Dogs Steal Yarn

And here's why it's worth the effort...

I made oatmeal honey bread yesterday. It was my first time making this particular bread. (The recipe is in the Tassajara Bread Book.) Thumper has always liked whatever bread I make, but he's absolutely nuts for this one. Seeing me eating a slice just now, he came running toward me, clapping, asking for "behd! behd! Peeees?" I tore off a piece for him and he ran with it back to the window, where he's right now very busy supervising our neighbors' move. (Trucks, guys moving heavy stuff. Very exciting. He's helping by shouting at them through the window. "Da! Da! Da! Beep beep!")

I love that he's so excited to eat something I made for him--something that took more effort than the lentil soup he also loves, the broccoli, the pasta. He's a pretty good eater and likes my cooking. But baking bread takes special effort and time. To bake bread is to give up the reading, knitting, regrouping I usually do during his nap, so a day when I bake bread is a day without downtime. But to see how happy it makes him, it's totally worth it.

It pleases me even more than seeing him wearing things I've knit for him. He tolerates the handknits, but he certainly never claps with joy when he sees them.

That said, it's Friday and soon will be naptime, but I'm not making challah today. One day of breadmaking a week is plenty.

Still here

I meant to blog sooner than this. I had every intention of returning from our trip and jumping back into some kind of regular blogging. But then there was the craziness of re-entry, and then the craziness of everyday life, and here we are several days later than I'd meant to post again.

Not that I actually have anything to say, mind you.

The red blob of the earlier post is now 9.5" of blob. It needs to be 12.5" of blob, at which point it gets set aside so that two red blobs of sleeve can be knit, then the whole blobby mess joined and knit and miraculously transformed from assembled blobs to lovely comfy sweater. All well and good, and quick work at 3.5 spi, but I've been getting very very little knitting time, so... So yeah...no sweater to show yet. Soon, I hope.

The garden is still a rectangle of dirt bordered by planks, so nothing to see there yet.

I spend a lot of time telling you about all the things I can't show you, don't I?

Yawn.

So what's new here? Thumper has been going around all morning singing, "I share, I share, I share." He does, too. What a guy.

Home

We’re back. Settling back into our Portland life after a week’s return to the frozen east and our mothers’ homes.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this trip. I figured one of two things: either my creeping homesickness would overtake me and I’d start to want to move back east, once I was back among my familiar beloveds and back walking familiar blocks and seeing familiar light, etc etc; or I would be reminded of all the reasons we left and be grateful for having so successfully escaped. What I didn’t expect (for some reason, though it now seems quite the most obvious result) was that this trip back east would finally seal Portland as Home.

Walking into my mother’s house, fresh from the airport, I started to cry because her house smelled like “home.” But it smelled like my childhood home, not like anyplace I’ve lived since I was going on eighteen and off to college. (Cinnamon and old wood and a slight note of paper, for the record. The wood I can chalk up to her antiques. The cinnamon and paper, not sure. But that’s what my mom’s house always smells like. And I never lived in the house she lives in now, so it’s not the house but my mother and her stuff and her cleaning products I was getting all Proustian about, I guess.) So nostalgia for my childhood, and the comfort of being with my mother, and then a family party where we got to see most of the family and many family friends all at once, and that was pretty damn good. That was the first two days of the trip.

A couple of days later, staying with Billy’s mom in his childhood home on the Upper West Side, I got to wallow in the nostalgia for my twenties and early thirties. There was the comfort of walking down streets I have walked down so many damn times I know them in my bones. (Downtown and Brooklyn, that is. UWS never was my turf.) The need to not look around you at all, to be able to feel where you are. I don’t have that in Portland yet. Didn’t know how much I was missing it.

Thumper and I got to spend the day with these three:

That’s Alicia and her son; and Xina. My two oldest, dearest friends, and the boy who was to be Thumper’s oldest, dearest friend. Except we up and moved, so the boys won’t get to have the shared childhood that Alicia and I had. Best laid plans etc etc. (But Billy and I are working hard to convince Alicia and family—and Xina and her fiance, for that matter—to move to Portland. It’ll most likely never happen, but worth a try.)

Later in the trip I got to visit with some of my closest knitty friends at The Point. Damn, I missed my knitters. It was a weekday lunchtime, so some couldn’t make it to the meetup. A big downside to these whirlwind visits… Must try to schedule a weekend day for knitting on our next trip back east.

So there were dear friends and family. There was knitting with more dear friends. The bagels were from H&H, the knishes from Zabars. There was beautiful winter light in Brooklyn, complete with gold-tipped trees in Prospect Park.

