Fidget

We finished up our ceramics class last weekend. Here are some of our finished projects. Most of these are BN’s - because I missed the class devoted to glazing (that headcold was such a bummer!), I had to catch up a bit and most of my pieces are still in the pre-fired state. Glazing is fun, you have to just experiment and see what you get. There are sample tiles with all the glazes on them but there are so many variables, like how you layer them in different coats, the kind of clay you used for your pot, and even different firings will produce different results. Dad, you would love it - chemistry meets art.

I thought these all looked cool together. Most of them have flaws - rough edges, glaze blisters, or too-thick bottoms giving them an unpleasant weight. But we are already dreaming of making more and better attempts.

I rented two movies this weekend: Bend it like Beckham, and The Devil Wears Prada. BILB was cute - I enjoyed watching the Indian families and their social gatherings. There were a few exiting “girls kick ass!” moments, too. But it’s quite shallow in a lot of ways.

The Devil was much more disturbing. If you haven’t seen it, don’t let me discourage you, but don’t read this review because I’m about to spoil the plot.

Anne Hathaway is so, so, pretty. I would love to look exactly like her. But the problem with this movie was that she starts out as a likable character (Andrea), and gradually becomes less and less so. For some reason, she decides that working for the nation’s top fashion magazine editor will be her big break in journalism. Didn’t seem that believable to me, ’cause she wasn’t originally interested in fashion journalism, and the job wasn’t writing. It was a whole lot of other tasks, but no writing.

“A million girls would kill for this job.” Andy is told this about 3 or 4 times by different people. She starts out as not included in that million, and ends up as one of them. I mean, she didn’t kill anyone in the movie. But she sure neglected, even abused, her relationships with just about everyone who mattered to her. Some really cool, laid-back witty friends, and her boyfriend - I have to say, a total hottie. And she trashed her integrity too, with a blatant, obvious, stereotypical sleaze-ball man. I don’t see how any woman watching the movie could sympathize with her choice to do so. I mean, he was so sleazy. And her boyfriend (recently ex’d) was so, so, cute! He treated her well enough, making her gourmet grilled cheese after hours from his job as a chef. He was such a normal, likeable guy.

The shared thematic downfall of both of these movies is that in each the main character, a young woman, pulls a lot of “assertive” moves. But she doesn’t become a better person for it. She plays fast and loose with her values and the people that matter to her, but there aren’t any lasting consequences. Everything comes out pretty much OK, everybody’s happy. There was maybe a normal amount of character development, but no character building. No deeper message, no resonance with human nature, emotions or motives.

This is a set of accessories that I knitted off-and-on for the past year or more… I started out with a scarf, knitted the long way, on a long circular needle. This is actually a really fast way to knit a scarf, because you knit fewer, longer, rows, and there is less turning. At the end of each row, I cut the yarn and joined a new one - automatic fringe, and best of all, no ends to weave in!

I had bought this green fuzzy yarn many years before, way before I even learned how to knit. I think I bought it around the time that those “tube scarves” first appeared, thinking I would learn how to knit and knit a tube scarf, like the one my co-worker’s aunt had knitted her… Little did I know how learning to knit would open up such a new world of creativity and fashion… I still haven’t made a tube scarf!

Next came the hat. I knitted this hat “on the bias,” inspired by a pattern I saw in a book. You increase on one edge and decrease on the other, to make a diagonal stripe. It’s a bit tricky to plan and estimate yarn, so I knitted up a parallelogram and ran out of yarn before it was big enough to go around my head… at this point, summer came along and I wasn’t motivated to knit a fuzzy wool hat, let alone one that had to be unraveled and started over!

So, this winter I got out the hat and re-worked it. I had an extra skein of the multi-colored yarn - the fancy Japanese kind that gradually changes color from one end of the skein to the other with no repeats!

I decided to make fingerless mitts out of it, from a pattern in Weekend Knitting. Because I just had the one skein, I knew the colors would be different on each mitt. So, I decided to capitalize on this and do stripes from different sections of the yarn skein. The pattern, unlike typical accessory (sock and glove) construction, has you knit these sideways, from wrist to knuckles.

They are a wool-silk blend and very stretchy and warm.

The three items, along with having the yarns in common, are each knitted in an unconventional direction. I’m very pleased with how they came out. It also felt good to wrap up a project that had been on the back burner for awhile. If you run into trouble with a project, it’s a good idea to tuck it away and ignore it for awhile - when you come back you’ll feel like you have a fresh start!

