Zatera Ul

I’ve been spring cleaning and nesting at the same time, and have been getting a lot done, slowly: cleaning out the flower garden, raking the yard, redoing some of the vegetable garden fencing, washing windows (it is so nice to have windows that are easy to wash), cleaning light fixtures, polishing furniture, cleaning underneath everything, and making a batch of homemade liquid laundry detergent (with the fels naphtha/Zote/Ivory soap-based recipe that can be found all over the internet).

I was cleaning the light fixture and ceiling fan blades in the kitchen right after I made the laundry detergent, and found that the detergent worked very well for cleaning the dust and grease off those (which I took down before scrubbing). For windows, I usually put a little dishwashing soap in warm water–I started this doing because most of our inside window grime is made of food. It did finally occur to me that dishwashing liquid is actually designed to leave glass shiny and unstreaked, so it should be expected to work well on windows.

Also, I persuaded MFH to photograph and part with some of his T-shirts from high school and college, and I used some of them to make myself long maternity shirts. With the warmer weather, I had zero shirts that fit. I cut and pieced them to make two shirts, and then just lengthened another. It turned out to be time well spent, because I found an XL maternity shirt at a rummage sale this weekend, and even that is several inches too short (and is just as shapeless as the maternity shirts that I threw together without a pattern). I always get enormous at the end of pregnancy, and I might still have as much as five weeks to go.

The children have been living outside a lot more. StrongBaby is very interested in all the wheeled toys–from the trucks to the scooters to his big sister’s roller skates. He persisted long enough with the roller skates that he started to get the hang of it; he’s so short that the falls didn’t bother him much. OLC has become very interested in nature, and is observing a lot outdoors this year. TLG has started to learn to cook.

I just had a smallish ball of yarn handy. I played around and knit for a bit, and then decided to make a knitted ball.

There are a lot of patterns online for this, but I used a simple short rows technique from a book from the Seventies, A New Look at Knitting, by Elyse and Mike Sommer (which is a excellent book to start with if you want to knit foofy shapes). Since Google didn’t help me find a pattern that explained this method of knitting a ball very well, I’ll do it here.

In knitting, you make a short row by turning the knitting before the end of the row, leaving some stitches unknit for the time being. You may have to bring the yarn between the needles (depending on stitch pattern) before you start knitting again. There are techniques for wrapping or tightening the yarn to avoid making a small hole at each mid-row turn, if you wish, but I’d skip that at first (actually I only just learned about those today).

So, if you start with 20 stitches on the needle, knit 18, turn, knit 18, you’ve created one more row on the starting edge, but not on the other edge. (I’m not saying left or right edge here, because I am left-handed and knit “backwards”, from left to right.) The needle holding the stitches is now not quite parallel to the bottom edge. You could knit straight at this point, making a strip that has a slight kink in it, or you could knit another short row, shorter than the first one, and kink it even further. Kink it far enough, and the strip will bend around into a circle.

To make a circle, you keep shortening the rows by two stitches at a time until you run out of stitches, then knit all the way to the end of the row and back. This makes one wedge-shaped segment (a slightly distorted triangle, really). Repeat 11 times to make a total of 12 segments, cast off and join the last row to the first row, and you have a circle.

To be more specific in knitting language, here is a pattern (20 stitches is enough to give you the idea without being tediously large):

Simple short rows garter stitch circle

Cast on 20 st, knit one row.
*Begin short rows for segment:
K 18, turn, K 18.
K 16, turn, K 16.
K 14, turn, K 14.
K 12, turn, K 12.
K 10, turn, K 10.
K 8, turn, K 8.
K 6, turn, K 6.
K 4, turn, K 4.
K 2, turn, K 2.
Knit down and back along entire row: K 20, turn, K 20.
Repeat from * to make a total of 12 segments. Cast off and join first row to last, and sew hole in center closed.

