la femme follette

more nyc post-postmodernist + ballet-school auction item

Brooklyn Anchorage
From Ring of Fire

Lisa Jarnot

and at noon I will fall in love
and nothing will have meaning
except for the brownness of
the sky, and tradition, and water
and in the water off the railway
in New Haven all the lights
go on across the sun, and for
millennia those who kiss fall into
hospitals, riding trains, wearing
black shoes, pursued by those
they love, the Chinese in the armies
with the shiny sound of Johnny Cash,
and in my plan to be myself
I became someone else with
soft lips and a secret life,
and I left, from an airport,
in tradition of the water
on the plains, until the train
started moving and yesterday
it seemed true that suddenly
inside of the newspaper
there was a powerline and
my heart stopped, and everything
leaned down from the sky to kill me
and now the cattails sing.

wip wednesday

Birthday sweater.  Cascade Pastaza.  Pattern adapted from one of the Yarn Girls' books. 

More later.

entrapment, entreaty, entrechat, entropy

I finally finished "the baby's" birthday legwarmers.  The "baby" who will be 7 years old this week.  Mari corrects me when I call her this, but for Garçon & I, she will always be the baby.  When she is not with us, we call her this, as in "It's almost time to go get the baby from her ballet class, so let's hurry."  This of course begs the question of who it was doing the babying of her and when.

I do not even have time to be emotional about her being seven (7!), for I am totally lost in a wave of homesickness I did not see coming.  Kowalski and I were talking about his socks and he reported them to be super, etc, but still quite warm and so past the season.  I countered that it was 36 degrees only there and he said, "Yes.  But you know people are in shorts."

I said nothing for a long time, and then he asked me, cautiously, quietly, "Have you forgotten this?"  I admitted I had -- 40 degrees back home is warm -- and burst not into tears, but some pretty heavy-duty sniffling.  Add to this that my baby is still -- in late March and in the same 40-degree temperatures -- wanting to cozy herself in wool and mohair practically up to her heiney, plus that when we asked both children if they would want to go to Chicago for summer vacation this year, they pronounced it unacceptable as a destination (no ocean, no mountains) and here it all is still days later, the relentlessness of displacement.  I find as I go on that it is of course impossible to imagine how it feel to lose a thing that I always just took for granted, but also every time I am surprised by how painful it is to realize an absence when it comes.  Anyhow.   

These legwarmers are the improvement upon the last.  At that time, Fillette expressed wanting for a pair of legwarmers to wear in the weather, saying nothing about ballet.  As soon as I made them, she wanted to wear them everywhere, including ballet class, which was fine with me but for that the girls are not allowed to wear them the whole class (just during warm-up) and so when she removed them, her palest-pink, regulation tights were covered in black mohair lint.  I have issues and could not let this go on.  Additionally, she subsequently expressed a secret wish for a pair that was thigh-high, "Like the big girls wear."  Done and done.

Just as the last, these are from the pattern in Hoverson Last-Minute Knitted Gifts book using Araucania Nature Wool and Madil Kid Seta, both from stash.  Again, they are in the 2- to 4-hour chapter and each one took me 6 hours (three movies per leg!), and I did not even knit these as long as the pattern is written!  These are 20 inches long, which is one movie short of her project's length as published, but just the right size for our baby ballerina.  Birthday knitting soldiers on.  There are too many spring birthdays for all this knitting.  My hands are tired!  I will try to get a work-in-progress photo of the next. 

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For my pal Jen, nine hours north, who presumably got a late-nite 5:15 sunset tonight, look what I found while sulking around the garden.

I vowed to put the garden to bed properly last fall, but then Fillette was reading some horseshit in My Big Backyard or Ranger Rick or somewhere about wintering caterpillars and other animals' harbor in the dead stalks and I had already been assiduous about black spot cleanup, so I left it and now it bothers me, but the worms! are! safe!

For Marsha and Lisa, that little bread guy was just a gluten-free okonomiyaki with shredded boiled potatoes thrown in the batter.  Kind of a colcannon okonomiyaki, really, I guess.   

bigger boat

I was reading Esquire's sandwich roundup in this month's issue and came across the promise of a reuben, fashioned by transplanted Chicagoans now somewhere in Colorado, which eschewed rye bread in the favor of latkes.  Hm. 

I hardly think about bread except when it comes to the sandwich, and one of my favorites was a reuben.  I was at the beginning of our interminable illiness when I read about this switcheroo.  During health's brief reprise, I made one.

It was tasty and well worth the effort of making latkes, then assembling and grilling a sandwich.  Time consuming (I made the russian dressing myself), and also tricky was the getting the latke big enough to hold a sandwich but still small enough to avoid gumminess.  Less tricky was remembering to leave one side with a lighter browning so that it could face out and finish while the cheese melted and the sandwich heated through.  I used izdiabal instead of swiss.  A knife and fork are mandatory for the eating.  All told, if I could eat bread, I would never bother, but I would order it if someone else were doing the cooking. 

