Musings from LAX
This:
.. is where I’ve been this week.
It’s been glorious.
My meeting Monday and Tuesday - the last face-to-face meeting for this project - went well and I feel that the work we’ve done has good, solid potential to be adopted by the sponsoring organizations. My role in that work was not insignificant, and that is something for which I’m both proud and grateful.
Starting around 2 on Tuesday, though, I’ve been on vacation and got to spend three laid back and relaxing days catching up with and getting to know better a few good friends. It’s not uncommon for me to be mildly anxious at being a house guest, especially at the home of someone I don’t know “like kin”, but my welcome was nothing short of warm and friendly and, best of all, casual. I typically prefer to simply melt into the background of any particular gathering and my friends here allowed me that - they allowed me to simply join their lives for a few days and exist alongside them as they went about doing what they do. I could not have asked for a better vacation and am already counting the days until we are reunited (133, in fact *smile*).
Because they are also SCAdians, and because SCAdians tend to be artisans of all sorts, I had time to work on some projects while I was here as well. The first of the Sprung Socks (PDF), from the Yarn Pirate yarn I received from Stephanie as part of the Gnome Swap, is almost complete:
I’ve also worked up a fair bit more of the baby camel and tussah silk since I last posted about it:
I will likely soon wind off the copp of this one as it’s getting a bit heavy to keep the thread as thin as I’d like. I haven’t decided yet what this will be, mostly because I’m not sure how much of it I’ll end up with. I’m hoping for something thin enough to make a lace wrap, or maybe the edging of one.
I also started working up the cashgora I got in Kansas City with Cate and Sara:
I’m loving the color in this, but working with the goat fiber is a bit different from wool - it has noticeably less crimp and is coarser than what I’ve been working with lately, much more like hair than fleece. All the same, I’m truly enjoying watching the color shifts and expect that this will be my first Navajo plied yarn so that I can maintain said shifts without muddying them.
I also managed to find some uninterrupted reading time, a luxury I rarely afford myself when at home. I finished The Dress Lodger by Sheri Holman, a book selected by a book group that’s recently started meeting on campus. It’s an odd little novel, centered (as seems to be somewhat of a theme with this group so far) on a cholera epidemic in early 19th century England. It took me awhile to really get into the book - something about the characters seemed distant, making it difficult for me to really care about their story - but by the end I was hooked in enough that it wasn’t as if I had to force myself to finish it. *shrug* The next book for this group will be The Thirteenth Tale, which I have on order from Zooba and will admit to being a bit stand-offish about given it’s recent acclaim (yes, I am contrary like that).
My guilty pleasure reading after The Dress Lodger is Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart, which I’m re-reading to remind myself of the beginnings of this wonderfully crafted tale. Having just finished Kushiel’s Scion I found myself with hazy memories of some of the history and interconnections built up throughout Phedre’s life and because the stories are so engaging it was the perfect choice for a book to get lost in while on vacation and a wonderful travel companion for the four and a half hours of flights home.
Oh, and since I was downloading the pictures in my camera, here’s one of the cheesecake I made last week, unmolded:
Books.
Right then.. It’s summer (I’m told most people consider Memorial Day weekend the “official” start of summer; for me (and I’d guess most of us in academia) it’s the start of summer term, about a week after commencement) and that means it’s time to read. Several weeks ago I posted about the books I wanted to read this summer. Some of you may recall that I finished Ghost Map shortly after that post, and Leaving Atlanta quickly followed. So that means Eat Pray Love was next, so without further ado..
I don’t think I’ve intentionally been putting off writing about this one - I have legitimately been busy and traveling and then there was the small matter of my laptop deciding not to boot for a couple days - but I admit to still being a bit unsettled about it. The book is divided into 3 sections - Italy, India, and Indonesia - and is the author’s (Elizabeth Gilbert) narrative of her recovery and rediscovery of herself throughout her year of travels. Ms. Gilbert’s writing style is very engaging and the opening of the book was immediately gripping; I felt like she was writing from inside my head, which is a bit misleading - I’m not now nor have I ever been in the situation she describes, but I could viscerally identify with the emotion.
