Ordinary Canary

Two months ago, during our last snow storm, I went out and bought a pressure cooker so that I could start making and storing my own stock. As a bit of a health nut, commercial stock drives me nuts because it’s so salty that after I eat anything with it, I’m immediately tempted to go and drink a gallon of water. So being able to make my own is cool, but it’s far too much effort to make some every time I want to use some.

Yesterday it snowed again, so apparently it was time to make stock:

My Beloved moved in with two very, very large pots that are perfect for this. They are so large that they do not actually fit into any of our cabinets.

Recipe (Golden Veggie Stock):

- Take lots of old veg (onions, mushrooms, carrots, parsnips and the like) and a sweet potato or two. Boil with some nice spices, like oregano and rosemary. (Think Italian). I like to make sure I have an actual fennel in there, as it’s a nice strong flavor. After the veggies have boiled the flavor out of them (about an hour), strain out the veggie parts.
- This leaves a very pale golden stock, but it’ll darken during the canning process.
- Can according to the pressure cooker’s instructions. In my case, this means 11 pounds of pressure for 20 minutes for the big jars and 25 minutes for the small. (I obviously need to invest in more big jars. Who ever needs a quart of stock?)

The last time I did this, I did about half the amount, with twice the amount of veg. From initial taste tests, I completely overdid it last time – and then I ran out of stock within a month because I actually had good stock to use, so I used it in everything.

The whole canning process does take a while, since I can only do so many jars at a time, but it makes you feel so incredibly cool and independent. Take that, commercial food corporations.

Just like last year, I started this year by going to Vogue Knitting with a hacking cough and taking a class, while wishing all the time to be drawing significantly less attention than I was.

But I was signed up for Franklin Habit’s Photographing Your Fiber class and I was *not* going to be missing that. (Also, I am cheap.) The class was excellent and informative, with a good grounding in photography basics. I already knew the basics of photography, the aperture and shutter speed bits and that photographing is quite literally recording light, but I’ve really struggled with how to take good photography of my fiber projects when I have no north facing windows and only see my house in daylight in the winter months on the weekends. He had some great suggestions. He also had a light tent. Now I desperately want a light tent, so that will be next weekend’s project.

I took the picture above in the class in the lightbox; it’s also my latest handspun, which is yarn that I’d actually like to knit with. I’m getting a lot better, though I’m not sure what I want to knit with this. It’s a nice change from my normal mode of putting the project on my gray driveway on cloudy weekend days. Color saturation will always be a problem, so his advice was not to worry about it. I am proceeding to not worry. See me not worry.

The yarn is green. Really.

I went to a lecture by Debbie Bliss, which was not what I expected. I thought it was going to be about customizing knitting patterns to your body, or at least in picking designs that will suit your figure type. It was more of a marketing event for Debbie Bliss, in which she proved to us that she does have very many nice patterns indeed. The sum up of useful information is that knitwear stretches a lot, so negative ease is fine as long as there’s a good fit in the shoulders. Also, A lines under the bust suit just about everybody.

Fortunately, I was feeling so ill that I left having purchased only 9 balls of yarn and four ounces of llama. It’s not my fault; the llama was local to Long Island, so I was just supporting local farming and I had to. Also, it is llama. LLllllllamma.

I am still quite sick, but I did finish a hat this weekend for the Man, who has such a big melon that he’s never had a hat that fit properly before. In fact, I couldn’t find any patterns for hats that would fit his head, so I had to make one up. It actually fits and he likes it a lot, though he is a very impatient model. (Franklin warned us about that too. He’s a genius.)

He likes it so much that he’s decided I’ll be knitting one for his brother. Ahem.

Christmas was a quiet affair filled with good friends and family, which is what it’s all about. I made out with some very thoughtful loot and ate slightly more than my body weight in cookies.

But I have prevailed; the cookies are all dead. In my belly.

I enjoy the week between Christmas and New Years an awful lot because it is so quiet. After all the hustle and bustle of lights, tree, cooking, family, etc., it becomes almost necessary downtime. The trains are quiet, nearly everyone is gone from the office, and I have no excuses for not getting a great deal done. As a productivity nut and worker bee, this makes me very happy. As a person with an exciting life to write about, well, not so much. But it’s been a nice quiet. I’ve been able to conquer the world in Civilization get some writing projects done, master some Bach and finish some big projects that have been hanging over my head at work. It’s a nice feeling.

