Light and Momentary

Done!

Last day of June: 30 days, 30 posts. Thanks for reading, friends.

Adventuring with Allingham

Part of the Kate Davies summer knitting community involves reading novels by Margery Allingham, ranked alongside Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers as one of the UK's Queens of Crime. I've read all of the Lord Peter Wimsey books and short stories, and I devoured Agatha Christie as a kid. So it seemed likely that I'd enjoy the Allingham books as well. I finished the third one today. 

I'm enjoying them enough to keep going. Our hero Albert Campion reminds me in some ways of Lord Peter Wimsey. The books are pleasantly diverting and they do not overwhelm a sensitive reader* with gore or tautly suspenseful plot lines.

*(It's me; I'm the sensitive reader. When I was a preschooler I found Scooby-Doo too frightening to watch, and so I would cover my eyes until the scary parts were over. That probably gives you a sense of my capacity for gore and suspense. I can only tolerate murder mysteries written for the delicate flower.)

It's interesting to be reading Allingham at the same time as my Trollope novel, though. In Trollope's world we can know that a person is inexcusably vulgar if he wears yellow gloves, a sartorial mishap that occurs in both Miss Mackenzie and Marion Fay. In Allingham's novel Flowers for the Judge, I lingered over the description of a natty dresser who disappeared mysteriously. His elegant ensemble included -- can you guess? -- yellow gloves. Were yellow gloves still vulgar, and their presence was supposed to tell us something about either the disappearing man or the tobacconist describing his disappearance? Or had yellow gloves been plucked from the Trash Heap of Bad Fashion Choices and placed in the Catalog of Snazzy Choices by the 1930s? Who can say? 

In Trollope's novels, "making love" means "wooing." Obviously it acquired a very different meaning at some point between the 1870s and the 1970s, but when? When an unhappily married Allingham character tells a rival to go ahead and make love to his wife, is he inviting the rival to flirt with her or to pursue carnal knowledge of her? The internet tells me that the current meaning took hold in the 1920s, beginning in the US. So had it traveled across the Atlantic by the 1930s? Who can say? 

I'm a little behind the reading schedule for the Kate Davies group (perhaps because I'm trying to finish another fat Trollope novel at the same time), but I am going to keep plugging along. Next up: Dancers in Mourning.

Giantess

This afternoon was the retirement party for someone who has worked in our department for twenty years, and tons of people came. One of them, to my delight, was the chair who hired me. She stayed on for an extra year after she was eligible to retire in order to get three of us through the tenure process (we all sailed through successfully, because she is awesome), and she continued to collaborate with me on a shared research interest even after she left the job in 2019. She's my favorite boss ever.

She hugged me and congratulated me on my promotion--

[it dawns on me that I was so grumpy and so far out of the blogging habit that I didn't even tell you when it was finally official: my promotion to full professor was formally approved last month by the president. whoops! also hurray! go me! that was a long sloggy process!]

--and she told me she'd been pulling for me. She said she had crossed paths with the current chair shortly before decisions were out and asked him if he had an update. "He told me he was still waiting for the president's letter but he was very confident all would be well. He said, 'She's my gentle giant.'"

She said this in a happy approving voice and so I didn't say what I was actually thinking, which was, "Excuse me, his gentle giant??"

My current chair grew up in a different part of the world and English is something like his fourth language, so I'm trying to cut him some slack. When the department committee reviewed my dossier last fall, they said to me, "How did you prep all these different classes while also publishing all these papers?" And I know that my chair also appreciates my service contributions, since I've been around long enough to be competent in a bunch of different committee roles. So I'm trying to interpret "gentle giant" as "versatile and thorough and plays nicely with others," or something like that.

In my mind, though, a gentle giant is something like a Clydesdale or a St. Bernard: generally harmless, maybe not the sharpest tool in the shed. I can't think of any fictional giants I'd aspire to be -- not the BFG, not the Giant Rumblebuffin, certainly none of the Silver Chair giantesses. And I am probably not the only woman who winces a little at the idea of being giant-sized, which is unfortunate but also pretty ingrained. 