And I stayed more or less an emotional voyeur throughout Italy. In India, Richard from Texas jumped out of the pages, living and breathing. We all need a Richard from Texas. My lasting impression of India was that it went by so much faster than Italy. I never went back to actually figure out if there were fewer pages, or if it was just that because of the relative lack of “terrain” covered compared to Italy, it seemed so. But Indonesia.. Indonesia is where I started to emotionally disconnect with Ms. Gilbert. I still can’t quite identify which part of Indonesia caused me to pull away - and I don’t want to give too much away by listing the options for those who still want to read it - but there was definitely something distancing in Indonesia. And while I still enjoyed the book through to the end, it wasn’t a book that left me wanting more.
Which I think is okay, and it rather nicely illustrates the point of the book - a journey to identify yourself. In the end, Ms. Gilbert found herself, and even though I can identify with where she started, and even several of the steps and stages she went through on her journey, in the end she arrived at herself and she and I - and everyone else - are on different paths to different destinations.
And that dovetails quite nicely into Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi, which is about a journey of a different sort. Judy G. asked if I liked it; and I did. But not being Canadian means that I’m mostly unaware of the media lovefest surrounding Martel at the moment. Yes, the book was highly acclaimed in the US when it was first released, but that was some time ago and I think it’s one of those flash-in-the-pan books for the fickle American readership - it was all the buzz for a few months and now it’s available in most half-price book stores on clearance for a couple of bucks (which is, in fact, where I picked up my copy). Which is really neither here nor there, other than to explain that I probably tend toward contrarianism when it comes to the hot new author as well and typically end up working back around to that once-must-read a few years later and get to make my judgement about the story.
And, as I mentioned, I did like The Life of Pi. It was.. real enough without being too much of a stretch. As an allegory, it’s subtle enough to skip over if you want to just plow through the story for the sake of a decently told story. And even though they mess with your head a bit at the end, I still liked it even though I’m not sure I’m going to bother to probe, even for my own edification, the depths of the allegory. *shrug*
I’m now about half way through Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (who is also the author of The Virgin Suicides), which I picked up in the Denver airport because I forgot to pack The Life of Pi. It was a book recommended by one of our campus librarians and one I’d glanced at a few times in the past year or so, but never bothered to pick up to read the synopsis. It’s not about what I thought it would be, and I have to say that it’s not really about (at least so far) what I thought it was after hearing it described. Middlesex is purportedly about the life of a modern hermaphrodite; so far, though, it’s mostly about the family history of a modern hermaphrodite, starting with his Greek grandparents in their remote Turkish village and their flight from the burning of Smyrna to 1920’s Detroit. It’s an interesting story packed with a lot of issues in addition to the probable most obvious one - racial tension in both Turkey and Detroit; immigration; prohibition; guilt; religion - but written so that you don’t get beaten over the head with any of them. Unfortunately, because it touches on so much, it can be a bit much for bedtime reading at times, but I won’t hold that against it. *smile*
Plans for the long weekend.
I’ve been traveling most of this week - Denver Sunday evening through late Tuesday and then Madison Wednesday and Thursday - and while it’s been a productive and useful week, I’m very glad not to be traveling again this weekend (especially because I only get seven days at home before I’m off again to Kansas City for six!).
