It’s been so long since I’ve done an etymology post that I’m sure you all thought I had expended all I had to say on the subject. Not going to happen. Ever. Sorry. I had a good reason to meditate on a word last week, and I think the etymology is interesting enough to be worthy of a TNQDE segment.
“curate”
Did you know that this word is both a verb and a noun? It is, in fact, not only the act overseeing and organizing, but also a cleric who assists in the oversight of a parish. Via back-formation, we have another noun form, “curator,” which also refers specifically to the process of managing a museum collection (curiously, the museum-specific sense of “curator” evolved along a different path). All of these words hail from the Latin “curare,” meaning “to care for.” We get another modern word from this verb: “cure,” but the sense is different enough that I won’t add that turn-off to our rabbit trail today.
Curator, in the liturgical sense, as I said, is a back-formation of “curate,” which comes from Middle English curat, which is derived from the Medieval Latin curatus, which in turns comes from the Late Latin cura, meaning “spiritual charge.” Not having an appropriate dictionary for Late Latin on hand, I can’t easily verify this, but my sense of that definition is that it is meant as “having charge of the spiritual well-being of another.” I suspect this, because the original Latin sense of cura is simply “care.”
Curator in the secular, museum-oversight sense, actually comes from the Middle English curatour, meaning “legal guardian.” This term came through the Old French curateur from the Latin curator, meaning “overseer.” Funny how orthography comes full circle, isn’t it? Curator is a noun derived from the past participle (curatus) of the verb curare, meaning “to take care of,” which is no doubt the same word at the root of cura.
Oversight springs from a tradition of giving care, you see, and the reason this is on my mind is that I’ve been considering my role as an educator. Last week, my kids and I help a bake sale/comic auction/cookbook sale to benefit our local athletic league. The event was born from some of my kids forming a comic club. Their charter: everyone can join and all comics produced will be copied and sold to benefit a charity which will be chosen by active members in turn, beginning with the youngest. They asked for my help to make it happen, and who could possibly say no to that sort of request?
In order to get a more obvious curb appeal and also engage some of my kids who are not inclined to draw comics, I added a bake sale to the event and also a cookbook project: students wrote recipes using two randomly chosen ingredients and I turned the recipes into a cookbook. Given the nature of my program (i.e., utterly insane), I don’t get enough focused attention with kids on individual projects to lead them from draft to finished project. If I can convince them to slap a title and their name on something when they’re done, I consider it a victory. What this translated to for our sale was several hours of tracing over pencil lines too light for the copier to read, typing recipes into a cookbook, scanning and ordering unnumbered pages, and trying to make sense of jumbled directions.
I realized that the work I was doing in those moments was not unlike the work I’ve done with college literary magazines, where my job was to take boatloads of crazy and edit it into art. The only differences are (1) the level of finesse expected in the finished project and (2) the fact that I care about my k-6 authors. (Lit mag authors are, by a disturbingly high percentage, complete tools with ego problems and while this is not a non-existent occurrence among children, children are generally more capable of accepting advice on their work and reproof for rudeness, making them infinitely easier to get along with.) To teach my kids that they are capable of anything they set their minds to, that they matter to me and to their community, all I had to do was polish and organize their work enough for their audience of teachers and parents to be able to make sense of what they had done. I was curating.
As I pondered the idea of a teacher as curator, I thought back to the original sense of the word and realized that caregiver was a good way of looking at what I was doing. When I pulled out my dictionary and found the spiritual sense of the word, it also struck me as relevant. Sometimes, the best thing I can do for my kids is simply to care about them enough that I am capable of interpreting their work so that a wide audience of their caregivers can appreciate them more fully.
Not to go sappy here, but this feels a little bit like a life-calling to me.
