A Weekend Away

The weekend's wedding festivities were lovely, and the trip to Sudbury was exactly what I needed. In addition to getting to see my husband in his kilt (and with his new muttonchops), I got to have dinner with my in-laws, to share drinks with good friends, and to dance to some awesome music. (The DJ played the B52s' "Rock Lobster" without us requesting it. Awesome.)

I had managed to forget that the Sudbury International Film Festival (which goes by Cinefest and not by SIFF, which is probably good) was happening, despite the fact that I have friends on the festival circuit. Once Mat discovered that it was happening, we decided to take in a film the next day. The only one that really worked for our timeline was Billy Bishop Goes to War, a film version of the play, written by Eric Peterson and John Gray. Eric is probably most famous for his roll as Oscar Leroy on Corner Gas.



Billy Bishop Goes to War is one of the most performed plays in North America, but neither Mat nor I had seen it before. The film version is very interesting; it clearly emphasizes the staged-ness of its own performance (it's performed on a very small stage surrounded by a sea of empty seats) at the same time that it uses huge, sweeping shots to emphasized its filmed-ness. Both actors are incredible; Peterson plays 18 different characters, shifting from person to person with only the use of a hat or an accent.

The best part is that Peterson was actually at the screening to do a Q & A session afterwards. It was very interesting to hear him talk about his experiences with the play. He and Gray wrote Billy Bishop when they were in their early 30s; Peterson will turn 65 later this week. He played Bishop extensively in his 30s, revisited him in his 50s, and has now made this film in his 60s, when he is older than Billy Bishop lived to be. What an interesting and unusual experience for an actor to have. The film is profoundly affective and effective--well worth watching.

It was a lovely weekend away with my husband. It's so easy to fall into the same old traps here of always doing the same things, and it's sad to have to go away in order to spend that time with one another, free from the distractions of our lives.

School Is In Session

I am currently on the hunt for a new knitting project.

I spent most of last week working on three shawls. Mat's childhood best friend¹ is getting married next weekend, and I had offered to make his fiancée a wedding shawl. She was so excited about the idea she asked me to make two more shawls for her flower girls.² After a false start on a Swallowtail Shawl, which has gone into the gift basket, I figured out that Annis was a much better choice for this task: it was faster, since it has both short rows and stockingette, and it also has a mini-size, which is perfect for tiny toddler flower girls. Thanks to this flash of knitting genius (with thanks to paperbirch and grrly), I was able to crank out 1 full sized shawl and 2 mini shawlettes in 7 days. Huzzah. Special thanks to Dorian for his help and supervision.

The little one is quite sweet, actually, and might be just the thing for that skein of cashmere silk I've got hanging around...in several months, anyway, when I'm not completely sick of the pattern.

Since finishing the shawls, I've started a test knit of a pair of intricately cabled socks. This pattern is probably one of the hardest things I've ever tried to knit. (Not in a bad, frustrating way, more in a challenging, read-closely-and-pay-attention-to-detail way.) The frequent cables, thin yarn, and tiny needles are also giving my left wrist fits, so I need to find something more relaxing to knit. Big yarn and big needles, and maybe a project that will work up quickly. I'd hoped to start on the first of my fall sweaters, but after careful perusal of both the pattern and my substantially increased waistline, I've come to realize that I will need to go up a size from where I thought I was when I bought the yarn eighteen months ago. Naturally, it's a yarn I purchased at the Knitters' Frolic, so getting more involves finding somewhere to order it from...

The new school year starts today for me, since I don't teach on Mondays this year, and I definitely want to have a project on the go at work.

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¹ James used to work in the restaurant at THSWSNBN, so I have actually known him longer than I've known Mat.

² Yes, this conversation happened about a year ago, so obviously I waited until six weeks before the wedding to start working on the shawls. Sigh.

A Pair of Ragged Claws

When I was about 11, I was at a Toronto Blue Jays game with my dad and my grandmother, and noticed a weird set of bubbles under the skin of my hands. Over the next few days, I noticed that the tiny blisters would swell whenever I washed my hands with warm water, and that when I showered, they would often burst, leaving me with scaly hands afterwards.

