Reading

Current Mood: grateful

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2025 52 Card Project: Week 49: Farewell

My work life is definitely winding down.

For the past eight and a half years, I have planned and overseen what are called Candidacy Days every other month, and we hold the candidacy annual Open House at the December meeting. I have probably arranged fifty of these meetings over that time, but this past week was my last one, and the annual Open House was my retirement party. One of my sisters, Betsy, my two daughters, my granddaughter M, and Eric were all able to attend.

People said nice things about me.

It's really starting to sink in. I have one week of work left.

Image Description: three women and one man (Peg, her former boss Bishop Ann, her present boss Bishop Jen, and her supervisor Pastor John) smile at the camera. Center: Peg and her family (Eric, sister Betsy, and her daughters Fiona and Delia) smile. Bottom: a portion of a bouquet and retirement gifts.

Farewell

49 Farewell

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

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brain: mental health

I'm not even sure if pathetic is the word...

That week of ultimately unhelpful jobseeker course three weeks ago not only wrecked my energy for cleaning, any projects, and my daily stretching and exercise routines, it also left me with too little energy (focus? Even with methylphenidate!) to update my pet photos or interior design blogs on Tumblr. Or to shop for holiday presents for my parents and sister.

I have enough energy to spend that time on the computer, but just not to focus on what to post/buy. 😭 I am planning to try again today. Wish me luck.

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stitchery

another inkling

Threading seven strands of thin cotton yarn through a standard heddle and tying the three minimally required knots was enough hand-effort to knock out some night-time sleep. I'd guessed it beforehand and paused after the knots, such that there were only minimal negative effects.

(Since this heddle's holes are too small for a reed hook (which I don't have) or a crochet hook of a size to snag the cotton yarn, I used the Stoorstålka suohpan---a little nylon loop---included with its heddle. A US knockoff product is available, slightly cheaper for me than paying shipping individually from Jokkmokk.)

I still haven't begun weaving with those seven cotton strands because the Stoorstålka backstrap, as demonstrated by their rep, doesn't stay on me. There's a remedy for it, however!

I've unearthed a backstrap starter kit from my first dip into weaving and braiding, purchased more than 25 years ago (it refers to making a case for one's cellphone or pager). It's meant for kids and kid-reach. Its backstrap is a piece of thin nylon rope, affixed to a (useful) band-lock. I have to step into and out of it. But someone pre-warped it 25+ years ago, and I've used it slowly to weave a basic band.

That band could become a backstrap slightly better than the nylon rope, which is a backstrap-using weaver's equivalent of a coder's "hello, world". I'd rather practice, then make something a bit wider. The kit's strap, which is drying with its ends braided, is only 2 cm across.

It seems to me that the main difference between weaving a band (suitable as strap, belt, etc.) and weaving cloth is how strongly each row of weft is beaten, pushed into its neighbors. The tools or loom type used don't matter, except insofar as they aid or limit the implementation.

Like fishing and sailing (but not like knitting, which is far younger a craft), weaving has a lot of terms of art in English. I started making myself a list to check whether I'd understood things consistently across different texts and videos; by now it's longer than several of my recent posts together. That's next, after I drain it of some sidechat, and then I'll resume posting about non-weaving things.

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using up yarn

Sandnes skeins are definitely designed to pull from the outside and it's inconvenient!

I was just getting really annoyed thinking about how it is not hard at all to wind your own center-pull yarn cake, so why can't mass-produced yarn balls pull from the center? (They can - there are some brands that do - but most of them don't work very well.) I got annoyed enough to just try a websearch for my question and found this forum discussion:

This is a very basic question, but

"...do you prefer pulling yarn from the inside of a skein or the outside? And why? I usually pull from the inside, but the other day I decided to try the outside for a swatch. I have been used to “untwisting” yarn as I knit, but this time it was ridiculous. I ended up winding the skein into a ball from the inside before trying again. (I have a ball winder, but don’t usually use it for hand knitting projects.) [...]"

[Responder B]: "You're correct, it all has to do with the twist of your yarn. Most commercial yarns are meant to be pulled from the inside, but there are so many yarns out there, that is not a rule set in stone. You obviously added more twist when you tried using your yarn from the outside. A yarn butler would help that problem because it allow the skein to roll off the skein rather than it unrolling and slipping off the end which adds a twist. Some low twist yarns or singles yarn you have to be very careful with otherwise you will completely untwist it and it will pull apart while working. Yarn bowls can be helpful with controlling twist as well."

Oh, what. Oh, UGH, that's so annoying! That makes sense, I guess. It just annoys me.

