one of those day in the life posts

Jiveturkey wants to know what we do all day. Here is what.

5:30am - sneak out of bunk bed, having fallen asleep while tucking the midnight-waker back in. Try to use toilet and make coffee without waking kids; fail. Leif calls from bed, where he is rubbing his eyes with all his hair frizzed up or dangling like a monkey from the bunk bed bars; he goes limp and pretends to be dead when I pick him up. I flop him onto the couch and he either says, "bread and nutella" or "banana" ("pwease"). Boy shuffles out in jammies, I assemble bread and cereal and coffee.

6:00 - 6:30am - breakfast and cartoons and email-checking. Wake man, shoo cats out of bathroom, take shower. Or skip shower in favor of second cup of coffee. Especially if the pilot blew out again and there isn't any hot water.

7:00 - 7:20am - Mike makes sandwiches while I put my face on and dress the infink. Gavin ambles around getting dressed, brushing hair, and playing Bey Blades. Brief flurry of shoe-finding and people-kissing, and out the door. Mike walks the little one to preschool, Gavin and I drive the 5 minutes to school.

7:30-9:45am - work; hobos, typewriter, fax machine, checkouts, sorting mail, storytime, endless cups of Lipton tea.

9:45am - BREAK TIME. A few minutes to knit a few rows, scarf down bananas, and read a chapter of whatever book is on my desk. Currently A Secret Rage, by Charlaine Harris and And Another Thing, by Eoin Colfer pretending to be Douglas Adams. Then back to work until lunch.

12:00pm - LUNCH TIME. Exactly the same as break, only longer, and with a meal bar or Lean Cuisine.

1:00pm - 4:30pm - work that usually involves budgets, numbers typed on tiny labels, someone yelling, someone refusing to pay .25, someone pooping on the floor, phone-in book renewals, and complaints about how slow the computers are/why I have to have a library card to use the computer/why I have to prove I live here to get a free resident's card/why I can't charge my phone/why I can't bathe in the urinal.

Gavin runs in after school, kisses me, and runs to catch the bus home. I stay and yell at teens for drawing cocks on our EXIT signs.

4:35pm - HOME FINALLY. Leif throws his toys down and tackle-hugs me, Gavin waves from over his homework, Mike waves from computer. I ask about everyone's day and pull things out of the fridge to start dinner. If work was more yelling than typing that day, I crack a beer while cooking (except not lately, because diet blah blah). We eat at the kitchen table and everyone tells about 3 good things that happened that day, then 3 bad things and what they did about it. If I have had a beer while making dinner, there are usually cookies or brownies in the toaster oven while we wait for Gavin the Slowest Eater Ever to finish spearing all the individual kernels of corn off his plate.

5:30 - 7:00pm - Commence wet blanket action. If I have been invited anywhere, I skip it. If we have hang-out plans on a Friday night, I pass. I am an introvert who works with the public all day, after which I just want to be left the hell alone for a while. The kids play on the rug, the man studies beer recipes or does chemistry in the kitchen, and I knit or help set up train tracks or go for a jog.

7:00 - 8:00pm - tag team bedtime. I give Leif a shower while Gavin gets some brother-free time playing computer games. The infink breakdances on the slippery shower floor for a few minutes, then I truss him up in a giant towel, carry him out and yell, "I HAVE THE CUTE!" to which brother and father squee dutifully. Then I drop him on the bed into kitten pee, and spend the next 10 minutes changing bedding while he runs naked after the kitten. By the time he is in his jammies, Gavin is showered, and we exchange goodnight kisses as we cross paths brushing teeth. I lay down with Leif in the boys' room to read Little Bear, and Mike reads a few chapters to Gavin in our room. In a few minutes the infink is asleep and I sneak out. Gavin sneaks in and up into his bed.

8:00 - 10:00pm - Mike pops a beer while I do a few pullups, and we settle onto the couch for an episode or two of whatever show we are currently obsessed with. If I'm lucky, I'll get to sleep in the grown-up bed for most of the night before lurching to the bunk bed for tuck-ins. If the rain is drumming down on the tin roof I will slip in next to my baby on my own, in case I can't hear him call. I don't mind either way; falling asleep next to my children is still top on my list of wonderful things. Being alone in a bed with Mike feels kind of weird after all this time.

It's a good, simple, comfortable life.

