Robin McKinley's Blog, page 131

Better

 

Today's been better.* My chief task for what's left of the week is not to re-destroy myself by trying to catch up.** I may not have adhered too well to this plan today, due to circumstances (mostly) beyond my control: today was Peter's Falling Down Clinic. Finally. The first thing that went wrong was that I remembered, most of the way back to the mews to pick Peter up, that I'd set the alarm at the cottage with the hellhounds there. Oops.*** So if Peter ever had meltdowns he'd've had a meltdown by the time I did pick him up, but fortunately he doesn't.† We were still about five minutes late, pedal to the metal or no.

This was an evaluation rather than a practical session, and I was thinking, as Professional Medical Person with a Speciality in Falling Down #1 went through her list of questions, that Peter and I together are such a pair of crocks. I'm the only one still driving, for example, but I have ME, so I can't guarantee to drive very far—I have ME and I'm menopausal, which means I have no memory††. On the way to the hospital Peter and I had been working out when things happened—so, did the man with the green cape swing through the window before or after the giant anaconda got next door's daughter-in-law and the dog she used to let crap all over the courtyard?—and I'm not at all sure I'd've passed that basic memory test hospital admin always give you before they assign you a sticking plaster or let you use the loo†††.  But fortunately I didn't have to take it so I sort of hummed to myself and tried to look blithe.

Prof Med Per with a Spec in Fall D #2 is the physio who will come to the mews in a few weeks [sic, sigh, more waiting] to teach Peter some postural and core-strengthening exercises, and after I got back from feeding more money into the car park meter‡ I finally remembered that I'd brought my knitting. So the three and a half hours we were at the hospital weren't a total waste. And I really liked the doctor. She had great shoes. Okay, so did I. I had felt that I needed particularly great shoes today‡‡

The doctor's sense of time, however, is similar to mine, so when I asked her if she could give me a guess about how much longer, she told me ten minutes, which proved to mean forty. I did not get a ticket for being nearly fifteen minutes over in the car park‡‡‡ . . . but I couldn't get a phone signal in the hospital, outdoors still couldn't pick up Colin's mobile at all, and (we figured out later) was leaving a message for Niall while he was listening to his messages and had not, of course, thought to check for messages coming in while he was checking his messages (AAAAAUGH) . . . and so I got back to the cottage twenty minutes late to two blokes sitting on my steps and, astonishingly, smiling. Colin had remembered that you can't get a signal at the hospital, and had therefore figured out what had happened.

So we still rang handbells. Late. We even had a go at Cambridge, which was not amazing or anything, except in terms of its not being amazing it wasn't worse. And I am going to sing tonight, because in theory I'm taking my music around with me to the lion's . . . I mean, to nice kindly Oisin tomorrow. Supposing I'm upright again tomorrow. Which would be nice. I also have more little mail-order green things to plant out/pot on. I don't have time to have ME. Um. . . .

* * *

* My recovery was set back dramatically by that frelling cover. BELLE LA CATIN^ ET LE THING THAT LIVES UNDER THE STAIRS. Sous l'escalier. Something. And for those of you who prefer Mlle A un Décolleté Plongeant to the blue-feather girl . . . not me, guys. I'd rather look like some publisher's bad idea of Joanna Russ or James Tiptree Jr than some publisher's bad idea of a bodice-ripper with added bestiality.

^ Maren or Julia or someone, how rude is 'catin'? I'm looking for something like 'trollop' or 'strumpet'.+ Not something to give Tante Gladys palpitations.

+ I did take French in school, not that anyone could tell now, but it didn't cover strumpets.

** I do feel that another bat in the house last night was an unamicable spur toward necessary functionality. We got back to the cottage what passes in our case for early and as soon as I took the hellhounds' harnesses off they shot over to the garden door and stood pointing at something and wagging their tails. Uh oh. But when I followed them there didn't seem to be anything . . . except for a rather squishy looking brown lump of the sort that my hellhounds wouldn't dream of leaving indoors. I looked at the lump. Nervously. I then shooed hellhounds upstairs, knelt by the (motionless) lump and touched it^ ever-so-delicately with a finger. OH GODS IT'S SOFT AND WARM AND FURRY. Funny how clearly even a self-squashed lump under a door sill isn't a mouse. It's way too dark, but it's also the wrong shape: wing-folded bats—at least little pipistrelles—are square. At this point it tried to press itself even farther under the door sill, but there wasn't room. I don't know why it wasn't bouncing off the walls like the last one, but given that human functionality was at a low ebb, I was grateful. I would have been more grateful for an absence of bat, but that wasn't one of the options.

At this rate I'm going to have to start keeping a pair of gardening gloves indoors, for dealing with small uninvited visitors.^^ I thought about it—hastily, in case it decided to go for wall-bouncing after all—and fetched the dustpan and a dustcloth, dropped the latter over it^^^, scooped it into the dustpan^^^^, opened the kitchen door, and tipped it gently out. It wasn't there an hour later when hellhounds went out for the last time, so I'm assuming it flew away. May it have needed to eat twice as many mosquitoes and midges to recover from its adventure.

^ See how completely I trust my hellhounds not to leave squishy brown lumps about the place. If they're in trouble, they howl to be let out.

^^ First however I am going to consult the Bat Squad again. Where are my visitors getting in? The screens over my open windows are undisturbed, and I no longer leave unscreened windows open, because I got tired of the mosquitoes, flies, wasps, bees, and giant spiders, although I'm afraid giant spiders will just laser a hole in my screen and come in anyway.

^^^ I tweeted this, and hamaker88 tweeted back, you'd hiss at someone who dropped a dustcloth over you. My response, with dignity, is, I would not, I would yell. And it was a clean dustcloth.

^^^^ If small bat jaws are too weak to bite through human skin successfully, there has to be some other reason America, for example, is quite so hysterical about rabid bats? Is this because you don't want to deal with a potentially rabid critter at all, and a very sensible attitude that is too, or that rabid bats bite other things that are large enough to bite humans?

*** I have a house alarm because almost everyone in this town does, and you don't want to be the only one who doesn't. And I have the Delete the Room with the Animals in It option, but I have to remember to use it.

† What happened? he said calmly. Gibber gibber gibber gibber gibber, I said.

†† See: set house alarm with hellhounds in house.

††† Although may I say that 'who is the current monarch' with that woman with the terrible taste in hats having been it for pushing sixty years is a lot less testing than 'who is the president of the United States' which is the one I used to be used to.

‡ Where I found a harried- and forlorn-looking young woman with a tiny in a pushchair standing in the middle of the road, who said to me hopelessly, I don't suppose you have change for a five? I did, for a wonder. I don't generally. And while yes, you should think of these things before you get to the car park, you're less likely to be thinking clearly if you need to be parking in a hospital car park in the first place.

‡‡ Tiger stripes. Sequins. They don't photo all that well, but I can give it a try if you like.