There was snow for Thumper to play in.

Really…everything was conspiring to make me want to move back to New York. And yet…at no point did I want to move back. We had a wonderful visit to the familiar places to visit the beloved, familiar people. And then it was time to leave, and we got on the plane and left. And as the plane came in low over Vancouver, and we saw the boats on the Columbia and we touched down in Portland, I turned to Billy and said exactly what I was thinking. I said, “I just remembered why we left New York.” Why? “Because we could.”

It is, apparently, entirely possible to love New York and leave it. Possible to love New York and many people in it, and then move far far away and find a much better life in that new, far-off place. This morning we woke up in our bed in Portland, where it was mid-fifties and sunny. Billy made blueberry pancakes, and then we played in the backyard and I prepped the garden bed for planting the early seeds next week by turning the winter cover crop under. When Thumper was ready for his nap, we loaded him into his stroller and walked across the Hawthorne Bridge while he slept. We strolled around downtown, stopped off for burritos (while he still slept). Got some coffee for me, walked back across the Morrison Bridge and then home, where he finally woke up. Something shifted in Portland while we were gone, and now things are blooming and the air smells like jasmine. (It may not actually be jasmine blooming, but it’s something sweet that I remember first smelling in springtime in Hong Kong.)

We are home. Absolutely home. I’m ready to finish unpacking now. Ready to hang the paintings and mirrors. Ready to get the garden going. Ready to get the guest room set up, because we’ve told our friends and family back east that we’re expecting plenty of visits.

And now, off to the market. After a week+ away, the cupboard is quite bare.

And we're off...

Take care, everybody. I'm going to do something rather out of character and leave the laptop home this time.

Comments closed while I'm gone, to thwart the evil ^$#*(&) spammers.

Behold! A red blob!

It's not much to look at yet, is it? But there you have it, the beginning of the next Trilce. I'm using Lamb's Pride Bulky this time, in the Spice colorway. I was able to match the gauge I got with the Manos of the first version using the same needle sizes, so I'm officially calling Lamb's Pride Bulky a good sub for this pattern. My wonderful tech editor has already done her tech edity thing with the pattern, and my wonderful test knitter has done her test knitty thing. So once I finish test knitting the size I'm making this time (40"), the pattern will be ready for release into the wild.

Sorry it's taken so long. I know a number of you wanted the pattern quite a while ago. Not much longer now! This pattern takes all of a weekend to knit up (if you don't have young kids). I don't get enough knitting time to get this one done quite that fast, but it shouldn't be TOO long now.

Making lists...

We're leaving town in a few days, finally headed back east for a visit. The dog/house sitter is all lined up, the travel plans made, plans made to see family and friends, etc. Now just the frantic list-making of everything that needs to be bought/washed/packed/remembered and trying not to stress too much in anticipation of the joys of air travel with a toddler. Add to that the stress of a too-short trip, having to divide time between Thumper's two grandmas, not having enough time to see enough friends, knowing however much time we give to anyone won't be enough... We moved away from everyone we love and now we get to see their faces oh so briefly in a whirlwind visit. Okay...some of their faces. So many people we aren't going to be able to see on this trip.

Oy vey. Enough.

So yeah...heading back home for a visit soon. Hoping Thumper travels as well as he did last time. Hoping Diego behaves for the dog sitter. And knitting Trilce again. I finally cast on for the second one. Photos of knitting tomorrow, perhaps. Photos of something, anyway. I've been doing way too many photoless posts lately, for my taste.

Fragment #4

Out on the street was the cool clean air of spring and everyone with that Saturday night bounce to their step. Another few hours and that slick edge of promise would be smudged and run. But for now there was still that impending sense that this could be it. This could be the night that changes everything. She could see it written on the faces around her. The eager way lips met cigarettes and hands reached for hands on the street.

Ahead of them a girl in a blue prom dress broke away from the group she walked with and stumbled out into the middle of the street. The back of her dress was torn where she or someone else had stepped on the cheap taffeta. She may have begun to rethink the decision to wear the dress for a night of bar hopping. She may have simply been hoping someone would come along with a tiara. Or a chariot. Or another beer. She stretched out her arms and spun there, centered on a manhole cover, spinning and spinning, one small breast breaking free from the taffeta and following her in joyful bouncing arcs. The traffic light bathed her skin in green and she was almost beautiful. When a friend grabbed her by the waist and pulled her back to the safety of the sidewalk, everyone had to blink once or twice to regain their bearings.