So there it is. If I had any intrigue, it is now gone. Are these posts stalker fodder, or what? Luckily, I have only 12 readers, and I'm pretty sure none of them want a coat out of my skin. Still, if you do, um... don't.

Kitten

The kitten has no name. We didn't intend to keep it, but nobody wants a stray kitten and I am too soft-hearted to put it out in a box, so a name is in order.

So far it identifies to a mangled string of exclamations - tearing across the back of the couch and savaging our heads as we all yell out names. "Astrid!" "Ass-turd!" "Nargles!" "Ripper!" "SHNORF!" Whatever random words the chorus contains, it doesn't end until Mike yells, "SHNORF," so that will probably be the thing that sticks. Nice.

This kitten has weird hand-paws with long knuckles, and claws up between the window and screen like a bat thing. The man absentmindedly plucked her up and dropped her off the edge of the couch, and she managed to land on her head instead of her feet. Clearly not entirely cat.

more hats

This is getting ridiculous. Finishing nearly one a day. I have been carrying half-knit hats under my arm, worrying at them - during lunch break, waiting for the kettle to boil, watching Being Human on BBC, driving to the general store.


So, this week:

 Infant size, for new nephew. Still needs tassels. 

Improvised from Snowtracks hat. 

 Proverbial cap.

Habitat. Love this pattern so, so much.

First time trying the fabled and fawned-over Malabrigo, and I was skeptical at first. 

Felt like regular yarn to me. Knits up into marshmallows. MAGIC.

I am calling this Love at Sunset. Here used as Angry Birds privacy tent.

Tearing through stash ottoman for the odd balls of good stuff I've hidden. Haven't gone for baggies down the back of the toilet yet, but it won't be long.

I made some hats. And I am wearing them. Shh.

Two more x-mess presents finished. The man's family doesn't read my blog (or care about hats), so I can put them on and ponce around for pictures.

The Vorderrhein hat (or "The Hat I Can't Pronounce"). Ran out of yarn on this one, three rows from finish. I wanted to rip it up, but the man rescued it and made me order more yarn because he liked the cables. MADE ME, I say. That ball of Malabrigo that arrived in the box was just a consolation.

All the hat models I've seen wear them ridiculously far back on their head like this.

After Kittiwake kicked my ass, I went for something zenlike and knit up a Little Things hat in the car yesterday. It's a long drive to the grocery store.

I really dig the decreases and dumb little loop at the top.

Next on the needles: MORE HATS. I am making an industry of ennui.

mystery cupboards reveal shocking lack of mysteries

My friend operates on stealth, sneaking to our front step to leave pineapples, avocados the size of small heads, bunches of bananas, whole fish, and bags of smoked wild pig. Nature's ninja. In the mail, postcards accumulate and tumble into my hands when I check the box, still warm from Bakersfield (more on these later).

People have a lot of love. It's pretty wonderful.

So to be a sport, I slapped myself up a bit, dumped a few cups of coffee down my throat, climbed up onto the counters in the back office, and used our janitor's mini broom to open up all the ridiculous cupboards built 15 feet up the wall. My spotter (workplace safety first!) tilted his head and watched with a smile that made me tuck my shirt into my jeans self-consciously. No dead bodies hidden in the mystery cupboards. I tap-danced across the desk and jete'd down [tottered onto a swivel chair and half fell across my janitor's head], then tore open the cupboards in the break room, where I found all the items that had been hidden from me because I am too clumsy to be trusted with them (we have a crystal punch bowl!). Threw up my hands because there still weren't any cryptic artifacts to propel us into mystery-novel antics. I did find some very old carbon paper, though. And I threw it away. Like a boss.

It felt wrong just leaving all that disappointment and dust up there, so I got into the ancient first-aid kit and put a sling-in-a-box up there for the next intrepid investigator.

Because really, if anyone breaks their ribs or collar bones at the library, I will be calling an ambulance, not throwing them a boxed sling from the 1970s. And watching it bounce off of them, because they can't catch it - broken bones and all. Odds are it will probably be me, anyway, since I'm the idiot who climbs up into cupboards while wearing wedge sandals.

And that was my week.

