Light and Momentary

Limbo

My husband, who never gets sick, has been sick all week. "I feel better today!" he says each morning, but then he is back in bed by the afternoon. I haven't seen him like this since 1999. No consistent symptoms -- occasional fever, intermittent headache -- but this crushing fatigue and a persistent conviction that the house is freezing cold.

It has made for a strange and lonely and worrying week. I am going to urge him to schedule a doctor's appointment on Monday, I think, unless he's much better tomorrow.

I am in limbo at work. The college committee that makes promotion decisions normally meets right before the start of the semester and issues decisions immediately thereafter. This means they would, in normal circumstances, have made the decision on my promotion portfolio more than two weeks ago. Every time I get a new email I wonder if it's the one. "Maybe the dean got sick and it was hard to reschedule a daylong meeting," I tell myself. "Maybe one of the decisions required them to consult the legal office or the provost," I tell myself. "This is a great place to practice detachment," I tell myself.

I flinch a little every time I open my email. 

The substance abuser to whom I am closest is doing Dry January and I have been trying my best to be supportive. Just between you and me and the internet, I am tired of worrying about her future and tired of trying to help her deal with her issues. "I'm not making a permanent commitment," she has said very clearly. I have learned over the years that my emphatic pronouncements are unlikely to be useful to her, so I'm telling you instead: it seems like the height of folly to abandon the effort after 31 days. And yet-- sometimes people we care about make decisions we hate.

I do not get to decide what she will do on Thursday. 

Work is always full of service responsibilities in January and February: admissions portfolios, search committee responsibilities, annual evaluations. My judger is in high demand. This semester I have 136 students, and a correspondingly heavy email load. I am going through the motions in the office, unable to muster much enthusiasm. I am trying to wrap up a huge and daunting paper with a co-author who is not especially helpful. I sit down and attempt to describe what I've done, and I struggle to put words in a row. "It's just going to get rejected," I tell myself, feeling pre-defeated. 

All of my colleagues are friendly but only two of them are actual friends, people I get together with outside of work. Both of them are on sabbatical this semester, so work feels a little strange and lonely too. That's part of the problem.

Another part of the problem is that the weather has been appalling this week: brutal cold, followed by juuust enough warming to allow an ice storm to drift through the region, then a further thaw accompanied by steady rain and ubiquitous mud, ending with oppressive fog. It was so thick last night that I went the wrong direction on the highway, at the beginning of a trip I've made hundreds of times. We haven't seen the sun in days. I know that some of my glumness arises from a lack of outside time and exercise, and yet here I sit on the couch again.

***

This morning I was reading the beginning of Exodus and thinking about waiting in unpleasant circumstances. There are a bunch of things weighing on me right now that I cannot control. Right now I feel like I am still driving on the highway in last night's fog, unable to see very far in front of me.

But I will keep moving forward, just like I did last night. There are sensible things I can do, so I will do them. I can make a cozy pot of chili for dinner. I can do a streamlined lifting session in the basement with music I like. I can knock out most of the remaining admissions portfolios today. And then I can have some fun, chatting in German with Pete (who is home for the weekend, hurray!) while I work on a happy knitting project for Stella. Check it out: elephant-patterned mittens, with picot cuffs and a Latvian braid.

Okay. Onward. Here I go.

Hot Bananas Day

First day of spring* semester classes for me, and it went well. Everything I'm teaching this semester I have taught at least 3 times before, so I'm hopeful that it will feel a little mellower than last semester. 

("Spring" semester, puh-- the RealFeel was -9 this morning.)

The LMS switch continues to create headaches, though. The people behind the scenes imported two of my old courses into the new LMS, which seemed like it would be a timesaver but which caused a student to stop by my office hours today. "Dr. Gladly," she said, "what is happening in this gradebook?" It is an automatically generated wild and daunting gallimaufry of all the assignments the system could identify from all SEVEN of the times I'd previously taught this class. I'm going to have to go in there with the LMS equivalent of electric hedgeclippers and shave it all down to nothing.

But it was a good day anyway. Last night for some reason I couldn't get to sleep. This never happens to me-- if I'm going to have a wakeful spell, it happens in the middle of the night. But I lay in bed for an hour, tossing and turning and wondering if I'd accidentally consumed some caffeine. I decided to get Sandy, who sleeps elsewhere almost 100% of the time. When she lay down next to me I fell asleep easily.