Sometime today I need to run into town to deliver some games to our Garden Gurus, the male half of which will be chaperoning a class of pre-teens on a trip to our nation’s capital next week. They’re taking the train and, knowing how hard it can be to keep preteens occupied for a long trip, MGG (Male Garden Guru) asked if we could loan them some of our board games. We’ve sort of collected quite a few, thanks in large part to some friends who have come to spend the last three New Year’s Eves with us playing games, and this is just a sampling of what we’re sending along for their trip:
Starting on the top left and going what will end up being more or less counter-clockwise: Phase 10, Peasantry, Queen’s Necklace, Rook, Carcassonne: The Castle, Carcassonne (original with a couple expansions), Ticket to Ride, Tsuro, double 12 dominoes, the 1910 expansion for Ticket to Ride, and Monkeys!. I tried to pull a selection that would allow for some smaller groups (The Castle, Tsuro, and dominoes can be played with two people) as well as larger groups (Tsuro can go to 8, but most of the rest top out around 5 or 6). I’m contemplating sending Mystery of the Abbey, but I’m a bit worried it might just be a bit too complex for the average pre-teen. And while we have Settlers of Catan and two of the larger expansions, as well as the expansion for 5-6 players, I think it just has too many little pieces that could too easily get lost on a train (and technically, so does Ticket to Ride, but I can’t resist sending game about trains along on a train trip!). Similarly, the Catan card game and Jambo (both two player games) are staying home (though I admit that the Catan card game is staying mostly because we just picked up the expansions from Pegasus Games while we were in Madison and haven’t had a chance to play it ourselves yet; we also just got Guillotine, which is also staying here for the same reason.) Yes.. we like good games and our friends know it. *smile*
When I drop off the games, I’ve been invited to peruse the GG’s garden for anything that I’d like to add to my own. I already know that I want to get some balloon flower from them, and hopefully some of the small Japanese irises. And some garlic chives (which I think Jack actually already got and just need to be planted). If the weather clears up tomorrow or Monday, I’ll likely go plant the seeds for the vegetable garden (I don’t want to plant them and then have a thunderstorm roll in right away for fear the seeds will flood out and all clump in one place).
I also plan to round out the packages for the summer swaps I’m doing. I sat down last Saturday before I left and ordered a bunch of stuff for my spoilees and was quite pleased that it all arrived by the time I got home:
I won’t go into detail on what’s all there just in case one of my spoilees happens to drop by and figure things out (and there are some things that were intentionally kept out of this picture because I was worried they’d be too easily identified by their intended recipients!), but I will say that it’s going to be hard to let some of this stuff go! There are just a few finishing touches needed for each of them, and of course, I still need to knit my sockapalooza pal’s socks, but I have a couple months for that still.
In the meantime, I finished the first of the toe up socks:
I didn’t really use a pattern, but the yarn is Lorna’s Laces in Buck’s Bar and I just worked the leg until I ran out of yarn. As I realized how tall these were going to be, I added in some calf shaping, which I think turned out pretty well considering I made it up as I went along!
(Thank goodness for Blogger’s new auto-save feature! I just accidentally clicked on a shortcut in my menu bar and thought I’d lost this entire post.. Whew!)
And as long as the weather stays chilly and storm-threatening, I snuck a skein of Louet Euroflax in Lilac in with the orders for my spoilees so I can snuggle in and watch a movie (we got both Babel and Pan’s Labyrinth from Netflix while I was gone) while making a couple washcloths (modified from the hand towel pattern from Mason-Dixon Knitting) for the upstairs bathroom.
I’m admittedly a bit torn because I’d really love to make hand towels for the new bathroom as well, but the Euroflax is a bit spendy. I’ve checked out KnitPicks new CotLin, though, and I think I could make a couple hand towels with the Linen colorway using the Royal Plum for accents that would work well and would come in around $7.50 per towel instead of the $20 it would be if I used Euroflax. And if they turn out well, I might just make some for gifts, too.. I know at least a couple folks who have done bathroom remodels lately!
Oh, and sometime soon I need to do a book post. I finished Eat, Pray, Love a few weeks ago, and since have also finished The Life of Pi and started Middlesex. And I picked up a couple new books while in Madison as well - Tayari Jones’s The Untelling (you knew this one was coming, right?) and Gabriel Garcia Marques’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The stack on my bedside table doesn’t seem to be getting smaller, but I couldn’t be happier at having so much good literature to read!
My head is full to bursting..
I have so much to say right now.. I hope I can do even half of it justice.
First, I received the following via email today:
DEAR /t,Thank you again for shopping at Spring Hill Nursery. The items listed below have been shipped and are on their way to you.