When I showed them to my mother, she promised to ask around at work for me.¹ One of the doctors told her that it was an eczema commonly caused by too-frequent hand washing of dishes. "Don't worry, though," she told me sarcastically. "I told him that wasn't possible for you." Our family doctor proscribed a cortisone cream for me, which never made a difference to the eczema, which would appear, burst open, and slowly heal off and on.

Many years later, the internet was kind enough to give me a real name for it: Dyshidrotic Eczema, so called because it was once thought to be associated with excess sweat. I learned that cortisone treatments were largely useless for this, and that not much could be done for it other than to care for the scaly skin after. I learned that mine is atypical, because mine is worse in the winter² than in the summer, and I also learned that mine is relatively mild compared to what some other people have.³

Over the last month, I have had two or three large flare ups of my dyshidrosis,⁴ which is unusual for me because it's usually much calmer in the summer. Today I woke up with blisters across the tips of a few of my fingers, as the blisters had spread up from the sides of my fingers. A few rounds of dishes and the cracks began to show.

Since becoming a knitter, I've become extra aware of my hands and how I treat them. Rough, cracked skin can snag delicate yarn as it slips through my fingers. Conversely, minimally treated yarns often retain their own lanolin, which gives moisture back to my hands. I've been knitting primarily with fine yarns (fingering/sock weight) for the last few months, and I'm yearning to move up to a worsted or aran yarn now that the weather is cooling off.

How do you take care of your hands?

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¹ One side effect of having a mother who was a nurse in one of Ontario's vastly overused hospital emergency rooms during the 1990s is that you are totally paranoid about seeking medical attention because you continually suspect that you are "not sick enough" to warrant taking up time and space at the ER.

² Likely because it's so flippin' dry up here in NBRC.

³ Seriously. Check out the pics at the link above--knowing how painful mine can be for how minor it is, I can only imagine how these people feel.

⁴ Yep, mine is stress-related.

Sister, Sister

Yesterday I helped to pack Middle Sister's life up into our parents' van and sent her away. She is headed back to school next week, pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Nursing in Toronto. Her program is interesting (it's a Scholar Practitioner program for people who already have undergraduate degrees) that focuses on placement hours. Her placements are with Toronto Public Health, which is perfect for her and will hopefully allow her to continue the kinds of work she's been doing here with safe needle exchange.

It's such a fantastic opportunity for her I almost don't feel sad that she's leaving me. Almost.

Silverskin Adventures

I spent a goodly portion of the weekend doing Fancy Lady-type things. The most significant of these things was the time spent creating a dress form to use for sewing.



Essentially, you get duct taped over a spare shirt, which is then cut up the back, reassembled, and stuffed. (I used a whole pillow, a bag of fibrefill, and the filling from another pillow.)



The advantage of this is that you now have a double of your body to work with for pinning/adjusting patterns. I'm pretty happy with how mine came out, except for the bust, which isn't quite as prominent as it ought to be. I'm brainstorming ways to fix this...

Yes Virginia, There Are Things More Boring Than My Posts About Knitting

I love having cats for pets. I've had cats all of my life--my mother has stories about how Spike and Muffet would "babysit" me very carefully when I was a newborn--they always wanted to be where I was, watching what I was doing. We owned several cats over the years, usually choosing to have them in pairs (and on one particularly ill-advised occasion, in quads). Leaving the cats behind when I went away to university was very difficult for me; the world always seemed like a much lonelier place without a cat to come home to.

(an early shot of Dorian being worn as a hat)

So I was pretty excited when Mat agreed that we could get a cat when we bought the house three years ago. Mat was raised as a dog person (owing largely to his mother's allergies) and he had always maintained that he was totally uninterested in having a cat. We went to the Humane Society here in town, and the cat chose us, as is the tradition in my family.

Bad Cat participates in tabletop role playing.

Dorian, so named because he was somewhat grey at the time we adopted him, grew into an enormous cat: nearly 17 lbs. at his peak. It seems quite obvious now that he would do so; just take a look at the size of those paws in his kitten pictures. Much to Mat's surprise, he found that Dorian had a lot of personality, and he found himself quite enamoured of our Bad Cat, as we'd taken to calling him. The cat, it turned out, was not at all like he'd imagined: the cat was affectionate, playful, and frequently a bit silly. He also has a fiendish craving for vegetables that makes it nearly impossible to do much food prep without a massive paw reaching up to beg for bits of pepper or lettuce or cucumber or...

