The Local Book Store is Dead!

That title is kind of an overstatement, but still....  I realised today that an institution I have been very fond of is no longer what it used to be and I'm sad.  This has been coming for a long time and I should have realized.  Today was just the day it hit me. 

To put today in context, I need to explain something and it's special enough to put in fancy letters:

Our daughter wrote a novel and today is the official publication date!!!

 David and I are just a wee, tiny bit proud....  😊

In case anyone is reading this and doesn't know our family, I will protect our daughter's privacy by referring to her by her pseudonym, which is Ada Hoffmann.   Her book is called "The Outside". I read an advanced copy of the first couple of chapters and it was about interesting characters in an interesting Sci Fi world and crazy things were happening and I can't wait to find out what will happen next!

So this afternoon we drove over to our local version of a big book chain. 

This store happens to be a new one, part of a renovated section of a local mall.  We used to patronize their old store, which was huge, and there were lots of helpful people in there who wanted to help us find things and get ideas.  I have never forgotten a year when our youngest child was in Grade 8 and we wanted to find him some new books for his birthday.  I wandered into the old store and started browsing the "young adult" section and an employee immediately saw me and asked if she could help me find something.  I told her I was browsing for ideas and she asked a couple of questions about our son and what he'd been reading and she said "oh, if he likes those I bet he'll like...." and started pulling books off the shelves.  I chose several of them and it was a very successful birthday.  That's what book stores are supposed to be like -- a place where you can browse and get suggestions and generally share the love of books.

This new store is less than half of the size of the old one and a great deal of its space was devoted to knick-knacks and cutesy stuff, some of it relating to books and some having nothing to do with books.  It was almost like the bookshelves were afterthoughts.  We ran to the rather small Science Fiction section and looked for the H's.  Not a single copy of this novel or her previous book of short stories.  (It would have been really cool too, because she would have come right after Heinlein!!!)  I thought maybe books didn't always arrive in the stores by the official dates, or maybe we weren't looking in the right place, so we talked to a very bored clerk.  She said basically "oh yeah, I don't know if we're going to stock that".  We said "she's a local author" and she said "we usually don't stock local authors unless they reach out to us".  It was almost like she was stifling a yawn while waiting to go back to selling t-shirts.  She directed us to the little computer where we could order our copies -- just like we could have done from home. 

I'm probably being a little ridiculous about this.  We'll get our copies pretty soon and it will be exciting to read them, and that's what really matters.  I understand that Internet shopping is changing everything and it is a great convenience.  To be perfectly honest, this new book store has been open for months and I'd never been in there before.  Usually we hear about books online or from friends and order them online.  I haven't been supporting local book stores, so I'm part of the problem.  Why should I have expected that that wonderful sort of big book store I remembered would be there waiting for me when I decided to go back?  And maybe with the Internet we don't actually need that kind of great big book store anymore.  Still, I wasn't ready to walk into that store and find something so different from what I had expected.

I guess you can't have your cake and eat it too.  The online "bookstores" make it so much easier to order books by new authors that not every store might carry.  

There is still a little independent book store downtown, run by people who love to read books and help people find good books to read.  We're going to patronize it more in the future and consider ordering books through them instead of from the big names if they get a cut.  Even if their books cost a little more than books from the big box store we would like to do business with a place that offers real service and gives back to the community.

And the good news is that you can still get a copy of Ada's book no matter where you live.  You might have to go online, but it's available everywhere.

Politics (eek!)

I try not to be a very political person, but today I'm making an exception.  I want to make this a general reflection about things that have been going through my head, rather than a specific political rant.  I'm not sure if it will end up making sense to anyone except me, but I need to get this off my chest.

For anybody who reads this and doesn't know, I grew up in the U.S. but have lived in Canada for more than half my life now.  This gives me a bit of a split viewpoint as I follow recent news and provides a lot of interesting material for conversation with my Canadian husband.  History and Civics were never my best subjects in high school, but I'm finding myself able to remember things from those long-ago classes.  I don't have a comprehensive set of details filed in my brain, but I do remember some of the basic principles we talked about at length.

