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April in January

Record high today, 70 degrees in Poughkeepsie, although I recorded 72 here.

It was a wonderful day to work in the yard. I caught up with some clean-up I had missed during those hectic autumn months when life seemed out of control.

But this winter is strange. It is too warm. The plants seem to think it is April or May. I am not complaining that the pansies and snapdragons keep coming back into bloom, both were filled with new buds today, if the weather doesn’t get too cold I will have flowers again next week. The blossoms are a treat in January.

But other things worry me. The irises are sending out new growth. The tulips and daffodils are peeking above the soil line. The hyacinths are even further along:

The poppies are getting huge. The asters and sedum are sending up new growth as well:

What will this mean? Tulip season is in May here not
February (like in Houston). Will all 360 tulips I planted in a fit of
greed and tulip-lust in October be for naught? Will they bloom in
February while I am away in Arizona and southern California? That can’t
be possible. Will the snow and ice finally come and slaughter all the
young plants before they have even had a chance to grow? The weather people tell me the strange weather is caused by el nino and we are in for several more months of this strangeness so all might be well. We might have a bilzzard in May. They might be wrong and we might have mass tulip infanticide next week.

I suppose there is nothing to do but enjoy it and hope for the best. I can certainly enjoy the mild weather. If this keeps up, think of all the work I can get done in the yard. Perhaps then, when the dog days of summer finally hit, I won’t feel guilty about not slaving away in the heat. Instead I will sit on the new deck by the pool and lounge, margarita in hand.

January 6, 2007
Book Update

I finished "The Beautiful Fall" and I have to admit that I grew bored before I finished the book. It was interesting enough, I certainly have heard of many of the names involved, and being an avid reader of fashion magazines, I had vague inklings of some of the personalities, but otherwise it is a world completely beyond my ken — beyond my comprehension even. Perhaps it is true, I am too serious and too boring. That kind of life never appealed to me (although the clothes and jewels and pretty objects certainly do). Too bad that they so often seem to go hand in hand, the beautiful objects and the wild lifestyle.

It wasn’t really that the book was badly written, although I did think it took itself too seriously at times, and could have used a lighter hand, but that in the end I found the characters to grow tedious and I lost interest in them. A shame really.

However, in another take on the "fashion scene" I am now reading Penelope Rowland’s "A Dash of Daring" which is about Carmel Snow. This book is much more entertaining, certainly far better than the novel "The Devil Wore Prada" which was rather whiney. Carmel Snow is interesting and there are certain parallels between her career and personality and Miranda in the novel/movie. The book is also written in an entertaining, sometimes gossipy, style. I have trouble putting it down; it appeals to my sense of fashion, gossip, and has just enough snark to keep it entertaining, although the author does have a habit of interjecting parenthetical asides, which although sometimes useful, are used far too frequently. I keep sneaking moments with the book whenever I walk through the family room. A terrible temptation and distraction.

January 6, 2007
Oil Spill

The sewing room in 2007 is a pile of UFO’s and mending — all things I have no real incentive to start except that they are hanging around my neck like a pile of bricks. All of the UFO’s are things I want to have, but the excitement with which I began has faded as interruptions have placed them further and further from memory. If I start something new, I fear that I will be ultimately only adding more to the UFO pile and the burden of their presence will become oppressive.

So I have vowed to work through my past projects, although I may give myself little breaks; sewing rewards I might say. If I complete a certain number of things I can make something new. Hopefully the successful elimation of old projects, the addition of new items to my wardrobe, and the occasional new project will keep me going.

With all of this in mind I was ready to dive in. I wanted to finish the Simplicity jacket first, but G ripped the lining out of his favorite pair of windpants and I naively agreed to fix them first. As usually happens when I really want to be doing something else, the job was not as simple as I originally thought. The windpants ripped because the lining fabric at the bottom of the leg was shredding. The knit lining from the knee up was fine. I found some lining in my stash that is a little heavier than the average bemberg, and although it was not white like the original lining, it was a perfect color to coordinate with the outer shell of the pants. So I washed the bemberg and removed the old lining pieces from the pants, using them to make a pattern for the new pieces.