Turning 3

I am fond of traditions. Gavin's birthday was easy; I went into labor over take-out Thai food, so every year we go on a hunt for panang curry and eat off the coffee table on the night before his birthday. Leif's birth did not present an inspired moment for reenactment, unless I want to pick a fight with an OB, tell off some nurses, or wear disposable underpants. There was, at least, the small matter of unhooking myself from the monitors and making a run for it down the L&D hallway, backless gown a-flapping, to stand in the waiting room with my family and scarf down a plate of rice, scrambled eggs, and bacon before the ghoul-nurses could find me and chase me back to the bed. It is a symptom of cultural dysfunction that laboring women are forbidden from eating while performing a marathon of physical activity. We have rice and eggs and bacon every August 6th now, although I don't make them eat it standing up and pantless. And while that's fine and all, it seems like a meager tradition, so we baked brownies the night before and speculated that every year we could bake a different kind of brownie. Which I think we decided last year would be varieties of banana bread. It looks as if the annual tradition will be the scrabble for an annual tradition. You're welcome, Leif!

Anyway, Gavin wasn't home for any of this tradition business, having spent the night with friends, so we ate his bacon and I set to work making chocolate butter cream. I was aiming for something like this:

And ended up with this:

Well, who cares, when there are toys jammed into it? The child made his wish, and it probably wasn't for more evenly layered lilikoi buttercream.

I had to drive with two cats loose in the car once. That is kind of what kiddie parties are like. We supplied a piñata, pizza, prizes, and waterplay - just trying to stand out of the way and hide in our novelty cups of prohibited park beverages.

After an initial period of "I'm bored" and "I don't waaaant any cake", the short people began heated bartering with piñata loot, broke the sprinkler, fought over Spongebob's dismembered limbs, and in general had a wonderful time. 

savages

The moms had all stayed home to bask in their childless houses, so I regaled the men with Leif's birth story instead. "It isn't a party until you talk about your filthy vagina*," said Mike. 

Suddenly there was a thunderous mooing and a bunch of cows came stampeding over the neighboring hillside. We decided that was a good note to end on.

The infink was so happy with the party and the presents that I had to run him down with a wet wipe while he was launching rubber Angry Birds to get him clean enough to chuck in bed. He threw himself onto the pillows, snuggled up against me, and was snoring before I finished singing the first song. My boy is 3; going to school, talking conversationally, running fearlessly into the ocean, and still baby enough to call for me at night and throw a fit when his cereal is poured incorrectly. He's smart and funny and just a bit mean; three things I really love together in a person. 

Happy Birthday, Leif!

*actual words used by OB. Why yes, I'm still mad at him.

I am not a jogger

I have given up booze (*cough*). I have cut back on salt. I have logged in my points. I have not lost an effing pound in 2 months.

So now I have to exercise more. This is a post about exercise.

This afternoon I went for a jog. You should warm up when going for a jog. And wear shoes.

I came back 15 minutes later. Jogging is hard.

Pull-ups are easier. You just hang from the bar, jump, and lift/flail until one day you burst out the armpits of your blouse and you discover you don't have to jump anymore.

After that first one, though, it's back to jumping/flailing.

Then you can lay on the floor and watch TV. Ta daa, that is how to exercise.

Good things

The state handed down a 5% pay cut. I laughed helplessly. 

When things go absurdly off track, it is time to consult with Julia Child. Poor eating is good eating, my mother has always told me. You have to do the work to make the magic, she says also. 

And you don't need a thing but a pantry and an old cookbook.

Apple turnovers for a small kitchen

1/2 cup sour cream

1/4 cup sugar

2 cups flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 sticks cold butter, cut into bits

2 apples, peeled and diced

1/4 cup sugar

2 tsp flour

a couple shakes of cinnamon

1 tbsp of butter

1 egg beat with 1tsp water, for egg wash

Mix up the sour cream and sugar in a small bowl and set it aside for a bit. Throw the flour and salt together, and work in the butter with your fingers. 

Leave pea-sized lumps and crumbled bits. They make the pastry light.

Get a fork and mix in the sweet sour cream. Use your hands to gather it together with the flour on the bottom of the bowl, and gently press it into a soft rectangle. Wrap it in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge for an hour.

When it's good and chilled, roll it out between layers of plastic wrap until it's about the size of your cutting board, and then fold it in thirds like an envelope. Put it back in the fridge for a few more hours, or leave it overnight to assemble for breakfast.

Mix diced apples with flour, sugar, and cinnamon.

