The skies were clear this morning as the sun rose, and the temperatures have finally equalized enough that we no longer have the thick early morning fog rising off the Hudson River. For a few brief moments everything just glowed with the warmth of the early morning light. I grabbed my camera but as I went outside my battery died and I had to run in again. I only managed one photo before the light suddenly shifted, and you can, in fact see the beginnings of that shift along the bottom of the photo and along the edge of the opposite shore.
That lovely autumnal color is as much the light as the colors on the trees. Most of the trees are actually bare, which you will see if you look closely. The colors have not been good this year, which is a sad kind of fairwell. There has been very little red, the leaves mostly just turning yellow then brown and falling off the trees. There has been far too much rain. The ground has been saturated for weeks and never really dries out. Trees don't any better with overwatering than houseplants.
Still, it is nice to have one last autumnal photograph to remember the old place by. We have decided that we will be moving in December. The new house should be ready the very end of the month or beginning of January and we should really be down there before closing anyway. So there will be a few weeks in temporary housing. I'm not ready, but I really won't be until it is done, and I already feel like our life is in a kind of limbo. Might as well get things moving along.
You might be wondering why, if I have a break in my time, I am not regaling you with things I've made, specifically things I've knit. I believe I mentioned that there have been two finished projects, which were done when I had less knitting time, but since my time has "freed up" nothing, nothing at all.
Or of course, you might not be wondering at all, not being a knitter, and you might be thinking "OMG she's about to go on and on about boring stuff involving long pointy sticks and string". And you'd be right. This is your chance, quit now or suffer the consequences.
I actually was sitting and knitting in the evenings, working on this kind of odd vesty-thing. It is designed by Anne Thompson and is called Creep. I was using this incredibly luscious alpaca yarn by Asland Trends, in a yummy shade of blue, blissfully whiling away the hours, when my knitting encountered an accident in the form of a four-legged terror. You see, I made a mistake. I put my knitting away, in my knitting bag, which zips closed, but (and this is a really BIG BUT) I left the zipper open by maybe half an inch, maybe less, at any rate not much.
And you know I've told you about how my sweet little baby cat, Moisés loves yarn, and is a very focused hunter. When he gets an idea in his head it stays there; he may file it away in some back corner of his little cat brain while he pursues more immediate concerns like chasing lights and flies, but as soon as an opportunity presents itself, he remembers and pounces.
Anyway Moises has figured out that if I leave the tiniest little opening in the zipper, he can get his claws in there and make it a little bigger, worrying that zipper along until the opening gets bigger and bigger until eventually he can get his head in the bag and survey the options before reaching in and snagging some prize.
Well of course, soft yummy alpaca is very tempting to a yarn loving cat. When I got up the next morning, this is what I found. Not particularly pretty is it? Of course I thought I would rip it out and start again, but the way this is knit and cast off and picked up and knit again (just writing all that gives me a headache) makes it difficult enough to unravel and the whole thing is made more complicated by the ministrations of little kitty claws.
I spent one whole evening, 3 hours, and got maybe a few feet of yarn untangled. And although some part of me doesn't want to admit to being defeated by yarn, I learned that it is only a very small bit. I am very willing to cut my losses and get back to what is important, namely knitting.
Now that sounds simple doesn't it?
But no. My evil little brain sometimes gets the better of me. I had a small part of that skein of soft blue yarn left and I wanted to do something with it. Apparently, like Moisés I store ideas up in the back of my brain where they pop out, unexpectedly, when an opportunity presents itself.
A friend and I had been talking about learning lever knitting, which is basically knitting, where one needle remains relatively motionless and the yarn is manipulated around the fixed needle. I decided that it had been too long since I forced myself to learn something new and this little bit of blue yarn offered huge potential for subjecting me to some kind of prolonged torture in the name of education.
I spent another day attempting to learn to hold my needles and my yarn differently. Mostly I just ripped and reknit the same little bit of yarn over and over again with increasing frustration. In desperation I turned to the web (yes, I know I should have done that first, but well, sometimes I am a slow learner), and I found a video of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee knitting using the lever method, or Irish cottage knitting.
