Wednesday Knitting Update: My Very First Sweater #3

Here is yet another update on the same old sweater. Yes, it is old news by now. I haven’t been spending as much time on it as I’d hoped, but my hours have been filled with other happy distractions, so it’s cool. When I do work on it, the knitting just zips right along, because it’s all stockinette. As you can see in the extremely modern graphic to the left, I’m most of the way through the body. If I’m feeling macho, I might leave it sleeveless. Ew, that would be tragic.

For a while, I was worried that the sweater was looking very tiny, and all I could think about was how disappointing it would be to have to give it to some miniature friend of mine. Now I’m thinking that it looks kind of wide, and I recently learned about negative and positive ease, something that no knitter had ever bothered to mention in my presence before. Negative ease is when something is smaller than your actual measurements, so if you’re 34 inches around at the bust and a sweater is 32 inches around, it’s got a 2-inch negative ease. I  usually wear things with a negative ease, because of the patriarchy. This sweater I’m making is going to have a two-inch positive ease, so I may be making my Very First Purple Sack with Sleeves! Or, right, no sleeves if I’m feeling macho.

I wonder if I could purposely make the sweater extra-long and then shrink it a little in the dryer? Very, very carefully, of course? Someone on Ravelry should be able to answer this question. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Pioneer Valley Bicycle Commute Week

This week is Bike Commute week, an annual event that I decided to get a little more involved in this year. This has gotten me thinking a lot about bicycles and why I love them. In fact, I spent most of my ride home a week or two ago counting all the reasons I love bikes. 

Bicycles are such elegant little machines. When you’re on a bike, you just hum along so quickly and quietly, and the only energy you use is from your own body. It seems almost ridiculous to mention the environmental benefit of bike-riding, because that’s such an obvious reason to ride a bike. But hey! It’s serious stuff.

You can actually carry a lot of stuff on a bike.

Riding a bike is a good opportunity to examine the countryside- you see things you would never catch in your car. Last year I saw a family of bobcats while I was riding through Hatfield. Bobcats!

Bike-riding is so, so fun. Is there anything more delightful than spinning down the road on a warmish spring day, with the sun and the wind on your face? There’s no reason that only kids should get to enjoy that feeling. And even in the dead of winter, when it’s so cold that everything is completely still, there something special about moving quietly through the freezing air on your bike. And that’s something that doesn’t happen when you’re trudging along on foot or cranking the heat in your car.

Bikes are for everyone. You don’t need any special equipment (except a helmet), or spandex, or to be part of a club.

I guess the real reason I love my bike is that feeling when you see the light turn green ahead, and you decide (responsibly!) that you’re going for it, and you crank away (carefully!) and you make it, and you just sail through the intersection (while looking both ways!) and you just think, “YES!!”

So, back to the environmental piece for a minute. Michael Pollan wrote an article for the New York Times sunday magazine a few weeks ago called “Why Bother?” which, like a lot of his writing, was mostly about gardening and food. But in it, he writes about Wendell Berry’s concept of the “cheap energy mind,” which basically is the mindset that most Americans have that takes cheap fuel as a given when making decisions, which I’ve been thinking about in terms of transportation. Most people don’t think of their bikes, or their feet, as a primary means of transportation, because fuel has been so cheap for so long. Well, why can’t we be a little more deliberate in our decisions about how we get around? Why do our cars have to be the only way we can think of to transport ourselves? Why should bicycling be this segmented activity that we only participate in during designated leisure or exercise time? When did anything other than driving become something like a novelty to so many people, when bicycling is actually so practical? I hope that Bike Commute Week will connect the dots for some people here in the Valley, and get some more people out of their cars and (safely!) onto their bikes.

If you live here and feel all inspired and fired up about bikes now, take advantage of the events being offered this week all around the Valley. Find out more about MassBike and get involved. And, at the risk of quoting Queen, get on your bikes and ride!

Wednesday Knitting Update: Very First Sweater, part 2

 I created this extremely helpful… graphic… to illustrate how far I’ve gotten on my Very First Sweater. All right, I cut a little arrow out of the top of a post-it and stuck it on the pattern and then took a picture. Well? It works, right? And I can totally use that post-it arrow again and again.

Anyway, as you can see, I’m just past the arm holes, so it’s basically just endless stockinette from here on out with a small amount of shaping around the waist. To pass the time, I’ll tell you about the pattern and the yarn.

The pattern is by Knitting Pure and Simple, and it definitely is both (or all three, actually) of those things. It’s the Split Neck T Shirt for Women, #257, and it’s super easy, clearly written, and if all goes according to plan the end result is going to be very appealing.

The yarn is Berroco Ultra Alpaca, which is a 50/50 wool and alpaca blend. It’s super soft, the color is lovely and grows on me every day, AND it was on sale! The thing I like about the color is that it’s a little bit heathered or something- it’s not a true lavender, so that works very nicely for such a simple sweater design. Ok, this is what it looks like right now:

It does look a little saucy at this stage, doesn’t it? It looks like something Mariah Carey would have worn in the mid-90s.