It was when I began to sew that the trouble began, turning what should have been a half-hour’s project into a prolonged siege:

I decided to use the Elna simply because I was too lazy to unthread the Bernina, which was still threaded for the Simplicity Jacket. I hadn’t used the Elna since I brought it home from the shop in November so I set it up, and ran a short seam on some scrap fabric. All looked good. I put the lining in the machine, and started sewing. As I moved down the seam I saw a large puddle of oil growing next to my fabric. Then I noticed oil running down the needle. To say that I was annoyed is putting my reaction very mildly. There was a big oil stain on my lining fabric right at the seam line and oil all over my machine. Obviously the person who repaired the machine over-oiled it. So I got out more scrap fabric and started seaming randomly. I got nice even stitches and lovely oil lines all over my fabric. It got better, the oil seemed to stop, I stitched faster, more oil poured out, it splattered like a spray gun on me and all around my sewing table. This was not fun! Eventually however the oil supply seemed to have been exhausted and I was able to sew, half an hour later.

I began stitching the lining to the wind pants. The machine jammed. I fixed it and started again. About a foot of seam later the machine jammed again, the thread popped out of the upper tension device and made a big tangle. I had trouble resetting the tension. This was the same problem for which I had originally taken the machine in for repair. Three more times I dismantled the machine, cleaned it out, reassembled it, and started over.

Eventually I had to give up. I unthreaded the Bernina, transferred the bobbin thread from the Elna bobbin to the Bernina bobbin, and finished the job. The pants look beautiful. G is probably the only man at the gym whose wind pants are lined with Ermengilda Zegna lining fabric.

I wonder if anything had been done to my machine or if the shop
had simply poured oil in it and charged me $50 for the privelege.
Admittedly I had had second thoughts. When I took the machine in, at
the recommendation of the closed Elna dealer who used to repair my
machine, the repair person said they didn’t sell or usually work with
Elna’s and they were just taking them as a favor. She did not sound
encouraging. Naively, I gave her my machine anyway. Now I regret
having done so.

The top piece of the upper tension device on the Elna definitely looks broken. I went to the Elna website and found that the closest dealers are all in NYC since my local dealer closed last summer. Crown Machine on upper Broadway still sells and services Elnas. I used to take my machine there before I had a local dealer. I see an excuse for a trip into NYC in my future.

G tells me it is silly to go in to NYC just to take a machine to the shop, we should go earlier on a day we have a concert and drop it off. (I will still have to go back and pick it up eventually). If I go in by myself I see this as an opportunity to get into all kinds of trouble in NYC. Besides, Crown machine used to fix the machine the same day, I could drop it, wander around, and come back at the end of the day to take it home with me. It could take longer if they needed to order more obscure parts, but most of the time it was a one day job. I wonder if they still do that. It seems worth a try. A day of fun and getting to take my baby home the same day sounds soo much better than dropping it off late in the afternoon and having to go back to pick it up another day. I know G will never go in early in the morning on a concert day, just to drop off a machine; he probably also thinks I can wait a month and pick it up the next time we go to a concert. Ha!

January 5, 2007
VK Winter 2006/7

When I finally got to the post office on Wednesday there were three buckets of mail waiting. More than 24 hours later I still have not caught up with everything, but I have dealt with most of the first class mail (although not all my office mail which was also voluminous).

When I saw the cover of the Vogue Knitting I immediately grabbed it up and put it aside, not in the stack of general catalogs and magazines that will be read as time allows. You see, I adore the cover sweater:

I couldn’t wait to see what other wonders lurked inside the pages of the magazine, so I treated myself to a preview while I ate my lunch. Lunch wasn’t long enough to get me to the design pages however, I was still poring over the ads and the columns and the various bits adding up to the main course.

So the rest of the magazine waited.

In the end however it is this sweater I adore. There are other sweaters I like very much, other sweaters I might knit and wear, but this sweater has completely captured my attention. I think about it while I sit in my chair dozing off in a cold-induced haze. I dream about it.

(I do hope you had previously realized that I am a total loon)

I have to knit this.

But when!!