SHIPMENT SUMMARY————————————————–
Ship Date: 04/18/2007
Items Shipped:Qty Item Item
Shipped Number Description
——- ——- ——————————
1 17715 VINCA EVERGREEN
1 09712 PHLOX CARPET WHITE DELIGHT
1 65019 MIXED FOXGLOVE
1 68537 SEA HOLLY BLUE STAR
1 09738 PHLOX CARPET SAPPHIRE BLUE
1 71367 WEIGELA VARIEGATED/VW
Whee! And sh!t! at the same time. I’m not ready to plant the front yard yet! It *SNOWED* last week?! HOW can I possibly be ready to dig my fingers into that (cold! wet!) dirt and trust that it will nurture tender young roots?! (Fortunately, I have a gardening consultant who is much more reliable than Francisco who told me that I just needed to keep the little plants’ dirt moist and cover them at night if I’m going to leave them outside until I’m ready to plant them in a week or so. Whew!)
Second, which chronologically should have been first, I finished reading Leaving Atlanta last night. It is a wonderfully written, very engaging and true-to-life telling of a terrible time narrated through the voices of 5th-graders. It left me wanting to know more about that time in our country’s history, wanting to know why this was the first I’d heard of a series of African American child kidnappings and murders that occured during my lifetime (1979-1981). It left me.. conflicted. Not because of any lack of attention paid to the events portrayed between it’s covers, but because it ended before the end.
I think..?
It didn’t finish the story - we don’t know what happened to any of the major characters (save one), we don’t know whether they ever caught the person(s?) responsible for the kidnappings and murders.. the story simply ends. In the middle. Of their lives, and their (broader) deaths.
And I’ve chewed over why this bugs me in the back of my head all day. I really can’t say that I think it’s any failing on the part of the author, nor of her skill in crafting a story - in fact I found the story gripping and engaging and had to force myself to put it down to go to sleep several times. Rather I think it’s an internal compulsion within myself to have things end.. neatly. Which is in stark contrast to.. well, reality. Things *don’t* end neatly. (The obvious example is the 33 lives abruptly ended amidst terror and panic and confusion on Monday.) Ends are rarely tied up in a neat little package (except, of course, in knitting.. which leads me to wonder about why it is a craft that tends to bring me such comfort, but that’s for another time). There is rarely (never?) An Answer(tm).
This echoed itself in my world rather strongly today. I’m on a team of faculty, staff, and students working to complete an 18-month process of inquiry and examination into the equity of outcomes for students of color at my university. We are working on completing the draft of the fifth (and next to last) piece of what will become our final report - the only remaining piece is the conclusion - and today we had a spirited and useful discussion centering on two sources of data that appear to present conflicting evidence. Both sources are based on relatively small samples of students - and therefore neither can be considered conclusive or definitive. There is, objectively, no reason to favor one source over the other. But subjectively, one source seems to fly in the face of the personal experiences of several members of the team. We, as a team, are struggling to present these data in a way that won’t muddy the already cloudy water surrounding “diversity” on our campus. We all want there to be a single, definitive story, An Answer(tm) that announces itself loud and clear in bright shining neon, a solution that is based on solid fact, not interpretation or reconciliation of conflicting data sources. A solution that fits with our experiences and that tells the story we think is Real(tm).
As a statistician and a social scientist, I know that such clarity never exists in the study of human society. I *know* that there is never a single story, that there is at most a common thread woven into a myriad of individual tapestries. We each bring to common experiences our own set of lenses and filters that shape our perceptions and remembrances of them. Just as the three narrators in Leaving Atlanta brought their own life’s knowledge to the common experience of what is now referred to as “the Atlanta child murders“.
I believe that any good book will not just tell a story, but leave the reader with something to mentally chew on. Tayari Jones has achieved that end in Leaving Atlanta, at least for me, but I doubt it’s the meal she expected to be leaving her readers with. I haven’t explored all the courses or sampled the myriad flavors, but I expect that this will be a meal I’ll not soon forget, even if I find it difficult to digest initially.
Almost Random Wednesday
In no particular order..
I finished Ghost Map tonight. I have to say that the historical bits were getting a little tiring toward the end, but he caught my interest and attention again in the last two chapters. Quite a bit to think about with on that front, especially in terms of the environmental impact of cities per capita. It brought me back around to thinking about trying to pick up an undergrad course in Epidemiology so that I can go back at some point for a Masters in Public Health.
