Tuesday Project Roundup: Bilbo Had A Vest LIke This, Too

I did finish the vest over the weekend and it turned out about 95% as wearable as I hoped. (The armholes are a little long; I was in too much of a hurry to check them.) The contrasting red faced hem (worked kind of like this, but at the end of the sweater, not the beginning) turned out really well, and overall I like it. It looks very rustic to me, like something that would be worn in the Shire where life is simple, the yarn is purple, and nobody wants to go far from home.


However, you'll notice there are no pockets yet. I tried experimenting with an inset pocket (like on a suit jacket) on a swatch and that was really alarming:
It's already become a cat toy.

But a Shire vest has to have pockets, my precious, so now I'm considering patch pockets (like the back of jeans) versus further experimentation with an inset pocket. We'll see.

Details: Free pattern here, with the lace and extra bands edited out.
Yarn is Beaverslide fisherman weight, in "Nightshade."

Also: Happy Veterans Day today to Dad and Mr. Isbell! Thank you!

It's Monday

Attack it like it's an empty garment bag.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. According to kottke.org, The NY Times edition Wednesday was only the fifth time in its history that it used 96 pt. type in a headline. In chronological order:

• MEN WALK ON MOON
  
• NIXON RESIGNS
  
• 01/01/2000
• U.S. ATTACKED
  
• OBAMA

2. I got sucked back into writing for Microsoft at work and was updating a campaign promoting Windows Vista. Client feedback: "I think it promotes Vista too much." Ah, the head-smacking world of Microsoft...

3. The weather: I don't approve of it.

3.

Getting Back To Normal: Let's Talk About Yarn Now

I hope to finish the vest soon (Mr. Isbell has more weekend commitments and I have Brideshead Revisted), which means I'm going to need another project lined up. Continuing the "wearability" theme, I've decided it's going to be a plain pullover crewneck sweater--no fancy cut, no shaping, no stitch patterns.

I know the yarn should be from the magic Montana ranch but I can't decide on the color. I had been thinking navy for wearability, but now I'm tempted by sky blue. A navy blue sweater would be pretty and wearable, but I know that a sky blue one is going to make me happier, getting dressed in the dark cold dead of winter. It just isn't as versatile. Which one should I pick? (And thank goodness this is the my only problem right now, too; not how to get Mr. Isbell a passport and get him, Toby, and myself to Canada.)

THANK YOU, AMERICA. FINALLY.

I'm very proud of you. (Except for those who voted for Proposition 8 and those who re-elected Chris Buttars. I'm not proud of you.) But most of us did a pretty good job, I think.

You Know What To Do Today!

Image from Cute Overload, of course, with the full song up on their home page today.

(All stoats aside, though, we really, really want Obama to win. Because if McCain wins, Mr. Isbell will more than likely get called up out of inactive duty and sent back to Iraq. Or Iran. Or Afghanistan. Because the Geezer Express has made no secret that they plan to win at any cost over there. Mr. Isbell has done his time, has the VA schedule to prove it, and I do not want to be left on the "homefront" of a war against an abstract noun that we cannot win.)

(Besides, I'm sure Obama likes Cute Overload.)

I Don't Know...Is It Baked Or Fried?

You may have already seen this David Sedaris piece from last month's New Yorker, but it bears repeating the day before election day:

[In the final days of the campaign] the focus shifts to the undecided voters. "Who are they?" the news anchors ask. "And how might they determine the outcome of this election?"

Then you'll see this man or woman— someone, I always think, who looks very happy to be on TV. "Well, Charlie," they say, "I've gone back and forth on the issues and whatnot, but I just can't seem to make up my mind!" Some insist that there's very little difference between candidate A and candidate B. Others claim that they're with A on defense and health care but are leaning toward B when it comes to the economy.

...To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?"

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. Happy Halloween, if you like it. I haven't been very excited for it since 1989. And it leads to to the darkest part of the year, the last downward slide to cold weather and no sun.

2. Fortunately, we can be happy that both the punctuation faces and the cats are cuter in Asia. (Well, MOST cats are cuter. Nothing is as cute as Toby!)

3. It's the birthday of John Keats, who has always reminded me of Schubert. (They lived almost at the same time and for the same span, and Keats' poems have the same otherworldy effect and quick mood changes that Schubert's later works have.)

