Dogs Steal Yarn

Here we go with the canned meat again

I just deleted 96 spam comments from yesterday's St Vincent post, and closed the comments on that and all previous posts to keep the little buggers from getting in again. Once they find an opening, they hit it again and again, so...

So it comes back to that Word Press migration again. David's all ready to go and I even have a new banner, thanks to Xina. I just haven't had the chance to make a template for the free patterns and move those over. When I have a moment, the last thing I want to do is tinker around with code, which I'm not terribly good with, but I guess it's time to buckle down and get that done. Or spend the rest of my days deleting comment spam.

Attempted yesterday to get back to my regularly scheduled Wednesday evening writing, but chose the wrong cafe (loud techno and dim lights and a counter guy who annoyed me by flirting and doing a magic trick with my change). I had walked there, and headed home, thinking to pick up the car to go to a different place that wasn't a walk away. Billy and Thumper already had the car, were out having adventures, and when I called Billy he suggested they could pick me up and drop me off at this other place. Big mistake. As soon as I got into the car, I knew there would be no escape. Thumper has been having a rough time, with all four eye teeth coming in, and he had no interest in me leaving again. We all headed home for dinner and I had to give up on the writing. I get to try again tonight. Certainly won't be going back to the House O' Techno Y Java. Ugh. Who plays loud music in a cafe full of people working on laptops on a Wednesday evening? Or am I getting really really old?

Have I told you yet how I much love St. Vincent? If not, I've been terribly remiss. Her debut album, Marry Me, came out this summer and it was my favorite album of 2007, no question. It was part of the soundtrack that brought us cross country on our road trip and remains in heavy rotation around here. She's kind of brilliant. In all the rock and roll daydreams I indulged in growing up, she was the kind of songwriter and musician I think I'd hoped I might one day wake up to be. Nevermind that I never did learn to play guitar and can barely hold a tune.

I came across these live performances on YouTube today and, well...just take a look. And don't listen for a minute and then click away, thinking you've heard it. Just when you think you know where she's going, she changes up on you. Brilliant, this woman. Two originals and a Nico cover for you. Enjoy!

Your Lips Are Red

Paris Is Burning

These Days

Fragment #2

“It’s payback for all the bad things I did over the years, I think. No one in my family ever had arthritis.” She says this with her small pinched mouth, her eyes pinched tight as well, a face accustomed to pain, accustomed to bearing up. Her walker leans, its limbs folded into itself, against her car. When we first moved in and Marla was giving me the rundown on all the neighbors, she warned me off this woman whose name I can’t seem to recall (Edith? Alice? Something old and solid like that. A name smelling of lavender and your grandmother’s sitting room).

Before we moved in, she was apparently caught sneaking around outside Bud’s house in the middle of the night, leafing through blueprints he’d left on the porch, plans for a renovation he has yet, to this day, gotten around to. Right up on his porch, Marla had told me. Hunkered down like a small animal, flipping feverish through the pages. Looking for evidence. Paranoid, Marla had hissed. She thinks someone’s after her.

Well, pain can twist everything around in a mind, no doubt. But Bud…to look at his tumbledown timber-pile of a house, I’d be doubtful of the existence of any blueprints. He doesn’t exactly strike me as the planning sort. And this woman standing in front of me, no way she could ever hunker. No way in hell she could do that. So as always with Marla’s stories I find myself coming back around to the one obvious truth amidst the jumble of threads she feeds me. What it usually comes around to is that Marla is a fucking liar.

Marla must be a fucking liar. Because all I’ve done is asked this Edith or Alice how she’s feeling, and acknowledged the walker instead of pretending I didn’t see it, and here her pinched little face is unfolding and she’s telling me about her hip replacement gone wrong. Telling me about the doctor and the hospital and the rehab. The cortisone shots and how none of it works and she’s in pain all the time, five months straight now in constant pain. And as she tells me this, her face goes open and soft, as if no one has asked how she was, and then stood there and listened to the answer, in a very very long time.

nap, nap...oh my god will you please nap?!?!

Today I am acutely, painfully, desperately (insert additional melodramatic adverbs here) aware of how very far we have moved from our (my) support system.

Billy has been out of town on business since Wednesday. He gets back late tonight, after Thumper's bedtime, and gets up for work tomorrow morning before Thumper and I wake up, so that means I'm single-parenting it until tomorrow evening.

It's been tiring being the only parent on duty for so many days (handknit socks off to you single moms. How the hell do you do it?), but I've been managing. Holding down the fort, etc. We've had healthy meals every day. The kitchen is clean. The kid is clean. I've been managing, and we've been having our usual good time together.

