Light and Momentary

WWJD, IJHS?

It was chilly today, chilly enough that I was wishing for gloves when I went for a run. It was chilly enough that I was not expecting to see Foundation Snake curled up by the daffodils. I think he was regretting his choice to sunbathe on this damp gray day (insofar as a creature with a brain the size of a lentil can be said to experience regret), because he was looking pretty torpid when I prodded him gently with a stick.

"Maybe I could pick him up with barbecue tongs and drop him down the storm sewer," I thought to myself. But when I opened the garage door, I remembered that the barbecue tongs were indoors, in the kitchen. And maybe this will sound weird to those of you who are less squeamish about snakes, but I didn't want to pick him up with something that would eventually be used on food I hoped to eat.

"Hm," I said to myself as I looked around the garage. 

My eyes fell on the rakes. "Will I have more nightmares about snakes if I try to move him or if I don't try to move him?" I asked myself. (I have been having nightmares about snakes in the house since the Unspeakable Event.) "Is it a bad idea to move him with an implement that is designed to bring him closer to me?" I asked myself. I decided that I would plunge in anyway.

Instead of using the rake like a rake, I adopted a sort of croquet-player stance, or at least the sort of stance croquet players might use if they were aiming their mallets at cold-blooded living creatures associated with evils including the Fall, countless deaths* by suffocation and poisoning, and unrelenting slitheriness.

*I know, okay; I KNOW garter snakes are not venomous and can't suffocate anything and still I cannot keep from shuddering at the thought of them. MUCH slithery. VERY slitheriness.

Wielding my rake like a croquet mallet, I sent Foundation Snake flying down the driveway. He landed with his pale belly upward, his body arranged in curves that I would call graceful if they weren't so darned...serpentine. If his little lentil brain does have any regret circuitry, it must have been lighting up like a Christmas tree.

Belly-up snake in the driveway did not seem like a big improvement over belly-down snake by the daffodils, so I tried another croquet maneuver. This time he landed in the street, unmoving, and I found myself on the horns of a dilemma.

If I left him in the street, he would probably get run over. If I scooted him into the nearest yard, it would be a failure in charity. I do not like the lady who lives directly across from us but I do take "love thy neighbor" very seriously. I believe Jesus understands why I do not like her and also does not want me to yeet any snakes at her. So that option was out. 

There's a narrow vacant lot next to Grumpy Neighbor's house which seemed like a good second choice, but I am friendly with the neighbor on the other side. Probably she would not be thrilled with snake-yeeting that directed Foundation Snake closer to her foundation. I didn't want to try to put him in the storm sewer because (a) he would die there and (b) my aim was not great with my rake-turned-croquet-mallet. I can believe that snakes are good for the environment even as I wish very strongly for them not to be in my own personal environment.

I went back inside. "Marie," I said, "I have an ethical question."

While I was inside, Foundation Snake shook off his torpor, righted himself, and headed off to parts unknown. At least I hope they are unknown. Maybe the likeliest outcome is that he wriggled back up the driveway and into his favorite tiny hole in the mortar. Maybe I could spackle that little hole the next time I catch him outside. Maybe then he'll find new digs until it gets warm enough for the mason to come out and do something more permanent.

The title of this post stands for What Would Jesus Do, If Jesus Hated Snakes? Perhaps it seems to you that the obvious solution is for me to stop hating snakes. But it doesn't really seem to be a decision of my conscious mind. If the snakes on your property were causing you recurring nightmares, what would you do? 

Climbing then and now

In January 2020 I posted about finishing a painfully long route at the climbing gym, graded 5.10a; the next month I finished an equally long 5.10b. The month after that, the world shut down, and I haven't climbed consistently since then.

In the interim, the climbing gym personnel completely changed over: new manager, new route-setters. Somewhere in there they decided collectively that their old grades had been too soft, so a route that used to get a 5.8 rating would now be a 5.7 or perhaps a 5.6. A 5.6 rating is supposed to mean it's beginner-friendly, but it got a lot harder to find easy routes.

Also in the interim, I started lifting weights and added a fair amount of bulk to my frame. (Seriously, you guys: I tried on Marie's blazer after she said, "But my shoulders are much bigger than yours," and I couldn't move my arms AT ALL. I needed, like, a sausage-stuffing machine to pour myself into those sleeves. Her shoulders are not actually bigger than mine, even though she is 8 inches taller than I am.) The muscle is an advantage, but at the same time it's harder to move a heavier body up the wall. This is a tension Joe has often talked about: wanting to build muscle for lifting, wanting to stay light for climbing. 

