You remember how sometime I struggle with these ten on Tuesday topis? Not this time. Heh. I made a PowerPoint once to present to middle-schoolers on this very topic. Let's see if I can remember my ten points.
Ten Reasons To Use The Public Library.
Free books on every topic you can possibly think of -- computers, Eastern religions, paganism, witchcraft, parkour, photography, paper airplanes, cooking, dog training, ancient music, Ozzy Ozbourne. And more.
Free videos and DVDs, from new releases to documentaries to DIY projects to yoga.
Free public access computers. (BTW, most -- if not all -- public access computers are set up to erase your browsing history when you log off. Just sayin'.)
Free music CDs. Ravel, rap, rock, religious.
Free magazines on everything from current events to birdwatching to skateboarding.
Your parents (this is from my middle-school PowerPoint, remember?) are already paying for the library through their taxes. You might as well take advantage of it.
Every single bit of information that has ever been written down is available through the library.
It's not all on the Internet, and what is there has no quality control.
Free programs -- check out your library's website and/or bulletin board.
Did I mention it is free/already paid for?
Carole is a library director and she loves libraries. I love libraries. I have worked in several small-town libraries, am treasurer of one Friends of the library group and secretary of another, and serve on the regional library board. Libraries ROCK!
And libraries are always under attack. Sometimes the attack is from well-meaning people who want to censor others' reading materials. Sometimes the attack is from over-ambitious law enforcement officials who think that knowing what people are reading will help them find criminals and terrorists. And sometimes libraries are seen as a luxury, one that cash-strapped local governments and belligerent taxpayers cannot afford.
The question is, Can we afford to be without them?
"Closing libraries in a recession is like closing hospitals in a plague." Amen.
The topic for today is ten reasons to be glad it is spring. Although the weather is warming slowly and the snow is melting, spring is not yet on the horizon up here on the Great Frozen Tundra. My daffodils in front of the Minneapolis house have poked up their little shoots... and gotten their tips frozen. So I will have to use my memory and imagination to visualize spring and change the topic slightly
Ten Reasons To Be Glad It's Spring Is Coming.
The return of the light. It has been returning gradually since December 21, noticeably since mid-January, and suddenly! when daylight savings kicked in. But long evenings when the light lingers until nearly 10 pm are still a long way off.
No more mittens, scarves, boots, parkas. Actually, that is a bit sad -- must put away the hand-knits until next November.
No more icy roads or sidewalks. My feet shot out from under me Friday morning when I walked out to my car and hit a patch of ice on the sidewalk. No more of that.
Smells. Damp earth, green growing things, spring flowers... ahhh!
Grilling. Nothing tastes better than food cooked on the grill... mmm!
Eating on the porch again. The view is lovely.
Spring peepers. To Smokey and I this is one of the Big Events Of Spring.
The return of the loons to the lake. Another Big Event.
I keep a list of the books I read each year, and a few years ago also started keeping a list of the ones I started and gave up on. For the first time ever, my list of "Did Not Finish" is currently longer (10) than the ones I actually finished (9). As might be true of any such list, the DNF is more reflective of my mood when reading than it is of the quality of the books. Right now, while doing taxes and consequently brain-dead after 8 pm, I find that it is the rare book that I can actually read and comprehend. I have finished only one book, a thriller, since I started work on February 7. Apparently a job is the enemy of literacy -- in my case, anyway.
* * * * *
A friend emailed this to me, and it touched my heart. Googling revealed that it was first published here.
Things here in Sendai have been rather surreal. But I am very blessed to have wonderful friends who are helping me a lot. Since my shack is even more worthy of that name, I am now staying at a friend's home. We share supplies like water, food and a kerosene heater. We sleep lined up in one room, eat by candlelight, share stories. It is warm, friendly, and beautiful.
During the day we help each other clean up the mess in our homes. People sit in their cars, looking at news on their navigation screens, or line up to get drinking water when a source is open. If someone has water running in their home, they put out a sign so people can come to fill up their jugs and buckets.
It's utterly amazingly that where I am there has been no looting, no pushing in lines. People leave their front door open, as it is safer when an earthquake strikes. People keep saying, "Oh, this is how it used to be in the old days when everyone helped one another."
Quakes keep coming. Last night they struck about every 15 minutes. Sirens are constant and helicopters pass overhead often.
We got water for a few hours in our homes last night, and now it is for half a day. Electricity came on this afternoon. Gas has not yet come on. But all of this is by area. Some people have these things, others do not. No one has washed for several days. We feel grubby, but there are so much more important concerns than that for us now. I love this peeling away of non-essentials. Living fully on the level of instinct, of intuition, of caring, of what is needed for survival, not just of me, but of the entire group.
