Knitting on Impulse

Nineteen

How many yards in an egg?

DD to DS: "If an ostrich laid an egg on the roof, which side would it roll down?" (her version of the old "if a rooster laid an egg..." brain teaser).

DS: (knows the rooster version) "Ha! Ostriches don't lay eggs!"

DD: "Of course they do, silly, guess again."

DS:  ".............that side?"

DD: (triumphantly) "No! Ostriches can't fly - it would never make it up to the roof! Your turn."

DS: (looking smug) "Which side of our condo has more boxes?"

DD: "That's easy - all sides are equally crammed with boxes, because Mom keeps ordering yarn."

DS: (sighs) "You're right."

Topology

 

Last night, I did (with some misgivings about all I could/should have been doing instead) a completely self-indulgent thing and attended a math lecture given at the local library by a professor from Quest University. 

It was titled "The Shape of the Universe?" and was primarily an introduction to topology for the layperson, in an "imagine what you would see if..." sort of format. It was very basic, but served to penetrate the fog of laundry and bills and sibling squabbles, and nudge a passion that long predates the kids, goes all the way back to the fork in the road when I bade farewell to the infinite possibilities in the non-premed parts of the University calendar and set my feet on the path of altruism. (Twenty-two years later, I am slowly coming around to the realization that following my natural aptitudes would not necessarily have been selfish or indulgent.)

In my dream world, I would go back to university and study a mixture of math, physics, music, philosophy, and textiles - pursuing the truth of the universe with the purest tools of inquiry: logic, harmony, and wool. (Also I would attend a dream school, wherein my explorations would be subject to scrutiny by persons wiser than I, who would relentlessly push me to dig deeper, aim higher, think more rigorously... but I'd skip the whole soul sucking business of test taking and grade ranking. It would be a journey propelled by my own passion, not a tick in anybody else's approval box. And as long as we're dreaming, this imaginary school would be inexpensive, and have a completely flexible timeline.)

The topic of the lecture itself was also oddly resonant, because mapping the topology of my personal universe is really what I've been doing for the last while. Plummeting down one too many "invisible" crevaces and sitting down at last to make my own map, collect my own data, make my own calculations. It's amazing how long we can spend attempting to make sense of a topology dictacted to us by the beliefs of others, or assumed based on our own faulty information and wishful thinking... only to wind up repeatedly shocked, disappointed, let down, resentful. Whether my personal universe ought to have the shape it does is, right now, irrelevant. The more urgent need is to create an accurate map for navigation, and eventually, to search for the underlying principles and formulae that have generated its shape. Only then, can possibility emerge from chaos.

 

Silence

I'm pretty much running on empty these days.  Beyond fighting it, past striving, fretting, trying harder... more like a pebble at the bottom of a turbulent stream.  Given up on floating, swimming, overcoming, just looking for some equilibrium, something solid to set my feet on, and carry on with what must be done.  It may well be the right place to be - it just doesn't come with many words right now.

 
Still knitting, still dyeing.... there will be pictures.

Pumpkin Day

Second only to Christmas in our house... Pumpkin Carving Day!  The whole family gets in on the action:

 
  


Last, but not least - the outcome of a long exposure photo with candles lit, lights off, and a mildly freaked out greyhound leaping at the photographer's head for reassurance.

Winter-ish Ramblings

The thermometer hasn't changed by more than a degree or two, but overnight the air has transformed from crisp to bitter. 

Snow flurries swirl before a biting wind, stripping the trees of their autumn glory and leaving their winter skeletons in fading rags and tatters.  "Very Hallowe'en-y," my daughter cheerfully noted en route to the bus.

The puppy was shivering a little even with her woolly sweater, and the children reminded me for the hundredth time that new mittens are inexcusably overdue. I may have to stop noodling around on a new cowl and get to work.

After I get the latest stack of orders bundled off to the post office, that is - I haven't had a moment to work on them since the flurry of orders late Friday, (and the post office has been closed the whole time, in any case) but they haunt me with their Not Mailed-ness. I have a fraction of the anxiety I used to endure in the old life, but if anything will wake me up at 2 AM in a cold sweat of fretting it's the feeling of failing a customer committment. (That and the usual nightmares about something happening to one of the kids...)  Nevertheless, neither sleet nor flurries nor nasty winds will stop me from sending the hubby out the door with an armload of packages. 