‡‡‡ Either because of that good karma I acquired by giving the young woman change for her fiver, or because the car park attendants know about doctors' sense of time.

A New Low Is Reached

 

. . . in jacket illustrations. I give you . . . the new French BEAUTY.

 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH

 

Wait, wait—I withdraw all the mean things I said about the naked blue girl covered with feathers!  I've changed my mind! I want her back!*   %<**&((#~????*" }}^%$£"!!!!!!! Moments like these I'm really sorry I made the decision to moderate my language on the blog. . . .

Who the hell are they trying to attract with this cover? What's with all the cleavage and the frelling claws?** BEAUTY is going to disappoint the S&M guys—or the kinky porn lot—rather badly. And while young French women are no doubt an alien species to my elderly British-tainted American mind . . . I find it difficult to believe that this is what they are looking for.***

I am also haunted by the thought that these jokers have taken EXACTLY as much trouble over the translation as they did for the cover. EXACTLY AS MUCH.†

They could at least have given her a rose. Couldn't they have given her a ROSE??††

So let's have some roses.

Old Blush. You darling.

This following is the rose that total strangers knock on my door to ask me about.  My fault for planting her out front.  The flowers are quite small, not much bigger than a golf ball, and they really are spherical.  She does eventually open to a cup, but she stays more cupped than most.  She also smells divine.  And has adorable peppermint stripes on her outside petals.

OH GODS HOW I HATE WORDPRESS, WHO JUST ATE MME PIERRE OGER AND MOST OF HER TEXT, BETWEEN THE EDIT WIND AND THE BLOG

 That would be 'window', only if I try and change it, WordPress will just eat the photo again.  Or worse.

Louise Odier. She's bedmate to Mme Pierre (and a lot of pansies and sweet peas) and also smells divine. In a totally different way. Which is pleasing.

Mme Isaac (Periere). You will get Mme Isaac photos every year. Who smells almost eye-wateringly of raspberries. Mmmmm.

I have about half a dozen Souvenirs (de la Malmaison) that survived the rain wreck. You can see a few of the ones that didn't behind this one. Sigh. There are still buds to come . . . but we had the kind of drizzle today that doesn't water anything, but does ruin rain-allergic roses.

The Fru, being loved by a bee. Roses are generally rather quellingly described as not being particularly interesting to bees, but that's not my experience. And it's easier to get a photo when there are fewer petals in the way.

* * *

* Which was the first French BEAUTY. I posted a photo of it on here somewhere.

** I also feel that the small beetle crawling on her chin is a mistake. A what? It is nothing of the kind. It's a beetle. Or possibly a large flea. I doubt whoever is attached to the claws is scrupulous about personal hygiene. Although from what you can see of the babe's hair, she isn't either.

*** And in case the book is spine out, although I'm sure French bookshops will be rupturing themselves to give this scintillating artwork face-out shelf space, there's a tiny medallion of the jacket on the spine. Of the claws and the cleavage.

† What if it . . . matches the cover?

†† To hold over all that CLEAVAGE?

My head is spinning

 

So . . . the ME isn't done with me yet. Feh. I guess I'd been pushing it harder than I realised.* I'm in the dazed, slightly hallucinatory, getting-my-nouns-wrong zone today, and I'm not sure the PEG II paragraphs are going to survive revision when my brain returns from its unsolicited holiday.**

I tottered back to the cottage with hellhounds this afternoon, wondering if I could face a little gardening. No. So I wobbled upstairs to address my To Be Read pile—in the middle of the afternoon! Shocking!

Approximately the last book I planned to choose was WINTERGIRLS by Laurie Halse Anderson: I was in no shape to deal with a story about a girl, already on the edge, pushed over it by the death of her ex-best-friend. And I knew how good Anderson is: I, who never reads 'realistic' YA, thought SPEAK was amazing. But life is still short and I'm a slow reader, and when I read fiction at all it's probably fantasy. Then I saw this review: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/30/wintergirls-laurie-halse-anderson-review and thought okay, I'm going to have to read this one. I bought it and put it in the pile. (And tucked the review, which I'd torn out of the paper, inside.)

I wasn't going to pick it up today; I'm already half in some other world, and not a friendly one, with the ME. I wanted a story about dragons and basilisks and enchantments and sorcery, and strong, energetic heroines who know how to deal, whom I could lean back and admire. But I had to move WINTERGIRLS to get to something farther down in the pile, and I idly opened to the first pages. Lia's stepmother is telling her, while eating breakfast on the run, 'the words dribbling out with the cranberry muffin crumbs, commas dunked in her coffee' that Cassie's body had been found in a motel room. Alone.

Lia is unloading the dishwasher as she listens, apparently undisturbed by the news. 'Here stands a girl clutching a knife. There is grease on the stove, blood in the air, and angry words piled in the corners. We are trained not to see it, not to see any of it.'

Cassie had phoned Lia thirty-three times between Saturday night and Sunday morning, before she died. 'Of course I didn't pick up. . . . I wasn't going to let her sucker me into being her friend again just so she could turn around and crush me one more time. . . . I was too angry to even look at the phone.' And now Cassie's dead.

Lia has already been in a residential facility for anorexics twice. She was released the second time with a list of rules, including that she would not drop below a certain weight, a contract verified by standing on the scales every week, and her stepmother writes the numbers down in a notebook. But Lia has sewn quarters into her bathrobe—tightly, so they won't jingle and give her away—and has figured out how to sabotage the scales.

And then Cassie dies, alone, in a motel room. Lia listens to her voice mail, now that it's too late: 'I'm so sad. I can't get out.' 'Call me. It's a mess.' 'I miss you. Miss you.'

Lia thinks: 'What was she doing there? . . .

'Did it hurt?

'There's no point in asking why, even though everybody will. I know why. The harder question is "why not?" I can't believe she ran out of answers before I did. . . .

'Was it easy?'

Two hours later I was still sitting on the edge of my bed, reading. I had cramp in both legs. Hellhounds, who might have expected an invitation to an unscheduled afternoon reading shift, had given up and gone to sleep in their crate. I put the book in my pocket and we all went back down to the mews. I kept reading.

WINTERGIRLS not a comfortable or a fun read. But it is vivid, gripping, astonishing, heartbreaking. Lia blackmails her doctor mother into telling her what really happened to Cassie, Cassie for whom everything now is too late—Cassie whose sad, angry ghost is haunting Lia, and cutting her inexorably off from the living world. The clinical details of Cassie's death collide with the clinical details of what is happening to Lia, and it's almost unbearably bleak. But there's hope for Lia at the end . . . and one of the things that helps to draw her back over the edge, back into life, is that she had promised her little stepsister to teach her to knit.

WINTERGIRLS was also a NY Times best-seller and a mega hit, and chances are most of you have read it already. If you haven't—I really can't recommend it highly enough. It's a breathtakingly compelling story, and Anderson's writing is knife-shiny and knife-sharp.