Pulling from the center seems more convenient in every respect to me, so why would you design it deliberately the other way? Obviously this isn't self-evident and there must be a lot of people who think it makes more sense or is more convenient to pull from the outside. I hate when my strong preferences are outliers like this because everything is working against me.

what the hell is a 'yarn butler'? What an annoying term. I could google it but I didn't.

I know about yarn bowls and I always found the concept a little annoying too, because I carry my knitting around in a bag and the bowl is hard, larger than my bag usually, and also frequently breakable. I typically put the skein in my knitting bag and that usually prevents it from rolling all over the place, although obviously it doesn't have the little loop to catch the working yarn and so isn't as effective as the yarn bowl concept.

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brain: mental health

SAD whining

It happens every year at this season that when the sun never comes up properly all day it feels like I have never woken up properly either, but it's always just as frustrating and I'm never prepared. Sigh. Time just comes unglued, because it's overcast all the time and it's only daylight (wan gray daylight) between 9 and 4 at best. A week could be a day long or a month long. It's like I'm dreaming, but not as pleasant, because my hands or feet are usually cold during the day.

Sunlamps have never been very noticeably useful for me, which is extremely depressing, but also not bad enough for me to completely give up on them. The worst part is that regular outdoor exercise probably would help but it's completely unattainable. You might as well tell me that a hundred pushups is the cure.

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Future's — made of — temporary insanity

Okay, I really thought my crafting hyperfixation of the month was going to be beading on a loom. Earlier this year, I picked up a book about it, thanks to a need to spend over $10 at a thrift store, and then a few weeks ago, I saw a plastic bead loom at Michael's and nabbed it. Obviously from there, I realized the kit was not sufficient for My Vision, so I headed back to Michael's and dropped a truly silly amount on beads and weird needles. Have I started beading, which I'm excited to do? No, obviously first I have to clean off my crafting table, which involves SO much organizing, purging and Gingko-wrangling, so she doesn't eat or destroy any of the above.

Then, over Thanksgiving, YouTube slammed me with an unexpected interest.

yooon_ie lives in Chicago, apparently close enough to the West Loop Goodwill that she can stop by often enough to pounce when she finds a vintage Coach bag in the wild. Her parents are a cobbler and a tailor, according to her telling, and she's got all kinds of amazing skills and know-how for taking these designer objects in tragic condition and rehabilitating them in a flash.

I am fascinated. It's related to the emotional satisfaction one gets watching a pet groomer rescue a terribly matted stray from neglect, though with less body horror. There are so many videos out there; I definitely spent more than one evening just working my way through everyone's shorts, which all follow the same pattern with the same ASMR. And so, the urge rises: I want to experience this! I want to find a mistreated designer bag for $8.99 in a back rack at Goodwill and treat myself to Real Luxury Like They Used to Make! I've never been a bag girlie or even a girly girlie. This, like my sudden realization that makeup is fun, actually, is all very new on my end.

Here is the problem: Because it is maximum load USPS season, everything I'm splurging on is very slow to come in the mail. I can spend the money and absolutely nothing about it is real because it is taking two weeks to get here. I became briefly insane last Sunday and decided it was worth it to buy a new bag from Coach Factory, and the delivery date keeps dropping back, and like!! Then I remembered DePop was a thing and immediately stayed up until 2 AM this Saturday bookmarking candidates (because I spent the weekend exploring varying thrift stores and coming to understand that thrifting is a persistence predator's game). Yesterday I tried out the "make an offer" button and then the seller accepted basically immediately?? So I DO have a glorious vintage '90s minimalist Coach purse (Swinger in black!) coming my way, for too much money STILL because of fees, but Amazon has not come through on my freaking saddle soap/horsehair brush/Leather CPR order, so obviously nothing exists until I can see it and hold it in my hands!!! And even then!!!!!

I am but a humble public media journalist, my poor bank account cannot take this ADHD object-permanence nonsense. All of this absolutely did start because my therapist poked me in the forehead and reminded me that it is good, in fact, to treat yourself and that it is hard to do things like date (more on that another time!) when you feel like a feral gremlin all the time. (That said, I do have a story in mind about this bag rehabber community that I hope to publish for Mother's Day, so maybe I can write it off for my taxes at some point.)

All of this does fall a bit into perspective given the real ballgame I'm warming up for: This morning, I spent an hour with a realtor who's going to help me, fingers crossed, Buy a Condo in the next few months. Speaking of money that absolutely isn't and cannot be real to me. But she's got sassy realtor energy and I am really excited to get started For Real on this search. ✶

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cats,
tv

TV, bird tv, fire tv

I intend to watch the three released episodes of Heated Rivalry so I can know what everyone (my wife) is talking about, but I haven't got to it yet. I am obviously spoiled by Tumblr posts but I haven't watched the bits between the gifsets.

