I Don't Normally Take Requests . . .

. . . but sometimes I do. Especially on a day that tastes like peppermint mocha, whipped cream, and tunafish.

But first, some background.

Ya'll know November is NaNoWriMo, yes? Well, at the office I'm in, there are two creative types who participate each year. Where most folks in this arena have all their academic credentials on the wall (down to notary public certificates and grade school spelling awards, it seems)these two have NaNoWriMo completion wallpaper (a tich blurry from where the .jpg was enlarged and printed, but there all the same).

There's no way I'm committing to a long writing project. Been there, done that, lost three of 'em when the computer died and all that was left was frag salad. After being widowed three times over, I'm just out to play the field.

However, I can't leave well enough alone. Any time there's a challenge, it seems I'm in it up to my ears.

So . . . I just had to do something. I'd been writing fifty-five word stories for postcards off and on as the mood struck me.

Sometimes it would just be a humourous thought:

He walked in as I was clipping the pollen-bearing bits off a floral arrangement. “What are you doing?”

“Castrating flowers,” I leered. “It makes the blooms last longer. After they’re pollinated, they wilt.”

“You know everything, don’t you?”

“Well, no.” I showed him the fuzzy bits in my palm. “I just have all the anthers.”

It was a great way to memorialize something funny that happened, because something funny happens most every day.

It was hot in the office, an itchy heat. He loosened his tie, undid the collar button. That helped, but when he took off his jacket, inspiration struck.

Shoes, socks, shirt, pants -- all joined the pile. Hearing footsteps, he hid in the closet.

“Look,” she said. “I’ve never seen a lawyer shed his skin before.”

But with NaNoWriMo going on, I felt like I had to step up to the plate somehow. While I wasn't willing to commit to a novel, surely I could do something else.

I could write a fifty-five word story evey day for a month! That would be thirty of them . . . and if I kept it up for three months, I'd have near-as-dammit 100 stories. I could bind them into little quartos. One on each page would be the kind of wild slim novel propounded by St. Baty. Fun!

“Some people write a novel in thirty days, but I don’t have their powers of concentration.”

“Or the time. Think of the time involved.”

“Besides, I don’t think I have that much to say. A whole novel? So I thought I’d start small.”

“So what are you working on during NaNoWriMo?”

“A fifty-five word story.”

So far, so good. I've stuck with it, and at the end of this month the first quarter in its quarto will be complete. I made a winsome little bookie out of painted magazine pages, and have tipped-in November and December so far. I need to rebind said litle bookie, as the tip-ins have fattened the text block so much that it poofs out and will not lie still. I have a tendency to use string that's a bit small and sew a bit tight when I work Coptic anyway--two threads in tandem work much better--and I'm not entirely happy with the cover. It doesn't go with the text or reflect what's inside, so I'll put the covers to use with another block and do an artist's journal with them.

I let one of the Tonstant Weaders who knows me IRL read the first quarter bookie, and she loved one of the stories so well that she asked me to put it on my blog so she could print it out/return to it/memorize it/whatever she's going to do with it (except steal it and pass it off as her own). So, thank you Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.

I used to believe words were magic; if I said the right things I could have anything and be anything I wanted. My thank you notes were works of art, my holiday cards always included a line specifically tailored for the recipient. It was my own form of white spellcasting.

Then I met my father-in-law.

This Is Just To Say . . .

I have posted a picture
of the gift that I made you
(that you have not received yet
because of the storm)

to my blog, here.
And thus, spoiled your surprise.
Could you please pretend
to have failed to read this?

Or at least,
to pretend to enjoy it
when the wrapping is torn?

Ok, I guess we've established that when I have nothing to say, I'll filch from William Carlos Williams (i.e., December 3, 2004 "So Much Depends Upon a Writing Exercise"). Shamelessly.

But at least I'm cribbing from a master. Oh, and without further adieu, here's the photo that's gonna get me in Dutch with the Dowager Empress:



It's a book for holding ATC's. We both participate in swapping them, and sometimes interchange between ourselves. I have made her sign a contract in blood that when she uhm, "no longer has need of her collection" I GET IT. Heh. So really, doing cool stuff for her that's ATC related is really doing cool stuff for me . . . oh, that was the "out loud and gloating voice," wasn't it. My bad.