Preheat oven to 375. My kitchen is warm, and my toaster oven is small, so I cut the dough in half to do quick batches. Roll the dough out on a floured board to about 1/8" - very thin. Turn a small cereal bowl upside down and cut out circles of dough. Place a few spoonfuls of apple mixture in the middle of the circle, dab with butter, and fold over the pastry like a giant wonton, press the edges with a fork. Brush with egg wash, sprinkle the tops with some sugar, and put them on your baking sheet. Bake 20 minutes. Try not to eat them while blisteringly hot.

magic

kittens from the sky

While the pastry was chilling, I brushed the flour off my pants and bullied the family into visiting the farmer's market at lunchtime. I had visions of ripe tomatoes and fresh basil for a creamy dinner soup.

As we paid up for the produce and sandwiches, a stray kitten started crying from the bushes and tried to fall into a construction pit beside the busy road. We climbed over the safety barriers and lured it over with bits of grilled ahi, which it scarfed down along with the tips of the man's fingers.

While the family ran off to play with friends up the mountain, I stayed behind to caramelize tomatoes and cuddle the kitten in front of Doctor Who while knitting a little hat for some hapless relative at Christmas. (The Snowboarder Hat that Rocks, for you ravelry hoars.)

here modeled by child who has learned to ignore me when I jam knitwear onto him

Pastries and soup and kittens and knitting. 

Another finished object - Twisted Tree

I haven't been able to sleep for a few weeks. The result has been a lot of early-morning knitting. My fingers are so muscular they need tiny Spartan fighting pants.

fingaaaaaaah!

I started this project on the day the problems started, and finished it a month later, on the day I bound off the cursed man-sweater. Knit on, with confidence and hope, through all crisis and all that.

There were some hiccups; I ran out of yarn at the armpits. Mustered my willpower and found a Ravelry user who would send me a single ball of Stroll, instead of going out of my head and filling a basket with balls of knitpicks. A mournful victory.

Everything from the armpits up is improvised, because I skimmed the pattern, believed it when it said something like, "by now you should have the hang of the cables" and completely missed the fateful little "AT THE SAME TIME" in the instructions. Immediately screwed up the cables and missed all the short row shaping for the neck, so I just fudged it. The sweater felt sorry for me and turned out ok despite my incompetence.

Bribed the child with angry birds so he would let me get it over his head.

Modifications: ribbing on all the edges and cuffs. I hate rolling edges.

It is hot enough to boil a monkey's bum lately, but keeping warm isn't really the point of the thing. My constant motion is like someone flapping in circles, trying to fly. Better than throwing myself off something.

Suddenly project-free, I flailed around and then started scribbling in my sketchbook over a pile of my mom's spiral-bound story notebooks. Had a stroke of genius. I could save money on yarn by learning to spin! And then I could be an actual spinster, instead of just some weird divorcée mom who pretends to be one!

Because that is what I need. Another obsessive hobby. One which will double the amount of time it takes me to produce anything, and end with me spending $600 on a spinning wheel for my children to break while pretending it is an AT-AT. Instead of just working on my graphic novel, which is the thing I am always saying I really want to do.

Hmm.

Ending the curse.

I started this post a while ago to document the magical cursed man sweater. And considering the way things have been going, I decided to go ahead and finish it. Here is the ridiculously long story of my sweater curse.

Or just scroll down to see the pretty sweater.

The magic bra

When I was ten, I had a lacy black sports bra, which served as my training bra. One morning, I opened my drawer and found two black bras rolled there. I laid the bras out next to each other and puzzled over them. They were identical. I looked at the Dean Koontz novel next to my bed, and out the frosty window. It seemed unlikely that a fairy had sneaked in and left me a bra. Maybe my old bra had reproduced like a tribble. Maybe my dresser had a double in another dimension and a cosmic rift had opened. My young heart pounded. An enchanted bra was not the gateway to magical realms that I would have hoped for, but I'd take it.

As it turned out, the bra belonged to our neighbor, who gave it to my mother after seeing mine on the laundry line because it was a cheap thing that didn't offer enough support for actual breasts. My mother put it in my drawer. The mystical bra-fairy poofed out of existence. But the possibility had opened briefly.

And this brings me to...

The Magical Man-Sweater

This fall makes 5 years since events unfolded, and I am ready to be over it. An idea formed. I would knit the man a sweater, and by making it, the sweater would become magical. Every stitch would bind me to him and graft shut the injury to my heart. He would wear it and feel loved. And if he fucked up again, I could choke him with it.