Enormo-tron with Youngest Sister.

Over time, Dorian grew into himself, and then overgrew himself, tipping the scales at 16 lbs. 8 oz. Our attempts to feed him less food were initially successful, but when the hot days of summer hit, his activity level dropped so low that he re-gained most of the weight we thought he'd lost. He also grew lonely during the days when we would both be at work for several hours. We eventually realized that it was time to add another cat to the mix: my parents' reasons for always having pairs of cats were actually pretty solid. Dorian needed a friend.

Enter Hob.

Hob (named after Hob Gadling, a minor character from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series) came home to us in January. In an unintentionally hilarious contrast to Bad Cat, Hob is what we call "little". We had a hard time picking out a name for him (his shelter name was Jean-Luc, which I thought was awesome and Mat hated purely on the grounds that it wasn't a name that we picked for him) so he actually spent the better part of about ten days being called "the Little Cat". Hob was a stray for a while, which has resulted in a couple of fairly curious behaviours: he eats everything he can find, and he is a wool sucker (likely caused by not being nursed for long enough). It has also given him an overbite--his incisors hang out of his mouth like little fangs.

Tiny vampire cat being groomed by Middle Sister's cat, Jerkwin.

Dorian and Hob get along pretty well, although I'm not sure Dorian has quite forgiven me for bringing the tiny interloper home. They chase each other and play fight (16 lbs cat vs 7 lbs cat is hilarious, in case you were wondering--sometimes Dorian literally holds Hob off with a single paw). Dorian has lost enough wait that he's now appropriate for his frame. There's no sleepy snuggling together just yet, but I imagine it will happen in time.

It's good to know that there are always two things that are going to be happy to see you when you come home--even if it's only because they think you're going to feed them.

Long Weekend

July 1st is Dominion Day up here in Canada; our annual celebration of that time when some old white guys got together and decided that it was high time we separated ourselves from Mother Britain. This year, we got to take an extended trip to visit our parents. My parents and I spent Canada Day wandering around downtown Barrie. My mother went for a 5K run while my father and I took in the sights at a street fair. One of the things we found was the former Robert Simpson brewery, now branded the Flying Monkeys Brewery, which was selling beer samplers for $4. After we collected Mum from her run (complete with patriotic running gear, from that time she went and ran the 5K at the Loch Ness marathon), we made our way back to the brewery. The Confederation Amber Ale was my favourite, although they had an orange/wheat beer that was also quite good. About halfway through our beer sampling, we collectively realized that none of us had eaten very much that morning, and that the alcohol had gone straight to our heads. There's nothing quite like the realization that both of your parents (and yourself) are a bit drunk at 11:45 in the morning...

So we found pulled pork sandwiches and a most delicious lunch was had.

I also found a cheese shop called Gouda For You, at which I purchased a ginger-mango Stilton, a Mont St. Benoit, and a caramelized onion cheddar. Lovely all around.

The best news of the week/end for me, though, was that I finished my lovely cardigan:

This pattern (Cirilia Rose's Ephemera Cardigan) went into my Ravelry queue the moment I saw it as part of Berroco's newsletter. It reminded me of my favourite cardigan, a hand-me-down from my friend Jess, which was from the Gap and black. The cardigan, having since gone to the great thrift store in the sky, had hook and eye fastenings up the front instead of buttons, a look I find quite figure flattering.

The cardigan is knit from Knit Picks Gloss in the fingering weight, which is a 50/50 wool-silk blend. I had the yarn dyed by Sharon at Three Irish Girls in Eavan. Eavan is pretty much the perfect colour for me: a deep, inky blue (one of the colours of the sky at twilight that I can never quite capture with my camera). Eavan is also one of my favourite names, and it is one that I will be lobbying for if ever I have a girl child. This blue is a great colour for me, if I do say so myself.

I made some mods to the pattern, mostly with the hems and the button bands (is it still a button band if there are no buttons?), and I'm really pleased with the way that it looks. I can hardly believe that I made it.

ETA - The tape on my arm in the second picture is covering a henna design on my arm.