But last night Thumper was restless and tossing and turning and nursing every hour or so, so I got broken sleep at best, and he woke up two hours earlier than usual this morning and is still GOING GOING GOING and will not take a nap. We've been reading, nursing, took an hour-long stroller walk...all my best tricks to bring on the nap and nope...he's wide awake. I desperately need him to nap. Oh my fucking god do I need this kid to nap.

And now he's calling... Fussing. Nap on the horizon? Maybe? Gotta go tend to the boss.

Sneaking a quick post while the kid naps...

He's conked out, but I don't know for how much longer. We had a busy morning. A playdate with Jonah, then a long stroller walk to the Goodwill to buy some more books for Thumper, then a nice long walk back home. I was hoping he'd fall asleep on the way back and he did, just a few blocks from home.

Six new books for him at Goodwill, and a cool hot rod toy,and two coffee mugs for me, and a winter coat for him for now and another to grow into. All for $25. We love Goodwill. They're big and clean and well-organized here. Nothing like the cramped little Salvation Army warrens back in NYC.

I have yet to cast on for David's kilt hose, or for the Vintage socks, or for the new Trilce. Truth be told, I'm barely knitting at all. Just a few rounds here and there on that stockinette sock, but then only when I can't be doing anything else--when we're in the car or if Thumper is playing independently for a few minutes. The time that I find available to me when I do have the peace and quiet and lack of distraction to follow a chart (kilt hose), I find myself just wanting to read. And not read while knitting, but really read. To just sink into the couch and into the book. I used to devour a book a week at least. When I started knitting, that slipped to a book every few weeks, then a book a month... I seem to be moving away from that right now. I love to knit, don't get me wrong. But I'm not seized by the desire to cram stitches into every free moment anymore. I missed reading and didn't even know it. Now that I'm reaching for the books before the needles, I'm remembering how good it feels to read a book quickly. To give it hours each day, so you're really living in it, right there with the characters. (Yes, fiction. That's pretty much all I read.)

In the past few weeks I've been hanging out with Alice Munro, Mary Gaitskill, Don DeLillo, Denis Johnson. Right now I've moved on to Philip Roth and Sabbath's Theater.

I've got a yarn stash that's way too big and needs to be knitted down before I acquire more yarn, but I've got even more of a book stash, many books waiting years for their turn.

There may be a bit of a slowdown on the knitting around here. Fair warning.

And now to get a bit more reading in before the baby wakes.

PS: David, I'm starting the kilt hose really soon, I swear. Probably tonight.

Positive Negative Socks

I've always got a pair of stockinette socks on the needles. Here's the latest pair:

I'm planning to make a second pair just like them, so I can choose matching or coordinating, depending on my mood.

Trekking # 183 and #145

Fragment #1

Chipped diner mug, heavy white ceramic and a rough spot at the rim, barely noticeable until your lip hits it on the first sip. Weak diner coffee, three a.m. and then that unexpected roughness against your bottom lip and isn’t that just the way it goes and don’t you deserve it, really, that small indignity, that secret discomfort of chipped ceramic at your mouth so far from home and so late at night, greasy fries on the greasy Formica in front of you and the wrong girl across the table. Melanie gazes out the window with those dead fish eyes of hers and her lipstick smudged to a bruise across her mouth and cheek. Red webbed mark across her temple from where she slept against the seatbelt.

You should be back in Jersey, asleep in bed with Beth anyway, so a chipped coffee mug is nothing you’ve got a right to complain about. Drink up. Eat up. Fries getting colder and Melanie’s half dead across the table from you, forehead tilting toward her uneaten burger. You’ve got half a mind to leave her there. You’ve got a half a mind to get up and go. You know you won’t. You’ll think about it, but you won’t. Come this far, and on fumes the last few miles and now there’s weak coffee, bad diner food, a fill-up and nothing to do but keep going.

Thanks so much for taking the time to comment on my last post. It's not that I'm seeking more comments--I'm probably one of the biggest lurkers out there on your blogs. I know we don't always have the time to comment, or have anything to say even if we've enjoyed a post. It just seemed that the process posts getting much fewer comments than other types of posts indicated a lack of interest. I'm so happy to hear that isn't so, and that many of you are enjoying the writing process posts, even if you aren't commenting. That's what I wasn't sure of. Please, no pressure to comment if you don't want to!

