Is it Spring Yet?

I have my garden planned and my seeds purchased already. They're waiting in the basement for warmer weather, or at least for the calendar date when I can put the seeds in some soil, under the lights in their fake Spring in order to get a jump on our growing season.

Yes, I know it's only January, but the snapdragons get started at the end of February and I was one of the last people to order my snapdragon seeds before the company ran out of the variety I wanted, so I'm not that crazy to have them this early.

Besides, ordering my seeds makes the weather outside seem less bleak, less endless.

We're putting in a garden this year. For the last couple of years I've had an ever-growing series of pots lining my driveway. We had no room for a garden in the front without turning the front yard into a garden and the back yard was shady and wooded. I'd have had to take down the neighbors' trees in order to get enough sunlight in the back, and I think they would have objected.

We bought a new house and moved in November; I brought along all of my pots so that I could plant flowers around the back deck. In our new house we have 3 acres of land with only one line of trees at the back of the property, so we have plenty of room for a garden. We've walked the property and decided exactly where the garden should go and I wait.

The neighbor, a Mennonite carpenter named Elmer Yoder who's lived in his house forever, told me that our property is largely "muck." While this sounded to me like it meant rich, fertile soil, I have since discovered that "muck" is actually a technical term used to describe property that is too wet for crops. There is a broken field tile in the front that will need to be fixed in order to alleviate some of the drainage issues and the county is overdue for dredging the creek that abuts our parcel.

The spot which we've chosen sits a little bit higher than some of the surrounding yard and I'm hopeful that there will be no standing water in that spot at the end of Spring. We'll figure something out, I'm sure, but if I end up using my old system for growing my tomatoes this year, heck, at least I've already got the pots for it.

Change to Blog

I've got another post coming, probably more than one, but I made a change today that I wanted to alert my readers to.

I've been getting spam posts in my "comments" sections on my posts and it's been a pain to log in and clear them out- invariably they show up on older posts and I have to figure out when I wrote the entry first.

I am no longer able to accept anonymous comments on the blog- I am hoping that the change will completely eliminate spam postings (I really don't think anyone who reads this is interested in German Viagra) but I know that some of my regulars will no longer be able to post comments. I've hesitated to make the change for that reason, but I'm sure you all will understand.

Check back soon- I'm in a writing mood- I just need the time to sit down. I'll get something up this month though, for sure.

Edited to add: I got another spam comment today, written in a character language, so clearly the problem hasn't been solved yet. Spam is something, like vandalism, that I just don't "get." Hmph.

Speaking Chinese and Doing Calculus

Disney has just announced they'll refund your money if you bought "Baby Einstein" videos from 2004-2009. Apparently, parents bought the videos with the expectation that they would increase their child's intelligence.

Although I purchased several of the videos I don't think I could ask for a refund. I never thought they were educational so I don't consider myself defrauded. There are lots of toys that bill themselves as "educational" whose claim seems ludicrous. I have occasionally joked that a toy is "educational" because if you throw it, you will witness the physical law of gravity in action.

Putting a picture of a square, a triangle, an oval and a rectangle on something does not make it educational. Nor does making the different sides out of different colors of plastic. As for the videos, the fact that there are toys and creepy puppets filmed against a soundtrack of classical music, in my mind at least, did not make it "educational." The surprising part about Disney's announcement (to me) is that people thought it was.

As I said, I have had the videos. They allowed me to take a shower or make dinner. I know that the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended no video watching before the age of two, but until one of their members wants to come over and make dinner for us, I have to find some way to get things done. My kids happily watched the videos while I got something done. They didn't watch them all day but I did let them watch them on a regular basis.

I'm not surprised that my 4 year-old isn't doing calculus or speaking Chinese. I am thankful that I had an electronic babysitter to help me get dinner made or laundry in the washing machine, but I never expected the videos to be anything more than that. The fact that it has been determined that the videos are not educational do not make me feel parental guilt- I never thought they were anything other than entertainment for my child.

So Disney, you can keep your money from me. The videos came in handy. If some of the major toy manufacturers take note of Disney's actions and start using the word "educational" a little more judiciously when describing their toys, that'd be great. If they don't, I'll just keep using their "educational" toys to teach my children the law of gravity.

Uprooting the Deeply Rooted

We're currently 2 1/2 weeks away from moving and there are boxes everywhere. The guy who works the Goodwill truck knows me by name. I'm starting to count things down- this is the last time I'll pay this bill or get this magazine or buy toilet paper until we move to our new house. The kids asked to drive by the new house yesterday. We're all excited, but it's a lot of work.