Sunshine on my shoulders

After about four days of near-constant rain, the sun has finally come out again here. Not a moment too soon, really, as I've been feeling cooped up. It's been good for the garden, of course, but some sunshine will also go a long way there.

In good knitting news, I finally finished the bulk of the work on my Ephemera cardigan last night. It's all pinned out and blocking currently; if all goes well I should be able to start on the finishing tomorrow.

I don't know that I'll be in a hurry to make a cardigan in fingering weight again for a while (though I do have my eye on a Tempest done in two shades of blue) but I think that I will really like the finished product. I need a good worsted weight project to work on, but I can't find the yarn that I want in the craft room right now. So obviously the logical thing to do was to cast on another pair of socks. I'm using a yarn that has mohair in it, which should be awesome for my perpetually cold feet come winter. I really wish I liked knitting socks more, since I love wearing handknitted socks so much.

Pride is coming up in Toronto next weekend; I finally made a point of telling my sisters that it disappoints me that they have never invited me to go with them. (Their response was, "We didn't think you'd want to come--there's so many people there." While I take their point, I can handle people for a day or so, particularly if there's no expectation that I have to interact with all of them.) Part of the sisters' annual Pride tradition is that they decorate their own t-shirts to wear to the parades. Even though I'm not going this year, I am going to help Middle make shirts for her friends.

If I were going, my shirt would say, "Straight but not narrow."

Something New

I am undertaking something new here at Casa Skylark--something almost unheard of.

I am purging books.

So far I've got about twenty in a box. There are more I want put in the box, but they belong to Mat so I suppose the polite thing to do is to wait.

The other thing that I should do is start returning books to people who have lent them to me. I have some that I've had for several years now (and yes, that's years plural).

What brave new world, gentle reader. What brave new world.

Recovery

I wasn't looking forward to this weekend. Mat's childhood best friend and former roommate, James, is getting married this fall, and his bachelor party was held over the weekend in Killbear Provincial Park. Then Mat's dad organized a big Father's Day fishing thing for all of their extended family. Four days alone with no car and two bad cats? I wasn't thrilled about it.

And then I got sick. I looked after a friend's little girl for a few hours on Thursday, and by the time I got home, I could feel the tickle in my throat and the pressure building in my sinuses. I spent most of my time alone moping on the couch, watching re-runs of Criminal Minds and feeling sorry for myself. The recovery efforts were somewhat hampered by the bad cats, who persisted in waking me up to be fed breakfast at absurd hours of the morning. I was able to drag my sad sack self to World Wide Knit In Public Day at the mall, which went well enough. (Though it did result in the purchase of more tea, much to my beloved's chagrin. Who am I to resist a first flush Darjeeling?) I was pretty much wrecked by the time I got home (owing to a lack of sleep the night before), and my intended nap was sidetracked by a phone call from the bank to tell me that my credit card had been compromised. And I still had a baby shower to go to.

I was in bed by 11 and slept until about 7:30, excepting a brief detour to toss the bad cat ringleader into the bathroom around 5. It was glorious and I feel much, much better today, aside from occasional sneezing.

I really hope this week is a better week.

Sweet Charity

If you're a frequent reader around here, or someone who is (un)fortunate enough to experience my company in real life, you'll know that I'm often ambivalent about the role religion plays in my life. I don't want to sidetrack this entry by pontificating on what I believe or how I practice, but a small reference to religion is sort of necessary for a thorough consideration of today's topic, charity.

Religious ambivalence aside, I do believe very strongly in the concept of charity and good works, which is something that (however loosely) has trickled down from the long line of Scottish Presbyterians from whom I am descended. I do some volunteer work (though not as much as I ought to) in the community, and I donate money to charity when I can. Most of my money goes to scholarship funds at the university, but I also donate to the AIDS Committee of North Bay and Area, the OSPCA, the MS Society of Canada, the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, and the Terry Fox Foundation. I try to keep my support to secular charities where possible, because I've yet to find a religious charity with a mandate to which I can reconcile my belief structure. I also try to support charities that are Canadian when I can, because I believe that we often forget that there are a lot of people in our own country that need help. That said, however, I will donate to international aid organizations when I can.