The result of all this was that my sense of what I could and couldn't do at the climbing gym came unmoored. Was I struggling on a route labeled 5.7 because it corresponded to a 2019 5.9 route? Or because it was set by a new employee with no clue what it's like to be a middle-aged climber with a 66-inch wingspan? Or because [self-critical thoughts redacted here, though they remain very loud in my brain] and I should just give up?

In January 2023 I decided to buy an annual membership, and I've been climbing every week with Pete. I would put the humbling:pleasant ratio at about 65:35, because he keeps nudging me to do hard things. But I think I am beginning to see some progress.

We have been doing more bouldering than we used to, climbing shorter routes with no ropes. I do not love the idea of jumping down from holds 15 feet in the air, even though there are mats on the floor, so part of the issue for me is mental. Also, though, the boulder problems are hard. 

Before the pandemic I could often but not always climb V2 boulders (I don't know why they have two different systems for rating difficulty) and I was just starting to do V3s. But when I started climbing again this year, the V2s felt entirely out of reach.

Pete has been super-patient with me, giving me both encouragement and beta (climber-speak for step-by-step explanations of how to get from Point A to Point B). He can propel his body across the wall with a combination of control and grace that seems impossible for this 52-year-old body to imitate. "Put your left foot there," he told me today. "My LEFT foot?" I asked him skeptically. "Your left foot," he said again, with more patience than I deserve. And do you know, after a few false starts I sent my first post-COVID V2 route.

"Now try the green one," he urged me. The green one felt ridiculous two weeks ago. Imagine putting one foot on a surface that's at hip height, and then standing up on that foot with minimal upper-body support. Like, say you have a light switch you can hold with one hand, but mostly you have to push with your bent leg without losing your balance. Hard, right? Pete and I have this recurring conversation at the climbing gym: he says, "now stand up on your foot," and I say, "I can't," because my legs don't really work like that here in my sixth decade. (There's a similar maneuver in this video (0:57-1:01), but I have two solid handholds there.)

"Hm," he said, looking again at the route. "You could also put get both hands on the next hold and pull up instead of pushing up." This is not a move that 2020 Jamie could have managed, because she did not have the upper-body strength for it, but it worked well for 2023 Jamie. And it felt really satisfying to finish a second tough boulder problem in one session after weeks of frustration.

Hm, now that I have written all this out I am thinking it is unlikely to be as interesting to anyone else as it is to me. But I want to remember the sensation of pulling myself up to that fat green hold: effortful but doable. I spent a lot of the session thinking tailspinny thoughts. I told myself I was too tired, inadequately fueled. I was a little shaky when I tackled the green route for the last time, and the voice in my head said, "What if you FALL and HIT YOUR HEAD?" 

The voice in my head is not very likely to say "what if you finish the route and feel really pleased with yourself?" But that's what actually happened.

Enthusiasm tempered

I finished Unraveling today and I am less enthusiastic than I was in my last post. I think it's largely an editing issue. In one chapter there were spots where she used very similar phrases close together on the same page, in a way that I would absolutely understand in a second draft but found grating in a published book. The diversity of topics that seemed pleasingly eclectic early on seemed a little more scattershot toward the end of the book -- I'm still not clear how the section on Fibonacci numbers was supposed to fit. 

Maybe because I know more about planning and knitting sweaters than I do about shearing and spinning fleece, I had less patience with her uncertainties in those chapters; maybe a non-knitter would like those better than I did. Or maybe it's just hard to write a whole book about making a sweater and hold the reader's interest all the way through. I had a similar experience with Adrienne Martini's book Sweater Quest -- the first half was more fun than the second half. Final verdict: glad I finished it, would still recommend it, but the recommendation is a little more measured now.

A couple of interesting books about women that might be niche recommendations

I am reading Peggy Orenstein's pandemic memoir, Unraveling, and I am really enjoying it. She'd always been a knitter, but during the pandemic she decided to learn how to shear a sheep, process and card the fleece, and spin her own yarn. But I don't think -- I'm not sure, but I really don't think -- it's too fiber-artsy for the non-fiber-arts-inclined among us. And you guys, there is SO much interesting stuff woven in (ha! see what I did there!) among the spinning bits. For instance, she discusses:

• research quantifying the amount of labor required of Viking women to produce sails in a time before spinning wheels
• textile millworkers as key drivers of both organized labor and the women's movement
• the face recognition abilities of sheep (better than mine!)