4. That sounded scholarly, huh?

Farmer Obama

Two weeks ago I read Michael Pollan's long open letter to the next president, which presented why agriculture today is unsustainable (it's based on cheap oil, which is going away) and his ideas about how it must change.(If you'd rather just read a summary of his proposed ideas, you can go here.) Some are practicable and some will probably never happen, but, as the summary points out, "It’s one thing to rail against what is wrong; another to offer realistic solutions to the problems you decry. I’m grateful to Pollan."

While reading it, I thought, "How cool would it be if Obama read this? Maybe things would change!"

Well, he has read it:
"I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollan about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity..."

Obama: He reads and retains and cares! He is awesome.

(Mr. Isbell and I are voting early tonight. I'll bet you'll never guess for whom!)

The Post That Talks About Chestnuts And Poems

So chestnuts are dropping everywhere and I have a hard time not thinking of Mark Doty's "Grosse Fugue," about Beethoven's quartet and difficult times, when I see them. (No online text but the whole collection--Atlantis--is worth getting.)

I love this because I first read it in the fall when I was a student, full of hope and promise, just discovering chestnut trees on campus, and the thought of playing the Grosse Fugue someday wasn't completely ludicrous;* and I loved it because it talked about music--which I knew all about, of course--and because it sounded so musical itself. For example:

The music
is like lying down in that light which gleams
out of chestnuts, the glow of oiled and rubbed
mahogany, of burled walnut, bird's-eye
maple polished into incandescence:
autumn's essence of brass and resin, bronze
and apples, the evanescent's brisk smoke.

And because I promised plural poems that mention chestnuts, here's Neruda's "Ode to a Chestnut Lying on the Ground." This doesn't have the same richness of association, since I discovered it this week searching for the online text of "Grosse Fugue," but it's very charming:

From bristly foliage
you fell
complete, polished wood, gleaming mahogany,
as perfect
as a violin newly
born of the treetops,
that falling
offers its sealed-in gifts,
the hidden sweetness
that grew in secret
amid birds and leaves,
a model of form,
kin to wood and flour,
an oval instrument
that holds within it
intact delight, an edible rose.

Music metaphors again. Chestnuts must be very poetic.


*I regret not learning four things back when I could play: Schubert's Cello Quintet, all of the Bach partita in D minor (I did get some of it, though), this Beethoven fugue, and the first Brahams sonata. Although I remember telling my teacher I wanted to learn the Brahams, and getting a look that I interpreted out loud as, "I should wait until I'm fifty?" She nodded. So I suppose I can still learn it.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Not Long Now

I'm trying to have another knitting home run with this vest: I want it to be as wearable as the green sweater, so I'm planning on doing a good job with the sewing up and the edging, and adding a faced hem and pockets (in the red yarn). Which makes me only about 2/3 finished.

(The main yarn is from the magic farm in Montana that makes its wool smell like flowers. Every time I work on it I pretend that I have a magic farm in Montana and get to take care of sheep and grow food all day.)

Themes For The Week

1. Chestnuts and poems that mention them.
2. Knitting!
3. The Omnivore's Dilemma and our food supply (possible title: Karen Can't Eat Anything Without Guilt Now).
4. The conclusion of 'Tocktober:

Friday Unrelated Information

1. According to this, Obama is leading McCain in newspaper endorsements by nearly 3-to-1.

2. Read the new online newsletter for Blue Moon Ranch Alpacas here --there's a special on yarn!

3. Mr. Isbell was trying to cheer me up via email this week, and sent me an all-caps list of things to be happy about. Here’s part of it:

• PABLO NERUDA LOVE POEMS
• HEMINGWAY
• SALINGER
• UNO
• PUZZLES
• LION CUBS
• BE-KIND-REWIND
• ORLY?
• HAPPY CHICKENS

First-World Problems

-Nordstrom Rack being sold out of designer jeans in your size

-Choosing not to eat meat because of animal cruelty concerns

-Not being able to decide what to have for dinner

-Having to wait to get a raise

-Not liking any of the music on your iPod

-Being angry about things like the time spent at stoplights

-Not being able to stop eating candy corn

A Pro-Vegetarian, Pro-Humane-Farm-Practices Post Without Any Links To PETA

In addition to the more-publicized Proposition 8, California has another prop on the ballot: Proposition 2, a humane farming law, which would outlaw devices called veal crates (sounds like what it is); gestation cages for swine (it's ok to click the link, there's no disturbing image); and keeping egg- and meat-producing chickens in a cage the size of a sheet of 8 1/2 x 11 paper. (I bet you have some paper on your desk right now. Look at it. Imagine a chicken in it.)