I see other bloggers out there doing lists of what they’d like to do next year. It’s made me think about some of the highlights of this year. This year, I:

- got engaged to the love of my life (this is a celebration, not an accomplishment)
- actually managed to get good enough at the piano to be able to sight read stuff where the left hand does more than play chords. Slowly, mind.
- learned how to fox trot, to rhumba, to merengue
- learned that if fox trotting, rhumbaing or merenguing with a 6’3″ man, heels are a good idea. Otherwise, neck injury occurs.
- (self)published a knitting pattern
- had the realization that not being my skinniest weight ever does not, in fact, make me a bad person
- watched my ward pull in grades higher than he thought possible on his report card, despite having skipped most of two years of school a few years back.
- adopted a house hippy. Everyone should have one.
- learned to rip up carpet and stained all the wood for a new staircase in a weekend
- went to a spinning convention and actually learned how to spin yarn that looks like yarn
- fell in love with the mountains of eastern Oregon and took some awesome pictures
- bought a cowboy hat
- knit multiple sweaters, learned to not hate knitting socks and designed a few more things on my own
- have actually done a little bit of wedding planning, despite hating it like you wouldn’t believe
- actually genuinely enjoyed the holidays for a third year running

It has, all in all, been a good year. We are all safe and happy and the family grew again this year (see the house hippy aspect). I am filled with gratitude and can only marvel at my good luck. Life is good; my only goal for next year is to keep it good.

Happy New Year everyone. Let’s make 2012 even more filled with light than 2011.

I’ve been very distracted lately, because I’ve discovered Librivox, which is a collection of public domain audiobook recordings. For free. This means that I can knit and have someone read Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy and Charlotte Bronte to me. If you don’t know about it, go now and download the books you always wished that you’d read, but never made time for. You can multitask! It’s a dream.

We went down to Virginia for Thanksgiving and had a very quiet visit, which was actually really what the doctor ordered. I took my new spinning wheel, the Majacraft Rose, because, well, it has a carrying bag. And carrying bags ought to be used. I managed to spin up about 2 ounces of alpaca, which I really ought to finish working on, as I have another 2 ounces left. My spinning has gotten so much better since SOAR, so now I must show a picture of the last skein I finished:

I’m not a master by any means, but I have improved an awful lot, which feeds into spinning as a new obsession. I’ve picked up a few tomes on spinning techniques now, as well as having subscribed to SpinOff, which mostly seems to be an excuse to look at pictures of weird looking sheep. Like merinos.

I have been doing a fair amount of knitting as well, including picking up a cardigan that I never quite liked the fit of and making the shawl collar twice as wide. It’s the first sweater I ever made and nearly took me two years to complete, as I naturally picked the most difficult cable pattern in the universe to learn how to cable on.

I feel like this picture should really be called Self-Portrait. Plants, books, games and knitting. If only it paid better.

Somehow it became December without me looking, but I’m procrastinating finishing up my holiday shopping. (I can say that, as I have purchased exactly two presents already). Tomorrow I’m going to find someplace in the house to put the tree and potentially procure one. I never used to be much of a fan of Christmas trees until I realized that having something gigantic and organic (unlike, say the giant fern in the picture above) is kind of awesome. We may even get ambitious and climb ladders and put up lights – coming home to a nicely lit house makes the dark of December so much more bearable.

As does sock yarn.

*Cough*.

This week was an extraordinarily challenging and draining one. I am very glad that it is Friday night and that I get two days to try and recharge my batteries before we go down to Virginia for Thanksgiving.

We had some excitement at the office on Thursday, when the Occupy Wall Street protesters decided to close down Wall Street for the day. I work two blocks from Wall Street, so what they effectively also did was close down Broad Street, while screaming about closing down Wall Street. I know this, because I asked if they’d let me through to my building, and the protesters instead formed a human chain and started chanting about how they were peaceful protesters. I got into it with one of the protesters, who had no idea that he was blocking access to a building that doesn’t have a single thing to do with Wall Street, other than that we eat at the same delis as the people who work at the Stock Market.

It was stressful and scary, particularly after a cop tried to clear a space for us to get through and the protesters on the edge went nuts and attacked the cop, with cameras zooming in for video footage. And it was frustrating, because I’m 100% sympathetic to the protesters, but got presumed to be the enemy. And then I was physically blocked from going where I needed to go, which isn’t going to change a damn thing, and is just really kind of awful.