I rewatched Derry Girls over the last two weeks while attempting to knit this nephew sweater (made it to first sleeve cuff again, finally!). That show is so good, and it's so frustrating, because there's nothing more that's like it! All the main adult actors are also so good, but none of them have a long back catalogue of other comedy to watch! And of course the writer, Lisa McGee, needs time to write more things.

I have a long list of things I've been intending to watch and rewatch, but it feels like I don't have enough emotional bandwidth, or attention, or something, for starting new long things that are going to be dramatic.

So I've been watching a ton of non fiction instead:

➡️very old Folding Ideas and Hbomberguy videos

➡️Mentour Pilot's back catalog of aviation disaster explainers (previously I was familiar from watching over

waxjism's shoulder)

➡️Defunctland episodes that aren't too Disney-focused (a mention on Tumblr reminded me and I've only seen a few before)

➡️KyleHatesHiking videos about true crime, accidents, and missing persons cases related to hiking and outdoor sports (recommended by my sister last week)

➡️BobbyBroccoli science scandal documentaries (there's a new movie on Nebula, but otherwise I've watched them all before)

Meanwhile Wax is filling our bird feeders (seed and tallow ball) sometimes multiple times a day and the bird traffic is constant. Sipuli will sit by the window watching them like tv. Tristana is happy to sit in a chair facing the woodstove and watch the fire like it's a tv, sometimes for hours.

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Poem: "Portrait of the Artist Feeling Liminal"

The pearl at my ear is a lacquered grey seed
My lips strong red from wind's chaffing
I do not feel my middle age as any lessening
Here I am, a portrait of myself more vividly

Among old oaks I am still a hot young thing
Mind like a swallow sketching possibility on the wing
They say uncertainty ferments fear
I feel the old familiar thrill of stepping out of known into becoming

___

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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reading

also recent reading

(Formerly stalled drafts have been nudged by end-of-term exams, in progress.)

Sonali Dev, Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors, The Rajes 1 (2019)
Recipe for Persuasion, The Rajes 2 (2020)
Incense and Sensibility, The Rajes 3 (2021)

Beyond the pairwise romance ostensibly cranking its plot, the first book is a love letter to third-culture kids whose lives have been bent by contradictory familial expectations, and an acknowledgment of bits of the wreckage wrought by postcolonial aspiration. Light touch, relatively, but I appreciate that these books say some of the quiet things aloud about costs and---better---that several characters encourage each other to speak to someone specific.

"Raje" isn't ordinarily a surname, which makes it a good choice.

Perhaps the most important feature of the setting, as a fix-it, is that when the kids who figure in these books as adult characters were growing up, several older relatives were local. I also appreciate the queer side-character situationship, whose arc suits the books' setting.

Anyway, four books total---none for Mansfield Park, which I think would be tough to fit. The fourth is The Emma Project (2022), which I've begun.

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reading

recent reading

1. I've finally dawdled my way through the rest of Spinney's Proto. It has fit into two minutes here, three minutes there, of accompanying tiny housemate outside.

2. Stephanie Brill and Lisa Kenney, The Transgender Teen: A Handbook for Parents and Professionals Supporting Transgender and Non-Binary [sic] Teens (2016)

Continues from Brill's Transgender Child with Rachel Pepper (2008, rev. 2022), which I haven't read. Kenney was (till 2020) the executive director of Gender Spectrum, the nonprofit visibility org that Brill founded almost 20 years ago.

Turban's Free to Be lays out several case studies supported by others' research, intersperses stylized parts of his own journey, and lets the reader decide how to read them, albeit over his shoulder. Brill and Kenney go like this:

We will help clarify the issues at hand so that you are able to refocus your attention on the whole of your child, and not just their gender. We will help you move from a place of concern, disbelief, fear, confusion, or wariness to a place where you can become an effective ally for your child---no matter where they may lie on the gender spectrum. We want to help you move to or return to a place where your teen knows they can count on you to support them, to love them, and to help them through the rough patches of life, both in these years and the years to come. (pp. xi-xii)

To save my hands, though I was given a paper copy, I bought and read epub.

Current Mood: thankful

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2025 52 Card Project: Week 48: Thanksgiving

We gathered at my sister Betsy's this year, and we had a lovely evening together. Because everyone in my family is a marvelous cook, the food, of course, was delicious. It's a matter of great joy to all of us that my mom is still with us to celebrate the holidays.

I hope you all had as wonderful a Thanksgiving as we did.