She has a lot to say about the fashion industry, and it's well timed for me given my recent forays into more sustainable clothing. The writing is zippy and engaging, and it's such an evocative book. That was a wild time to be alive, and lament and uncertainty are beautifully interleaved with fabric factoids and anti-fast-fashion segments. Enthusiastically recommended, with the caveat that I might have more patience for passages about sheep breeds than the average reader.

Yesterday I finished Trollope novel #14, Miss Mackenzie. On one of my recent-ish book posts, Nicole-the-Victorian-lit-professor (as distinct from Canadian Nicole, whose teaching interests lie more in the yoga-ward direction) asked me what I thought about Trollope's female characters, and the answer is that I am generally a fan. In contrast to Dickens, who has approximately five female characters to whom he assigns different names across all of his books, Trollope usually does a nice job creating interesting characters who also happen to be women. I had low expectations for this book because of its obscurity, but I'm glad I read it.

I wish I knew of a Trollope-loving corner of the internet. There are UK and US Trollope societies, but they seem to be a little too academic for my taste. I want a 1990s-ish bulletin board, or something like Pemberley, only Trollope-flavored. Lady Glencora Palliser makes an appearance late in Miss Mackenzie and I was so pleased to see her there-- alive and well, not yet a duchess, presumably rolling her eyes affectionately at Plantagenet's plans to decimalize English currency. Alas, the number of people to whom I can say, "You guys, you guys, it's Lady Glencora Palliser!" is approximately zero.

Well, I did say it to my husband, who nodded patiently if bemusedly, but you know what I mean.

Day 50

My 30-day dress challenge turned me into a Wool& fangirl, and I started a 100-day challenge on day 31. Today is the halfway point. Do you remember when I posted about how my swingy black tank dress caused the jam-session guy to ask me if I was a nun? That's my 100-day dress and I love it. It's cozy but never hot, and it lends itself to all kinds of layering adventures: shirts underneath, tunics atop, knitwear every which way. I have an eShakti wrap dress that is very pretty but a little too revealing, and today I wore it over my challenge dress. No cleavage issues, no skirt-blowing-open surprises when the wind came gusting off the prairie. I wondered if it would be too bulky to have that much yardage tucked underneath the wrap dress, but I think it works. (Facial expression caption: the person in this photo does not love taking selfies. Least favorite part of the challenge.)

So far Stella seems to be the only person in my life who has noticed that I am doing this admittedly rather odd thing. She told me that today's ensemble made me look like a Disney princess, and I did not ask whether this was a good look or a bad look. (She's not the only one to think the eShakti dress has a Disney princess vibe. Once when I wore it to class one of my students once said to me, "Dr. Gladly! You have Merida's hair AND you have her dress too!") My friend Beth, the one who encouraged me to give it a whirl, texts me every so often asking if my husband has commented on the wardrobe shift yet. So far the answer is no. One of my colleagues said something complimentary about "that dress you wore yesterday," not recognizing that I was wearing the selfsame dress again.

Sometimes I will only wear the challenge dress for part of the day, and put on something different to teach. Only sometimes, though -- mostly I love the structure of knowing what I will wear while retaining a bit of freedom to accessorize.

When I first heard about this challenge it sounded implausible. Like, c'mon, of course the clothes get stinky. Also: it's wool -- how could you not get overheated wearing wool every day? But it turns out they were telling the truth: an overnight airing does the trick, for their leggings as well as their dresses. And even as a person whose inner furnace is set to ROAST far more often than she might like, I'm finding that the temperature control element of their marketing materials holds up as well. 

Wool& doesn't do promos but here's a WoolX referral link for a $20 coupon, if you want some magic leggings or magic PJs of your very own.

More thoughts on leisure activities that require persistence

Today I came home from work and plunked myself down in the armchair. I picked up a project I started knitting almost 3 years ago, and I said to myself, "I am tired of knitting this thing." It reminded me of my post from earlier this week about books that I have to make myself read: I spend a not-inconsiderable proportion of my leisure time doing things that are more annoying than pleasant in the moment.