I was entranced. I watched this thing over and over again. Something really clicked when she compared the action of knitting to the action of a sewing machine, and I really wanted to do this.
My fingers could work like a sewing machine when there was no yarn in my hands, but doing it with actual yarn was problematic. Either my yarn fell off my hands and I dropped stitches, or I wrapped the yarn so tightly that it cut off the circulation in my fingers and got my hands locked in place with the needle. I spent another day in a protracted struggle with yarn and needles before it finally began to click.
Obviously I am not a natural knitter.
A week later I am reknitting Creep with new yarn. This time I am using Cascade Venezia Worsted in a lovely teal. I am not yet faster than I was before, but I like this technique. My tension is tighter than it used to be and far more even. My knitting tension remains remarkably even whatever my personal tension level happens to be. My tension remained consistent even after I accidentally flung a 14 inch metal needle across the waiting room of the Vassar Brothers Medical Center Radiology Department yesterday and had to listen to it clang as it bounced along the tile floor several times, even as I endured the irate glare of the lady who had just told us all to be "very very quiet" because she couldn't hear Judge Alex on the television, even as I nervously managed to tangle my fingers in the yarn and then drop the yarn under the chairs as I tried to extricate myself, even after all of that, my tension remained fabulously even.
As too Creep. I will confess that at the moment I have doubts. I look at the pattern picture above, and the mess of loopy knitting hanging off my needles and wonder what I was thinking when I decided to knit this project. Oh, I will probably love it in the end. At least I hope I will love it in the end. Right now my brain is too fogged up with learning new things to really think clearly, but I am loving knitting, and am sneaking in a row or two whenever I get a chance, so I know it will have been worthwhile whatever the outcome.
Today is our 25th Wedding Anniversary. There are no big celebrations planned and yet it is a special day and like a good marriage will be celebrated with a combination of the necessary, the mundane, the joyful and the decadent:
Go to vet to pick up prescription for insulin for Sam the cat.
Meet with investment advisor for retirement accounts
Lunch at the American Bounty Room with Champagne
Nap
Light Dinner
Sit on sofa and watch TV (Ringer tonight!)
Have a lovely day and I will be back later in the week.
Sometimes the simplest outfits bring the greatest satisfation.
This past weekend was "Rhinebeck Weekend". It was the weekend of the NYS Sheep and Wool Festival and I was up at the fairgrounds both Saturday and Sunday. Sunday I also went to the Farmer's Market and considering the amount of traffic, and that quite a few of the parking lots were closed due to excessive mud, I found parking near the fairgrounds in a moderately muddy, but still driveable field, and walked back to town for the produce before proceeding to the sheep fest.
Obviously, practicality and functionality were a consideration. Of course I wore boots. Specifically I wore my Frye Harness boots, my go-to boots when a lot of standing, walking and possibly questionable terrain are involved. This is actually my Sunday outfit. Sunday was the warmer day, with mixed sun and clouds and this outfit offered just enough warmth without being stiffling inside crowded barns.
Although this outfit isn't particularly stylish and is in fact probably pretty boring, I felt fabulous wearing it. I felt completely comfortable in my skin, appropriate, and even chic, if chic can be defined as a state of mind, whether I was at the farmer's market, walking throgh town, at the fairgrounds, or out with G in the afternoon perusing old master drawings at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.
With the boots I am wearing a pair of Agave Paraiso straight leg jeans in a medium wash, which had the pefect "feel" and weight, both physical and metaphysical. The lightweight plaid shirt is cotton batiste, purchased at Eddie Bauer last year. But it is the outer top that may be my favorite "new" piece this year. New is in quotes because it is really old. This is one of many sweet things I found in a box of old clothes that fit me before I gained so much weight, clothes that are all at least 7 or 8 years old and some even older. Surprisingly, I did a good job of editing that box, because not only do they fit they are styles I will happily wear.
But back to the black top. It is a pleated lightweight woven fabric (polyester and wool) by Issey Miyake that G gave me. I don't think I wore it much. I never wore much black (the exception being the past few years) and I couldn't quite figure out how to wear it in a way I liked. It does strike me as funny that now that I have decided to gradually eliminate most black from my wardrobe, I find an old black piece that I adore and will wear. I'm not eliminating pieces I love now that happen to be black though, I am just not buying black, so this still fits into the general plan.
