Rolling On One

On our way to Charleston, while waiting at Logan for our flight, I had my first substantial knitting-in-public-related conversation. I was working on the entrelac scarf, which was just about in the same state as the picture I posted recently, when a woman about my age walked over and asked what I was working on. She looked, shook her head, and said, “Men knitters are so fearless!” When I think about it, I guess I’m just not afraid of wasting some money on a project that I may not be able to do. Of course, I don’t want to waste a lot of money; but I’m not afraid of failure at that level. “It’s just yarn,” I said. Once I’ve gotten enough over my fear of a chainsaw enough to use it, I can handle the prospect of a botched scarf.

We talked quite a while. She told me how good Stephanie’s second book is, and I told her that I had signed copies of the first and third ones but haven’t read the second, and we discussed what kinds of things we like to work on. She showed me the pattern for the scarf she was working on, in a fluffy mohair blend on about size 11 needles, *knit 1 and yarn over*, repeat all the way across the first row; *knit 1, drop 1 stitch*, repeat all the way back the next row; knit two rows. I was very pleased to find that I can hold up my end of a knitting-related conversation.

After a while I heard the really interesting part. She had been here to visit her daughter over Hannukah. The family went to the Middle East in Cambridge to hear her daughter’s boyfriend’s band play a concert there. For out-of-town readers, that’s probably the premier rock club in the Boston area, at anyrate the one that radio concert reports will list first most often; so I was impressed right there. In the middle of the concert the band did a love song, and at the end of that the boyfriend came off the stage, walked over to this woman’s daughter, and asked her to marry him!

We just got back (well, yesterday, after getting up at 3:15 AM to catch a 6:00 AM flight) from a week on Hilton Head Island, where Arlene’s sister & brother-in-law had invited us to a timeshare condo. I have lots of pictures to post — I took 98, of which 36 survived the first cut — so there’s a lot of catching up to do.

Somewhere along the line there — alright, it was the 21st — we went out to Blue Ginger to celebrate Charley’s birthday. Blue Ginger is a restaurant that you make a reservation at two weeks in advance, and that calls you the day before to confirm. It’s sort of an Asian fusion nouvelle cuisine place with specialties you wouldn’t come close to anywhere else.

We weren’t sure we’d all be able to be there because a deal that Anne was working on was supposed to close the day before but might be late. It did close on time, however, and she and Matt were there as well as Charley and Nicole. We can’t give much of a restaurant review because three of us ordered the Alaskan butterfish and three of us ordered scallops. We’re very enthusiastic about those dishes, though. The butterfish was grilled, with a good burn taste where the grill marks were, and was served with seaweed salad and Japanese noodle sushi. I loved the fish and I guess the side dishes did complement it, but I didn’t like them all that much. We did get five different desserts (Arlene and I shared) and everyone thought theirs was excellent. Anne’s dessert was billed as doughnuts; they looked more like slightly oversized Dunkin munchkins but — and I know this because Anne didn’t finish and let me have half of the last one, with apple filling — were the product of a genuine pastry chef.

Here are updates on Matt’s sweater and a kind of new project, the Danica entrelac scarf (but in different yarn, Garnstudio Alaska, and different colors from the pattern) from Knitty.

That was last weekend. By now the second sleeve is all done, all three pieces are connected, and I have a half-dozen rounds done above with the sleeves and body together.

If I had really been thinking I would have made the bottom of the body navy instead of the gray. When it came to the sleeves, I was thinking, the part of a garment that gets dirtiest fastest, except maybe for the ring around the collar, is the cuffs. So how dumb would it be to use the light color for the end of the cuffs? So I didn’t. But I hadn’t been that smart for the body ribbing.

This one came out so out-of-focus that I’m showing it smaller in the hopes that it will be sharp enough this way. But you can still see where I picked up and knit when I should have picked up and purled. I think entrelac is going to be a major exercise in picking up stitches. I haven’t got really far, but I think I’ve done one each of every kind of unit in the project except for the very last blocks.

The weekend of Dec. 16 we did a Springbok jigsaw puzzle up in Casco. It must have been a really old one, judging from the copy on the box. It seemed to be written for people who had never seen a Springbok puzzle before. The picture is not our normal style, but if we have the puzzle, what better time to do it?

