Waterloo Bridge

A very winding yarn follows.

A few months ago on my way back from a gig in Tennessee, LB and I stopped in Paducah, KY where I found this great billikin charm.

Not being from St. Louis, the woman in the antique store didn't recognize it for what it was, so I scored it for only $8. It's likely carved in Alaska from walrus ivory and has a gold nugget embedded in its belly. I was just thrilled to find it and posted this photo to Facebook.

There, someone I had never even met told me that a similar billikin charm is a recurring symbol in the film Waterloo Bridge. Wanting to check it out, I went to Netflix and ordered Waterloo Bridge. Oops, there are two versions of Waterloo Bridge, and I had accidentally requested the 1930s version, out of a collection of pre-code films. Fortunately, I'd never complain about watching a pre-code film. They're saucy! And this one even had knitting.

The heroine, a former chorus girl who now ekes out a living as a prostitute, meets a WWI soldier and resolves to change her wicked ways. To show her attempts at reform, she takes up knitting.

You can tell by her knitting technique, especially by the way she's squinting past her fag, that she's not likely to succeed. She had spoken of learning to knit socks, but she's actually working on a balaclava, a relatively sensible first project.

She knows the relationship has no future, but he badgers her into travelling to his family's estate for the weekend. Of course, he has a family estate. Of course.

His mother knits as well, and it's fun to watch the relationship between the two women. They're surprisingly frank with one another. The heroine realizes she will never really fit in to this world and flees back to her squalid little flat where she immediately snaps her yarn, rips out the needles, and unravels her project.

I won't spoil the rest, and besides, that's the end of all the knitting.

As for me, here's a teaser for a project I'm currently working on:

They're for my mother, so no spoilers please.

Chickens in the Bathtub

Last year at this time, my bathtub was full of baby chicks. This year, although I really really really wanted chicks again, I opted to use the bathtub for seedlings instead.

The chickens will lay for three more years, whereas last year I never managed to get in a garden at all. This year, LB used the shower curtain rod to rig up a grow light, and yesterday our first seedlings spouted, cabbage.

I've been using Sprout Robot to help me schedule my planting, which seems just low key enough for my needs. I find seed catalogues overwhelming and confusing. I have well-founded fears of investing a lot of cash in seeds that I never end up planting. So far, I've invested less than $3 by making my own seed cups from egg shells (cute, eh?) and only buying seeds as I need them. Tomorrow, I will stop by the hardware store and pick up some chive seeds.

Knitting has been happening, but I've largely just been noodling around. For some reason, I've had dishcloth urges.

I don't question these urges. I just knit.

We've also recommitted to our resolution to entertain once a month. It took until yesterday, but we did fit in our first guests of 2013 for a vegan/wheat-free brunch with the following menu.

• parfaits layered with almond-milk yogurt (which didn't suck as badly as I feared), assorted berries, granola, and sorghum
• tofu scrambled with onion and bell pepper
• hash-browned potatoes
• roasted asparagus
• optional poached eggs (which our guests were willing to eat because our chickens are so happy)
• and mimosas, of course!

I didn't subject our guests to an obnoxious photo shoot, but perhaps with the next batch.

Muffin Tin Cookbook

When I was doing some Christmas shopping with a friend, we visited a cooking store. I picked up some coffee and a Denby crock for LB for Christmas, and had to restrain myself from buying anything for myself.

I didn't restrain myself too well, since I bought a pack of silicone mini-muffin cups. I did not, however, buy the digital scale I wanted, nor did I buy the silicone vegetable steamer. Most vexing, I did not buy The Muffin Tin Chef cookbook I spotted.

I've since checked out some amazon reviews and did find a copy of a different Muffin Tin Cookbook in the public library. I've been playing around with some of the recipes and haven't decided whether I need to own either one of these books.*

I had to buy some special ingredients, like whole wheat pastry flour, which cost about $6 and which I'm storing in the freezer. God forbid a $6 bag of flour get buggy. Even in a big city grocery store, there was only one brand, Bob's Red Mill, so it might be hard to find in a smaller town.

My other complaint is that I felt like I bought a lot of processed food.  I like ramen noodles as much as the next person, but most of my grocery shopping is definitely from the outer aisles of the grocery store: meat, produce, dairy. In shopping for some of these recipes, I ended up buying lunch meat, crescent rolls, thwack biscuits, etc.

