The mitten box

I was going to tell you about how I was wondering why the astronaut chick had a bb gun with her, but then I remembered that a colleague at work shot his own front teeth out when he was a kid in a bb gun mishap. I guess maybe she figured that if she couldn't kill her, she could at least take out a few teeth.

Then I was going to tell you about how when my sister was little she called her throat her "teledirt." None of us have any clue why, or what she might have been mispronouncing, and even my sister to this day has no idea. (I think she was saying "throat hurt" because moms like to say "does your throat hurt" and touch your neck, so maybe she thought it was the name.)

But then I called my dad tonight and he said it's been -17 all week back in Michigan, and I couldn't think of anything except walking to school in the freezing cold, occasionally with my hair wet so it would freeze (hi, 4th grade) but more often in one of those blue snowmobile coats with the hood that was a mile long and trimmed with fur and the lining was orange, and I had a string in my coat to hold my mittens on. And THAT got me thinking about the mitten box.

We always had a mitten box in our mud room, and it's a good thing they were all tied together with idiot strings because there were a lot of mittens. I also had a blue ski pair that had clips on the wrists and I am not sure what they were for but I used them to clip the mittens to each other when I took them off so I wouldn't lose them. When I came in from the back yard, my first stop was that box. I've dreamed about it - in one I was digging through the mitten box in the back of Outback Steakhouse, where I waited tables in college. It was one of those dreams where you have 5 ungreeted tables and they just sat you with a party of 12. And I was digging in my family's mitten box. And the mitten box reminded me of ice skating.

Dad put a skating rink in the back yard every year - maybe I have told you that. He had a gigantic plastic tarp and he carved out the space with a shovel and laid down the tarp and sprayed it with the hose until there was a lot of ice. And when that wasn't working I went down to the high school with my skates and spent hours whirling around on their rink, frozen and with my stupid mitten strings banging against my legs. I was a skating fool - backwards, forwards, spirals, speed-skating, you name it, I was out there perfecting my technique. Then I saw Ice Castles on HBO around 1980, and I didn't skate anymore. What happened to Lexie was just too awful. A few months ago I watched that movie again, laughing at Robby Benson's crazy hair and how her hairdos got better the more successful she got, and then there was that awful jump and the chain and - laugh at me if you will - all my love for skating left me.

I never had a thing for Robby Benson, but a skating career made her lose him. I knew even back then the movie was super cheesy, but it was just so sad.



This is a picture of me and my sister in the back yard. I am guessing because of the moon boots that I was 9 and my sister was going on 4. That would make it 1979. I would guess it was pretty early in the winter based on how smooth the snowman is. We lived in a house that was built from a giant lumber baron's mansion - four houses were built from what they salvaged from it. (My hometown was a lumber boomtown back in the day.) The garage behind us was the carriage house. We had a dog named Butch who lived at the end of the garage and never came in the house. He was a collie, I guess, but mostly brown. One day he just wandered off and never came back. He was deaf, we couldn't find him. I like that we put whiskers on the snowman.

Anyway. I don't remember those mittens at all, but see how we are both wearing snowpants? How cool dippy is that? And those moon boots? My friend Jennifer Jo and I took her paddleboat out on their stinky-arse pond one day and I stuck my foot in. After that the boot stunk, and I had to throw them out. But Napoleon would be proud!

Ice Castles, moon boots and the mitten box - I've destroyed all my street cred with y'all, and you know all you'll ever need to know about me.

22 degrees

My apartment just doesn't seem to warm up. I have a whole wall of windows - not a plate-glass, but large, eastern-facing windows in the living room, dining room and my bedroom. This is fantastic in Tennessee summers, where the sun is so hot between 4pm and 6pm that you really think you're going to die in it, and if your windows face that way it's enough to melt the paint off the walls. Because my windows face west, my apartment is quite livable in the summer months. In the winter when it's warm in the sun and cold in the shade, though, my apartment is freezing.

How DID those women live way back when with wool summer dresses, etc? No wonder everybody was always fainting.

We seem to be in the middle of a serious, non-moving deep freeze. I feel the same way about my knitting. I'm most of the way through another felted clog (sole #2 left on clog 1), but my lovely Monkey socks have stalled and I need to put in some serious effort to finish those green socks I started way back when. Also, I'm making Elbac but I'm not loving the fabric. I am seriously thinking of overdyeing the yarn in brown, and I'm still toying with the idea of making a ribbed cable scarf that has big giant cables - like 16 stitches wide - but I'm really kind of stuck on the math. Actually I have it all worked out in theory but I need to decide what I want to do about the execution. It is really time to swatch. And those lovely Brittany birch cable needles I bought this weekend will help ease the pain (even I'm not crazy enough to do a 16-stitch ribbed cable with no cable needle).

So, the cold air is stalled, my knitting is stalled, and I don't have any glamorous kitty pictures to show you. I have been taking pictures of these cats almost daily for about four years, and I feel like I'm finally starting to get some good shots. In college I would have loved a digital camera instead of the clunky Pentax K-1000 I hauled with me everywhere I went. Even buying bulk film was pricey by today's standards. I do miss the smell of the photo lab, though I don't miss the hours I spent there. Anyway, I never did much with live subjects back in college; it was always a still life or a barn or some shadows or a cool graveyard. I am still sorely lacking in that department, and learning as I go.