So. It's nice to hear that my chair has confidence in me. I'm just going to record my actual reaction to his actual words here in hopes of leaving it behind me.

Soaking it up

You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone, they say, but then you can be really grateful when you get it back for a little while.

There are a bunch of posts in my archives about the couple who led music at our parish for ten years. They did a fantastic job straddling all the tensions that come with leading church music-- making it beautiful without making it a performance, keeping it reverent while also keeping it fun, ensuring that the egos and the perfectionism don't rear their ugly little heads too often. 

I wrote in the summer of 2020 about how delighted I was to be playing with them again, and how much I missed the pre-pandemic version of normal. I didn't know then that the parish music ministry would never go back to the pre-pandemic version of normal, that they'd step down and the music program would remain fragmented and cobbled together. I mean, it's not bad but it's also not what it used to be.

Our pastor is leaving and this couple is leading music for his last Mass. They asked a bunch of us to be part of the ensemble, and we rehearsed tonight.

Early on we sang the Gloria, and I reveled in it: the keyboardist's distinctive up-tempo accompaniment, the subtle echo of the electric bass underneath, the three-part harmonies and the well-practiced dynamics. We dusted off familiar old arrangements and tried out some new ones. All of us had made a lot of music together in various combinations over the years, and it was a joy to be together doing this familiar thing again.

This couple has been pretty clear that they have moved on from the joint music ministry phase of their lives, and nobody really knows what our parish will be like under our new pastor. He might tell us it's going to be all Marty Haugen all the time (please no). It's unlikely that this group will come together again under these directors, at least in the foreseeable future. So here I am, basking in happy memories and grateful for the opportunity to sing together again -- saying goodbye to our longtime pastor amid a strange mix of wistfulness and joy.

Inventions

Years and years ago now, Jennifer Fulwiler wrote a blog post in which she described a conversation with her husband. She was thinking about developing a sort of dress that you could throw on over your regular clothes while you were cooking and cleaning, and then remove when you were done with the messy stuff. "That way you'd get the dress-thing spotted and greasy but your regular clothes would still look nice!" she explained. 

Her husband blinked. "Did you just invent...the apron?" he asked her.

Last summer we were talking about cooking at dinner and Joe was opining about the difficulty of getting food cooked evenly on the stove. "What if you could have an omnidirectional heat source?" he said.

Elwood blinked. "You mean, like, an oven?" he said. (We still joke about putting things in the omnidirectional heat source.)

Earlier this week I was thinking about bras, about the way that a bra snug enough to provide antigravity action will often produce some unhappy bulging above and below the band. I thought to myself, "What if you had something that was, like, an adjustable stretchy cylinder of fabric that extended below your bra and smoothed everything out nicely?"

I blinked at myself. "A girdle," I said to myself. "You just invented the girdle. Or perhaps the corset?"

As a kid watching old sitcoms I thought girdles were the exclusive property of aging ladies from long ago. They were like orthopedic shoes, or perhaps aspic -- unpleasant relics of the forgotten past. And yet here I am, living in the future: an aging lady whose brain spontaneously burps out a wish for a girdle of her very own.

The Bad Place

I'm reading Trollope novel #22, which has the improbable title Is He Popenjoy?, and we are just about to meet two characters whose advent has been the subject of exclamation-point-filled dread for many chapters. These characters come from the Bad Place: Italy.

Perhaps you have never thought of Italy as a bad place. Perhaps you even like Italy; perhaps you plan to visit Italy someday. But Trollope would like you to re-evaluate. Any time you encounter the label "Italian," know that it actually means "under a permanent cloud of suspicion." 