I particularly remember a lot of discussion about "checks and balances".  For non-Americans reading this, the U.S. federal government is divided into three branches -- legislative, executive, and judicial (i.e. Congress, President & Supreme Court).  These checks and balances consist of a lot of rules in the constitution and later amendments, spelling out rules for how these three branches work together.  That includes things that each branch is supposed to do, things each branch is forbidden to do, and ways in which the three interact in both positive and negative ways.  I just found a nice little easy-to-read overview of this at https://bensguide.gpo.gov/j-check-balance. 

Setting aside personal political feelings, I'm reflecting that we're living in "interesting times", seeing a lot of these principles being demonstrated and tested and speculated about.  The president has the right under vaguely defined sorts of circumstances to declare a state of emergency and do an end run around congress to get something done.  The current president is certainly not the first one to do this.  The president has the right to veto bills passed by congress and the congress has the right to override those vetoes if they have a strong enough majority.  (And the Congress is divided into two houses, which sometimes cooperate and sometimes fight like cat & dog.)  The president appoints Supreme Court justices but Congress has to approve those appointments and Congress can impeach justices.  The Supreme Court can "interpret" bills and consider precedents set by presidents and congress.  

The principle behind all this is to spread power evenly between a large number of people so that it's harder to have one person or a small group of people hijack everything.   One can think of it like a three-legged table; when all three legs are working well the legs provide stability and make it harder to tip the table over than if it were balanced on just a single pedestal or two legs.  Or like a responsible adult sitting down with three squabbling children and telling them "you are going to have to find a way to calm down and work things out between you".

If you look at it another way it feels like a recipe for chaos.  Anyone who has tried to get even something small done by a group of people with vastly different opinions and backgrounds knows how difficult and unpleasant this can be.  So much simpler to have a single leader or small, homogeneous group that makes the hard decisions and for everyone to follow them.  But also much more dangerous.  

I remember some discussions about politics with my parents many years ago, agreeing that the ideal form of government might be a benevolent dictator -- someone wise enough to take all the hard decisions off of our hands and save everyone else the hard work of those messy decisions.  But the conversation went on to the obvious question: where do we find one of those? And if we miraculously found the perfect parental figure to lead us all in a perfect way, what happens when he or she dies or wants to retire?  

I'm thinking that the current state of the U.S. is a perfect example of this whole dilemma.  The government is looking like a jigsaw puzzle that just won't fit together into a whole.  Different individuals and groups within it have very different ideas of what is right and what should be done -- not just about immigration but about many other things as well.  It's chaos and it's hard to watch.  We all wish for wisdom and unity in high places.  Although if we examined that wish we would almost certainly find that we have widely different opinions about what wisdom (or even unity) would mean at the present time.

I'm kind of meandering towards a point here.  When power is shared between many people, it can be very messy and inefficient and frustrating and nobody may get exactly what they want.  But when power is concentrated in one person or one small homogeneous group, the risks are obvious.  So as upset as I am to see my country of birth floundering around and in-fighting as they are right now I will take it over the other options.  And I suddenly realised that I've run right back to Winston Churchill, who said "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

David and I just happened to finish watching the Ken Burns documentary about the Roosevelts and I was fascinated with FDR's time -- the depression and World War 2 and all of the changes and disagreements in those times. We are living in "interesting times" right now, but there have been interesting times before and there will be again and as long as we have the right to interact and discuss we'll get through it.   History is an extremely messy process and I don't see a way around that.

If anyone reading this doesn't like what I've written, that's OK.  That's what life is about.  We all see it in smaller scales -- in families, workplaces, churches, local organizations, etc.  Sometimes the fighting and disagreements are very hard to take, but they seem to be a necessary part of life.  The most we can hope for is to manage it with some degree of courtesy towards the other points of view.  If you know me personally I'd be happy to talk.  If you've just stumbled onto this page there's a limit to how much online arguing I can manage at the moment, but you still have the right to disagree.

OK, it's time to move from generalities to the current situation.  I've got Trump's speech recording right now and I need to be a big girl and turn on the DVR and watch it from the beginning and find out what is going to happen next in this great drama.  And then try to take deep breaths afterwards as the commentators argue about what it all means and what might happen next.  And remind myself that although North America is going through an extremely difficult time right now  the system is flexible enough that we're not stuck here.  There is potential for compromise and for corrections. 

