Knit Sisters

After five days of living in an igloo, we were amazed and delighted when our new furnace groaned to life around 4 p.m. yesterday. Its maiden voyage was a rough one, requiring the little-furnace-that-could to raise the temperature from a frigid 48 degrees (yes, that’s where it kind of permanently settled…which means it could have been worse, of course…although had you tried to tell me that on Friday I probably would have hung up on you) to a toasty 68 degrees.

You will never meet anyone so grateful to be in a home where the temperature is in the sixties. Comparatively speaking, I feel like I am on the isle of Oahu, basking in the sunshine on Waikiki and enjoying the “spirit of aloha.”

Pardon me for a moment while I summon Alex to fix me a Mai Tai with a miniature umbrella…

In practice, we were at the hotel for much of the past five days, but because of the animals’ needs and because we were unable to relocate all of our possessions, we were unable to completely abandon the house.

We all found this extremely inconvenient, except perhaps for Shelley, who enjoyed all the walking back and forth between the house and the hotel. And the subsequent sack-outs on the sofa in our suite.

A few tasty details from the furnace debacle:
1. The Paleozoic furnace was operating, we learned from our friendly Keyspan furnace professional, at a whopping 50% efficiency.

2. He also told us that there is a special place in hell for criminally neglectful sumbitches landlords who care so little about their property and their tenants that they fail to replace Paleozoic furnances operating at 50% efficiency.

3. When we asked him if there was a particular reason why the Paleozoic furnace died at that particular moment, he said, “Yeah, the same reason that that 114-year-old woman in Connecticut died a few weeks ago. She was old.”

4. The new furnace operates at over 90% efficiency. 90% efficiency, 100% satisfaction Chez Les Eskimaux!

5. It is warmer in this house than it ever has been. And I mean ever. This furnace just flat out has more juice. Go, little furnace! Do your stuff!

So I suppose that in the final analysis, this short-term cloud is bound to have a long-term silver lining. And yet…I still hope my landlord rots in hell.

Meanwhile, I took Wanda’s advice for getting out of the knitting doldrums and started a sock project:

Regia 4-Ply in red, black, and white. Faux-cable pattern over 60 stitches on US #1 needles. And highly portable.

And “Time” has not been out of mind. The lovely fit I spoke of formerly:

I have not yet ceased to be amazed that I got this part right!

How the sleeve is shaping up:

Upon consultation with my pals Kat and Kerry, it was decided that one central cable would be the most flattering sleeve solution.

And finally, a shot in which you can sort of see how the neck fits:

A woman with two-thirds of a sweater and central heating is a very happy woman indeed.

And last, but not least, many thanks to all who offered their support, commiseration, and warm thoughts during the Great Furnace Debacle of 2007.

Once again, I have good news and I have bad news.

The good news is that I retooled the neck of “Time” and now it is perfect. You may, however, be wondering why there is no accompanying picture. Well, then. Shall we proceed to the bad news?

The bad news is that our furnace died an unceremonious death sometime during the night of February 6th. We woke up on Wednesday morning to discover that it was 48 degrees in the house.

It has remained 48 degrees in the house ever since.

Our lying, cheapskate, craphound landlord has made arrangements to have an entirely new furnace put in, but that will take a couple of days (!!%$#@^&). Of course, he might have thought of this twenty years ago, when the furnace was only forty years old rather than sixty years old, and he might have thought of this during the summer. What I’m telling you here is that this crisis was inevitable and that a certain neglectful sumbitch just didn’t care enough to avert it.

Speaking of that same sumbitch, do you know that he actually had the audacity to tell me just yesterday that the furnace was “only 10 years old”? Like I don’t have eyes.

Meanwhile, I am staying in a hotel and charging it to him. That, I must say, has lit rather a fire under his lazy wazoo, but that’s the only heat that we’re getting around here because there’s only so fast you can get an entirely new furnace installed in the dead of winter. As it turns out.

Until there is heat, there will be no new sweater pictures, I’m afraid. The camera has gone on strike due to unacceptable working conditions.

Shelley Bales, in warmer times. File photo.

Well, as it turns out, the camera was actually a victim of reason #1 (see Monday’s post), and I myself had, indeed, set it down in an unlikely place.  Then, naturally, it was knocked off onto the floor, possibly by the cat,

 

or, more likely, by me.

And, just to compound my humiliation, Rob found it within about five minutes of getting home.