Which is how, in January of 2010 (some full 18 months ago, for those of you keeping track at home), I came to donate some money to Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders after the earthquake in Haiti. It wasn't even a lot of money--maybe $25? However, since then, I have been bombarded with emails and paper newsletters from the organization. (In fact, according to my gMail account, I've received 30 emails since that donation; I would guess that I receive at least one paper mailing from them per month as well.) I would be willing to bet that by now, they have spent at least the cost of my donation on trying to convince me to donate more.

I might well have donated more at some point in the future, I think, were it not for the telephone call I received from them last night. I should've just ignored the phone, but I didn't. When I picked up, I got a five minute spiel from the caller, who outlined all of the "like, amazing" work MSF has been doing with my donation.¹ She then asked me to consider a monthly gift of $25.² When I told the caller that I had just been laid off from my job, and thus could not afford to lay out a monthly sum, she didn't even pause before saying, "Well, look around your house and see if you can round up some loose change to donate."

At that point, I did hang up.

Part of me wishes that I'd given her a piece of my mind--as much as I try not to be rude to people who are just doing their jobs, I think that courtesy should end when those people stop being polite to me. I find it completely galling that after I've just told someone that I no longer had gainful employment, that person would turn around and ask me for money. Yup, stuff is bad in other countries, and MSF largely does work that I support, but if I can't pay my own bills, if I can't feed my husband or my cats, then things are pretty bad in this country for me, and going into debt to make charitable donations is just plain stupid. In soliciting from me this aggressively, MSF has ruined any chance that they have of receiving money from me in the future.

Any tips on charities who treat their donors like people, rather than endless money bags?

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¹ I have a personal policy of not hanging up on telemarketers; I listen, I refuse politely, and then I ask to be taken off the calling list.
² Given that I gave them $25 18 months ago, this seems unlikely.

Graduation Day

Yesterday, I attended my first convocation ceremony at the university. Just as I had completed my fourth year at my "new" job, the students I taught in my first year had just completed the fourth year of their degrees.

They came to me as teenagers, some as young as seventeen. I was their teacher, but they were my school: I had just come out of one of the worst years of my life to date, and I didn't know my ass from my elbow. I wasn't convinced that I should be teaching, or even if I could teach any more. You'll notice that 2007 was this blog's worst year in terms of posts, as well, which I think speaks to my frame of mind--I just don't write when I don't feel well.

As usual, though, time and experience are the best teachers. I learned so much in that first year, far more than I think the students got out of it. I learned the pleasure of teaching people who actually want to learn, and I learned the aggravation of teaching those who are only there because someone else has paid for them to be. I learned how to grade, how to explain grades in a way that seems clear and fair. I learned how to find plagiarists, which instincts to trust. I learned how to break out of my shell, how to see myself as an authority in the classroom, and how to get others to see me as an authority as well.

It is so much easier to see your own mortality through the aging and experiences of others. When I look at my students four years later, I can hardly believe the changes that some of them have gone through. Their faces are so much more mature; they are so much more confident than the little kids who came through my classroom, who were nervous about speaking in front of others and so eager to make friends. I couldn't be prouder of them, but the pleasure in their success is tinged with some sadness on my part. And so it goes...

Mooning and June-ing

Today is the first day of my unemployment. It was a surprisingly busy day--I finally talked Mat into helping put a garden in our backyard, which meant that he spent a good portion of the day ripping out the raspberry bushes that have been threatening to take over the back.

We're lucky to have a fairly large plot of land (the lot is 33'x125'), but unfortunately we've managed to do next to nothing with it in the three summers since we bought the house. I am not a gardener by nature (the green thumb in my family managed to pass me by all together) but I'm determined to make a go of it this summer. We've put in a 5x10 raised bed which is about half full sun and half partially shaded, and I'm hoping to plan a variety of veggies back there. I currently have a red pepper plant, two tomato plants, and a zucchini plant. I have plans to add a Thai chile plant, some cucumbers, some beans and peas, and some lettuces. I've planted some herbs out front: lots of basil (I have high hopes for basil and tomato salads this summer), cilantro, mint, rosemary...I'd like to get a cherry tomato, maybe as a hanging basket...

I'm excited for this little beauty, purchased at the local farmer's market last week.