 * * *

* In case anyone is wondering, no, I don't regret my voice lesson yesterday at all, and if I'm even remotely walking next Monday I'll have another one. I can take tomorrow more or less off, barring PEG II, hurtling hellhounds, and more watering^, but Thursday is due to be rather a marathon. Including that Oisin^^ poked the director of the Muddlehampton Choir, who doesn't answer his emails, and I should go along Thursday evening in an experimental capacity. The Muddlehampton Choir seems to have the best rep of the non-church-affiliated, no-audition choirs around here, but I'm a little worried about their choice of material. If it's Yesterday and highlights from Les Miz I'm out of there.

^ The sodding rain really did only come for long enough to wreck my Souvenir. As non-life-threatening frellfests go, this is a big one. Meanwhile I'm carrying so many heavy, full watering cans I'm sure my arms are stretching. My arms are long enough. I already can't get long-sleeved shirts long enough, unless I buy men's. I will have to start buying an extra skein of yarn for anything for myself with long sleeves.

^^ who has a houseful of visiting family, an unexpected deadline, and is helping an ex-student through a crisis, and so probably isn't writing guest blogs this week either.

** Although barring a little noun reassignment, they probably will. I've talked about this before: being zombified has almost alarmingly little impact on story quality. It slows me the hell down, but what I write tends still to be the real stuff. Which only helps to prove my belief that what you're writing is out there, itself, and all you're doing is reportage. However squishy you're feeling, you're describing granite and flint. I was thinking about this yesterday, when Nadia was producing surprising sounds using my vocal cords/folds.^ Singing may be turning out to be another one of those odd things I can still do (slowly) when I'm soggy toast and yesterday's oatmeal. Which—if true—raises some interesting questions about where I sing from.

^ I believe we're supposed to call them vocal folds these days, but I grew up saying vocal cords.

Tra la. In fact, tra la la la la la.

 

So the ME decided to start wearing off . . . at about one o'clock this morning. With the result that at five a.m. I was lying wide and gruesomely awake staring at the brightening daylight. It would be strong enough to read by soon—I having finally, despairingly, turned my light out at about four. At this point I put a pillow over my head and prayed for unconsciousness. I got unconsciousness*, but I still woke up again about five hours later and had to get up. . . . This is one of the ME's favourite little tricks: thus effectively ruining another day . . . siiigh. There is a definable difference between ME exhaustion and no-sleep exhaustion but it's all exhaustion and it means you have no brain and who CARES? Brainless is brainless.

I considered cancelling my voice lesson. But doing it at the last minute, either I'd have to pay her anyway, in which case I'm out of pocket, or she acknowledges that ME is a circumstance beyond my control and doesn't charge me, in which case she's out. And I didn't really want to cancel. At the moment my singing lessons are mostly about the astonishing—and FRUSTRATING—difference between the noises I can make at home and the noises Nadia can get out of me during my lesson, and while the ME has a major physical impact** at the moment having no brain to engage whilst singing is not quite so important as it will be (I hope) in six months or so. Besides, I thought even pretending to have a voice lesson might cheer me up. It would at least be a change of scene.***

So I drove over to Little Warbling hugging the slow lane since driving + ME + lack of sleep = not ideal.† And stumbled into Nadia's music room saying, today is by way of an experiment, and she said, that's all right, I haven't had any sleep either.†† We did waste a few minutes bonding over the excellence of chocolate under life's little stresses†††. . . .

I hadn't bothered even to try to sing yesterday‡ since I was finding breathing challenging, but this morning I did try to warm up and I sounded . . . mushy. And occluded, like my throat was full of mud or clay or something. Ewww. Oh dear. But Nadia has an amazing number of funny vocal exercises to pull out of her hat—and I'm sure they are partly just so you don't settle into familiarity. And brainless or not, flabby about the knees or not, she got some real noises out of me—as she so often does—to the extent that at one point I said, that's not me singing. I don't know who it is but it's not me. And she said, one of the good things about what I'm hearing is that when you're fully engaged like that, the sound you're making is nice and clear, not at all breathy. And that bodes well for where we're going over the next months.

I'm going to make it into a proper choir. I am.

However we will draw a veil of kindness and discretion over tonight's tower bell practise at Glaciation. . . .

* * *

* I had a radical, pre-eminent YAAAAAH type nightmare, which I'm a bit prone to if I've had a bad night and fall asleep at dawn (or frelling later). Do any of the rest of you have those nightmares where you finally come face to face with your nemesis and you can't fight back? These are how mine go. I have the opportunity to take out the villain and can't. I get all weak and floppy and can't. This makes the nightmare worse, of course. This morning I was having a particularly dire version of this and I finally come face to face with the bad guy and we both know how it's going to go. I am groping around for a weapon and I find . . . well, it looks like a bell stay, if you want to know, but call it a baseball bat only square in cross-section instead of round. And I go to whack him with it and I'm too weak. I can barely lift it, and it just slides off his shoulder. And he laughs and turns away.

And then I pick up a big roast-beast-dismembering kitchen knife and stick it between his shoulder blades and push it THROUGH and the sucker goes DOWN. Yaay me. I usually get out of nightmares by waking myself up. This was quite startling.^ But if I'm going to have a nightmare, I'd much rather, you know, win before I wake up. All very Freudian. But . . . I don't care. I WON.

^ The villain was startled too. Just before he died.

** !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*** Including that Nadia's mum's house has horses in the back garden. Well, just over the fence in the back garden. Last week there were a couple of foals trying out their voices, so I'd stop singing and there'd be this little, shrill, distant, but not all that distant, eeeeeeeeeeeee, like a sort of other-worldly commentary. Not necessarily a favourable one.

† And got there in time to knit two or three rows in a comforting and grounding sort of way. I was talking to Hannah after I got back home and she, with two teenagers to finish raising and a world to run, finds the idea of knitting attractive but has no immediate plans to try to wedge it into her life, said, When do you knit? Well, now, for example, I said, looping and twisting away like mad.^ And—er—waiting at stoplights. Waiting for watering cans to fill. Waiting for the voice lesson before me to finish. Waiting for hellhounds to eat. Waiting for the opera to start . . . it doesn't sound like much, does it? Funny how the squares mount up though.

^ And I have GOT to get a speakerphone.

†† Nadia has a much better excuse, however. Her name is Stella, and she's about eighteen months old. I'm in the first intake since Nadia started teaching again after Stella was born. And grew up enough to start sleeping through the night sometimes.

††† Turns out she's also a major Diana Wynne Jones fan . . . and she bought her brother a copy of WILD ROBERT. Oh gods. Whimper. Er. I'm mostly complimentary about Wild Robert . . . sort of . . . in my own inimitable way. . . .I knew there was a reason the blog was a really bad idea.^

^ Merrilee! This is all YOUR fault! You should know how BONKERS writers are! The LAST thing we should do is run public blogs!