Tomorrow I'll post the first fiction fragment. Until then, I give you that knitting/baby blog staple, the child playing dress-up in Mommy's knitwear:

Promises, promises

Okay, so I found the camera. I didn't have all that much luck taking a decent photo of the haircut, but I'll share the best of a so-so bunch.

I chose a salon that claimed to use all non-toxic products and dyes, all ready to go the vegetable dye route with my haircolor. Unfortunately, though they are switching over to all non-toxic, they haven't made that transition yet. The shipment of vegetable dyes was due in this past Friday. I got my hair cut on Wednesday, and I decided to go for the toxic just one last time, rather than wait any longer. The stylist and I agreed I'd go with the vegetable dye the next time.

I saw Lu at Gilly's Salon. She was fantastic. I really lucked out. Not everyone can cut curls well. Plus she was fun to hang out with for the two hours I spent in the chair. That counts too.

So...okay. There's the hair for you.

The blog's been kind of weird lately, hasn't it? Spotty postings and sometimes talking about the kid and sometimes about Portland and sometimes about knitting and sometimes just getting all angsty and you guys start to assume I have S.A.D., which I totally don't, and then I feel weird about that and...well... Thanks for sticking with me.

This started as a knitting blog, but I don't knit quickly enough or well enough to keep a blog running just on the knitty. And then it was a knitting and grad school and writing blog. And then it was a pregnancy and knitting blog, then a baby and knitting blog, then a cross-country move and knitting blog... Now?

Apart from my family, the most important thing in my life is my writing. Not my blog writing, but my real writing. But as long as I've had this blog, the posts that have consistently generated the most deafening silences in the comment box have been the posts about writing. I don't blog to get comments, but I do enjoy getting them--who doesn't?--and they can give you a good sense of how the blog is being received, what readers are interested in and what they're not. I'm going to keep talking about the writing--it's what I do--but the seeming lack of interest in it makes me wonder about the direction of the blog. Do I just talk about sock knitting and the baby and the dog? I don't want to do that. It's just gives me pause that when I offer up a post that's most like myself, the way I really am offline, those are the posts that generate the least interest.

Which leads me to a decision that will perhaps guarantee that I generate increasingly less interest, but, well...I mostly blog for my own entertainment, so... Here's what I'm thinking. I talk about my writing, but all any of you have read is a short story I wrote four years ago. I don't intend to post anything from either novel, or from any stories in progress, but I do want to share a bit more of my fiction here. I also want to find a way to play around and get a breather now and then from the big problems of the novel-writing process without having to throw myself into the smaller problems of story-writing. What I'm planning to do is to write one fragment or snapshot a week and post it here. A quick sketch of a freewrite and then just hit publish. So you get to see a little bit more behind the curtain and I get to exercise my fiction muscles in a way that doesn't carry the pressure of expectation or the commitment of a larger project. It might not always be good, but I hope it won't often be dull.

And if it is, well, it'll be over fast. These are going to be swift little things. Or you could just not read them.

I'm thinking Tuesday would be a good day for it. Fragment Tuesdays. Or somesuch.

Unless it just sucks. And then I'll stop and tell you about the sock I'm knitting.

Or I could just put up a toddler pic, like this one:

Someone really likes his new boots.

If I could remember where I put the camera...

...I could show you:

• My fabulous new haircut
• The still-unwound Vintage kit (and frankly, with Stephanie's latest posts I'm no longer in a hurry to cast on for that one. Wee bit scared o' the toe leaf, I am)
• A rather dull plain ole Sock in Progress (SIP?)
• Some cute shots of Thumper visiting with David when he and Lilith were in town last week
• The swatch that wants to be a new Trilce, and soon will be because I'm finally almost done writing up the pattern for test knitting. (It's now off with Jenn for a professional once-over, because she rocks like that.)

Alas, I have no idea where I put the camera, much less the damn cable. Maybe photos tomorrow? I have high hopes.

Remember my big plan for the new novel?

The one where I'd use index cards and a bulletin board to keep track of the fictional and historical storylines and where they met and where they diverged and all that? It was worth a try, but even as I set the system up I knew it was a long-shot. That's just not how I work. I'm not methodical in that way. I guess I'll be flying blind for the first draft of this book, same as I did with the first book*.

I'd come up with that index-card method--so totally counter to my natural freewrite inclinations--in an attempt to keep my hands around the project even though my life is no longer shaped in such a way that I have the freedom to write for six+ hours a day. And now that I've given up on the index cards...yeah...I do feel like the book gets away from me in parts, and that I can't very clearly see it all at once, and sometimes it takes me an hour or two of banging my head against a wall before I can pick back up where I'd left off the last time I wrote, but it's easier to let go of the illusion of control over the story than it is to force myself to work in a manner that feels too structured. No good ever came of feeling stifled while writing. Or maybe that's not true at all. Maybe someone, somewhere, writes best when they feel constrained. I can't imagine it, though.