I Grow Old

I am turning 60 today. For the last week a line from a poem has been going through my head:

“I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”

Not sure exactly what that means, but I like it. I take it as permission to stop worrying about conventions and how others might think I should think or dress or act. 

But today I’m thinking more serious thoughts too. Quite frankly, I don’t want to be 60. I didn’t like turning 50 and I dealt with that by not thinking about it much.  Today I really don’t like turning 60 and I’m making myself think about it.  It’s not really fear of death; I believe God will take care of me when I die. But it is a fear of becoming old and sick. It’s a fear of becoming useless and helpless.  Even more than that, it's regret about how much of my life has gone past and how many things there are that I would like to go back and change.  We don't get do-overs.

I often have music running through my head. Sometimes it’s random but sometimes it’s there to tell me something. Today it’s a song we sang in the church in Pittsburgh where David and I were married. I don’t remember all of it, but I remember these three lines:

     “For our life together we celebrate”

     “For the joy and for the pain we celebrate”

     “Celebrate the whole of it”

There is certainly a lot to celebrate about my life so far. I have not experienced the kind of pain and poverty that so many people in the world suffer from. I had good, supportive parents who made sure I got the good education which led to my career.  My husband and I will be celebrating our 35^th wedding anniversary in January. We have three interesting, creative children. And as of just yesterday we have an empty nest!   We belong to a wonderful church community and we have some wonderful friends.  I have done some worthwhile things – teaching, music, and at least some aspects of my parenting.

Still, like every single person in the world my life has included its share of pain. I am experiencing chronic physical pain at the moment and there has been pain in relationships and in my career.  Some of that pain has been of the "shit happens" variety, but  I am also very aware of ways in which I have caused or contributed to some of my own pain and given pain to others.   There is so much I would like to go back and fix. I can celebrate the joy but I don’t feel able to celebrate the pain and my first response is to rebel against this stupid “earworm”.

So I’m focusing on the third line of that song: “Celebrate the whole of it”. It is difficult to see my life so far as a whole instead of a tangle of details, let alone to celebrate it that way.  My decision for today is to take a leap of faith into that line and believe that my life so far, while imperfect, has overall been worth living and worth celebrating.   Instead of mentally replaying all of my failures I’m going to try remember that everyone (not just me) is imperfect and probably trying their best. I’m going to try to remember all of the good things in my life and the fact that God loves me no matter what.  

To celebrate this birthday (and perhaps to rebel against it just a little) I'm going out with my husband and one of my kids to see "Mary Poppins Returns".  Nobody is too old for Mary Poppins!  I loved her when I saw the first movie at the age of 5 and I loved her when I read the books and I can't wait to see this new chapter.  

When I was just about to finish this I got a wonderful text message from my wonderful sister:

                   "Happy Birthday!!! Can't believe one of us is 60!  Thank God it's you!"

I am very thankful for a sister who can make me laugh.  Nothing is as scary or horrible when you find a way to laugh at it.

Another Spritz Cookie Fail!

My mother was a great cook.  When I was a kid she let my sister and me help her, but she never wanted to give up complete control.  She wanted to be near the kitchen to hover and make sure we were doing everything just right.  One thing she made that I really loved was chocolate spritz cookies -- a soft cookie dough pressed through a cookie press to make little shapes.  She made these every year without fail at Christmas time and I loved helping her with them.

Today I remembered something I haven't thought about for decades: an occasion when Mom let me make spritz cookie dough without her help.  I must have been 10 or 11.  It was my turn the next day to bring a snack to a Camp Fire Girl meeting and I convinced her that I could make spritz cookie dough all by myself while she was working and then we could shape and bake the cookies later.  I proudly melted the chocolate and mixed up the dough on my own and set it aside to bake with her that evening.  I felt very proud of myself.

