Just another personal weblog
Frank Howell, on why there is lots of soundproofing between the different screening rooms in the new Magic Lantern theater in Bridgton ME:
“There is nothing more irritating than watching a love scene and hearing an asteroid explode in the theater next door.”
Maybe I’ll do it with bullet points like Sheepish Annie:
…and that’s just the evening. Morning, paid bills and swam 20 lengths (500 meters). Work, actually fixed a bug that came in over the weekend! Woo hoo!
Oh that reminds me, I’d better connect to my work computer and follow up on the tests. Bye.
On our way back from Franklin’s photo shoot in Brunswick we stopped for groceries at a Hannaford’s in Yarmouth. I spotted a bag of meyer lemons and grabbed them.
Six or seven years ago I saw meyer lemons at whole foods (or maybe it was Bread and Circus then) and got a couple to throw in a batch of orange marmalade. I had no idea what was special about them, but thought they were worth a try. I think there was also a lime in the mix and that certainly helped, but I always thought the meyer lemons made the difference. They’re as different from ordinary lemons as tangerines are from oranges — much more aromatic, with a distinctive flavor. Now I get them whenever I see them and have any intention of making marmalade that year.
I think this batch used four meyer lemons, one lime, water to bring the peel and juice and water to four cups, five and 2/3 cups of sugar, and one package of liquid pectin. It was one more cup of juice and a proportional amount of sugar more than the pectin recipe leaflet called for. I got six half-pints and one twelve ounce jars of marmalade plus another custard cup full. The custard cup had jelled by morning, so it wasn’t too much juice for the pectin. It would have been eight half-pints if I had washed that many. It’s good stuff.
The most interesting birds here (Casco) yesterday were a half-dozen, or maybe seven, cedar waxwings. We haven’t seen them here before, and I’m just as glad there weren’t more. A big flock of them, and they sometimes come in flocks of thirty or more, could strip all the fruit from the crabapple tree in a day. Then there wouldn’t be anything to attract the grouse — who was also there, at first walking very slowly and carefully across the driveway, then jumping up into the crabapple with a little flurry of wingbeats.
Today I saw a couple of yellowish-brownish birds in the crabapple. I thought they might be the waxwings having come back, but no — when I put the binoculars up I was struck by how big the bills were. Oh! The pine grosbeaks are back. This time it was the females or immature males. The first one I looked at impressed me almost as being the color of a female goldfinch, mostly gray and white with that dull yellow, almost greenish color. The second was a much brighter yellow-orange color, especially on the upper tail coverts but also the head (and note the wash of the same color on the breast). These pictures are all the second bird:
We had redpolls today also, I think five or six at one point; also both red- and white-breasted nuthatch, two goldfinch, downy and probably hairy woodpeckers, and titmice and chickadees.
Turkey in the woods (turkey in the woods)
Turkey in the snow (turkey in the snow)
Walk around the block, wouldn’t you know
Turn the corner, see a turkey in the snow.
Actually five of them, I’m gonna say all male because we saw the beards. They were mostly foraging, or trying to forage, on the road. They weren’t really enthusiastic about going through the snow. Some of them were staying on top of the crust of the snow most of the time, but most of them would only go a few steps between times they broke through the crust. It looked like slow going.
I bought a kit for these mittens at the Maine Fiber Frolic in 2006 — a year and a half ago. I didn’t start them right away, and I didn’t get serious about them until a few weeks ago, maybe after we got home from Pocatello. But winter is here for fair (the Portland paper said that Maine got more snow by Dec. 15 than in an average December total, and it snowed twice since then) so it was time go get going.
These mittens have roving, or really combed merino top, knit in every fourth stitch (except for that line on the top part of the right hand one. I’m not sure how I got off the track there – probably counted something wrong after the thumb gusset. The left hand is closer to how they’re supposed to look). The lining is supposed to felt down with use. They’re a lot like thrummed mittens, except that you don’t have to cut the roving and work with individual bits of it. With all that roving inside, I can believe that they’ll keep my hands warm.
One thing I love is the no-nonsense attitude in the directions. She (the designer, Sarah Miller, Miller Farm, 1289 River Rd, Livermore ME, 207-897-6954) says, under finishing directions, “Cuff. These mittens are expected to do work…You do not want ends pulling out with rings or by snagged fingers with use…tie together any “twin” yarn tails in a square knot (yes!)”
The real point of today’s trip through Gray and Lisbon Falls was to get to Purl Diva in Brunswick for Franklin’s photo shoot for the 1000 knitters project. We got there right around 4:00, when the store had closed as a store for the day and was just being a photo studio. Cars were parked on the street facing back towards U.S. 1. I drove past the end of the line, turned around, and joined the small parade of photo subjects walking toward the store.
They were very organized. As soon as we walked in I was handed a slip of paper with my number (first come, first served) and a clipboard with a model release form to fill out. There was cider and cookies (pretty daring for a yarn shop to have food right there next to the yarn!) for all.
Purl Diva has lots of examples of knitted things hanging up (is that a Knitty Clapotis at the top center of the picture there?) and displayed on shelves. It was a little too crowded to look around a lot — there was standing room only by the time we got there, and it only got more crowded as time went on. I was number 17 and Franklin was photographing number four or five by the time I got there, so there were say 13 people ahead of me. When we left they had given out number 33 I think, so there the last person in by that time had a longer wait than I had.