Because I'm a POTATO

I've been staring at this blank post for the last thirty minutes, trying to piece something together to write about, and failing admirably. My life is full of things that are not interesting. I've spent most of the last week in what feels like an increasingly futile quest to clean the house. Why can't stuff just ever stay clean???

My knitting has felt very uninspired lately, likely because I'm knitting a cardigan right now. It's a free Berroco pattern--the Ephemera cardigan--and it's knit flat in fingering weight yarn and then seamed. In short, a total snoozefest.¹ I mixed things up today by using the Exfoliate! pattern to make a blanket square for my guild.² I haven't knit with cotton in ages, and my left hand is all tense from working bobbles in a non-elastic yarn. I've picked out (I think) my next pair of socks, so I'm going to get those started tomorrow. Dad got tickets to see the Cars in Toronto on Friday, so I am headed south for the long weekend, and these will make some good companion knitting on the bus ride down.


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¹Which is not to say that it won't be fabulous when it's done. It's just that it's pretty much the least interesting knit ever. It's one of the tragedies of my knitting life that the things that I want to wear are often the things that I don't want to actually knit.
² Because what charity knitting project can't be enriched by the inclusion of Daleks?

In a corner of the world on election day...

Well, the election happened, and I was wrong on pretty much all of my predictions: Harper got a majority; the NDP took the Opposition; the Bloc Quebecois went down in flames; the Conservative candidate here won by a scant fifteen votes. The only things that I got right were 1) that Helena Guergis would be drummed out of office¹ and 2) that the voter turnout would be higher.

Watching my social network respond to the election was fascinating. Because Canada encompasses six different time zones, there is supposed to be a media blackout on reporting results from the eastern half of the country until all of the polls close. Violation of this blackout can earn you a $25000 fine or 5 years in jail. The ban is, in theory, a logical thing: news of an NDP landslide in Quebec could well affect how things fall out in British Columbia. Unfortunately, in the day of the internet, this isn't really feasible. #tweettheresults became the most popular hash tag on Twitter during the election, and people from other countries started to gather and retweet the early polling information. It was very neat to watch it happen.

On the not-so-neat side of social media, my Facebook page was a total clusterf-ck. I should have anticipated this, having just discovered how many 9/11 truthers I am apparently friends with, but I didn't. Seeing people's reactions to the election was really eye-opening for me: on one hand, a good majority of the people on my friends' list voted (including some for the first time), but on the other hand, some people became very belligerent and pouty when the results didn't work out to their satisfaction. A few people actually asked that their friends who had voted Conservative to identified themselves so that they could delete anyone who voted for Harper from their friends list. A few others have changed their profile pictures to upside down Canadian flags, and pledged to leave them there as long as the Conservatives are in power.²

I just don't understand this. I mean, I understand the emotion, I guess³; I just don't have the energy to sustain that anger for the next 4 years, nor to perform that anger publicly. My friends (and family) who voted for Steven Harper are still just that--my friends and family. As much as I wouldn't vote for Harper, I recognize and accept that some people would.


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¹ and she was, coming in third after the NDP candidate (my elementary school French teacher), a loss that I find enormously personally satisfying in a way that says bad things about my character.
² Little Hob, who has been nothing short of a holy terror all day, having knocked over the spinning wheel, the humidifier, and a glass of water all over a stack of books, has now decided to be extra cute by sitting on the back of the couch with his front paws on my shoulder, as though he's reading what I'm typing here.
³ And then he jumped off my shoulder and managed to hit the "Off" button on the remote control on his way down.