Anyhoo, it's a single needle, single sheet coptic stitched book. The interior boards are covered with art paper, the exterior boards were a board game of some sort that a fellow artist snagged at a garage sale. No pieces, no notes on the board itself, just black and white spaces, and holes in the outside. I noticed that the bigger holes were very nearly almost ATC size, and well . . . that was that.




I'm glad to finally have it done--I put aside just about all my "art for me and mine" this last year doing art for others via swaps and such. The next project is to re-make a deco for me. I assume the original was either lost in the mail between artists--or languishes on someone's worktable--or got thrown away. Dammit! It was one that was important to me, so much so that I bought duplicate materials just so I could make a copy for me to fill and hold on to.

I'm glad I did--I have not seen the materials I'd need for a couple of years now. had I not snarfed them and stashed them, I'd be completely out of luck. Now i just need to pull them out and have at them. I may make color copies of some of the ephemera to help me fill the pages . . . or not.



P.S.--Blogger notes that this is my 200th post! Happy bicentennial to me!

Writing About Writing About Writing

Today tastes like oregano, dark baking chocolate, and coffee.

Received a birthday giftie from my folks (yes, my birthday IS in April) and it looks like we're going to Vegas for the weekend next month. So now I'm celebrating the 90 days of birthday, it appears. (Was 12 days, then 30, now apparently it takes a whole quarter to get it done. I just thought you got more candles on your cake . . . who knew?)

And while the gift is particularly nifty keen and wonderful(whips out mat, bows in general direction of Albuquerque, mumbling "thank you thank you thank you o merciful and benevolent parents, ink of my Sharpies, lines in my paper, flecks in my deckle; I can never repay you though I live a thousand years)the thing that really caught my attention was the birthday card. Or rather, my father's handwriting in the birthday card.

I've envied his cursive since I began to write. I do okay if the actual technology of the writing implement causes me to go very sssllooowwwlllyyy and with great care to form the letters. I've a nice uncil hand with a toothpick and paint, f'r instance, and I do well with a fountain pen at a twisted angle, but give me a felt tip or pencil and I produce a scrawl that would make a doctor proud when I'm writing at speed. There's a reason I have a billion fonts on my computer and use computer-generated text when there's words on my ATC's--or I use a toothpick and paint.

Now, though, his hand is starting to slip; to take on those qualities that make you say, "It was an old person's handwriting." And I know it only seems sudden to me because I don't live at home any more and almost never see his penmanship. He doesn't have to sign my permission slips any more, or write notes to my boss about the dentist's appointment.

But at the same time it feels like it's happening overnight, like I woke up one morning in a strange body and my parents don't look like themselves any more--and who is that lady in the mirror!

And it's only unique because I'm the only me I have. Everyone wrassles with this sea change where you go to bed young and wake up in a middle-aged body with aches and pains that take longer to fade out than they did ten-fifteen years ago, and the grey in your hair isn't part of a Halloween disguise that you forgot to wash out from the party last night.

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I'm doing more journaling than I ever did before. I remember being surprised that I'd kept this blog going for a year last fall. I tried to keep diaries at various times in school, but I never kept them for very long. I had the idea that a diray was about Big Important Matters, and well, my life wasn't Big; I wasn't a teen pop idol. And there's only so many times you can write, "Dear Diary: Got up. Went to school. Ate dinner. Went to bed." before a factual recounting of the day stops making sense.

Then I read Glen Campbell's Black Company series. One of the main characters in the first couple-three books is the physician, Croaker, who serves as the Annelist for the Company. The have always had an Annelist, from the days they were first commissioned, because if you don't keep track of what you've done, you can't keep track of who you are, especially if you're a wandering band of nomads. How do you keep a sense of identity and group cohesion when you pick up a person here, lose a man there, and don't even share a common language?