So, after having publicly and completely undeservedly maligned my poor husband, I feel it incumbent upon me to offer an equally public apology.

I’m sorry, Rob.  Mea culpa.  Mea maxima culpa.

And now, those pictures.

                                                           Melissa Leapman’s new book, Cables Untangled.  Full of great projects that are now on my wish list.

Like these ultra-cool cabled pillows.

And these beautiful cabled sweaters.

Wouldn’t one of these sweaters look great in my new yarn?

                                     Elann Uros Aran in that gingery color I was talking about on Monday.

And finally, my progress on the Suffolk lambswool.

                                                One bobbin full.

                                        And another in progress.

“Lord, make my words sweet today, for I most likely I will have to eat them tomorrow.”

I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I finished the body of “Time Out of Mind”:

Doncha think I make rawther a handsome vest? And truth be known, I fit my maker quite perfectly…except for one small detail…

The bad news is that the neck looks terrible, rumply and amateurish:

Bwah, ha, ha, ha, ha! You think you can design sweaters, fool? You will be punished for your hubris, and I will lay my vengeance upon you! And you will know my name is The Knitting Goddess!

I have to rip it out and rethink it completely, but I may knit the sleeves first, just to avoid feeling downcast about running in place. I am at a bit of a low-ebb with knitting, I’m afraid. I don’t have decent portable project going and Time is getting to be a very big boy for his age, even putting aside for the moment that his neck is kicking me to the curb.

Meanwhile, in defiance of traditional graduate student lore and angst, the only thing that went right for me today was dissertation writing. The rest of the day was characterized by mercilessly low temperatures,

If I stay in a tight tuck, I may be able to preserve some of my body heat and survive until someone comes to rescue me. Someone with a warmer house.

surly cashiers, and burned dinner rolls. The latter mishap was especially bitter because I was so looking forward to having a roll with my broiled fish, steamed broccoli, and multivitamins, and to have that hope literally carbonized at the last minute, even though it was my own inattention that sealed those rolls’ fate… The agony!

You have no idea how fixated you can become on the idea of a dinner roll when you can only eat thirty-nine things and one of them is “oleomargarine.” (If you are new to the blog, you can get the back-story here.)

If my Berkeley professor was here, he’d ask, “So what’s the lesson?” Based on today’s events, I think the lesson would have to be: spend more time on your dissertation. Although come to think of it, the lesson might also be: hire a cook.

In the plus column, we ordered our wedding rings! They look approximately like this:

We are now deciding what to have engraved on the inside.

We’ve also been in the process of gathering addresses for the invitation list, which is a larger task than you might think, in this age of electronic communication. We have many friends with whom we never exchange real letters, so we don’t keep street addresses for them. But it has been an excuse to get in touch with some friends I contact infrequently.

Today, for instance, I e-mailed a friend of mine who always signs her e-mails with her initial and a line from a song, the cheesier the better, e.g.:

Love, M. “Really love your peaches…”

Upon which the recipient might reply with the signature:

XOXO, E. “…Wanna shake your tree.”

Other strong candidates for lyrics of this sort might include:

More than a woman, more than a woman to me…

I wanna put on my, my, my, my, my boogie shoes…

Goodbye Michelle, it’s hard to die, when all the birds are singing in the sky…

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!

It’s more than a feeling…more than a feeling…when I hear that old song they used to play…

Even though we ain’t got money, I’m so in love with ya honey…

And you! You light up my life! You give me hope! To carry on!

Baby, what a big surprise…right before my very eyes…whoa ho, oh, oh, oh…

But now circling back to the subject of those wedding band engravings, what do you think about, “Really love your peaches”?

Me? I think it’s class, pure class.

I went on an exhaustive search of the house this evening, looking for the digital camera.  It is nowhere to be found.  This can only mean one of two things: 

1.  I have put it down in some strange place and can’t find it amidst the general (ahem) clutter. 

OR

2.  Rob put it in his coat pocket this morning to take some pictures at school, unbeknownst to me, and forgot to take it out of said pocket when he left this evening to go to his fencing class.

Do you know which option I am betting on?  Yep.  That would be number two.

(As an aside, do you ever wish you could just trade in your life, your problems, and your family for someone else’s, just for a little while?  God knows I’m not asking for a life without problems, but some different problems would be ever so refreshing once in a while.)

But, as Harvey just pronounced, I am persevering.

