphatic about teaching their dogs to heel, and not letting their dogs set the pace during walks. To them I say: whatever, guys. I enjoy my lively and curious little dog, and our stop-and-start walks work well for the two of us. We are getting acquainted with the neighborhood dogs (some friendly, some not) and with their owners (here too: some friendly, some not).

If you're walking near Gladlyville U and you see us bounding down the street, be sure to wave.

Will you halve my to-may-TOES?

Stella has turned into a dedicated Taylor Swift fan, which means I've been listening to a lot of Taylor Swift lately. Whenever I hear the song Lover, it strikes me as a 20-year-old's idea of what love will be like -- saving seats for each other, having your own place where you can decide for yourselves to let your friends sleep on the couch. It's interesting to me that she was almost 30 when she wrote it, and I'm curious about whether she penned those lyrics with a younger audience in mind.

Occasionally I have idle thoughts about what a middle-aged version of the song might sound like. Will you file the taxes? mow the lawn when it's not your turn? be patient when your spouse does the thing that has irritated you for 35 years now? (Maybe, just possibly, that version is less likely to be streamed by the teens and 20-somethings.) This evening I am thinking about another addition to the middle-aged lady version, sparked by a green salad.

I don't eat a lot of green salad. There's usually some on the dinner table, but Elwood eats more than 90% of it. I prefer salads in the slaw family-- I like them more cabbage-y and less lettuce-y -- so it's not unusual for us to have his-and-hers salads at dinnertime. But tonight I asked him to pass me the green salad, and I found out something that makes me feel unexpectedly loved: he always cuts the cherry tomatoes in half.

I don't think I have a lot of texture issues when it comes to food. My mother has a long list of foods she can't deal with because of the way they feel to her, but I like a variety of textures, usually. I do not, however, like it when cherry tomatoes pop inside my mouth. If I get a salad at a restaurant I have to eat the cherry tomatoes first, when I'm really hungry. Once I slow down a little, I'll look at the whole cherry tomatoes, imagine them bursting inside my mouth, and push them aside, uneaten.

When he first learned this about me, Elwood thought it was strange and fussy. And who knows, maybe he still thinks it's strange and fussy. But here's what I learned tonight: if he's making a green salad with cherry tomatoes, he always takes the time to cut them in half. There's more than a 90% chance that I won't eat the salad, but he cuts them in half anyway.

So where Taylor sings "Can we always be this CLOSE?" I'm swapping in "Will you halve my to-may-TOES?" Because that's what long-lasting love looks like, I think: you don't always understand why they are the way they are, but you make space for them to be that way anyhow.

So perky

Stella is taking first-year German with Pete's former teacher, and she texted him for assistance. "Your task is to write a note to a teacher," said another teacher in a different class, and Stella picked Frau H.

"Help!" she wrote him. "What should I say to Frau H?"

Pete answered her right away with a couple of German sentences, and she copied and pasted his suggestion into her note. When I got home she told me about it. "I'm not quite sure what I said," she admitted.

I looked at her phone and burst out laughing.

Pete had told her to say, "I like to eat shoes! They are very tasty!"

Pete loves German; right now he's taking a college German class that he's really enjoying. When we're together we slide between English and German all the time, laughing frequently at our clunky German sentences. Last week he asked me if I had time to talk on the phone and for a moment my innards seized up. He's a Gen Z kind of guy, and I have hardly ever spoken to him on the phone even though we text regularly. Was something wrong??

Nothing was wrong -- he wanted to tell me a funny story from one of his classes. But he wanted to tell me in German, and I couldn't keep up. The connection was bad, and it felt harder to untangle what he was saying with no visual input, and after a few minutes I said, "Sorry, sweetheart, can we switch to English?" 

Anyway: the point is that he likes thinking about constructing sentences in German and he was well equipped to give his sister some useful input. But instead he told her to say she likes to eat delicious shoes.

"What in the world?" I asked him.

