Friday, May 09, 2008
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OK, now I'm stretching the theme a bit. But here are some images that put a smile on my aging visage.
Cracked me up:
Get your antioxidants.
From Berroco.
Made me proud:
Cousin Stephanie's University of Michigan afghan knit for her BF. (Wise girl, knows better than to knit her man a sweater before he ponies up with the you know.)
Intarsia, baby, must be love.
Made me stop and smell:
Lilacs 2008
Made my heart swell:
Of course the moment lasted all of two seconds, but still...
Antone in repose.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
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Last night at the North Denver Knitting Guild, Marybeth regaled us with tales of Yarn School: Three-plus days of classes in dyeing, fiber prep and spinning that take place in an early 20th-century schoolhouse. All meals and fiber included. And you should have seen Marybeth's dye jobs and nifty art yarns.
The event takes place in Harveyville, KS, at The Harveyville Project, a creator retreat and artist refuge founded by two urban refugees interested in escaping city noise and reclaiming a bit of Americana. (One of the urban escapee is Nikol Lohr, author of Naughty Needles.)
Anyway, we were weak in the knees at the thought of it and excited beyond belief. Isn't enthusiasm a wonderful tonic?
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
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Yesterday as we were driving back from El Rancho--a non-sustainable endeavor to be sure--we listened to Terry Gross' interview with Al Gore. Before she launched into a discussion of his book, The Assault on Reason, she asked the requisite questions about the Democratic race for the nomination, prefacing her questions with the phrase, "as an elder party statesman..."
Gore laughed and good humoredly took umbrage at being called an "elder party statesman," saying that a woman approached him recently saying, "If you had dark hair, you'd look just like Al Gore"!
It would appear that even a Noble prize doesn't insulate one from feeling tender about one's age.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
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Cheerful slug, huh?
But it's been something with which I've been preoccupied, so thought I'd open the discussion.
Yesterday, I received an email from my friend Stephanie alarmed by a dream that turned her out like a wrinkly Johnny Cash, only blonde. Stephanie looks nothing like Johnny Cash, though I believe she's a fan. She is not blonde. Nor is she wrinkly. I think it's a creativity dream. Kind of a "I-hear-the-train-a-comin'" warning shot about time flying and you better get crackin' on fulfilling your creative life or you'll end up like looking like Johnny Cash. Or something.
I could be projecting here, because I have these dreams all the time. In my dreamscapes, lately, I look really young or really old or really thin or really fat and people think my writing is brilliant or that it sucks or I've finished my novel or haven't or I'm working on a campus and things go terribly wrong, but I look really good doing it. Or something. A subconscious is a terrible thing to waste, isn't it?
At a dinner party recently, Mitch was talking to our hostess who expressed her annoyance with a 60-year-old friend of hers, a single gentleman, who, when she inquired whether he'd like to meet an attractive woman of similar vintage, explained to her in no uncertain terms his criteria for potential dates. Wants 'em younger.
Another friend of mine who has single girlfriends in this age group confirmed the phenomenon. Her take: "Like 60-year-old men look so great naked"?
Much of this fretting has to do with the fact that Mitch and I are staring down significant birthdays in the not-too-distant future. The AARP birthdays. The birthday where, all your more senior girlfriends report, everything sags, deteriorates, shuts down, wrinkles up, expands, contracts, turns brown, falls out, dries up. Or something. Oh goody, can't wait. I
t's hard enough to feel valued as a woman in this culture--hell, most cultures--without taking one's beauty quotient into account. Not to mention the nagging tempus fugit messages bubbling up at night. I really don’t know where I’m going with this, but would appreciate any thoughts you might have about keeping it together while the bod falls apart.
Friday, May 02, 2008
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I met this really cute guy.
He was wearing a clean shirt at the time.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
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This is one of those times I wish we had smellivision so you could smell this amazing soap. My soap, typically, is pretty homely, sopa ala rustica, but it does the job and this batch happens to be especially odiferous. In a good way. Ylang-ylang and tangerine with shea butter and organic rose hip oil.
Makes it even more fun to get nake-id!
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
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I wasn't doing anything extreme, I swear. No Celtic cables. No two-handed Fair Isle. Just a few M1s and kerpow. Size 4 ebony. Snapped like twigs. Not delighted. Not delighted at all.
Monday, April 28, 2008
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Saturday afternoon I pulled the dough I made the day before from the refrigerator and placed it on a "lightly floured surface"" to roll it out. It was so hard, it would have been much more at home in a bowling alley than on a lightly floured surface. Given I had guests arriving for luncheon in a few hours, I called my friend Lisa, a trained chef.
L: You've got to roll it out right after you make it.
L: But the recipe said you could refrigerate it.
L: It's just never the same.
L (who has a history of making pie crusts with the consistency of dry wall): How do you mean, it's never the same?
L: Not as flakey. Tougher.
L: Great.
After letting the dough warm, I began beating it with the rolling pin rolling it out. Who knew cooking could be so aerobic? In a flurry of flour and upper-body machinations, I managed three sh*tty looking rustic pie crusts that remarkably became three quiches: Asparagus and Irish cheese; roasted red pepper, bacon and smoked cheddar and spinach, red onion and feta. Served with chilled rose and the company of three friends, who made even this humble offering seem sweet and fine.
Friday, April 25, 2008
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Does your inner editor ever get the best of you?
Mostly, mine stays put with the occasional outing reserved for Mitch, "You're not going to wear that"? Or the cats, "For God's sake, get off the keyboard"!
And when I'm writing, she's always there to make sure I don't get a swelled head.
Last night, faced with the prospect of frogging that damned shrug a second time, I am reminded of the value editors bring to a project. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with this pattern, except after completing the garment my arms looked like kielbassa sausages and my breasts, like they had been subjected to heat and pumped through an extruder. This may be more a problem of body type than writing, but I would argue that a caveat like, "more is more when it comes to knitting wrapalicious garments. Error on the side of knitting too much as opposed to too little," might go a long way. I read the measurements on the schematic literally, but should have recognized that this item is meant to kiss the body, not hug it.
Never fear, I'll unseam the arms and reknit the collar to unencumber the girls.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
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Some of us remember the first Earth Day. It was a big deal. We learned about it in school. In fact I remember one especially dire film, probably narrated by Walter Cronkite (they were all narrated by Walter Concrite, it seemed, except for the ones about men-stru-a-tion), which ended with the image of a giant bulldozer about to crush a nest of hatchling chicks.
Chaos broke out in the classroom. Wouldn't the filmmakers have stopped the bulldozer? And if not, why not? How could they allow those birds to die?
As I recall that was the point of the documentary, giant smokestacks spewing sulfurous gases into the air, litter clogging the waterways, wall-eyed fish washing up onto the shore. And dead chicks.
Of course, we were the generation subjected to those nasty lungs. Remember those? Some guy from the cancer association would tour schools with these two plastic cases. One contained a healthy human lung. The other a smoker's lung. He would attach a pump to the cases to demonstrate how the pink, non-smoker's lung filled and deflated efficiently while the black, shriveled smoker's lung wheezed and quivered like an old squeeze box.
I suspect they treat children's feelings more gently today. But I can tell you one thing, I've never smoked a single cigarette. And I grew up with an absolute horror of scarring virgin land.