In some ways I wanted to be Croaker, I wanted to have a stack of journals I could point to and say, "I was here, I did these things, I said those things. I have lived a life." I began attempting to keep travel journals--first in a notebook I transferred to a computer file (lost in a crash that took over 300 pages of fiction with it. I had word salad, except, ironically, from a little writing exercise. They could retrive that bit of doggerel.) Then I found some nicely bound ones--but of course, spined bindings lack the flexibility to allow you to open them all the way up and write to the gutters. They work. They'll do for now.

But that's travelling. That's like trips to Mexico, and Italy, and the like. I'm glad to have them--they're my versions of stickers on the suitcase. I wanted something more like a day to day book.

Then it became clear that I needed to repack my head. I found Endsville, the place where all service terminates. And I'm not a good candidate for the talking cure.

I'd found a tool to bust through the crap and re-sort what was worth keeping and what had to go--but it involved a lot of writing. I mean a lot of writing--something like eight journals, two of which you'd hit daily and do three pages apiece in (SIX PAGES???!!!) and five of which you'd work sequentially, putting in an hour a week (or about six MORE pages) for a total of forty-eight pages a week, working to reframe your habitual mindscript and to dig out insights about behavior and attitude.

Forty-eight pages a week is a LOT--in two weeks, you'd have a slim novel. In a month, that's 200 pages. TWO NaNoWriMos, in other words. In the past, when I'd write, each and every word came in blood. The work was good, and needed little editing and polishing--but DAMN. I'd spend almost as long looking at the page, re-reading and chopping at what I'd done as I did putting words there to pick at.

But well, there I was. In Endsville, where you can take the easy way out--but that's awfully final.

So I grabbed eight journals, and got going. The morning ritual is pretty well set in stone, and the evening ritual is getting there. Next month, I'm going to make an equal point of devoting time to the weekly journal, and get that habit down.

I wonder what it will be like to travel now--I'll be carrying nearly as many journals as I will pairs of clean panties.
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So now I'm reading Robin Hobb's Soldier's Son trilogy--or rather, the first book in the trilogy, Shaman's Crossing. Lo and behold, the eponymous soldier's son is gifted with a fine journal in which to record his exploits at his coming of age ceremony.

It's a big deal in that world--the first son inherits, the second son serves as a soldier, the third is for the priesthood, the fourth is an artist. The soldier sends home filled journals to record the military doings of the family, and the old and noble houses have stacks and stacks of volumes in the libraries.

So now it looks as if I'll get my wish--one travel journal completed, an ongoing diary on line, and a stack of closely-written journals about day and night and the past.

Happy New Year

Today tastes like honey, with cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg.

It's been a good year so far, which isn't saying much at this point. Ask me again in late winter.

Celebrated by going on vacation in our hometown--we let someone else drive us to a paired tasting for dinner, then spent the night with friends in a small intimate party of ten. Ahhhhh.

Saw Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events. Love the books, wasn't enchanted by the movie. The visuals are great--but the humor in print is veddy British; it's up to you to get the jokes. The movie is very very 'Murrican--I'm going to tell a joke, are you ready? Are you ready? JOOOOOOOOOOOOKEEEEEEEE!!! Did you get it?

The characters are way over the top and played for laughs in the film, in the books, they're quite serious about what they're doing. I'm not sure the filmakers intended this as irony. Oh well. Will simply refuse to see the sequels--or pick them up for the visuals. I really like the sets and costumes and dressings of the film--the fantasy Victorian thing is great eye candy.

Back Home Again

Today tastes like flat peppermint, oily and cold.

Listening to George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones, the first book in his Song of Fire and Ice series. I don't know if I like the narrator's voice much in this--at times, he's so perfectly what I heard in my head it's spooky; and at others, well, my disbelief has left noticeable dents in the ground from where it fell.

I know several people who don't like the world Martin set up--it's feudal. Women have no power save what they can grasp and wield in the shadows through thier influence on the men in their lives. The arguement I've heard is that if you're going to create a world of fantasy, why not fantasize that true equality between the sexes has been achieved? Why place such a premium on inherited power, and male succession, rather than on the capabilities of the individual?