‡ And after being blasted out of my seat by all those Wagnerian voices on Saturday, having the excuse in this particular was not a bad idea.^ But when I said this to Nadia she said, think about it, probably even Emma Kirkby^^, listening to Wagnerians, says 'I am a sad limp pathetic weed'.

^ Self to self, more emphatically than usual: You call that singing?

^^ http://www.emmakirkby.com/recordings.shtml

ME. Tra la. Not.

 

Another—ugh—another really sodding rotten awful-bad ME day. I knew I was pushing it, and the forty-minutes-late-starting last night plus the superfluous half hour walk back to the car put me emphatically over the line.* Today has been about . . . trying to get hellhounds hurtled. Managed. Just.

It's interesting the compromises you make with chronic anything, to the extent that you almost don't notice them any more. A few of us bell ringers have been having an email chat about ringing education courses, specifically the several-day residential ones. I don't think I even remember what it's like not having No Stamina as one of my chief organising principles—and some of you may remember that I started trying to learn to ring the first time during that grey, lurking-shadow period of regularly-recurring glandular fever, over a decade ago now, when I'd had to give up riding again because of the unreliability thing. You can't keep a horse fit when you keep having to spend days lying on the sofa. And then full-onslaught official horizontality-enforced ME closed me down completely for about eighteen months, and I stopped ringing too. I've mostly figured out working compromises since I started ringing again, but a several-day residential ringing course? Not a frelling chance. But they're very popular; the good ones develop mythic status and are regularly oversubscribed. The only sweetener to this bitter pill for me is that I don't really learn all that well by this kind of intensive system: you can cram me, but it'll all fall out the holes again. And that was before the ME—although I find myself wondering if that might be one of the signposts for ME vulnerability. Those of you with significantly holey memories: keep taking your vitamins and get lots of sleep.

One of the compromises that mostly does work for me though is grimly maintaining a level of physical fitness that will help paper over the bad days. This is one of the best examples of the fact that I have a mild case of ME. The people who have it badly can maybe get out of bed on a good day. But the use-it-or-lose it aspect of all physical training is acute and merciless with ME: take a holiday and find yourself having trouble brushing your hair or tying your shoes by the end of it.** This isn't the only reason for having a dog to walk, or hellhounds to hurtle, but it's a good one: dogs don't take days off either. I admit it's also risky, since on a bad day hellhounds could knock me over and be not merely in Kent but Sweden by the time I crawled to the nearest tree and climbed hand-over-hand till I was more or less upright again. In hindsight I'm not sure how we did survive puppyhood. But now that we've been together almost five (!) years . . . I was going to say now that they're adults, but that's a variable concept, adulthood, and what matters more in this case I think is that we're imprinted on each other. I am their hellgoddess. I may be a fitful and temperamental hellgoddess, but I am their hellgoddess. When we're out tumulting about the countryside they keep checking back. On my bad days they check back more. I'm not sure what it is that they know, but after five years they know it pretty well.

Anyway. Pretty much the sum total of my attainments today has been getting hellhounds hurtled. But I did—because my body is used to it, and to a certain extent, if I have the sense, when I'm bad because I've been pushing it, not to push it any more, I can (probably) go through maintenance motions, like hellhound hurtling. It's a strange sensation, hurtling when you're made out of old deflated inner tubes: perhaps a bit like being Elastigirl without the snap.

But now there is knitting. Emoon has talked about the soothingness of knitting when you're under stress, and how it gives you something to focus on and feel productive by doing. Yes. It's also good on a bad ME day, when your world gets very small and wobbly: you have no brain, and you've just tapped yourself out getting your dogs walked, but if you can knit you can not think about the fact that it's probably about the only thing you can do.*** And—unlike cruising the internet and clicking all the interesting-looking links on Twitter—you end up with something to show for it.

blondviolinist

… belts in photographs of knitwear are a flashing neon sign for: "These sweaters are shaped like a box, and the only way to show your waist is by finding a big belt!" Mind you, a big boxy cardigan is a good item of clothing to have (and soooo cozy!), but sometimes the way photographs are styled can hide the true shape of the pattern.

(Other big warning signs: only side & back shots of the model? "We can't get the front of this garment to look good no matter how we try!" Pictures of the model sitting, but none standing? "The hem and/or bust line of this garment hit our model in an unfortunate place, so we're hiding that." Of course, sometimes the photographer simply went all artsy with his shoot, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with the garment, but what photos don't show about knitting patterns is as important as what they do show.)

Yes. Part One: Before You Begin to Knit: Chapter One: You Can Always Tell What's Wrong with the Garment by the Way the Model is Posed or, Slender Five-Foot-Ten-Inch Models Look Good in Anything, KNITTING IN PLAIN ENGLISH by Maggie Righetti, and I'm sure elsewhere too, but that's where I met these warnings first. In this particular case I'm expecting the resulting sweater to be big and boxy—and my other two First Sweater projects (COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH) were bought having seen the thing knitted up in the yarn shop.† But I'm sure I'll fall afoul of this, ahem, artistic license some day. Although I'm already developing sales resistance to some of the more egregious examples of designer-over-romanticised. Get real. I want to wear it, whatever it is. I suppose the worst offenders should remain nameless, but my problem is that roses lend themselves to over-romanticising, so I keep falling in the ooey-gooey-hooey knitwear come-ons.

Diane in MN

I think almost all newer pattern books give you schematics with printed dimensions in the instruction section, so you can see the actual shape of the garment. This is extremely useful.

Hmm. This one doesn't. They clearly don't want you to know you've just bought a book of twelve Big Boxy Shapeless Sweaters. It's okay. I wasn't planning on making the one with buttons.††

You don't want to be making hellhound squares forever–BORING.

And actually, that's the bad part about sewing up. It's not that it's so hard, it's BORING. Weaving ends in is BORING.

Um. Says in a very small voice: but I like embroidery. Which is pretty much one stitch after another. Well, so is knitting, in a different way. But I'm still not too worried about sewing up. I am worried about weaving in ends. Weaving in ends looks really boring.

blondviolinist

I've known several cases where the drawing of the schematic didn't actually match the shape of the finished garment. (Sigh.)

That was going to be my next question. I'm also being pretty unnerved by the number of errors in knitting books. I'm not a big fan of amazon's customer reviews, and I rarely look at them for fiction, but I do run an eye over them for practical nonfiction like knitting, and if every other review mentions errors, I cross that book off my list. I'm too young a knitter to cope with pattern errors—I'm going to have had a nervous breakdown before I've thought to look on the author's/publisher's/ravelry's web site for corrections.

ETA: I'm one of those freaks who actually likes seaming. It's so fun to watch the various pieces come together into a cohesive whole.

Oh good. I plan to be another one. I need to like seaming if I'm going to make a long-term habit of things based on squares.

I will completely agree on the boringness of weaving in ends, however. I have to have something good to listen to or watch while I do that task.

Sigh. Well, I can catch up on my podcasts.