It took me a while to figure this out. In Marion Fay, a character is discovered to be an Italian nobleman, and I failed to grasp the full implications of this discovery at the time. Would you want to be a nobleman under a permanent cloud of suspicion? I thought not. You'd probably renounce your title too.

I didn't tell you about Lady Anna aside from my introduction to it via the Trollope Society (I figure there are probably limits on the number of Trollope posts you are willing to read), but Lady Anna's father was a nasty piece of work. We know this in part because of his romantic involvement -- in Italy. (Parenthetically, to the few of you who are intrigued by Trollope, Trollope's treatment of Lady Anna reminds me of the ending he wrote for John Eames. Both of them surprised me.)

Oh! Also! I'd never thought about this before, but there's a character in Barchester Towers whom we're supposed to regard as indolent -- a sketchy guy with a sketchy family -- and guess where he just spent twelve years? Italy, that's where!

Italy seems like a strange place to vilify, but Trollope apparently had very firm ideas about it. I guess I'll have to wait and see what these characters get up to. It seems unlikely to bring happiness to our heroine.

The funniest book I've read this year

Catherine Newman's new book, Sandwich, came out last week, and you should probably read it. If you're a woman in the 45-55 age range, it will make you laugh until you weep with its devastatingly hilarious takes on the indignities of midlife. If you're married to a woman in that age range, it will make you say, "Weeeellllll, things could definitely be worse around here." If you are outside those age ranges, it will give you some insight into the goings-on inside the aging brains of your middle-aged loved ones.

It is uproariously funny. I was reading it in public over my lunchtime sandwich and I snort-laughed helplessly. I thought maybe I would just get a quick coffee and squeeze in another chapter (or two) before I went back to my office, and I laughed until I had actual tears running down my face right there in the coffeehouse.

It reminds me very much of her first novel, We All Want Impossible Things, which I blogged about in early 2023. It intertwines heartbreakingly sad parts with the laugh-so-hard-you-inhale-your-beverage parts in a way that I find memorable and effective. This one is more about marriage than the earlier book, and it combines the moments of "I don't know who I would be without you" and the moments of "I might kill you in your sleep" in a way that might -- just possibly -- resonate with some of the folks I know navigating marriage at midlife.

Although the main character's kids are grown, the book talks a lot about pregnancy and miscarriage and abortion. It does so in ways that left me pretty uncomfortable, but maybe that's the point. I am guessing that even if your views on abortion diverge from mine, parts of the book will make you squirm.

Across both books there are things that struck me as implausible, but not in a way that torpedoed my enjoyment of the book. (Although, just in case the magic of Google alerts ever brings this post to the author's attention: next time you're writing about early speech development, shoot me an email. I'll happily volunteer as your subject matter expert.) Mostly what I will remember is the distinctive voice: smart, aching, acerbic, riotously funny.

A recipe for when you are drowning in leafy greens

I've told you before that we often make Crescent Dragonwagon's gumbo when we have an abundance of CSA leafy greens, and I've also told you before that it's A Project. So delicious, such a pain. This weekend I used one of its elements in a much more streamlined way.

We were behind on eating CSA greens. It's a total first-world problem to struggle with eating all of our beautiful organic leafy greens -- and yet it's a struggle to eat all of our beautiful organic leafy greens. When I stuffed them into my giant Instant Pot, it was three-quarters full. I poured in a 46-ounce bottle of V-8 and maybe another pint of water. I cooked them under pressure for 12 minutes, because it's easier to get kids (and grownups!) to eat leafy greens if they are thoroughly cooked, and also because you can take the girl out of the South but you can't take the South out of the girl, and I still prefer my greens cooked to tenderness. I let the pressure come down naturally.

I want to stress here that I did pretty much zero prep. I soaked them briefly in cold water because greens do tend to have some dirt hiding in their crevices, but I didn't fuss about removing ribs or stems or chopping or whatever else. I just chucked them in the pot, doused them in liquid, and pressure-cooked them into submission. I got out my immersion blender and briskly turned them into puree.

