Race to the finish

No, it's not that I was speed-knitting. I was racing the yarn to the end. When I finished the last bit of the edging on the star shawl last night at 10:45 (there was no way I could have stopped when I was that close to being finished!), this is how much yarn I had left.
Once I can see through a ball of yarn, it starts to feel like a nail-biter to me. It wasn't really; there was plenty left to finish the edging, but no way could I have squeaked another repeat in the body of the shawl out of this one. Of course, I knew that I had another skein of this yarn tucked away in case of emergencies, but it really would have made me cranky to break into a whole new skein of yarn just for a couple of yards (I'm petty that way), so I'm glad it worked out the way it did.

The girls and I got home a little while ago, after taking Younger Daughter to her Irish dance lessons, and stopping at Target on the way home to pick up costumes for both girls for their spring concert. I put the shawl in to soak while I made pizzas for dinner (mmm....), and once I was done, I got the girls started on homework and headed into the guest room to block that baby. Forty (back-breaking, knee-bruising; am I the only one who finds blocking to be a painful physical process?) minutes later, it was done.
(That corner is looking wonky, now that I see the picture; must go fix it...)

It blocked as a rather attenuated triangle, rather than an even-sided one, which I very much prefer in my triangular shawls, as it turns out (who knew?). Of course, as always, the edging just has me all a-tingle.
Scrumdiddlyumptious, no?
Love it.

So, to recap. This is another one of Anne's amazing patterns, the Star of Evening Triangle. I knitted it with Lanas Puras Melosa lace weight (100% merino), in the Fern Green colorway, on size 3 Addi Turbos. The yarn came from One Planet Yarn and Fiber; they were wonderful about getting it to me quickly, and making sure I had plenty (that's also where I got the yarn for Boing). I love working with people that friendly! And of course, as always, it's a blast to work with Anne, totally aside from how much I love her patterns; it just doesn't seem like someone could be that nice, but she really is.

I do have a new project on the needles, but I'll save that for another day. I'm still at the beginning stage, where I'm not feeling the pull of the over-the-hump, more-than-halfway-there, it's-all-downhill-from-here stage of knitting. I know I will, but in the meantime, I'm thinking that tonight may be a spinning night, as I've been wanting very much to finish the second half of the Rabbitworks roving; I'm thinking that the yarn might make a nice hat or a pair of mitts for Older Daughter for our cold-weather trip this summer (and yes, that is a teaser). I've been listening to book that is an old favorite on my iPod while driving and knitting recently, and have found that I can listen while I spin, too, which is very restful and soothing (the book? one of Bujold's from the Vorkosigan saga, called Memory), so that is something to look forward to, after a day spent grading, and with stacks more to go.

But first, I must get the girls to bed. You may imagine the theme music from Psycho here; I certainly do.

Miles of knitting

Literally.

It's about 1,000 miles round trip to the Bay Area, and as I drove only half of those, I got 500 miles of knitting done. This means that the body of the Star shawl is finished, and the edging (after a few false starts) is almost halfway done! It's funny how the 800 some-odd rows of edging feel so very much faster than the 200 some-odd rows of the body...
Looking good, eh?
That gives you a sense of how far I've come, I think. Maybe it's really about 1/3 of the edging completed, but that's not half bad, given that I started in the car on Sunday morning, and stopped somewhere just south of Coalinga.

Older Daughter also knitted on this trip. Her first FO:
We call it "Bag". It's her own design, up to and including the making-up (I don't know that I'd put any small valuables in there, but otherwise, she did quite nicely for a first-time seamer). How proud am I?

Our visits with Grandmom were wonderful. We'd gotten the news the day before we left that she'd had a couple of what appeared to be mini-strokes, and we were expecting that things would be pretty bad when we got there, but she appears to have made a good recovery, and we had some lovely conversations. Rick's dad had also sent her a nifty gadget that has earphones for her, and a microphone for us to talk into. It appears to direct and magnify speech better than her hearing aid does, and she was able to actually hear the girls telling her things and to respond to them for the first time in ages. Younger Daughter told Grandmom about the iguana on Virgin Gorda, and Grandmom understood almost all of it; I think that's honestly the first time that's happened, and Grandmom's hearing loss was already pretty advanced by the time Kivrin could talk, and high-pitched children's voices are the hardest for her to hear and process. It was a great moment (yes, I did get a bit teary-eyed).

