Early Sunday morning

I blew up this blog last night.  (It got better.)  I was attempting to activate the calendar and apparently deleted something essential, because all of a sudden it all went foom and there was nothing left but the index page.  Fortunately, the beloved Wiggy spends his waking hours communing with software and code and was able to haul Early Sunday Morning back from the abyss. 

I should know better. I’m not completely computer-illiterate, but CSS is way beyond my capacity and I should be playing with paint-by-numbers Blogger or Blogspot or something.  So sometime in the near future Wiggy and I will be migrating everything over to Blogger and publishing it here on Growlery.com.  My faith in Wiggy’s abilities is utterly unbounded, so you shouldn’t notice anything except a template change. 

Further bulletins as events warrant.

I read a lot of blogs, just about every day.  Politics, literature, knitting, stitching, food, spirituality – and it’s very rare that I don’t read something that interests me to the point where I have to go haring out across the internet right then and there, via Wikipedia or Google or simply links thoughtfully provided by the blogger, to find out more about it.  The web has certainly got its share of idiotarians out there, but the great satisfaction of finding so many people who have interesting and intelligent things to say gives me great hope for the human race.  (Even on Mondays.) 

I seem to have been reading a whole lot about rotations and goals and the completing of UFOs recently.  I’ve never really been one to follow an actual rotation; I usually stitch on a project until either (a) I’m done, (b) I’m bored with it, or (c) something new and mind-bogglingly beautiful comes along.  Options (b) and (c) have left quite a few UFOs in their wake, as you can imagine.  Maybe, just maybe, a little judicious application of a rotation might pull some pieces out of the Rubbermaid sarcophagi they’ve been interred in, and see the light of day once more.  Hmmm.

Here’s where I am right now on Toccata One (the whole thing’s in Works In Progress).  I’m enjoying it so much that I actually got through a section of some 70 queen stitches and enjoyed it all the way through!  This is nothing less than amazing.  I may have to send Cynthia Zittel a mash note.

And just in case anyone should think I have a free moment, I also started Lizzie Kate’s Love Crazy as a Valentine for the beloved Wiggy.  (This one’s in Works In Progress, too.)  I love doing delicate stitchery that looks like the fairies did it, but I also love sunny colors and simple, blithe designs too.  I usually finish her pieces as stand-up boxes, but I think I’ll frame this one.

I am living with two adolescent dogs.  If you go by the idea that one dog year is seven human years, then Molly and Milo are just about human-sixteen now, and boy howdy are they acting like human teenagers.  Molly’s always been our Alpha — protective, shrewd, smart, worried, in charge of everything.  Milo, until recently a cheerful and slightly loopy Beta, has gotten his growth spurt and now has about twenty pounds on Molly — and appears to have decided that he wants a crack at being Alpha, by virtue of superior weight.  This is not going over well with Molly.

If he gets too near her dish (and I’m talking five feet away), she growls.  If he comes to me to be petted while she’s nearby, she growls.  If she steals his chooble and is lying on both his and hers, and he comes to claim one, she growls.  Up till now, Milo has just walked away.  Now, unfortunately, he’s gotten a little fed up of it — and is growling back.  And the growling escalated tonight to a full-on snarling and barking frenzy in the middle of the kitchen.  It earned them both a half-hour in their separate dens, and a fairly loud (and unfortunately semi-profane) lecture from me. 

I’m all for them sorting out their differences on their own terms, but there are three cats and my elderly mother in residence here.  I don’t want any of them to be too close if that starts up again.  If it takes a few time-outs in their dens to reinforce that *I* get to be the real Alpha, then that’s what it’ll have to be.

In stitching news: I’ve finished Block 1 and the border of Block 2 for VoHRH, and have put it aside for a week or so, until our SAL meets again and we all start Block 2 together.  In the meantime, I’m working on Drawn Thread’s Toccata One.  I LOVE this piece!  All those picky, fiddly, complicated stitches and combinations are so much fun to work on!  I can foresee Toccatas Two and Three joining the queue as well.  Hmm, maybe these will give me a chance to try Vikki Clayton’s silks.

That’s what this blog is named because if I work it right, early Sunday mornings are the most peaceful time of the week.  Weekday mornings are for running around and getting to work; Saturdays are for either sleeping till the sybaritic hour of 7:15 or being nosed out of bed by two excitable dogs who need to go out NOW NOW NOW, and then for doing chores and errands.

