route markers

With the holiday madness setting on earlier and earlier each year, courtesy of increasingly desperate marketers and sellers of superfluous stuff, when we set out from home in the SF Bay Area for our destination back east two days ago, we thought that we were going to get a head start on the rush. But as it turns out that in addition to the early onset of the mass travel syndrome, all it took is a bad hamburger or too much of something or other to bring down a pilot, which necessitated our airline of choice to fly in another pilot to man the plane. Seems they are short on locally available crews….

Needless to say, there went any hope of our catching the connecting flight from one of the world’s worst possible places to catch a connecting flight, JFK! Still, given the airlines generously sized seats (at least in comparison to other airlines) the trip itself was pleasant and restful, even if the madness in trying to figure out our next move from JFK in the middle of the night was not. But the airline, having learned its lesson from a PR fiasco back some time ago, once we established contact over the lost connection, sprung a voucher for us for a night in a hotel in nearby Queens.

And so our own version of the Amazing Race started, with being couple number one (thanks to finding the airline info counter first among the hordes who missed their connecting flights) at the first “pit stop,” where we got our prize: a free one-night stay in a Holiday Inn in Queens.

After 4 hours of sleep in our travel clothes, interrupted by the shriek of an unstoppable alarm clock set earlier by some other hapless traveler caught in a similar predicament, we set out on the next leg of our journey, which being early in the day, went off without a hitch. And so we and our luggage arrived at our destination in Pittsburgh, where, celebrating with family, we are bound to encounter challenges and games and detours meant to trip us up and so risk elimination from the race…. But I am prepared! With knitting needles and plenty of wool.

Oh, and the one lesson I take with me from this: If your children move away from home, try to make it a rule that they have to live in a place that’s within a non-stop flight from your base….

haste makes waste

My little knitting frenzy has been, well, frenetic, to say the least. Remembering that I took up this old hobby again as a way to practice a form of meditation, could help curb, if not my enthusiasm for knitting, at least my judgment for its haphazard results.

For here it is, the lovely child’s cape I imagined in my beginner’s knitting mind, finished and standing like a giant tea cozy or an unfinished hat, or a pillow or purse gone mad, both in size and pattern, the more rows I added:

This creation will certainly not delight the child for whom it was meant, but so far, it gave me a good laugh today, the best I had in a long time. Tomorrow, like the Penelope of myths, I will unravel this marvel of attempt, and start again, keeping the suitors, those desires for perfection and such, partying in the din-addled halls of the mind.

just another sunday

… indeed, it is just another Sunday, peacefully quiet and surprisingly sunny after yesterday’s gloomy skies and generous dose of rain. I am catching up with chores to boring to mention here, but very satisfying to finish with finally. In the course of performing one of these chores, I realized just how much I have spent in one week at the yarn store. at this rate, I would be better off buying my own flock of sheep….

But, in this one week, I also managed to wrap up one knitting project, the long scarf for my mother, which should keep her neck warm in the early winter that seems to be settling on Budapest, apparently.

I am already well into the next project, my first ever on circular needles, which I am liking more and more. This project is a caplet for a child, and, being quite simple, it should take me another two days or so of spare-time knitting to finish.

The yarn, which is superwash wool, feels like silk to work with, making the simple knit stitches easy and fast to produce in even rows. The yarn comes from Lorna’s Hand-Dyed Yarns, and if you explore the somewhat clumsy (and stupidly programmed in terms of links) site, you’ll be treated to some lovely patterns that really show off Lorna’s yarns to an advantage. I don’t know if there is a Lorna or not, but her yarns are really, really nice — even if not cheap.

Now, if some this enthusiasm I have for knitting could be transfered to writing perhaps I could fascinate my readers here at least one-tenth of the fascination I have with knitting. OK, that didn’t make much sense, but it illustrates the point I was making….

nuttingness

I attended a workshop at Spirit Rock today. It was an all-day event, with plenty of opportunities to speak up and share. I did neither, but was moved by the stories of those who live with a “wounded brain,” and those who care for them, for the split between these two groups was almost even.

Though there was much wisdom gained about what it means when “neurons that fire together, wire together,” what I want to record are two extraneous incidents, neither which would have happened to me had I not gone to the workshop today.