We drove home (accidentally) across the Golden Gate bridge (Rick saw "south" and headed, much like a horse at the end of the day, for home, temporarily forgetting that crossing the bay on the Richmond/San Rafael bridge, as we usually do, involves a momentary northward detour from Corte Madera). We decided to make lemonade of it, and took the girls by Grandmom's old house in the Marina, and showed them the Marina green, where we used to take them (especially Older Daughter) for long walks with Grandmom before we moved. It was nice to give them a sense of just how integral a part of our lives Grandmom has been, and how much Rick and I miss the easy visits that living near her made possible. I know that Older Daughter remembers some of that, but we moved before Younger Daughter was old enough.

We also had some time to hike in the open space behind Rick's aunt and uncle's house. We saw wild turkeys; who knew they could fly so high into trees? (A good tail wind and a downhill slope seem to help.) Here's one of the few pictures from the weekend, of a turkey chick in a tree.
Can you see it there? They blend in quite nicely, but their coloration is astonishingly subtle and beautiful when viewed close to. The girls also got to play "princess of the world" (apparently I got the title of "queen of the world" as it was mother's day) on the rocks at the crest of the hill.
We also saw my parents, who kindly made the drive from Sacramento on Saturday so that they could see Grandmom, and so that I could take mom out for Mother's day (how nice was that? shouldn't I be doing the driving on mother's day?). The girls were happy to see them, and we had a nice visit, and even got to go to a bookstore together (always a favorite family activity)(more about my bookstore acquisitions another time). We also managed to get everyone (my parents, Rick's aunt and uncle and cousin and her husband) together for coffee, which was good fun. We used to all get together a lot when we lived up there, as we'd have birthday and holiday dinners at our house and both families came, but they all see less of each other now, so it was a nice mini-reunion.

Thanks so much to everyone for your kind words about Grandmom, and for all of the understanding things you all said about how important it is to take this time to visit her -- you are so right! I was away from email most of the weekend, so I'm woefully behind, but I appreciated everything each of you said.

I have one technical advice question from any Mac users out there who might be willing to help out. (I don't know very many here.) I load my pictures into iPhoto, and lately it's been doing a funny thing. I boot up the program, and all the pictures show momentarily, and then random and sporadic pictures disappear and are replaced by empty spots encircled by a dashed gray line, and I can't get the pictures to show again, nor can I upload them, say, on blogger or email. Has anyone had this happen? Any advice would be appreciated, because there are some good pictures missing (and this goes back through my whole archive, not just recent pictures). In this interests of giving all of the information, I used to (because I'm a luddite and a bit slow when it comes to technology) tell the program to import everything from my camera, but not to copy duplicates. Now I just tell it to import the latest photos; could that have anything to do with it?

Happy Monday, everyone!

Jacaranda!

The jacarandas have begun to jacarandize. I wait for this all year. It begins with the faintest of purple hazes in the jacaranda trees, and ends with all of them in full purple glory. Can you see the little bit of purple there?
Soon the whole tree will be covered with it. Along with trees all over our neighborhood. I can't wait. It's one of my favorite moments of spring in the southland, to see exuberantly purpling trees on every street.

Alas, I will have to wait, as we are leaving for the Bay Area tonight. We've been planning to go up to see Grandmom for a couple of weeks now, ever since we heard that she'd begun receiving hospice care at her assisted living facility. At this point, the hospice person only comes to check in on her every so often, but it's a sign of things to come, and we want to spend as much time as we can with her this summer. This morning we heard that she's had what appear to be a couple of mini-strokes in the past 24 hours, so I think that we're going none too soon. We'll spend the weekend there, and start looking for an opportunity to spend as much as a week up there this summer so that we can see her for short stints each day, which is all that she has the energy for any more.

It's hard to believe, though. I realize that it's been almost exactly 19 years since I met her. Rick and I had been dating for a few months, and had realized that we were getting to a place where our families were going to have to be involved at some point, and we'd better just get it over with. He came up to see me over summer break in Sacramento, and after a few days with my parents, we drove into the City to stay with Grandmom for a while. I remember so clearly driving up to her house in the Marina, and walking up to the front door to ring the doorbell, wondering what this first meeting with someone from Rick's family would be like. She flung the door open, took one look at this imposing 6' 6" man at my side, threw her arms open, and joyfully said, "Ricky!" I about died laughing. Ricky? Snortgiggle.

For all kinds of reasons, many having to do with proximity at the right age, I think that we're closer to Grandmom than either of us was with any of our other grandparents. We lived across the Bay from her for 10 years, and spent a lot of time with her during that period. We had our engagement pictures taken at a beach near her house. She took us on a tour of the Legion (where she docented) when I was hugely pregnant with Older Daughter. We cooked at her house, shared meals with her, and took long walks on the Marina green. She and I (along with Rick's mom and and aunt and my mom) went to France together for 10 days soon after Rick and I were married. She has always been stubbornly independent, and fiercely interested in everything that happens around her. It's hard to see her frail, blinded by macular degeneration, nearly deaf. But it's better to see her than not.