John and I got talking about Joss Whedon last night, after John read an article in Wired (based largely on this interview) about one of very few television writers whose career I envy. For those of you who don’t know who I’m talking about, Whedon is largely responsible for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Dollhouse, Firefly, Serenity, and most recently, The Avengers. I haven’t seen The Avengers yet and, quite frankly, I had no real interest in seeing it until Charlie (who only knew that Whedon was of consequence because her fiance pointed it out) mentioned that Whedon was in charge. I’ve been falling in love with Whedon as a writer since I saw Serenity in the theater, but I didn’t really pay attention to the fact that the same man was behind these amazing works of art until I watched Dollhouse last fall, and then only because I started reading Hijinks Ensue, whose writer will most likely either end up with a restraining order from Whedon or as his best friend and collaborator.
 Joss Whedon / Photo by Gage Skidmore (CC BY 2.0) Yes, I am the lazy sort of fangirl who can adore just about everything in a screenwriter’s oeuvre without knowing it. Shut up.
As John and I were discussing what makes Whedon projects whedonesque, two qualities stood out to me. First, the man is a master of dialogue. He has a keen ear for the way people talk that gives me serious keyboard envy. Second, and equally important to me as a writer: he’s a butt-kicking feminist.
I had a hard time coming to grips with that second fact. A word to the wise: while you can watch most of his above-mentioned projects through Netflix Instant, I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone. “Whedonesque” means that strong women characters are going to occasionally have their asses handed to them in an extremely graphic manner. When I was watching Buffy, I found that I sometimes had to pause in the middle of an episode and go for a walk to shake off the yick of watching this young woman lose a no-punches pulled fist fight with older men. Dollhouse was infinitely worse.
I kept going back, though it took me a while to understand why I found this fairly violent television to be worthy of my time. My reason? Buffy and Echo are on the frontiers of feminism, rewriting the paradigm of what it means to be female. The paradigm I was raised with is that girls are capable of kicking butt BUT not so capable that it’s okay for boys to kick back. By putting strong women in the category of “not to be touched,” media sends the message that women really are more fragile than men. It’s sickening on an almost physical level to watch a particularly close fight in which the woman seems to be losing, especially when the staged fighting is fairly believable, but I don’t have the same gut reaction watching a similar fight between two men, or between two women, for that matter. Why? Because I have been trained to believe that men and women are not equals, that women are physically inferior to men.
Mentally, I am capable of saying, “That is incorrect, kind sir!” But the attitudes that matter are not the ones you pull out at the university colloquium. The attitudes that have power are the ones you carry in your bones–the ones that will tell you how to react if you should ever face a given situation in real life. In other words, my brain tells me that I am capable of standing up for myself if I am ever attacked by a man, but my bones tell me to cower, weep, and beg for mercy. I have been blessed in my life to never be faced with a situation where I had to make that decision, but many women are. Domestic violence is not a rarity in the United States, and plenty of women stay in abusive situations, allowing themselves to be hit again and again and again, and not least among the reasons for this is that our cultural perception of women is that they aren’t really empowered to do anything about it.
When a man refrains from hitting a woman, too often his reason is, “You shouldn’t hit women.” That’s a bad reason. You shouldn’t hit anybody. The same man might also back down from a fight with a man, probably on moral principles (if only to save face), but what media usually tells us about this interaction is that the man is also somewhat concerned that he might be seriously injured. In other words, he respects the power of the other man’s fists. When you “respect a woman” by refusing to fight her on the premise that she’s a woman, the only thing you’re respecting is her fragility. I’m not saying you should go around picking bar fights with women, mind you, but I am saying that Joss Whedon’s work is ripping that paradigm to shreds.
Neither Buffy nor Echo is ever beaten up. They lose fights. They win more fights than they lose, however, and when they do lose, they pick themselves up and approach the problem from another angle–with more training, more knowledge, and backup. The narrative of gender this creates is that women and men are inherently on equal footing, and given that equality, women sometimes lose. They have the power, however, to push themselves through hard work and study to a place where they can take down the monster who beat them. Women are not fragile flowers who are helpless when the world fails to protect them: they are powerful, and God help you if you make the mistake of turning your back on a woman you’ve done wrong by.