We are still ill, the children with a lingering cough and me with something that wants to be the mother of all sinus infections, if only I would put away my neti pot and let it.  Mari is just afflicted by his general surliness and refusal to take B vitamin supplements. 

I have three spring birthday presents on the needles and feel a little like Norma Rae.  A Norma Rae who is in love times three, but still.  Knit knit knit.  A lot of movies have washed over me in the past week: Syriana (learn CPR, parents); MI:III (really poor villain development, really);  Ocean's 13 (not enough Izzard), and Hitch (not good, but somehow exceptionally funny).  Mari has never seen Jaws (excellent tension out on that boat), and tonight we are going to change all that.   

slipstream

Last week, Filette and Garçon were with me in the grocery, which almost never happens, so the result was that they were loitering around produce, fascinated by the inventory as if Soviet defectors, and did not hear me when I said, "I'm moving on." 

The result of that was them rushing up to me (finally!) while I was on line for the register, "Mommy!  We couldn't find you!"  I had another errand to run in the store next door to the grocery, and as old as they are, I was certainly going to abandon them into the grocery and come back for them later. 

Whatever.  They knew where the car was parked.  I was in a hurry.  The knitting mines have been the least of it, but just because of that, calls have not been returned, all communication has been shorthanded, emails have been totally ignored.  I have been trying to get it on when I can; watch the mails.   

Legwarmers for a little ballerina.  From the Hoverson Last-Minute Knitted Gifts book using Araucania Nature Wool and Madil Kid Seta, both from stash.  The book is way the fuck wrong about how long they take.  I almost did not make the deadline.  Cheers. 

nothing says anything

The evidence is in and I have not been the victim of a 2008 switcheroo hijinks with the lovely puff-pastry-creating Santos.  Phew.

There was some kind of weird sagginess in this loaf of non-chocolatized banana bread.  Culprits are either:  a. too much banana -- and wtf defines "small banana" anyhow? -- in the batter; b. when I pulverized the blanched almonds into the almond meal I sub in part for all-purpose wheat flour, I think I went too far, taking them right up to the cusp of almond butter. 

It tastes fine anyhow; even old Mari, aka Mr Gluten-Filled, wanted to wrestle me for a portion of my slice.  I have been performing one-legged deadlifts under the thumb of the Sadist.  Recognize.   

muffins for muffin tops

I feel as if I am in some kind of improbable 2008 internet switcheroo since I am lately tinkering around with the gluten-free baked goods every week while the beautiful & talented Santos is working on beet purees and dairy-free cakes.

These were adapted from Nigella Lawson's Jam-Doughnut Muffin recipe, found in her stupidly-titled cookbook How to be a Domestic Goddess.  They seemed grainy, but I am not sure because they were mini-muffins.  I think that even though the text said mini-muffin tins that they were supposed to be regular-sized tins, which maybe in the UK means not mega-muffin tins?  O, cultural exchange.

Anyhow, it is hard to evaluate the granularity of a substitute flour when the very dainty product is rolled in melted butter and then sugar, all the while concealing within a little chirrup of cherry preserves.  They were enough of a success as is to be scheduled to stand in later this year for the long-pined-for sufganiyot.  L'chaim!    

aviate, navigate, communicate

After the full moon poured itself all over us in big, sunshiny, awakening patches all night long, I was surprised to wake up and find that it was gray and cloudy, too cloudy to really take any photographs, even in rooms that are flooded with natural light.  But I did finish with the yarn sorting, get the guest room tidied up with all the yarn still inside, except for a sweet little bundle of luxury yarns in a separate woven hamper.  I am satisfied, I guess.

Mari did wonder why I wanted a BlackBerry and I did woo him on the matter when I unpsun a rather lengthy and romantic reminiscence, not just 100 words on the matter, on being able to control the channels, about having discretion in access, on being able to turn everything off from one position, on the possibilities that exist when interruption is not expected.  Then we went to Maine for vacation and disrupted our availability, in addition to having sketchy access to the digital world, anyhow.  He was convinced and I was reformed.

Mostly.

After an initial honeymoon of total silence, comparatively, I did begin to let it serve as a major kind of distraction in places I had never before needed distraction -- doctor's waiting rooms, playgrounds, stoplights!  Not as a review of incoming, nor even as a way to deal with outgoing, but a really passive kind of clickety-clack of windows and emails and the rest.  Hijinks.  I pretty much reached my limit of patience with myself and this device (there is a reason it is nicknamed the CrackBerry) when I accidentally "hid" instead of "closed" a browser window, which led me to leave 15 comments on a weblog.  Not at once, or consecutively, no.  All throughout the day, every time I accidentally clicked open the browser function where this lay in the background all day long, I left yet another duplicate conversational footprint.  Whoops.

