Life In Ordinary Time

Back to Knitting

I spent a lot of time today making a swatch to check my gauge for a sock I want to start.  It's nothing fancy, I'm new to sock making, but it takes what seems like a lot of time to make a 4" gauge swatch in the round.  It's like making a quarter of the sock, and then since the gauge wasn't right, I had to rip it out right away.  Frustrating.  The only thing that saved me was seeing the pretty hand dyed yarn as it was revealed.  It's nicer than I thought it would be when I first got it.

I'm already gearing up for Fall knitting, I'm anticipating it.  I took a break from it over the summer for the most part, I was getting too obsessed.  I also signed up for the class at Tall Mouse, and if I can afford it I might take a class or two at Yarn Lady or someplace like it.

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I'm back again after a short break to run to Michael's in search of double pointed needles that will get me the correct gauge and that I don't have already,  2 and 2.5.  They didn't have them, of course, so I ended buying some sterling silver kidney wires for my Egyptian Revival earrings there, and then got back in the car and drove to Velona's where I should have gone in the first place.  I couldn't get out of there without buying some yarn, I was looking for some pastel colored wool that wasn't too scratchy so I could (eventually) make some lacy socks.  I found Baby Ull by Garn Studio in a pretty mint shade, and it's quite soft compared to some other wool super wash that I checked out.

When I got home I fed the girls and myself, then worked on another gauge swatch with the 2.5 needles.  Now I've started the sock, which is going to be very simple.  I'm sort of working my way down in yarn thickness.  The first sock I did was a pair of worsted weight bed socks, these are going to be in sport weight, a child's sock.  Every time I start something with fingering weight, I make a mess of it, so I've designed this progression for myself.

Forever Changes....

I got an MP3 player for my birthday and I'm struggling with it.  I'm old enough to still have my album collection, albeit in storage,  but not so old that I'm uninterested in the new technology that's swept through the music business.  I guess it swept through, I actually haven't been paying much attention.

Anyway, in my struggle to try to get music on my player, I've revisited a lot of the groups and musicians I used to listen to.  This has caused me to realize a couple of things--one, that I don't listen to nearly as much music as I used to when I was in my teens, 20's and 30's, and two,  that most of what I want to listen to is old in one way or another.  Now that doesn't seem to matter if I'm listening to classical music, old is the name of the game there, so why should it matter when I play more "popular" music?  I suppose it doesn't, but there is a part of me that fears I'm becoming like all the old people who only like their music, the music they played and loved when they were young. Shades of my father playing his Glenn Miller records when I was a kid....   I guess there are worse things--I could be so old I couldn't hear any music at all....

I also discovered YouTube, and I went hunting for videos on many of the musicians I admired.  I guess it must be my own getting older that made that experience so poignant.   I found a wonderfully fresh-faced Ray Davies singing some of his most characteristic songs (Wonderboy, Autumn Almanac) on what I gathered was British TV,  I found an impossibly skinny Todd Rundgren in a costume I'm being kind to call weird, batting butterfly wings where his eyebrows should have been and singing, lamentably, Hello, It's Me.   Then I looked up Fairport Convention, and they were all young and sweet-faced, and Richard Thompson had lots of hair on his head,  not to mention in his Mingus eyes.  And that wasn't all.  I was also an Incredible String Band fan so of course I looked them up and was astonished at their youth and beauty and amazed at their 60's psychedelic wardrobe.  And no, I didn't stop there, I went on to the LA group, Love, whose album Forever Changes is still one of my favorite records of all time and saw a young Arthur Lee singing  Little Red Book.

But I still didn't stop, and I suppose that's where the poignancy came in.  I also saw Arthur Lee as an older man, just out of prison and not long before he was to die.  And I already knew how Ray Davies and Richard Thompson had aged, RT because I keep more abreast of his current work, and Ray Davies because he put out a new album not too long ago and I saw some of the publicity.  The Incredible String Band was a shock, though.  Those guys have really aged.  And now I hear a querulous voice saying in my head a memorable line from one of my Brit Coms:  "And who do you think you are, Peter Pan?"

No, I don't.  Though I am 7-10 years younger than all the musicians I mentioned.  I hasten to add--it ain't much.

They looked so young and fearless then, so confident.  Did it seem to them they could do anything?  That was my perception of them.  Perhaps I see that in them because it was so different for me when I was young.  But time happened to us both.  30 plus years have passed and we're all hastening towards the same end.

So is this just a Big Gloat session on my part?  They may have had a better time than me on this earth but they're going to die, too?

The fact may be true but I don't think that's what I was feeling. 

I was feeling weighed down by our mortality, realizing everyones youth, however it's spent, passes, and acknowledging the normal rhythm of life that doesn't alter for anyone, unless you die young.  Fresh faced youths become old men who can't remember how to tie their shoes and pretty girls become bent with age and incontinent.

This is the kind of thing you begin to think about when you reach your 50's.

I don't know how much more I can take.