I bought our house 9 years ago when I was married to my ex-husband. I was working full-time and this house needed a LOT of work. There was a hole in the balcony as big as a garbage-can lid and every room was ugly beyond description. Instead of putting time into carefully going through and cleaning out my old house, I came over to the new one after work and painted, prepped, stripped and cleaned. The boxes in the attic, left there from my move from law school, were moved into the attic here. Some of them had been untouched during the 9 years I'd been here.

My husband Nate moved in after we got married in 2004. He already had a house, but we decided we'd live in mine. It was clearly MY house, with all of my artwork on the walls, my furniture everywhere.

Nate sold his house 3 days after he'd put it on the market, a year after we were married. We already had a child at that time and Nate didn't have the time or the energy to go through his things. They joined mine in the attic. I tried to make as much space for his things in my house as I could- I felt he'd sacrificed his home identity when we got married.

We had too much furniture, too many things. Two sets of plates and two coffee makers, eight phones, two standing mixers, three blenders, 12 blankets, 15 towels- we simply had too much.

Both of us tend to be pack rats and I have had to remind myself that just because something has value doesn't mean it has value to me.

There is an emotional component to it too- prior to meeting Nate, I had gone through a divorce which left me feeling like the stuff I'd kept was like the piece of myself he hadn't chipped away. I didn't want to give up anything I still had left. I was not done healing from my divorce when Nate and I married.

When Nate and I got married, Nate had been a widower for 4 years. Tossing out things that had been theirs was like treating his past with disregard- it was a dishonoring of her memory.

We've been married for over 5 years now. We have two children, we've been on 8 vacations; lost a grandparent and a friend; bought two cars; been to the doctor numerous times and to the hospital 5 times; been to a few weddings; welcomed a nephew into the family and gone through the daily and weekly trials and tribulations that a family goes through together. In short, we've both moved beyond our pasts. We carry them with us, for good and for bad, but we don't need the things anymore that were as important to us as they were when we united our households.

We've been going through the boxes one by one. We've had an extra trash pick-up at our house and we've borrowed an extra trash can a couple of times. We've made many trips to the Goodwill truck.

It feels good to clean out and sort and purge the things we have.

We're moving into our house. We chose it together after looking at a LOT of houses. We'll pick out the wall coverings and the floor coverings together because it's our house. I'm excited about what it's going to mean for us as a family.

I still have too much fabric and he probably has more tools than he needs, but neither one of us is moving something into our new house simply because we don't know what to do with it.

That's a very clean feeling.

50 First Dates

We just sold our house.

Thank goodness too, because the suspense was killing me.

Every time we had a showing it was like a first date. I never liked first dates- it was simply too stressful. Does he like me? Was this the right perfume? Is my neckline too low? Too high? Was that a good joke or did I just sound stupid?

Then the next couple of days were torture. Did he like me? Is he going to call again? Do I get a second date? I knew I wore the wrong shoes.

Selling the house was the same way. I'd do a last-minute clean-up of the kids' toys and walk out of the house, drive down the street and the questions would start: Are they there now? Do they like the paint color? Is my kitchen showing itself off well? Do they like the yard? Did my 4-year old pee all over the toilet right before we left? And then the inevitable: What did they think? Are they going to call again? Do they want a second showing? Maybe they'll pop the question!!

One time (I am not making this up and am still embarrassed by it) one of our cats threw a hairball on the dining room table, all over the literature about our house AFTER we'd left, but BEFORE our prospective buyers came through. Needless to say, they did not make an offer.

Sometimes we found out why the prospective buyers declined to make an offer and most of the times the reason made sense- they didn't like the ravine abutting the back yard or the layout wasn't conducive to their lifestyle. Sometimes the reason made no sense- one couple said that our kitchen was too small. The kitchen is a showplace room that I spent way too much money on. One of the largest rooms in the house and bigger than any kitchen in any house I'd looked at, the kitchen boasts top-of the line appliances and about a mile of Silestone counters. The kitchen, ugly when I bought it, sold the house to me because my old kitchen was a cramped little space that I couldn't work in. Those buyers made up a reason- their agent called them "crazy."

When we got a rejection, we'd kvetch and speculate about the real reason, much the way my girlfriends and I would kvetch and speculate about the real reason he didn't call back, whoever the he of the moment was.

When the first offer came in, our response was mixed. We were a little insulted by his figure- we'd made every major repair during our 9 years in the house- roof, furnace, A/C, kitchen renovation- and thought our house was worth more. We were part elated- someone liked our house enough to make an offer! And we were part terrified- lay-offs had just been announced at my husband's job and while he was unlikely to be directly effected, we weren't sure how deep the lay-offs would go or what kind of financial concessions we'd be asked to make in order to save jobs. In addition, we would be moving to a new community and neither Nate nor myself likes change- I like knowing where everything is in my grocery store.