To make a ball, you work short rows at both sides of the knitting, kinking in both sides at the same time. A little mind-blowing, but it works:

Simple short rows knitted ball in garter stitch

Cast on 20 st, knit one row.
*Begin short rows for segment:
K 18, turn, K 16.
K 14, turn, K 12.
K 10, turn, K 8.
K 8, turn, K 6.
K 4, turn, K 2.
Knit down and back along entire row: K 20, turn, K 20.
Repeat from * to make a total of 12 segments. Cast off, insert stuffing, join first row to last, and sew holes at top and bottom closed.

In The Serendipitous Sabbatical, I briefly mentioned Paul Miller, who was unplugging himself from the internet for a year. Now he is back, and apparently considers the year to have been a failure, even though he learned a few things along the way.

I finally got hold of a copy of Hidden Art, by Edith Schaeffer, which I’ve been wanting to read for a long time. (She recently died.)

I guessed that she would focus on everyday art, as opposed to the High Art that her husband Francis Schaeffer focused on in How Shall We Then Live? This she did, marvelously, making a strong case for us Christians to be creative in our everyday lives and live with art and beauty, no matter how limited our means. Hidden Art is full of ideas, only occasionally going into the details of the how-to.

———-

It occurred to me recently that I should dig the baby clothes out of the far back reaches of the closet, and get them ready. The weeks are skimming by, and we’ve been getting our birth supplies together. We’ll be canning up a double batch of beef bourguignon (known as “beef boojie-boojie” in our house) to eat over rice postpartum. I’ve been working through an endless list of small cleaning tasks.

TLG has been taking a strong interest in cooking lately. He is good at cracking eggs and peeling carrots.

…at one end of the bedroom closet. I was going to make a small table, and move my computer back into the bedroom, but God’s sovereign will, as expressed in the available materials, led me to put it in the closet. I contrived a homemade magnetic lock for the door–a metal pin that slides in a channel when pushed by a strong magnet from outside–to keep StrongBaby out. It unlocks easily, but requires a certain finesse to lock.

With that done, I’ve been able to type my twenty pages of notes into FreeMind, and to start organizing them into a more coherent structure. Once the outline is straightened out, I can go back to the laptop for writing. (The laptop is just too old to run the Java that FreeMind is based on.)

In other projects, we finally figured out why TLG was refusing to wear most of his pants–he kept saying they were “too big” for him because they were wider in the legs than he wanted, not because they were too long. So I took measurements (on a strip of paper because we are short on tape measures at the moment), and narrowed his pant legs for him by taking width out at the inseam. Now he is happy with all of his pants. I cut up the scraps into little disposable kitchen wipes, which are handy for wiping up grease and small spills. I haven’t been sewing as much lately, so I didn’t have them for a while, and I missed them.

We got about eight inches of damp, fluffy snow. The previous snowfall had just finished melting.

With this kind of snow, it’s best to keep up with the shoveling. Because: If the weather gets warmer, the snow will get wetter and denser, and be a lot harder to shovel. If the weather gets colder the snow will freeze, and be a lot harder to shovel. If it stays the same, the snow will keep falling, get even deeper, and be a lot harder to shovel.

We survived the Minne-Faire, with some loss of sleep and sanity from finishing projects and packing everything. Sometimes I’m amazed how much MFH can complicate his process of getting out the door. From the physics point of view, the world is already plenty complex, and we look for ways to simplify things enough that we can make some progress. (”Assuming that the cow is a sphere, we can….”)

I haven’t been following the news much, and I’m mystified how one crazy guy shooting up a school has led to weeks and weeks of the media and legislators pushing the issue of gun control with all their might–which would impose on the Second Amendment rights of all the sane people. (And for every crazy guy who goes on a shooting spree, there are hundreds of thousands of crazy guys who don’t.) I know they go by the motto “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” but this is clearly the wrong crisis.

