Living in the early to mid-90s dance party

I got to go out dancing this weekend for the first time in nearly a year. It was a marvellously good time: it was a dance for the local pride group. (Colloquially known as "the Big Gay Dance" to me and my sister.) The DJ was not quite to my taste, but she did track down the B52s' "Rock Lobster", leading to much hilarity as Mat took the dance floor. (Also: that song is much, much longer than I remember it being. And there's an alarm clock sound in it.)

There was also a drag show on Friday to raise money for the AIDS Committee, which was also a good time, but I am afraid that I must accept that I can no longer go out two nights in a row. (If, indeed, I ever could.)

I've lost that lovin' feeling

If you've seen my mojo, could you let me know where it is?

Yesterday started out quite well. I drove M to work, came home, scrubbed out the bathtub, cleaned up the counter, and reorganized the craft room. And then I was done--I didn't want to do any of the other twelve things that I could do, didn't want to do any of the dozens of things that I needed to do, and wound up just taking a nap on the couch while watching something idiotic on TV. It might even have been reality TV, that's how idiotic it was.

I frogged three projects that had been languishing for several months; I had finished a long time work in progress earlier in the week, and knitting it was such a dreadful experience that I think it might have killed knitting for me for a while. I've cast on about 6 other things over the last few days, only one of which has come to any kind of fruition (and this after I started with one set of needle, finished 3/4s of the hat, realized it would fit a beachball, and started over with a smaller needle, bringing me two full sizes below the recommended needle).

I hope I can get it figured out soon--I've got stuff to do. It's only been three months since Christmas, and I haven't even started my mom's sweater yet.

Reflections on the State of Poetry

We devoted the first six weeks of Intro to English Studies II to the study of poetry, and rounded out our consideration with a look at two Canadian poets and poems, both of which examine the role of poetry in the twentieth century. (The poems in question are A.M. Klein's "Portrait of the Poet as Landscape" and Irving Layton's "Whatever Else Poetry is Freedom".) Both seek to examine the state of poetry, particularly in Canada, with very different results. Klein rages against the obsolescence of poetry, which he describes as being like the fletcher's craft, where Layton paints the poet as a fool or buffoon.

For our last seminar, we asked the students to respond to Layton and Klein, to reflect on what they thought the state of poetry was, and on the role that poetry should play in English Studies at both the secondary and post-secondary levels. My students don't know what to make of poetry. They don't think it's dead, per se, but they don't know what to do with it. An educated person should know poetry, they agree. And music is poetry, but only sometimes. Only if it is real, or genuine, or has meaning behind it. They're reluctant to tell me how meaning is created--they just know. If meaning is conflated with authenticity, I ask, does that mean that Real Poetry must also be authentic to be meaningful? They're not sure, but a few of them wonder if that's why they don't like some of what we've studied. It doesn't mean anything to them.

They stare at me blankly when I tell them that I like poetry, that I even own books (plural!) of it. I hope that some of them leave this year with an understanding that poetry does something. That it makes you feel. Just like music can, only you have to work harder for ir.

I read a piece that a fourth year student submitted to our Creative Writing Exhibition. It was actually a prose piece, but it spoke of finding TS Eliot, and finding friends. One of the things that I miss most about undergrad si discovering poetry for the first time. I don't remember starting university with any particular love for poetry, but I do remember what it felt like to read some of those poems for the first time, the tiny frisson of excitement in my abdomen.

The poem I remember most from my first year of university is Wallace Steven's "Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird." I know that we read other things--"Goblin Market", some Atwood, some Auden--but it is Stevens that sticks in my mind, it is Stevens who made me think This Is Poetry for the first time. The poem does everything that it does so simply, but so well, while so actively defying linear interpretation. It was unlike anything I'd ever read before.

The next year was the British Literature survey year, which brought even more poetry: "Dover Beach," "The Waste Land," "Dulce Et Decorum Est", "The Pomegranate."

And into third year: "Sed Non Satiata," "The Lady's Dressing Room," "Brebeuf and his Brethren". Oh, and Prufrock.

Prufrock.

In a lot of ways, Prufrock is why I'm in English Studies. I'm not an Eliot scholar, nor even a poetry specialist, but Prufrock was a revelation to me. When I read it for the first time, it was the apex of everything that I was learning to love about poetry; for me, it manages to be both alpha and omega. Every time I write, I am not as good as Prufrock, but every time I write I have that summit to strive for.