So I've been spending much of today getting things done around the house so that we can leave. I did take a much-needed break with a dear friend; good conversation and Indian food and a little bit of yarn shopping never hurt anyone, right? I picked up a little bit of yarn (in spite of the fact that we were ostensibly shopping for yarn for my friend to knit her very first sweater ever for her daughter; I figured that some sympathetic purchasing was in order, just to be encouraging, don't you know)...
The pink one (shades of dusty rose colors) will, I think, become the lace scarf that Older Daughter has been asking for. It's her kind of colors. I'm not sure about the other one, which has blues and browns and greens in it, but I'm pretty sure that I can think of something to do with it.

All right, I'm off to pack. If I don't manage to post this weekend (which is starting to look very full, between visits with Grandmom and Rick's aunt and uncle and cousin, and my parents who are kindly coming from Sacramento so I can take Mom out for Mother's day), I will most definitely be back on Monday. And with luck, I will come back with a completed stars shawl in hand; after all, 1,000 miles of driving in three days has to be good for something, right?

Puppies!

It's spring, and a young person's fancy turns to thoughts of (apparently)...

Puppies.

The neighborhood is crawling. Positively lousy with puppies. I think everyone has gotten one.

When I drive, when I walk the dogs, when I get the mail. Puppies. Everywhere. Who knew I was part of a trend?

This morning, for the first time, I left Kia behind when I took Tilly out for a quick pre-prandial morning stroll. If I don't have to walk until about 8:00, Kia's good to go. But on the mornings that I need to get the puppy walked earlier, she's so stiff that the walk is agonizing for all of us. Tilly, because we're going so slowly; me, because I'm trying to control 22 lbs of anxiously straining puppy at the end of the leash (I'm also not getting much of a cardio workout); and (I can only assume) Kia, who looks so stiff it's hard for me to watch. So, as equally hard as it was to see her face when I left this morning without her, I decided that discretion was the better part of valor and headed out.

It's very funny to walk Tilly after all of these years with Kia, for so many reasons. Kia is a long-legged dog. Very long-legged (in fact, I remember when we'd first gotten her and Grandmom told me that I was going to start to look like that dog if I spent any more time with her, and all I could think was "lean and long-legged? let me at it"). And Tilly isn't. So, where Kia always pranced in her younger days, picking her legs up merrily with each step, head held high in the air, Tilly swarms along down low on the ground, snuffling at everything.

We will start puppy classes (assuming all goes well) next Monday night, now that I'm done teaching Monday classes. I'm looking forward to the day when Tilly's under voice control, and we can walk together without quite so much reliance on the leash, if for no other reason than that I won't have to stop whenever she wants to give something a quick sniff. I'm also looking forward to having her understand the importance of heeling to my left side; whenever she gets a scant bit of leash, she crosses to my right, which drives me batty. Since we walk facing traffic, if she's on my left, I'm on the road side, which makes me feel better about her safety relative to cars, which are more likely to see me than her (as short as I am, she's shorter).

Today's a pictureless post, as I haven't got my camera, and it hasn't any new pictures on it in any case. However, thanks to an extended Senate meeting today, I finished the eighth repeat of the stars shawl, and will be starting on the ninth (and final) repeat. Anne has decided on an edging for the top bit, and will be sending that to me soon. I'm completely charmed by it (but then, we all know that I have an unnatural relationship with edgings), and can't wait to get started. Soon, my precious, soon... But now, I must go face the last independent study of the semester, after which there are no more students to see; just miles and miles of grading.

Slowly and surely

Work on the shawl continues. I am making progress, and I can feel that I'm making progress, but it doesn't show very well in photos; more of the same, is more like it.
Does it look any bigger? It is, honestly. I'm now done with seven repeats, and into the eighth, so I'm getting there. I knitted at it a bit at a time today, in between loads of laundry (ah, the joy of Sundays at home). Here's the body and the edging closer up.
Patterns like this really suck me in. In 24 rows, the bigger motif repeats twice, and the smaller three times, and 24 rows feels like a really approachable number, especially as I've split them into four row sections on my chart with pencil lines. So I knit one RS row, and then of course, I have to knit the corresponding WS row, and then I notice that I'm only two more rows away from finishing a 4-row section, so I get those next two done, and then hey, look how far I've come, better do one more RS row and then... Well, you get the picture. Apparently I'm easily amused.