Ramble, ramble ramble... The kiddo is playing with a big bucket of black beans right now and I'm blogging fast because you never know how long the independent play will last.

So the writing... Some days I write at home in my office, some days in a cafe. That's another change with this book. I was never able to write in public before--too much distraction. Either motherhood has made me better at filtering out distractions or I'm just so desperate for time to write that I've become better at just buckling down and doing it. Either way, I'm glad for the time. And I'm often lucky enough to have a charming office mate to chat with on work breaks. Work goes better when there's the occasional break for knitty gossip. That, and it's nice to have coffee close at hand without having to stop to make it yourself.

As for the subject matter, which I blogged about a million childless years ago...I'm finding it kind of daunting. Daunting in that I'm trying to tell a fictional story based in recent history. I'm using entirely fictional characters, but I'm letting my characters move around in a world that very real people moved around in little more than a decade ago. And these real people were/are highly political people. They were/are not pushovers. They wouldn't/don't suffer fools lightly... They were my neighbors, geographically, but we lived in different East Villages. I admired the homesteader squatters (not to be confused with the homeless kids who roamed St Marks back in the day), to the extent that I understood what they were doing, but they intimidated the living shit out of me. And here I am, a sympathetic bystander, telling the story of that time in their lives. I'm on their side, but if I get it wrong and if I'm lucky enough that the book gets published and anyone at all reads it, boy will they let me know how wrong I got it.

Or maybe not. Maybe not at all. If I knew for a fact how those involved in the fight to defend the Ea. 13th squats against the city would feel about this book, there'd be less a chance of my getting it wrong, wouldn't there. Or maybe not.

I knew a couple former Ea. 13th squatters back in the day, but have lost touch and attempts to track them down have been totally unsuccessful so far. After I have a finished first draft I'll try to get in touch with some even if I have never met them. And maybe the lawyers...I have the names of their lawyers...

But, but, but... This fear of "getting it wrong," even though I'm writing a fictional story. This fear of being exposed as a fraud or some clueless bourgeois novelist bitch by noble class warriors... Well, that's something I need to look at as I write this book too. Because in some ways I am a clueless bourgeois and in some ways I am not. (Protesting that I lived in a rent-stabilized apartment but still eventually got priced out of the East Village seems somewhat thin. Especially after I bought a co-op and later a brownstone in Brooklyn... But even that seems simplistic...) And in some ways the squatters were/are class warriors, but not always noble, for sure.

Yeah...I've got some complicated shit to work out in my own head as I write this book, class guilt not being the least of it. But isn't that one of the things that drives us to write? Fiction gives me a place to unravel all the crap in my head and take a good hard look at it. When I'm doing it right, anyway. There have been times I shied away from what I saw on the page, and the writing got weak and thin in those spots and showed me for a coward. Sometimes I've gone back and dug deeper and sometimes I just let it be.

Heh. I just meant to fess up about the index cards and get on with my evening. Never planned to actually fess up to anything real. But there you have it. The blog surprises me sometimes.

*And before you ask, my agent is still shopping the first novel around to publishers. It's proving to be a SLOOOOOW process. One editor we haven't heard back from yet has had the manuscript since May. I bet they haven't even opened the damn box yet.

I am the very image of will power and restraint

Please note the Vintage kit, still in skeins, posed beside today's paper.

I have not cast on. I have not even wound the yarn. I am terribly impressed with myself.

Here's a close up of that dateline.

The fact that I also haven't yet cast on for David's socks means I'm still at zero rather than ahead of the game, but at least I haven't slipped into the negative. And if I cast on for those kilt hose today, which I fully intend to do in a few minutes, Thumper-nap allowing, well then...

I can totally do this. Those fat little leaf-colored skeins aren't calling to me at all. Not at all.

In which Stephanie gets to me again with her tempty ways

A couple of weeks ago, in a fit of sleep-deprived, having-just-ridden-out-a-toddler-tantrum yarn craving, I clicked on an ad on Ravelry and bought myself a sock kit. It arrived today, and I set it aside to be started later, because I’ve got other knitting that takes priority now.

Specifically, I’m making these for him. Partly to thank him for making my blog go since 2003 and partly to entice him to continue to make my blog go, but mostly because he’s my friend and I adore him. I want him to have these kilt hose to enjoy this winter, so I need to get cracking on them. I’m not sure how long winter lasts in San Antonio, but something tells me the window is a bit smaller than it is here.

