Brain Dump

Ramble-icious Update
Sorry no posts lately, y'all.

I forget that January/February just wreaks havoc with my headspace. The days and nights blur into each other, Caz working second shift doesn't help matters whatsoever, the kids and I have massive cabin fever thanks to dangerously cold temps and lots of snow and our continued inability to find boots that will fit Ben's flipper-like feet.

I've been knitting, albeit in odd fits and starts, as my cabin fever restlessness permits.

There are socks going on, and some other socks, and a fourth pair of Jaywalkers on the needles. But mostly, lately, I've been working on a lovely feather-and-fan scarf in Elsebeth Lavold Silky Wool, ostensibly for my mother-in-law, but we'll see who the final recipient turns out to be.

I do find myself astonished that I've been knitting for close to three years and I never worked in feather-and-fan until now. I love how it's just stupid flippin' easy, and yet looks unbelievably gorgeous and complex. I love that about knitting - that increasing and decreasing in certain orders can give you a gorgeous effect, that knitting your stitches out of order can give you another, equally gorgeous effect. The mechanics of it are simple, but the results are fantabulous. I love it. I'll post some pics soon, though I suspect I will not do well in capturing the true awesomeness of this scarf.

In other knitting news, I'm thinking once again on sweaters for myself. I swatched for Arwen, but never got around to actually measuring my swatch post-washing (yes, yes, you can point and laugh, I won't mind). And I hauled out Brambleberry again, frogged the inch and a half of sleeve I had knitted. Why did I frog it? Couldn't tell you. Think it was Winter Headspace Weirdness or something, because there wasn't a darn thing wrong with it. At least not that I could tell - it's not like I'd even done enough to tell if I was getting gauge or not.

Anyway. So I'm torn between Brambleberry and Arwen (or Samus, or Eris, or FLAK, or a host of other cabled cardigans out there). Brambleberry might win out simply because I don't have to make any big decisions beyond "start Brambleberry." And really, decision-making is pretty hard for me right now.

In Other News

Speaking of decision-making, I'm still reeling from the bad case of sticker shock I got this weekend, when I finally started researching preschool options for the daring duo. Holy crap on a stick. As Caz pointed out - for the cost of one year of preschool for the kids, we could buy a car. A whole car. Maybe not a big car or a fancy car, but a car. A CAR! I knew it would be bad, but man... I seriously about crapped myself when I saw the actual numbers all laid out there.

Oh, and here's that Crazy Twin Story I promised a few weeks ago:

So, back in mid-January, Meg and Jonathan visited us as they were passing through, as rock stars are wont to do. We hung out, they brought really cute knitted bears for the kids (seriously, check 'em out), and we went to a local Indian buffet for lunch (mmm mmm good). In preparation for their visit, Caz and I (by which I mean, Caz) prepared a yummilicious dessert - Sarafina's Almond Cake. We made it a day ahead, and then Meg and Jonathan had to postpone their visit by a day (rock stars, what can you do?), but that was all fine. The cake was carefully wrapped and kept safe, so no big deal. Besides, I could swear Lanea had said that letting it "age" for a couple days did nothing but good for the almond cake.

Well... yeah. You know what's coming, right? Sure enough, Sunday morning the kids got rolling before we did, and instead of coming into our room right away, they struck out on their own to see what they could get into. And so, of course, Henry got into the cake. Caz walked out of our room a while later to discover Henry sitting on the kitchen table, gouging handfuls of goodness out of the almond cake and stuffing his face with them.

So much for fancy dessert for our friends. sigh! At least the kid's got good taste, right? Right? Right? (Humor me here, just a little, would you?)

I tried to get pictures for the blogging, but the camera was not immediately accessible, and Caz, having spent two days on his very best Resisting Temptation behavior, decided, "Dammit, then I'm having some almond cake too!" and started cutting slices from the poor disfigured cake for himself. And well, I sure wasn't going to let him eat the whole rest of the cake himself, so uh... I helped. As it turns out, the goodness of almond cake completely trumps any Grubby Toddler Hands factor. Who'd have guessed it?