There are at least three, or is it four, other sweaters about which I am currently obsessed, sweaters with patterns I adore, or for which the yarn is so luscious and yummy it calls to me , tempts me and taunts me.

The competition in the yarn stash is growing fierce. Things might get rough before it is all settled.

January 4, 2007
Fractured

I had hoped, when my nose started running and I started sneezing last night, that it was because I was sitting on the sofa next to about 200 mass-market paperback sized books that I tossed down from their storage place on top of one of the ceiling beams. They didn’t look dusty, or feel dusty but it seemed like the most hopeful answer to the cause of my sneezing fit.

I was wrong.

I am still dripping and sneezing, tired, red-eyed and red-nosed, pale of cheek. It appears that I have finally gotten my annual cold. Does this mean that, since it has come so early in the year, I will be safe until 2008? Probably not. I have probably caught 2006’s cold.

But what was I doing with the books? My passion to simplify and declutter has (finally) made it to the bookshelves. I managed to separate them into two stacks, about 110 tossers and 92 keepers. I was being fairly ruthless, although there are some who would probably say that I am still too soft when it comes to pruning possessions. Now I have to find a home for the tossers and a new storage place for the keepers.

The books had been stored one of of the ceiling beams, much like these:

Unfortunately the beam in question is indisposed:

And now you know the true reason I was sorting through books last night, instead of knitting or sewing.

I suppose G and I aren’t the only ones feeling the aches and pains of age around here. I noticed the crack yesterday afternoon while dusting the ceilings and behind the furniture. It was not there when we left for Christmas.

The cracked beam spans the family room. The crack is directly above my chair. G thinks I should move the chair forward until it is repaired, and it will be as the carpenters are going to bring a support beam to put there until they can order a new one and replace the existing beam. The beam is 20 feet long and spans the family room with one support about 6 feet from one side of the room. I have been told that the support should be more in the center, and the original beam is too narrow to act as a support for that size of span. Well it has held for 40 years. Of course we built peaked roofs on the house some time ago so although it still supports the weight of the ceiling, which was the old roof, it does not support the new roof or any snow load. The crack is dead center in the beam, where the support post will be moved. We may have to get a bigger beam, as this extends through the walls out to the edge of the roof, about 18 inches beyond the house; I know from experience that most of the lumber in the house is the old dimensional standard and is bigger than the new dimensional standard. So a new 4×8 is smaller than the one in my family room. If the beam is too small, all the supporting structures which depend on it will be too small as well.

What size beam, where the supports will be placed, and how they will be built is all to be worked. Why it happened? That we may never know. I suspect it was already stressed, was stressed further when the sill beam on the foundation had to be replaced about 10 feet away) and it only just now gave out.

One thing leads to another.

January 4, 2007
On the Floor and On the Needles

I began a new project on December 25. I finished knitting the main pieces on January 1. 26 hours of round-trip driving time does wonders for one’s knitting progress:

The pattern is Haute Luce , the cover sweater from Anny Blatt book 197, Fall 2006. I am using the same yarn shown in the photo. I think I like how the sweater is turning out, although there were some adjustments and I am still holding off judgment until I see how it works out in the end.

Meanwhile I am eager to get this finished, and eager to start my next project, but I cannot until this dries. If I start my next sweater I will not feel like coming back to this one, and another project will go on the UFO pile.

In an attempt to find a quick knitting project, I pulled up the two extra skeins of Tahki Donegal Tweed remaining from Rogue and cast on for a cap to donate to the children at Morse School in Poughkeepsie. I am embarrassed to say that I have done no Morse knitting this year and I am sure they will need caps eventually, there are still several months of potential winter ahead.

I have not been inspired and the cap seems to be progressing interminably. I suppose it is really only that I want to finish the other sweater and am not in the mood to wait. I have so many things I want to knit I don’t know where to begin but I steadfastly refuse to start to many simultaneous projects. This is only the path to UFOs and frustration.

January 4, 2007
Reading About Saint Laurent

I have been reading The Beautiful Fall by Alicia
Drake and it even thought it is not about the clothes as such, but about the
life of the designers and the lives of the “beautiful people” in the 1970s, it
has still fed my fashion obsession because I remember some of the collections
so vividly.