I also cooked a pound of white beans, adding about 2t. salt once they were soft. At dinnertime I cooked up a package of sweet Italian sausage. I added a head of garlic, slivered, to the cooking fat, and deglazed the pan with about a cup of white wine once I took the cooked sausage out and chopped it up. I found that I wanted to make one flavor adjustment late in the cooking process: the V-8 made the greens puree fairly acidic, so I added a wee little sprinkle (maybe an eighth of a teaspoon) of baking soda to raise the pH. Once the fizzing was over, the flavor balance was better. I combined it all and served it up with some good bread and a plate of raw veggies for crunch.

Honestly, I was not expecting this to be a super-popular dinner, but everybody enthused about it. The greens are pleasingly vegetal but unobtrusive, the beans are mild and tender, and the sausage and garlic offer little bursts of flavor. It's like gumbo's more easygoing cousin.

The knitter who forgot about The Mittens That Never Forget

When I did more knitting I was more active on Ravelry, and I was careful about recording the details of my projects. Last weekend I decided to update my Ravelry notebook for the first time in a while, and I thought I was all caught up. Only later did I remember the project I started in January and never logged: a pair of mittens for Stella. 

I finished the body of the first mitten back in the winter and stuffed it into a bag, where it sat neglected for a long time. I finally pulled it out again this week and closed up the top.

The pattern calls for an afterthought thumb with more small elephants, and I hadn't been looking forward to knitting it. But I pulled my socks up and got down to it, and now the left mitten has a thumb and everything.

As always with colorwork, it will look neater after I give it a bath.

Whenever I knit big motifs, it feels like a paint-by-numbers project. This is true even of patterns that I created myself, back in the days when my kids asked me for dragon knitwear. The fun part of stranded colorwork is getting into a groove, and cranking out rounds with a easy-to-memorize flow. There's nothing easy to memorize about this pattern. 

The finished mitten has a pleasing weight to it, because it's worsted yarn on size 3 needles. This means they will keep Stella's hands warmer next winter, but it's kind of annoying to knit this yarn at this gauge. All in all, it's one of those projects where I think I will enjoy the product much more than the process.

I cast on the right mitten this morning, and got halfway through the picot cuff before I stopped to go climbing with Pete. We shall how long it takes me to finish mitten #2. 

Progress

Okay, I did some things around here! 

First off, it dawned on me that I needed an easier goal race. If a person has lost aerobic fitness, she should not set the same kinds of goals she used to set for herself! This is not rocket science! After lots of dithering about whether I could swing the 5-mile race or whether September would give me enough time to get ready for the half-marathon, I said to myself, "Self, we're going to start small." I registered for an August 5K.

I am thinking about doing the women's running group that I had so much fun with in 2012 and subsequent summers, twice as a participant and maybe three times as a leader. These are the things that kept me from signing up today: (1) I need to talk it over with Elwood, since I'll be gone regularly for evening retreat meetings this summer, (2) it hurts my pride to feel like I'm starting over at the beginning (but is it better to sit on the couch instead of starting over? no, it is not), and (3) its home base is a local running store owned by a guy who gets mansplain-y when he talks to the women's running group. Which-- no. Just no. Do the benefits of the group offset the mansplaining given my sub-basement-level tolerance for mansplaining these days? Undecided.

Second, I cleared off my dresser for the first time in ages, HUZZAH. You guys, I think I was so far out of the blogging groove in the winter that I didn't even tell you we had our downstairs bathroom remodeled, but: we had our downstairs bathroom remodeled. We have a pretty new vanity in there now, but I have still not adapted to the storage situation. I used to keep makeup and skincare products in a drawer; now we have no bathroom drawers. Today, after literal months of thinking to myself on a loop "I need a storage solution for the bathroom or should I get rid of all the makeup I never wear but I like to have some makeup just in case but I need a place to put the makeup where should I put the makeup I need a storage solution for the bathroom" -- literal MONTHS of this, it dawned on me: if I go to Target and get a little plastic dealio with little plastic drawers, I can put my makeup and skincare items under the bathroom sink instead of leaving them in a laundry basket in my crowded bedroom.