And this is exactly why boyfriend sweaters are cursed.

So, knowing I was setting myself up for disaster, I decided to take the thing one step further; this project needed to teach me to be a better knitter, from the foundations up. There are two rock stars of knitting in particular who I consider to be exact opposites of each other in philosophy: Alice Starmore and Elizabeth Zimmerman. I would hitch this sweater to them and ride it to victory like a woolly chariot.

In her books, Alice Starmore has explicit directions, complicated charts, and even her very own yarns - all of which must be used exactly to achieve her elaborate designs. Starmore referred is to in the knitting community as "LSD" -Litigious Scottish Designer; even mentioning her name here on my little blog sets me up for a potential slap on the wrist. I was a bit nervous. I just wanted to KNIT A MAGICAL SWEATER, OK?

Elizabeth Zimmerman, on the other hand, gives gentle advice instead of instruction; she guides you through the process of making a thing and leaves it up to you to fill in the gaps with your own good sense and imagination. And math. Lots of hateful math. She assured me I am smart enough to do this, but I don't think she has seen me counting the bank deposit for work.

So I bought the yarn ($60), ordered the books ($25.00), and got ready to do some math.

My design sketch:

The books: Knitting Without Tears, by Elizabeth Zimmerman, and Aran Knitting, by Alice Starmore.

I've loved the the cables in Starmore's St. Brigid for a long time. The sweater is complicated and terrifying.

I wanted the cables to go up the sleeves, paired with Zimmerman's classic Seamless Hybrid sweater, which has folded hems and clever construction to complement broad, manly shoulders.

Hmm, where are the sizes and measurements and charts?
Oh, there AREN'T ANY.

The yarn arrived. Plymouth merino superwash in heathered grey. I love it.

 

I got out my needles, ready to cast on. Zimmerman tells me that I MUST make a swatch. "Otherwise you may sup the porridge of regret with the spoon of sorrow." Well, shit.

She suggests making a hat as a swatch, but I am too cheap and lazy, so I cast on 30 stitches and worked up a little rectangle, instead. Perhaps not off to the best start. I got the numbers I needed and promised to be more faithful to methodology in the future.

It took 7 measurements to determine my gauge: 5 stitches per inch on size 7 needles. I took a sweater from the man's closet and measured 41 inches around. That seemed kind of huge. He has a 36-inch chest and a 31-inch waist (jerk), but if I went by that, he would look like this:

After 3 tries, my math skills told me that 5 x 41 = 205 stitches. I decided to start with a sleeve, to warm up, and realized that I had no size 7 double-pointed needles. Or contrasting color for the inner hemming. Ordered the stuff ($18.50) and cast on the body, instead.

It started well. I toted the sweater to work with me and knit on lunch break while listening to audio books, and toted it home again to knit in front of weeknight tv with a cup of tea and my bottles of antibiotics.

And then I dropped it out of a moving car.

There was a moment of horror when I looked down at the knitting on my lap and saw the tail leading under the driver's side door. I yanked the car over and jumped out, waving traffic around, and ran down the middle of the lane for 200 yards to roll it all back up into a ball on my hand. Tourists in renta-mustangs swerved, and I tossed a length of yarn over onto the grass, where it became snarled in sticker bushes. After a bit of yanking and cussing, I jammed the wad of snarled thorny yarn into the car and fled the scene. I suspected things were beginning to go wrong.

Things happened very quickly after that.

The man was laid off. We lost our lovely home, had to put the car up for sale. Moved into a cramped subdivision house along a busy road. Picked up our new neighbor's dog when it was run over in front of us. Lost a friend in a terrible way, with tasers and drugs and an attempt to break into city hall naked.

"BIND OFF THE SWEATER ALREADY," the man said. So I snatched it up from where it was sitting like a wad of explosives in my knitting basket and got to work, expecting a car to come plowing through the wall at any moment.

Today it is finished.

Zimmerman was a genius. The seamless shoulders are very clever, and look great across his back.

Inside the hem, I worked in a secret message, which took me a few days to decide on. All the world of literature and love poetry to choose from, and I finally went with "dxfh".

 

dear ex-fucking-husband

I learned more than I intended with this project. Mostly, don't fuck with the fates. I whined about my heartache, and got punched in the nose. Aww - does it hurt now? Ok, fine. I'm great now, thanks.