As a teacher, I want to be the person who introduces someone to his or her Prufrock. I want to see someone realize that poetry is not in fact dead, or archaic; I want to see someone realize that poetry has both meaning and life, that there is somewhere to go from here.

Whatever else, poetry is freedom. (Words Layton's, but the comma is mine.) Writing poetry is freedom, but so is reading it.

Knitting history

While visiting my parents this past weekend, I recovered a piece of my family's knitting history: the duck vest. This was made for me by my mother or one of my grandmothers. (Mum isn't sure which; she thinks that it was her, or she thinks that she has the pattern for it somewhere.) It's made in a dreadful acrylic, of course (it was the 80s) but is really quite sweet otherwise (in a hideous 80s sort of way). There was an elephant vest to match, which featured an i-cord trunk on the front and a tail on the back.

Awesome.

Confessions of a Sleep Deprived Mind

To begin, I have to confess that I love awards shows. Yes, I know they are terrible and boring and generic and never as good as they were in the past. I know all these things to be true, but I still like to watch them. As I grow older, I find myself having to admit to more than a passing interest in fashion (which is something I would never have expected of myself, as I tend to dress like a bag lady who was given a shopping spree at Old Navy), so the costume aspect of it plays into my interest. I like the speeches, too. I used to love the musical segment of the Oscars--I still have fond memories of seeing Elliott Smith perform--and was quite disappointed to see that go by the wayside, even though we apparently still had time for James Taylor to wheeze his way through a Beatles song in spectacular MOR fashion.

Actually, the whole show was disappointing. Whither Chris Rock?

The morning after

I've borrowed the image above from BradCran.com because it is awesome. The IOC has such a weird relationship with women's sports and women in sports, and I think that they need to think very carefully about how they intend to handle that.

all the love that I've found

So far all of my prevaricating about how I feel about the Olympics, I have watched a lot of them these last few days. I've also enjoyed watching them, which has caught me off guard. I'm largely uninterested in sports at the best of times (with a few exceptions--baseball and curling), and we don't actually even have any sports channels in our satellite package, but it has been really exciting to watch a lot of the events. The highlight for me so far has been Joannie Rochette's figure skating. While she is obviously not in the same league as Yu Na Kim, she skated tremendously well, and did so under enormous emotional strain. (Her mother flew out from Quebec last week to see Joannie skate, and died of a heart attack a few days later.)

The Ravelympics haven't been so good to me. I finally figured out a pattern that I've been wanting to design for years now, but it hasn't come out as well as I'd hoped. I've got the first mitt blocking right now, and I'm hoping that will sort out some of my problems with my colourwork gauge.

I'm spending my Friday night putting the finishing touches on a paper proposal for an interdisciplinary conference on Eros. (Luce Irigaray is the keynote speaker. ZOMG.) We had a guest lecturer at the school yesterday afternoon lecturing on the cultural politics of the zombie narrative. Prior to the lecture, we watched David Cronenberg's Rabid (which is called Rage elsewhere), and now I have all of these ideas about motherhood, fertility, and the monstrous feminine in horror movies floating around in my head. (To say nothing of the geopolitical implications of what happens in Rabid...there's a whole paper on the FLQ crisis and French-English relations in Quebec in my head right now.) It figures that I am getting my academic mojo back shortly after having decided that a PhD is not in the foreseeable future.

If I could just find a good pattern for a hat in worsted weight yarn, I'd be away to the races.

come in from the cold

It has been a very interesting day around these parts. We were woken up this morning by the loud and incessant cawing of a murder of crows. There were about thirty of them in the tree on our front lawn, on the wires and the rooftops. If it weren't so cold out, I'd even go so far as to say that the darn things were having a hootenanny. What could possibly have so many birds all riled up at 6:30 in the morning? I asked myself. Then I slid my fingers through the slats in the Venetian blinds, and looked out at the yard.

This is what I saw:



The racket went on for a good hour or so until the owl took off, and all the crows just exploded behind him. It made me feel as though I was in a Hitchcock movie.