However, when it was time to shape the cookies after dinner we ran into some trouble; the dough wouldn't go smoothly through the cookie press.  Turns out I hadn't melted the chocolate squares quite carefully enough and there were little bits of unmelted chocolate in the dough -- pretty tiny chunks, but not big enough to fit through the little holes in the cookie press disks.  We ended up just shaping the dough by hand into little circles instead and the world went on turning, but in my memory she really gave me a hard time for that mistake.  The first time she trusted me to do a baking chore by myself and I had blown it!  I hadn't thought about that day in decades until today.

I am now quite a few years older than my mother was on the occasion of my memorable Spritz cookie fail.  I am also on some fairly strong pain pills while waiting for a back problem to be fixed.  They work, but they also make me kind of sleepy and absent-minded and lead to silly mistakes.  Still, Christmas isn't Christmas without cookies and today I decided it was the perfect days to make chocolate Spritz cookies.  I mixed up the dough and put it into the cookie press, thinking how nice it was to use the old favorite cookie recipes I remembered from childhood.  And then something else happened that I remembered from childhood: the dough had trouble fitting through the cookie press disks -- tiny little chunks of unmelted chocolate exactly like all those years ago!  I had forgotten to stir the chocolate carefully to make sure it was completely melted before I mixed it into the dough.  I was really mad at myself but started to see the funny side to it too.  Just when we think we're finally grown up we find ourselves regressing to childhood mistakes.  Nobody really grows up; we just like to think we do....

I managed to get a lot of the dough through the press, but many of the cookies are kind of "freckled" or misshapen.  Some bits of the dough wouldn't go through at all and I had to fish those bits out and make little circles by hand.   And you know what?  They aren't beautiful but they still taste good.  Life goes on and we'll have some nice cookies for Christmas.  I guess that's a double lesson from Mom -- strive for the best, but learn from your mistakes and improvise when you have to!

Here's wishing everyone a happy holiday free from cookie disasters, but also a sense of humor to get through the little things that sometimes go wrong.

A BSJ for Baby G

I am all done making the big scarves, mittens and hats for the Seafarers (using big fat yarn and big fat needles).  It was fun and felt rewarding, but after that I felt ready for a smaller project with smaller needles and yarn.

And what better than a baby sweater? This sweater is for Baby G, the daughter of a family friend.  I used the "Baby Surprise Jacket" pattern, by the famous and clever knitting designer Elizabeth Zimmermann.  I have made several of these and it's a pattern I always enjoy coming back to.  The sweaters are fun to make and the finished products are cute.

The "surprise" referred to in the title of this pattern is the fact that the pattern works even though it seems to make no sense at all while you're knitting it.  It's an exercise in faith.  You knit back and forth for 96 rows, making increases and decreases as directed, and it looks like a bunchy old rag.  Then you follow the directions and make a few folds and add a couple of little seams and -- surprise! -- you have a a baby sweater.  It never ceases to amaze me.

Since Baby G's mother is a physicist, I thought she would enjoy an illustration of how this sweater came together.  I have knitted this sweater with variegated yarn many times, but I thought this time I'd make it with four colors of yarn in stripes to make the construction a little clearer.  I like the way it came out.  (Thanks to my husband for taking me yarn shopping and helping me pick out the colors.  I would have gravitated towards bright colors and I think the result would have been a bit garish.  He has a better color sense than I do.  So much for gender stereotypes....)

I changed colors every 8 rows, which means that those 96 rows produced 12 stripes.  I told myself I would take a picture after finishing every stripe and I managed to remember 11 out of 12 times, which is pretty good.   The pictures were taken on a pair of regular-sized placemats, to give you an idea of the scale.


Stripe 1:

Stripe 2:

Stripe 3:

Stripe 4:

Stripe 5:

Stripe 6:

Stripe 7:

Stripe 8: (multiple increases in this stripe are are making a little ruffle at the top so the work no longer sits flat)

Stripe 9: (the ruffles are more noticeable now that there is more fabric on top of the increases)

(forgot to take a picture after stripe 10...)

Stripe 11: (Stripe 10 involved some back-and-forth knitting on the back of the sweater to provide extra space for the diaper bulge.  And you can see that at this point it's really impossible to lay the work out flat.)

Stripe 12 (This is the finished sweater before seaming.)

At this point, my husband suggested that I had knitted a "thnead".  (If you don't know what a thnead is, you need to review your Doctor Seuss.)