I was going to write about my recent acquisition of this book, and the beautiful cabled designs therein.

I was going to write about another recent acquisition:  this yarn in a lovely sort of gingery cognac color.  About the gorgeous cabled sweater that might possibly be made by me from this yarn.

I was going to write about another raw fleece that is lurking in the closet, one which I have not even touched yet.

I was going to include a picture of my spinning progress on the Suffolk lamb’s wool.  I finished the first bobbin, and started the second, and this sort of progress should be documented, don’t you think?

But no!  It’s all gone down the tubes. 

For want of a camera, a post was lost.

For want of a post….

Truth be known, I loathe Robert Frost. Something there is that does not love a dour, ungenerous New England poet.

Quite. I must say, among the American poets, I prefer Whitman. His lanky, muscular line provides the perfect accompaniment to gnawing the end off of a cow femur.

Nonetheless, I keep thinking of his mean-spirited “Mending Wall,” in which the narrator’s beleagured neighbor, the one who keeps saying, “Good fences make good neighbors,” is immortalized forever as the schlemiel who just keeps thoughtlessly mending the stone wall every spring and saying the same unexamined thing over and over because he thinks it’s clever.

As opposed to the narrator, who questions what the point of the wall is, but likewise keeps mending the stone wall every spring.

My question to you is, who’s the bigger jerk?

But lately I’ve started to think that I too am an old-stone savage. For a year and a half, we lived on the first floor of our three-story house without neighbors on the second floor. The house was very cold in the winter and there were drug dealers living on the third floor, yes, but it was very quiet. The drug dealers only popped around a couple of times a week and they pretty much sidled into the house, dropped things off, picked things up, and headed out to points unknown where there was a little cash-o-la to be made in illegal commodities. I liked to think of them as “young entrepreneurs.”

We were just one big, happy, dysfunctional, criminally-inclined family.

Until the people on the second floor moved in. One month later, the drug dealers cleared out, apparently having come to regard the space as “no longer suitable to their business needs” now that there was someone immediately downstairs to monitor their comings and goings.

A mere two months later, Zeno and the rest of the Mad Dog household were plunged into mourning for our oil-dripping, petrochemically-hazardous derelict truck, which “the new people” had insisted, through an enraging combination of uncontestable and coolly rational arguments, on having towed away.

You can see as well as I where this is going.

First they came for the drug dealers,
but I did not speak up because I was not a drug dealer.
Then they came for the derelict truck,
but I did not speak up because I was not a derelict truck…

The awful part about all this is that they are perfectly nice people. They love my dog, they are civilized, they don’t throw loud parties, they only cook aromatic foods about once a week, and they have politically-correct bumper stickers on their cars indicating their love of the Goddess and vegetable-oil-powered vehicles and their hatred of George Bush and U.S. imperialism.

And yet, I hate it when I’m trying to go to sleep and I can hear them walking around upstairs, which they seem to do at all hours of the day and night. Can you imagine? People thinking that it is “okay” to walk around their own apartment? I mean, how inconsiderate can you get?

Yeah, I know this is my problem.

But I swear their cat wears combat boots. Thud, thud, thud, thud, meow!

The lastest development is that our neighbors have proposed having tea together to “chat about the house.” Something there is that doesn’t love a chat. (Something there is that doesn’t love le chat, either, but that’s another matter altogether.)

I think perhaps in response I will send a note saying, “Good fences make good neighbors,” and leave it at that.

Progress on “Time Out of Mind”:

I realize this is a bit like watching the grass grow. Humor me, will you?

The front proceeds…

Since writing about the Handsome Triangle shawl last week, I’ve been inspired to actually pull it out and work on it.  Progress is being made, although it may be difficult to see in these photos.

                             A whole-shawl shot, with cat butt on the right.  (Boots enjoys sitting on the back of the couch like this–just lurking in a totally cat-like way.)

                                         A detail of the lace pattern.

                                 Another detail–showing how the lace flows out of the increases along the side.

I’m really enjoying working on this shawl.  It’s one of those patterns that looks a lot more complex than it really is.  It’s actually just four pattern rows, and they’re pretty easy to memorize, so although the charts look a bit daunting, the knitting itself is simple.  Minimal effort with maximum payoff.

                                 “Speaking of minimal effort, can’t you take me out for another walk?  Maybe if I look really, really sad?”

                                      “No?  Well, then I’m outta here, human.  Triangulate that.”