Because the interesting characters are the girls/women. They can't hack and slash their way to victory--but they can work behind the scenes to mold their world. They can choose to be the dutiful daughter, marrying a stranger for the political alliance the match brings, bearing trueborn children to inherit their father's lands and manage that particular chunk of the country--or they can choose to cuckold their husband for ego's sake. One of the girls becomes a tomboyish hero within the limits imposed by her youth and strength, another is a pawn of the court still peering through scaled eyes and believing in romance and fairy tales. I'm looking forward to what happens when the latter gets her act together and figures out that she's NOT actually a little frail paper boat; that she has a rudder and oars and can steer herself. She can't completely ignore the wind and waves of the world she's in--but she could very much learn to tack into the breeze and ride the swells.

If the world were fair, I'd have three-four pairs of socks and photos of both the Queen Anne's Lace Cardi and its companion shell to show off. Unfortunately, the Shell Shell (Shell Squared?) turned into a Penelope project--I worked on it all day some days, then ripped it all back at night. Two rows forward were countered by three rows back.

Most of the front is done now--but it's at a really awkward point. I don't have enough yarn to finish the front completely, and will not have more till Wednesday evening. Sigh. So I'm going to punish it by not taking photos till the front is complete.

Of course, having met with my muse the week before I left, I have all kinds of ideas to follow up on, and I'm feeling stymied because I don't want to get started on more more more.

I have an idea for a lace moebius scarf that's started in the center with faggoting and then knit to the edges in long long rows. Terpsichore showed me a crocheted scarf that another designer made--but that designer had to go take care of two seriously ill family members before she could write up the pattern. I think I've got a handle on how it works, and Terpsichore is dying to be able to offer it--but it too has to wait till Wednesday.

I'm dying to realize the Arizona shawl that's been kicking around in my head since I first laid eyes on Schroder's Oregon shawl. I have the materials, I have the charts, but I have to clear my magnet board first. Grrrrr.

And did I mention that I'm running out of handknit socks? Slowly, slowly, holes are being worn in them, and frankly, I have zero interest in learning how to darn them. Love to knit them, hate to mend them, so they never have little thin worn spots. No, they have great gaping voids which would require real mending skills, not just grafting, but nalbinding.

Wolf, cabbage, goat--banana, cat, mouse, pipe organ. I need a bigger boat, dammit. Or more hours in the day.

Insatiable Monkey Mind

Today tastes like chai and hot chocolate, graham crackers and cardamom.

Lately, it seems that my sig line should be that Lovecraft quote about "the greatest kindness of the universe is the inability of the human mind to correlate its contents."

I’m grumpy at having to get up in the dark, do yoga in the cold, leave at sunrise and return at sunset. Lack of heat and light leaves me scattered and groping. And it’s only going to get worse until late December. Bah! In a civilized society, I’d be able to come to work early (the sun comes up at 5:00 in the morning, here in AZ; my eyelids poink! right open at 5:01 a.m. Even on a Saturday, when I’ve been out painting the town fuschia.) And in summer, I’d leave late, after some of the heat dissipated—say, around 8:00 p.m.

In exchange, during the winter months, I’d drag my leaden limbs through the door around 10:00 a.m., and leave at the reasonable hour of 3:00 p.m. Ah, but no. That is Not the Way the World Works. Or at least, not my world, not right now.

This has been an interesting year—a year of doing things I actively said I would never do. I’d never take up yoga. Freezing in position makes my joints hurt. I’m not flexible enough. I have the tightest hips in Christendom. Never never never . . . say never. You only tempt the gods.

And, of course, when I take something up, I don’t do it by halves. When I learned to knit, I learned on a baby sweater. (Yes, I had a fantastic teacher. I was also lucky enough to be the only one who signed up for the class, so it was a one-on-one experience. ) So by the time I was through the class, I had the basics down and could follow a pattern knit flat in pieces. I knit myself a sweater, teaching myself about cables and fixing errors in cables as I went. At one point, I dropped 12 stitches down six rows to correct some mis-twisting, and then laddered them back up to the body. I can only plead that I didn’t know that was an advanced move, I only knew that I didn’t want to rip more than I had to.