Image description: Top: a buffet set with Thanksgiving foods. Below that: a family gathered around a Thanksgiving table. Lower center: a mother and daughter smile at the camera. Bottom: a caramel cheese cake, surrounded by decorative squashes.

Thanksgiving

48 Thanksgiving

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

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using up yarn

Knitting a (Medium) Man Sweater

Medium Man is a large size. It has more fabric in it than Small Woman (the size of me). It doesn't have more fabric than a sweater for

waxjism, but she is too warm-blooded to wear sweaters really, so the last time I knitted one for her was over 10 years ago.

It's a lot of knitting. It's going. There are setbacks.

There are gauge issues. And challenges of imagination.

( Knitting Talk )

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politics,
reading

(no subject)

Reading Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's The Wizard of the Crow; absolutely wild parallels to current events here, on the daily. Despotism as the ultimate theater of the absurd: all of these petty men running around to shiv each other and cover their own asses, twisting language and logic and meaning up in absolute knots because what are words but a means to power?

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family,
health

Dry eyes in the house

Yesterday Wax had to quit work early and drive into Turku to see a doctor because it felt like something was poking her in her left eye but there was nothing there! And then she had to get up early and go to Turku today to see a specialist. She got some eyedrops prescribed, but there's nothing majorly wrong with her eye. It's just that her eyes are too dry. Apparently when your eyes are too dry one of the things that can happen is that they stick to your eyelids when you're asleep and if they're too stuck, when you open your eyes a few cells from the cornea can get torn off it and stay stuck to the eyelid, which creates a little micro hole in it and feels like you're being constantly stabbed in the eyeball. Isn't that great?

When we were talking about this last night I said, "You know, for a bunch of years, like maybe five to ten years ago, I felt like my eyes were too dry all the time and I was putting saline drops in them frequently, but a few years ago instead it started being like they overcompensate and make a lot of tears and now my eyes are more likely to be running when I've been asleep or lying down..." and with her new knowledge she was able to devastatingly inform me that this is just a sign of my eyes being dry, and even though it makes them hurt less, the tears are the wrong kind of moisture or something and not actually helping the eye themselves. So apparently in addition to the drops Wax needs for the inflammation and pain, we both have to start moisturizing our eyes now.

The other quixotic thing that happened this week was that my sister forgot about Brexit. Again.

To be specific: last year my sister ordered me a holiday present from a UK etsy shop that cost more than the minimum you can import without paying import taxes now (which I think is like under 20€ - it might even be 10?). As a result I got a text informing me that a package I didn't know about previously was at Customs, and in order to free it I had to fill out an online form indicating exactly what it was (which is a hassle in itself because they're in a taxonomic tree list) and provide a receipt or proof of purchase, in this case, the email receipt from the webshop that my sister had to forward, which obviously sort of spoiled the surprise. With a small present the amount you have to pay to release it from jail is only a few euros typically, but it is a hassle and it spoils the surprise.

And then this week she FORGOT THAT THAT HAD HAPPENED and ordered me a present from another UK shop.

(My parents & sister and I have pretty much given up on mailing back and forth anything larger than a padded envelope due to the delays and the fact that postage for the regular-sized boxes we typically used to send has gone up to generally over 100€.)

Entry tags:

stitchery

current stitching, and

Still knitting: while I address a request, Sundial has gone on hold, a few colorways from its probable end. I have enough scraps after all to vary the latter's sequence of hues out to reasonable scarf-length.

For trying to restart weaving: spent some time with old notes and recent reading/viewing. (No new notes. For example, Long Thread, a magazine publisher, lets influencers rent ad space in their newsletters, but they're never useful (delete, delete) when they repackage info from older practitioners and researchers who're still active. If one knows about the latter, it's better to visit the source.) Besides Susan Foulkes, whose blog I've read almost since its start, off the top of my head there's Laverne Waddington, Liz Gipson, Annie MacHale, and Linda Hendrickson, for expert weavers and reliably clear teachers who've shared info generously.

I will never want or need to do this, but check out Hendrickson tablet-weaving with wire.

I've checked my yarn stash for something warp-suitable---similar yarn weight to the scraps for Sundial, but with a different tension requirement. Years ago, tiny skeins of cotton yarn were sold in sets of a few colorways, the fingering-weight equivalent of worsted-weight dishcloth yarn. They were marketed ten years ago (when big-box craft stores still walked the earth in my region) for fingerweaving or basic knotting as "friendship bracelets"; narrow bands are exactly what they're intended to become. Lion, the manufacturer, makes some sets from acrylic yarn nowadays, but a couple of all-cotton sets are still sold. The two packets in the kitchen craft drawer are plenty for playing with before I try hemp or wool.

