Deploy

Olympics Stealth Project The Second is 98% finished.  It lacks some weaving in of yarny ends and some minor functional embellishment.  I’ll save those bits to finish up during knitting breaks on the next project to take center stage.  

Which would be: Deployment Sock for Brother-in-Law (BIL).  Here’s what I have so far on sock one.  About three inches of cuff (why yes, that is a Shiner Bohemian Black Lager bottle—it seemed somehow appropriate).  

This is a basic black sock.  Knit from the top down, it will have ribbing down the whole leg, a heel-flap heel, and smooth knitting down the foot.  But I just can’t bring myself to leave all of that lovely smooth knitting blank.  I want to do some kind of decorative embellishment.  BIL is a biker-boot wearer during his off-time from a job as a U.S. Marine, so embellishments will likely be seen by no one but me and you and my sister and BIL.  But it’s the the sentiment that counts.  He once admired the Shambones socks I made for Brother:

That would be the tough Irish skull-and-crossbones socks in honor of a St. Patrick’s Day Birthday.  

And closer in. 

So, what embellishments would be appropriate for the socks of someone about to go off to (and we hope to come back whole from) war?  

I have considered some red flames around the feet.  Or some other such power graphic that could be simplified.  Or perhaps some words.  Maybe “home” on one foot and “safe” on the other.  Maybe his initials to make sure no one steals his socks?  

Embellishments will be added as duplicate stitch (an embroidering that imitates the knitted stitch), just like the Shambones.  Any ideas and suggestions you might have would be greatly appreciated.  I’ll ponder and take suggestions until I finish knitting the socks and then choose some decoration in consultation with Sister.  

Stash Toss

I may have mentioned that I have too many hobbies.  I sew—clothes, quilts, household goods, toys, costumes.  I knit—socks, lace, sweaters, toys, apple jackets.  I make crafty little weird things from time to time.  I encourage my children to do the same.  Their projects often involve small pieces of wood and copious amounts of scotch tape and glue.  And also sometimes paint.  I write—yes, I think right now this counts as a hobby, so seldom do I do it, but I aspire to shift this from hobby to, well, to something more involved at some point.  Oh, and I used to be a runner, and hope someday to be one again.  

That doesn’t count reading, which isn’t so much a hobby as a need.  And cooking, ditto need.  And gardening, which truthfully doesn’t involve me as often as it does Partner, but I’m there in a pinch.  

Each of these activities has accumulated stuff.  Reading: books.  Gardening:  uh, dirt, and vegetables, gloves, tools, blisters.  Knitting:  yarn, needles, scissors, patterns.  Sewing: boxes and boxes of fabric, and stuffing, elastic, buttons, snaps, velcro, thread, patterns and two sewing machines (ok, one is a serger and I haven’t actually used it successfully yet, but I’m hopeful).  

The craft stuff has filled an entire closet in my house.  I’ve admitted to my yarn stash being fairly reasonable and modest.  After tossing the craft closet, the yarn now occupies two plastic file boxes and one plastic blanket bag.  The fabric is another story altogether—several bins, a couple of garbage bags, and slouchy stacks.  

All of this stuff wears down my brain.  Even when it is successfully crammed into the closet with the door shut, I know it is there, occupying space.  Making me feel guilty with the unfulfilled promise and possibility that all of those raw materials represent.  

Before his death, trying to finish one last album before cancer finished him off, Warren Zevon noted about his love of reading that buying new books does not buy the time it takes to read them.  Not the happiest thought, but it is a realistic assessment that each of us has only a limited amount of time in any day, week or life, and that the accumulation of stuff does not magically expand our hours.  

When I shop (which I really dislike doing), I often ask myself the basic question, ‘Do I need this?’  That’s fairly easy to answer, but harder often is the next question, ‘Do I have time for this?’  I can cascade from there into sub-questions about whether I’m willing to make time for something that I need or something that I will find fulfilling for other reasons.  This basic personal consumption questioning has helped to keep the stashes under some semblance of control.  

Fabric and yarn are difficult for me though.  I can see the possibility in every piece of fabric I have.  The things that I could make.  I have the skill, the creativity, the enthusiasm.  So when someone says, ‘Hey, I don’t need this fabric/these bedsheets/this old quilt/this yarn, would you like to have it?’  I often can’t say no, especially if they are walking to the trash can as they say it.  When the yarn or fabric is super-cheap, I often can’t say no.  But the generosity of neighbors, the lure of a good deal, the infinite possibilities that those materials could become, do not give me the extra time to actually use them.  

So, in the interest of simplifying my closets, life, brain/clutter distress, I tossed my craft closet last night.  I wanted to be firm.  I planned ahead.  I had decided to keep all yarn, but sort it (and, oh, did I find some of the flashiest, sluttiest red mohair yarn that I did not know I had—I would link to a pic, but it’s discontinued and I can’t find it online: Pingouin Panache Mohair.  I don’t even know where it came from.  Yarn fairies?  There are at least two lace scarves coming out of that).  I had decided to keep fabric that I like that would be useful in the creation of quilts (I will quilt again.  I will.  I feel a moral compunction here.  I made quilts for some friends/family for their babies, and feel certain that I will want to do the same again for future babies.  Also, my sonars are outgrowing their kid quilts, and one day I will want to make them growing-up quilts that fit their big bodies.)  I had decided to keep any garment fabric that was already cut or paired with a specific pattern.  In other words, I would finish what I’d started in there.  