I am pathetically addicted to television, because I love the indefinite drawing out of the lives and stories of characters. In movies and even books, it seems like I hardly get a chance to know and like a set of characters before their authors wrap up and move on. Seven seasons is a good long time to enjoy the growth of a character’s life. Where television almost inevitably fails, however, is in its consistent inability to stick the landing. I understand why this is–endings are notoriously difficult for even mediums in which you have the time and resources to work them out and rewrite preceding details to accommodate them and many factors make this an unlikely situation for television shows. (These reasons don’t apply to the LOST producers, so I still want to know what the heck their excuse is.) The single best exception to this rule I have ever enjoyed is the finale of Buffy.
*SPOILER ALERT: THE END OF BUFFY IS REVEALED HERE.*
The solution to the series of problems building to the climax in Buffy is a stand up and shout anthem to Whedon’s take on feminism. For those of you who don’t know the show, the basic premise is that there is always exactly one girl who has the particular power to defeat evil: the Vampire Slayer. When one dies, that potential is awakened in another. Buffy & co. find themselves in a more apocalyptic situation than usual (still my favorite quote from the show: “I find myself needing to know the plural of apocalypse.”), and their plan is to unlock the Slayer potential in all of the girls the world over. There’s a great series of shots of girls in bad situations waking up to the fact that they don’t have to take it anymore. Buffy no longer has to carry the weight of being THE Slayer because she is not the only woman capable of kicking butt and taking names. It’s an incredibly empowering moment, and I will always forgive Joss Whedon for writing decisions I strongly disagree with because of that scene.
*SPOILER DANGER OVER*
I hate to be too much of a rabid fangirl, but Whedon’s ideas of feminism push me in my own writing to go to uncomfortable places that we need to pay attention to… like getting a pap smear or a prostate exam. It’s uncomfortable and a bit painful to write outside of the paradigm I still believe in my bones, but my writing will be better off for it. If I’m lucky, someday I’ll have readers who will be better off for it. If I’m REALLY lucky, society will change because of my writing and I will be remembered as one of the critical literary pap smears of the post-modern, anti-feminist social cancer.
…
And now I’m wondering if I need to reconsider my aspirations in life. (Also, does being a card-carrying member of the Over-Extended Metaphor Society really give me the right to imply that Joss Whedon is a literary pap smear? Honestly, Mr. Whedon, I mean it as a compliment.)
I probably shouldn’t be trying to write a blog post right now. Probably I should be sitting quietly on the couch and watching something very passively, but you know what? Convalescence is boring. And lonely. Writing is about the only way I have of connecting with other human beings at the moment since my mouth is too swollen to talk much, so I’m writing. Those of you who know me in real life (aka, my Facebook friends) have possibly seen my constant posts and thought, “Huh. Melissa’s doing really well for just having had her wisdom teeth out.”
I’ve posted like a thousand times on Facebook in the past two days: that is not doing well. That, my friends, is a cry for help, but since we live three hundred miles away from anyone who might rescue me from making a fool of myself while under the influence of pain, exhaustion, and drugs, I’m stuck hanging out with the internet while John is at work. Not that I mind–the internet is pretty good company. It has Felicia Day and Wil Wheaton and the Bloggess (whose new book is wonderful, by the way). I think the internet really needs to be rescued from me however, or at least Felicia Day does. I probably owe her an apology for this photo, but the Flog distracted me from my discomfort for almost an hour yesterday, so she sort of has temporary hero status in my eyes at the moment. Maybe I should make one for Wil Wheaton and the Bloggess too, but then I’d also owe them apologies for being in over-zealous and possibly drug-induced adoration of their awesomeness, so maybe I should just go sit quietly and finish watching all of Deep Space Nine…
I got all excited for a minute because I thought I might be able to finally claim that I have watched all of Star Trek once I finish DS9, but that’s not true. I’ve been re-watching TNG at John’s pace (an episode once in a while after work) so we can watch it together, and it’s possible there’s a TNG episode I haven’t seen. And I still have Enterprise to go. Drat. See? I really need to stop typing and go watch more Star Trek so I can unlock that achievement instead of doing what I’m about to do, which is to write you a really useful primer of the top ten things that you should know if you ever have your wisdom teeth out that the dentist’s office won’t tell you. Scratch that. Top five. Ten takes too much concentration, which I have in diamonds. (Which is the opposite of spades, right? Not that I know what that means. I should look that up sometime, but not today, because it would require spades of concentration. Oh! Theory: spades are shovels, right? Having something in spades must be having shovels full of it. Genius, right here, yes ma’am.)