I succeeded in getting the Scrivener Linux beta to convert text to Kindle format. There is just a small (known) bug: you need to get KindleGen from Amazon, and then tell Scrivener where you put it. The problem is that Scrivener is set to only show filenames of format *.* (which means, basically, any filename that contains a period) when you’re showing it where the file is, and the KindleGen filename doesn’t have a period. The workaround is simply to get to the right directory and type the filename into the Open dialog box yourself, instead of trying to choose it from the list that it doesn’t appear in.

I was thinking of decoupaging a world map onto our well-worn coffee table, and sealing it with polyurethane, but after doing some tests, I’m not convinced the surface would last very long–polyurethane on loose paper dents quite easily. I should do a test with the paper glued down to wood, though.

Back to snowy and cold weather. My internal winter clock was set much further north, and naturally expects substantial snowfalls in April, but everyone else seems rather put out.

The latest snowstorm turned out to be a blessing: two things that were overcrowding our calendar this week were cancelled or postponed.

MFH will be at the Minne-Faire this weekend, rain, shine, or snow; he’s been working hard to get ready for it. (Unfortunately, his exhibit space is outdoors in a tent.) I’ve finished up or put aside most of my own projects, to help him with a couple of things, and generally let him get things done. I have some internal urgings to do some organizing, rearranging, or decorating, but have no particular projects in mind at the moment.

I’m starting to feel huge and awkward, but I am still getting around all right.

It’s getting cold again, but we had just enough of a warm spell that I was able to haul my dresser out to the porch and paint it (with free paint from the hazardous waste center). I mixed a light blue paint with a smaller amount of light yellowish green of the same general type, and it came out just about the shade of mint green that I wanted. The dresser is an old $15 estate sale find, nothing that anyone is ever going to want to refinish, but I like its configuration: tall and narrow, with six smallish drawers.

I also made a small apron with large pockets, for holding clothespins. I’m not sure yet where or how we’re going to put up the clothesline, but it is on the list for this spring.

I filled up my first blank handmade book, and have moved on to the second one. I quickly found out that it needed a loop to hold a pen, so I cut one out of scrap leather. The most expedient way to attach it to the cover was to use an awl to make holes all the way through the cover, and then stitch it on with thick waxed thread left over from the shoe/boot projects. The thread matches the cover well.

Even before MFH was laid off, we were starting to move away from eating out once a week, to cooking a special meal at home. For less than the cost of eating out, we can eat very, very well in. So we’ve been experimenting with different meals to find good ones that aren’t too much work. One recent success was to buy injera (large Ethiopian flatbread), and eat Ethiopian-style: little piles of different foods are placed on the flatbread, then everyone tears off little pieces of injera (with the right hand), uses them to pick up morsels of food out of the piles, and eats the injera and morsels together. Savory and sweet foods both work well for this, or even salad with dressing.

Lately I’ve been thinking about this, from The War of Art by Steven Pressfield:

The Marine Corps teaches you how to be miserable.

This is invaluable for an artist.

Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction in having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swab jockeys, or flyboys…

…The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.

We went from winter to spring in only one week. Almost all of the snow is melted now.

StrongBaby decided to start being two a little early. He has been making huge strides in language and in having opinions of his own.

I’ve been playing with the free Linux beta version of Scrivener. Installing the .deb on Ubuntu using the Ubuntu Software Center went very smoothly. It looks very useful for doing ebook conversions, although I don’t know if I’ll be able to make Kindle ebooks with this beta, but with my limited options for workspaces I am going to stick with doing most of my book writing on the dinosaur laptop (running Windows 2000) at the dining room table.

I was thinking yesterday that it is rather nice to just have one of everything in this house: one eating area, one bathroom, one living room, one bedroom with toys, one without, and nothing redundant. (But that is why my big Linux computer is in the cold basement.)

Various projects: Rebuilding the base for the dining room table–after four moves, it’s not really clear to me how I originally put it together, but its current configuration should last a couple more years. I rearranged books, and now have one less bookshelf in the living room. A couple more diapers got to the point of needing to be refurbished, so I did that. Not recently, I made a small hoe for the garden, inspired by a guy who made a rake.