For this week's foray into new food territory, I decided to make some gyoza. The university held a food fest a few weeks ago, and I had some there that were just ridiculously good. They didn't seem as though they would be excessively difficult to make, so I snooped around to find a good recipe and wound up settling on an Anna Olson recipe. I only changed two things: first, I used lean ground pork instead of regular (it was all they had at the store), and second, I only put in about 125 grams of cabbage instead of a pound. I honestly don't know how they'd be with a full pound of cabbage in there. The little bit that I had was more than enough. It wound up making about 75 little dumplings, which are very tasty. (The other thing that I changed is that I've just been steaming them, not frying then steaming then frying.)

Not much progress to report on my Ravelympics knitting except that I've ripped out and started over again (so that I could go up a needle size). I'm pretty sure the third time's the charm, though; this gauge seems much more workable.

drink up, baby, and stay up all night

I've been visiting my mother for the last few days, and it has been absolutely wonderful. After spending an afternoon with a few friends and my mother, I departed for one of the girls' house armed with my knitting and a bottle of red wine. We wound up watching 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Women's Moguls on the Olympics, and the bottle of red wine was consumed entirely by me. It was interesting to revisit 2001, as it has been several years since I'd watched it last. I was quite surprised to learn that it is actually only 2h25 long, as I would have bet good money on it being more in the four hour range. It turns out that it only feels four hours long. My main memory from the last time I watched it was that I'd spent most of the film reflecting on how much George Lucas had cribbed visually from the set design of the spaceships. My main memory from this time will probably be that the ending is pretty incomprehensible when 3/4 of a bottle of red wine is inside you.

Post-red wine, my mum and I took a trip down to Toronto to visit her parents. My grandfather hasn't been well lately, so I was excited but apprehensive about seeing him. (He's 86, and has a number of health issues related to age, in addition to a recent diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis.) He had a really good day, though. He was chipper and full of jokes, and even agreed to come out of the house to visit a farming store. He doesn't remember my name, but he does remember who I am. (I blame my mother for giving me such an outlandish name.) ;) My gramma was in good spirits as well. She's not much younger than Grampa, but is in much better health. The responsibility of taking care of Grampa falls on her, and I imagine that can be very trying sometimes. They have been married for almost 60 years.

On the knitting front, I've been working on a pair of mittens for the Ravelympics. I don't want to post pictures until I've managed to knit a little more of them, so that the pattern is more visible. I've had to rip them out entirely once already due to gauge issues, but I think the end result will be worth it.

The best thing that I have done so far on reading week, aside from consuming a large amount of delicious sushi, is write a short story. It's the first thing I've written in almost six years, aside from a few snatches of very bad poetry. It's not any good, but it makes me so unbelievably happy to have written something again. Let's hope there is more to come.

Gearing up for the Ravelympics

Every competitor needs some swanky new clothing for competition. Sadly, the Ravelympics are not sponsored by HBC (and after this post, I can't really blame them for that.) Thus, I have taken it upon myself to create a new avatar for the next two weeks:



Let the games begin!

DVR Clearout I

My taping appetite has apparently exceeded my capacity to watch the things that I record, so today I decided to buckle down and watch a bunch of the stuff that I've been avoiding for a while. The Olympics are coming (perhaps you've heard?) and I anticipate that there will probably be a few events that I'll need to tape, so I want to make sure that I have room.

Part of the problem is that the kind of movie that I like (and like to tape, evidently) is the kind of movie that requires a certain frame of mind to watch: the PVR is currently full of Very Serious Films, that cannot simply be watched while I'm puttering around with other things. They need (and, arguably, deserve) my full attention. Anything that's a bit more fluffy gets watched quite quickly.

Thus far I've been successful in clearing out some CSI, Criminal Minds, and Star Trek: Voyager, but I also managed to watch The Pelican Brief, starring Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts, based on the Grisham novel of the same name. I'd watched and read The Pelican Brief years ago when they first came out (and yes, that would put me at about 11 or 12; my parents never restricted me as a reader). It was an interesting film to revisit. So much of the plot depends on conventions of film writing that are now dated and nearly obsolete. Cell phones, in particular, completely eliminate the "but how will I get ahold of you?" tension in the plot; Julia Roberts's character would have a much harder time going off the grid if the movie were written today. The ways in which the various characters are restricted (in terms of movement) by the need stay in contact with others is fascinating. In these days of email and instant communication, the idea of the hard copy of the actual Pelican Brief being passed around is also quite fascinating, as is the card catalogue/filing cabinet style research that Roberts and Washington do.