Where was I? Right. Things you should know about having your wisdom teeth out.
5. You will drool.
They warn you about the swelling and the pain, which there is a lot of. What they don’t warn you about is the drool, which there is also a bloody (but only for the first day) lot of. You aren’t allowed to be cool about it and spit either, because that would disturb the clotting. Nope. You get to drool like a rejected Gerber baby applicant.
4. Lukewarm food is amazing.
Seriously. I tend to enjoy most of my foods at extreme temps, but you miss out on so much of the flavor profile. Never would have learned that if too cold or too hot foods weren’t so uncomfortable to eat.
3. Don’t open your medicine over the recycling bin.
You will be clumsy from pain/nausea/exhaustion. The bottles are small and hard to open with shaky hands. You will spend half an hour crying while digging through the recycling bin for half a dozen antibiotic pills that you’re terrified of not taking because stopping antibiotics early will leave you at the mercy of some superbug like MRSA and you will die. I recommend sitting down on a wide open, clear space of floor for this job.
2. It’s not just the narcotics.
I have only taken three of the percocet since the surgery because the pain has been almost manageable with ice and ibuprofen. Minor outpatient procedures are still capable of messing with you on a serious level. (See above re: why I probably owe Felicia Day an apology).
1. Charge your phone.
Because if you don’t, the battery will die when you call your husband with a list of pudding flavors to buy and he will be panicked with visions of you passing out from too much percocet, especially when you can’t answer any of his half dozen calls because the battery is dead. True story.
And now I’ve worn myself out with all this chatter, so I’m going to go stare at my knitting project and wonder how much of it I’m going to have to frog after working on it in this state while I finish watching the rest of DS9. You’re welcome.
Last night I boiled water. I made myself a cup of hot cocoa, and as an after thought, I mentioned to John that there was hot water if he felt like making himself anything. Nice wife, right? This is why I love my husband though: he jumped up excitedly and said, “Thank you! You’re awesome. I REALLY love you.”
Me: “I….boiled water.”
John: “I know! That’s awesome.”
Me: “I just boiled water.”
John: “But it’s just so nice, to be going along and then suddenly be surprised because you can have a hot cup of something cozy.”
Me: “Okaaaay…”
I constantly find John’s relentless enthusiasm for simple things to be utterly baffling, even though it’s one of the qualities I most love and admire in him. I got some perspective on this quality the other day, however, when we got an email from his lovely mother, who is a counselor. “When I am working with clients I explain to them that the human mind generally has 9 negative thoughts to every 1 positive thought even when we aren’t depressed (when the ratio is closer to 89-0) We have to WORK to be positive. I give them an assignment to be in awe of 1 thing each day.” It’s such an admirable quality, and I can really see the power of being raised around such thinking in my husband.
John’s mom also sent us some pictures of the frog we gave her for Easter. “Frog and I just spent a half hour finding things in which to be in awe. It wasn’t hard…..he is in awe of everything:) ” These pictures cheered me up and continue to cheer me up as I face down the looming prospect of having my wisdom teeth pulled (T-45 minutes), and I thought I would share them.