In the meantime, it was not really saving me a lot of time.  Except for when I found out I could email Mari about an appointment with one touch of one button, right from the appointment function.  I kissed it when I found this feature!  Kissed!  This way I could put in an appointment, while standing at the point of service, all the details, notes, etc, and **schwink!**  I would never ever have to call my husband at work again!  Also, never ever have to hear, "No, honey, you never told me about this thing."  Love means never having to say, "Would you like to see my email receipt?"

Aside from that, not so much promise fulfilled.  It was my own lack of discipline.  The idea that I could send an email from it (there is a full keyboard, but it is quite wee) was the thing that made me just go to the desktop and get it over with already.  But there is no such thing as a simple trip to the desktop, mostly because it is on my desk, sitting so conveniently near all my lists of things to do -- reply to this! check into that, purchase x, y, and z.  A simple sit-down to type an email that I wanted to read more than "Yes.  V excited.  Call in morning?"  that maybe I wanted to infuse some kind of lyrical wax about how very excited I actually was and also, maybe to put a subject with that verb "to call," well, anyhow, over an hour later and 9 times out of 10, I would not have finished the email that sent me there. 

Scandalously, it is not really convenient to make actual phone calls with a BlackBerry.  This seems to be its secondary purpose, phone calling.  It takes about five keystrokes to place a call that is not speed-dial-set, in which case it takes still two.  Answering a call takes more movement than I can manage, plus invariably results in me sending the person to voicemail accidentally. 

In terms of managing our landline calls, well, I have generally forwarded all calls to our home phone along to my cell phone number.  I stopped that pretty much as soon as I got the device, because the volume of calls coming in was too many and I was sending 50% of them to voice mail and really, it was the wrong 50%.  I always found myself on the business end of some telemarketer mispronouncing Mari's family name while I was trying to struggle out of the grocery store in the rain with two hungry children and instead missing sad calls about deceased pets and fun invitations to come over and sit quietly drinking tea.   

So now I was in arrears on most email replying (anything requiring more than "yes! me, too!  xxox"), and on voice mails left in our home phone's mailbox.  This was not turning out to be good time management plus, people were getting a little bit fisty about our failure to respond to their calls.  For example, 17 text messages from Kowalski, who was waiting to open his socks with me on the line if only he could get me.  The situation with my distractions and distractability will only become worse; winter soccer league starts this week -- two evenings for two children! -- and I was about to be Overcome By Events, as Kowalski likes to say.  (I am always a little undone by how excellently descriptive Naval terminology is for my life with the children.)    

My Blackberry solution, to be implemented by the end of January, consisted of:  deleting any urls from the BlackBerry; forwarding all calls to our home phone into its sinkhole; wiping my address books in Gmail and Outlook and so thus forcing myself to use the fruits of all my data-entering labor on this grownup Tamagotchi of a device.  Also, to save all pertinent attachments to my hard drive, but delete each and every email in my inbox.  Because I spend a lot of time distracted by, say, looking for some recipe someone emailed me in 2004.  Enough, already.  Just enough.   

I did have to put Chickie's email address back into my desktop, because I cannot ever remember it and he and I send almost nothing to each other but photo and music files, so I needed it to pop-up from the desktop.  But everyone else has a little entry in the little BlackBerry and for emailing that is all I need.  If I need to email, which is becoming less urgent every day.  (I mean, v obviously urgent = 17 text messages in an afternoon from a grownup person.) 

It is working.  Yesterday, I was going to respond to an email I got a long time ago while waiting for Mari and the children to come and pick me up from the coffee shop.  Faced with the wee keyboard, I sighed and decided to take care of it when I got home.  Then I remembered all of my big ideas, so reached deep into my purse to take out a pen and a notecard to write the chatty little missive that I had been meaning to write in addition to the reply required by the original email.  Then I realized that everyone's post address is in my Filofax.  Do I put it in the BlackBerry?  Do I believe paper goes with paper?  Will I have to redefine my interior game of Rock, Paper, Scissors?  Why must January be so much like 31 Mondays? 

don't. stop. don't stop.

I had a dream this morning that Mari was long-dead and I was getting it on and on with The Israeli's cousin.  I was telling it to Mari after I woke up, and he said, "Isn't he married?"  and I said, "Yes.  In the dream he said, I don't even like her!  and then I said to him, I don't even like you.  Take off your pants."  Mari gaped a little and I shrugged.  "You never knew me then," I told him.

Subconscious showcasing of then is surely due to the spectacle of cold on teevee last night, really.  I was not exactly homesick, watching all that excellent sub-zero, but I kept all night thinking of that Dean Martin line I quit drinking, now I just freeze it and eat it like a popsicle.  There is something purgative about the bleakness of an entire season of punishing, arctic temperatures, the scourge of just one minute outside, when breathing takes the breath away.  I always found the icy austerity such a comfort, its impossible severity so familiar to me, like my tenacious emotional frigidity.  I don't even like you.  Take off your pants.   