This project is a design by Ysolda Teague, a pair of colorwork mittens with some bells and whistles. They have a flip top, they have a lining (pulled out in the picture below), they have a fancypants braided cast-on. Unfortunately, they also have a gauge issue.

This is not my first go-round with Ysolda's mitt patterns and gauge issues. Gauge has bitten me in the butt on two other Ysolda projects, actually.. The last time I made a pair of Ysolda mitts, I started over THREE TIMES in an effort to get them right. But! Alas! I used to have the problem that my knitting was looser than expected, and the finished product would be too big. These mittens, though, are too snug.

I don't get it, actually. My gauge is spot on and I have average-sized hands. Did the pattern get rushed to print because she was trying to wrap up the Colourwork Club? Is there some other weird alchemy where the size can be right and the gauge can be right and the finished item can still be too small? It's a mystery.

Maybe if I tell you what the steps are, I will talk myself into completing them. Maybe they will grow when I block them, or maybe I have a friend with Lilliputian hands who would love them. We shall see. Anyway, here are the tasks standing between me and a pair of completed mittens.

• There are only ten rounds left in the main mitten chart, plus a little I-cord button loop. Painful level: yellow; definitely fiddly.
• Next up: flip-top openings (top and bottom) and thumb. Painful level: orange shading to red.
• After that, the lining. Painful level: yellow shading to green.
• Finally, the finishing-- tidying up, weaving ends, adding buttons. Painful level: fiery flame-bright red. Not my favorite part of any project and this one is extra-complicated.

It's really rare for me not to finish a knitting project, even if it marinates for a while. Which is a little funny, given that in this space I tend to grouse about my knitting more often than I say happy things about my knitting. I grumbled about this selfsame project nine months ago today, as a matter of fact. I wonder if I'd be happier if my leisure time included more purely leisurely things and fewer things that feel like work. Or maybe I am just wired this way. How about you? How much of your leisure time do you spend doing things that you enjoy more in the rearview mirror? Do tell -- I'm very curious.

Bon courage

This semester, friends, I have done a series of brave things that I can't tell you much about. I was left queasy and disheartened by the outcome of deliberations I was part of, and I resolved to see what I could do to make the situation better. I made a couple of scary appointments; I wrote (and rewrote!) a couple of scary letters. Today I sat in a room with the deliberating group again, and I told someone very senior that he was wrong, and why. My voice was calm but my heart was thumping loudly.

When I did the scary things I was mostly focused on the fact that they were scary (and hard, and time-consuming). But here is what happened as a result: five of the people involved in various steps of this process said, "Thank you for raising these issues; I agree with you." Best of all -- hurray! huzzah! -- a bad decision was reversed. 

So this post is to say that if you have been hesitating to rock a boat that needs rocking, or to push back on a bad outcome, or to do some other flavor of hard thing-- maybe it's a good day to take a step forward. Sometimes people are just waiting for someone to say, "This needs to change."

Books that reward persistence

Nicole posted today about abandoning books, and it made me think about books that I've kept reading when I wasn't enthusiastic about them. Sometimes it's a great decision, and sometimes it means throwing away additional hours of my life on something that wasn't worth the time.

When we were living in Scotland an older friend from church gave me a copy of Far from the Madding Crowd. I did not enjoy the first three-quarters of that book, you guys. I was pushing myself to finish it because it had been a gift from this kind and helpful person, but I was forcing myself to read it. And then! to my amazement! the last quarter of the book was really, really good.

A friend's recommendation is not always sufficient. I kept waiting for the part when I would like Middlemarch, because a different friend said, "You will absolutely love it!" I did not love it: not at the beginning, not in the middle, and not even at the end. That was a LOT of waiting fruitlessly for things to improve.

It's pretty common for me to start a book, set it aside, and then come back to it. Two of the best books I read in 2022 were Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, and I had to start them both more than once before they caught my interest.

But it's also pretty common for me to buy a book, read part of it, and then feel that I ought to finish it because of some blend of stubbornness and enduring susceptibility to the sunk cost fallacy.

You must have books in both categories, too. What's something that you were glad you put in the effort to finish? What's something that wasn't actually worth the time it required?

One of these days it will stop surprising me

Today was a long full day at work (they're all feeling like long full days right now), and I walked home under spitting gray skies feeling tired and sick. I walked in the door and took a COVID test. But I had told Pete that we could climb today, so when my test was negative I changed into workout clothes and headed off, a little reluctantly, to the climbing gym. 