The Awe Frog has already become a mental meme in our house: when John reacted to the boiled water with such delight last night, we considered photoshopping him next to the kettle. In fact, if anyone with some photoshop skills feels like turning Awe Frog into a real internet meme, that would tickle me pink. In the meantime, I’m just going to imagine Frog sitting next to the giant box of fudgesicles and the vats of soup I cooked up and try to be excited about my convalescence.
Wish me luck, folkles.
I went to a dentist in February for the first time in I don’t even know how many years. It’s ridiculous, really. I’ve had dental insurance for over a year and a half, but I was scared of what they would say to me, so I kept putting it off. When I finally went, the news wasn’t as bad as I expected: only three cavities, and those pretty minor. My wisdom teeth will be coming out next week, but at least they didn’t take one look and say, “Call the surgeon, stat! We’ve got a rotten tooth about to turn into a brain infection here.” The wisdom teeth thing is an unfinished saga, so I’ll save that for another day, but the cavities I had done in short order after my exam and there’s an amusing story in there.
Maybe three or four days after having my cavities drilled and filled, I woke up to discover that the tip of my tongue had gone numb, almost as if I had burned it. It wasn’t painful, exactly but certainly disconcerting.
I think I’ve been a bit stressed of late. I mean, I know I’ve been stressed. I more or less abandoned a blog that I’ve been intrepidly plugging away at in spite of a low readership for more than two years, and believe it or not, I love obsessing about my life and attempting to spin the details into stories that will garner a chuckle or two from my grandmother and mother-in-law. I’ve hardly touched my guitar in three months, and I haven’t even pulled my ukulele out of the case in six. My sourdough is more sour than usual because I haven’t been working with it on a regular basis. All of these things I love, I’ve put aside because one person can only do so much, and I just haven’t had the will or the energy.
I had forgotten, however, just how different stress feels from not-stress. Stress is one of those things that changes your quality of life in slow, subtle ways, like putting a frog in a pot of comfortable water and putting it on to boil at a low heat. You don’t notice the incremental changes in your well-being until they’ve transformed you from a banjo-strumming green nudist into Doc Hopper’s French-fried dinner.
Last week I had the first real vacation I’ve had in a long time. My program schedule is tied to the school schedule, so of course I get Monday holidays and in-service days off, and I have more vacations in a year than most people would know what to do with, but in all that alleged time off, I have had Stuff To do for Other People (questionably by appropriately acronymized, STOP). Not unpleasant stuff, really, and not so much from anyone person that their desire to borrow my time could be questioned, but enough from enough people that my vacations have felt claustrophobic. When I have had time, it’s been so cold and dreary that I didn’t want to go anywhere, which led to a claustrophobic vacation of my own making that did not do its job. If you never vacate your apartment, it’s not really a vacation, is it?
But last week, the weather was warm and inviting. The grass was green. My obligations to others were so minimal as to be all but nonexistent. I didn’t even have the pressures of my book hanging over my head because I just finished a major rewrite and the book is now locked away until July so I can get some distance and perspective on it. I literally had nothing to do except walk in the park, read, pick away at some short stories I had relegated to the back burner, and generally relish the sense of being unfettered for a week. I didn’t even make myself exercise, beyond those gorgeous park walks, or do housework. I just plain chilled until I was on that pleasant edge of boredom where you haven’t yet crossed into despair at your own uselessness. It was marvelous. Monday morning came, and for the first time since September, I woke up before my alarm feeling rested and not miserable at getting up at such an unholy hour.
Driving home on Monday, I noticed something. My left eye was twitching. I frowned and considered the past week. The eye twitching thing has been intermittent most of my life, and in the last year or so it’s become much more regular. During my vacation, however, the eye twitching hadn’t made a single appearance. Yesterday, as I was driving to a meeting, I noticed that the tip of my tongue was feeling a bit numb and sore. This too, has become a regular occurrence over the past three months, but I had chalked it up to some weird reaction my mouth was having to the new topography of my teeth-after-three-fillings. Again, however, during my vacation my tongue felt good and normal and whole.
