Archive for May, 2009
Today is the kind of day I imagined when I imagined having a house. After breakfast, I played with the Little People and did some laundry. They went outside with me when I went to hang up the laundry. The neighbors are building a dramatic treehouse; when the Little Guy expressed his envy, the neighbor’s dad sent the kids over to play while he finished building. They were nice boys, 5 and 7 years old, and everyone played nicely until lunch. The Little People ate a nice lunch; Miss Baby took a good long nap, and the Little Guy played Train Simulator and then read for a while before going outside again. This time, he was invited to the neighbors’, where he played in the treehouse. I went to call him in for dinner, at which point in time I saw him coming up our street with the girl from across the street. She’d been over playing there, and he’d walked home with her. Nice dinner, nice baths, nice books.
It was just so nice; the weather was good, the kids were nice and had fun. I did some reading, and some knitting, and even a little housekeeping. Sadly, my DH wasn’t here to enjoy it too. He was on the road; his grandmother (97 years old) died yesterday, so he was on the road to Tennessee for the memorial service tomorrow.
The Little Guy has been a bit emotional lately; he threw a number of fits today, primarily for dramatic effect. However, he threw a gigantic one after he’d already been put to bed. My DH remembered that it was Wednesday; we’d forgotten to take the Little Guy to church for the kid’s choir party. He wept and screamed and kicked and hollered and swore he couldn’t get into bed and he couldn’t stop crying and on and on. Eventually he did go back to bed, where the cat was waiting.
The cat bit him. It’s very unusual; he’s a mellow cat. However, he knows when someone’s sick, and when someone’s putting on. He wouldn’t have bitten the Little Guy if he were experiencing real anguish. The Little Guy was probably thrashing about and smacked him and he bit him in self-defense. Either that, or the cat was trying to discipline him. Either way, the cat had a point.
For the record, the Little Guy did manage to settle himself down with deep breathing.
He’s under a lot of stress; it’s the end of school, he’s got the spelling bee coming up, he’s tired of listening to us read Little House in the Big Woods, we made him clean his room on Monday. It’s hard to be seven.
Their T-shirts say, “No!,” but the band says, “Yes!”
Can I play Little League?
Filed under: knittingPosted: May / 27 / 2009
There’s a group of women at church who knit or crochet baby blankets for baptisms and prayer shawls for the sick and infirm. I’ve been working on a baby blanket for them for a while, but today I finally got to go to a meeting. There was some discussion of the summer book choices for the book group, and a long discussion of how to make a tomato aspic.
I also found out that they are knitting 8″ squares for a charity project, so I’m going to dig through my yarn and find the half-used balls and make some squares. That will go much more quickly than the baby blanket (large blanket, small yarn), and I can experiment with some different patterns, which will be fun.
No, real jobs.
I’m all with Crawford; manual labor clearly demands intelligence and affection for one’s work, and the ethical implications are immediate and reassuring. This is why I like knitting and the like, although I’d have to say that I don’t find housecleaning satisfying or intellectually stimulating in the same way. Mopping the floor does not offer the same problem-solving opportunities that knitting does.
I always worry when intellectuals want to write about the nobility of work. (Note: I am not saying work is not noble. I just said it is). When I was a kid, my father was a mechanic, and a good one, but he moved into management when he got the chance, and when computers came along, he moved in that direction. The same mental skills that made him a good mechanic made him a good programmer. People who have to live by manual labor, who don’t get to choose between working at a Washington think tank and repairing vintage motorcycles, aren’t necessarily going to reach the same conclusions as Crawford. True, they may find satisfaction in rebuilding a carburetor, but they are also likely to long for a job where they can sit down sometimes. And a lot of manual labor doesn’t offer the satisfactions that Crawford finds in his shop; it’s hard for me to see how vacuuming someone else’s house or mowing someone else’s lawn over and over again would provide a great deal of intellectual stimulation or provoke love for one’s work. Now, I think that janitors and groundskeepers who work for a particular location, like the folks that keep colleges nice and tidy, often do come to feel a sense of community and pride in that place and institution. I don’t know. I know that I have a hard time saying that washing dishes and writing a scholarly paper or teaching a class provide me with the same mental and ethical challenges. Knitting and cooking can be more satisfying, and more like the kind of work Crawford is talking about (motorcycle repair), in terms of developing specialized knowledge, connecting with others in the field, and the like.