Open Source Misogyny

I know that everyone has been talking about this for days, but I just have to comment on this “Open Source Boob Project.” So, in case you haven’t heard about it, some dudes were sitting around at a comic convention or something, and talking about how awesome it would be if they could just go around touching women’s breasts, and then someone offered her breasts up for touching, and then many more breasts were fondled over the course of the convention. This, naturally, led to the creation of color-coded buttons (green for yes, red for no, natch) and the title “Open Source Boob Project”. Get it? Boobs that everyone can access, like open source software. Free! And finally, this led to the writing of a super-smug blog post by one of the masterminds of the whole thing and then a  groundswell of protestations from the feminist blogosphere.

Here’s a link to the original post, but don’t read the whole thing if you don’t want to vomit just a little. I’ve bravely waded through it and excerped a few key points for your enjoyment.

“This should be a better world,” a friend of mine said. “A more honest one, where sex isn’t shameful or degrading. I wish this was the kind of world where say, ‘Wow, I’d like to touch your breasts,’ and people would understand that it’s not a way of reducing you to a set of nipples and ignoring the rest of you, but rather a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful.”

Allow me to translate: “Guys, I want to be able to grab boobies, but I don’t want the boobie-carriers to get all pre-menstrual about it. Is there any language I can appropriate towards that end? Something about liberation, perhaps? Yup, chicks love hearing about that crap! Let’s proceed with the button-making!”

You know how dudez like to say douchey things like, “The only reason people are opposed to strip clubs and porn is because we live in a puritanical society where people are, like, *afraid* of expressions of sexuality. I think it’s totally brave to just be totally open and honest about what you like and, you know, stand proud in the face of that sexual oppression. ” Uh, sure, buddy. Strip clubs are so totally liberating, and you’re obviously so mature and cool for really *getting* it. Well, liberating for mainstream hetero males who are into fake body parts and long hair and female degradation, anyway, and lord knows that people like that have been woefully underrepresented in our culture for far too long.

 Here’s the breakdown:

Problem-solving

Runners like to say that they do their best thinking while out for a jog. Ok, so here’s the challenge I rolled around in my brain while out for a morning run: how to bring enough water to douse my little plot to the community garden (since the community garden water won’t be turned on until next week), keeping in mind that I left my car at work and apparently don’t have any large jug-like items in my home.

To the left is the solution I came up with. It involved like twelve ziplock bags, two buckets, four straps, and two bungees. Perhaps it wasn’t the most elegant solution, and it took probably half a hour to get everything affixed securely to the trailer. But success! Obviously I should try to solve global problems while running and see where that gets us.

And then when I got to the garden, it became clear that the water had, in fact, been turned on already. I had been misled. Well! Didn’t my little rigged-up system of bags and buckets look silly all of a sudden. And, pretty much as soon as I got home, it started to rain, and it proceeded to rain for quite some time.

I imagine there’s some poignant lesson in this story. Think about it.

Wednesday Knitting Update: my very first sweater

I got really sick of making hats and scarves and other tiny things, and I decided it was time to just bite the bullet and get over my fear of tackling something larger. So I went to Webs, asked for help picking out an easy first sweater pattern, and then spent about 40 minutes sitting on the floor holding onto this purple alpaca-wool blend and wondering if I would like a sweater that color, both throughout the process of making it and after it was done. This decision was complicated by the presence of a perfectly lovely grey yarn that was a more obvious choice for me. After asking several kindly ladies for their thoughts, I went with the purple and felt very very brave about it, and thus far I think it’s lovely. We’ll see how it looks when it’s all knitted up. I haven’t gotten very far with the knitting yet, but it seems pretty straightforward. Time will tell!

Community Garden!

I signed up for a plot at the Northampton Community Garden this year, so now I have my very own little 20×20 space to grow whatever I want. There’s a picture of it. That compost barrel was left by the previous tenant, which was an unexpected bonus. Ok, so maybe it’s not breathtaking quite yet, but rest assured that in a few short weeks it will be.

The truth is that I’ve been super anxious about the garden, probably because I imagined that there are lots of really experienced gardners all around me, and I fully expected to be mocked and derided by them for making foolish mistakes. Emily and I were joking that I should do all my gardening by headlamp to avoid prying eyes, but the plan is complicated by my failure to actually own a headlamp. God, I am the worst gardener! Plus someone would probably call the police if I was stumbling about with a headlamp on in the middle of the night, and that would be even more embarrassing than putting in my snap peas too late.

On Saturday I raked up the hay left behing by the previous gardener, loosened the soil with a fork, spread and spaded in some compost from Martin’s Farm in Greenfield, and raked it all smooth. On Sunday I put in peas, both sugar snaps and shell peas, and bok choy, spinach, and swiss chard. Very exciting. Oh yes, very, very exciting indeed.

I should say for the record that everyone I’ve encountered there so far was supernice and helpful. They did not seem interested in identifying my weaknesses and drawing attention to them for their own amusement.

Sunday Cooking Project: Bread Pudding

I had a loaf a sourdough flax-seed bread sitting on my shelf, getting a little harder and less palatable every day, so I decided to make it into bread pudding. Usually you can’t just slap the word “pudding” on the end of whatever you’ve got going stale in your kitchen and make it edible again, but you can with bread!