Out the door I had planned to throw all other apparel fabric, all weird fabric, all upholstery fabric, all stinky fabric (I inherited a bunch of stuff from my grandmother’s garage), all ugly fabric, and any clothes that were beyond reasonable mending.  

The will is strong in theory and weak in the face of the actual stuff.  

As I started to unload the closet, I was struck by how much more stuff was in there than I realized.  It really was worse than I thought.  Some things were easy:  8 yards of stinky, yellow, knit terry cloth.  Gone.  Ditto the 50 yards of stinky, navy, woven terry.  I fudged a bit, keeping the old sheets because I thought they might make a good bottom layer for summer quilts.  I completely faltered at the fleece-lined neoprene.  I mean, seriously, I know it’s red and black, and I know I bought it for a ridiculously low price, but what if one of the Sonars needs a wet-suit one day?  I could make it!!  It could happen.  We do live on the coast.  Maybe one of them will become a surfer.  Or a kiteboarder.  

It was painful.  Two hours later I had two large trashbags full of fabric to freecycle.  Which is good.  But I really did want to get rid of more.  I am left with one giant bin full of quilting fabric (loosely defined).  A giant bin of various works in progress, and apparel fabric that I just couldn’t get rid of (the pink/orange/drapey Hawaiian print that my grandma bought a whole bolt of on vacation 800 years ago and which she begrudgingly shared 3 yards with me, among other things).  A smaller bin full of upholstery fabric, which is really just too handy and versatile to part with (and oh, what if I need drapes sometime?).  In there is also about half of the array of lining fabrics that I inherited from my mother-in-law (seriously, we could have lined anything to match.  The woman had collected everything from shell pink to blood red to chocolate brown to caramel paisley—I kept the caramel paisley).  There is a file box full of patterns.  Ditto a file box full of notions (which really needs its own toss, but I was too drained to do it last night).  

Remind me not to look in the garbage bags again before I get rid of it.  I might take stuff out.  

Do I have time now to knit the slutty red lace?  

Teeth, and the Last Day of School

I really love to brush my teeth.  It feels good.  Leaves my mouth fresh.  Satisfies that obsessive part of my brain that is into patterns and repetition and order.  That’s not to say that I brush my teeth as often as I should.  I’m pretty good about brushing in the morning, unless it’s a weekend and my day starts off in a slower, more lazy way.  

I’m very hit-or-miss about nighttime brushing.  And it seems to me that nighttime brushing is even more important than morning brushing in terms of overall mouth health.  I mean, at night there’s no saliva flowing, no movement of the inside-the-mouth parts, and whether we sleep with our mouths open or closed, if there is food residue in there while we’re sleeping, we’re just setting up a wonderland playground for the little germs that live in there and eat our teeth when we’re not looking.   But skipping the nighttime brushing is so much easier perhaps because there is no social stigma.  I mean, skipping the morning brushing leaves you breathing horror into the faces of anyone you talk to, while skipping the nighttime brushing offends only you, or perhaps the person that shares your bed and suffers your open-mouthed breathing in his or her face.  

Still, I do a fairly good job of both morning and nighttime brushing when I’m on a set schedule.  When I am regularly required to do certain things at a certain time and/or place.  

I am about to be cut loose from most such constraints for eleven weeks because today is the last day of the school year.  After today, our only regularly scheduled stop will be Thursday storytime at the library, that and the need to generally get the children food and sleep at approximately the same times each day.  

Before you assume that I’ll be sleeping in and eating bon-bons all day, let me reassure you that laundry and dishes and cooking and entertainment and vetting of media and discipline and mediation and education and legos and the carving out of time to have adult conversation with Partner and squeeze in some personal intellectual development and the enaction of my own dreams and goals and aspirations—not to mention a birthday party for an eight-year-old— will all still occur.  I’ll just be able to do it without having to get up at the crack of dawn or go to bed before midnight.  

I’m just not sure I’ll remember to brush my teeth.  

Aspirations and Fear

I realized this week—to my surprise and confusion—that I still aspire. Not the breathing-in kind of aspiring. The hoping-to-achieve kind.

It’s been nearly eight (!) years since my first child was born, and five years (!!) since I left graduate school and payroll work. Only one of my three kids is in school right now. I have two-and-a-half years to get all three of them there. But that point is suddenly close enough that I can see the reality of it. Close enough that all of those things I said I might do when all three kids are in school are now barrelling toward me more quickly than I expected.

I thought I’d be ready for this. The decision to leave grad school and paid work was gut-wrenching for me. I knew, though, that my children would only be small for so long, and it was important to me to be their primary caregiver through their earliest years. And that one day they would go to school, and at that point I would figure out some other professional me to be.