On top of that, there’s been a good deal of interest in the Trilce pattern, so I need to write that up and get it off to test knitters (thanks again, Colleen!). I’ll be test knitting another size myself, as well. I made the 38” size the first time around, and I’m finding that it doesn’t overlap in the front as much as I’d like it to. The 38” is zero to negative ease on me (depending on how recently Thumper has nursed. TMI?), and that wasn’t such great planning on my part, considering it’s a jacket. (The way I designed it, the sweater is 38" around before you pick up and knit the front edging and collar, which is 2" of ribbing on each side. I thought that extra 4" would be plenty to overlap the way I want it to, but I'm finding I want more. I'm going to make the ribbing 3" deep on this next version, as well as go up a size.) So I’m going to make myself a 40” version. I’m using Lamb’s Pride Bulky to see how the pattern works in that yarn. All I’ve got so far is a swatch, but based on that I think it will be a good substitution, and result in a slightly more finished look.

And then there’s the second Lenore calling to me. I just finished the cuff and now it’s the speedy part of the simple lace repeat…

I didn’t expect it would be difficult to set the Vintage kit aside for a while. I mean…cute socks, but no big rush, right? There are other socks I want to knit more—like finally casting on for my Loksins!, and like Nutkin, which I think would be perfect use for the yarn Helen gave me. So I’m standing around in the kitchen a few minutes ago, surfing blogs and eating lunch while the kiddo naps, and I get to Stephanie’s blog and of course she’s talking about the very kit, in the very colorway, that I just opened. It was sitting beside me on the counter as I read her post. And Stephanie being Stephanie, with that weird power she has, I felt the urge creeping up to Cast. On. Right. Now for the Vintage socks. (Which I had been thinking of as my Bacchus socks, because Vintage just makes me think of the fabulous Nancy Bush book, rather than wine. Maybe because I don’t drink. Who knows.) Seeing those sweet little leaves on Stephanie’s blog totally suckered me in.

But I won’t do it. I will resist. At the very least, David will have kilt hose and the Trilce pattern will be written up before I jump down that rabbit hole of tiny little knitted leaves.

I swear. You can hold me to that.

Oh look! I knit a pair of socks v.377

Yarn: Austermann Step, colorway #26
Needles: 2 Knit Picks classic circs, 2mm
Pattern: The basic roll-top sock pattern that lives in my head

I wasn't so into these socks as I knit them, for some reason. I'm not exactly sure why, since the colorway is rather perfect for me. I knit them here and there, when my hands needed some mindless stockinette. Now that they're finished, I absolutely adore them, and I'm regretting not making them knee highs. How cute would knee-highs be with that striping pattern? I have so much yarn left over that I could have easily done it, too. I don't love them enough to lop off the cast-on edge and make the legs longer, but I will remember this for the next time I use a sock yarn with the same put up.

New socks. Mmmmm....

Schlumping along into a new year

Yeah...schlumping in a kind of fuzzy gray grump. Trudging through the inevitable New Year's letdown. 2007 was a hard year in many ways, and in the days leading up to New Year's there was a gathering feeling that 2008 would be different, easier, better. It may very well prove to be so. But with all that buildup to "a better year ahead," I guess some small part of me that's entirely immune to the workings of logic and reason kind of expected the universe to spring open and produce some shiny fantastic Thing of Wonder in the first days of the year, to prove just how very different 2008 would be.

No Thing of Wonder emerged, and here I am feeling all bleak and blah and wanting only to drink too much coffee and eat too many cookies. I am drinking too much coffee, but I am skipping the cookies. (The part of me that is not immune to logic and reason has very reasonably noticed that, though I am still breastfeeding Thumper, my superfast breastfeeding metabolism has slowed back down to a normal rate. No more eating cookies with wild abandon, alas. I must, again, approach the baked goods responsibly. And you care about this because...well...you don't, do you? I'm rambling. I'm self-indulgent. Meh. And Feh.)

I guess I could tell you about the knitting I'm doing. This is supposed to be a knitting blog, right? I'll leave that for another day, though. There are gifty kilt hose involved, and another Trilce being worked up in another yarn. And socks. Always with the socks around here.

Meh. And Feh. If the Thing of Wonder doesn't manifest in the next 24 hours, I swear I'll put that expectation down and get on with the living of a perfectly normal, unremarkable, good and bad and hard and easy year. Same as any other year.

Or maybe I'll just put that expectation down right now and get on with it.