It goes back to Joe, who told Pete before his first-ever German class that he should greet the teacher with "ich mag Schuhe essen!" Pete is a dutiful guy, and he introduced himself to Frau H. with "ich mag Schuhe essen!" He's not sure she'll remember it, though; she might just think Stella, like Miracle Max, is partial to a tasty MLT. In this case, though, it's a Mary Jane, lettuce, and tomato.

Socks for beginners

Last night I was texting with my friend Shelley about making socks, and then Heather left a comment on yesterday's post about getting started with socks, so I am going to write a post about knitting socks.

Knitting socks = the best! They are such happy little projects: portable, colorful, varied, and easy to give to your knitworthy friends and loved ones, because just about everybody needs socks.

Choose good yarn -- I love the Schoppel sock yarns myself. You want mostly superwash wool mixed with something tougher for durability, like 25% nylon. Good sock yarn is more expensive than you might expect it to be, because a lot of us are used to buying socks at Target. You are going to spend a lot of hours staring at this sock yarn as it runs through your fingers, so tell yourself that the price per hour of enjoyment is low, not that the price per sock is high.

I recommend knitting socks on two circular needles, or using the magic loop technique on one circular needle with a 40-inch cable. YouTube will show you how to get started with either of those techniques for knitting in the round if you haven't tried them yet. You can also use double-points, but they make your project less portable and you are going to find yourself grumbling about chasing after the one that rolled under the coffee table again. Start with US size 2, which is 2.75mm in non-US locales.

Top-down socks are easier to start with than toe-up socks (or any of the weirder offerings, like this goofy pattern that tells you to start in the middle). Use a long-tail cast-on to set yourself up for working 64 stitches in the round. Make yourself a nice K2P2 cuff. I like to rib all the way down my sock leg to minimize sag, but you can switch over to stockinette after an inch of ribbing if it's easier for you to find a groove with stockinette.

When your sock leg is the length you want it to be, you'll switch for a bit from knitting in the round to knitting back and forth. I found this Wayback Machine link that's very much like my go-to pattern for top-down socks. It will walk you through the heel flap, heel turn, and gusset. Once you're back to 64 stitches, you just cruise down the foot in happy rounds of stockinette until you reach the toe-zone.

Heather asked specifically about socks for Fred Flintstone, and LO, I have a post in my archives called Fred Flintstone's New Socks! (What are the odds? I wonder if I am the internet's leading Fred Flintstone sock blogger in addition to being the internet's leading kraken/bunyip blogger?) Most sock patterns tell you to taper the toe at a 45-degree angle for 1.5-2 inches before grafting the front and back together, but you can just do fewer rounds of toe decreases to get a squarer sock. Heather, you might think about grafting your first toe in a contrasting color so it's easy to unpick it if you want to take another crack at the toe shaping.

If you think you want to try toe-up socks, which are my default these days, here's a post with my sock recipe. The beginning is more fiddly and there's more math and/or guessing involved in deciding when to start the gusset increases, so I suggest top-down for your first pair or two.

90% of a mitten is not enough of a mitten

It was chilly over the weekend and as I was heading out to walk the dog I thought to myself, "I wish I had a pair of flip-top mittens, so my fingertips could mostly be warm but I could have easy access when I needed to do something requiring some dexterity."

"Oh," I said back to myself, "you mean like the flip-top mittens you started making in APRIL 2020?"

I rarely knit these days and I'm not sure exactly why. It used to be that every time I read a book to a kid I'd pick up my knitting, and it used to be that I read a lot of books to a lot of kids. Knitting took the edge off when I was reading the same book for the 427th time, but these days all the people in my household read their own books to themselves. Knitting was something I always reached for if I was watching a TV show, but I hardly ever watch TV shows these days.

Another thing that's changed: I used to enjoy the knitting community. I'm not active on Ravelry these days, and the knitting bloggers I used to follow have all stopped blogging. It's pleasant to talk about progress and frustrations with people who are excited about knitting. It's motivating to see other people's projects and riff on their ideas.

And here's another thing: I can't seem to combine very much knitting with lifting, because it makes my elbow hurt. I'd rather get strong than make socks. But probably I can make a few socks and keep lifting pain-free, right? 