There are strange parallel universes happening. Houses a mess in some places, yet then a house with futons or laundry out drying in the sun. People lining up for water and food, and yet a few people out walking their dogs. All happening at the same time.
Other unexpected touches of beauty are first, the silence at night. No cars. No one out on the streets. And the heavens at night are scattered with stars. I usually can see about two, but now the whole sky is filled. The mountains are Sendai are solid and with the crisp air we can see them silhouetted against the sky magnificently.
And the Japanese themselves are so wonderful. I come back to my shack to check on it each day, now to send this e-mail since the electricity is on, and I find food and water left in my entranceway. I have no idea from whom, but it is there. Old men in green hats go from door to door checking to see if everyone is OK. People talk to complete strangers asking if they need help. I see no signs of fear. Resignation, yes, but fear or panic, no.
They tell us we can expect aftershocks, and even other major quakes, for another month or more. And we are getting constant tremors, rolls, shaking, rumbling. I am blessed in that I live in a part of Sendai that is a bit elevated, a bit more solid than other parts. So, so far this area is better off than others. Last night my friend's husband came in from the country, bringing food and water. Blessed again.
Somehow at this time I realize from direct experience that there is indeed an enormous Cosmic evolutionary step that is occurring all over the world right at this moment. And somehow as I experience the events happening now in Japan, I can feel my heart opening very wide. My brother asked me if I felt so small because of all that is happening. I don't. Rather, I feel as part of something happening that much larger than myself. This wave of birthing (worldwide) is hard, and yet magnificent.
Thank you again for your care and Love of me,
With Love in return, to you all, Anne
* * * * *
You may have read / seen / heard about the gas main explosion in Minneapolis on Thursday. I missed it entirely, having been back in Wisconsin for meetings on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. If I been in Minneapolis I would most certainly have known about it; the site is about 1.5 miles from our house.
Caution: this video was made, apparently, by a young man with a limited vocabulary; his commentary is definitely NSFW. But it is the best video I found on YouTube. After the young man's initial comment, he spliced in some audio from a local radio station, which includes an announcer who doesn't know how to pronounce Nicollet (NICK-o-let, not Nick-o-LET).
If you don't want to watch the video, here are some choice screen shots of cars that were parked close to the site.
The melted stuff reminds me of that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when they open the Ark of the Covenant and the Nazis' faces melt.
To orient you, here is Google's shot of the area looking north toward downtown. The orange star marks the approximate site of the blast, the orange arrow points to the tree that is no more, and Cub Foods, a large supermarket, is outlined in red. Our house is somewhere off to the upper left. I think the man who took the video was standing on Nicollet Avenue, initially up between 58th and 59th Streets, and later, after the fire was out, near 60th.
The freeway at the right , I-35W, is one of the busiest in the country, and the explosion occurred near the end of the morning rush hour. It is amazing, considering the neighborhood, that no one was injured.
We had a rather massive ice dam on the roof of the addition. It was right above the laundry / sewing / craft room. I took this photo on January 12, and you know it hadn't gotten any smaller in the last two months.
Our roof is only a few years old, is very well built, and we have never had any damage or leakage from previous ice dams in that same place so we didn't worry about it.
This week the weather is starting to warm up. Lots of melting going on.
Tuesday afternoon Smokey heard a big Thwump! but didn't think much about it. Probably just the cat getting something he isn't supposed to, he thought.
But when he came out later to drive to town, he discovered what had made the noise. The entire ice dam and the snowbank behind it had slid off the roof... and onto the small deck on that side of the house.
Those are some m%^&% f^&*ing big ice cubes lying on our driveway there.
Late last night when I came home after the monthly county board meeting, I backed my car down the driveway (because it is easier to get it up the next day if I don't have to deal with turning it around on the ice) not realizing that there was, er, debris down there.
Happily, I missed the railing...
...and the nails sticking up from the board (in the red circle).
Part of the deck took out a side window in the entryway (barely visible above the roof of the yellow Aveo in the first photo) and bounced off the hood of the car. Said car has only a couple tiny dents in the fender and the hood; said window needs new thermopane. Or entire new window; insurance adjuster hasn't been here yet.
No animals were injured in the making of this blog post, and we needed a new barbecue grill anyway.
Blueberry, particularly if made with fresh wild blueberries. I have only had this once, about 40 years ago, but I still remember it.
Pumpkin. This is #1 Son's favorite. I make it on his birthday instead of a cake.
Apple. The all-American classic. I make mine with Granny Smith apples.
