“I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens, but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls off a string.” — L.M. Montgomery
Where was I…where was my head…my ears…why don’t I remember any of these folks? (Turn your speakers on.) I missed each of their deaths. I should have noticed something. Felt a twinge of remorse or sorrow. Something. 50 of them. And these are just the ones Will Yurman documented with his photographs. There were others. Family voices tell the stories of each of these people as the pictures are displayed in a slideshow fashion. Suffice it to say, it is heartbreaking. 50 sons, daughters, cousins, dads, and moms, all murdered in Rochester in 2007, and I don’t remember hearing about even one of them. I feel ashamed.
An exhibit of Yurman’s work involving these 50 families is at the George Eastman House through March 2.
Clapotis, improperly pronounced, sounds rather like a sexually transmitted disease. As in, “I’m sorry. Your lab tests show you have Clap-ah-tis. But we can treat it with an antibiotic.”
Properly pronounced, Clapotis is uttered as though you have just finished a cafe au lait and a croissant while strolling the Left Bank. “I’ve just finished my Clap-o-tee!”
Witness the spread of my Clapotis. Choose whichever pronunciation pleases you most.
Drop #4/13 of the straight rows is complete. Just 9 more to go before the decrease rows commence.
A closer look.
And the requisite, artsy-fartsy, and virtually useless, close-up. (But I challenge you not to drool on the colors.)
My hair is out of control. My wonderful hair stylist is changing careers and now going to nursing school. She doesn’t have the time to devote to her business any more. I am left with a pile of unruly fine, yet thick, super straight, flyaway, dull dishwater blonde hair. So I’ve given up, and have started pulling it back. I can’t decide if I look fetching or just ridiculous. (And I’m just at the point where I really don’t care.)
My brother, if he is reading this blog, will be so pleased to know I have scored yet another Flax outfit on eBay.
Perhaps it would be best if you would ignore my ranting posts of just over a week ago. You know the ones. I will abdicate this consumer culture if it kills me and save money…yada yada yada.
Have one of those days when everything seemed right in your world? Like today. My job is good. I get paid, not great, but reasonably well. The bills are paid. Sometimes I can buy yarn. My patients are cool. The families, though sad when I meet them, are always fascinating and sometimes people that I wish I had a chance to know better. (Actually, I wish I could know some of my patients better, but there’s usually not time enough for that.)
Look in your closet and discover the perfect pair of shoes you forgot you had were right there, in a box, right where you left them, high on the back shelf in the spare room?
Spend several minutes throughout the day holding your foot up for self satisfied inspection of said shoes?
Try and spin silk? (Here’s a tip. Use hand lotion first.) (Here’s another. Rejoice, rejoice, and rejoice again when you see thread. Because in another minute that thread is going to break, but damn. It sure is pretty for a second.)
Watch episode after episode of House Hunters and then start to suddenly believe that $400,000 doesn’t seem like so much to pay for a house?
Get a disproportionate amount of glee from keeping a promise to a cat? (I promised Harrison Greenies, and he got them. Cats. Love. Greenies.)
Feel incredibly worldly because someone in Bezon, Ile de France visited your blog?
Days like today aren’t all that rare, really. And I know that to the uninitiated eye, they’re not even all that special. But they sure do balance out all those funky days that come along with alarming regularity.
This is a stone that all those who are
in service to others should have upon them. it helps you feel more like
giving to others and doing so with love and joy in your heart. There is
no room for resentment in ones heart who is being of service to others
and this stone does not allow that to be a part of your heart. it helps
you relax as you caretake others because you can trust you will not be
trapped in any way in that role. it helps all to be warm, caring and
help out with the needs of others. it also helps one with devotion to
others.
All this, and only $8.99 on eBay. I didn’t look up the characteristics of ruby until after the ring arrived, but it’s a nice surprise that’s it’s so appropriate for what I do. (Or try to do.)
The Clap. Oh, my. Dropping a stitch, even on purpose, is a little unnerving. But I like the result, I think. I really like how every bar is a different color. I can see myself wearing this all the time. I’m already planning on wearing it to Rhinebeck next year unless I come up with something even better before then.
As promised, the contents of my Yarne Source shopping bag –
Delicious Noro sock yarn! They have a bunch of colors. Get thee over there and get some before it’s gone.
And this. For a cabled bag. My favorite yarn. Noro Kureyon. In my favorite colors of old olive green, brown and pond scum, with a little brilliant turquoise thrown in for good measure.
I love Kureyon.
That’s all, folks. Someone has a project called “cleaning” around here, and someone ought to get to it.
Someday I will have a nice housekeeper type come to visit me every week or so and take this cleaning business out of my hands for a fair wage and a cup of tea.