I know well that liberals eat their own. That’s exactly what I’m doing here. I think the protests are a good thing for a number of reasons. I don’t think they’re going to be directly productive, but they’re productive in the way that the Tea Party is productive. People are pissed off and now people are talking about it. They’re pissed off on the left and the right, for eerily similar reasons. So it’s good that people are protesting. Politicians may well take note. Things could potentially change for the better.

But it’s not good that the protesters are getting violent enough to physically stop people from walking down the street. Admittedly, New York is not a good city for massive gatherings. I grew up in D.C, where the avenues are wide and protests tend to happen in big parks. I grew up going to them. New York doesn’t really have those kinds of spaces, so when people protest, they do it at the expense of the neighborhood that they’re in. Businesses get blocked off. Cars get stepped on. Crowds get dense and out of control and people get hurt. That’s a lot of the reason the cops have been out in force, though it’s certainly much more popular to believe they’re just evil. Or something.

It’s a lot harder to go on the presumption that we’re mostly decent human beings at heart, but that our reactions and opinions differ. I’m getting so tired of listening to the left and the right call each other idiots, the protesters going on about how all cops are evil and against them and…well, I haven’t heard a word from the police, but the same rules apply. Both sides make mistakes. Both sides are filled with humans. Propaganda and name-calling is getting us nowhere.

I know it’s hard to listen to someone you disagree with, but do it for me.

Spinning 101 Class Table, a photo by searchingbuddha on Flickr.

I’ve been at SOAR the last week, which is Spin Off magazine’s big conference each year. It’s been an incredible experience and I haven’t quite finished processing everything that’s happened. Tonight is the last night, so there’s still a big spin-in, but my classes are all over and my shopping done and we’re starting to pack, so it’s beginning to feel like goodbye.

I took a three day workshop with Maggie Casey that focused on the basics of spinning. I’ve been hand carding and combing wool and learning tons about fiber prep. I’ve finally figured out the difference between spinning woolen and worsted and got a lot of practice with the various spinning methods. I learned to make an Andean bracelet and chain ply. She’s an excellent teacher and it was a real honor to learn from her.

I also took a class with Michelle Boyd on how to even out spinning (super helpful) and one with Robin Russo on camelied fibers, where I got to try and spin lots and lots of three toed animal furs. I’m still very much a baby spinner, but I’ve advanced a whole lot in the past week. Just watching master spinners and being around lots of people who are doing really excellent things with the craft is so utterly neat. I am feeling very inspired. And tired. I may have been talked into spending my rest day spinning for a vendor here, as he offered to pay me in alpaca. Lovely, lovely alpaca.

I may have also bought another wheel. Second hand, with lots and lots of perks and kits included, for hundreds less than it would have cost me new. It’s a fabulous deal and one I’m happy to take advantage of.

And one I’ll be even happier to take pictures of, once it gets here. It’ll be a few weeks left.

I haven’t given up on my Thumbelina, who I will be keeping, as the wheel is forty years old and deserves some respect. But the Rose will give me a lot more flexibility and is an easier wheel to work on, so I’m excited about the possibilities. And the double treadle. Oh god, the double treadle.

This is the first vacation I’ve ever taken where I get to focus on art for an entire week. I think it may be the first week of my life in which there are no distractions from my artistic side. I often feel really pressured to produce art and make a living at the same time. The latter is necessary and I know I’m blessed to have a career that is fun, lucrative and challenging. But it just doesn’t answer my need to have an artistic outlet, so it’s been awesome and inspirational. I can’t wait to put everything I’ve learned into practice.

I’ve been feeling very overwhelmed with all the management that I have to do in my life.  Aside from the literal management that I do at work, between staff and projects (I seem to be the “give her a giant project that could bring down our whole network since we know she’ll carry it off okay” person), I’ve got a lot going on on the homefront.  We’re getting roofing work done, I’m managing a mortgage refinance, school has started and the kid is joining a soccer team on top of all his other stuff and there’s vacation coming up.  So things are busy.  Very, very good but very, very busy.