But Sundays . . . ah, Sundays are for coffee and stitching and church (when I go), for listening to the rain and maybe some Vivaldi or Turlough O’Carolan.  Today was one of those mornings.   I was actually allowed to sleep until 6:45, at which point the morning creature-parade commenced.  Fiona began to walk up and down my ribcage, Molly brought me her chooble and left it on the bed near my face, and Milo actually jumped up on the bed to come and see me – which is emphatically Not Allowed, and he knows it.  (He got down in a hurry.)  Got up, let the dogs out, made coffee, let the dogs in, took a shower — and then it was 7:30 in the blessed morning, it was raining lightly out, and I had a cup of coffee and stitching in front of me.  Mom wasn’t up, the dogs fell asleep in their dens, and I had nearly two hours all to myself.  It was so lovely I almost didn’t want to stitch, so I could grok the fullness, as they say — but yes I did stitch.  And as of 9:45 this morning, this is where I am on VoHRH:

I may have mentioned that the NPI to DMC conversion leaves a little to be desired, at least to my eyes.  So one of the Saturday errands was to find a DMC color card.  I have one in this house somewhere, but of course it cannot be found when I need it.  Plus it’s about ten years old and doesn’t have all the new colors, so I really did need to replace it.  I want you to know that it took me one actual needlework store (Lazy Daizy in Raleigh), two Michael’s stores, and one Jo-Ann’s before I found a color card, and by that time I was ready to cross state lines to get one.   Nothing else was hard to find, but that color card just made me ornery, and I was determined to get my hands on it.  (Thanks, Michael’s in Knightdale!)

Just because it was quiet while I was stitching doesn’t mean that I didn’t have company.  Zone Five the Terrorist is always alert for something to be happening, and watches me like a hawk.

Diarmuid would be alert too, but it wears him out.

Milo the Wonder Dog knows how to delegate, and lets Five do all the work.  This is what happens when you wake Mommy up at 6:45 by jumping on the bed.

It wasn’t very much, but what there was, was pretty.  Freezing rain, just enough to dip the branches in crystal, but not enough to make the roads dangerous.

This is the pyracantha at the corner of the porch.  Not quite as vivid as bittersweet, and a little more friendly-looking.

On my way home for lunch, it was looking like we might end up with some serious icing on the trees.  This is about as much ice as we ever got, though.  Just a little bit is pretty — not like what’s happening in Oklahoma and Missouri right now.  Those poor people, and those poor beautiful trees!

I’m convinced God’s got some trainee in charge of the weather.  The past two weeks have seen temps in the 70s where we are, and startlingly warm weather all through the East.  This morning it’s snowing in Raleigh, there’s a cold steady rain in Eastern NC, and  the whole thing’s moving north and east.  Now, I love winter, and can think of nothing more cheering than a good snowfall when I can stay home and enjoy it, but going from 74 and sunny to sleet in less than a week is a bit startling.  The recent warmth has coaxed the daffodil bulbs to start coming up — I can only imagine how startled they are!  

Somehow temps in the 70s are just all kinds of wrong for January.  We’ll have summer here from mid-April through the end of October, and I think we can afford one month of winter without everybody fearing for another Ice Age.

So out comes the leather jacket and the wool challis shawl that goes underneath; the gloves are in the pockets even though I probably won’t wear them; I should probably knit myself a hat, one that won’t give me hat head (if such a hat exists).  I’d love to stay home today and stitch, but the office is open and I’ll be out the door in 45 minutes.  It’s just 31 degrees now, so if that rain starts to freeze I’ll be mighty grateful for 4-wheel drive on my Jeep!

(This was actually written on 1/8/07, but I didn’t post it until 1/16/07, because I was having trouble posting the pictures.  Step into the Wayback Machine here for a bit.) 

In an unprecedented move, Your Heroine is actually making progress on one of her resolutions!  (I know I said they were projects, not resolutions.  Humor me.)  Three of my very favorite friends and stitchers — Barb, Wendy and Julie, take a bow, ladies — are starting work on a 12-part sampler as a project for 2007.  They’re in New Mexico and even though I’m here in North Carolina, I’ll be stitching along with them.  I’m so happy and excited to be stitching with friends again!