1. Cube stale, gross bread until you’ve got 4 cups. Dump that into a 9×13 pan, and add a thinly sliced apple.
2. Whip together 3 eggs, 3 cups milk, approx. 1/2 C maple syrup, 2 tsp vanilla extract, a dash of salt and a dash of cinnamon.
3. Pour that mixture over the bread and eggs, and bake at 350 for 35-4 minutes.

I used skim milk and won’t be doing that again. There needs to be some fat or it takes a lot longer for the custard to set. But it did eventually, athough the whole thing is a little thinner than I’d like it to be. Luckily for me, it’s not unusual for my bread supply to get away from me, so I’ll have ample opportunity to perfect the recipe.

It’s extremely important that this be served warm with ice cream.

Taking the stairs for fun and fitness and also so you never have to drink your own urine.

Did anyone else see this story in the New Yorker about the guy, Nicholas White, who was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours? Just sit back for a second and think about the last 41 hours, and the ways in which they would have been different if you’d been trapped, alone and without food or water, in a 6×6 space. Uh, that’s a long-ass time.

Luckily for us, the entire ordeal was captured on the building’s security camera. So if in your quiet moments you’ve ever wondered what a person does under such circumstances, now you can find out, thankfully not in real-time. Here’s the link. It’s amazing how gripping it is to watch someone just pace around at super-speed and lie on the floor for hours at a time. Definitely watch it.

For people who are too busy and important to read the entire accompanying article, here is a bulleted list of the things we all want to know:

1. He pushed the doors open and peed down the elevator shaft. That was my number-one question, of course.
2. He didn’t have his cell phone with him.
3. He had three cigarettes, which he smoked, and two rolaids, which he did not eat.
4. It was over a weekend, so no one noticed that the elevator was not functioning. He pulled the alarm, but no one heard it. Apparently several security guards came and went and didn’t notice him on the security camera.
5. It was an express elevator to the 39th floor, and he was trapped somewhere around the 13th floor, so even if the escape hatch hadn’t been locked from the outside there would have been no way for him to climb to safety. It was just a concrete shaft for hundreds of feet in both directions! Shudder.
6. Eventually someone either noticed him on the camera or friends came looking for him (unclear in the article), and he was released.

I was emailing with my buddy who alerted me to this story and thinking about how I would react under similar circumstances. The New Yorker article said that White had the idea in his head that he wanted to be a ”model employee,” even under these extreme circumstances, so that’s why it took him so long to smoke his cigarettes or try to climb out the escape hatch. I thought that was kind of notable. I feel like I would panic immediately. It’s amazing that I don’t freak and go into survival mode when the elevator’s just moving normally between floors.

I’d be trying to start a fire and catch mice for sustenance within three minutes if this happened to me. They’d pry the doors open 10 minutes later and find me clothed in some sort of mouse-pelt loincloth, with a half-chewed piece of carpet in one hand and a urine cocktail in the other.

And fine, that’s not actually a picture of John McClane in an elevator shaft, but you get the idea. It’s just a visual reminder of how awesome that was. Actually, I wouldn’t be eating mice! I’d be climbing around the elevator shaft in a tank top and bare feet trying to kill Alan Rickman! Maybe after dementia had set in, anyway.

Sugaring Season Special: Gould’s Sugarhouse

Well, I think this is the end of sugaring season for me. There might be a few sugar shacks that’ll be open for another week or so, but I’ve gone to one every weekend for six weeks straight, and that’s a lot of pancakes for one girl to eat, and I don’t think anyone is boiling anymore anyway. The final sugarhouse we hit up this year was Gould’s, which is right on the Mohawk Trail in Shelburne. It’s really popular and probably the best-known sugarhouse in the region.

The wait was over an hour, and our morale fell with our blood sugar while we waited. The waiting area is a kind of kitschy little gift shop, and the parking lot was full of Connecticut and New York plates, so the whole thing had a touristy feel to it. Sort of like a very tiny Yankee Candle. They weren’t boiling anymore, since it’s so late in the season, so maybe I would have had a different feeling if we could have gone in and checked out their evaporator.

But the restaurant itself is a really pleasant place to be, once you make it in there- big windows with a nice view, lovely handhewn beams, and the sweetest little old lady ever (Mrs. Gould herself, I think). Unfortunately for us, by the time we actually made it to the restaurant we were all so hungry that we gobbled down our meal in 10 seconds and we’d been there for so long that we were ready to bolt. The pancakes that I got, though, were probably the best sugarhouse pancakes I’ve had all year. Fluffy and delicious.

My feeling was that they have carved out a niche that works really well for them, they draw a lot of people from all over the region, and they’re definitely taking advantage of their wonderful location. Great! But for me, I think I’ll stick to places that are a little more off the beaten path. People from Connecticut can take a much-needed break from needlessly tailgating their way up 91, tighten the skis affixed to the roofs of their SUVs, and eat some delicious pancakes there. I’ll be elsewhere.