It caught my attention as I started Leaving Atlanta that the Acknowledgements in Ghost Map are at the end, but in Leaving Atlanta they’re at the beginning. I may be a bit off in this, but I usually read the author’s acknowledgements which is why I noticed this. The names aren’t ever anyone I know, but I feel somehow that reading them is important. I guess it’s somehow related to the idea that we all, no matter what endeavors we undertake, owe acknowledgement for love and laughter and support and assistance to those around us but it seems we rarely remember how important all of it is until we get to the end of something.. or.. well, maybe the beginning of something.
Today was Bad Politics(tm) day at work. Nothing that I was directly involved with, but it seemed that lots of folks around me were caught up in some sort of bad juju. Here’s hoping that tomorrow will be better.
I’ve started working on the Blue Willow Cardigan again and have (finally) divided for the front and back. This means that for the first time since I started knitting this one, I was able to stretch it all out and realize just how long the rows for that first 12 inches were:
It’s too long for a single picture and I wasn’t feeling quite motivated enough to try to figure out how to graft the two pictures together. *shrug* The ruler is there for scale, but also in a (mostly vain) attempt to unroll the bottom edge. Here’s a slightly more detailed shot of just the back:
This is also the first opportunity I’ve had to more or less wrap the body around me to see if it’s going to fit - I’ve been plagued with sweaters that end up .. off. The raglan I made a couple years ago has sleeves just a touch too short; Rogue is slightly too small; and my Fair Isle 101 is slightly too loose, especially around the neck, etc. This one will have a 3 inch Fair Isle border added all around the front edge and the bottom, and I think that once that’s in place, this one will fit well enough. I may not be able to button it, but in truth I so rarely button cardigans that I doubt it will matter.
I’m in meetings at work for the next three days pretty much solid. Tomorrow I have some reprieve in the late afternoon, but Thursday and Friday are booked straight through with back-to-back demos of several of the PeopleSoft functional unit components for their student information system. I’m .. cautiously optimistic at the moment that the living hell we’ll endure over the next 2-ish years during conversion and initial implementation will be worth it in the end. At least, I am most of the time.
We have not done any additional work in the upstairs bathroom. I alternate between feeling guilty about this and knowing that our lives our busy and the bathroom can wait. I feel quite a bit more guilty about the dust, which just accentuates the fact that I haven’t vacuumed in.. longer than I care to admit. Maybe tomorrow.
It’s almost summer..
.. and that means it’s almost time for sitting on the front porch in the late evening with a good book. And, let me tell you, this year, I have quite the line up and I can’t wait!
At the moment, I’m getting to the tail end of Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson. It’s an interesting little reconstruction of the 1856 cholera epidemic in London’s Soho neighborhood, centering specifically on the pump at Broad Street. Johnson follows two “amateur” public health detectives - John Snow, London’s premiere anesthesiologist, and Reverand Henry Whitehead - as they work under the haze of the miasmatist theory (which states that disease is spread through noxious air, in a nutshell) to pioneer the theory that cholera is actually waterborne. The book contains a hefty collection of footnotes, but they’re not marked in the text, so I haven’t been keeping up on them to know what is actual fact or based on the writings of those mentioned and what is conjecture. All the same, it’s enough of a “story”, instead of a pure factual account of the events, that’s mostly held my interest. It also likely helps that I have an inclination toward public health and the findings of Snow & Whitehead (and a fair number of their contemporaries, like the guy whose name I can’t recall at the moment who engineered London’s sewers so they wouldn’t dump raw sewage into the Thames) were more or less the first real push toward modern public health.
Up next will be either Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, or Leaving Atlanta by Tayari Jones, both of which were gifts from my dear friend Kim. She recently read both of them and they immediately caught my attention. Much to my surprise when I mentioned that I wanted to pick them up in conversation with her, she popped right over to Amazon and had them sent to me! The anticipation of both of them has almost been enough to make me be unfaithful to Ghost Map, but so far I’m holding out.