Sandy is grateful for a break in the frigid temperatures we've been having. On the day when our high was below zero she didn't even want to approach the back door. Usually she comes racing toward me when she sees me holding the leash, careening down the stairs because she just can't contain her enthusiasm about going for a walk. But for a few days there she was like "Are you kidding me right now? Are you seriously suggesting we go out into that frozen wasteland ON PURPOSE?"

Today, though, for the first time since Saturday we had a high temperature in the double digits. Double-digit temperatures are my favorite kind of temperatures.

OKAY, friends, late night + full day = mush brain. Signing off, more soon, hope the bananas are pleasantly warm at your house.

Pickle Quest

Things I would eat before I would eat dill, a partial list:

1. Brains
2. Durian
3. A whole bowl of unadorned cilantro
4. Epoisses cheese 
5. Chalk

I don't mind most of the items on those internet lists of divisive foods. I'll eat oysters, I'll eat black licorice, I'll eat fennel and okra and collards and other unpopular vegetables. Not dill, though. Can't do it. It tastes like sadness and compost, neither of which I wish to have in my mouth.

Elwood just asked us if we knew where dill originated. "Hell?" I answered right away, and Joe laughed out loud. "I knew you were going to say that," he said. (The answer is actually Egypt.)

Yesterday we made our annual end-of-break trip to Chicago, and after a visit to the National Museum of Mexican Art I got a delicious chicken sandwich at a restaurant in Pilsen. I asked for the pickles on the side, please, because usually pickles taste like dill. But! In a happy surprise, these pickles were dill-free and they made the sandwich. I ate them all and licked my fingers afterward.

Pickles are such a perfect thing to put on a sandwich -- crunchy, sour, salty, a little sweet. I love the idea of pickles. Why oh why, though, do most pickles have to taste like sadness and compost? Periodically I have attempted to find pickles without dill. I used to get these fantastic, ferociously sour little gherkins when we lived near a Whole Foods. I've made refrigerator pickles in the summertime. But there must be some options at the neighborhood Kroger, right? I can't be the only person who digs the crunchy-sour-salty part and detests the dill part. 

If you have any recommendations for dill-free pickles, please tell me all about them.

The Trollope Project

Anthony Trollope wrote a staggering 47 novels, and I am going to take a crack at reading all of them. I started with the six Barsetshire Chronicles, and then read the six Palliser Chronicles followed by The Way We Live Now. Last year I took a deep breath and plunged into the obscurer corners of his oeuvre.

I kicked it off with Miss Mackenzie (spinster begins anew; contemplates marriage proposals), followed it up with Dr. Wortle's School (how should we assess the moral weight of making an unacceptable decision for a compelling reason?), moved on to The Three Clerks (don't judge your books by their covers, and don't underestimate the Department of Internal Navigation), and then read The Fixed Period (a comically weird book set in a dystopian future). Last month I also read one of his pieces of short Christmas fiction, Christmas Day at Kirkby Cottage.

For those of you counting along at home, this means I have 30 Trollope novels to go. If I aim for one per season, I'll be done when I'm 60 (pushing 61, but let's go with the round number). I do love a good long-haul reading project. 

This year I am going to begin with Marion Fay, a book chosen randomly from my Kindle version of the complete works. (Parenthetically, isn't it astonishing that I can fit the complete works of Trollope in my pocket? Let's hear it for living in the future!) Later this year I will probably read The American Senator and Orley Farm, but we'll see which way my fickle impulses steer me. I also think I'll read one more Christmas story before the Christmas season ends, even though Christmas Day at Kirkby Cottage was a little disappointing.

The trouble with an obscure hobby is that it doesn't usually make for very compelling blogging. If I tell you that the first chapter of Marion Fay reminds me of the beginning of The Duke's Children, it's unlikely to make you say "oooh! tell us more!" But perhaps we'll hear again from the hypothetical Aspasia. In any event, I continue to find that a daily Trollope chapter is a pleasant peaceful way to end the day. And if a person reads enough chapters for enough nights, eventually she will read all of Trollope.

The Lunacy Report

On the 19th of December I began to make a pair of socks for an adult man, with the goal of giving them to him for Christmas. If you are not a knitter, you probably didn't gasp at my audacity. It warrants a gasp or two, though.

I've made socks with short deadlines before, but only for women. There is considerably more acreage in a man's size 11 foot than in a woman's size 7 foot. And in the past I had the good sense to stick to a straightforward pattern, in a window when there wasn't much else going on. If you're undertaking a 7-hour drive, you might as well knit like fury while you're in the passenger seat. It doesn't work if you're busy. It doesn't make any sense to knit a pair of men's socks with less than a week to go until Christmas.