I always find myself turning towards creativity when my stress levels reach these heights.  And by creativity, I mean yarn.  There’s just something about being able to hold something in your hands that you’ve made.  Perhaps it’s because so much of my work happens virtually; I work hard all day long, but there’s very little in the physical world to show for all that effort.  Spinning and knitting and crochet pick up the call.  Good yarn is so soothing to hold; nothing beats looking at a sweater or a ball of yarn and thinking, “Hey, I did that.”

Here’s a picture my second bit of homespun yarn, which is a big improvement on the first, but goes to show that SOAR will be worth the money.

   This is spun from Corriedale and is a whole bunch better than the last yarn I spun.  I’ve been focusing on spinning more air into the yarn, as it make the yarn loads more pleasant.  I’ve no idea what I’m going to do with this, as I only have 215 yards (but hey, I remembered to count yardage this time).  I’ve already made one cowl for the season and am working on another with some homespun, but can one have too many colorful warm neckerchiefs?  I’m feeling like scarves are too much this year – and cowls have *buttons*.  I’ve become kind of insanely button obsessed, or rather, because I’m a knitter, *buttonhole* obsessed.  I do love making buttonholes, which I learned how to do for this project:

This was my first homespun yarn, with a cowl pattern I made up.  I’m pleased with the buttonholes, but not  a whole lot else.  Being my first yarn, it’s spun very, very stiff, because I just didn’t know better until I tried to knit with it.  But being a cowl, it knit up ridiculously quickly – and it does fit around my neck, which means I’ve learned a thing or two about sizing appropriately.  So, uhm, yeah.  Just overlook the cable pattern that didn’t quite work out.

I’ve also been knitting sweaters, but I don’t have pictures yet of the finished project.  I’ve already finished my first one of the year, although it is blocking for the second time at the moment, as it’s knit in a rather nontraditional manner and didn’t quite stretch as anticipated.  But it was made in lovely, lovely Cascade 220 Heathers and I cannot wait until it dries.  And it was excellent to finally try out one of Ann Weaver’s patterns, as she’s a designer that I’ve really admired for quite some time.  She’s innovative and it shows, because it is a neat, neat sweater.  If only you could see it.

I went on a bobbin hunt last Saturday for my spinning wheel, as I only have two and I need three.  It took me to a famous yarn and spinning shop that only carried Ashford bobbins, alas, but since I was there and it was quite a drive, I had to buy something.  To my delight, I discovered Rowan Tweed there at a semi-reasonable price.  I think Rowan Tweed may actually be my favorite yarn of all time, so I bought three balls, giving me about 600 yards to work with.  I keep thinking of the scarf from Lost in Translation, which has haunted me for literally years, but I’m not yet sure what the destiny of this freaking gorgeous yarn is going to be.

  Of course, I had no business buying yarn when I still have 1,200 yards of my gorgeous three ply mystery yarn from Henry’s Attic.  I bought this in a little yarn shop out in Joseph, Oregon when we were on vacation with the idea of making a serious keep-me-warm 19th century type shawl with it.  I’ve been browsing patterns, but haven’t quite found my inspiration yet, although there is a pattern in Nancy Bush’s Knitted Lace of Estonia that’s coming close to the right idea.  My yarn is the wrong weight, but I think I can steal some of the ideas.  Once I stop being lazy, that is.

And by being lazy, I mean knitting sweaters by hand.

It’s September 11th, ten years after the event. There’s so much that’s been written about this that I couldn’t dare, even if I wanted to. But I find that I don’t want to – that day was horrible enough to live through the first time. Perhaps it’s cowardly of me, but I can’t stand to watch any of the coverage. I hate being reminded that we live in a world where people exist that spend all their productivity on hurting other people. The September 11th attacks are a demonstration of the worst part of humanity. I don’t want to give people like that any more attention than they already get. And I don’t just mean Al-Qaeda – every country and every group has its murderers in the population. We must understand ourselves and each other as humans first. We are all responsible for and to each other.

I’m a Washingtonian and a New Yorker. My two homes were attacked. But I want to live a life filled with gratitude and light. It is so easy to drown in the badness in the world. Spending a day reliving the emotions of that day, as I tried to track down the safety of people in both of my cities, is just too much.

I spent this morning watching kids play soccer at the community center. Kids who don’t remember the attacks, or a world unchanged by them, but are out and joyful and worried about nothing more than keeping the ball out of the goal. I was surrounded by family, knitting in my hands. I was filled with gratitude. The day was crisp and beautiful, like it was ten years ago. We talked about it. Looking back, we all seemed so young. It’s one of those pivotal moments in a culture that people just don’t forget. Major hurricanes, volcanoes, terrorist attacks. You remember where you were.