After 45 minutes at the gym I felt seven million times better -- perky, upbeat, singing happy songs about dinner. This always seems a little weird to me. I can read about the mood-boosting effects of exercise, but when my own personal mood is boosted by exercise I'm always like, "Wait, this is not fair. Why can't I get my mood boosted by lying on the couch with a bag of Lindor truffles?"

I am shifting my focus back toward endurance training for the first time in a while. It feels pretty terrible right now, but bodies are adaptable and so I am just going to lean into the terrible. My plan is to dial back my lower-body weight-training to about once a week. I'm not willing to give up deadlifting, because nothing else makes me feel quite as mighty, but I find it very tricky to combine tough lifting sessions and tough running sessions. So: for a while I am going to run more and lift less, with the goal of maintaining my current level of strength while also getting enough rest to absorb the benefits of my running workouts.

Pete and I have been climbing more lately, which I am counting as a strength + cardio + flexibility cross-training session. I am trying not to focus on the ground I lost over the pandemic; I'm just going to try to keep nudging it forward from where I am.

Argentina-bound

It's been nice knowing you, Gladlyville, but I am off to Argentina. Tonight I discovered that Argentina is home to a creature called the pink fairy armadillo, the little palm-sized friend I have been waiting for all my life. Seriously, click that link and look at that picture and tell me you are not (a) sorely tempted to move to Argentina to cozy up to one of those and (b) mildly curious about whether you are being punked, because it looks more like a Pokemon than an actual live mammal.

They die in captivity, so I cannot keep one as a pet, but if I go to Argentina I am confident I can befriend one. Or six. You know. Maybe if I am very gentle with them and kindly bring them some especially delectable grubs, they will dig me a hobbit hole with their adorably oversized claws.

Doesn't that video make you pine for an Argentinean hobbit hole in which you can drink yerba mate with your pink fairy armadillo friends? No? Just me?

Apparently they hate the rain and sometimes die if there's too much of it. They do not sound especially resilient, I have to say, but they couldn't really be any cuter.

Sister Jamie plays her mandolin

Tonight, you guys, I did the thing I have been a little nervous about doing: I took my mandolin to the jam session at the old courthouse. Everybody was welcoming and encouraging, and it was big fun in a brain-bendy way. It's hard: there's no sheet music anywhere, so you just have to pick up the tunes by listening. And they move at a brisk pace, so it had my brain firing on every single cylinder.

I was inspecting my calluses at the end when a big bearded guy walked up to me and said, "So are you a nun?"

I said, "...No. Thirty years married, five children."

Today I am wearing a swingy black tank dress with a teal underlayer, like so:

I'm also wearing highly visible festive handknit socks, with shoes that show them off. Do these look like nun socks?

Apparently the nuns in his world wear stripy slightly mismatched handknit socks, maybe?

That's kind of a weird opener, is it not? I think I'll go back anyway, but who knew mandolin-playing nuns were a thing?

Maybe they will be warm bananas this week

"How's your first week going?" my colleague across the hall asked me on Thursday. I told her the hot bananas story, and she laughed and agreed. I am hoping the bananas level will ease down to warm this week, but we shall see.

I did not work out all week (because: bananas, so many bananas and so hot), and then I waltzed into the gym today and pulled a deadlift PR: 160 for 2. Joe thinks I could get to 200 pretty speedily but I took a video of myself lifting 160 and I think he may be optimistic there. I took the video expecting the bottom part of each rep to be the problematic bit, but my form on the bottom half looks fine to me. The top half of each rep, however, looks like garbage: I am laboring to lock out 160. But lock it out I did! Nevertheless she persisted, huzzah!

Have you read This Is How You Lose The Time War? It was recommended by someone whose judgment I respect, and so I was a little surprised to find it pretentious, with a twist that seemed obvious from far away. There is a very emphatic community of people who love this book, though, so tell me what you liked about it if you have read it and disagree with my assessment.

I have the feeling that I was going to tell you some more things, my friends, but as I sit here typing I can feel myself sliding into a state of torpor that is unlikely to yield any especially scintillating blog content. I am going to throw up this quick and fairly random post, and come back soon.