I also have a couple “young adult” books in the stack - Trickster’s Queen by Tamora Pierce and Coraline (warning - Flash-heavy site) by Neil Gaiman. I read Trickster’s Choice earlier this spring after picking up both books when our local Waldenbooks went out of business and while they’re written a little simply for my usual taste, the plot is still very engaging and I enjoyed it. Coraline is has been on my nightstand for awhile, mostly because I’m curious about Neil Gaiman as a writer for children. I simply love his novels - American Gods especially - and the Sandman series of graphic novels, but both tend to be a little grittier than I think might be suitable for kids, so I’m curious to see how he tones it down without losing the intensity. I like to know what young adult literature is out there, both to know which authors are good authors for when we buy books for our niblings, but also to know what the niblings might be finding on their own.
The last two, at least so far, are a couple that have been around for a couple years and spent a fair amount of time in the spotlight - Bel Canto by Ann Patchett and Life of Pi by Yann Martel. While these both caught my attention at the time they were the latest hot read, neither of them captured it enough to make me run out and get them right then. But in talking to bibliophiles who’ve read them, I’ve gotten more intrigued about them, so they’ve been acquired (both through used book stores in paperback) and added to the stack on the night stand.
So.. any other suggestions? What are you looking forward to reading this summer?
"I don’t know what I’ve been drinking, but I hope to Christ there’s more"
I think Rogue is expressing its displeasure at being ignored for the last several months. I’ve knit one sleeve through the end of the cable chart, only to discover that I missed an essential instruction in the increase rows. I ripped it back to the turning row, started again, got about 12 rows before realizing that I’d missed a two decreases several rows back. Ripped it back again and decided enough was enough for one night.
In other news, I just got notification from Barnes & Noble that the books I ordered.. a couple months ago? are shipping. Yes, I knew they wouldn’t ship until now when I placed the order, but I had a $25 gift card from MyPoints and knew that I wanted to get the next Harry Potter book in paperback, the last Gunslinger book in paperback, and the second of Jacqueline Carey’s Godslayer series in paperback, and one or the other of them didn’t print in paperback until this month (the Godslayer book, I think). Rather than pay extra shipping for books I wouldn’t miss until now, I just had them hold the whole order until they were all available. Yea! Christmas in July! Now to plough through the rest of A People’s History of the Supreme Court.. (Not going so well.. feels like I read this one already (which I have, just not in this format - I had an unofficial emphasis in American Constitutional History in college))
In yet other news, I’ve been contacted and asked to do Artisans Row at Boar’s Head this year, which is nifty. I’m not sure yet whether we’re actually planning to go to the event, but the fact that they sought me out to ask if I’d coordinate it again - especially with a solid four-plus months advance warning - is hopeful. I’m willing to shepherd this idea along for a little longer in hopes others will start to pick up the idea at other events I may or may not be able to attend. At least until something else catches my fancy. *shrug*
Right then.. off to try to get through the rest of Dred Scott..
Almost..
I’m half way through the 15th repeat. One and a half to go! And then the edging. But since today is a lazy stay at home and listen to audiobooks day (we’re about 11 hours into The Time Traveler’s Wife, though that’s not all from today!), it’s possible that it will actually get finished today. Which means blocked tonight or tomorrow morning which means pictures soon. And then it will be all ready to get scrunched back up and stuffed in a suitable package to be mailed since I won’t likely see the recipient at this point until April or so.
And that leaves me trying to decide if I want to try to swatch for Fair Isle 101 during a Super Bowl party tomorrow, or try to spin (amidst kids and boisterous fans.. not likely to be safe), or continue working on the Lily tank, or try to start a pair of socks or the scarfy bit that I wanted to make with the Mountain Colors yarn.
Oh, and in a fit of impulsiveness, I’ve joined a small knit-along for Rogue with a couple friends. The deal is that we’ll only work on it Monday evenings, so I figure I can make time even during the Olympics to work on it. I ordered yarn for it Wednesday or Thursday, so here’s hoping it will arrive Monday so I can start it with the rest of the group. After months of indecision on the yarn, and after just dropping a fair amount to get the yarn for Fair Isle 101, I decided to go with KnitPicks Wool of the Andes in Evergreen. I don’t have a dark green sweater and it’s a color I really like, so it was a fairly logical choice. Progress pictures will get posted every week so I can keep the others (who all see each other in person Monday evenings) informed of my progress.
Berry cordials, brewing (& vintning), books and biking!
B turned out a bit easier than I expected. There are *lots* of things that start with B that are Good Things(tm), such as..
