New from the Mountains

The Man drove up to the mountain house on Sunday, just to see how it was enjoying the fine winter weather. He left later than he had planned, so it was dark when he got to the house. A strange, gushing sound greeted him when he walked inside. He turned on the lights and saw water stains creeping up the dining room walls. The house was very, very cold, even though we'd left the furnace on when we closed the house up for the winter, to keep the pipes from freezing.

And then, when he walked into the bathroom, he saw it: the toilet had exploded.

The toilet had exploded because the heat had stopped running and the pipes had burst. The bathroom and dining room were flooded. The horrid red, indoor-outdoor carpet that covers the first floor of the house was a sponge.

It sounds like bad news, doesn't it?

Well, it was bad news for the Man on Sunday night. He had to sleep in a cold, wet house with an exploded toilet. He put in calls to the heating people and the insurance people and hoped that they'd call back on Monday, even though it was a federal holiday. He ran the space heater in the bedroom to knock the chill off, but turned it off when it was time to go to sleep. He kept waking up all night to worry about things.

Oh, but there's good news. The Man crawled under the house Monday morning and got the heat back on. Folks returned his calls. A great guy named Richard from Restorations, Inc., came out and cranked up his wet/dry vac. The Man gave Richard the key to the house and came home.

That's what I love about the mountains. You can give a complete stranger a key to your house without a second thought.

Insurance will probably pay for most, if not all of the damage. More good news: We get a new toilet! The old one was pretty cruddy. Even better news: that horrible indoor-outdoor carpet will finally get pulled up, and if the floors don't buckle, we can refinish them. This has been on our to-do list for awhile, and now the insurance company will pay for it. Whee!

So, really, there are a lot of silver linings in this particular cloud. Maybe best of all, I get to go around saying, "Our toilet exploded!"

And that, my friends, is fun.

Not much, you?

I don't actually have anything particular to say today, but I have a need to say something. Hello. Is it cold where you are? It's been freezing here for the last two weeks. Yesterday I felt like I did nothing but eat. Finally I realized I was eating because I was cold. My body was fueling up like nobody's business. It doesn't understand that it is a middle-class North American body surrounded by all the food it can eat. It thinks: Cold=Winter=Eat food whenever and wherever you find it, because who knows when you'll find it again.

I think today I'll turn up the heat a degree or two.

***

Yesterday I had coffee with a woman I just barely knew in college. In fact, I'm not sure I did know her, but I knew her face. As it turns out, her son is a student at Our Fine Middle School and is on the Battle of the Books team with Jack. So she e-mailed and said, Coffee after drop-off some morning? And I e-mailed back, Sure!

She was very nice and down-to-earth, and I enjoyed chatting with her. But she dressed like a grown-up, and that threw me. Most of my friends tend to dress on the funkier side of the fashion line, and I dress like an eleven-year-old. It was strange to have coffee with someone my age who wore a silk blouse, slacks and sleek, stylish loafers with a bit of a heel.

One day I'm going to drag all my shoes out of my closet and take a picture and post it. All my shoes are big. Chunky. I wear a lot of Danskos. I have a pair of girly biker boots. Sleek loafers are beautiful, but I would feel wrong in them. Still, there's part of me that feels like those are the shoes I ought to be wearing.

But have you ever put on shoes that weren't you and spent the day in them? By the end of the day, you feel like crying. All day long your feet have been giving the world the wrong impression. All day long you've been an imposter.

A girl just can't live that way.

***

I think that's all I have to say for now. It's supposed to warm up to 55 degrees this afternoon. Shall I run naked through the backyard to celebrate?

No, no I shan't.

Sew and Tell

(My new friend, Betty)

I took a sewing class on Saturday and am pleased to report I hardly learned a thing. For once, I was not the incompetent bumbler in the back row wondering why everyone else had it all figured out when I didn't even understand how to use the scissors . No, dear reader, this time it was someone else who hadn't quite mastered the art of cutting a straight line. Someone else who wasn't clear on how to cut on the bias. Not me.

What a relief.

The class I took was called "Welcome to Your Machine." As the recipient of a lovely Kenmore for Christmas, I decided it was finally time for me to learn how to sew for real. I've been fake sewing for several years now, and the results have been pretty okay. But it's time for me to really learn how to do what I'm doing.

Turns out, I know more than I thought I did. So for once in my life I was one of the perky, oh-so-blase, oh, I've done this a million times class participants. And that, my friends, was worth the price of admission. Total thrill.

One important thing I did learn: How to clean my machine. As it so happens, you're supposed to clean your machine and replace the needle every four hours of sewing. I never cleaned my old machine. Only replaced needles when they broke. That might explain why it got so inconsistent toward the end.

I actually feel sort of guilty about it now. I feel like I should apologize to my old machine. I've said a lot of lousy things about how cheap it was, how unreliable. I may take it out of the closet and give it a good cleaning, just for old time's sake. Not that I plan to ever use it again. Upward and onward!

Did you notice Betty, up top? My sister-in-law gave her to me for Christmas. She's wearing the scarf I made in class. I don't know how much clothes sewing I plan to do (mostly I'm in it for the quilts), but the thought of dressing up Betty does seem fun. I think I might make her an apron, in case she wants to take up cooking.

Sweater Weather

(Above: My Dad's Christmas sweater, by me)

I almost didn't take my walk this morning. Not only is it still in the low 20s out there, when I looked out the window at 8:20, my usual walking time, I could see the wind rattling the trees. I don't mind the cold--I've got lots of winter gear from my days in the mountains--but I can't abide the winter wind. Who can?

So I headed up stairs to make beds and plow a path through Will's room. I put on a sweater and my fuzzy leopard-skin slippers and braved the attic to store some miscellaneous Christmas stuff.