We were so young ten years ago. And yet, time has gone on. I decided to celebrate life.

I ran some errands. One of them was to fix my car, which someone tried to break into during the hurricane. They fortunately did this rather ineptly, so I have a car to fix, but they did knock out my turning indicator, which means I can’t drive it. But this is a minor problem, compared to the “evacuate because a hurricane is coming” problem of two weeks ago. It’s hard to be too upset, although it was done while we were evacuated, which means it was probably someone I see every day. But it’s just stuff. The car is just a thing.

We ran to get groceries and then I spent the afternoon doing the cooking for the week. (And pie!) While I was chopping vegetables, listening to Norah Jones on Pandora and filled with peace, I looked out the back door into the yard. There, my fourteen year old cat and my thirteen year old cat were pouncing on dried leaves like they were newborn kittens. Even today, when we’re all thinking of death and murder, life goes on, unstoppable and, in some places still, innocent.

In the darkness, light.

Is that really two blog posts in a row about the weather? Oh yes, yes it is.

Hurricane Irene hit this past weekend. I was too busy to blog about it because we were worrying about a possible mandatory evacuation, which we got sometime on Friday night. Unlike the majority of my neighbors, apparently, this means that we packed up and left and spent a really uncomfortable twenty-four hours in a hurricane shelter.

Of course, my neighbors didn’t have a tree drop on their car in Hurricane Isabel in 2003, but I did. Maybe it’s the Virginian in me, but I know what a hurricane can do. When the police tell you to leave, staying behind is asinine.

People are now screaming about the government and media overreacting, which is also asinine, as when the order was issued, there was a Category 2 hurricane due to hit us, which is not a joke. We got lucky in that it downgraded to a tropical storm just as it was leaving our area, but it could have been so much worse than it was. It’s likely to still be days until we have public transportation back up and running the way it normally does, since quite a lot of semaphores are damaged, so the trains can’t run.

My neighbor yesterday said to me, “What, you were scared or something? I mean, they said the police wouldn’t arrest you if you didn’t leave, so what was the problem?”

Long Island, my friends, Long Island in a nutshell.

We are due, within minutes, another epic flash-flood rainstorm here on Long Island, which will be the second in as many weeks. Last week’s rainstorm rained ten inches in one day, which is an awful lot of rain, but particularly when you live four feet above sea level, as it has absolutely nowhere to go. Also much of what is dropping down on your head just came from the ocean. Some of it straight into my dining room, which was unfortunate.

But fortunately I live with someone who knows what to do about that. In fact, at this point, *I* know what to do about it. The house has been filled with drips and leaks that we’ve been slowly plugging up as we go, which is probably what I get for buying a 90 year old house.

So I’ve taken measures to keep the rain on the outside of the house and we’ll see how it goes.

It’s otherwise been a very quiet weekend, which was just what the doctor ordered. I’ve watched three entire movies while not actually doing something with my hands, which is a serious indication of how exhausted I’ve been lately. We went on Friday and saw One Day (likable, not challenging, lame ending). Then, as our hippy rightfully is fed up with movies that always have to end with a romantic ending, he picked out a couple to watch that were not uplifting, but were very, very good. We started with Boys Don’t Cry, which….just has to be seen, but not with children. Then we followed up with Skin, which at least ended with some happy music. Also very good. Go see it. In fact, skip right past basically anything in the movie theaters to see it.

I mean, it was One Day or Conan the Barbarian.

I did pick up the kid from the airport today, so my little family is almost nearly reunited. Himself is still in Ireland for another week, but the house is slowly filling up. On Tuesday, I’ll be picking up a cousin from the airport (I really should have priority parking at JFK by now, as this will be my fifth visit in a month), which I’m really looking forward to. This is the last visit for the summer, which must mean that things are winding down. The season change is upon us, so I grabbed up all the tomatoes I could handle and made sauce to freeze. That’s what August is, isn’t it? Frozen tomato sauce?

The rain has finally hit us, which is a great relief for the humidity and my sinuses, which have been awaiting this storm via giant headache. It is now the absolute best kind of summer day, as I never feel as fantastic as I do the day *after* a killer sinus headache. Nothing but blue skies tomorrow.