I'm not a huge Grisham fan by any stretch of the imagination, but I do find some of his work entertaining. It makes me kind of sad that what is actually a decent legal thriller is now more curious for its antique qualities than its plot.

the only thing that helps me pass the time away

It's the sixth week of the term, which puts us at the official halfway point for the year. On one hand, this is awesome, because it means that next week is the Spring Study Break, but on the other hand, I have come to the realization that I have only graded 10% of the work my students will submit to me this term, which means that the remaining 90% is still to come. Yikes.

I am making an effort to focus on the positive this term, which means that I am actually going to give myself a proper Spring Break. I had to grade my exams over the winter holidays, resulting in only 3 actual days off for me in the 2.5 weeks I had "off" work, and I am determined that I need a real break this time. This can only happy if I get a goodly chunk of work done before the break begins, of course. My plans are not especially grandiose: I am going home to see my mother, who is home alone currently, having been abandoned by my father (golfing in the States) and Youngest Sister (adventuring in New Zealand). She is talking about going to see my grandparents, maybe, and possibly doing some house painting. It will be nice to have a couple of truly relaxing, vegetative days in the middle of all of this craziness. (Once I finish grading my 125 essays, I have about 100 midterms to grade as well, with more on the way.)

On the knitting and wedding front, I just finished my wedding shawl. The pattern is called Feather Duster, and it is lovely, using ostrich lace for the repeats. The yarn is also lovely: I used a 2 ply fingering weight yarn in natural ivory from Misty Haven Alpacas, which is right outside of town. I picked it because I like the heft of fingering weight yarns in comparison with laceweights, and because the 2 ply fingering is made from Misty Haven's own alpaca herd. (Most of the yarns they carry are from an alpaca co-op, where all the members contribute fiber and then receive a proportionate amount of yarn.) Although it is a millspun yarn, it feels very much like a handspun, as the thickness varied from part to part. The fabric is likely the softest thing I've ever knit, and feels unbelievably luxurious. I cannot wait for my wedding dress to come in so that I can see the two of them together. The best part is that I made the whole shawl out of one skein--less than 400 yards. I'm ever so pleased with myself.

I've got socks on the needles right now, and I think I may actually have broken through my sock rut--I finished the first sock in three days, and am up to the gusset increases on the second already.

For this week's cooking challenge, I made Chicken Saltimbocca for supper. It actually came out really well--I even found a Marsala wine to make the sauce. The sauce, on its own, didn't taste especially good, but once it was on the chicken, it mellowed out the saltiness of the proscuitto and was generally quite tasty. I would definitely make it again.

Cowichan sweaters, HBC, and what I'm not knitting for Ravelympics

Regular commenter Castor Rouge has contributed the above photograph, taken at Ottawa's Winterlude festivities three years ago. It makes a good segue to the subject of today's blog, which manages to address a bunch of stuff that I've been pondering off and on for the last few months.

During the last [summer] Olympic games, Ravelry hosted the Ravelympics, in which various teams competed in different knitting related categories. Everyone cast on their projects during the opening ceremonies, and the first person finished in each category would "win". It's happening again this year, which is pretty cool. I'm competing on Team Three Irish Girls (for the yarn club I belong to). We have our own colourway, Sheepnuts, so called because...well...


(thanks to Kregarious for photo under Creative Commons license)

Anyhow. I was thinking about potential projects for Ravelympics, and I hit upon the idea of making a Cowichan-style sweater. In many ways, it would be the perfect project for the Vancouver Olympics: it would be uniquely Canadian; I could make it out of a heritage yarn, like Briggs and Little; it would be challenging but not intimidating; it would pay homage to the aboriginal people of British Columbia.

Unfortunately, when you're a critical theory person, these things are never so simple as that. At what point does pay homage become cultural appropriation? As a white person of British descent, would I simply be perpetuate the cycle of colonization? It doesn't help that these sweaters are already fraught with controversy in relation to this Olympic games. The Hudson's Bay Company (yes, the same company that used to trade blankets for beaver pelts) is the official clothing company for the Olympic games. As part of their collection for the Olympics, they have a sweater that they swear is *not* a Cowichan sweater. Local aboriginal groups are upset because HBC opted to contract out the sweater making rather than having aboriginal knitters make them, claiming that the Cowichans wouldn't be able to produce sweaters to HBC's strict standards. HBC also claims that their design isn't Cowichan:



I'll leave you to be the judge of that. I especially enjoyed the statement that HBC released:

It is a contemporary design inspired by a great fashion icon that is recognized as a knit sweater all across the country.