On the one hand, I want to take this guy seriously, and I would love to see more of a DIY culture in our country (but that’s not blue collar vs white collar; that’s a both/and world). On the other hand, he sounds a bit like he might have read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance one too many times.
This interesting LAT piece was reprinted in today’s local paper. It repeats the common assertion that improving women’s rights in Africa would help with overpopulation; indeed, all the evidence points towards a clear connection between educating women and improving their economic lot. It also goes in the other direction, saying that improved women’s rights in Europe would increase the population. Basically, the author thinks that women in Europe, when faced with the work/life struggle, choose to have fewer children. If were less of an either/or decision (Italy has an especially low birthrate and an especially patriarchal family structure), women might be more willing to work and reproduce.
Generally, these arguments seem logical, but it is possible that improving women’s rights won’t solve all of society’s ills. Tell you what; let’s try it and find out.
So, I was inspired by a project in Mason-Dixon knitting, in which they took the little fabric loops used for pot-holder making, knotted them together, and knit a doormat with them. I cut loops out of the legs of about four pairs of jeans, and the Little Guy and I knotted them together into a giant ball of “yarn.” It’s about 240 feet long and weighs about 4 pounds, which impressed the Little Guy. I’ve begun to knit, and it is a bear. It makes a very thick and dense fabric, which will be a very interesting doormat.
Here’s our “Before” picture:
The “After” is forthcoming.
My parents had some basic household items that I’d love to find — simple, practical things.
Lately, I’ve been looking for a can crusher. You put the aluminium can in the mechanism, pull, the handle, and it squishes the can. If you recycle a lot of cans, it’s pretty handy, and a good job for kids. We’ve found a place in town that will give you cash for aluminium and the like, and I’m starting to collect our cans seperately from the rest of the recycling. Can’t find the little machine anywhere.
My mom had a little plastic counter that she took to the grocery store. It had buttons on the top that advanced the numbers inside, and she used it to keep track of how much she was spending. Sometimes she would let me use it. I’d love to have one of those things.
Also, at one point we had a little soap mold. You could collect all your little soap-ends, put them in, squish them tight, and let them dry into a new bar of soap.
Yep, I’m getting old.
I was sitting on the couch, looking through a knitting book from the library, when Miss Baby walked up, looked me in the eye, and said, “Poopie. Diaper poopy.” So I got a diaper and we changed her. Sure enough, she was quite poopy (a note on spelling: I’m using “ie” for the noun and “y” for the adjective). This is excellent; she knows when she’s poopy, and she wants to be changed. This is a step towards potty training, and we’re all for that.
She was in the kitchen, getting into everything as usual while my DH was preparing dinner. At one point, she put her finger to her mouth and said, “jello.” She had been trying to get into the jello in the fridge, but it was out of her reach, so I checked her finger. There was a little bit of blood on her fingertip; she’d nicked it on an apple corer in the drawer. She put the finger in her mouth, and when she tasted the blood, she fussed. She’s tasted it before, when she bashed her lip on the table last week, and she knows it means “owie.” She calmed right down when we put a band-aid on it; either the band-aid helped, or the novelty of it distracted her.
Today, I completed our documents for the English Education program. We have to submit a document that explains what evidence we will use to prove that our students meet the state standards for High School English teachers. I basically imitated whatever the Math department had done, and they imitated what Special Ed had done; so that’s layers and layers of plagiarism. I figure that the folks up in Raleigh will look it over, say, “This part is OK, and this part is crap,” and I will make the appropriate changes next year. I get the impression that, as long as they have passed the Praxis exam and done their student teaching, they are OK, but I can’t just say that. This little graph seems quite appropriate:
see more Funny Graphs