Can you tell how I feel about these practices? So strongly that I'm going on my 11th year of being a vegetarian. I haven't talked much here about why I don't eat meat, because my experience with family and friends (especially meat-producing extended family! Fun times!) has taught me that people are a little...resistant, both to being preached at and to drastically changing their diet.

And because nobody likes a preachy vegetarian (who still eats dairy and wears leather shoes, yes, but is at least switching to soymilk in coffee), I won't go into detail about just how much pollution large-scale meat and dairy operations produce, or how much food and water is required to raise a single pound of beef, or how antibiotics in animal feed are creating diseases resistant to known antibiotics.

I will only say that there are better ways to raise meat, and good for California for getting the measure on the ballot. If you know of anyone in the state, send them to humanecalifornia.org and tell them to vote yes. If it passes in California there's a slim chance similar laws could pass elsewhere in the future.

What can you do if you don't live in California? Well, what if you bought cage-free eggs the next time you went grocery shopping? Or free-range chicken or grass-fed beef? And if you want to be really wild, what if, one day a week...you didn't eat meat7776? Skip the grilled chicken pieces on top of your salad. Make vegetable beef stew and leave out the beef. You could even accidentally visit a vegan resatruarant. One day a week wouldn't be that hard, would it?

Hey, Obama is ahead in the polls, so our wildest dreams can apparently come true. It never hurts to ask.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Just Use Your Imagination Anyway

After rescheduling the last project roundup because I didn't want people to use their imagination about how cute this dress looks when being worn, I give you:A closet shot.

A dark and slightly blurry closet shot that doesn't show the cute detail of the fabric or the nice dark brown buttons. It was a busy week.

I think this might be the Last Dress of the Season. I have fabric for one more, but my sewing mojo is gone and I'm not sure the weather will continue to be dress weather until I can get it finished. On to flannel shirts and more knitting, I guess.

In other seasonal news, this is what it looks like before I make the bed in the morning, when it's not cold enough to run the heat in the whole apartment:

Mr. Isbell and I have dubbed the quartz space heater tower "Minas Heatas," because we're Lord of the Rings geeks like that. Toby doesn't call it anything but I think he loves it even more than me.

Finally

After removing about a cubic yard of both snails and rocks, digging out vine roots that were probably older than me, spading up dirt that hadn't been touched since the Reagan years, and generally doing a lot of work*, I have a flowerbed!

There are daylilies, grape hyacinths, regular hyacinths, and jupiters beard planted now, with zinnias, nasturtiums, and tomatoes to follow next spring.
Just don't be like my neighbor, who asked,"Are you going to plant anything in there?" Simply being able to see the dirt took three weeks, dude. And yes, there ARE plants. They'll fill in


*I can't take credit for even half the work, because it took a village to get this flower bed. My excellent mother helped so much; I think my clumsy spading technique was too painful to her to watch, so she did most of that. And Mr. Isbell pulled out vines like it was going out of style.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. In an article about the Queen Elizabeth 2 (which has been sold to Dubai to become a floating hotel, boo!) I learned that "only the actual monarchs warrant Roman numerals, not the ships named for royalty." I always wondered about that.

2. Infinitely creepy: One of the McCain eye-roll reaction shots captured from Wednesday night's debate, over and over and over.

3. While I obviously love cats (and the men who love them),dogs are great, too. (My brother and his wife recently adopted a puppy. PUPPY!) Visit UpsideDownDogs.com and you will smile.

It's Still 'Tocktober!

And it's still hard to get a shot of Toby 'tocks!

Real Men Love Cats

It didn’t take an article in the New York Times to tell me that: More Men Are Unabashedly Embracing Their

Love of Cats.

Back in the day, I asked potential boyfriends if they liked cats or gin. If they liked gin, they might work. If

they liked cats, they had a much better chance. (If they liked both,it was awesome.) It never occurred to me

that men thought liking cats was effeminate or strange, probably because I wouldn’t have wanted to talk to

those men.

Crazy Cat Ladies and Crazy Cat Men, unite!