* * *

* I still want to give you a rant about the staging^, but . . . not tonight.

^ I especially want to give you a rant about the staging after several people have told me that the delay last night was because The World's Largest Rotisserie jammed.

** This is pretty standard, whatever level of ME you're on. If you can just about get out of bed, then you need to keep getting out of bed, or you'll lose it.

*** Hellhounds may end up with a lot of blankets: nice plain knitting. I acknowledge that I find acquiring a new must have genre way too easy, but I like the number of squares-based knitting projects, styles and books out there, because a nice little square is so doable when you're not very do-worthy. Although I hope I don't end up in twenty years or so with closets full of squares that I've never quite had the mental acuity to make into what they were destined for. —Lots of hellhound blankets, as I say.

† In one case I wouldn't have so much as paused at the pattern, draped over a sulky sixteen-year-old anorexic as it was.

†† Buttonholes! Arrgh! No, I'm not ready to think about buttonholes yet.

Die Walkure

 

So it was already Wagner, right? Lord of the Eternal Posturing Howl? Tonight's opera was already going to be five and a half hours long (which was causing a certain amount of prospective howling from yours truly, not being a totally devoted Wagner chick), including the two knitting-with-champagne intervals.

And then it started forty minutes late. We needed that. We really did. And they couldn't even tell us why? What's that about, oh mighty Metropolitan?* It is now after midnight and I'm only just home, because when we finally got out at eleven p.m. the gate through the medieval part of town was closed because of course we're due a Hun invasion any day now and you can't be too careful. So we had to go waaaaay the hell and gone around . . . and we went the even wayer and goner around because Peter and I had an argument about which way was shorter, he won, and I was right.

And I have to get up tomorrow morning to ring bells. And I haven't had supper yet.

So, the short form:

Fabulously sung. Fabulously. Since I'm not a Wagnerite I forget the obsessive focus on the principals: there are only four people carrying over four hours of music. Sieglinde's husband has a few lines, and Wotan's wife Fricka has one scene—and Brunnhilde's eight sisters come on for the Ride of the Valkyries** . . . and that's pretty much it. And while I acknowledge that Fricka's music is difficult and demanding, it's such a thankless role—thankless even up against stiff competition from 50% of the big four—that I'm going to pass over her entirely beyond saying that she did a creditable job.***

Of the steel-throated four . . . I think it may be impossible to do a sympathetic Sieglinde. She's another in the long tedious line of whining, collapse-prone heroines wholly identified by their relationships to men.† And while this kind of female is always a sexual pawn being moved around the chessboard by men, I feel that poor dreadful Sieglinde is even more genital-defined than usual, although that may just be that I always freak out a little that nobody (except Fricka) seems to find it at all odd that brother and sister are getting it on. In Act Two Sieglinde is throwing herself around about her disgrace, and how could she submit to a man she hated, ie her husband . . . um, possibly because she wanted to go on eating? If she refused an arranged marriage, did she have other options? How are her IT skills? Maybe she could get a job as a waitress at the local hostelry?†† Anyway, she says she is not WORTHY of Siegmund's 'blameless [sic] love'. Um. Honey, he's your brother.

And then there's Wotan. Ewwwww. I have known that I dislike Wotan, and that my (okay, intense) dislike of Wotan is one of the things that keeps me at a little (sort of a large little) distance from the Ring.††† I don't think I'd realised just how much I frelling loathe Wotan, who is an arrogant, self-obsessed pigsodomiser, and a whiner-pants with it. Frelling frell. And the real shock to the system was that Bryn Terfel, my hero, did nothing to bring me any closer. Except sing his/your socks off, of course: as I say, the singing was all fabulous.‡ But, dear . . . um, gods . . . what a tick.

But now we're getting into the good stuff. I haven't seen Jonas Kaufmann on stage before, although I know him from CD. I was all excited about hearing him as Siegmund, and I was right about that. And Deborah Voigt . . . I already knew I loved Deborah Voigt, and she was a glorious Brunnhilde, and sympathetic with it, as her tick of an old man was not. It is interesting to me—and I hope some of the rest of you saw this WALKURE and will post about what you thought of the singers—because the extent the four principals actually persuaded me cuts right down the middle, with Sieglinde and Wotan on one side and Siegmund and Brunnhilde on the other. Sieglinde (Eva-Maria Westbroek) and Wotan are terrific singers doing a hell of a job with some of the hardest vocal music out there: Siegmund and Brunnhilde were characters. I wasn't watching them do their snappy complex turns, I was watching Siegmund and Brunnhilde as embodied by two particular singers.

And . . . I have to go to bed. I may tackle the staging tomorrow. Glerb.

* * *

* It's possible of course that they tried and it didn't get through to the cinema staff for one reason or another. But there was plenty of opportunity for one of the on-the-spot Met introducers to say something like 'gee, we're really sorry, but the elephant from AIDA got loose, smashed all the music stands in the pit and then impaled itself on one of those incredibly stupid rotating pistons that cost £1,000,000,000,000 and were the idiot centrepiece of this production, and it took us a little while to clean up and borrow some spare music stands from the City Opera next door.'^

^ I think the City Opera is still next door. I haven't been there in a while.

** Which was the low point of the incredibly STUPID staging.

*** The problem with thankless roles is that you have to have enough time on stage to make some kind of impression outside the essential awfulness. Fricka is a cow. A prissy cow. She's married to a rat turd and this has clearly been bad for her character development, but she's still a cow.

† As these creatures go, I minded the droopy girl in IL TROVATORE less than a lot of you. But I am surprised nobody else thought that the soprano's top end had a few effortful moments, chiefly, as I blurrily recall now, at the beginning. Quality of voice, A-plus. Smooth and sweet and luscious. But.

†† I have a similar problem with Siegmund's story of how he came to be being hunted by bloodthirsty foes: he was nobly trying to rescue a girl from a forced marriage. All very well, but what was he planning on doing with her after he killed her brothers?

††† The other big reason is the staggering inanity of the plot. As Peter^ says, it reads like a really bad paperback fantasy.

^ Peter wanted to go!  When I read off the list of this year's season, it was one of the ones he chose!

‡ Or if it wasn't, I am so gobsmacked by the sheer force of the Wagnerian voice that I'm incapable of making subtle judgements.

It must be summer

 

Woman with Macro

I have no idea why my no-longer-new-but-maintaining-enigma-status-nicely camera has suddenly started granting me macro focus.  I knew macro had to be in there somewhere, but I have FAILED to find it in any sensible, oh, it's that little icon on this menu but WHY???, way, and then suddenly I prodded the right/wrong button one day while I was playing juggle-me-quick and it's now in macro mode.   Which means distance focus is presently disabled.  SIIIIIGH.  I really am going to have to do something drastic like stick the instruction CD in the slot, open it–eeek–and maybe nibble a little bit around its edges.  Maybe the easy introductory paragraphs, like how they haven't given you a wrist strap despite the fact that you need three hands to press the right sequence of buttons (when you know what they are) and this is when you're holding it in your teeth as your only strapless option–and are standing on hellhound leads which is really not a good idea.   Bronwen and I were discussing Learning to Use Your New Camera yesterday and the so-amusing little weirdnesses that you don't find out till it's too late.   This is a much better and option-mega-loaded camera than my previous little one . . .  but there are problems with cramming all the bells and whistles on something about the size of a deck of playing cards and keeping a grip on the thing while you try to access any of them is a BIG ONE.