If you can tell me what "recognized as a knit sweater" means, exactly, I'd really like to hear it.

All of this is a longwinded way of saying that I'm probably just going to make a scarf rather than a sweater during the Olympics. Is there a way to mitigate that uncomfortable feeling of cultural appropriation?

Knitting, Cooking, Cleaning: The Life Domestic

It has been a busy few days here; when I haven't been thinking about the politics of knitting, I've been actually knitting. (Scary.) There's also been a lot of cooking and cleaning happening over here. Friends of ours are due to welcome a baby girl into the world in a few short days, so I've been working on a wee feather-and-fan sweater for her, and Mat and I are making up some food to take over. We've realized that we've been in a rut lately, so we're trying to be proactive in making changes in our lives.

I frequently try to tell my students that life is a learning process and that university is not necessarily about learning to identify the parts of sentences, but I tend to forget that myself. Living with my partner has meant a lot of learning for me. We have very different temperaments: he will brood where I will attack; he sleeps more than I do; he is much neater than I am. One of the things that I have learned about myself since we've moved in together is that if I don't plan my week out in advance, nothing gets done properly.

This never seemed to be an issue when I lived alone, but I think that's because I only ever had to worry about myself. If left to my own devices, I will often graze rather than eat properly, which just doesn't cut it when you need to feed someone else too. It also didn't matter when I cleaned the tub or did the dishes, or if I remembered to wash the sheets or vacuum. Add another person into the mix, though, and that does start to matter.

In the spirit of breaking out of my biggest rut, which is a food rut, I've decided to make one new recipe every week. This week's adventure in fooding will be a pork tenderloin with roasted potatoes.

Perhaps I've been going about it all wrong

The difficulties of hacking through the Gordian knot I've made of knitting and politics have been weighing on me; I've made little progress in terms of figuring out what I might like to make for the art show. It's the same crippling thought that has bogged up much of my creative writing for the last few years: everything I think of always seems so hopelessly derivative.

Then Karie passed on a link that has made me see that perhps the problem is not with me, but the way in which I am considering art as resistance and knitting as politics. Anna, of Knitting, Sex and God, writes:

What I have enjoyed about the 100 Objects series so far is that it is collapsing distinctions between ‘art’, ‘craft’, ‘tools’, ‘technology’, etc. The only criterion is that each object is an artefact – made by human beings. The semantic awkwardness there is significant – the words that easily slip in the structure of our language are ‘man-made’ – made by men, or with men representative of the whole of humanity. The whole traditional men/women, culture/nature division is particularly significant as regards ‘thingyness’, because men ‘make’ and women ‘generate’, men invent things and make decisions and get them done, whereas women give birth. Or the things that women make traditionally – textiles, food, domestic items – aren’t as valued as those of men: they are craft, not art; tools, not technology.

Feminism hasn’t always done as well as it might in trying to redress the neglect of ‘women’s things’: having diagnosed the culture/nature dualism, it has often wanted to choose one side of the divide rather than to dissolve it. So you have a disembodiedly intellectual kind of feminism that is dismissive of activities such as cooking or embroidery, versus the spiritual feminism saturated in the imagery of the natural, untouched by the social – moon, sea, soil, etc, speaking of ‘technology’ as the evil tool of patriarchy that has subjugated women and the earth. Or feminist reclamation of traditional female crafts has tended to romanticise them as being closer to the natural and part of women’s birth-giving capacities, rather than part of the general human project of negotiating the world through tools and objects that are useful and beautiful.

There's quite a lot going on there. To start with, Anna brings up the word "man-made" as significant; I would also add that the objects women produced are more often referred to as being "handmade," which is a term loaded with solipsisms, conjuring up images of macaroni picture frames and pinecone bird feeders on one hand, or expensive, "Fair Trade" wooden bowls carved in a Third World county on the other. Anna goes on to talk about the divide between intellectual vs. spiritual feminism, which in some ways reinforces this solipsism.

