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.

"could be worse" curse

Typing on phone, sitting in windowsill to catch 1-foot pocket of 3G.

Night 1: Hated the house. Hated the stray dogs and feral cats and speeding cars and tourist neighbors and stifling mugginess. Couldn't sleep. Cried. Embarrassed with self for being snively, said, "It could be worse." Suspected I had made a terrible mistake.

Night 2: toddler peed in his sleep. Mostly on me. Changed bedding and jammies, realized as I was stuffing the wet sheets in washer that the laundry soap was at the old house. Just as I sighed about this and decided to go back to bed, my guts made a sound like a water cooler, and I spent the rest of the night in the toilet.

The moving doesn't stop for la grippe, and I cemented my insides with my mind powers for 6 hours while scrubbing down the old house and closing it up for the last time. Got home, body immediated re-asserted its attempt to invert itself.

Crawled to bed early, near hysteria from lack of sleep and dehydration. Listened to ocean, tried to convince self that inner Scottish seafarer should be soothed by it, drifted to sleep finally, and BLAMMO! the house rocked, plaster raining from the ceiling. Shot out of bed, smelling gun powder. Ran outside in undercrackers with flashlight. No bullet holes, firework remnants, exploded gas tanks, exploded cats, toppled furniture, or ambulances. When I was 16, our neighbor blew his head off, and it sounded like that. Either one of our neighbors is as yet to be discovered headless, or some asshole drove by with a shotgun to welcome in July 4th.

Well, FANTASTIC. Our new house is fucking awesome.

The road strikes

Early morning. Pulled a shard of glass from my foot in the kitchen, sighed at my coffee pot because I was out of sweetener, and sat down with a sliced banana for the infink to watch cartoons in our jammies. A truck roared by. A dog screamed. I looked out to see our neighbor's mama-dog tumble and crumple on the roadside in front of us. Leaped up, yelling for the man. He jerked awake and yanked on his shorts as I scooped the infink onto my hip. The man ran to the road and I ran to the neighbor's house. The dog died as Mike held her. He walked down with her in his arms, the neighbor cried out, and the puppies are without a mother.

After she had gone to bury her companion, I propped a handwritten card against the angel statue on her step. Felt helpless and ineffectual.

Sad, horrible morning.

uprooting

Now that it is evident that we are not going to be homeless or starve to death, the household is falling into their own reactions to the changes. I have become narcoleptic and distracted, yawning through the day with clothes pins stuck to my bra. The man is going through a giddy end-of-school streak of freedom, plotting his new incarnation and career. The infink is using the expanse of empty floor to stage elaborate Lego wars and break dance. The cats are working through a backlog of small creatures to kill, and then barfing them back up all over the moving boxes. There is paperwork, and hauling, and immune systems threatening to keel over. I need vitamin C. And maybe a shot of albuterol.

I'm not a Power of the Secret person, or even a cup-half-full person, but when things get taken out of my hands I tend to watch them go and trust that things eventually balance out, somewhere. You'll get yours, and I'll get mine. I'm good at waiting, and I have hope in shovelfuls.

Other things:

found myself at a party with gorgeous tattooed people who were far cooler than me.

made off with produce and lau lau.

saw a guy honk his wife's cooter in line at Costco.

consolidated phone plans to cut bills and somehow ended up with an [older model] iPhone. Taking pictures of absolutely effing everything. Sorry, unsuspecting people.

amazingly, came home to find the yard had been visited by the riding mower fairy. I don't know who did it.

Our people are fantastic. I am going to sleep until Tuesday now.

Alone (note to axe murderers: disregard)

The presents were bought, the tickets were nonrefundable, and so we flew to Oahu for my mother's birthday, which we celebrated in a pile of construction debris and Thai food containers. The boys were kept behind to finish renovation, and I was mailed back to Maui by myself to face a week of work and house hunting. I sat in the back seat between my sons and gripped their knees as we drove to the airport in the small blue VW - which may soon catch a barge over to replace the Chevy. And it is stick-shift. I decided to spend my week of isolation lifting weights and doing chin-ups, as this certainly means that I will also be needing to behead zombies and punch sharks (things, like driving stick, I also claim I would be able to do in a crisis). My superstitions are competing to determine which would cause less disaster; complaining about how everything can eat a bag of dicks and die in a fire, or greeting the challenge with optimism and manic enthusiasm. Opting to squint at it suspiciously and wait, for now.

After the initial grief of being left at the curb while my children cried and pressed their hands to the car windows, I broke into a state of emotional detachment. Walked across the tarmac to a roller skate on wings. The flight attendant appeared to be a young marine who had been plucked from a bar during his third shot of Cuervo and draped in a limp plastic life vest. The rattles of turbulence didn't bother me (and I once tried to steal valium from my cat on a bumpy plane ride). Found the car, paid up for parking, and drove to the grocery store for a cart load of Spinster Chow; fruit, Lean Cuisine, diet soda, beer, cat food. Drove home, listening to a Dean Koontz novel and skipping ahead through all the sappy bits.

So I'm here. With the cats and the quiet and all the pillows (also: locked doors and pepper spray), writing up lists and plans and sad emails to delete.