Even though the two collars were at odds throughout most of the day, I loved the shirts together. I love the idea of wearing the Miyake piece as a layering piece, something that never occurred to me 8 years ago. I see now that this piece was just waiting, patiently, to be rediscovered.
Yesterday was a kind of blah day, and although it was cool and rainy, I'm not talking about the weather per se even though it is possible that the dreary skies and rain did dampen my state of mind.
In my head I'd had this idea that I would now have some time off to explore my own interests, that there would be a bit of a rest between putting the house on the market and actually moving. Yesterday it finally dawned on me how many decisions still needed to be made and how much needed to be done and my imaginary reprieve vanished like the dream it was. The truth is that I am ready to go, even if I'm not really ready to pack. I just want to get on with it. I want someone to buy my house, to close the deal, and move. But it may take longer than that. I had hoped to move in December, but there have been delays and the new place may not be ready until January. But January is an iffier month in which to move, and I had hoped to avoid the winter. Now I have to make decisions and consider other plans, think about the actual options not just my hoped-for scenario.
Reality has a way of kicking in like that and disrupting our fantasies.
I've given myself the weekend off. This is Sheep and Wool weekend here in Rhinebeck, and I intend to spend most of my time at the fairgrounds. Early next week is our anniversary. After that I have to start working on plans again, decide if we are going to stay and wait for either this house to sell or that house to be finished, or just go, finding temporary space for ourselves. Only when I know what we want to do can I figure out how best to make it happen.
In the meantime, I made soup. I love soup and could eat soup every day. G does not feel the same way. I gave him a break this summer and there were no summertime soups. Now that the nights are cool and crisp and the leaves are turning colors however, I feel that it is once again time for the comfort of soup.
The inspiration for this soup came from Food & Wine magazine back in August 2008. It was fancier, and more fussy: a salad contained in a soup. I suppose the original was a late summer soup. Although my version still revolves around a summer vegetable, it is more of a fall soup.
Yellow Squash Soup with Sausage (4 servings)
1 Tablespoon unsalted butter
2 pounds yellow squash, preferably small, cut in 1" chunks
2 bay leave
1 1/2 cups chicken stock
1 1/2 cups water
1 cup buttermilk
salt and pepper to taste
12 ounces pre-cooked sausage such as kielbasa, sliced into thin rounds
Melt the butter in a medium-large saucepan over low heat. Add the yellow squash and bay leaves and stir to coat lightly. Place a sheet of waxed paper over the top of the pot and then place the lid on top of the wax paper, sealing the pot tightly, turn the heat to very low. Cook undisturbed over low heat for 10 minutes, until the squash is beginning to soften and is quite fragrant but is not yet turning brown.
Remove the lid and wax paper from the pot, discarding the wax paper. Add the broth and water, replace the lid on the pot and bring to a simmer. Simmer until the squash is soft. Remove pot from heat and allow to cool slightly.
Discard the bay leaves. Transfer soup to a blender and puree until smooth. Depending on the size of your blender, you may have to do this in batches. Stir in the buttermilk and season with salt and pepper to taste.
While the soup is cooling heat a skillet over moderate heat. Add the sliced sausage and heat until just hot through and perhaps beginning to brown. Do not overcook or the sausage slices will be tough.
Divide sausages between 4 bowls and top with soup.
In the batch I made yesterday I used a local venison sausage from Highland Deer Farm. I have used their Venison Keilbasa, and the Venison Garlic Sausage and this was the latter. In the winter, when their sausages are not always available in local markets, I tend to prefer the Andouille sausage from Aidell's, although regular keilbasa would also work. The soup itself has a very subtle flavor and a spicier sausage compliments it well although it is also lovely plain, without the sausage, in a cup. This recipe would fill 6 standard mugs with soup (not the oversized variety).
Now that the days are getting shorter, I am often up before the sun. Unfortunately, I have no view of the sunrise to enjoy with my morning coffee, usually just a gradual brightening as the sun filters through the thick morning fog that coats the river.