I think that I need to stop thinking about knitting as resistance in terms of capital P Politics, and start thinking about where knitting sits in terms of the politics of feminism, and in what ways my position as a [third wave] feminist and knitter resists, subverts, conforms, or defies this feminism.

alpacas uber alles

Castor Rouge has given me some food for thought in response to my last post about political knitting. (I will point out, though, that he likes my February Lady Sweater because of the buttons, which are Tudor Roses, and that he recognized them right away.)

I managed to sneak home this weekend, and it wound up being a very nice weekend. I had a nice long soak in my parents' bathtub, ate ridiculous amounts of sushi, and spent time knitting and talking with a good friend. I made good progress on a very sweet baby sweater, which I will hopefully finish before wee Abigail Autumn makes her way into the world.

On Friday, I was sitting on the couch and knitting, and my dad said to me, "Of all my daughters, you are not the one I would've thought to be the knitter." This was quite surprising to me. "Which of us did you think it would be?" I asked. "I'm not sure," he replied. "Just not you. But you really love it, don't you? You get it from your grandmother, though. Your great-grandmother too."

My dad's mother passed away when I was fourteen after a long battle with a number of illness, although I believe it came down to Hepatitis C and cirrhosis in the end. She taught me to knit years before that, and after making a few little things, I forgot all about it until I started working at The Historic Site Which Shall Not Be Named. It makes me very sad that she will never know how grateful I am for those early lessons, or see any of the things that I have made. I can still remember the first square I knit, in white yarn (probably acrylic), and how disappointed I was that it didn't look like "real" knitting. (It was garter stitch, and I thought it would or should look like stockinette.)

Part of the impetus to knit, for me, is that connection to the past. How does that connect to the politics of knitting? I'm not sure. I have a few more thoughts, but they will have to wait until tomorrow.

art as resistance

Every year for International Women's Week, one of the local galleries does a juried art show, usually inconjunction with the Gender Equality and Social Justice department here at the university. This year's theme is Art of Resistance, and I would really like to submit a knitted piece. Unfortunately, I just don't know what to submit.

Many knitters, all much smarter than I, do incredible politically minded projects--Rav had a whole group of "Knitters for Obama" who came up with some mindblowing ideas. The Body Count Mittens have always been a personal favourite of mine; since you finish the mittens on different dates, they will have different numbers on them, representing the number of casualties in the Iraq war. I considered doing Afghanistan mittens, but I don't know that I'd have access to the body count information, and I also don't want to simply re-tread ground others have already walked on. It's hard to justify knitting as a subversive act when you're following a pattern.

Poetry mittens are another option; perhaps with lines from Rich or Atwood? Cixous, even? But that still doesn't feel like it's quite enough.

Part of the problem is that I have very mixed feelings about the relationship between knitting and politics. In some ways, yes, it is very much about resistance: it is an act of reclamation. I reclaim my past (imagined?), participating in the culture of my ancestors. I create things by hand: every item that I make is something unique, something not created by a machine or in a sweatshop. It is labour but also love. I reclaim it as a feminist act: I knit because I choose to knit; I knit primarily for myself. The act of knitting is political because it destabilizes commonly encountered cultural attitudes about knitting and knitters.

The flip side is that it only does these things because of my class; is the reclamation of a working class profession as my upper middle class hobby really all that awesome, or just kind of bourgeois? Knitting isn't truly a matter of necessity for me; it is a luxury, and one I choose to pursue. Does the mere fact of choice problematize any arguments about reclamation?

Even if you want to ignore all of these, there are still the political issues that every knitter must face: body image and body politics; man vs. animal fibre; the environmental costs of plant fibres; neoconservatism (women who see knitting as a reclamation of traditional gender roles and values) vs. progressive liberalism (people who see knitting as an honourable craft); bargain vs. luxury yarns; local yarn stores vs. online stores; stash size as a measure of worth; the DIY esthetic; design and designers; community.

How can I turn all of that into a simple handmade garment?

The first week back at work was a busy one. The school physically shut down for two weeks, which complicated the return to work; the building was opened only an hour before my first class. It went well enough, though many of the students who failed part I are still somehow registered for part II, so I will have to do some wrangling with the Registrar's Office later this week.