Third, I drafted posts in preparation for selling some clothing. Since I bought my first Wool& dress in late 2022, I have become a total wool convert and now I wear wool almost every day. (Yes, even in this heat wave. Temperature-regulating, for real!) There is a thriving secondhand market for lightly used wool clothing (or even heavily used wool clothing -- sometimes it seems like people will buy anything, in any condition, with a Wool& label). I have some things I want to sell but I have not quite been able to organize myself to write the descriptions and take the pictures and post them at a time when I can get to the PO quickly. It should not be a big hassle and I will be happier when the things are winging their way to new homes.

Fourth, I gathered up all the CSA vegetables and the backlog was not as overwhelming as I had feared. I cooked all the greens in a quart of V-8. This required a giant pot, but of course they cooked way down. I am going to make them into a soup with white beans and Italian sausage. Nothing like a steaming bowl of soup on a 92-degree day, am I right? I went through all the rhubarb and eliminated the slimy bits, and cooked it all down with sugar to make an ice cream sauce. The last batch of rhubarb sauce was very popular, so let's hope people like this one too.

Fifth, I have had some clean laundry awaiting my attention for a while now. As in, a long while. [Picture my embarrassed face here.] On Easter Sunday I took my own tablecloths to the facility we rented. Right away, on Easter evening, I spot-treated the greasy places and laundered them. But then they sat in a spare laundry basket in an out-of-the-way spot until JUNE 21. Better late than never, I guess.

***

This last paragraph has nothing to do with the rest of the post except that it happened today and I want to remember it. Alex has excellent taste in clothing and he sent Elwood an amazing sweater for Fathers' Day. Today I texted him a picture of Elwood trying on the sweater (briefly, because today is not the day for an alpaca-silk sweater, no matter how beautiful it may be) and commented on the luscious knitted fabric. He texted back, "They’re for real my second favorite maker of knitwear." I wondered to myself what fancy little high-end Manhattan boutique had the top spot. I envisioned highly curated shelves full of eye-wateringly expensive knits. I thought I might just take a peek at their website, and so I texted again to ask where it might be.

Isn't he a sweetie? 

June progress

I started off strong with my June goals and then I got off track when I went out of town. I'm 20 for 20 on June blog posts; I finished Hard Times and have been progressing steadily through my next Trollope novel. As for the rest of it (daily exercise, tracking produce, consistent work writing), I'm probably batting under .500.

I'm not teaching tomorrow and I want to clear the decks: tidy our bedroom, take stock of the wilting CSA produce, and do some planning.

I do think I need a race on my calendar for motivation, so I am going to pick one. I also keep meaning to try the approach to training recommended in Next Level, so maybe I'll think about how it can mesh with endurance training. This strategy for using up CSA vegetables is very sensible and not hugely effortful, but I have to DO IT instead of just remembering that it worked nicely two years ago.

None of these things will be hard.

Work writing, on the other hand, feels hard. I am stuck on a paper; I've been stuck for a while. But the writing time I put in earlier this month helped me understand the stuckness, so we'll call it progress. And if I say to my co-author, "Here is where I am stuck and what I need to get unstuck," perhaps he will be helpful. Perhaps.

I'll report back tomorrow!

Full swing

I agreed to be part of another retreat team, this time as the music coordinator. This choice may surprise anyone who remembers my oh-so-angsty posts about past retreat teams with music responsibilities, but I think in this role I'm supposed to focus more on organizing the music and less on executing the music. There are a bunch of other musicians on the team, so it seems unlikely that I will wind up as the lone instrumentalist at any of the weekend Masses. I'm generally perfectly happy to strum along under someone else's direction; I prefer not to be the person in charge at a Mass.