Lest you think he has the worst of it, I should point out that our present experiment in electrical austerity has our indoors a little on the chilly side, too.  Not sure how long that's going to last (kids aren't buying the "put on a sweater" line) but in the meantime, it's a perfect excuse to appreciate the warming attributes of my lovely new mug:

I rarely ever buy this sort of thing for myself - we have no money, no space (we gave away two thirds of our mug collection when we moved here) and no good practical reason to indulge so.  But it came about that the potters are an older French couple, and we were next to them a couple of markets ago and had a lovely day of conversation and reminiscence about France (I was born in Nice, she in Paris). They engaged our children with the sort of gracious dignity and delight that is rare and lovely and makes me endlessly wistful for more people of that sort in the world. I loved her work, and it embodied for me a whisper of lovely things half remembered from a childhood in Provence, and... I splurged. Just a bit, but it makes my hands, my heart and my eyes very happy.

Thanksgiving

It was Canadian Thanksgiving today, and even though I said I'd be spending the day relaxing and goofing off after hell weekend, what I really deep down meant is that I'd be sleeping in a little and then trying to sneak in a full day's work while pretending to Just Hang Out. Until the phone rang this morning, and my SIL asked if they could pop up from Vancouver for a few hours. Since we like them a whole bunch, we said "Yes! (but the house is trashed and we aren't going to go nuts putting it right, so you have to love us as is.)"

We went to our favorite pub for lunch, wandered about the Village, and the cousins (as they always do) had a blast together.  We made a concerted attempt at group photos, with mixed results:

They all get along well, but the two eldest are hampered at times by their competitive and dominant instincts:

Whereas the two youngest just "get" each other, you know?

 

So anyway, I got NO work of any kind done, and it felt great. (I'm choosing to defer the aaaaggghhhh feeling of behind-ness until tomorrow morning.)

PS. Want a closer look at the pink hat?  I whipped it up this morning from a skein of Woolly Moguls that was a few yards short and consequently wound up in the seconds bin. She loves it.

 
As for the sweater, well, yes it's The New Sweater and I'm being sort of coy about a super detailed view because I haven't made up my mind yet whether to publish it. 

Foggy

The kids' back-to-school cold has finally caught up with me, on top of the usual Monday-after-Market exhaustion, so I played hookey from inumerable important tasks today and opted for a bit of quiet, completely non-physical work at a ridiculously slow pace.

 

Fortunately their colds didn't last long, so I have high hopes the fog will clear in short order. 

Spinning Part II: A Cautionary Tale

Remember this?

Thursday noonish (not long after I uploaded the site, come to think of it) we got The Phone Call from the school.  (Which, given DD's temperment, tends to happen a lot, so while Rob and I always flinch when the phone rings during the school day, we're also sort of used to it.)

This was the most dramatic one to date, though.  Seems she was squatting on the disc while the big kids spun it, leaned back to enhance the effect, bumped her head on a spectator's knee and pulled it in again quickly.  Unfortunately, there was a sort of a whiplash effect and she wound up smashing her mouth forcibly against the upper disc.

Thankfully, she has had relatively minimal pain, and the dentist saw her yesterday and did phase 1 of the restoration:

The tooth with the most missing was also quite loose (hence the temporary cement splinting it to its mate), which means she can't bite or do anything that risks bumping the tooth... for a month.  To her mind, this is by far the worst part, particularly as she is banned for that period from most of the rough and tumble playground games she adores.

Ironically, the parent volunteer who picked out that bit of new playground equipment.... was the dentist's wife.  Also? It was a mere two weeks ago that DD was in for a dental check up, confirming that the poor enamel for which she had the massive amount of work done last fall was indeed confined to her baby teeth (a result of prematurity) and that her adult teeth are flawless.  I believe Perfect was they term they used, and we left with joy in our hearts, and a spring in our step, knowing that massive dental bills were a thing of the past. 

Yeah.

Spinning

We took advantage of a brief sunny respite yesterday to investigate the much anticipated new playground equipment at the school.  The Spinning Disc, in particular, was pronounced exceptional in the categories of Centrifugal Force and Vertigo Induction. (No children were harmed in the making of this sequence, though there were some award winning performances.)