Ennui

Now that my knitting related blogging obligations have been discharged, I can return to you to our regularly scheduled programming. Which might actually be less interesting, come to think of it, because I am in a slump. Or maybe a funk. Hard to say. I think it's because all of the fun things are over--no more wedding, no more honeymoon, just a lifetime of scrimping and saving to try to buy a new furnace, a new bathroom, and a million other small repairs that our house requires. Sure, we're talking about planning a trip to Europe, but it will be at least a couple of years before that comes through. It's also because the school year is winding down, and this wasn't a good year in a lot of ways. It wasn't a bad year, exactly--not like that year I spent teaching high school--but neither was it a good year. I struggled with the material and some of my colleagues; I struggled with my personal life; there was that whole thing with negotiating a new collective agreement for my union during a time of wage restraint. I'm not sure how I feel about this year yet, either, and it's strange to be thinking about closing something off that feels unresolved to me. It's also the time of year. Spring always makes me feel like getting the hell out of North Bay Rock City, which is never at its ugliest more so than in those weeks when winter is dying and spring hasn't quite decided that it wants to be reborn. The detritus of winter is all over this city, and it's not even warm enough to be optimistic. There's very much a piece of me that wants to be heading "home" like I did when I was a student, back to my parents' house. All that's left here right now is being a grown up with grown up problems, and I am so effing tired of that. Surely the sun has to come out some time.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum

It is, as of a few weeks ago, election season here in Canada once again. People are upset about this, for a variety of reasons. Some people are upset because they see the election as unnecessary and, if you're Stephen Harper, apparently dangerous. Some people are upset because the Conservative government was found to be in contempt of Parliament. Some people are upset because Canada has three parties that suffer from a lack of leadership. ¹

And I get that. I hate the attack ads that the Conservative Party of Canada runs about Michael Ignatieff--I hate that they are personal attacks, rather than attacks on policy. That said, they do resonate--it's not difficult to portray Ignatieff as an elitist blowhard who is out of touch with "the average Canadian" because, well, he comes off as an elitist blowhard who is out of touch with the average Canadian. If he was elected, he certainly wouldn't be the first elitist blowhard to lead our country, and I don't know that those qualities would necessarily make him a bad PM.

This will be an interesting election for a lot of reasons. We have three leaders who are likely fighting the last election battles of their careers: Layton, in addition to his health issues, has yet to lead his party to even Official Opposition Status. If Ignatieff fails to win even a minority government this time, it will be a death knell for him as Liberal leader. Anything less than a majority government means the same for Harper; after two minority wins, he needs to show that he is actually engaging Canadians.² Then there's the ubiquitous Green Party question: will Elizabeth May ever get to participate in a debate?

We are less than four weeks away from the election. I do not know what will happen in the next few weeks. I do not know what kind of dirt will be slung around, what kind of promises will be made, nor what crazy back room allegiances will be struck. I do know that our system is not perfect and that sometimes it feels very broken.

The other thing that I do know is that I, as a Canadian, am choosing to view this election as a positive thing. I believe in our system of government very strongly. I also believe in democracy and the right of suffrage. I am hopeful that everything that has happened in the world since our last election will serve as a call to arms to Canadians: Vote. Vote because we can, because our constitution enshrines it as a right and a freedom. Vote because others worked very hard to get us these rights. Vote because our country is worth investing ourselves in.

Above all else, I will not let the bastards grind me down. No matter how ugly this campaign gets (and given that the attack ads started before the writ was dropped, I think it's safe to say that it will), I will speak loudly in defense of our system and speak loudly in defense of ourselves. I will not let the bastards grind me down into apathy or subservience. I will stand up and be counted.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.
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¹ I know I'm pressing at least a few of your buttons by saying that, readers, but I'm calling it as I see it. Your mileage may vary.
²Speaking of Harper, he looks uncannily like my father in this pre-election ad for Conservative jingoism. His hair, glasses, mannerisms, and Beatles mug are all the same. I have no choice but to see this as further evidence of the Masonic-Reptilian conspiracy.

Day Threeeee

How do you keep your yarn wrangling organised? It seems like an easy to answer question at first, but in fact organisation exists on many levels. Maybe you are truly not organised at all, in which case I am personally daring you to try and photograph your stash in whatever locations you can find the individual skeins. However, if you are organised, blog about an aspect of that organisation process, whether that be a particularly neat and tidy knitting bag, a decorative display of your crochet hooks, your organised stash or your project and stash pages on Ravelry.