So, since that first try at making sushi, I’ve made it several times again since it’s so easy and so yummy. It’s easy, but somewhat time-consuming, depending on what ingredients you use for fillings. I learned this, as I worked for more than 3 hours prepping goodies for a tray of sushi to take to a Ladies’ International Potluck party with the church girls. The problem was that I made 4 different kinds, with 3 different ingredients each. From left to right, you see: Shitake Mushroom & Egg with Daikon radish sprouts; Tofu & Asparagus with Carrot, Roasted Butternut Squash & Cucumber with Carrot, and California roll (Krab & Avocado with Carrot.) Really, 3 ingredients is too many for one roll anyway… as you can see from a few messy specimens shown above. Plus, I added toasted sesame seeds and chopped pickled ginger to each roll (you have to eat sushi with ginger, but this was a party tray rather than a sit-down meal.) Whew. I learned my lesson… But the ladies loved it. It was worth it.

by Leo Tolstoy

The edition I read, 1300 pages, is Oxford “World’s Classics.” Now I know why… War and Peace has to be one of the most amazing books I have read. Where to begin. I guess the thing I enjoyed the most about it, and what impressed me the most, was Tolstoy’s depth of insight and perception of human nature, spanning social classes, men, women, and children. By the end you feel that you know the characters so well that you could recognize them in a crowd on the street. And there isn’t just one or two main characters that this applies to. There are whole families of main characters, but I didn’t feel challenged in keeping track of them. They are so believable, you just get to know them in spite of yourself. They start out as social acquaintences among the wealthy Russian gentry, and you follow them through battles, illnesses, romances, military hospitals, war captivity, death, debt, and life-changing perspective shifts. You have the experience of the War of 1812 right along with them, with things gradually getting worse and more intense, looking back and thinking, I never thought things would come to this. But here we are. I am still me, but I have grown and changed, and these others - I can remember a time before I met them but I know them so well now that I can’t remember how it felt to not know them.
This is my criteria for an excellent, compelling book: Through the telling of a story, the author imparts to the reader the same feelings and experiences that the characters are having. By reading the book you live out in a partial, but convincing and moving way, the same thoughts, emotions, and discoveries that the story describes. This is a subtle, hard-to-pin down quality. Something in the pacing, the way and timing in which information is revealed or concealed… Obviously it comes with the author’s skill in describing people and events. Choice of words, to evoke the right imagery that really resonates with the reader. That’s the magic of good writing - you don’t have to work to imagine. The visuals spring unbidden to your mind, as if they couldn’t be any other way. A few brief external words later, you have envisioned internal truths.

Many of the descriptions and characters resonated with me in an “ah, yes. This I know. True, that.” kind of a way. But other things, like the descriptions of the characters’ experiences in battle, taught me a lot of new things about what it must be like to be a man, a soldier, a soldier in combat. These kinds of things are timeless, I think. A socialite in the early 1800’s, a young army officer in the early 1800’s - we are not so different in these modern days. Human nature still rings true, when it is truly captured in words, and so masterfully as Leo Tolstoy has done in War and Peace.

I would recommend it to anyone.

——

One tiny note: You have to be patient with Tolstoy. He kind of goes off on his ideas about the philosophy of history, especially in the later portion of the book. I found it interesting, but maybe repeated a few too many times…

This is a hat I finished a while back. It’s based on the Luggy Bonnet pattern in Weekend Knitting. It looks pretty different from the pattern, which was multi-colored stripes with star or heart motifs. But I had this fluffy blue yarn with coordinating novelty yarn, multi-colored yellow and orange with little nubs that knit up into a thick terry-cloth fabric, and I wanted a hat with earflaps and a crocheted border so I could get the nubby yarn in an even edging all the way around. The ear-flaps curled up a bit more than I anticipated, but I guess the overall effect is super-funky but in a cute way…

Hi, there! Gosh, it’s been an incredibly busy week. I think for me it was the busiest week of my freelance design career. I built a custom blog design (and let me tell you, I’m glad to get that time-black-hole off my plate!) and I’m working on 2 web-app UI’s and a custom handbag site design. whew.

Well, it’s been a week now but last weekend BN and I went on the annual Math Department snow trip. We went to Odell Lake, which is only about a 2 hour drive to the south-west. It was very thickly iced over, and in the boat-mooring area we stepped down into the frozen shallows. Wow. BN was hunting around for a heavy object to throw and try to crack the ice, but the log he found only bounced with a deep dull ringing sound.

The Odell Lake Resort features cabins of various sizes. We were in “the big cabin” with about 10 or 12 others, and more Math Dept people were lodged in other cabins. It seems that BN isn’t the only mathematician who likes to play board games and card games. It was a Settlers of Catan marathon weekend; and for once I came out on top for many consecutive rounds of the “caste system” card game known as “dirt slave,” “presidents and a___’s,” etc.

The resort rents cross-country skis and there are many trails all around the area. We had originally planned on downhill skiing at the nearest venue for that, but the snow was not at all fresh, with quite an icy crust. I had fearful memories of my most recent downhill experience, snowboarding in march of 03, when I broke my wrist!

So, we tried cross-country. It was so much fun. Yes, it was a good workout - but I liked the mellow pace better than the downhill experience of pressure-filled moments: gotta get off the lift without falling; gotta get down the hill, wait in line and on the lift, do it again. With X-C, you’re at your leisure. I’ve never been very athletic, either, but I’m in better shape now than any of my previous snow-sport experiences. So I’m sure that helped, and I wasn’t dying of soreness the next day, either. The trails we were on were very level, no extreme uphills or downhills, with frequent change of up, down, or flat. It was good.