My next project was socks, because I had fallen in love with lace . . . but you see how it goes.

And it’s no different with the old yoga than with “the new yoga.” I get interested, then went to the library and pulled every book on the shelf I could find. I was just interested in hatha yoga, the stuff with all the poses, done for fitness/flexibility. (The first taste is free . . . )

So just recently I was back in the library, feeding the insatiable monkey (AKA the 900-pound baboon). One of the books I picked up was Rodney Yee's _Poetry of the Body_.

Yee is a big name yoga teacher, and what I found refreshing about the essays were his comments on beginning and doing yoga. It goes along with a recent conversation about different bodies and different abilities with the Dowager Empress Odie-Bird. IN an amazing moment of parent-child synchronicity, we took up yoga within a few weeks of each other, with no prior discussion of the subject.

_Poetry of the Body_ is one of Yee’s books. I get the feeling that he’s aiming at the beginner—there’s nothing flaky here regarding meditation, advanced system cleansing, and the poses are arranged in series. I appreciate that very much—I find it easier to learn when there’s some flow to it, when there’s a series of do this, then do that, instead of having to learn about a hundred different poses, then figure out how to arrange them, then . . .

But the part I enjoyed the most is Yee’s essays and interviews with his less-renowned co-author (whose name has slipped my feeble mind.) It’s refreshing to hear someone who makes what appears to be a very nice living talk about his experience as a beginner in the field he now works in. It feels good to have a yoga teacher explaining that no, actually, he left ballet because he was so inflexible, and now he does yoga because he’s still naturally tight.

And to read it now, while I'm feeling like toffee that has cooled (when it was warm, I flowed in ribbons and mounds of satiny shiny smoothness. Now that it's cold, I'm brittle. I flex a tiny bit, then snap.)--well, it makes me feel better and encourages me to just be with it now. Not to worry about what was a few months ago, how it will be when summer returns, just to take deep breaths and do what works for me right now.

Additionally, Yee has another book worth a flip through _8 Weeks of Yoga With Rodney Yee_. It has routines laid out like the book I am leaning on, and I snitched his restorative routine. I do some poses from that on the mornings when "my bed is warm, my pillow deep" and it's hard to drag myself to the mat. I set a timer, so if I drift off, something will bring me back in time for shower and breakfast, and then settle in. Ahhhhhh, it's like 2 hours of sleep in fifteen minutes.

I plan to obtain materials to build some props because I can't see spending the kind of money supply shops want for bolsters. I priced the materials out, because we all know that fallacy of being able to make it cheaper than you can buy it. It looks like the cotton batts will be the pricy part. Polar fleece (which is what I'd want to cover the things with [ohh so soft and cushiony]) and plain weave for the pillow forms is cheap, especially this time of year.

Anyway, build some props and then establish that Fridays when I get home, I do a full restorative routine to pinch off the workweek and get ready for the weekend. Right now, it seems like I finally get relaxed and weekendish, then look at the clock . . . and it's 7 p.m. On Sunday. Ahhhhrrrrrgh!

I also said I’d never start blogging. I have multiple physical journals, and also do a little bookbinding, so have enough blank books to keep me going forever. I had started a couple of private, eyes-only web logs to get the really vituperative junk out of my head and off where it wouldn’t have repercussions. So why would I want a public diary?

But then, as a constant knitter, I would get asked by friends whom I see monthly if I ever finished anything. I knit primarily for charity—Project Linus in particular. Blankets are good easy social knitting, especially in garter stitch. But since I was knitting to give away, no-one ever saw the fruits of my labors. And I don’t have much use for sweaters in the low desert. That which is not seen is not, after all.

That, and I’m prone to startitis. (“Hi, I’m Spike, and I’m a startaholic.” “Hi, Spike.” “I’ve begun four sweaters, a yoga mat bag, two pairs of socks and three blankets in the last week . . . I’m running out of needles.”) So it seemed to me that beginning a diary of projects would let me tell people who asked where to look to find pictures of what I’d done, as well as keeping me honest about the progress (or, ahem, lack thereof) in my knitting.