Like everything else in my life, my yarn is subject to what appears to be an organizational system founded on total chaos. It totally works for me, though, and I very seldom have difficulty finding what I want. I am lucky enough to have a whole room to myself for crafting. It was billed as a third bedroom when we bought the house, but I have strong doubts about that since a) it has no door, and b) it has no heat supply. It is upstairs between our two actual bedrooms, and it is currently in desperate need of reorganization. I have one plastic bin (won at an OPSEU Christmas party a few years back) which holds acrylics, cottons, cheap wool, and other things that you can buy at big box retailers. I have a three drawer plastic unit that holds my lace weights and my fingering weights. (I have two others that have recently been repurposed for sewing and fabric.) I have a wooden shelving unit that holds a lot of assorted crafting supplies. On it, I have several plastic shoe/sweater boxes that have my Three Irish Girls collection, sorted by weight. I also have--and this might be my one moment of true organizational genius-- three of the zippered plastic bags that comforters and duvets come in. I like these because they are strong, they have a convenient rectangular shape that makes them easy to stack, and they zip closed, which keeps everything inside the bags. I have one for workhorse yarn, one for fancy yarn, and one for odds and ends.

I will occasionally bag my yarn in freezer bags before putting them into other containers, if it helps to keep a sweater set together or something like that. I also have a large, fabric covered box that one of my wedding presents came in, which I use to hold yarn downstairs in the living room, in case I suddenly decide to cast on something else.

This was not the most interesting of posts; I think today might have been a good day to rock the wildcard topic. I apologize.

A Tale of Two Yarns

Part of any fibre enthusiast’s hobby is an appreciation of yarn. Choose two yarns that you have either used, are in your stash or which you yearn after and capture what it is you love or loathe about them.

I like yarn a lot, in general, and I can think of very few that I have genuinely disliked knitting with. There are a few, of course; the most recent of which is the Knit Picks Swish, which is a superwash worsted weight yarn. I am actually a pretty big fan of Knit Picks; there are several of their products that I really like, namely the City Tweeds, the Imagination sock, and the Wool of the Andes, all of which I've made things out of that have held up very well over time. I recently completed a Rogue sweater for my mother out of the Swish, and I was pretty much cursing it by the end. It was splitty, which lead to a lot of half-dropped stitches that I had to fix, and the small balls meant lots of ends to weave in. Mostly, though, I just didn't like the way that it felt in my hands. (I'm attributing this to the superwashing process.) I had picked it for this sweater initially because of the price, and while I did save a good chunk of money, I wish now I'd spent the money to buy a nicer yarn: it's much too big a project for a yarn that I hated.

In the yarn that I love category, where to start? I love different yarns at different times and for different things. I love the Peace Fleece that I bought at the Frolic last year. It's the perfect heathered green colour and it feels slightly rustic. I bought it to go with these buttons, which I'd had for over a year in anticipation of finding just the right green yarn. I also tend to love alpaca yarns. The yarn that I made my wedding shawl from, which I bought from a local alpaca farm, is like knitting with clouds--so beautifully soft and smooth, and perfect for shawls. I also love(d) Fleece Artist's Woolie Silk 2-ply, now sadly discontinued. I've made two shawls from it, and they are both beautiful and warm. I get compliments on mine whenever I wear it, and I think my mom gets some on hers, too.

The good, the bread, and two weeks left

This is actually the first of two posts for today, since today is the beginning of the Second Annual Knit Crochet Blog Week.

There are two weeks left in the term. This is simulataneously exciting and terrifying. I have quite a lot of work to do as a result of this (plus our exam is only 4 days after the last day of classes, which gives me no cushion) but somehow I always find myself dreaming of the things I will be doing once classes are over. I have big plans for the month of April, and the summer sort of snowballs from there--concerts, plays, road trips, sewing, painting, gardening, baking...maybe even running.

Speaking of baking, here is a picture of my second place winning bread:


Don't you want some now? I do. I'll have to make more this week. I am going to attempt a chickpea soup today, as well. We took a roadtrip to Sudbury on Friday to visit Chapters and Costco, and we got to have lunch at Respect Is Burning, which was serving a soup that was chickpeas, proscuitto, bacon, asparagus, white wine, chicken broth, and cream. I've found a recipe for one that sounds similar, and I'm going to give it a shot since it was a pretty tasty soup.

We also went to a hunting/sporting good store, which was in the process of a massive liquidation sale because they were moving locations. I was able to get both a Helly Hansen running jacket and a Cybersilk base layer shirt for my mother for under $40 (regularly $180). Very fortuitous timing, given that the next day was my mother's birthday...