Anyway.  While the macro is on the front line I thought I'd use it.  That's Louis IV, a known poor doer and prone to sudden death, who was one of my dumber ideas six years ago when I was (as I thought) cutting down from 500-plus roses to maybe twenty, having not yet plumbed my potential for ruthless use of garden space, or realised that a Third House was in my future.  But Louis has been burbling happily along in a now rapidly-disintegrating pot in what should be a less than salubrious position for a frail heroine, and produces about a dozen amazing daaaaark red roses every season.  And she smells divine.  You get a gust of it as you clamber up those frelling steps.  

I really must put her in a new pot this year.  I said that last year.

Lovely Louis

This is the stair by the side of the house, and that's Louis on the right in the disintegrating pot, and Nelly Moser on the wall on the left.

These stairs are not my favourite thing about the cottage. I used to think that pitons for everyday use were a silly affectation.

I did promise you pictures of Nelly Moser, the original lurid, over the top clematis.   The sad thing is that she may be original, but she isn't lurid, at least not on my wall.  She's growing in a pot (Robin's Cottage:  Where Everything Is in a Pot) and she's vigorous enough but I may not be feeding her her necessary Luridity Supplement.  Also, the catalogues are full of lurid clematises now and it takes more to shock the punters these days.

But I'm still very fond of her.  Fond enough to put up with the fact that she's a Group Two which means that you have to prune her but that you will do it wrong.   Those are pretty much the rules for pruning Group Two clematises:  Prune.  Be wrong.*

Nelly, you hot pink-purple striper you

Macro is good. Macro is fun.

* * *

* Oisin was on the phone while I was there this afternoon^ so while he was making arrangements to torture . . . I mean, to assist and support some aspiring student on his/her zealous way to musical something or other, I was reading a gardening article lying on his piano.^^  This hotshot gardener and garden designer who shall remain nameless was going on about this or that fabulous plant that only grows in southwestern Gili Motang and is dependent on being peed on by komodo dragons to thrive but we all want it in our gardens, and then let slip that he is clueless about the whole group thing with clematis.  I think he was trying for the common touch but all that happened with this reader is that I added his name to the long list of fancy professional Chelsea-attending gardeners I will not spend a squillion pounds on when I hire someone to tell me what the frell to do about Third House's plastic waterfall.  Gorblimey.  I hadn't realised there was a waterfall till I hired that bloke to rescue the pond last year and, lo, there was a waterfall waiting for someone to turn the pump on.  Ewww.  It came out of the same box as the duckie and chickie kitchen tiles of unlamented memory that some of you may remember.  A year later I'm still staring at it in incredulity.  I mean, I could get an electrician to sort out the motor–maybe–but I think it would look just as stupid with water running over it as it does without.

^ Note that he is now saying next week for a guest blog.  GAAAAH.

^^ It was that or reading some scholarly impenetrability+ about Glenn Gould and I am . . . so not a fan.  Of Glenn Gould or the Scholarly Impenetrability school of writing.

+ Well . . . I could have got my knitting out.  But I have this suspicion that Oisin would make my life hell if I did.

No, no, don't look at the clock

 

Well I'm in trouble. It's already mmph o'clock in the morning and I haven't started a blog post yet.

The day started by going to the dump. No, I mean really. It wasn't quite that if I was planning on getting five people—five!—in my house at the same time, something had to leave first, but there was that aspect. Also all that striving with the jungle over the last few days had produced an impressive large-plastic-garden-sheet load of detritus, of a volume roughly equivalent to a medium-sized Alp, and I needed to do something with it.* So hellhounds—walled in by forty-seven grocery bags of clothing I should have given to the Salvation Army years ago, and a lot of empty bottles that go ping-ping-jingle-jingle-jingle-rattle as you drive down the road, I am very grateful I live only a few minutes from the bottle bank—and I went to the dump on our way to the morning hurtle.

Then we came back to the mews where I dithered and wrung my hands over the competing necessities of finishing the discussion/interview that is due tomorrow** . . . and the possibility that I would be forced to ring Cambridge before Alicia and Bronwen arrived this evening. If I'd had even half my wits about me I would have realised that it was not the possibility but the likelihood of being forced to ring Cambridge, because Alicia was dependent on SouthWest Trains, which is like being dependent on the Borg for mercy, compassion, and the development of individual autonomy***, and Bronwen's ferry from Skye is invariably besieged by sea monsters.

So . . . never mind deadlines.† I decided to ring Cambridge. But since I was short of time I wanted to concentrate on that frelling third lead—yes, we're up to the third lead, more or less, which is giving both Niall and Colin unwelcome scope for jokes about how we can now all turn around and go out the way we came††: very funny ha ha ha ha ha, speak for yourselves, boys—so I decided to risk ringing it on Abel, the bell software on my laptop, where you can choose your starting point, which crucial subapplication was left out of the iPhone version. And . . . I managed to find another way to screw it up, which is to say that I once again thought there was something wrong with the software which is to say I am a clueless buffoon (again). So I got back to the cottage in time††† to blurt out my latest apologies and extenuating circumstances when Niall showed up in his appallingly on-time way. . . . Colin came in on the end of these and said 'excuses, excuses' while I was turning on my laptop to prove that I was being undermined by a shifty, ill-natured computer programme . . . and Niall looked at the problem for three and a half seconds (very like what happened the other day for another one of my problems) and said, I think you're hitting the wrong keys. . . .

I was hitting the wrong keys.

Whimper. I was not meant for bell software. I want the individual-lead option added to the iPhone so I can stay in what passes in bell-software terms as my comfort zone. Comfort zone! Hahahahahaha.‡

So I was now wholly sapped and sabotaged by my own idiocy and they were expecting me to ring Cambridge? Well, yes. There was a whole HOUR of Cambridge before Alicia finally showed up and saved me. Ringing plain hunt on four/eight was then peaceful and restorative if not precisely quiet . . . and then Bronwen showed up and The Horror Began Again because Niall decided we should ring plain hunt on all ten—hey! I'd be happy to sit out and knit!—I can't count to ten on handbells!‡‡ Especially not when I'm on one of the inside pairs, which go in strange anti-parallel directions!

The tea and biscuits were excellent, however.

As was supper, when we finally got that far. And the knitting, although Alicia doesn't knit, she embroiders.‡‡‡ And Bronwen, bless her clever little fingers, is going to provide some neat plain-green Secret Project #1 squares, which is probably cheating but I don't care. Us beginning knitters need support and comfort while we are on that diabolical quest for neatness (and square squares) ourselves.