But now comes the magical folding step, which needs a video to do it justice:

 

After that, all I had to do was sew up the shoulder seams and add the buttons and it was done!:

 And a view from the back:

Then there was leftover yarn and I couldn't just let that go to waste.  I thought a garter stitch hat with some of the same colors would be a good choice to go with the garter stitch sweater:

I like how it came out, but when it was done I wasn't sure how well it would fit.  Since I had plenty of yarn left, I added a good old stretchy ribbed hat, which is a pretty safe bet.  And I learned a new skill for that: how to change colors in ribbing without those ugly "purl bumps".  Here is a link to the web page where I found this clever trick.  Here's how it looks:

A little odd looking without a head in it, but it will stretch to fit a range of head sizes.

With the little bit  of yarn I still had left over I made striped tube socks, using the same rib+stripe trick: 

And then I added a second pair of tube socks with fingering-weight yarn as well:

I made some DK-weight tube socks for Baby G earlier (in between fingering and worsted weight) and her mom said they worked very well and requested more.  So now she will have a pair in each of three weights of yarn and she can tell me which weight she likes best and I can make a few more in that weight. 

Credit for the tube sock idea: "Genevieve's Tube Socks" from Ravelry, created by one of my favorite knitting podcasters.  The idea is that for a baby who is growing rapidly and not walking yet there's no real reason for shaping a heel into a sock and a simple tube is good enough.  They are also knit in ribbing, so they're really stretchy and won't fall off so easily and will fit the baby through a few growth spurts.  I wish I had heard about these when my kids were small!  They could kick off socks in the blink of an eye.  The design made the socks 11" long and I couldn't quite picture shoving a baby's foot into a sock that long, so I made them a bit shorter (7-8"). 

Finally, here is a picture of everything together:

I hope Baby G and her family enjoy these.  I certainly enjoyed knitting them.

For fellow knitters, I will soon have notes about these projects on Ravelry (marglamb).

MORE Seafarer Knitting

The deadline for the Seafarer contributions was farther in the future than I had thought, so I have continued to knit for them.  One could say that I got just a bit carried away, but it was fun and I hope the things I made will be useful.  It has been a nice project to distract me from my back and sciatic pain, and the items I made were simple enough that I could handle them in spite of the painkillers dulling my mind.

After I made the items I posted about before I was out of chunky weight yarn (#6), but I remembered reading that if you hold two strands of worsted (#4) together it comes out about the same as chunky.  I had a LOT of small balls of leftover worsted as well as several balls of cheap black & white worsted that I bought on sale a while ago thinking they'd eventually be useful -- and they were!

I made one additional scarf with some of the leftovers.  Here are my three completed scarves:

This new scarf was a nice simple project that helped me get used to knitting with two strands held together.  It's not very hard except that it means two balls of yarn at a time to keep track of instead of one, which is occasionally annoying.  But I liked the way the fabric turned out -- thick and cushy and warm just like the chunky yarn.

Even though the new one (the one in the middle) was narrower than the others, it took a lot of yarn to make a stripe and it used up my biggest balls of leftovers.  I decided that another scarf would have to have narrower stripes, which would mean a LOT of ends to weave in on the edges, so that was the last scarf.  Mittens are fussy enough without having to worry about stripes (as I learned with a previous project this fall!).  So I made lots of hats.

I started out with a hat that combined one strand each of two colors:

I was happy with the look of that -- almost like a variegated yarn.  And it was nice and plushy and warm just like the chunky weight hats had been.   It did mean having two balls of yarn bouncing around in my lap instead, but I had done that before with other kinds of projects.

After this hat, I didn't have enough yarn of any colors except black and white to knit even one strand of a whole hat.  (I have little kitchen scale that also is a big help for measuring yarn.  I had no leftover balls that weighed half as much as the hat I just finished, which answered that question easily.)  So I experimented with all sorts of stripes -- fat ones and skinny ones, sometimes in combination with two colors together.   Here are the results:


With stripes of double-stranded colors I was sometimes holding four  balls of yarn in my lap, which meant a significant amount of effort fighting tangles.