I've also been spinning this week, working on the Linguistic roving that Rabbitch dyed for me. Sitting down at the wheel for short periods of time is starting to feel easier, as it no longer takes quite so long for me to settle in.
What do you think? Aren't the colors amazing? They really are that vibrant, and there's an amazing royal blue in there, too, that you can't see so well in this shot. I'll be spinning another bobbin full with the second half of the roving, and then plying them together. I can't wait to see how it turns out.

In other news, it would appear that it's a good rattlesnake year here. In all the years I've lived and hiked in California (that would be my whole life, now I come to think of it), I have only ever seen two rattlesnakes, one in Simi Valley, and one in Big Sur. On Friday, I doubled that number. Rick and I took the dogs hiking while the girls had their piano lesson, and we saw two big fat rattlers on the trail. Neither of them could be bothered to even rattle at us, although their rattles were clearly visible, as were the diamonds on their backs, and their triangle-shaped heads. Tilly almost stepped on the first one, which was coiled up on the side of the trail (all 3 1/2 feet of him), and Rick saw the second across the trail before we got too close. Luckily, Kia has never been much of a dog for chasing wildlife, and Tilly didn't seem interested, but we're seriously thinking of enrolling in one of those rattlesnake-avoidance classes as part of her training. Laura pointed out yesterday that it's a big rabbit year, which usually means a rise in rattlesnakes and coyotes, and both of those snakes looked fat and well-fed, so I think we'll need to start being even more careful than we usually are.

Tonight, Rick and I get to go out for dinner -- a date! We're off very soon; an evening out the two of us is a rare and precious commodity, so I'm looking forward to it. And then on to the last week of classes before finals. Almost there...

Knitters!

Today was a good day.

The morning was good for the usual Saturday morning reasons; the farmer's market was wonderful and busy (except that the fiber lady wasn't there, which was a disappointment), and Older Daughter made it to and from her placement exam at her new school with no incident. But that's not what made this day particularly fun. The really fun stuff came later.

I had a date. With knitters.

At 11:00, I checked the traffic heading down I-5 to Encinitas after hearing someone on NPR announce that Legoland was expecting 70,000 vehicles today. For the love of Pete, I mean really. Luckily, there's a back way to Encinitas which involves not a single freeway (I know, anathema to anyone from the southland, but that's the way it goes), so I set out at 11:20, and made it to Encinitas in time for my 12:00 date.

With whom, you may ask? Why, with these lovely ladies.
That's Laura, and Anne, and (sadly blogless) Kim. (I've always wanted to write that "sadly blogless" thing; does this mean that I've arrived?)

Laura and Kim are both wearing shawls designed and knitted by Laura (are they not stunning?), and Anne is wearing (in an amazing incidence of worlds colliding) the Simurgh that she designed and I knitted. How wonderful is that? (It looks much better on her than on me, alas; but I made sure to get it back anyway.)

We had a lovely afternoon. We ate lunch at a Peruvian place on Coast Highway called Q'ero that I'd never tried but will be going back to just as soon as I can justify the drive south. The appetizers were particularly wonderful (I'm a sucker for appetizers in any case, and fried yucca with yummy sauce is my idea of heaven on earth), as was the company. Alas, the one picture I got of us in the restaurant doesn't really convey the fun we were having (Kim is getting out pictures of her handsome sons and beautiful daughter here; they sound like an amazingly fun bunch of young people -- I hope I do so well with mine!).
Trust me, it was good.

Then we headed for Common Threads, where we spent a great deal of time wandering about and patting the yarn (we will not speak of the fact that I accidentally picked up yarn for a pair of socks for Rick and a sweater for Younger Daughter, as well as a knitting book for Older Daughter, and a copy of the Wallaby pattern for a friend whom I am attempting to enable), before settling down in the back room to visit and compare lace.

When we'd sat long enough, we wandered a few blocks south to The Black Sheep, where I may have acquired a Lantern Moon bag, but I'm not saying. A small post-shopping amount of chocolate was consumed before we all headed out for our various homes. I think I may have had the shortest distance to travel, as Laura was headed up to Orange County, and Anne and Kim had to drive back to Kim's house before getting Anne onto a plane tonight for Ohio (I hope the flight went well, Anne!).

It was wonderful. It was nice to spend some time with like-minded knitters, and especially wonderful to meet Anne in person, as her email friendship has become such a great part of my life; her kindness and sense of humor are just as apparent in person as they have been as we've corresponded since last fall. Isn't it great when people turn out to be just as wonderful as they seem? And I'm hoping that, as we're in the same region, Kim and I will be able, at least once in a while, to indulge our love of bags together (call me, baby, you know I'll go bag shopping with you any day).