First, on the lunch break, I browsed the bookstore and in the bargain bin I found a book titled “The Knitting Sutra,” by Susan Gordon Lydon. Having spent the last week knitting (yes, I have several projects on the needles), I had the opportunity to come to see my knitting as a form of practice, about which I wanted to write. But lo ad behold, here was a small volume already working with that thread….

The second incident is the kernel for the title of this post – and perhaps for the one-word summary of my day.

The practice at Spirit Rock is to pay a fee for the workshops/courses based on a sliding scale. These fees go towards maintaining Spirit Rock, but they do not cover payment to the teachers. For that, there is dana, or the practice of generosity.

Well, when yours truly signed up for the course, she gave above and beyond the fee, though not exactly in magnanimous amounts. Yours truly also went a little nuts in the bookstore and bought more books than the one from the bargain bin. So, when the time came to put the shoes back on and head out into the rainy night, she reasoned that she gave – and that (and get this), after reading the books, she’ll be giving in ways more than money can account for, so she sheepishly passed the dana basket and stepped out into the rain. She made her way down the steps and as she took her first step on the path, conk, she felt something hitting her head fast and hard. Just about where her right frontal lobe area might be residing, a big nut from a tree (which she can’t identify botanically just now), knocked, as if trying to remind her of the sense of the day she spent. Her first move was to keep walking toward the parking lot and laughing at the superstition her mind just cooked up. But it wasn’t long before she turned around – that is, her body moved faster than her mind – and soon she was back in the building, dropping a reasonable amount into the dana basket for the teachers who have been so generous with their spirit on this day.

In fact, the generosity of these teachers can be availed by all here, where they keep talks and articles free for the taking….

blog bubbly

Blogging gets so much bad press still, that when a fellow blogger gets some fantastic news on account of her blog, one can’t help but gloat. The poly-talented Natalie d’Arbeloff, who writes Blaugustine, was not only one of six finalists among some 700 in a competition sponsored by the Guardian newspaper, but WON, as she was to find out at the party.

Her prize? She gets to edit the Guardian’s women’s pages for a week. Way to go, Natalie!!!

fuzz on the brain (and mind)

Woolly thoughts, as I keep knitting away like some madwoman who tries to hang on to reality (and yes, here comes the pun … sorry) by a thread. But really, it is more Virginia Woolf that I am thinking of, and the ways in which she talked about the patterns in the weave of things and literature.

Like the two-part Bach invention I am trying to learn to play on the piano (forget master, for what would be the purpose of that anyway, except its pompous purposefullness?) so it is with the knitting suddenly. Patterns that challenge and soothe. Patterns that require mindfulness without a mind full of preoccupations.

So here is how it’s shaping up so far: the original colorful yarn I bought and quickly purled into a longish piece is going to be unraveled to make something else, for the yarn is too good and too expensive to have used for practice only.

Then again, if I am to follow this thread, practice is the purpose, isn’t it?

What they say about knitting and bicycles is true. No matter how long it’s been since your last ride, you’ll always know how to push off, if nothing else. So, I went back to the yarn store (oh my poor wallet), and bought more needles and yarn for those joy rides to come.

The two balls of yarn to the right of the scarf-in-progress are going to turn into a poncho for a special little girl. They will also provide me with my first turn at making a seamless garment on circular needles. The scarf is a gift for my mother. Aside from making her kitschy gifts in elementary school, I don’t think I have given her anything I made. Well, my book of poems – the patterns of which may or may not resemble this:

in stitches

Well, I guess it is going around, so it’s no wonder I got the bug, too. Yep, I felt the urge today, and it was strong enough — helped also by a desire to escape a number of twists and turns I had to deal with lately — for me to run out and get some yarn and knitting needles.

It’s been years (no, many decades) since I last took up the needles — and these circular things are nothing like the old big sticks I used to beat yarn into shape, so to speak. It took some 10 minutes to remember how to go about the knit and purl business, and now I am ready to make a scarf — well, make that two, since I have two sons in cold climates this season…. One thing I haven’t quite remembered yet is how to make the edges even.

Best of all, the place where I bought the yarn has classes and workshops and just plain knitting get-togethers, which could help take my knitting to the next level, such as sweater maybe, not to mention what it can do to my recent bout of playing Minesweep for hours at a time on the computer….