And I really need to go to bed. I still have to meet a deadline . . . later today.

* * *

* I considered building an impenetrable redoubt as an alternative to hoping that the jungle would develop impenetrability in this last twenty-four hours—don't I feed you enough, you lot? Can't you do something for me for a change?—but I decided this was probably unsporting. And as it happens it was nearly twilight by the time I finally dragged Alicia and Bronwen outdoors and forced them to look at my garden. I rather feel about gardens the way I feel about music: they're supposed to be shared. And since I'm a cantankerous cow, my garden(s) doesn't get shared much.

And they pretty much looked stunned and went 'mmhmm' and went hastily back indoors again. But that was probably a combination of the lingering Trauma of Handbells and the prospective trauma of hurtling hellhounds . . . and now they're being threatened by thirty-foot roses? And all this is before dinner.

** Of Which More Later when I know when it's going to be posted.

*** Or depending on Hollywood to make a good movie. Roger Ebert, my hero. http://bit.ly/m0lyoJ

Yes. Thank you, @radmilibrarian.

† Deadline? What's a deadline?

†† Have I bored you about method structure enough yet that you realise that if you fold a bell pattern down the middle, the second half is the mirror image of the first? So if you have a brain that works like that, yes, you only have to learn half the wretched method, and then you can do it again backwards. GAAH.  For the rest of us, mirror image is worse than learning a whole frelling new pattern, because it's just familiar enough to be horribly confusing. —Specifically: Cambridge has five leads, so halfway through the third lead is halfway through the plain course.  Mirror time.  Ugggh.

††† In time to drag the hoover, roaring and gnashing its carpet brushes at me, out from under my bed and sic it on the shocking accumulation of spider webs, hellhound hair and dropped geranium petals that form a protective coating over my floors. I don't suppose there's a lot I can do about the spiders^ but why do my chosen live companions both fauna and flora have to be so messy? And the hellhounds and I can't be solely responsible for the amount of dirt that gets tracked indoors. It must be those spiders.

^ Barring the pet bat

‡ It's just a good thing Niall—and Colin—are really desperate to ring handbells. . . . Um . . . Wait a minute, is it a good thing??

‡‡ Can I count to ten for any reason and under any circumstances as such circumstances might be met in my normal daily life and require such accounting?^ Let's not go there.

^ Most time signatures don't go higher than eight either, I can barely count semiquavers, and I'd rather not think about hemidemisemiquavers at all.

‡‡‡ She is embroidering this amazing Chinese bird-and-flowers wall panel, and yes, my old embroidery impulses are twitching.

Gardening Update #1811, or, Bleeding Profusely Again

 

I've been pruning roses. Well, tidying them up a bit anyway. I don't do much real pruning; I belong to the school of thought that says that a rosebush wants to be the size she wants to be, and she'll waste a lot of time and energy regaining that size before she starts producing flowers. This varies, of course; roses are fey fickle creatures, and some of them will let you hack them back and meekly produce flowers at the level you want. But my experience is that you will get more flowers if you (a) feed her as if she's the rooty green equivalent of an entire high school football team and (b) let her grow more or less as she wants.*

You wouldn't be doing real pruning this time of year anyway or you'd be cutting off your incipient floral extravaganza, which would be even more deranged than growing roses in the first place.** I tend to be so conservative about cutting back in the autumn that I frequently don't get around to it at all, partly because of that pesky time problem and partly because I worry more about die-back*** than I do about wind-rock†, which means I should do some kind of a prune in the early spring before active growth starts . . . but I usually don't get around to that either. Which means that when Jungle Season arrives it's bloody dangerous out there. Literally. We had the whole lacerated-scalp-blood-sheeting-down-forehead thing again today, only this time I noticed it before it started running into my eyes, and managed to dam it before it blinded me.

I have way too many roses that are thornier than average. I'd started by trying to cut out the dead under-bits of Mme Alfred††, who mostly hangs down rather gracefully, like a green awning, but the dead dangling under-bits will get you if they can. But Mme Alfred is only averagely thorny, and I felt quite calm when I moved on from her to Sombreuil. Sombreuil is not perhaps the rose that most needs a tidy-up (spoilt for choice in that category, I am) but I noticed that she had reached a long floriferous arm over the wall into my neighbour's garden, Mr Ugliest Shed in the Universe and the Roof is Ruining the View from My Office Window, Thank You Very Much You Blergwad and Furthermore All the Ground Elder in that Same Densely Shed-Populated Universe Comes under Mr Ugliest's Wall into MY Garden, You More Than Ratbag, You Unspeakable Fungus from Yuggoth.††† My Sombreuil isn't going to waste any of her flowers on him.‡ So I had to haul her back to this side and tie her down. Ow. Ow. OWWW.

One way or another I spent way too much time in the garden today: it's that time of year. And especially after that burst of decent rain‡‡ everything is storming up, and laying siege to anything it can wind its little tendrils around. If I'm lucky by the time Alicia-my-friend-the-serious-gardener arrives tomorrow we won't be able to get out the kitchen door. She's not likely to be in a very charitable mood because I'll be making her ring handbells.‡‡‡

Although I was thinking today as I found another forty-seven little things in pots tucked away in a corner that I'd forgotten about, it would be surprisingly, if horrifyingly, easy to make a National-Gardens-Scheme‡‡‡-level garden out of something even this size, if you were mad and focussed enough. I'm mad enough, but I'm not focussed enough—there are a lot of healthy, vigorous weeds in my garden and a lot of—ahem—unplanned and possibly insalubrious botanical combinations. I also have low tastes. Dahlias. Busy lizzies. Petunias. Roses. I got away with being vulgar at the old house because the setting was so gratuitously romantic even dahlias couldn't spoil it—and Peter provided a counterbalance of tactful perennials and a posh accent spouting Latin names—but if I were doing it in a tiny town garden I'd have to turn into a plantswoman and I'm not.  I'm not and I'm not going to.

But don't talk to me about Third House's garden. Third House's garden is another small town garden . . . but it's plenty big enough. Fortunately I still have low, vulgar, anti-plantswoman tastes. Which is just as well. I wasn't ringing frelling handbells and taking voice lessons when we were still at the old house. There are limits.§§

 * * *

* Sigh. The impenetrable-jungle aspect of the cottage's garden would be significantly less both impenetrable and jungly if I kept my roses to the sizes they're supposed to be. On the other hand, that would mean spending more time pruning, which means MORE TIME and also more blood loss.

** No, no, growing roses isn't deranged, but jamming nearly fifty into a space the size of the cottage garden is definitely deranged.

*** Where the stem-tips die, and you have to cut back to live wood. If you've already pruned too much off, you're in trouble.