Five of us have been meeting for a while in preparation, and tonight was our first team meeting. It went well, I think.

After a pleasant leisurely lull, summer is ramping up: I'll be working not-quite-full-time hours until August, and this retreat will be a substantial volunteer commitment. I'm hoping to fit some short trips in. Tomorrow I want to tell you some of the things I've been thinking about life organization and the endless battle against entropy. Tonight, though, it's off to bed with me.

Second day of school

The class I'm teaching this summer is the one I prepped last fall for the first time. I was feeling optimistic about taking the fall class and smooshing it into the summer session, but I forgot something: this is the first time since 2015 that I have taught brand-new embryonic grad students. Yesterday was Day 1 of grad school for them, and I...might have scared them.

This was not my intent. I was just planning to cruise through a review of the content from an undergrad class in the first week of the summer semester, and quiz them on it in the second week. Just like I did in the fall, except that six classes during the fall semester amounts to three weeks of class time, not 1.5. About 50 minutes into our class today I paused. "You guys are seeming a little overwhelmed," I said. They were indeed overwhelmed, so I regrouped: took extra time for questions, gave them an encouraging practice exercise*, promised to share some additional online resources after class.

*(At least it was INTENDED as an encouraging practice exercise. Some students found it more difficult than I thought they would; "encouraging" is probably not the descriptor they would use.)

There's only so much I can slow down, though. The trouble with summer classes is that the pace is unforgiving. I am contractually obligated to include a boatload of material in this class, and they're going to have to review independently if they've forgotten the foundational content from their undergrad coursework.

I'm not going to say that out loud quite yet, though. I'm going to hope that the week 1 overload recedes a little, and they get more comfortable with what's expected of them in graduate-level classes. Fingers crossed.

First day of school

I am teaching a summer class and I had been feeling a little glum about it. I've been scheduled to teach for six of the last seven summers, and I was wishing I had turned this class down. "Next summer," I told myself, "I'm going to say 'no, thank you' to any request to teach." 

A chunk of the reason is that I finished the spring semester feeling burned out and unhappy after dealing with AI-generated student submissions. I had been a little naive about the whole thing, thinking that if I asked a group of generally motivated students to do worthwhile assignments focused on specific segments of specific books and gave them ample time and support, they would do the assignments. 

Well. That was not actually how it went down.

It's a weird time to be working in higher ed, which is getting more and more expensive at the same time that a sizable segment of the population views it as less and less worthwhile. Now these new tools make it more and more possible to progress toward a degree while learning absolutely nothing worthwhile. It's enough to make a person consider an exciting new career as a Peruvian alpaca farmer.

But today I took a deep breath and talked to my students about why I ask them to write, and what I want them to learn from the process, and why the insertion of AI-generated text gets in the way of actual learning. I compared it to training for an endurance event. ("Both grad school and triathlon training," I told them, "involve some suffering." This may, in hindsight, not have been the thing they were hoping to hear on their first day of grad school.) I told them that doing hard things repeatedly is valuable in two ways: first, the hard thing gets less hard when you do it repeatedly, because you learn how to do it better and more efficiently; second, your tolerance for hard tasks grows because you get more comfortable with that particular kind of discomfort. It's still hard, but you know you can do it. I shared a few stories with them from my first year of clinical practice, in which authority figures asked me tough questions and expected instant answers. "It's not an option," I told them, "to tell a skeptical physician that you need a minute to put his question into ChatGPT. It's the slow and painstaking process of writing reports that sharpens your thinking and gives you the language to support your position in those painful conversations."

Will they believe me? Who can say? Will they submit AI-generated papers despite my fervent plea? Let us all hope they do not. My family would miss me if I moved to Peru.