Not much knitting got done, but that's OK. It was truly knitterly anyway. And I am still making good progress on the stars shawl; I'm almost six and a half repeats in, and Anne thinks that it may only need nine, instead of ten. I'll see how I'm feeling when I get there, and how it's looking; I still haven't decided whether I'm keeping this one for myself or giving it away, and that may make a difference, as I'm short, and the person who might get it isn't quite so short as I (there need be no comments here about how no-one is as short as I, really -- I'm quite aware). I've also started another project about which I will write tomorrow that I think will be good car knitting for our trip up north next weekend. I'm hoping to get those two things done before starting on anything else too big. (Read: I am attempting desperately to ignore the cries of "cast me on, cast me on!" coming from the skein of Noro in my yarn bowl.)

Tomorrow: pictures of the star shawl (which just looks like a bigger version of what I've shown you before, but it's what I've got to show you), and my latest spinning project. And a story about hiking and rattlesnakes.

Boing!

I took these pictures yesterday, but didn't get around to posting them. I also didn't really make the list I'd promised myself I would (maybe this morning?), but I did begin to do some research for two of the projects that are hanging over my head, so I didn't completely fall down on the job.

Here it is, off the pins. I love this scarf!
I know I've said it before, but this stitch motif is so lively, and combined with the flow of the colors in this yarn, it's vibrant, without being overwhelming. It's not overly-long, which I like; it is the kind of thing that can be tucked into a collar to keep the chill off (I was hard put not to wear it yesterday, as it was bit breezy and cool, but I made do with Gust instead)(I know, my life is hard). Here it is, wrapped around my neck.
Not the world's best picture, but it gives you an idea of the length (it turns out it's hard to take pictures of yourself!).

On Monday, I'll be giving this scarf to my friend Patricia, for bravery and generosity above and beyond the call of friendship. I've been thinking a lot lately about the fact that I am not particularly good at accepting what I might call random acts of kindness directed at me. This has been borne home to me in a couple of ways this semester, and I think it's one of the long-lingering remnants of some very deeply-felt insecurities (of the "how could I possibly be worth this kind of effort on the part of other people" sort). One of the things that has brought this home to me is how worried I was at the beginning of the semester about asking my friend Patricia if she'd help me out in a class, and how much more worried I became when she said yes (what if she hates it? what if she has a miserable time? what if she never wants to talk to me again when this is over? -- that kind of thing).

The class I have been teaching is a course in linguistic field methods. The idea is to give students a taste of what it would be like to be a real, live field linguist, faced with gathering data about a language they don't know and then analyzing that data with an eye towards documentation. This, of course, requires a speaker of a language that none of us knows (the course tends to go even better if the professor also doesn't know the language; students then get the experience -- and the faculty member gets the stress -- of seeing the professor analyze data on the fly). And my friend, originally from Senegal, speaks not only English and French, but also Wolof. And when I asked whether she'd consider being our consultant, she said yes.

She said yes, in spite of the fact that she was nervous about it, not having used Wolof in regular conversation for some time. She said yes, in spite of the fact that this meant coming to campus right after working all day with preschool students (she's a Montessori teacher, and we know how much I admire people who have the patience to work with small humans all day) to spend two hours working with college students. For the first half of the semester, she also had to pick up her two children and bring them to the class with her, where they amused themselves like troopers in the back of the classroom.

And let me tell you, she made me look good in there! She's the kind of consultant that every linguist wants. Patient, willing to repeat herself endless numbers of times (maybe the Montessori training coming through?), engaged in the process, and charmed every time she figured out what it was the students were trying to learn about Wolof; having a speaker say, "I never knew my language did that! How neat!" is every field linguist's dream. And because she is that kind of person, because she was friendly, and patient when my students had trouble writing what she was saying on the board, or when their questions didn't make sense the first time, she made my students' jobs easier, which made me look like I'd planned this whole thing to the hilt, instead of just being along for the ride (which is what fieldwork is really all about).

And she did all of that, just because I asked. I tell you, that's a lot of pressure for a person who would just as soon not put people out on her behalf if at all possible (that would be me).

It's the kind of thing that reminds me that many people really are, at heart, kind. And that people really do commit selfless acts, just because it's the right thing to do, or because they care about the person they're helping. It's a nice thing to be reminded of. And so I'm going to give her Boing! (which fits her personality in so many ways -- she has to be one of the most vibrant people I know), which is a small thing, but what I've got right now. From the moment I finished the first pattern repeat, I knew this was her scarf, so on Monday, off it goes, with my thanks for both making my class fun enough that I wish it wouldn't end (!!), and for reminding me that acts of kindness offered with grace should be accepted with grace. I'm working on it.