So far the subtle play of light through fog is something I am unable to capture on film.
The sunsets, however, have been spectacular, and although my photographic skills don't capture their full glory, I occasionally come close.
Although I love the longer days of summer. The fall sunsets are somehow more vivid and the timing now is perfect.
Providing the perfect counterpoint to the day.
Allowing time to pause and reflect.
Before settling in on the sofa with my sweetie for a few quiet hours.
Issues of visibility have been weighing on my mind a lot lately. Partly this was due to my continued absense from this blog, but partly it was the seemingly endless weeks of wearing shorts or chinos and loose tees or my husbands old shirts as I cleaned out attics and basements, oiled paneling, painted, sorted and cleaned putting the house on the market. I felt like a nameless, faceless drudge, and although I told myself that the end result would be worth it, there were days that I truly felt invisible.
But of course there were exceptions. I did leave the house and I did dress, although it is also true that I was letting parts of myself go into hibernation. I also cannot deny that a certain creative impulse was satisfied as I moved around pieces of our accumulated life together, trying to fit them into a specific vision of the house that I wanted to sell.
And yet, shallow as it may be, when we finally put the house on the market I felt a certain palpable relief at being able, finally, to dress as I pleased, not according to the dictates of paint and bleach and other nasty stuff. Not that dressing as I pleased lead to a seismic shift in personal style. I don't work outside the home other than teaching an occasional knitting class, a field not known for requiring strict adherence to a corporate dress code, so jeans tend to be the staple of my fall wardrobe. and often, in the fall and winter, those jeans are worn with boots.
This is what I wore the photos were taken of my house last week. The morning started out rainy so the boots are rain boots by Aquatalia. With the boots I wore DKNY Soho bootcut jeans, a black turtleneck by Spanx (which I love not for its supposed figure flattery but because the wrists and neck do not sag and bag, remaining close fitting throughout the day without feelig constricting) and Teasel, a linen, wool and alpaca sweater I finished knitting in June. I love wearing things I made myself, but I am especially happy when one of those hand-made items gets incorporated into my wardrobe in a way that lives up to the my original vision. Even though you probably can't tell from this picture, I felt sleek and strong and pulled together. I felt ready to stride purposefully into the future. I felt visible, but not just visible, fully myself.
Last week I learned about Visible Monday and seeing as how this is the week I have come out of hibernation it only seems fitting that I should join in the Visible Monday brigade. You can find links to other particpants in today's post at Not Yet Dead Style. Check it out.
I never intended to disappear. And yet for a while I did, if not from reality, at least from the virtual version of reality as it shows up on the internet. In some ways this was good as I was quite busy and the time gained helped me focus. And that time was time was well spent.
But it wasn't really the busy intervention of life that kept me away, at least not at first, but a head-slamming encounter with the kind of nastiness that swirls around the currents of the interwebs. By the time I dealt with the issue and my own feelings, life had indeed intervened, and I was swept up in other tasks.
But I'm back, perhaps in some ways more open and more connected to my own voice, my own thoughts, and actually less interested in what other people think. For that I have to say "thank you" to the trolls. It seems that I have spent most of my life worrying about what other people think, worrying if I am doing the right thing, saying the right thing, trying to look right, trying to be right, trying to maintain the peace and avoid conflict at all costs. Especially trying to avoid conflicts. And it struck me that all that effort trying to avoid conflict, trying to do the right thing, trying to be nice, was for naught. I'm not going to go into all the nastiness, because really what is the point? We all get our share of it. Hopefully it never crosses the line from our internet lives to our "real" lives, but it can. I now know that from personal experience. Despite this, I am still here.
Consider this blog active once again.
In the intervening time a few things have happened:
1. My House is on the market.
2.There has been some sewing and some knitting. These projects may or may not appear on this blog, depending on my whims.
And a few decisions have been made, namely that this is my blog and I am not particularly interested in pursuing a narrow focus or in any kind of move toward having a presence or branding. It is what it is and I hope you continue to follow, but in the end I shall write what I feel like writing. This blog is my space apart from the pressures, conventions, and tyrranies of expectation.
There will be knitting.
There will be sewing.