Books I have been reading recently

I forgot that I pre-ordered Lauren Fleshman's Good for a Girl until it showed up in my Kindle library yesterday. I devoured it. I loved Fleshman's voice when she was writing for Runner's World and so the book was an easy sell. But it was a hard read. It was an extended reminder that we live in a world where people just keep looking at women's bodies and saying, "Hm, you know what would improve this situation? If there were less of you, that's what." In competitive running as in the rest of women's lives, weight loss might offer a small short-term improvement but it does so with enormous medium-term and long-term costs. Fleshman does a nice job juxtaposing the joy of running against the train-wreck-itude of vast swaths of women's sports. I found it both sobering and encouraging, reading about all the damage that has been done to female athletes, and her determination to put future coaches on a better path.

I also forgot that I pre-ordered Catherine Newman's We All Want Impossible Things until it showed up in my Kindle library, but I did not devour it right away. I read the first half of the first chapter a few times and then got distracted. But once I got out of the first chapter I couldn't put it down. It is riotously funny -- the kind of snort-laugh funny that I can't read in bed because I might accidentally shake my husband awake giggling -- which is a little weird for a book about a woman losing her best friend to cancer. It is also hauntingly sad. In hindsight there are some implausible parts (like the hospice doctor's on-the-clock extracurricular activities, excuse me? and also the whole setup of the book -- would this character really leave her kid to go to an out-of-state hospice facility?), but I enjoyed the heck out of it anyway.

On the last day of 2022 I finished Four Thousand Weeks, which I had seen recommended in a zillion different places and started a few times. I found the first two-thirds of it every bit as thought-provoking as promised, but then he kinda lost me in the last chunk. I'm curious about whether you've read it and what you thought. Biggest takeaways: I would like to travel more, and I would like to dedicate more time to creative pursuits (specifically, music and fiction-writing). This book was a factor in my decision to finish the recording I posted on Monday. In the sections where I am singing harmony with myself I just could not find the F♯ in the alto part. I got it wrong an exasperating number of times, but I stuck it out because it's too easy for me to say to myself, "I don't have time to become a better musician." This is a less vulnerable way to live, but it is not a true statement. 

One more recommendation: it has been a month since I finished Demon Copperhead, and I keep meaning to tell you how much I loved it. It's one of the best books I read in 2022, my favorite of the Barbara Kingsolver novels I've read, and a really well-done homage to David Copperfield. If you had told me up front that the Dora character would be an opioid addict I would have given the book some serious side-eye, but it works amazingly well. I'd love to chat about it with somebody else who loves Copperfield, so say the word if that's you.

Resolutions for Ordinary Time

I have been in a bit of a funk, friends. My mood always dips in the short gray days of mid-December, but this year it dipped more deeply than usual and it has been taking longer to rebound. The day after Christmas we were driving to my in-laws' house and I could feel my anxiety pulsing, squashing me flat like a malevolent invisible anvil. "If I am not feeling much better in ten days' time," I said, "I should make an appointment to go to the doctor and request an SSRI prescription."

It is now 15 days later and I am definitely better, a largely-back-to-normal kind of better, but I am still riding intermittent swells of grumpiness, irrational anger, and melancholy. I do not really want to take an SSRI and, for separate (possibly dumb) reasons, I do not really want to go to the doctor. So for today I am just going to blog about it, and watch for a continued upward trend, and reassess as needed. So this is the frame of mind in which I am thinking about post-Christmas resolutions: they have to be reasonable and gentle. 

1. Soul.
1. Elwood and I are going to join a small group our church is sponsoring? I am not sure how it is going to go? I will report back? This first resolution does not sound very resolute, I know, but that's where I am right now.
2. After 7 consecutive years of reading the whole Bible every year, I am taking a break from the law/history/prophecy parts of OT (see above re: reasonable and gentle; I can't deal with Judges and Ezekiel right now). The 2023 morning reading plan is NT + wisdom books + some other spiritual reading, currently Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa. (I am a total Fr. Cantalamessa fangirl, but his book is not stirring my soul at the moment. We shall see.)
2. Body.
1. Prioritize joyful exercise, including daily mobility work. Nobody else is going to prioritize exercise for me, my friends, and it makes such a difference in my mood, energy level, and capacity to take ridiculous emails in stride. I am going to try to focus on M/W cardio and T/Th lifting, with some of each on Sat/Sun and Friday as a rest day.
2. Make more yummy food that I enjoy. Each week, I want to plan a couple of dinners to look forward to, and make enough to pack leftovers for lunches. I also want to find a couple of appealing salad dressings. Recommendations are welcome.
3. Mind.
1. Keep going to bed with Victorians, with the goal of finishing another three Trollope novels and some Dickens novellas/nonfiction. This was an excellent 2022 resolution.
2. Read the Dorothy Dunnett Game of Kings series.
3. Prioritize writing at work. I feel SO MUCH BETTER about every facet of my job when every day starts with an inviolable writing block. Even when I have to get to the office at 7:15 to make it happen, it's worth it.
4. Wider world.
1. Maintain a small-tasks block à la Laura Vanderkam with the goal of keeping my household in order. So many frustrations can be diminished or eradicated with a modest amount of effort. It feels better to expend the effort than to live with the frustrations.
2. Take myself and my mandolin to a local music group that meets each week and see if it seems like a good fit. Don't be bashful about being a beginner.