Then a group of pixel pals (who uses pens any more, I ask you) from an e-mail list all began blogging, and reading through the little bitty ring that was formed to let all the members find and read their virtual (and in some cases, meat) friends’ words of wisdom and look at the projects being chatted about on the list finally inspired me to get going on my own. And now that I’ve been here a couple of months, I’m really pleased with the side benefits.

It’s easier to write. I ran across a comment in my trolling the web, where the person writing the commentary put forth the idea that there are four types of writers—prolific facile; prolific agonized; scanty facile; and scanty agonized. I belong firmly to the agonized school of writing, which is why my first drafts are so clean—I’ve gone back and revised even as I type the sentence out. (By the time you see these words, I’ve already gone over and revised it at least twice.)

But now I have to face the blank screen three times a week (yes, it’s a self-imposed schedule. Aren’t they all, to some extent?) and bang out something I’d want to read regarding where I’m at in this uber-project we call life. And sometimes I score a big one and hit the mark on what I’d want to say, with authenticity and flair. And other times, well, what’s floating in the punch bowl is not a Baby Ruth bar.

On top of that, in order to get what I want insofar as the visuals on this site, I’m having to learn to navigate my way around photoediting programs, learn some baby code, figure out where stuff gets stashed when these programs do what they do . . . and I can see a lot more ahead.

At least I’m enjoying the journey.

Vita Brevis, Texere Accelerante

Today tastes like . . . pomegranate juice, cream soda, and cinnamon.

Listening to: John Grisham’s _A Time to Kill_. Can you say “eclectic reader?” I knew you could.

This is a grimmer Grisham with more gore and pain than he usually dishes out. Most of my experience with him has been white-collar problems—inheritance woes, long-standing legal issues regarding dueling businesses. This is gritty, and begs questions regarding racial justice and vigilanteeism. Heavy dose of ethics, here, and no simple solutions.

Progress report:

Spent another weekend on the Queen Anne’s Lace Cardi. I pulled out my knitter’s bag o’ tricks to see if I could motivate the article into wanting to be done—I’m certainly inspired to get it finished!

Vanity Fair and Sleeve Island

Today tastes like . . . axel grease and cotton candy, dust and hot dogs, iron railings and curly fries. It’s been a helluva day thus far—and it’s not even over!

Listening to: Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. I love the classics, I just find them hard to sit and read. Reading for me is reading in bits and bites—fifteen minutes here, fifteen minutes there. It’s tough for me to focus on long and intricate sentences or mannered plots in short spurts.

However, I love to have them read to me. The narrator’s voice brings me right back to where I left off (ah, yes, she’s just found out Mr. Rochester is still married to the madwoman in the attic, so she got up in the middle of the night—and I had to turn the player off and go to work. But now, here I am in the car, on my way home, and Jane is slipping out the wicket gate, off to who knows where.) whereas if I were reading this back at home while making dinner, I’d have to back up a page or three to get back to where I was.

And yes, the player Audible used to flog (I don’t know about the MuVo) came with attachments to allow you to play it over your car stereo, so you could listen hands and ears free. Just like radio without commercials, jabbering DJ’s, and with a program you were really interested in—all the time.

Progress report:

Here’s the ups part of the roller-coaster ride. I mentioned I had created Hagatha for an on-line list of folks-- the good people at Knitting Beyond the Hebrides. Part of what the list has been doing to promote excellent knitting (knitterly knitting, with an emphasis on finishing technique and knitting skill) has been to hold Virtual Conferences, where the focus is on certain knitting techniques. Fair Isle and stranded knitting, Aran and other cables, that sort of thing. The conference mascot has always featured an evil looking witch, with hooked nose and bulging eyes, toothless maw agape in a wicked grin, holding her knitting needles in the stereotyped way, wrapped in a swath of her own knitting. “Hagatha” is based largely on this cartoon.

This conference was “Way Beyond the Hebridies” and featured frippery knitting—knitting sculpted items, knitting with trendy frou-frou yarn, knitting at its simplest level without esoteric techniques.