I’ve had this book for several years. On many more occasions that I care to count, I’ve opened it randomly and found a page/meditation that spoke to me.
Today, for instance. #220. Threshold.
Why mourn for a cocoon
After the butterfly has flown?
Without even reading the thoughts that accompany this in the book, I know it must be about death. (Most likely it’s the word mourn that does it.)
Why mourn for a cocoon after the butterfly has flown…why mourn for the person, when the soul is finally free…in a nutshell, that’s how I interpret it. Death isn’t the ending. It’s a metamorphosis.
Maybe these are the thoughts that keep a hospice nurse going back to work, day after day.
Anyway, works for me. I like that little book.
So. Today is payday. There’s a little overtime in the bank now, and I’ve been quite frugal. On the way home from the hospital, I made a stop at The Yarne Source in Henrietta, because I read on their web page that they had…well…
Can you see it?
It might have something to do with this…
I’ll show you tomorrow. Bet you already guessed anyway!
But speaking of Noro, here is the project that I stuff into my bag and work on during random moments of freedom…like the last few minutes of a rare lunch break, when the food is gone but I can’t bear to go back to work yet…waiting at the lab for a blood draw…you get the idea. This is my second Brooklyn Tweed scarf. The first one got frogged due to painfully awkward color changes. Hunter orange and forest green coupled with Carrie Bradshaw pink and NYC black just didn’t work. I called it the gender bender project. Deer hunters and fashionistas alike could have used that scarf. Or their respective pieces of it. So anyway, I started over and am ending up with this, which I’m much happier with. I love how Silk Garden, under the right circumstances, sort of glows.
I have this half baked scheme in my head that I will (finally) accomplish this weekend everything that I have planned for the last 3.
Though, listen. There’s hope. I read somewhere that if you take a kitchen timer and set it for 15 minutes, then go and scrub the bathtub and swirl out the toilet bowl for those few minutes, soon the timer will go off and then you set it again and get equal time to do something fun, like knit. And back and forth you go, until A) the house is clean, and B) you’ve whacked off a few more rows.
I just have one more repeat of the increase rows (followed by rows 1-6 of the twelve), then I can start the straight rows. At some point after that, I get to start dropping and ripping! You can’t imagine how much I look forward to this. Dropping? Ripping? On purpose? Oh, my. You can see the lines that will rip out, made right now by sets of twisted stitches that will (supposedly) create a neat border to the rows of bars created by the dropped stitches.
Better shot.
Lorna’s Laces is nice stuff. It has softness and substance, all at once. The colors look a little, well, intense, in these pictures, but in real life, I hope that when the ripping is done, the effect will be a little less riotous. No matter, I like color against all the black and brown I have in my (boring) wardrobe.
Someone’s grumpy cat interrupted the photo shoot.
Seeing that it’s only Wednesday night, and I have back to back meetings tomorrow on both sides of town…a meeting with the medical directors tomorrow afternoon that most likely will bring news of more and better, and did I mention more? documentation that we must do to stay compliant with regs….
I wish I could spend a little more time in this, my favorite corner of the world.
We’re swinging into February, and traditionally, February is the month where I tend to get a little wired. I think it’s the darkness and the cold. Cabin fever? The endless stretch of gray that looms before me, oh, until about May 25th, when the trees finally start to bud? I’m twitching just thinking about it.
Anyway. It’s still January, and I am trying to ride out the rest of the wave of “Peace on earth!”, “Auld Lang Syne!”, and “let’s get organized!”
Eh.
So I crammed all my yarn into Ziploc bags and threw it into the linen closet.
There.
Organized.
I labeled the bags.
And…
And in the spirit of what-the-hell-am-I going-to-do-with-this-shit…
Anyway. Consider me organized. Now leave me alone.
This freaking Waves scarf made out of Malabrigo is going to be waving me straight to the check-in desk at R-wing. I mean, how long can one scarf take?
The picture on the pattern shows this lovely blanket of a scarf very artfully draped over the shoulders of a woman who must be 2 feet tall. Because after 2.75 skeins of Malabrigo, this is all I have. This freaking thing eats yarn like there’s no tomorrow.
Luckily I was able to score two more skeins on eBay, so I guess I’ll just keep knitting and cabling and cabling and knitting, and maybe if I work really, really hard, in 2009 I’ll have a scarf.
So, bored with Malabrigo and the nightmare on cable street, I’m switching gears. Again.
All hail the Lorna’s Laces. It’s Shepard Worsted, and yes. It comes from my stash. Okay? All the crap I spouted on about last weekend, not spending money, etc., — I meant it.
It will be a Clapotis. I’ve posted the link before and am too lazy, aggravated, whatever, to do it again.