'Tis the season, but not for long

Tomorrow is the beginning of Ordinary Time for Catholics. It's a little weird for the new season to start on a Tuesday, but that's how it goes when Christmas falls on a Sunday. This means today is the last day on which it makes much sense to talk about a Christmas carol, and so I am going to squeeze in some Christmas carol thoughts.

The nutshell version of the post is this: if you have any influence over which Christmas music will be performed live at a venue near you, be VERY CAREFUL about selecting What Child Is This. It is a pain to sing solo, because the phrases go on a leetle too long. But it is a MINEFIELD to sing with others. CAUTION NEEDED; hazards await.

By my count there are six different spots in What Child Is This? where the interval between two notes changes from version to version. Some sheet music will have half-steps in some of the spots; some will have whole steps in some of the spots. All of these divergences happen on sixteenth notes, which means that the dissonance between the half-step singers and the whole-step singers will be brief, but it also means it's very very hard to correct reliably. Here, I will play you a little sample to show you what I mean:

Yesterday I had agreed to substitute for the usual cantor at the early Mass. When I got there at 7am, there were two junior high girls who were planning to sing as well. Normally it's a more-the-merrier vibe, but normally we don't sing What Child Is This. I asked the accompanist to help us practice the tricky whole steps, but you guys, it's just really hard to sing the right notes in the right spots, especially as you wade into the verses where you to think about the lyrics as well as the intervals. I decided I would just fade out for the sketchy whole-step bits and let the girls sing what sounded right to them, but I didn't realize that this would mean a livestreamed clash between their voices and the keyboard. Was that better or worse than throwing my at-least-intermittently accurate vocal in the mix? Who can say?

The version that lives in my head is all half-steps, all the way through, all six times. I do not have a single sheet-music version that does it this way, but that's the version in my head regardless. So here on the very last day of the Christmas season, for those of you who are not too weary of Christmas music, I have recorded the Jamie Gladly All Half-Steps version. 

What child is this, ALL HALF-STEPS ALL THE TIME

And remember for next year: if you're picking Christmas music to be performed live somewhere, go with Hark the Herald Angels Sing over What Child Is This.

Calling it good

I was slogging through the pictures, three months per day, and I was finding it time-consuming and unpleasant, like always. It was satisfying, though, to be pushing through the backlog. I love having made photo albums; it's just the making of photo albums that I dislike.

On Saturday I noticed that Snapfish had an enticing coupon code: 65% off for photo books purchased by January 8. "Hm," I said to myself, "how much headway could I make by tomorrow if I really made an effort?" 

A lot, it turns out. I just clicked purchase on a photo book that runs from September 2020 through the end of July 2022. There are three helpful things I want to remember:

1. Pete did a couple of two-page spreads with just a little input from me. I asked him to help with pictures from his 2021 Scout trip to Philmont, and he wound up being so independent that I asked him to do his 2022 trip to Germany too. It felt great to be able to delegate. I don't have to do it all myself these days.
2. The kids kept asking to see my progress, and laughing and reminiscing while they looked at the in-progress version of the book. This was much more motivating than solo late-night slog sessions.
3. I have figured out a method that works better than my old approach: if I keep uploading small batches of pictures, I don't have to scroll through a ton of images with tiny sidebar thumbnails. I use Photos to look at my pictures and decide which ones to upload, and copy them into a folder called "for upload," which I empty after each batch makes it into a Snapfish album. This gives me something like 5-10 pictures to pull from; I use them to make a couple of pages and then repeat the process. Back when we had slower internet, I used to do all my uploading at once because it took a while. But these days it is quick and painless, and the result is that I'm not wading through 80 itsy teeny thumbnails in the Snapfish interface to find one particular shot.