† Where the wind knocks your rose around so much her roots start coming loose, so the wind is rocking her back and forth, not just the above-ground plant, but down into underground. Roses hate wind rock. Back at the old house I was always torn by the ghastly dilemma of choosing between pruning, and risking die-back, and leaving the above-ground growth available for the wind to get a grip on. Those short skeletal winter rosebushes you see in some gardens are pretty well wind-proof. But the tiny walled cottage garden mostly doesn't get bad winter wind. So I can pretend not doing the autumn prune is deliberate.

†† —Carriere, who is the creamy thirty-foot-high-and-launching-herself-into-space-over-my-semi-detached-neighbour's-roof one. I'll post photos of her this year too.

††† Except for the all-the-ground-elder-in-the-universe that comes in under the wall at Third House. Third House has major bindweed too, which also comes under the wall. Siiiiigh. Neighbours are the blight of a gardener's existence.

‡ My garden has the cottage on one side, obviously, and my semi-detached neighbour is on the left (as you stand in my kitchen door, looking out in alarm at the prospect), and Mr Ugliest is immediately opposite you. On the right is the neighbour who owns the downhill half of the two-car garage I own the upper half of.^ This is a nice neighbour^^ who furthermore used to have a Climbing Cecile Brunner on that wall so ebullient she used to come freely over to my side. I haven't seen her in a couple of years and I'm afraid to ask. It's all right though, I've put her—the rose, I mean, not the neighbour—in at Third House. Where she's joyously eating the hedge.

^ I keep telling you it's a jigsaw here. The little old section of a little old English village. Get out your micrometers.

^^ Barring their occasional visitor whose unnecessarily large shiny car's car alarm doesn't like anyone getting too close to it in the process of getting into the car next to it: Like we have a choice. Shut the ungleblarg up or I'll give you something to yell about. If there's an unnecessarily large (shiny: shiny takes up even more room) car next to Wolfgang, hellhounds and I must perforce sidle.

‡‡ Bronwen will be here too, but she's an untidy gardener, like me, and she likes handbells.

‡‡‡ She says perhaps a trifle grimly, and averting her eyes from the rain-wreckage on the right-hand wall as she looks out her kitchen window.

§ http://www.ngs.org.uk/about-us/open-for-the-ngs.aspx

I haven't looked at their guidelines recently but when we were opening our garden at the old house the rule of thumb was that a NGS garden had to have enough in it to remain interesting for half an hour. Hey, people crawling around on their hands and knees with magnifying glasses are really slow. Also leaning against the wall in hysterics at the pots-in-pots-in-pots-in-pots array slows you down.

§§ And speaking of Secret Projects, as I was last night in yarny terms . . . I now have a secret gardening project. Mwa ha ha ha ha.^ I potted it on today. Nice root system. If it croaks, it will clearly be my fault.

^ Although this blog business of having to third guess myself because not only do I not want either to Reveal All for a variety of reasons or to embarrass anyone but myself, which is the second-guessing part, I also have to—third guessing—allow for stuff I'd be perfectly happy to tell the rest of you, barring the One Wrong Reader. Feh.

But first . . .

 

The Yarn.

I tweeted several days ago that I'd fallen into sin and error again and bought more yarn. I know, this is standard behaviour in the knitting community, but my membership is still only a few months old* and I haven't frelling FINISHED anything yet. I have three Secret Projects and a hellhound blanket going right now.** And I'm buying more yarn. Shoot me. Someone. Please.

But it was on sale. And I had been looking at it thoughtfully even when it wasn't on sale. It's 100% wool, which, rather mysteriously to this neophyte, seems to be rather rare in the yarn world, and it hasn't been through x strange chemical processes, although I admit I haven't yet researched what 'natural' and 'untreated' means exactly in knitterdom. But I love the colours***—even though none of them is pink—and you get to use 6 mm needles which means you won't get as old knitting the same amount of stuff as you would on 4 mm, which unfortunately the first† Secret Project is in. I got as far as filling out the on-line order form when it wasn't on sale . . . and barely managed to make myself not press the 'order' button. When it went on sale . . . I was lost.

And of course the entire weight of Ravelry fell on me and demanded details, because knitters are (apparently) like that. So here you are. At last.

I'm again expecting my poor camera to cope with indoor lighting at night. There's actually--ahem--twelve skeins of it because I have a CARDIGAN on my mind. Yarn addiction is perhaps easier (or anyway cheaper) when you think in terms of socks.

This may be a slightly truer colour. Or then again it may not. It depends as it so often does on your computer screen. But it's cream-gold-brown-slatey-blue-grey.

If you buy enough of it you get your own Eco Friendly Bio Degradable Brown Paper Project Bag

But in fact all twelve don't fit in the brown paper bag all that well, which is beginning to split at the seams. So I am keeping it in my latest Project Bag. ::Swoons:: An INFINITY of uses for tote bags opens dangerously before me.

The temptation is worse when they lay out patterns for the yarn you're trying unsuccessfully not to buy. This is what my yarn looks like knitted up, by the way.

And I like the sweater on the front cover but I may like this one even better. And it says 'quick & easy' on the cover. They lie, right? Although if I had to wear either of these belts I'd probably have to forswear knitting forever, since apparently it leads you into dreadfulness.

 

* * * 

* Fancy. It's still only been a few months.

BurgandyIce wrote:  But just to ask hypothetically, can one knit in, say, the line at the Post Office?

Sweetheart, I knit at stoplights.^ There's a particularly ogreish stoplight in the middle of Mauncester which I am seeing way too much of again, it being on the way to both Tabitha and Nadia, and it used to be a pet hate of mine. No more. I roll up, put the clutch in neutral, yank on the handbrake, and knit.

^ Not to mention waiting for frelling WordPress to load photos. 

** And TRAGEDY, WOE, WOE, WOE. I blogged or tweeted or something recently^ that I was near the end of Secret Project #1 and approaching the Dreaded Sewing-Up Part—which isn't dreaded! I'm NOT dreading! NOT! I CAN DO HAND SEWING gods dranglefab it!—anyway. I decided I'd better lay my lots of nice squares out in some semblance of their final shape, and see if they're going to fit and what, you know, sizes I need to make more of to fill in the gaps, since they're not all the same size (ahem). And . . . I can't use all of them. WOE. UNBEARABLE WOE. But the plain-colour ones show the gleeps and blergs so clearly. I had somehow not realised the ghastly truth.  The awful bobbly yarn, while probably in actual fact blergier, hides the lumps better because it is itself lumpy. And the self-muddling yarn is, well, self-muddling—if you squint you can't necessarily immediately tell which is a colour change and which is a blerg. But the plain green . . . oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear.

Whimper. I'm not as near the end as I thought. And the hellhound blanket may have just gained a row or two of green. In the wrong gauge.

^ When so much of my life happens, or anyway re-happens, on line, it's scary living with this memory. What did I say? Was I right? I can't remember. . . .

*** And after the Agony of the Plain Green Squares let me say that my first big scary project is going to be in one of these multicoloured yarns.

† endless