I remember that Photoshop 2.0 was the first version I ever used, and if I could get to the Photoshop lab and get a machine that had 8mb of RAM I knew I'd be able to get my assignment done for that class. Today at work I have 2.5GB. That would have sounded space-age to me 12 or 13 years ago.

Thanks for all the good comments on my little tips. I'll try to come up with some more basics.

A monkey and some other stuff

One monkey sock is finished:



My new mattress arrived yesterday, so I spent Friday night buying a mattress pad, a faux down topper (curiously, this felt better than the feather version, and I am a stickler for feathers), two sets of sheets, a bedskirt...I'm not even going to think about what it cost. Two very polite gentlemen showed up yesterday at about 8:15 (for an 8:30 - 10:30 delivery!), set the bed up, and I was all set to start moving furniture around to accomodate this giant thing.

Bed is huge. Gi-normous. It's at least a foot higher up than my last mattress when you add in the topper and stuff. Grady can barely jump up on it. The space under it seems the same, so evidently it's just big. In addition to that my previous mattress was a double, and this is a queen size, so it's bigger width and lengthwise as well. (This is the first bed I've ever owned where I fit on it lengthwise, I'm 5'9.) I moved things around at least three times before finally moving everything back to its original configuration and sliding my desk over to the left. It works. Then I went yarn shopping.

I know everyone says that mattresses hurt your back for at least 30 days after you get them, but honest to Pete last night was the most comfortable I have ever been in a bed. True story!

This morning I scrubbed the bathroom floor (the apartment reeks of Pine-Sol, which doesn't smell like Pine or Sol). My friend is coming at 1 to pick up the old mattress (after sleeping on the new one I feel guilty giving her the old crappy one but it's really not that crappy). I'm going to try to take a walk in our freezing weather (24 degrees) a little later and try out my coat's mp3 pocket and headphones holder. And then I'll be rooting for the Bears (or the Colts) and watching dumb commercials tonight.

Here are some other pictures from last week...

Stitch n' Bitch group at Threaded Bliss, January 25th:


Some yarn I bought to make the Elbac scarf, which pattern am not yet sure I like:


The teeny bit of snow that closed school on Thursday:


And finally, the pretty snow we got Friday:


As always, click to see them bigger. Happy Superbowlday! :o)

Finally, a Post.

Y'all know that despite my penchant for Southern cooking and the word "y'all" I was born and raised in Michigan, the northern Lower Peninsula, to be exact. This is what you are seeing when you see people holding up their hand and pointing at it to show everybody where they are from. Right hand, palm side is the correct presentation. I am from the pad on the little finger. (That is one of those crazy things in life that you don't need to know, but they make it better, like knowing that all of Emily Dickinson's poems can be sung to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas." Try it! Useless, but entertaining.)

For 18 years I lived on the shore of Lake Michigan, less than two miles away from it in fact. I could easily walk down there and dip my toes in the Lake anytime I wanted to. And for a long time after I moved here I laughed so hard at people who called these teeny-tiny southern ponds "lakes" and call bedroom furniture "suits." (A bedroom suit is Pajamas, not furniture.) I guess you go with what you have.

Well obviously I like the South better, and one of the main things I like about it is sunshine in the wintertime. Winter was always my so-so season, because although it was snowy and lovely, it was also gray. Maybe seven or eight times a winter the sun comes out, and the rest of the time it's hidden behind a bank of clouds so thick there is no blue. Those clouds bring clippers, arctic blasts, and the dreaded Lake-Effect snow. That is when a snowstorm moves in over a warmish lake and picks up all manner of precipitation to dump on the shore. So when everybody else got 12" of snow, we got three feet. But here in Nashville it hardly ever snows, and the sky is almost always blue even when it's cold, and if it does snow it's melted by 2:00 or so.

Y'all, I am used to snow. I am used to my dad shoveling the driveway only to have the plow go by and Dad cuss like a sailor. I am used to snow up to the eaves of the house because of blowing and drifting. I am used to walking on snow to school every day and thinking it's a heat wave when the temperature is 40.

What I am not used to is closing the school systems because an inch of snow was forecast. "Just in case." I am not used to the local news being on the scene at Kroger interviewing people who are buying all the milk. I can deal pretty well with the crazy drivers who don't know about driving in snow. I can deal with being snowed in. I've been in blizzards and whiteouts and seen snow so deep we couldn't get to our car, let alone drive it. But it absolutely baffles me that a little snow can shut down a town.

When I was a kid the only time they closed school is if it was so cold your skin would freeze when you went outside. But when you live somewhere where it snows almost every single day, I guess you have to adjust the standards.

I have a picture of what my car looked like this morning that I'll post later. In the meantime...do y'all think I'm crazy? I just can't adjust to buying a whole cart full of canned goods because of a couple of flakes.