But enough of that, more about football and yarn.  I vowed I would not get caught up in yesterday's games, but then found myself involved in a yarn storage project, instead of getting in and out of the gym at a reasonable hour, like a daytime hour.  I have more and less yarn than I thought.  It has mostly been tucked in places and in parts, sorted by project or priority, and mostly with the goal of keeping my (once-) small children from "discovering" it and unraveling it all over the house.  Not to mention what they could do to or with the right-sized needle.

The children are bigger now, also more afraid of what might happen if they fuck with my stuff since they now have some stuff of their own.  So I decided that it was time to pull it out and find a way to put it all together somewhere.  Oof.  We have these stupid cabinets on our third floor for years.  Good IKEA idea gone bad.  I hate them, they were originally intended for our bedroom (??? I clearly was high) but put them in the guest room in case our guests want to hang something up.  The closet in that room is kind of a joke.

This birch-shelf-on-white-cabinet look I saw at IKEA was much cuter at IKEA, I have to say.

I keep thinking it is not a lot of yarn, and it is not a lot, not compared to some of the stashes I have seen on the onlines.  But for me it seems like a lot of holdings.  Also, this is after two winters of more or less using what is in my stash.  Also, a crochet project.   Only a teeny pile consisting mostly of black cashmere and/or silk-mohair is stuff that I am hoarding for myself.

The rest of it is yarn (ok, a lot of yarn) I bought for projects that I have since turned my back on.  Also, I have three unfinished projects, one of which is going to its rightful owner, a co-knitter on a baby gift project which crashed onto the reef of Not So Much Her Friend Anymore.  The other is a poncho for Fillette, waiting for finishing, which is dumb, because it is a 10 minute seam to crochet.  The third project is a felted handbag, also part of a Concert Project, which I dropped out of, mostly because of fear of the unknown and also because I realized I did not actually want a felted handbag.  Now I look at the pattern and the whole thing is a cinch to complete, but it would be so anti-climactic, that it serves as better tension just lying around while hanging over my head.

Also, I found a shitload of accessories -- stitch markers, tapestry needles, stitch holders, four ka-cha ka-cha counters -- and a lot of  gauge swatches and little bits of leftover yarns from projects I loved, which I miraculously remembered to label in some way.

I finally left yarn all over the bed in the guest room and went to the gym, just in time to catch the AFC game's post-game show. Oh, curious!  Look at that what is on teevee!  I said to myself, not fooling even myself.  There is nothing, however, to clear a gym of its New Year's Resolvers like a major sporting event.  I whipped out a 5k on the rowing machine, then noodled around stretching and fooling around with a swiss ball until kickoff at old Lambeau Field.  Then I climbed onto a Stairmill machine and had an excellent discussion with the guy on the machine next to me, also with the game tuned to his little teevee, about the cold. 

"It seems cold there," he said.  I said, "Dude.  Yeah.  Where are you from?"  He was from Charlotte.  I rolled my eyes and looked at him sympathetically.  "Trust me," I told him.  "It could be colder, but it is plenty cold enough."  He watched a little longer and then turned to me , slightly horrified, and said, "The people in the stands?  They're not even playing football."  "Nope," I said.  "But they are from Wisconsin."  I was only not dying of homesickness because it was cold enough here yesterday and I was not very in the mood.   

I finished my (even-elongated for teevee-watching) workout before there was a score, and pretty much while in the shower vowed (again) to not watch it.  On the way out, I caught the score right before the half ended and when I came home reported to Mari (who knew full well where I had sneaked off to -- a place with teevee) that it was shaping up to be a nail-biter that I simply could not watch.  No way!  I meant it this time! 

We do not watch broadcast television here.  The children used to watch a little bit of PBS Kids programming when they were younger, but then about three years ago I got tired of them sassing me about whether they would or would not watch it, so I got rid of the rabbit ears and that was that.  Yes, rabbit ears.  So when I found out on ESPN.com that the game was tied in the 4th quarter, we went downstairs to find out if we could watch this game. 

We could.  It was pretty entertaining, an exciting quarter, though none of the game that I saw was any great football playing.  I mean, whatever.  Too much loose ball hootenanny, for one.  I have to say that I am relieved at the outcome because a. I now do not have to watch the Super Bowl and b. I now do not have to watch the Super Bowl in which the Patriots clean the floor with the Packers, after they worked so hard to win the NFC championship game.  But I might want to steal fleeting glances at the Super Bowl where the Patriots clean the floor with the Giants.  The gym will be so empty on that day.  I wonder if rabbit ears can still be purchased?  Maybe I could just use knitting needles.