PHEW, I am relieved to have that item crossed off my list of nagging tasks.

Lentil bowls for dinner

I decided to make lentil bowls for dinner tonight, and the kids liked them more than I expected they would.

I put a cup and a half of little French lentils in the Instant Pot with two cloves of garlic and 3 cups of water. I gave them 18 minutes and let the pressure come down naturally.

While they were cooking I cut up the sad remains of a bag of Brussels sprouts (halved vertically, browned slowly in olive oil, tossed with salt and lemon juice and a spoonful of preserved lemon paste). I wanted something crunchy and tangy to go on top, so I steeped a grated carrot and a cucumber that I had peeled and seeded and cut into spears in a speedy mix of rice vinegar, lime juice, sambal oelek, and honey. 

When the lentils were ready I added some Middle Eastern flavors to the pot along with salt and the juice of half a lemon: ground coriander, za'atar, a spoonful of NY Shuk's olive matbucha and another of preserved lemon paste. I also added a shake of Kafe Hawaij but I'd probably leave it out next time -- I didn't love the cinnamon.

We also had a sad little bag of wilting parsley in the crisper drawer, which I turned into a speedy dressing by chucking it in the blender with a clove of garlic, the juice of half a lemon, a handful of walnuts, salt, and enough olive oil to make it pourable. 

I put everything on the table along with a dish of reheated leftover rice, some sliced avocado, and plain yogurt. I love meals where everybody can choose whatever combinations look tasty to them. Of the four kids at dinner, three were very enthusiastic. "It would be easy for lentils and rice to be really boring," said my most carnivorous kid, "but there are so many pleasant flavors here."

They ate up every bite, which probably means they thought it was delicious. But it might also mean that I'm out of practice cooking the right amount of dinner for 6 people.

Dead Bodies R Us, Apparently

The first time one of my kids came home with a result from one of those find-your-career quizzes, it was "taxidermist." We all laughed, because it was a ridiculously bad fit for this particular kid, and didn't think much more about it. When Pete's result was "mortician," we thought, "Hm, two weird results in a row." My great-grandparents owned a funeral home for many years (my great-grandmother was in demand for embalming women, as there were very few female morticians in those days), and one of my cousins still runs the business, but it's not a career any of my kids have ever considered. Again, we shrugged: there are so many factors that go into a career choice, and it's not surprising that a short quiz would offer up some surprising answers.

Today Stella came home with her quiz results. She is supposed to be well-suited for life as a pathologist.

There can't be a quiz question that asks "do you feel comfortable manipulating dead bodies?" -- right? What is happening here, exactly?

Two weeks

I will be back in the classroom two weeks from tomorrow, and I am making myself a list. The work tasks always get done because they have to get done, but the home tasks can swirl around and cause low-level "I should I should I should" kinds of thoughts for a long time.

Every day for the next ten days, I want to put 3 months' worth of pictures into a Snapfish photo book.

Every day until it's done, I want to repair one knitted item. Mostly these repairs do not take long. I just don't like doing them and so they linger. I think posting pictures will be motivating. I also want to finish up three lingering UFOs with a low volume of actual knitting/crocheting but a medium-to-high irksome factor.

I have some annoying phone calls to make but I am going to make them instead of thinking about how annoying they will be-- one set for home needs, one set for people needs.

And I am going to make time for music and exercise every day, because all work and no play makes Jamie a grumpy lady. 

Watch this space!

FO #1

I have been nibbling away at the Princess Bride-inspired stole that I told you about back in November, and yesterday I bound it off and blocked it. (It is not actually trapezoidal, just asymmetrically positioned.)

This morning I trimmed off all the knitted-in ends and wove in the others. Marie was admiring it before she went to work this morning. "I've always loved purple and green together," I told her, "ever since I was young. Not a popular combo, but I love it anyway."

"Yes," she said, "I think most people associate purple and green with the Joker and Green Goblin and characters of that ilk."

So maybe it will read as a supervillain cape to the Gen Z-ers in my world, but I am pleased with it anyway. The pattern is clearly written and nicely structured, with a pleasant mix of easy and intermediate sections. It's a great choice for harmoniously colored fingering-weight leftovers, if you have a collection of your own awaiting their destiny.