One reason to restart weaving: another way to use up yarn scraps from knit and crochet. :)

(TIL that Lion bought Quince the yarn company in 2023. Not surprising that something would've; could be worse.)

Current Mood: anxious

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Wednesday Reading Meme

What I Just Finished Reading

Nothing. It has been a very tiring week.

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday!

( Doctor Strange #1, Fantastic Four #6, Ultimate Universe Two Years In #1, Ultimate X-Men #22, Wiccan Witches Road #1 )

What I'm Reading Next

Still working through the tennis soulmate romance.

Current Mood: exhausted

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video games

Clues By Sam

Posting here in the hopes that typing this out will make me remember the name of the site: if you like logic puzzles, Clues by Sam is a fun little daily logic puzzle.

That is all.

(no subject)

ngl it's been fun that the snow set in hard this year as soon as December was on the horizon

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Comment sought on fictional 1953 rural British hotel tea

An order for tea was understood by this person to include a plate piled with bacon, eggs, sausages, tomatoes, and chips, three or four kinds of jam, scones, a heavy fruit cake, a loaf of bread, a dish of stewed fruit, and one of radishes.

— Georgette Heyer, Detection Unlimited (1953)

There is some context to this scene that I understand from other reading about the period - rationing, for example. And I've often come upon fictional hotels and pubs in the country serving much more generously than more urban and sophisticated visitors are used to.

But I don't really have a sense of how unusual this is - what a normal pub or hotel would serve for tea. I would have guessed a combination of something like beans, meat, or fish with bread and then scones or cakes, perhaps, but the beginning of this sounds more to me like an English breakfast than my understanding of a tea.

Also: is a dish of radishes just washed radishes for snacking? Or is it more slices with some kind of dressing? My parents were both fond of radishes and grew them in our garden, but I've never encountered the idea of a whole dish of them (and nothing else) on the table at a meal. (Recipes that include them, yes, but would you refer even to roasted radishes as "a dish of radishes"?)

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Updates

1. Wax's fatigue and stress

Wax had a breakdown about a year ago after Snookums died and we lost Anubis, the same as I did. But she hasn't really rebounded, just been scraping along as if she had the flu since then. She recently told me she thought it wasn't burnout, or anxiety, but maybe something physical related to menopause or thyroid perhaps, and she finally went to a doctor and had a bunch of bloodwork done. But it looked like it wasn't anything like that, and the doctor who gave her the results said she needs to probably see a gynecologist to check if it's related to hormones next. That was a couple of weeks ago, and she hasn't done it yet - she seems to have been alarmed by some vagueness about how the referral process is gonna work. This is her work health insurance, so completely differently from how it works for me.

2. Me seeing a doctor

I got up early yesterday to call between 8:00 and 8:01 am and actually got a record-fast callback in less than 40 minutes, and this time they ACTUALLY GAVE ME AN APPOINTMENT!!! The appointment is in a week and a half, shortly after my birthday. I have a whole list of questions unrelated to this medication to ask the GP while I am there.

3. Cat training & cat divorce

The other day Tristana and Sipuli were briefly sitting calmly on opposite sites of the gate looking at each other! It only lasted for about one minute. While I was still talking to Wax about it, as we watched, Sipuli jumped down, turned in a circle, then jumped back up and tried to grab Tristana through the gate, and Tristana jumped away of course. But it's still a milestone. (I think I've seen this twice before maybe.)

Sipuli is focused enough on training now that she will keep her attention on me even if Tristana is right there staring through the gate! She only ignored me to jump on the gate once, and I ended the session immediately. Since then she has kept her attention on me in spite of gross provocation from Tristana several times.

I think I will try training them to turn in a circle next, and I've started doing this with Tristana by moving the target around to the side next to her hip so she has to twist after it a bit. (Tristana has not even realized she can touch the target with her foot instead of her nose yet. Sipuli seems to switch sort of randomly.)

4. Attempting to become less sedentary

I was doing pretty well with stretches and exercises in the last few months up until I got my driver's licence, but the week before last which I spent at that job-hunting course caused me to drop all the balls I had been juggling (balls of daily routines I mean), and I have not managed to get back to the exercise yet. Which is extra annoying because at the same time I started knitting a sweater for an 18-year-old nephew, so doing shoulder- and arm-focused stretching routines would be more useful now than it was a month ago. I spent all last week feeling exhausted and didn't get past cleaning and knitting. But at the same time, it's now pitch black by four in the afternoon and doesn't lighten until after eight. I need to dig out my sunlamp and get it set up in a good position, probably. In twenty years I've never managed to establish a lasting routine with it, but maybe I just need more practice.