They ran a contest for knitted items, and in the process of the conference, the deadline for entry was moved to allow for a little more time to take photos and post. I was working from my old notes, and when I went to post Hagatha—I thought I was too late. So I put her here, and dropped a note on KBTH, since this was her intended audience, after all. I was hoping for a mention on-list, and maybe to be able to post a picture on the website.

Well! Due to an enthusiastic write-in campaign (Nader should have been so lucky) Hagatha was awarded the “Way Beyond the Stratosphere” award! I’m beyond psyched.

And now for the plunging crash of the downs. When I sat down to work on the Queen Anne’s Lace cardi this weekend, I was halfway through the sleeves.

After spending the whole weekend working on the cardi, I am . . . halfway through the sleeves. Grrrrrr . . . sometimes process is incompatible with progress.

I thought I had a good idea with how the sleeves should be worked and attached. And they looked great . . . until you actually put the garment on a human being. Then they bagged and bulged strangely. So, rippity rippity rippity. Try another way. Nope, just as bad. Rip, rip, rip. Try again?

Finally decided that while it would have been really cool to work them attached as you go to avoid anything like sewing (‘cos the really cool thing about crochet is that you can take off in any direction you wish, to cover a 3-d object smoothly with an essentially 2-d covering without the limitation of needing to work in rows, like knitting) it just wasn’t going to do. Well, ok, if this were a one-off, it would be no problem. I would just drape as I went, and the whole thing would be just fine. On me. Maybe on people who were shaped very much like me. But no way would this work in a pattern.

The response I’ve been getting from other crocheters is that the garment is gorgeous and wonderful and oh my gosh I could NEVER do that—and to this last, when I explain that it’s nothing more than a chain partially filled with double crochet and then topped with chain picots, they stop and stare and say, “Is that all? I think I COULD do that . . .” Which is after all, exactly what I’m after. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, after all.

So—no pictures till this is done, I think. All there is is one big purple glob with two little purple rectangles. See previous shots for stitch pattern and texture. The picture in your mind is probably better than the actual shot would be.

Brownian Stillness

Today tastes like peanut butter taffy in the black and orange wrappers, streamers, and confetti.

Listening to: Stephen King's Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower. Have heard through the grapevine that this is the last book King intends to write, that he will, in the words of somebody or another "Write no more forever."

Not sure if that is more comforting (it's good when players we admire retire at the top of thier game instead of being forced to quit by failing bodies and falling market share); relieving (it's been a long time since any of his works seduced me, lured me into spending a day and night compulsively reading as the dishes pile up, as my joints get tired and stiff from inactivity, but like a relationship that's entered a fallow period, I can't give up on his writing entirely. In part, because I remember the days when I headily giddily swung as he pushed me with his words and his characters and it seemed like we'd be together forever in an unending summer evening); or depressing (I hate to see anything end, even when it hasn't been satisfying).

Progress Report: Have been working on the Queen Anne's Lace Cardi, and have reached the point where it doesn't photograph well. Both the fronts are finished, and the sides have been worked up. Have begun (but not attached) the first sleeve--so all a picture would show is a big purple blob with a little purple strip lying next to it.

The Castle Blanket has a couple more little squares done, but you'd have to know exactly where I stopped to focus on the cardi to see the difference. Ditto for the sock--I'm a little further along on the instep (having taken that along tonight to work on at the guild meeting) but, again, nothing blog-worthy.

Hence, the title of this post. My creative universe is not moving at this point in time.

Here would be where I'd be tempted to put in the results of some little fluffy whatcha from Quizilla--"What Kind of Procrastinator Are You?" However, I swore to myself that if I ever did that, I'd give up blogging entirely. I love the quizzes--every time I see one on someone else's blog I click the link and go play along--but somehow, they always seem like the breadcrumbs of blogging. Filler, not binder. I couldn't find anything else to say today, but in order to keep my hits up I have to post something, so, uhm, here it is.

Instead, I'll keep a promise to some on-line folks, and post photos of a particular finished object. I'll even post them AFTER this long essay, so they can find the meat more easily, assuming they come to this party. See you up above!