They’ll be sending photos of their samplers, and I’ll be posting them here for all to see.  Since it was my idea, I’d better post mine right now:

Behold my kitchen table!  Currently the base of operations for a very extensive piece of stitching.

The project is The Village of Hawk Run Hollow (scroll down the page about halfway) designed by Carriage House Samplings.  It’s quite large — twelve panels, each 92 stitches square, with quite a lot of filled-in areas.  The last square, in fact, has a black background — all cross stitches.  (Barb’s very excited about that one.)  The model’s stitched on 40-count linen in Needlepoint Inc. silks, but the Albuquerque contingent is stitching on 36-count, and I’m stitching on 32-count (mostly because that’s what I had on hand), and we’re using DMC.  NPI silks are utterly gorgeous and wonderful to work with, but they’re expensive (of course) and the chart calls for quite a lot of them.  Until we hit Powerball, I’ll be saving NPI for smaller projects.

We had our first get-together yesterday, with me participating by phone.  It became very clear very quickly just how long the border is on a 92 by 92 stitch square.  Some very ambitious plans for speed were squelched rather abruptly!  Homework for January: the borders on the first two panels, and the first whole panel completed. 

Because mine is going to be approximately the size of a tablecloth, I decided to mount it on a scroll frame.  This is gonna have to change pronto.  I’m losing the circulation in my left arm stitching, and there really isn’t a lot of room under the bottom of the scroll for my right arm.  Q-snaps will mean that a lot of linen will have to be rolled up and pinned out of the way, but I can mount the whole thing on a Z-frame and be a lot more comfortable. 

 As of about 7:30 pm on January 7, 2007, here’s what I’ve finished on VoHRH:

The alphabet is one I’ve done before, and it’s very regular, so it doesn’t require a lot of checking the pattern.  (I should NOT have said that; I am now doomed to rip out half of the wording, I just know it.)  The fun part willl come with the riverbank below it, with the fishies and the plants and the snake.

Have I said I’m excited about this?  I’m really really excited about this.

I love beginnings, and I even like endings.  It’s the middles that get messy.  Don’t you get a wonderfully hopeful feeling on New Year’s Day?  I know I do, no matter what kind of tangles will carry over from the previous year.  And it’s not like I expect that a few changes (those magical Resolutions!) will transform my world into a combination of Martha Stewart Living, Yoga Journal and the Forbes 500.  It’s just that all those fresh new pages on brand new calendars are a very cheering thing.

So no, there will be none of those Magical Resolution things for 2007.  What I do have for 2007 is Projects. 

2006 held a couple of far-reaching changes for our household: my mother moved in with us, and Wiggy lost his job and took a contract position in Detroit.  Mom moving in has involved a few workarounds, but didn’t look like it would cause immediate disruption, and it hasn’t yet.  But she’ll be 80 in May, and while she’s pretty healthy now, she’s quietly becoming more physically fragile, more hard of hearing, and more forgetful.  I’m keeping a weather eye out for changes.

Wiggy’s job situation was a huge earthquake for us.  Our employer (I work for the same company) abruptly terminated his employment in October on legal-but-specious grounds.  His computer area is rather specialized, so there was no chance of him getting work close to home, or even in North Carolina.  (NC is a right-to-work state, so just about anything is technically legal.  Some legalities are smelly as week-old fish, however.)  Ultimately, this means that we’ll have to sell the house and move — but the house needs some work before we can think about selling it.  Fortunately, Wiggy’s previous life as a Road Warrior gave him contacts in his industry all over the country, and also gave him a pretty sterling reputation in teaching and training in the work he does.  We talked about it at length, and settled on the course of him getting contract work for a number of months, to keep the bills paid (let’s face it, I get paid diddly/squat) and work on fixing up the house to sell.  When the time is right — and we’re talking twelve to eighteen months here — we’ll find him the right job in the right place at the right money, and make the big move.

We didn’t plan on this, naturally.  When Wiggy took this job, it was with the idea that this would be the job he held till retirement, this would be the place we would live till we got old and impossible.  (We especially loved the house for the front porch, where he planned to sit and take over the role of Neighborhood Curmudgeon, rant about the government and shout at the kids next door.)