We rejected the offer.

And then our buyer came back with more money. He really liked our house. It was going to be a good fit for him. Nate and I joined hands, closed our eyes and stepped off the cliff.

We signed the contract.

We didn't know where we were going to move to but had a couple of houses we were contemplating. We had a couple more we wanted to see. I did not sleep.

We went out one more time with our agent and narrowed our choices down to two.

We decided to make an offer. Again, I did not sleep. We'd made an offer on a house we'd decided was our dream house. It had everything we'd hoped for, including some things we thought we'd never get in one house. We knew other people were also interested in the house. We crossed our fingers and waited to hear from our agent.

This was worse than any first-date jitters I'd ever had. The phone rang and I jumped at it. Our agent! NO! I was NOT interested in taking a short telephone survey! The phone rang. Our agent! Sorry, dear friend, I will have to call you back later. AFTER our agent has called. The phone rang! Our agent! With a signed contract in hand.

Phew. I am so glad that's over. Now we just have to move. Ugh.

Project Grace Completed

If you don't know about Project Grace, please read my last entry first- it will save me the time of re-writing it here.



I finished Project Grace a couple of weeks ago. We'd just gotten back from vacation and it took me until tonight to put my hands on my camera so that I could take pictures that would provide the evidence that I wanted.

There were two panels that gave me trouble- one was fairly easy to suss out- it took a couple of hours of research and a new book purchase, but my first attempt revealed the correct pattern. The "Bramble" was indeed "Bramble."

The "Slip Stitch Diamonds" turned out to be a bit harder to unravel. I searched every book I had including two newly purchased ones. I made a practice square- it looked good on the front, but the back was clearly different. It had to be perfect- good enough was not going to be good enough. I was also concerned that as the blanket aged, the difference between Grace's pattern and mine would become more evident.

Finally I went to a local knitting shop and asked the ladies there for help. One of them pointed out a bit of knitting that I would have missed- every fourth stitch had one more row to it- an odd bit of knitting indeed. They'd never seen a stitch like it before- it makes a perfectly flat diamond pattern. It's brilliant construction. Their discovery enabled me to work out the stitch the rest of the way.

The cabling was simply resolved with a little math.

Here's the blanket, in all its glory:


(Grace loved cats, so I let Patches stay and be photographed.)

Here's a picture of the end that I knit:



Here's a picture of the juncture where Grace's knitting ends and mine begins:



I tried to take that last picture at a point where the knitting is the most complicated because I figured that if there was a place where the transition would show, that would be it. I can't tell where she left off and I took over. My goal was for the transition to be seamless, and it appears that I accomplished that.

I'm pretty proud of the work I did and glad that I could do it right. I have a blanket I cherish and I will think of Grace often when I am curled up beneath it, with a cat in my lap. Anyone who knew Grace would know that spending time under a hand-knit blanket, sharing its comfort with a cat is the perfect way to remember Grace. I am lucky to have her blanket (and so is Patches.)

Project Grace

A dear friend of mine died recently. Grace was only 64 and she died of pancreatic cancer. It was a horrible end to a gentle and generous person. I will miss her tremendously.

Grace was a knitter and seamstress extraordinaire. She could puzzle out a pattern in her head and solve other people's mistakes and mis-stitches. She could create patterns and tailor and calculate in her head. Her ability was both fascinating and impressive.

I have had the good fortune to inherit a mostly-finished blanket that was part of her legacy. It's about ten inches too short and it comes without any notes or patterns. This is it:

There are a total of seventeen patterned panels across the front and a border around it.

A couple of the patterns are easy to figure out:
This one is a simple X and O cable with a Diamond Bobble cable in the center


This one is a Trophy Cable on either side and a Seed Stitch Diamond in the center:


And the center section is a simple diamond trellis cable:


Then there are the Mystery Stitches:

Bramble?


Slip Stitch Diamonds?


I think that finishing this blanket without a pattern is the perfect way to remember Grace. I will have to use my head and I will have to be careful. I'm checking my gauge to make sure it will go seamlessly from her work to mine- I'll have to use a larger diameter needle- she always knit looser than I do. I've been thinking about how to recreate the mystery stitches and I've poured through my books. I think I have one of them solved- I found a pattern that looks like it's the right one and I have a swatch knitted up that I'll subject to a close comparison. The "Slip Stitch Diamond" I haven't found a pattern for yet, but I think I've worked it out in my head. I have a swatch of that started too- I don't have it perfect yet, but I think I'm on the right track.

Grace would have it figured out by now, most likely. She'd have loved the challenge.

I love it too.