I'm not sure I really want to learn this lesson

Today we drove over to the town where Marie lives because she was speaking at a church service, and I was knitting in the car on the way there. I hadn't looked at the manta ray shawl in the sunshine before, and you guys, it is VIVID. A person might need some sunglasses to avoid being blinded by that chartreuse in the sunlight. It's billed as a pop color but it's more like an EXPANSE color or a VISTA color or a VERY PLENTIFUL color.

My chevrons are taking shape and the 70s afghan vibe is building. I was thinking about the structure of the piece, with the hole in the center just right for poking one's head through, combined with the wild colors and the zigzag structure. "It's like an Easter-egg-colored clown collar," I said to Elwood. I thought back to the most recent pattern release, which is constructed in a nifty way but which has a definite circus tent feel, if you ask me. (If you don't have a Ravelry account, this link might work better for you.) "Huh," I said, "clown collars and circus tents. Maybe the designer is pranking us all."

It's a tricky thing, running a mystery knit-along. I once did one where we just made a big triangle, and people in the MKAL discussion group were annoyed about it. But then there was the MKAL where we started by knitting a giant trilobite and then added wedges plus a ruffle, and people in the MKAL discussion group were annoyed that they were making giant trilobites. It should be a little bit mysterious or else people will grumble, but only a little bit mysterious or else people will grumble. 

I was lamenting a little to Marie after the church service. "Hm," she said, "that is a pretty bold color choice. But Mom, you do this every time with mystery knit-alongs. You get into the middle and you declare that the designer is writing the pattern specifically to yank your chain." As soon as she said that I remembered posting about it in 2016. (In fairness, that Stephen West shawl wound up being so weird that I gave it away; I also gave away the shawl I made in the next Stephen West MKAL because it was also too big and too dramatic for me. Maybe I am too boring for Stephen West MKALs.) I had forgotten that I said the same thing in 2018 about a shawl that I love and wear frequently, and I wrote pretty much the same post in 2014 about an Ysolda Teague MKAL: things looked too weird in the middle for me to be quite content, and then it all worked out. Marie even remembered my response to my very first MKAL in 2012. "You were NOT happy about knitting that ruffle," she reminded me -- but then I wound up loving both the process and the ruffle.

Huh, this makes twelve years of Jamie saying, "WAIT, THIS EXERCISE IN RELINQUISHING CONTROL IS KIND OF PAINFUL AND I MIGHT REGRET IT." Perhaps I should get back to grousing about the (knitting) pattern so I don't have to contemplate that (behavioral) pattern for very long.

Packed up

Stella is leaving early tomorrow morning with the youth group, and I have been thinking about how much the pandemic changed things. It’s been at least five years since she left home for a week without a parent. She’s a little nervous. Tonight as we were loading her luggage I saw someone I used to talk to regularly, and I’m pretty sure we hadn’t spoken since 2019. 

What a strange season we went through. 

Knitting along, mysteriously

The manta ray shawl got bigger and bigger and stripier and stripier, and then it sprouted a frilly conjoined twin.

This is what it looked like at the end of clue 1:

Clue 2 was initially perplexing. (Perplexity is both a bug and a feature of mystery knit-alongs.) It requires the knitter to knit halfway across the existing work and then cast on 345 additional stitches. At first I thought we were knitting a giant ruffly edge for the existing square, but then it dawned on me: we are knitting an attached adjacent square, building it from the outside in. 

I'm still repeating my mantra: you buy the MKAL ticket, you take the MKAL ride. The first chunk of the square is chevron-patterned; the designer likes chevrons more than I do. I think they have a pretty strong 70s afghan vibe. "Knitters have been using chevrons for generations," I am telling myself. "Be open-minded." 

Another thing that's distinctive about MKALs is that you get the pattern in pieces, so you may need to look at more than one file if you're searching for a particular detail. I did not review the introduction to the first clue before I started the second one. "Color A," I said to myself. "That's the light one." Three thousand stitches later, I realized that color A is actually the dark one. My chevrons have a bit of an Easter egg feel:

But you know, I'm not going to fret. I like all of these colors, and an MKAL is always an exercise in relinquishing control and accepting surprises, and no one will ever say, "Huh, I think you were supposed to put the deep blue-green on the outside of your big square and the aqua in the middle, but you did it backwards."