Apparently, stress is also a wolf lurking at the edge’s of the campfire’s light, ready to pounce on that pot of boiling frog the second the illumination of rest starts to fade. One day back at work, and my nervous ticks that I hadn’t even registered as nervous ticks before were back in full force.
All I can say to this is (1) it’s a shame I’m not really able to tell the short and squeaky sources of my stress what they’re doing to me, for fear of giving them long-term anxiety issues and (2) I am really looking forward to June 21st. Part-time employment may not be a permanently sustainable situation, but I am going to rock it while I can.
Although the intense swings from summer to winter that have posed as spring have me fairly convinced that the apocalypse is upon us, no, scratch that. BECAUSE the intense swings from summer to winter that have posed as spring have me COMPLETELY convinced that society is teetering on the verge of collapse, I have renewed my commitment to learn how to grow my own food. As some of you may recall from last year, gardening is a challenge for me.
For one thing, plants apparently need sun or something, and my apartment doesn’t come with any. In college, a good friend gave me one of those plants with the broad, shiny leaves you get in the grocery store as a dorm-warming present. I named it Joseph. That thing survived seven and a half years of complete neglect, minimal sun, and occasional deadly encounters with cat teeth. I was convinced he was going to outlive me. Then we moved to this apartment. Joseph hung in like a trooper for as long as he could, but apparently even undead plant require either sunlight or water.
 Rest in peace, Joseph John got me an azalea plant for Valentine’s Day, and I was really torn. What I said was, “Oh, that’s so sweet. It’s lovely. Thank you for not buying me cut flowers, which I have ethical objections to unless they’re locally grown.” What I was thinking, however, was more like, “MURDERER! What did that poor plant ever do to you?” Sure enough, within days, it was on its way out. I didn’t even bother trying to rescue it. I mean, azaleas are meant to me planted, for one thing, and though John might have been trying to make a statement about the state of our apartment (hey, he knew when we got married that I don’t dust or wash floor unless the offending surfaces are dirty enough to make my feet black), there still isn’t enough dirt in here to plant a small bush in. John made a valiant attempt to rescue the azalea. He put it in the spot with the least indirect light and constructed a reflector from cardboard and tinfoil and proceeded to water the plant more than any plant in our household has ever been watered. In retrospect, that might have been part of the problem…
Azalea? Goner.
We did okay with a few of the shady herbs last year, in that we got sprouts, but the only herbs that grow well in shade are herbs I have never used before. The borage was pretty, but seriously–would you eat fuzzy leaves? Intimated by the alien herbs, we never watered or thinned them, and they too died.
This year, things are going to be different. I have proof:
 Well-Traveled LEttuce This, my friends, is the most well-traveled lettuce you are likely to meet. These little seedlings have traveled approximately 2,000 miles, which is 500 miles further than the average head of lettuce travels from the farm to the family table. I believe they prove the exception to the rule that says the further food has traveled, the less nutritious it’s going to be, but only because I don’t believe it would be particularly smart for commercial enterprises to build gardens in their semis and then drive around letting people pick their lettuce from the back of the tractor-trailer truck.
In my case, however, it makes perfect sense. I mean, I’m not driving the plants around for their own sake. It’s not like I think the soothing rhythm of the road and the soothing excess of carbon dioxide is going to make them grow better. I happen to drive close to 2,000 miles in a typical month because my family is in Maine and my job is a split-shift nightmare half an hour away. My car, however, spends most of its time parked in gorgeously sunny parking lots and has a large amount of glass in its structure, making it, in essence, a magical mobile greenhouse. I say magical, because those greens that I thinned from my lettuce beds this afternoon are the first food I have produce since the two best tomatoes ever I managed to coax from a plant back in college.
I’m also growing tomatoes in my car. See?