Anyway.  This leads me to Projects, as opposed to Magical Resolutions.  My projects for 2007 are to:

1. Start cleaning out closets.  Decide what to keep, throw things out, box up things for storage.  Probably rent a storage unit someplace — if we’re going to sell the house, the big closets are a selling point and they can’t look like they’re choked with our crap.
2. Fix up the house.  New kitchen floor, new upstairs bathroom floor (previous owners painted it lipstick pink, if you can believe that, and the stick-on tiles are corroding), paint everything — I’m creating a list, and it may get long.  That’s what I get for watching too many of those “Designed to Sell” things on HGTV.
3. Work on cutting out sugar.  This one sounds like a prepackaged resolution, but I’m looking at it as a project.  Sugar’s been making me literally sick in the past year, and much as I love it, it’s time to go.
4. This is a fun one: get back to my cross stitch.  There’s nobody I’ve found in this little town who’s doing counted cross stitch (just knitting skinny scarves with novelty yarn, but that’s another kvetch), and I really miss stitching with friends.  Barb in Albuquerque told me about a pattern some of my friends there have decided to do as a project, and I’m going to join them by phone and probably on this blog.

These’ll do to go on with.  The cleaning out and cleaning up are the big ones for 2007 — the amount of stuff we own is truly scary, and absolutely depressing as well.  Every spiritual and psychological philosophy I’ve read about agrees that good things cannot happen where there’s no room for them to happen, so maybe it’s time for me to make some room here.

In other news, Wiggy got back to Detroit safely, all the creatures here are safe, healthy and happy (I thought that Five got out when I let the dogs out last night.  Couldn’t find her for hours, and worked myself up into a real panic.  I eventually found her asleep in Wiggy’s desk chair — she’d simply ignored me calling.  I picked the wretched little beast up out of a sound sleep and cuddled her while calling her names.  She just purred.), and I’m going to take down the Christmas tree and drag it out to the curb.

Happy New Year, everyone!

I hate heat and humidity.  Sticky, damp, sweaty and exhausted are four of my most unfavorite adjectives, and they’re what a North Carolina July is all about.  When I moved out of New York City nine years ago, I swore I’d never ever spend a hot, humid summer ever again!

So what am I doing living in eastern North Carolina, facing down another summer of this stuff?  Somebody please remind me what my reason was for this?

In the high deserts of New Mexico, it gets up to the low hundreds by six in the evening, but you don’t pass out from trying to breathe it.  It might get all the way up to 20 percent humidity, and folks who’ve lived there a long time think that’s murderous humidity.  Yes, you stay in the shade as much as possible; yes, you drink a lot of water; yes, you wear your sunscreen; yes, if you park your car in the sunshine it cooks inside.  But when I sat on my terrace or patio in the shade, I was perfectly comfortable and could enjoy the evening air — and bug-free, too!  Swamp coolers add a little moisture to the air inside your house, it drops the temperature fifteen degrees, and that’s just fine.

Criminey, it’s hot here.  Ninety-something degrees and 85 percent humidity.  Open the back door at 5:35 am to let the dogs out, and it’s like walking into a steamed towel.  Molly and Milo stay out about three minutes, and come in smelling like wet stinky dogs, which they are.  And let’s not forget our little friends, the bugs!  Mosquitoes, no-see-ums, and little bitey things!  Yeah!

Tomorrow will be better — rain, and then temps in the 80’s for a few days.  I’m sure I can survive for the rest of this week.

But I’d rather live in New Mexico again.

I like knitting socks, I do.  I admit that using dpns took a little getting used to, and that sometimes the ladders at the corners can be irritating.  But I have turned out a few simple pairs of ribbed-cuff socks, have no trouble turning a heel or picking up stitches, and while I need some work on kitchener stitch, am pleased with the results.

Now I’m trying to learn two socks on two circular needles.  I have all of one inch of cuff done on them, and I’m not sure I want to proceed further.  You have to have two separate balls of yarn going at the same time, and combined with having one non-working circular needle flapping in the breeze at all times, it can lead to some impressive tangles.  One of the things I liked about dpns is that I never had any trouble knowing which needle came next; on the 2 circs I have already lost my place a couple of times, and I HATE not knowing how I got to where I am.

Maybe I need to remember to place a marker where I stopped, or at the beginning of the section that I should knit next.  There are certainly enough websites with comments and suggestions for 2S/2C; I’ll go google a search and see what I find.