Things the Guru Never Told Me, Part One: It's the Second Step That's Hard

Today tastes like . . . sugared nails. Jordan nails? Which begs the question, do you suck the coating off and then chew, or bite down from the very beginning?

Listening to: Stephen King's Dark Tower VII: The Tower. Another reviewer called it indulgent, and I agree. King has a tendency to put plot aside while he focuses on character, and this time, he's divided the party and is telling the story from each point of view, so we see it through Jake's eyes, then through Callahan's; though Eddie's, then through Roland's. Hence, the action moves very very sloooowly. Also, as fans who have read his more recent material know, the Tower has been coloring many books, most notably Black House, and the Bobby Garfield story in Hearts In Atlantis. Now these stories (and others) pop up in the Tower series.

Additionally, King also often ends up going for the E.C. Comics gross-out, mixing horror with, well, just icky. Horrific, perhaps, if you are of the mentality that is "horrified" at blood, snot, and other effluvia; but the only thing that comes to my mind when the author writes of pus on the mirror or blood on the floor is, "Great. Something ELSE to mop up."

And this is a pity, because at his best, his villains' voice resonates with the voice of my shadow self's shadow self--the darkest, bleakest, most destructive part of me. When his Really Bad Thing is whispering to one hero, "Kill the boy; cut his throat and wash me in his blood. Then, throw yourself out of the window. If you do this, if you please me well, I will let you sing my praises all the way down." and the RBT's voice is low, and melodic, and reasonable. Ever so reasonable. I can understand the hero listening, nodding along; and the boy who can hear the RBT too is nodding. Whispering back to do it, just to do it, that they've come a long way, but who cares. It doesn't matter; the quest doesn't matter, they'll all end someday, so why not here and now, serving the Really Bad Thing?

And then later we're treated to a round of exhibitionistic phlegmophagia and cutesy euphemisms for sex, and suddenly I'm transported back onto the schoolyard. The part where as an adult, I recall what was REALLY funny then—the scat jokes, the horrified fascination with bodily fluids and excreta—and all I can do is sigh and roll my eyes.

I'm enjoying it, don't get me wrong. But for me, it's kind of like the last half of Tolkiein's Return of the King, right after Strider/Aragorn heads off through the crack to negotiate with the specter kings and enlist their aid. It took the movie to get me to read past that point, because by that part of the story, I pretty much lost interest. I'm holding on because King done give me his gotta—I gotta know if Roland makes it to the Tower, and what he finds there.

Progress report:

Scroll down to last Monday and look at the wimple and castle blan. Haven't knit a stitch on these since they aren't easily carried, simple to work, or under a deadline. Knit happens, as they say.

Pilgrim's Progress Report

Today tastes like . . . bananas and nail polish remover. Sweet. Sweet in a way that you thought would be good (and might have been good at one time) and is now just way too over the top one-note, and nasty. Sometimes you get what you thought you wanted, and it isn't at all what you were after. But enough about my off-line life.

Listening to: Dress Your Family In Corduroy and Denim. I actually like essays, and am enjoying the writing style; it's just the occasional paragraphs of subject matter that set my teeth on edge. Scat stopped being the height of humor for me about the time I was potty-trained, and this author still hasn't gotten over the delights of finger-painting with the stuff; metaphorically speaking. And all I can think is that this book spent time on the bestseller lists (and when he's not in the bathroom he's got an eye for detail and an ear for dialogue) and is adored by those whose political agenda I abhor; who tend to spend a lot of time in eternal digressions for those living in the flyover states because we're all a bunch of pig farmers who can't be trusted to think for ourselves. (And did I just do the same thing? Why yes, I think I did. So what? At least I freely admit to my bursts of hypocrisy.)

Progress report:

But first, another digression.

I hold myself to a limit of five works in progress at any given time. More, and nothing gets done; I just spin my wheels. Fewer, and I get bored. If I get bored, I go and start a bunch of things all at once looking for the perfect project, and suddenly I'm back in the quagmire again.

So what's on the needles now?