Some of the knitting or sewing will be new garments, but some of it may also address alterations or refashioning of garments as well. I am not and never will be interested in sewing all of my clothes and I honestly don't mind alterations. In fact I've learned more about garment construction from altering high-end ready to wear than from any number of sewing books and classes. I don't expect clothes to fit perfectly off the rack (no one should) and I don't expect patterns to fit perfectly either. This leaves room for exploration.
In my mind, wearing and creating are completely different processes. Posts about things I make will be about the thing and the making. Posts about what I wore will be about the wearing and the reasons behind the wearing. I refuse to submit to the tyrrany espoused by some, but by no means all, in the sewing and knitting communities that garments must be shown as they are worn on a person.
There will, of course, be books and music. I am no critic. I am increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of criticism per se, and of ratings systems. Writing about books and music will be about what said books or music meant to me and will therefore be highly subjective and personal.
And of course, I will write about whatever else lodges in my mind and refuses to budge until I have beaten it into submission under a pile of words. This is after all my blog, my journal, my place. Hopefully that place will be a calm place. Athough I might occasionally vent, I hope to do so in a reasonable way. I expect that my readers will do the same. Different opinions and constructive criticism are welcome if they are offered with civility and at least a nod to keeping an open mind. Comments remain open; however, those who persistently violate the tenets of civil discourse will be banned.
Although living with someone with severe short term memory loss can at times be trying, there are also moments of pure joy as you watch this same person rediscover the world on a daily basis.
This morning at breakfast, G took a bite of his eggs with smoked salmon, capers, and tomatoes and looked up, eyes sparkling with joy. "This is wonderful" he said, his voice filled with awe at having made a fabulous new discovery. No matter that he has had the same breakfast once a week for the past 36 weeks.
As I sat at the table this morning, savoring those few moments when the house remained at rest and all was quiet, I realized that mid-August has crept upon me far too quickly, and I have been far too laid-back in my approach to reaching a few goals concerning this house and the planned move to another. It is probably a good thing that I always worked well under a deadline. Once again, however, I may be scarce, or not.
I did however, clear my mind of all the things I had missed writing about, that I intended to share but didn't quite manage. The past is the past and I shall not dredge it up except as if plays a role in the present or the immediate future. And this in itself is liberating.
But of course the past cannot be completely forgotten. For example, when I went down to Knoxville a few weeks ago, I took a book to read on the plane. I looked at other books in the airport at Newark but did not buy anything, assuming, incorrecctly, that I could buy a book at the Knoxville airport should the need arise. This proved to be a mistake because the book I took was not long enough to get me through two 2-hour flights plus a 1 hour delay, and I was left with over an hour to kill in flight with nothing to read.
But what was that book? And how does it affect the present? The book was The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood. I forgot that it follows Oryx and Crake, which I had not read. This didn't particularly bother me. I loved the book and felt it worked well on its own, although I did pick up on the presence of Oryx and Crake in the background, and Jimmy/Snowman, who I didn't even realize was a character in the former book. But I did realize that it might serve me well to read Oryx and Crake and then perhaps reread The Year of The Flood.
Of course the problem is that I can never go back to The Year of the Flood and read it as if I hadn't read it first. And I am no longer looking at Oryx and Crake with unjaundiced eyes. Rather than seeing Flood as the story of minor characters in Oryx, I immediately recognize characters that were minor in Flood, and think of this as fleshing out a different story. How we read a book depends heavily on what we have read before and how our own experiences and life affects the way we react to the words on the page. Although I try to read each book separately, without comparison to other works, a work that is written in a series necessarily makes this more difficult. Reading the work outside of the order in which it was written or intended can completely change the perception of the thing.
I am not far into Oryx and Crake at this point, having started it only last night. But I can already see that I am going to be looking at a world from two overlapping but entirely different perspetives, and I am intrigued. In many ways this is a gift, an opportunity to explore two views of the same world, in an order that I would not have encountered had I kept up with my reading list. It is rare that we are able to remind ourselves that what we see is only a fragment of reality viewed through a broken lens. As I see this now, these stolen moments of reading over the next few weeks promise a rich reward, perhaps made richer than they would have been had I started reading the books in the intended order.