In which the non-parents will be bored to tears

Child-led toilet training. That's been the plan all along, when the time came. I just didn't expect the child to lead us to it quite so soon.

Last night Thumper asked to have his diaper taken off. He then ran straight to the toilet, shouting, "Pee! Pee!" We put him on the toilet, and sure enough... He peed. Then I gave him some toilet paper to wipe himself with, which he did proudly. Billy said, "Toilet paper? For pee?" Well, yeah. He's a bit young for that shake-and-zip move, don't you think? And what do I know about having a penis? Thankfully not very much. So as long as Mommy has any say in it, yes I think a little square of toilet paper is perfectly appropriate. I doubt it's going to scar him for life.

When we woke up this morning, he asked to pee in the toilet again, and did. We're not going to push it. Today we'll get him a potty as well as one of those seats that fits over the regular toilet, to see which he prefers, and we'll let him use them or use his diapers as he chooses.

But it's all happening a bit sooner than I would have expected. He's only 19 months old still. My little baby! The thought of that little tush in underpants instead of diapers is so strange to me. Even though the underpants are still quite a ways off.

Not sick of the rain yet

A cold, rainy night in Portland. I've spent the evening happily tucked into a corner of a cafe that does NOT play techno, drinking my decaf americano and writing. A good writing night, I'm happy to say, and now a very quick hello of a blog post and off to buy groceries and then go home to my guys. A character I had thought was going to make just one minor appearance in the early pages of the book has made a reappearance on page 110 and turns out to be far more interesting than I'd first thought when meeting him on page 40 or thereabouts. He's bringing a twist to the story that I didn't expect. I'm looking forward to seeing where it's all leading.

I'm also looking forward to getting out of here now to go grocery shopping. For real. I love grocery stores. I was a cashier in a Foodtown in high school and you'd think that would have scarred me for life, but apparently not. I didn't like the job much, but I did enjoy the voyeuristic aspects of it. Seeing what people bought, in what quantities, how often. Listening to what they said to each other. Seeing their addresses on their checks (this was pre-debit cards and very few people used their credit cards to buy groceries back then, at least where I worked) and making some guesses about their lifestyles based on the address. And then the regulars...having regulars and liking them. Old Mr. Masikoff, well into his seventies and an unapologetic flirt with his favorite cashiers (me and this girl Ann Marie)... The woman who asked me where I got my hair cut and then came back in a week later with the same cut as me--a suburban punk asymmetric cut (dyed a flaming red, of course) that was weirdly out of place on her middle aged head, even though she didn't go for the red. The dad in his late forties or early fifties with the faded Levi's and salt and pepper crew cut who would come in with kids about my age and my hands would shake when I gave him his change and even today I'm getting a nervous little rush thinking about him... (I wonder what he would have thought, had he known a 17-year-old had a crush on him?)

Ah...Foodtown...

You never know where a blog entry will take you when you sit down to write. I only meant to say that I'm looking forward to shopping without having to rush through and appease/entertain a toddler.

And now I must go and do said shopping and get home to my guys.

Have a lovely evening. And while we're at it... Any nameless strangers from your distant past, the thought of whom can still make you feel a bit wiggly?

Fragment #3

I was, let’s see…seven at the time? Eight? 1925, so I guess… eight. I was eight and my brother Ronny, he was ten or thereabouts. Miranda was just five. I do remember that, because that’s as old as she got. We lived at the coast then, we’d just moved there some months before so Daddy could work the docks in Astoria.

So that day, this one day out playing by the water and we were playing hide and go seek. Ronny was it and he found me right away, but Miranda hid so good we couldn’t find her at all and it was coming on dark and the two of us figured she’d headed the two blocks or so back to the house to hide there and we went on home. There was this rundown old shack of a thing at the beach there, I should tell you that straight out. And come to find out when she didn’t come home and all the men of the neighborhood go out looking for her with lanterns lit and calling her name, Miranda! Miranda! And Mama rushing through the streets too, the women too rushing around, calling Miranda! Miranda! Well, that girl had gone and wiggled herself into a hole underneath that shack, and must have fell asleep there waiting for us to find her and then the tide come in.

None of us were much for the water after that and we never did any of us learn to swim. But my mother had another daughter after that, another girl with red hair and blue eyes, so it all worked out alright.

The Positive Negative Socks are done

Details here.

In other news, I finished reading Sabbath's Theater last night. Oh my god. How (why) did I wait this long to read Roth?