Although I am enjoying the book, I alternate between being
fascinated and appalled. I am familiar with the designers and the
personalities discussed from reading fashion magazines over the years. I remember many of Saint Laurent’s collections but I was
basically only marginally aware of Karl Lagerfeld before he became the designer
for Chanel. The personalities and
lifestyle are not something I ever found appealing and I don’t believe I would
like either designer, but that doesn’t really change my opinion of their
talents as designers. I have never
really confused a person’s creativity with their personality and I have never
been one to be disillusioned or disappointed when a favorite philosopher,
writer, or designer turns out to be truly dislikeable person.

What I am enjoying is the general descriptions of the mood
and the time and place evoked by the story. I am mostly attracted to the aspects of the story dealing with Saint Laurent; simply because I have always been attracted to
Saint Laurent’s
clothes. They are definitely clothes
that define a persona, but it is one I always found appealing and one that
attracted me long after Saint Laurent stopped designing new and groundbreaking collections. I liked the combination of sensuality and untouchability
combined in the clothes, be they the day suits or the wildly impractical
collections such as the Opera collection.

I realized early on, perhaps because I was shy, the power of clothes as a mask,
of a way to present a persona to the world. When I was young I was fascinated with clothes even as my mother had
trouble getting me to comb my hair and look neat. I was fascinated by the idea of clothes as
role-playing just as I was fascinated with play-acting. I suppose I still am to some extent, but not
as much so as when I was then. Perhaps
it is just that I no longer feel as strong a need to hide behind the mask. When I was young and working in a much more
corporate environment I was attracted to suits in the Saint Laurent vein far
more than the standard, dowdy, shapeless, sexless suits that my colleagues wore
and corporate (at least IBM style corporate) America seemed to espouse. I like the powerful image of a well-cut suit
and I liked a suit that also celebrated being female. Yves Saint Laurent did this kind of suit very
well, and although many were not appropriate for business, much of his day look
could be adapted. Dressing in this kind of suit was a statement of confidence
and strength, strength I could shore myself up with even when I personally felt
insecure. Insecure, quiet, and something of a doormat I might have been, but
there was a part of me that was smart, competent, and very proud of being a
woman with all that the words female and feminine entailed. I saw no reason why I couldn’t be smarter
than the men I worked with and enjoy clothes.. Perhaps this was an extension of those confused childhood dreams I
always had, where I was the princess in the tower waiting to be rescued by the
handsome prince; except my prince always got in trouble and I had to go out and
rescue him.

January 3, 2007
I was reading part of the NY Times early this morning when I happened to see the sky with just a glimmer of light breaking the darkness:

What a nice way to start the day.

The reading, not so nice.

I was reading this article about recent outbreaks of e coli in fresh produce and contemplating one of the conundrums of modern life. Here we are living in one of the most technologically advanced times in human history, in one of the most advanced communities and yet we can’t eat the lettuce, or drink the water. The very mass production that has enabled us to live extraordinarily varied and rich lives, that gives us the potential to feed and clothe huge numbers of people, also can aide in the spread of dangerous contaminants and diseases.

What is the answer? no one knows yet. But I have hope in humanity, in the human capacity to find answers. The pre-dawn patch of sky reminds me of our capacity to find answers.

The answer is not banning cattle from states that grow produce. Nor is it living exclusively on locally-grown food. We could never support the world’s population. This is a movement of the relatively rich and secure. The same advances that bring us produce from New Zealand have brought so many life enhancing improvements from which we all benefit.

I refuse to be ruled by fear of food. Increasingly I refuse to be ruled by so many things. Science and society has grown so complex. The food we we eat. The medicines we take to live longer "healthier" lives. Our electronics (I am using some now). In the same issue of the Times is an article on how common are mistakes in drug distribution and dosing. People don’t know what they are taking or how much. They don’t know how things interact. Pharmacists, nurses and even doctors are people too, they make mistakes. In the end we have to pay attention to what we put in our bodies, be it lettuce or medication. It is not simple, you can’t necessarily wash the e-coli off. You might not recover from the drug mistake.