I knit much less than I used to, and I am really enjoying the hands-busy-mind-free contemplative facet of this project. It is going to take me a long time to knit a 20-inch square in fingering-weight yarn, but I'm looking forward to it. I'll post a picture of the two squares side by side when this second one is a little less scrunched up on the needles.

The Long Haul

There used to be a Catholic blogger who set my teeth on edge. Eventually I stopped reading her posts so that my teeth could be [whatever the opposite of "on edge" would be] and she stopped blogging (along with most of the rest of the world), but she's still out there in Catholic internet-land. I saw her listed as a conference speaker recently, and her talk was about keeping kids Catholic. 

"Sproing!" went my teeth, back on edge yet again. "Listen, lady," said my on-edge teeth, "every one of your kids is still listed on your tax forms as your dependent, and yet you are giving advice to an audience about keeping them Catholic? Are you also going to dispense advice on grandparenting?"

Because this is a true thing I know from painful experience: you can follow (and even dispense!) lots of plausible-sounding advice about keeping kids Catholic, but it is the kids themselves who will be making that decision in the long run.

Lately YouTube has been telling me I might like to watch a video from a lady in her 40s talking about her five! easy! habits! that allowed her to take off 20 pounds FOREVER!! And -- who knows? -- maybe those pounds are actually gone forever. But that thumbnail also sets my teeth on edge. "Listen, lady," say my on-edge teeth, "you look to be about 5 years out from a dramatic shift in your body's hormonal milieu, and it is associated with increased body fat for a surprisingly large percentage of the people who go through it. So maybe let's talk about 'forever' on the other side, okay?"

I should know by know that humans like to think they've got things figured out. Inside the two-year-old who insists that marshmallows ARE TOO a good breakfast is the germ of the 20-year-old who will tell his professor with certainty that this assignment isn't going to teach him anything worthwhile. They're both convinced they're right despite being underqualified to make those judgments.

I remember some of my childhood assertions about the long haul. I once said confidently that I'd watch Saturday morning cartoons until I was 80. I declared that everyone at my school would love Kool & The Gang's song Celebration forevermore, because I was sure it was a timeless hit for the ages. These memories make it highly unlikely that I will ever get a tattoo, because too many of my own FOREVERs have turned into emphatic NO THANK YOUs.

Perhaps I still have some ideas about how to guarantee a desirable outcome many years into the future. But I think I have mostly learned that life is long, and full of surprising developments.

How about you? Any childhood declarations about the future that haven't held up well? Any developments in your life that would have been shocking to the you of 2004?

A meringue book

I pre-ordered Katherine Center's new book because I've read and enjoyed a few of her others. i read it in a day and laughed out loud a double-digit number of times. If you're looking for something sweet and fluffy and funny, this might be your book.

Her books are a little formulaic: improbable heroes falling for heroines who have faced down some flavor of struggle or tragedy. This one is about writing a screenplay for a romantic comedy, so she spends time talking appreciatively about the conventions of the genre.

Thomas Pynchon writes Mustard Green Books-- probably good for your brain but not especially easy or delightful to consume. Katherine Center writes Meringue Books: light, sweet, fluffy, easy to gobble up.

And home

Phew, long drives tire me out. I may not be able to tell you much more than that, because Sandy disapproves of my using a hand to type. If I'm going to spend two nights away from home, she thinks, she should be entitled to two-handed petting when I return.

So, briefly: we had a lovely visit, and a smooth trip home, in which I was pretty calm about the traffic around Chicago.

I have the new Katherine Center novel on my Kindle and I am going to read it in bed after I do a few minutes' worth of dishes and a few minutes' worth of stretching. See you tomorrow.