To break up the wait, our hostess passed around an advance copy Woolbur, a children’s book about a nonconformist lamb.
Here’s Franklin at work. I peeked in at the studio area when he was about on number 12.
How it works is, you sit up on a high stool, figure out how you want to hold the looong ribbon of knitting he has — it’s mostly ecru worsted weight cotton with a big band of indigo somewhere near the other end — and start knitting on it and talking. Franklin gives the impression that he would be comfortable talking to anyone, which of course means he’s pretty good at making his subjects comfortable. You knit on the ribbon, anything you want so long as you leave the same number of stitches on the needles as you started with. Franklin takes pictures, and when you’ve done two rows you’re done. It’s not that your turn is over as soon as he has one good picture, or that your turn lasts until he has one good picture, two rows and that’s it. He tells you what sequence number you are in the project. I don’t remember precisely but I think it was somewhere near 289.
I had brought along a handful of my “knitting” rubber stamps.
About 10 years ago Arlene’s Aunt Lee had invited us to sell stamps at a weaving guild convention that she was helping organize. We designed a bunch of stamps specifically for that event, including a drop spindle and a couple of spinning wheels, and that ball of yarn and a skein. This particular one has been the best selling stamp of all the ones that I’ve designed (as opposed to Arlene’s designs, several of which have sold three or five times as many as this one). The “3620 F” is our catalog number, not part of the stamp, included in the GIF so people can’t use our stamp catalog pages as clip art. As copyright holder, I can use it on my blog if I darn well please. Well anyway, I gave a stamp to the store owner, one to Franklin, and one to Marlena of Swatch This. I also met Jessica of saisquoi. And there were probably other knitbloggers there that I didn’t introduce myself to. All in all, it was lots of fun being at the knitblogging center of southern Maine for an afternoon.
Nowadays there are whole malls, even towns full of malls, that call themselves outlets. What that seems to mean is that the stores each are an outlet for just one manufacturer’s goods. Every so often we stop in Kittery, the first town you come to in Maine coming from Boston, at the Crate and Barrel outlet. But years ago, factory outlet stores were adjacent to the factory they were an outlet for. They had stuff that had been made next door, possible factory seconds or overruns, or maybe the factory had an order for 10,000 of something and made 10500 while they were set up and sold the last 500 at the outlet for a quarter of retail price because that was still more than they got from the distributor.
Arlene had seen ads in some local papers (Maine abounds in giveaway newspapers with a little local news, gardening, hunting, and fishing columns, and lots of ads) from a place that said it was one of the last of the real outlets. We planned our trip to Brunswick (after a shopping stop at Marden’s in Gray) via Lisbon Falls to check it out.
Marden’s is a story by itself. Those of you from the Boston area will probably understand if I say it’s the Building 19 of Maine. If that means nothing to you, does Railroad Salvage? Building 19 has closeouts, insurance salvage, stuff bought from places that are going bankrupt, last year’s clothing styles that mainstream stores don’t want to display this year, and in general whatever other merchandise they can buy for well below normal wholesale price, sold for well below normal retail price. Marden’s in Gray is a quarter the size of Building 19 in Natick, but has the same sort of stuff. Neither of them is where you would go to buy anything specific, but both are great fun to look through in the hopes of finding something you never realized you needed. Marden’s in Gray is a quarter of a mile off our route from Newton to Casco, but it’s always closed when we’re en route. So if we are going to be going that way during store hours, Arlene will want to stop there.
But I digress. The topic was supposed to be the Worumbo Mill Outlet store.
It’s a no-frills sort of place. The exterior is not covered in a slick facade; it looks the way it looks — mainly as though there used to be a building attached to this one that was torn down and nobody really cared about the appearance of the leftover wall:
— and it’s next to the mill!
This was a textile mill, basically the kind of thing New England did for a living between the start of the industrial revolution and the 1930s. The outlet store has lots of blankets, sheets, and bedspreads. It has a small selection of yard goods, some 54 inches wide for a dollar a yard. I got a yard of black and white herringbone wool fabric that looks like material for at least a half-dozen newsboy caps. Arlene got a total of six yards of ivory fabric that will be good for stitchery projects. Some of the fabric they sell probably been around for 40 years, when the mill made lots of fabric for curtains and drapes, in the days before honeycomb blinds took over the window treatment niche.
The most fun thing we found there, not that we have any idea what to do with it but it was too much fun to pass up, was a roll of 2-inch wide day-glow green felt. Tennis ball felt. Any ideas? Maybe there’s a way to use it to liven up those newsboy caps.
I’ve posted a scan of my Evel Knievel postcard. Check the entry for Dec 6.
Did I ever post the pictures of the sandhill cranes in Pocatello last month?
Some people my mom knows live in a modern housing development adjacent to a golf course just south of Pocatello. For the past two or three years a family of sandhill cranes has been hanging out at a water hazard on the golf course right across the street from those people’s house. They sometimes cross the street and feed on the friend’s lawn. One day we went over to see if they were around. Voila! They’re big birds, taller and much more massive than great blue herons, much taller but probably not heavier than a big Canada goose, certainly not as heavy as a bug turkey. But very impressive anyway. And these weren’t the least bit bothered by my taking pictures.