 The tomatoes are in the middle. In other news, I’ve finally decided on a name for my car. Marjory. She’s a trash heap alright (more my fault than hers), but she’s reliable, and something good seems to be coming from her, so I think the name is fitting.
I haven’t posted a word in over a month, not here anyway. What little extra energy I’ve had has gone into my fibers and writing about them. There are new posts over at Variations on a String if you care to read them, but you may not. That’s okay. Aside from the uninspired prose describing my adventures with fiber, I haven’t written much since the beginning of December. Not here, not on the book I’m supposed to be finishing, and definitely not on the book I need to finish revising so I can send it out to potential agents.
Sometimes I feel like I spend a vast amount of time apologizing for not writing more regularly. I apologize on here, as if saying “I’m sorry for not being more consistent” is going to improve my SEO, or as if it’s going to make a difference to the very few people who actually visit this blog for my little essays on life. I apologize to myself for not working on my book. “Tomorrow,” I promise. “Tomorrow I’ll write an extra thousand words, honestly.” Sometimes I keep my promises, but not all that often.
I’ve always had a romanticized idea of the life of a writer involving waking up early and padding barefoot to the computer to write an inspired several thousand words before breakfast. I have this idea, because that has more or less been my process. What I am discovering, however, is that the several thousand words that come so easily you can churn them out before your stomach insists on “At least a piece of toast, come on woman, feed me!” are not the words you want anyone else to read. They require intense editing, at best, and more realistically, complete restructuring.
Writers are architects and demolitionists. We’re like two-year-olds, endlessly setting up a block tower only to knock it down. We’re masochistic two-year-olds, though, because the knocking down doesn’t bring a whole lot of glee. I find it to be difficult mental work and taxing on my confidence in my ability to succeed.
Knitting and spinning and carding and sewing are the winter of my brain’s garden. While my hands work, my mind can lay fallow for a while, giving the soil a chance to rest and the bulbs of my creativity a chance to prepare to spring and bloom. I do not believe in the ever-dreaded writer’s block: only winter. Winter can last too long and kill the crop with cold, I’ll grant you, but that doesn’t mean it has no function. If I don’t write, it’s not laziness, really. It’s winter.
And if you’re just not buying that, well, be merciful because life is life. Between the holidays, the relentless colds associated with childcare, and planning for a major life change in the nearer-than-expected future, I don’t know when I’ll have the energy and focus to spend on blogging regularly again. In the meantime, please accept this humble offering of proof that I have not only been sitting on my rump eating chocolate and watching Deep Space Nine.
 The fleece I washed on the hammock John helped me make.  A case I made for my interchangeable knitting needles.  A necklace tree I made so I could toss all the little boxes.  Yarn I spun and plied on a spindle, on a niddy-noddy John helped me make.
Since we got married, John and I have tried to find a new ornament each Christmas we’ve had a tree, something that would have some meaning for us. It’s been a struggle. Most of the ornaments you find in the Christmas shops, or worse, in the Christmas section of department stores, are lacking in soul. My favorite of the lot to date is a glass octopus that reminds me of the nativity octopus costume in Love, Actually, but it’s a strange connection.
Read the Rest!
Forgive my absence, loyal fans. I’ve been participating in National Novel Writing Month and knitting like a lunatic for Christmas: blogging on top of those projects and my two jobs has been that one thing too many to ask of myself. Once we hit January, I have a whole slew of patterns for you, but it will be hit or miss until then. Not that I’m worried–I assume it’s mostly fiber geeks who are interested in this blog, and I suspect the rest of you are too bogged down in gift-making to be reading this blog anyway.
Read the Full Post
Or rather, fleece and dirty, because I am so not going down the path of down… yet. Being a teacher (ish), I had Veterans’ Day off, which meant extra time to write my book and wash my newly acquired grease fleece. I won’t tell you about my writing: that’s my other blog. You folks want to know about the wool. I am a fiber n00b, so this “how to” is the result of research, trial, and some damn fine luck.
Full Post Here (Lots of Pictures!)
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