Another article talks about how we are perhaps over-diagnosed. Medicine has made such great advances. But medicine cannot give us perfect lives. We can find things earlier. We may be able to treat various diseases or malfunctions. But are they all something that should be treated or just variations. People are still machines in a way, machines that work wonderfully, but things wear down, ache, feel depressed. We can’t be perfect. It is too easy to see ourselves as "sick" in this world. We forget the old medical adage that "all medicine is poison". This is true for all medicines, even the over-the-counter ones and even the ones we take for health, like vitamins and supplements. There is a risk and a price to pay for everything we do.

Here I have written a post with too many questions and without answers. My thoughts are rambling. There probably are no answers and there probably are too many questions. Perhaps we should spend more time considering them.

Me I’m going to sit down and watch the sun come up.

January 2, 2007
Black Eyes

I hope you ate your black eyed peas for luck this year. I know some people who eat them immediately following midnight, to be sure to maximize their luck, but I am a little more lackadaisical. As long as I eat them on New Year’s Day, I think I am OK.

I have about 4 or 5 regular black-eyed pea recipes, in regular rotation. This year we added collard greens to the black eyes in the final minutes of cooking, and served the whole mess with cornbread.

I used the cornbread recipe from the January 2007 Food & Wine Magazine. The only alteration I made was to substitute an equal amount of Gluten Free Pantry French Bread and Pizza Mix for the flour used in the recipe.

BLACK EYED PEAS WITH GREENS

1 pound dried black eyed peas
2 smoked ham hocks
1 large Spanish or other sweet onion
3 garlic cloves, peeled and minced
1 tablespoon olive oil
3 cups chicken stock
3 cups water
1 bunch collard or turnip greens
salt to taste

I cooked the beans in the slow cooker, although you can easily adapt this for stove-top or oven cooking.

Heat a medium saucepan overr medium heat.

Add oil to pan and allow to warm. Add onions and cook until onions are golden and just beginning to brown. Add garlic and cook for 1 minute more. Add stock and water and bring to a boil.

Add the black-eyed peas and ham hocks to the bottom of the slow cooker insert and pour the boiling stock and onion mixture over it. Cook on high for 7 hours, or until the beans are swollen and soft and the liquid has thickened and is somewhwat viscuous. You may have to drain off some of the liquid and boil it in a separate pan at the end of cooking if it does not thicken in your slow cooker.

When the beans are done, remove the ham hocks from the pan and set aside. You may discard the entire ham hock or you may retrieve the meat before discarding the fat and bone. Chop the meat and add it back into the bean pot for additional flavor.

Remove beans from heat or turn slow cooker to low.

Wash greens and cut leaves into narrow strips and set aside. Before stirring greens into bean pot, skim off any fat that has settled on the surface of the beans. Add salt to taste. Stir in the greens and allow to warm for a few minutes, just long enough to wilt the greens. Serve.

January 1, 2007
Happy New Year

We drove home from Tennessee a day early, not realizing that while we were cruising up I81 in the brilliant sunshine the storm we were expecting to bring ice and snow had stalled over the Midwest.

Given a reprieve, we spent part of Saturday morning tooling around Northeastern Pennsylvania and the lake Wallenpaupack area where G worked at a camp owned by the Brooklyn YMCA on one of the smaller neighboring lakes. He couldn’t remember if the lake was near Hawley or Tafton so we just explored the lovely area. The camp is apparently long gone, and we had trouble finding anyone who remembered a camp which apparently closed more than 50 years ago, but it was nice just to putter about the countryside.

We used to spend time just wandering and puttering, stopping here and there and seeing whatever we found. But the 21st century obsession with not wasting time caught up with us and lately it seems we rush here and there, always trying to do more, with fewer stops just to sit and let the world wander by. We need to try slow down, appreciate the time to sit and relax, and let the world move a little more slowly.

I will leave you with this, a street sign found about a mile from where the one-time-campsite was located (now a nice housing development). It bears no relation to G’s youth, but the name on the street sign was G’s father’s name, although there are probably lots of Herman Steiners in the world. We just found it interesting in the self-absorbed way that we humans are always looking at ways to tie what we see into our own personal lives and stories, no matter how distant they may be.

January 1, 2007