Back in October I mentioned visiting the dermatologist, who wanted me to come back for a biopsy in December. I got the results a few days ago. The mole was pre-cancerous, which officially puts me in every single high risk group for skin cancer. I know that it isn't a big deal, as pre-cancerous is not at all the same as cancerous, but I am going to have to be really careful about staying out of the sun whenever possible, and watching my 300+ moles to make sure that they are not changing at all.

The great Stashdown of 2010 continues on; the wedding shawl is working out very well. The yarn is so soft and lovely. I also cast on a simple pair of handwarmers that I can wear at work, which I am making out of the handspun baby camel yarn that my mum bought for me on the Isle of Skye. I've never knit with handspun before, so it's quite neat that way. The yarn is so special that I want to keep the pattern quite simple, so I'm making up my own and I'm pleased with the way it's working out.

if she can't find you handsome...

My annual sinus cold has set in, just in time for the start of the school year, when I have to do lots of talking. Huzzah. Fortunately most of my students have had me before, so they know that this is not quite what I sound like or act like; I am hopeful that things will get better soon.

There are currently men in the kitchen doing manly things, which in this instance means "home renos while drinking beer." It's a bit scary. When we bought the house, it came with some appliances, including a very old refrigerator. The fridge lived in its own little alcove in the kitchen. When we replaced the fridge, we quickly discovered that old fridges are in fact quite small by comparison to their modern counterparts, and the new fridge did not fit into the alcove.

Fast forward a year and a half or so, and the men have decided to remove a portion of one wall to enlarge the space for the fridge to fit into. This necessitated power tools, a trip to Home Depot, and beer. Naturally. This is, apparently, how renovations work.

It actually worked out pretty well. The fridge seems quite happy in its new home. The cupboard above the fridge was out tea cupboard, and we had to clean it out so that the men could do their work. Sadly, this brought us to the realization of how much tea we own. (Mat would like to pretend that it is all mine, but frankly, that is a lie. Most of the black teas are mine, but there's a fair amount of green and rooibos that belong to him.) To give you an idea, we nearly filled a large Rubbermaid container with tea. I think it may be time for a tea purge soon enough.

In knitting news, I have begun work on my wedding shawl. The pattern uses an Ostrich lace pattern, which is just beautiful, and I'm knitting it in a local alpaca yarn from the Misty Haven Alpaca farm out in Corbeil. It's so beautiful and soft to work with. I was doing some googling this afternoon and came across a quaich with an inscription reading, "Of Earthly Joys, Thou Art My Choice." I quite like that.

into the future

It has been a surprising productive weekend around these parts. I finally finished all of my grading from last semester and submitted my final grades. (160 final exams x 30 minutes apiece to grade=80 hours of grading and a very sad grader.)
I cleaned up my craftroom (you can see my work table now! It's made of plastic) and cleaned up my bedroom. I've got laundry in both the washer and dryer. Best of all, there's a turkey in the oven. It's my very first turkey, and I really hope that it comes out okay. It smells pretty good.

I've joined a destashing game on Ravelry for the next few months in hopes of getting some projects done (and not buying more yarn!) I came out of Christmas with a skein of Fleece Artist's Scotian Silk and a skein of Handmaiden's Mini-Maiden, plus some yarn from a Harry Potter Quidditch swap. I am hoping that I will be able to go the next three months without adding any more to my stash (aside from my Three Irish Girls yarn of the month). I finished my first project of the year this morning: a little cozy for Richard Parker, my iPod, with an owl cable on it. Next up is finishing my hooded scarf, and not a moment too soon: it is cold here, and when it isn't cold, it's windchills in the -30s. Brrr.

The university opens back up tomorrow. My schedule this term is pretty good--I have Fridays off, and I finish at 12:30 on Thursdays, so I'm hoping that I will be able to make good use of my time and get some academic and creative work done. It's good to be ambitious.

New Year's was strange this year. The event itself wasn't strange, especially, but it was strange to reflect back on the last ten years of my life. The strangest thing was to think about NYE 2000. I spent it at a friend's house in the country with my high school friends. Of all the people that I saw that night, I talk to one semi-regularly now. So many things about me are so different now from what they were back then--I am very lucky to have had the opportunities and friendships that I have over the last ten years.