 

High Drama In The Backyard

High drama in the backyard.  I was sitting at the computer fiddling when suddenly Chloe started barking and growling frantically, and Molly ran out to join her.  I could hear the large rustling sound of dogs jumping onto plant life as they threw themselves on my clematis vine, trying to get whatever it was.  So I ran out to collar them and bring them inside and was just in time to see a cat running away on the carport roof that abuts my yard, then Chloe ran in the other direction towards a hole in the wall of my building.  This hole came about when my  landlord had to put in another spigot for my yard, and didn't fill in the hole or re-plaster it.  As soon as Chloe ran to that spot I knew what was up.

You see, the cat was chasing the rat, and the dog ran after the cat.  Sounds like a nursery rhyme.    Let me explain.  Lately I have come to realize that there is a large rodent, a rat, in fact, living in my backyard.  Well, he actually lives in the aforementioned hole in the wall.  My backyard is merely his hunting ground.  I have learned that this rat has a wide and varied appetite.  He loved my lemon balm plant, ate all the seed heads on my chives and ate my columbine plants till they were only nubs.  He also eats the snails, which is not a bad thing to a gardener, and I hope he hasn't eaten the newts that live under some of my potted plants, but I fear that he has.

I'm sure my dogs know he lives here, but unless he is in their faces they act like they're not aware he exists.  I, on the other hand, am very aware he exists.  My patio door is closed most of the time now, especially at night, for I know he's a nocturnal little guy and seems to be most active then.  When I go outside even later in the afternoon I'm looking all around me just in case he should dash across my feet.  I plan to do something about him soon, I just haven't yet.  I actually went to the hardware store last weekend to see what they had in the "no kill" line of traps, because that's what I've decided I want, but they didn't have anything big enough.  Apparently people who would prefer not to kill a cute little mouse have no such scruples when it comes to rats.  Zapping them with as much as it takes seems to be the norm there.  And really, why have I decided to do something different?

Update:  Didn't finish my cogitating on that one but things came to a head a few months ago.  I woke up in the middle of the night hearing a scratching, scrabbling sound.  I thought it was one of the dogs, scratching on the carpet like they sometimes do.  I uttered a "Chloe, stop!" in a stern voice but the scritching, scratching noise didn't stop.  I then turned on the light and Chloe was in her spot at the end of the bed, quite innocent, but the noise was still there.   Of course I knew  right away it was the rat.  It's hole in the wall not surprisingly let it get in between the walls, where it could scratch to it's hearts content.  I have to say my reaction was not "Poor Rat" but "Ugh!" and I got up and ran around the apartment  in a panic trying to see if there were any holes it could get through to come inside the apartment.  There were--places where the plastic covers for electrical outlets had come loose.  I put something in front of them, hoping that would at least be a little deterrent if the rat got adventurous, and I went back to bed. 

The very next morning I was off to the hardware store to get any kind of trap I could afford, trying not to care if it was a Final Solution for the rat or not.  I couldn't have it scratching and scrabbling between my walls, I just couldn't.   I set the traps that very night and baited them with peanut butter, a rat favorite, I was told.

The rest of the story is rather messy and I don't care to go into details.  I will say this:  the rat was caught, the trap didn't kill him, I called my landlord over to deal with the poor live rat in the trap, foisting my dirty work onto someone else.  Yeah and believe it or not, I felt guilty.  I'm a bleeding heart, but you already knew that.   It was a dirty, disease carrying rat, it could have infected my dogs with god knows what (Bubonic plague?) and I didn't like having it killed.  So there, hah, as my sister would say.  It was a creature, trying to survive, is what it was.  I don't see how any wild creature survives in this world.   You find food, or you don't.  You eat,  or you starve.  You live, or you die.  Mostly the latter.

I saw a coyote once in the school yard where I sometimes take the dogs to run.  This is in the middle of the city, with no wild places nearby.  I saw it only after I had let the girls off their leads, and once they saw it, I could scream all I wanted to, they wouldn't come to me till they had checked it out.  I was terrified it would kill them, but now I realize it probably didn't like the odds:  broad daylight, two dogs and one crazy screaming human.  The girls ran after it,  curious to see what this creature was, especially Molly.  Chloe just followed Molly.  And as this creature loped across the field--there was something about that loping.  There was no way you could ever think it was anything but a wild creature.  That steady, unhurried lope showed a creature with its own purposes.  And those purposes had nothing to do with anything human.  It was self-contained, it had it's own existence.  Someone told me that in a Southeast Asian Buddhist country, I forget which one, that's how they treat dogs.  If one impinges upon human life--say it enters a human dwelling--it is simply regarded as another creature, certainly not a pet, and is free to live or starve as it can, like the coyote or the rat.

So--"my" rat was a living creature.  It wasn't a Disney cartoon rat with a sneer on its face.  It was a rat that had delicate but unexpectedly large ears, so large that for a moment I wondered if it was a rabbit and not a rat.  Whether I could/would have done anything differently or not,  I need to know the reality of what I did.

That's it really.  Oh,  and if you want to read a really good bleeding heart poem, find Roethke's, The Meadow Mouse.