Chocolate. Not the French silk pie at Baker's Square or Perkins or some other family restaurant, but the chocolate pie at The Brother's or the Lincoln Del or Bernie's Deli (those are all in Minneapolis). The French silk gets its scant yumminess from a little bit of chocolate and a lot of sugar, whereas the other get their excessive yumminess from a lot of chocolate. Sigh; haven't had a slice of that for years.
Everything after this is way, way down on the list.
On Friday I saw irony personified. Didn't have my camera with me so had to come back on Saturday. Forgot about it Saturday morning on the way to work so had to take a swing back after work to grab a photo before I headed home to Wisconsin.
This is between the street and the parking lot of my neighborhood liquor store.
Happily I caught the red light -- I took these from my car -- so I got an even better shot.
Advertising a *spring* wine sale... on a ginormous pile of snow. Yep, that's Minneapolis, all right!
Click on the burger to see another snow- and hop-filled video.
* * * * *
Thanks for all the input on the shawlette bind-off yesterday. I am taking it all into consideration. Hope to finish and block it this weekend and present it to the recipient next week when I am home for a couple days.
It came to me that I had swatched this yarn a few month ago. That swatch had enough yarn in it to knit another row and a half! That would certainly help, but would it be enough?
Then I hit on the idea of weighing my remaining ball of yarn before and after one of those 500+ stitch rows.
Before: 11 grams
After: 9 grams
Assuming that the bind-off row takes a bit more than each of the other rows -- which is what I have noticed in the past; when I run out of yarn during a bind-off, ripping back exactly one row doesn't give me quite enough yarn (YMMV) -- and assuming that I used exactly 2 grams (scale doesn't go to tenths of a gram) I would be able to knit 8 of the remaining 11 eleven rows called for by the pattern, plus the bind-off row.
That might be satisfactory, but I thought I should at least explore the possibility of using ALL the Misti Alpaca Hand-Painted yarn and doing the bind-off in a solid color.
At left, all the solids I considered; at right, the finalists.
I am leaning toward either of the ones on the left side of the finalist photo, with a slight preference for the one at upper left.
(If you are not hungry, you will be by the time you finish my list.)
Bread baking. Anything in the oven, really.
Steak or burgers on the grill.
Onions frying. My MIL used to quote a friend who said the to make a man happy, fry some onions right before he comes home. Works for me!
Anything with garlic
The first smell of spring, usually damp earth (followed closely by the smell of defrosting dog poo; that part is not my favorite).
Lavender. It doesn't grow in Zone 3/4 where I live; the first time I smelled it in situ was in an English garden. Heaven!
Old roses. Only the traditional roses have a real rose scent; the modern ones have been bred for other characteristics.
Paperwhite narcissus. Febreze has a scent called Springtime, and this is what it smells like.
Lilacs. We had a huge old bush outside the windows of our house in Minneapolis. I loved to open the windows on a spring afternoon and let the fragrance waft into the house.
Food and flowers. Yep, that pretty much covers it.
Wha-at? Surely you are not surprised to learn that I, the nerdiest of your favorite nerdy bloggers, reads a grammar blog? How else do you think am I able to write such consistently grammatically and syntactically and punctuarially perfect prose? (Oh, I can hear you groaning and doing the ::headdesk:: out there. Sure, I make that occasional goof. That's what makes me so lovable, right? Never mind.)
I read another one, too, by Harmless Drudge*, who is a dictionary editor and the producer of much dry hilarity. I would link to a particularly amusing post here, but her version of WordPress does not seem to allow for that. Crap. My favorites are the ones where she responds to letters to Amalgamated Language, her fictionalized employer; page through her posts until you find one. You will not be sorry.
Harmless is also a published knitter, but that is beside my point here. Do read that article on knitting two socks at once, though; it will blow your tiny little mind just like it did mine. Way back when I discovered her, she was writing a series of posts that explained the parts of speech -- nouns, verbs, etc. -- by the analogy of a family picnic. I didn't search her archives well enough to find them but you are welcome to do so.
There you have it. Nerd post by nerd blogger about fellow nerds. Nerds rule!
* Tragically, that blog seems to have languished pretty much into oblivion. But hark! The Google to the rescue! She has a newer one! Read away to your heart's content! Harmless seems to blog only about once a year, but still, that is better than no blogging at all.
That, my friends, is a nearly finished Citron, knit from Mista Alpaca fingering weight. It is a bit scrunched up; know that when it is properly blocked it will appear less blotchy. (I hope.) I have knitted 2 of the 11 rows of the final ruffle. Each of those rows is >500 st.
And this is how much yarn I have left.
That ball is about the size of a golf ball. It will not be enough. The final ruffle, she will be... narrower than called for in the pattern. And the bind off may be a solid color. But it will be done. It is a gift, and when it has been finished and blocked and presented to the recipient, I can knit something for memeME!