I did my best to ignore Travis the Dog, who whined at me from the bottom of the stairs. It was time for his walk, and he wanted to know what the hold up was. He cares not a whit about the wind. He has territory to mark, dog leavings to sniff out, and by jiminy, he needs me to get him out and about on his rounds.

Normally I'm pretty good at avoiding the guilt trips my dog tries to lay on me (I'm less successful when it comes to my children, sadly). But I could feel the slightest edge of morning anxiety poking its finger at my side, and that's finally what got me headed out the door, wind or no wind.

Morning anxiety is my family's stock and trade. I suppose it's just a chemical imbalance we've been saddled with, but my father, my brothers and I all have it. Exercise and dog ownership have gone a long way to eradicate mine, but over Christmas I went almost three weeks without a walk, and by the end of last week, I could feel the anxiety creeping back in.

So off Travis and I went, and as I write this my ears are still cold. But my soul is well, and my dog is happy. My ears will just have to suffer.

New Year

I'm back.

That cold I mentioned in my last post? Took me down, baby, took me down. It started off mildly, one of those colds you think you can beat with a round of vitamin C and a lot of grapefruit juice. Ha! You know when I finally felt better? Yesterday. That's right, my friends, the cold lasted three lousy weeks.

I hate those kind of colds.

But I feel better now. Travis and I just got back from our morning walk--forty brisk minutes in the 20-degree cold--our first walk in--yes, you guessed it--three weeks. I just cleaned out my e-mail box and in a little bit am off to buy a sharply-discounted 2010 calendar.

I have to say I'm happy to have Christmas behind me. I'd hoped this would be the year we'd simplify things, but with my parents' coming, that wasn't going to happen, and having a cold kept me from always making the wisest decisions. Let's say I spent more money than I'd planned to. And I decorated more than I planned to, and cooked and baked more than I planned to ...

What I'm saying is, this wasn't the most spiritual Christmas I've ever had.

But now it's the new year, and I feel good again, though my jeans are tighter than I like. I have some big writing projects ahead of me, but not much travel until the end of March. Resolutions: Stand up straighter. Go to the Tuesday night fiddle jam over at the music store at least once. Have more people over to dinner. Seek community, in spite of myself and my proclivities and predilections.

That's it. That's as resolved as I get.

I am going to try to post more often, and soon I'm going to post a picture of the sweater I made for my dad for Christmas. Guess what? Not only did it fit perfectly, it was beautiful. A knitting victory after my awful defeat at the silky hands of a lace shawl. So the year ended in interesting ways--with me sick and tired and stressed, but also amazed that sometimes things work out exactly as you planned them.

More soon.

Just Checking In

Once again, Christmas is kicking my butt.

I had a dream things would be different this year. All knitted gifts would be wrapped up with a pretty bow by October. The house would be clean and tidy and purged by December 1. Gifts bought and wrapped by December 2.

Oh, the best laid plans of mice and me.

I came roaring out of the gate after Thanksgiving. Big, big plans for cleaning and chucking and making straight all the paths. I had two days of beautiful purging when disaster struck: the dreaded stomach bug. Six days, shot. No knitting, no gifting, the end of purging. Lots of lying on the couch napping.

When I got back on my feet again, I was behind. I'm still behind.

It's like this every year. I make my big, big plans, all for naught. I always spend the middle two weeks of December in a mild or acute state of panic. I lie in bed at night making lists of all the things I need to do. I toss and turn.

This year my problems are compounded by the fact my parents are coming for Christmas. On the one hand, they are pretty laid-back customers and don't expect perfection. On the other hand, I want to make things nice for them. For everyone.

Did I mention I'm coming down with a cold?

And did I mention that the pattern for the sweater I'm knitting my dad just sort putters out at the end, leaving me on my own when it comes to the finishing? Yep. Thank goodness for Ravelry and the kind knitters there. I posted my problem in the Sweaters group, and an expert angel figured out what I needed to do and wrote out instructions for me--and they work!

Still, I was supposed to have finished that sweater in October.

So I haven't been blogging much, or visiting blogs, or doing anything except running around doing the next thing and the next. But here's the good news: I decided last night, as I was drifting off to sleep, that I will buy rolls for Christmas Eve dinner instead of making them. You can buy perfectly good ready-to-bake yeast rolls in the freezer section. High-falutin' rolls. Rolls my boys will gobble up and ask for more.

Which is to say, I haven't gone completely insane, at least not yet. Who knows what other projects I'll abandon? What other plans I'll toss into garbage bin?

I think I'll go make a list.

Giving Up

I'm sad to report that I am giving up on knitting lace once and for all. I have made two attempts (and a hundred attempts within those attempts, if you know what I mean), and they have undone me.

Even sadder, the spiral scarf I knit out of the silk yarn intended for a lace shawl after I'd given up on the lace shawl is a puny, scrawny little thing. No self-respecting neck would be caught dead in its sorry, spirally little grip.

What to think when you've invested significant time, effort and money into a project, only to fail? As a process knitter, I don't begrudge the hours. As a tightwad, I really regret spending the big bucks on the yarn. Do you want it? I'll unravel it and send it to you. It would give me joy to think someone might knit something out it. It's pretty, I'll give it that.

I guess what I'm wondering is who came up with this lace-knitting idea in the first place? Who thought, 'I know, I'll knit something up with yarn like dental floss, do lots of yarn overs and k2tog's and slowly drive myself insane'? Whose great big friggin' bad idea was that?

As for me, I'm going back to socks and sweaters. Knitting that makes sense. Real Woman knitting. Sane person knitting.

Let me know if you want the yarn.