Monday Charley, Nicole, and Emma were over at our house for latkes. The gluten-free sweet potato latkes didn’t hold together at all. The ones with flour in them tasted pretty good with sweet potato pie-inspired ginger and cinnamon in ’em.
On Tuesday the 19th our hanukiah looked like this —

That’s a modular hanukiah, nine separate parts that we put on a marble cheeseboard as a non-flammable base. Another hanukiah, in that ’60s or ’70s Israeli green enamelware, is behind it, unused tonight. If there are lots of people who want to light candles, we haul out more hanukiot. There are probably a couple of miniature ones that take birthday cake candles on that brass tray, too. Oh yes, I see a brass one, about as easy to see as the grouse in the crabapple tree.

We always light our candles from right to left, the way you read Hebrew. And how about that tablecloth!

We missed lighting candles Wedensday. I was working late and Arlene was out at Emma’s birthday party at Nicole’s parents’ house. I didn’t even think about it until this morning.

Last Friday (that’s the 15th) we went over to Charley’s condo for the first night of Hanukah. Nicole and Emma were there, too.

Pictures of Hanukah menorahs almost always show you eight candles going (or really, nine). Just because that’s only what they look like on the last night of the holiday, here’s how it was on Friday. There’s one real Hanukah candle going. You see two? The blue one is the helper candle. Hanukah candles are just to look at, not to provide light or do anything useful. Lighting another candle would be useful, so you do that with the helper candle. There’s always one more flame than Hanukah candles!

So let’s see, it was relatively uneventful, especially compared to driving all the way to Orono. We did go to Casco. There was no snow there, except for a few little sheltered places. Really, it’s unnaturally warm so far this winter.

We walked all around our trails. Without the snow, we had no way of knowing what animals might have been around. On Sunday Arlene flushed the (or “a”) grouse out of the crabapple tree. I didn’t get to see it. Except for feeder birds, that was the only wildlife we saw.

Saturday afternoon we went to Bridgton mostly just shopping. We got a couple of books, including a used copy of a book Arlene needs for her book club at EFG used books and a couple of others at Bridgton Books. I got enough yarn (from Down Home & Company) to at least start the Danica entrelac scarf from Knitty. That should keep me busy on an upcoming airplane ride. It’s three 50 gram balls of Garnstudio Alaska, kind of worsted weight. Now I just have to learn when to pick up the stitches, and all that.

We also went into Studio 302, Craftworks, and of course Reny’s. Studio 302 had a few pieces  of rustic furniture by Eve Abreu, some beautiful nature photography — I liked a luna moth and a salamander; Arlene was critical of the framing — and gorgeous hand-colored linocuts. Craftworks was (I guess always is) so packed with stuff that it’s hard to see anything.

I did get a lot done on the second sleeve of Matt’s sweater. Four more rounds, and I’ll have to think seriously about joining the sleeves to the body.

We did an old Springbok puzzle in pretty good time. We didn’t start until Saturday evening (oh! sometime in the middle we heard the Hanukah hymn “Maoz Tzur” on the radio, in the course of Prairie Home Companion, remembered that we hadn’t lit the candles yet, so we were able to sing along with the radio and then light our candles. Thanks, Garrison!), watched a lot of an Electric Company special, stopped puzzling when SNL came on, and still finished the puzzle in the early afternoon Sunday.

OK, so today was my second time in the pool. I did eight lengths in a row (in about 5:20 — a little slow. A goal for midway through the winter is to do 32 lengths in 20 minutes, that is, four 5:00 sets of eight lengths without any stops), rested about a minute and a quarter, did three lengths, rested, and did three more. That’s fourteen, up from just eight the first time, good progress.

The sauna is back in action but I didn’t go in it.

I swam this morning. I think I didn’t get to the pool once last year, so this is something of a breakthrough. Once I’m started I’m likely to keep going.

I only did eight lengths, six in a row and then two after a short rest. I was good and out of breath. I looked at the pace clock for the last two lengths, and it was about 1 minute 15 sec onds for 50 meters. The pace isn’t bad, my stroke is still reasonably good, but the endurance is pitiful. There’s nowhere to go but up.

In spite of going in to work first to get some tests running on more computers (and there were only two I could grab to use) I swam and got back to work well before 10. So time is not going to be a problem, except that I didn’t get to knit nor practice trumpet before leaving this morning. That’s going to be an adjustment.