Berry cordials! The top one is aging - it’s a raspberry cordial that got started sometime this fall (I did finally find my B&V journal after the move, so I will start keeping better track of these things again!) and bottled a month or so ago. It will need to age for another 6 months or so and then we’ll see how it turned out.
The bottom one is still steeping - at the moment it’s just blueberries in vodka, but in a couple weeks it will get sugar added and start aging into blueberry cordial.
As I’m pretty new to cordials, I’m starting out with very small batches - just a bottle each. It can get expensive fast to do larger batches as the liquid base is one of various clear, non-distinct alcohols (vodka, white brandy, etc.)
And while we’re on the topic, I might as well throw in the rest of the brewing set up. This isn’t all of it (noticeably missing are the two large (one 5-gallon and one 7-gallon)glass carboys and the bottling bucket, along with all the (at the moment empty) bottles), but it’s the interesting stuff at the moment.
The two gallon carboys on the top shelf are an apple-raspberry mead that was started in August and has been racked once off the sediment. The funny looking bits at the bottom are actually glass marbles, which work marvelously to take up extra air-space in small carboys when oxidation of wine or mead is a concern.
The front gallon carboy on the second shelf is a pineapple wine that was started at the same time as the mead, but hasn’t been racked. I made it with juice concentrate rather than actual fruit, so there’s *very* little sediment. Rather than stir it all up by racking it, I’ve decided to let is sit as is until I bottle it (which should pr’bly happen soon).
The back gallon carboy that you can’t see very well is a blackberry wine that was started sometime earlier in the summer - July maybe? - and has been racked once (in August). It’s also in need of bottling. The wines should ideally bottle age at least a year, but as these have both sat in carboys a couple months longer than usual, I may age them less than that.
I’m also still doing small batches of the wines as I’m pretty new to them; I expect to get somewhere between 4-5 bottles of mead/wine per 1-gallon batch. When I do beer, on the other hand (which I still do from kits for the most part), I do at least 5 gallon batches and usually end up with somewhere between 22 and 28 22-ounce bottles. I have enough bottles to have 2 complete batches at any given time.
This should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me - books are fairly central in my life. I love books, as does Jack, so between the two of us we manage to go through quite a number of them. Between hobbies and academic/professional interests (the first picture, though most of my knitting books and all my stats books are missing as they have homes elsewhere) and personal favorites (though, again, several recent reads are missing as they tend to still live on the bedside table), you get a fairly decent picture of the types of things I read.
..and finally, because there’s still the hope of a chance that I will compete in my very first sprint-triathlon late this coming summer, my bike (a Novara Randonee commuter bike, currently set up in the living room on the trainer (a Cycleops Mag, for those interested). I’ve been a slug lately, though, so it’s not been getting as much use as it should. But I have managed to be more active this month so far than I was for most of the fall, so there’s still hope!
Draft 1, finished!
Thankfully, the aforementioned grant proposal is short and relatively quick to throw together, so the first draft is now finished and out for comments. Whew!
To return to a topic from a few days ago, I’m about a quarter of the way into A Million Little Pieces which really is about rather severely broken people (as the title suggests). It’s very good and captivating, but I have to put it down after every thirty or forty pages.. I was talking to someone who’d already finished it yesterday who mentioned that they just flew through it. I think the difference is that I can put faces on some of those characters; they’re not abstractions. I know people who could easily be the people in this book. Not well, but I know (or knew them) well enough that it’s a touch too close to the bone to poke at for very long at a time. And, well, we just won’t talk about the whole bit about the dentist.. *shudder*
But the lovely soft gorgeous CashSoft socks are almost finished. I have half the foot left on the second one and it should get finished tonight. Whee! Warm soft socks as a reward for crunching out something on short notice! Then all I’ll have on needles is the tank I’m making for me out of the cotton/silk stuff. I was trying to entertain the idea of making a Mickey Mouse baby blanket for my cousin-in-law, but I have had absolutely no luck finding an intarsia Mickey silhouette, so she may just get a little sweater with Mickey buttons or something. We’ll see how motivated I get this weekend as the shower is next weekend.