One nice benefit of all of these hats is that I became much more comfortable making jogless stripes.  (For non knitters: when you knit in a round you're actually working in a spiral, so when you switch colors you get a funny little "jog" unless you take special pains to avoid it.)  I found this page from the TECHknitting web site to be a real help.

With the bottom right hat I used a different technique -- helix stripes -- to make really skinny stripes.  (another page from TECHknitting).   That's a clever technique that I enjoy, but OMG I had SIX balls of yarn bouncing around at once and there was a lot of time devoted to un-tangling and tangle prevention!  I think from now on I'll reserve helix stripes for times when I'm not also double stranding!

That's the end of what I made for the Seafarers this year, but my donation will include yet another hat.  I made this hat two years ago when I was loom knitting with one hand after my surgery.  For some reason this hat got left out of that donation and I found it recently when I was organizing my yarn.  Here it is:

I enjoyed this hat marathon and I learned another interesting technique while I was doing it.  I ran through almost all of my worsted-weight scraps and wanted to make a few more hats.  I remembered from my reading that three strands of DK weight yarn is approximately the same weight as one strand of chunky. The idea of three skeins of each color going at once was kind of off-putting, but it turns out there's a really cool trick.  For some reason it's called "Navajo chaining" and it works like magic -- only one ball of yarn for each color in your lap and you get three strands at once.  I don't have a link to share for this technique because I had heard of it a while ago and had been meaning to try it, so I didn't have to look it up.  It was actually kind of fun to do.  I have a lot of DK scraps left and I will probably do a lot of Navajo chaining for some Seafarer projects next year!  I ended by making two hats using Navajo chaining.  I am writing this a couple of days after finishing all the hats and I honestly can't remember which hats were made with Navajo chaining and I can't actually tell from a quick look over the hats.  That is an interesting confirmation that knitting with two or three strands together really is equivalent to one strand of a fatter yarn!

Here is a group portrait of all this year's Seafarer projects:

It was a lot of fun to do and I hope these items help keep some people warm on the high seas this winter and beyond.

Now I will go back to much more delicate knitting.  I have been knitting for the baby of a family friend and she is growing like a weed and needs another hat and sweater.  I haven't been blogging about the baby knitting -- just posting on Ravelry -- but I'm enjoying writing about my knitting here so I'll try to start putting all my projects here from now on.

Seafarer Knitting

In just about 10 days I have managed to knit quite a lot for the Seafarer's collection.  I have enjoyed having something like this to do while I'm housebound.  Even if I can't go out much physically it's a way to contribute something to the world.

The grand total (out of 3 Caron Chunky Cakes) is 2 hats, 2 pairs of mittens and 2 scarves.  That feels like a ridiculous amount to have knit in just over a week, but I have a lot of time on my hands and these are fairly simple items made with really big yarn.  I have never actually knit with such big yarn or with such big needles before.  In knitting lingo, I used super bulky (size 6) yarn and 8 mm needles and got 10-11 stitches to 4 inches.  Compared to knitting socks with 2 mm needles and 8-9 stitches to the inch, this was quite a switch. 

This was a good way to create a lot of useful objects so fast, but after doing it I'm not sure I'd want such thick items myself.  The mittens in particular feel a bit clumsy.  Maybe on the windy deck of a ship on a cold ocean the warmth will be worth it.

Caron Chunky Cakes are multi-colored and I like the combination of colors in this one (and in others I saw in the store) but I wish they changed colors more frequently.  It's OK for the scarfs and is probably very pretty for blankets, but a hat didn't take enough yarn to have all five colors on it, and the mittens look kind of silly and don't match.  Still, they will be warm and cozy and I hope the recipients enjoy them.

I intend to make Seafarer knitting an annual thing, but I think if I use super bulky yarn again I will look elsewhere (probably by mail) and buy several colors separately so I can choose how to stripe them.  Or just make solid color stuff. 

I hope these items make a few seafarers' lives a little easier.  I'm almost totally shut in at the moment and it's good to know that I can make some things that will help people far away from people.  It reminds me that I'm still part of the big world.

(If any knitters want details, I will be posting this stuff on Ravelry soon.  My Ravelry id is marglamb.)