After I wrote the post I linked above, I finished the first two remaining tasks and then I just could not bring myself to pick up stitches for the lining of the second mitten. But you know, it won't actually be that hard. I need bright light and 20 minutes, and then I'll say to myself, "Why did I put this off for so long?"

What's something Stella and I could watch together in the evenings while I ease myself back into the knitting groove? It needs to be something I can catch most of by listening (i.e., no subtitles), and it can't be too creepy or violent because I don't do well with creepy/violent shows. 

In which I am not reading the comments

I used to be much more vocal about being a Catholic blogger, and then things got weird. I alienated a bunch of Catholic readers with my posts about Trump and then about COVID, and then my post about January 6 was just a bridge too far for some folks. I don't know how much of the issue is that fewer people are reading blogs now, and how much of the issue is that people stopped reading my blog in particular. But there is a deep rift in the particular Catholic subculture I used to inhabit so happily. 

In my first months of blogging, way back in 2004, I connected with a blogging Catholic midwife and mom of six who became a Facebook friend. Earlier this week she posted a link to the NPR interview with Russell Moore in which he talked about all the pastors who tell him they can't preach the Sermon on the Mount these days. Jesus sounds like a wuss, their congregants complain. She got a reply from someone I've been seeing in internet comment boxes for almost 20 years now, an earthy-crunchy mom of many whom I first encountered in that same Catholic subculture. "You can't trust anything NPR says," she asserted.

This is not the first time I've posted about the problems with contemporary US Catholic epistemology, so I'll try not to repeat myself. I'm thinking about it this weekend, though, because I can't quite get my mind around the Bishop Strickland situation.

If this hasn't been on your radar, here's the short version: a bishop in rural Texas has been increasingly strident in his opposition to the pope. Months ago the Vatican sent a deputation to investigate, and he was asked for his resignation on Thursday. He declined to resign, so the Holy Father removed him from office yesterday.

"I will not read the comments," I said to Elwood yesterday morning. "For the health of my soul I am not going to look at what traditionalists are saying about his removal." Unfortunately, I'm going to have to work at not reading the comments, because I can't open Facebook without being greeted by posts about the situation. I keep hiding them, but the algorithm is astoundingly good at sniffing out outrage, is it not?

I am thinking about all the people I knew in the nineties and the aughts who were a little smug about the need to yield to the pope's authority. (I include myself in the smug tally-- mea culpa.) I keep asking myself: what happened? And how do we fix it?

I don't know the answer to either of those questions. But I do know better than to read the comments.

Twilight of the Apostrophe

When I started working at Gladlyville U I was strict about writing mechanics. I expected that students' written work would be meticulously edited, and I marked them down if it wasn't. Both of those things are still true, I guess, but my expectations are much lower.

Students routinely turn in written assignments that read like haphazard first drafts, with freeform spelling and punctuation. Even when they're making more of an effort, though, they often treat apostrophes as optional.

I think maybe I'm a product of a place and time that put a lot of emphasis on writing mechanics. For my parents, who grew up on western Kentucky farms, it was excruciatingly important not to sound (or look, if we're talking about writing rather than speech) ignorant. I went to junior high and high school in southern West Virginia, where I think my teachers must have been reacting to the widespread anti-intellectualism all around them. I went to college with the idea that a misplaced apostrophe was a personal failing.

This is absurd, obviously. And yet I wish sometimes that some of my students had a wee little sprinkle of that attitude. Not enough to cause them distress, you understand -- just enough to restore some apostrophes to their writing.

I have spent hours this week grading an assignment in which students were discussing a book (an AMAZING book -- highly recommended, and germane for those of you interested in the questions about AAC users raised in Happiness Falls). I have read so many posts about "Fionas doctor" and "the authors husband."

If I were a betting woman, I'd wager that English is moving in the direction of German, which does not require apostrophes. The apostrophe omissions are so widespread in the writing of young adults that I expect in 30 years' time it will be acceptable to show possession by adding an s without an apostrophe -- as in "Jamies prediction about Englishs future." But it is NOT 30 years in the future, and so I will keep marking down the students who omit apostrophes.

It's a lot of marking down, though.