So I think I’ll start it tonight. Since (ah ha! Now she’s going to tell us why she’s mad!) the boyfriend has decided he is too tired to do our usual Saturday night movie thing, and while I am sure this is true, why couldn’t he have let me know this earlier, so I could have made alternate plans. I am not good with abrupt changes.
I am also not good without food. I’m going to go forage for my dinner at Wegman’s and return home to sulk and knit. More later.
I’m trying to start a meditation practice. Yesterday I mentioned engaging in a guided meditation that nearly put me out of commission. I was so utterly relaxed. I’m really making an attempt to live more mindfully. Meditation is part of that. So is simplifying my life, and reducing the amount of stuff I have become a slave to.
Last night I spent with my daughter, perusing the aisles at Target. Not to blast Target (or it’s evil twin W__mart), but the obscene consumerism over there has begun to make me twitch. If I bother to think about it. If I mindlessly wander, like I’m prone to do, then I’m overcome with how much I think I need this item, or that one. And I buy, buy, buy.
Before she dropped by, I was organizing my yarn stash (or trying to), and was stuffing skeins into my curio cabinet in the dining room. When I realized the whole project looked like ass, and I hadn’t even begun to make a dent in the stash, I got wildly anxious and threw everything back where it came from. That’s when I realized I have an obscene amount of yarn. More than I will ever use.
BUT. This yarn brings me a strange feeling of comfort. It feels like money in the bank. Though I suspect actual money in the bank would feel more secure, but at this point, what do I know about that.
Anyway. The stash is going into labeled ziplock bags.
From there I hope to store it on simple wire shelves upstairs in the spare bedroom — well within my sight. I know what I want to use each bag of yarn for — it did indeed have a purpose when I bought it. So when I get the urge to fondle fiber and drool on new colors, I plan to march straight upstairs and do it from stash.
My problem, and it is indeed a problem, is that I view shopping (for yarn and other stuff) as a means of self-care. Now, shopping for food is probably a valid means of self care. Shopping for earrings or shoes or a new lipstick is probably not. But it’s just like the little video above says it is. I work all day, come home exhausted and spent, and think of all the different ways that I suck, and then think, rather obsessively at times, of how I could fix that by buying just the right handbag, or yarn, or the needles that looked really cool, or three shirts that will make me look thinner than I am. Always, the message is that what I have, and what I am, is not good enough.
This is a crazy world we live in. It helps to remember that I did not engineer this wild consumerist society by myself. I am being manipulated and cajoled on an hourly basis that I need more stuff. The trick is to learn to be more mindful.
Does this make sense to anyone else but me, I wonder. It’s okay if it doesn’t. This is my blog, and I’ll write train of thought jibberish if I want to!
I would like to find a soft little case for my digital camera. My mind tells me that Vera Bradley just introduced their Spring ‘08 prints and they make this fabulous little techie case, and Parkleigh is just a short drive away…
I’m trying to mindfully live, remember. So I am knitting some Berroco alpaca up into a striped bag that I will felt, and I am thrilled with the colors. Much better than any overpriced Vera Bradley, any day!
Wisp is blocked. The cat slept on her last night as she dried on the spare bed.
Like I said, all I need is buttons. It remains to be seen if buttons from my grandmother’s stash will work, or if they’ll be too heavy, and I’ll need to run by Joann’s to pick up some light weight shell buttons.
One more shot of the stash (or part of it). On the right is a pile of Koigu topped with Silky Wool, and on the left is some Fleece Artist, Schaeffer, and Lorna’s Laces. Yes, I have plans for all of it. Absolutely.
I really enjoyed knitting Wisp. The pattern was both easy to memorize and quickly changing enough so as not to cause undue boredom. I really like how it turned out in the natural colored alpaca I bought two years ago at Rhinebeck.
I did this guided meditation this morning that nearly rendered me comatose. I must have been very, very susceptible to suggestion. Either that or very, very tired.
I have the weekend utterly to myself as the boyfriend is still away. I thought I might see a movie by myself down at The Little later on, or maybe tomorrow afternoon. There’s a knitting group that’s meeting tomorrow morning that I’d like to stop in on. I should organize my yarn. The bathrooms need scouring. Yet it’s noon and I’m still in my pajamas.
The boyfriend gets back very late Monday night. (Note to self. Don’t try to be two places at one time. Take a personal day on Tuesday, if you can.)
I think I’m going to organize my yarn in ziplock bags, then put them on a very visible shelf in the spare bedroom. This will accomplish two things.
1) Yarn is protected from cats, moths, and other beasties.
2) Yarn is visible so I can “shop” from my stash this year, and stop making a trip to the LYS a form of recreation. Although it is fun, clearly, my bank account is not so convinced. I really need to practice mindful spending.
Posted by purlsoffastring 
Posted by purlsoffastring 
Posted by purlsoffastring 