As I see that point coming closer, I find myself unready. Unsteady. Terrified. And exhilerated with the possibilities.

Some of you might say it’s the anxiety about the babies growing up. And there is some of that of course. But I trust them, and while I will sigh nostalgically over their baby selves, I also know that their growing selves will be just as interesting and sigh-worthy.

No, the anxiety and excitement and confusion is about me. About my self-identity. The caring for my very small children is important to me. I would not have left grad school if I didn’t feel that the care of their early selves was the most important work I could do for them. Them going to school, though, provides me with the time to begin to rebuild my individual identity, the one that is separate from my children. It is very unlikely to be the same me that I was before I was a mama, though there are still big chunks of that fierce girl (a feminist intellectual, determined to fight The Man, and make new knowledge) left in me. It is very unlikely to be completely disentangled from the mama-me either. I AM someone’s mama now.

How will those bits of fierce girl and fierce mama fit together? And what other pieces will fit in there? Who will I be and what will I do?

For a full 24 hours this week I decided that I wanted to get an Accounting Degree and become a CPA. This seemed like a very reasonable thing to want to be. I would study for a few years, and be virtually assured a steady job with steady pay that would allow me to support my family in the event of catastrophe, or to allow my husband to take a turn away from the payroll as the before-and-after-school parent.

Ha.

I don’t really want to be an Accountant (though, seriously, all of the numbers and the puzzle of making them make sense does seriously appeal to that hyper-organized, A-personality, keener part of me). I want to be a writer. But boy oh boy is that scary.

Look, if I became an Accountant, I’d have to put in the work (and the money) to be a student for a few years, but at the end of it I have no reason to doubt that I’d get a reasonable job. To become a writer, I’ll likely have to put in some hard work for a few years, producing readable, publishable material, but there is no virtual guarantee at the end. The work might suck. Or the market might be resistant. From what I hear the publishing industry is hard. This lot-of-work-for-no-guaranteed-return is scary. Make-me-think-about-Accounting scary. Shake-in-my-boots-and-make-me-want-to-overhyphenate-everything scary.

Two trusted people poked me just the right way at just the right time. I remembered that scary isn’t always bad. If I wanted to avoid the unexpected and the difficult, I’d never have become a parent. If I wanted an opportunity to CREATE (which, as you might notice, I love to do) anything like new knowledge or understanding, I could do it with writing. If I wanted to try to pick up and rail against The Man, I could do it with writing. I can write in the space between packing the kids off to school and greeting them with a snack. I could write and find a balance point between the two.

While I’m not a big one for doing things to please other people, it did help, this week, to have two people point out to me in their own unique ways, that they do want to read what I write. That they do want me to give it my best shot. And that no decision has to be made RIGHT NOW. I still have a little time.

But I think I’ve already decided. And here it goes. One baby step at a time. I will try to add Professional Writer to my list of personal descriptors.

Deep Breath.

*****
P.S. Today R and C were involved in an incident that resulted in a spectacular head bonk for C. He has a goose egg on his forehead the size of Manhattan Island, otherwise he is ok. We’ll check on him a few times tonight. In the moment of the trauma, I acted exactly as I had to. Did all of the things I was supposed to do at the right times. Soothing, icing, hugging, checking pupils, and asking the right questions. I really am sure that he’ll be fine. But the aftermath leaves me wrung out, on the weepy side, and with muscles shivering with fatigue and emotion. Seriously, if I can convince an injured four-year-old to hold the ice pack to his swollen head in spite of the searing pain, surely writing won’t be so hard. ;)

Goals

Random though the beginning of a new year is, it’s a convenient time for new beginnings.

So here we are—da da da dum!—My goals for 2008. These are my personal goals, and are rather inwardly focused this year (and yes, I have included a cliched exercise goal here). I’m hoping, as a mom, that the residual effects of these practices will be good for my family as well. Sort of like putting on my own oxygen mask in an airplane depressurization before I assist those around me.

1. To write every day. Blog, free-write, handwritten letters, story planning. Something written. I’ve decided not to count email, unless it’s a post of significant length. This mainly because I want to have substantive writing each day.

2. To do some combination of running, walking, or yoga every day. The meta-goal here is fitness. Short term goal is to be able to run for 30 minutes four times a week (I’m building up to that over eleven weeks). The long term goal is going to be distance running. Perhaps a marathon next year?

3. To get enough sleep. To be in the bed for seven to eight hours every night. In many ways, this is the toughest one for me. I like staying up late. I like talking with my partner, chatting with friends, reading, knitting, sometimes watching a movie. In the quiet house. The one where the children are all sleeping. So it is very easy for me to stay up to midnight. This is not so good when I have to get up at six or six-thirty to get a child off to school. It’s also not so good for the influence it has on my partner, who regularly gets up at five. So (deep breath) I’m going to try to be in bed by 10:30 on school nights and 11:30 on other nights. This is the goal I have the most doubt about, honestly. I’m laughing at it right now.

Wish me luck.

How about you? Any goals you want to share?