Back in 2012 my oldest son asked me for a pair of Space Invaders socks. They were slow and painful: the leg has 91 stitches per round, on size 0 needles. The charts are not intuitive, since most of us don't spend much time knitting pictures of aliens, and the colorwork sections are technically challenging because of all the long floats. They were a total pain in my butt. But he loved them. Over the years he made a special point of wearing them when we were together. They had acquired the status of special occasion socks as they grew more weathered, and I had made noises about replacing them, but when I thought about the time required to knit another pair my heart would sink.

But I love that boy, and he is the hardest person in my orbit to buy for, and so I said to myself, "This is the year, self!" On a dark and windy Tuesday evening, six days before Christmas, I went out and bought yarn. That night I dove in. 

Handknit items are a gift of time even when all goes smoothly. If a person mashes up two aliens accidentally and then rips back because her firstborn deserves CORRECT aliens, even more time is required. If a person needs three cracks at the fiddly short-row heel, she will notice that Christmas is GALLOPING closer at a speed that does not leave room for any more mistakes. If she painstakingly knits her firstborn's birthdate into the high score portion of the second sock's leg and only realizes afterward that the 6 in the pattern is actually backward, she might need to do some deep breathing. (Seriously, Knitty, that error has been sitting there on your site since 2007! Fix it already!)

My goal was to get down to beginning of the toe before I gave them to him, so I could check the fit. I put the live stitches on scrap yarn and wrapped them up just like that. I'm glad I did, because I had been asking Joe to try them on for me and Alex's feet are a little longer. On Christmas night I finished the first sock, with its fiddly short-row toe and its long whack of Kitchener stitch and its eleventy-zillion ends to weave in.

On December 26 we were driving to the Chicago 'burbs to meet my in-laws for lunch at a restaurant, and Alex was leaving in the late afternoon to catch his flight back to NYC. I worked steadily at the second toe as we headed their way, but I made a mistake because I was trying to play B is for Botticelli at the same time. I ripped it back and did it again correctly. I started the second long whack of grafting and discovered that car grafting makes me carsick in a way that car knitting never has. We were early for lunch, so I held my sock discreetly under the table and finished it off. Grafting, check. Ends woven in, also check. I laid them in my lap to take a picture.

I handed them over with a modest smile of triumph. If someone wanted to buy a pair of these socks from me, I would charge them a thousand dollars. Wear them in good health, Alex, and never doubt that your mother loves you.

Feel the fear and knit it anyway

Hello, friends, I am steeling myself to do something brave: I am going to figure out bust darts. Months and months ago in a knitting post I showed you an embryonic sweater back.

Frog it, you told me; it's not worth saving. But I did not listen.

I have found my feet in the pattern, which was a bit of an undertaking. I'm using Ann Budd's book of top-down sweaters. It has the advantage of being extremely versatile. Choose your own gauge, choose your preferred sweater style, and you're off to the races. This versatility has a cost, though, which is that following a sweater pattern requires you to wade through pages and pages of tables. And if you should happen to set your nascent sweater aside for a year or three -- well, go with God, my friend.

Anyway, I figured out which end was up and worked my way to the front of the sweater, whereupon I hit a snag. It's a fine-gauge close-fitting cardigan, and I'd like to be able to wear it open or closed. I think I'm going to add bust darts, which I have never done before.

I've done plenty of shaping in the bustular region over the years, but never anything as tailored as a dart. Most knitting patterns just say, here, add some fabric at the sides and it will probably work out. It feels a little daunting to tackle something much more specific: add x amount of fabric, at this precise location. And it feels even more daunting to do it for a garment that I want to be able to wear in various stages of buttoned-ness. 

It seems likely that I will not get it quite right on the first try, which will mean ripping and re-knitting at 6 stitches to the inch. And it also seems likely that a dart that looks good when the sweater is buttoned will seem sadly misplaced in an unbuttoned cardigan, as if I have inserted a weird little pocket for a snack or a hamster or what have you.

HOWEVER, I have concluded based on years of observation that one does not generally learn to do difficult new things by sighing defeatedly while telling oneself it sounds too hard. I found a tutorial; it has a worksheet. I'll report back.

(Tomorrow I am sending out new year's/Epiphany cards for the first time in five years, and the accompanying letter mentions this blog. I always feel a bit of uncertainty about including the link, and I tell myself I should write a few friendly appealing posts about funny kid doings or pleasant recipes. But instead I have just written a whole post about clothing modifications to accommodate breasts. The Light & Momentary blog, keeping it weird since 2006.)