So far, I've made monkey bread, pizza muffins, and chocolate chip muffins. They're cute and fun, but none has been particularly stellar, although the dog seemed to enjoy the pizza muffin he stole when I left it unattended. I'm hoping to try some of the egg recipes this weekend. This summer, I started making eggs in ham cups from a recipe I spotted on Pinterest and which shows up in the cookbook as well.

On the plus side, these recipes offer automatic portion control, but I don't know that they're really worth all of the effort.

ps--that's the Denby mini-crock I bought off to the right; the lid is on upside down to remind me to fill it with butter.
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*Don't be silly. Of course I'm going to buy it.

Craft It Forward

Last New Year's, a flurry of posts went around facebook with offers to "craft it forward." The first five responses got a handmade goodie in exchange for making the same offer themselves.  I didn't participate and don't know how it worked out for most people. I have a feeling that not everyone finished their crafts.

Still, when it went around this year, I joined in and got five takers pretty quickly: Heather, Beverly, Kay, Gail, & Elaine. I signed up for K, Kay, and Beverly's swaps too (I'm posting the names largely for my own memory).

I delivered the first crafty the very next day and have already made my second one, knitted washcloths in 100% hemp.

It hurts my hands, so I'll be taking a break from hemp for awhile.

Can you spot my constant knitting companion?

FOs

Behold the last FO of 2012 and the first of 2013:

My friend Tempest Tea gave me some beautiful Plymouth Bazinga for Christmas, not knowing that I already had one ball in my stash. I was able to get this shawlette out of the three balls.

The other item is half of a pair of nineteenth-century undersleeves, suitable for second mourning if needed. I've made three pairs in this pattern now and really like it.

Cracking the Ice

Temperatures are in the 20s today, and I'm recovering from a cold, but the first day of the year is as good a day as any to dip my toe back into this blog. I've never been so happy to see the back end of a year as I have with 2012, which was a slog from beginning to end. A friend of mine weighed out the balance of good and bad in his own year, and I'm resolved to do the same. My friend had a heart attack in 2012. Certainly, all of us had a better year than Whitney Houston, right?

On the plus side:

• I've been growing as a rock star, and I'm finally booking some national gigs 
• I taught two eight-week classes in how to be a rock star
• I had a full load of courses to teach each semester, a blessing given deep budget cuts.
• Knitting friends
• Musician friends
• We successfully raised every chick in our first attempt, and I was able to sell off the surplus at a tidy profit. I've even been selling eggs now and then. The gals are fat, happy, and most importantly, productive.
• The cutest, smartest, most loving pup on the planet
• I got a really glowing teaching evaluation
• A dang fine husband, on balance
• I discovered my reserves were deeper than I had previously imagined.

May 2013 be a year of renewal. I had decided not to make any resolutions this year, but can't seem to help myself. This year, I vow to go to more drag shows.

Teacher Training 2012

Teacher training is tomorrow, and I've written about the various annoyances of it practically every year since I started blogging. Mind you, I've actually been teaching for twenty years, sometimes at multiple institutions per year. That's a lot of teacher training.

This year, because I teach an inter-disciplinary class (meaning neither department gives a rats ass) and because my former supervisor was replaced, and because the program is rumored to be vanishing anyway, I somehow fell off the mailing list and didn't get any reminders about the dates. Technically, I don't have to go at all. Technically, I also don't have a desk this semester, but that's another issue.

Still, training pays about $75 (Eventually. The check will show up sometime in mid-September) and as whorish as it feels to say this, I can sit through a morning of lectures for $75.* There's even a free lunch, which I really, really, really need right now.

The real problem, however, is as always ... what to knit. While I've been concentrating on UFOs, they're UFOs for a reason. Too bulky. Too fiddly. Too wtf-was-I-doing.

The answer is generally socks, but again there's a problem. I'm tired of boring ribbed socks. I don't have access to a printer for my pattern. LB really likes toe-up socks, preferably two at once.

I'll let you know what I decide.

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*ps--don't tell anyone, but I usually enjoy parts of teacher training and almost always get 1-2 valuable tips. Shhh.