HA! Joke's on me! (Or: Update)
So, I wrote up this post this afternoon, but then got sidetracked before I could put in all the links. While I was out in the other room, I finally decided to check that gauge swatch I did for Arwen a while back. My gauge was. Spot. On. Absolutely perfect. The cable was also precisely as it should have been. So... I took a plunge and cast on for the back. And then, of course, got sidetracked some more, so I haven't done anything but cast on. But I did cast on. Looks like Arwen it is. Sorry, Brambleberry.

Blog for Choice

Sorry for the hiatus, y'all, and sorry that there's no knitting content forthwith. Those who aren't down are free to skip today's post and come back next time - I promise knitting content and maybe even a Crazy Twin Story to boot. For now, though, some politically inspired navel-gazing.


Blog for Choice

In November of 1972, I was conceived. My parents were young - 18 and 19 years old - unmarried (but some reports say they were engaged), and scared to death.

They put on a brave face, announced a January wedding date, and ploughed ahead.

My parents got married on January 13, 1973. Nine days later the Roe v. Wade judgment was handed down, legalizing abortion.

Even though I wasn't born for another seven months after that, I still feel as if my parents' wedding date, in relation to when Roe v. Wade was decided, is somehow significant. Though not how you might think.

I don't feel relief, as if I somehow scraped through a tight spot. The truth is, even if abortion had been legal, I can't imagine my mother getting an abortion. She was a good Catholic girl (fooling around with her maybe-fiance notwithstanding), who came from a large Italian family whose judgment intimidated her more than their love comforted her.

The sad fact of the matter is, my parents' wedding was a grim affair. I've seen the pictures. Everyone looks dazed, in a state of shock, except for the best man, who is quite obviously drunk off his ass. My parents' smiles are brave, but not particularly convincing.

My maternal grandfather looks like he's at a funeral. My maternal grandmother refuses to look at the camera. My paternal grandparents don't look much happier. My mother's siblings look extremely confused. As well they should - my grandparents didn't tell them about my mother's wedding until that morning. My grandparents didn't want them to be distracted for finals week at school.

Everyone appears stunned, at a loss for what to do or how to behave.

No one looks happy.

That day set the tone.

My parents' marriage, which lasted a grueling 22 years, was also grim. We never quite made it all the way into After-School Special territory, but we got close more often than a family should.

I was five years old when I first learned how long it takes a baby to grow in its mama's belly. Being a precocious kinda kid, I then immediately did the math to find out when I'd been "planted" in my mama's belly, only to realize that the math didn't work out. I'd been hoping to find out I'd been a Honeymoon Baby. But something was wrong, because babies take longer than seven months to be born. My mom tried to tell me that I was early, that I came before I was supposed to.

Mom's "brave face" has never been her specialty.

For the ensuing 17 years of pain, misery, resentment and depression, on all our parts, I would think to myself that if I hadn't come along, my parents never would have married. They would have eventually broken up, married other people, and maybe then everyone would be happy. It was a child's view of the world, of course, wherein everything that happened was all to do with me. But how else does a child see the world?


What's this got to do with Choice?

It's true. Even if abortion had been legal before January 13, 1973, I still would have been born. Chances are my parents still would have married, still would have been a bad match, still would have created a difficult situation for themselves, each other and for my sister and me.

But maybe, just maybe, being free to really choose to keep me would have changed things. Would have made my parents feel a little less trapped. Maybe then their wedding album would seem less like every member of my family is doing their best "deer in the headlights" impression.

I don't think for a moment that my mother would have made any different decisions, when she discovered she was pregnant all those years ago. But I do think it would have helped her to have options available to her. To be given the chance to choose to keep the baby she discovered she was carrying, rather than backed into a corner and given no other alternatives.

Because abortion was illegal, my mother was denied the chance to chart her own course, to choose her own destiny.

Maybe, given a choice, my mother would have approached motherhood with less bitterness and anger in her heart.

Some folks say depression is anger turned inward. I believe that's quite often the case.

My mother is the angriest person I've ever met, and she's been angry for 34 years now. She can't voice her anger, of course. She can't actually speak the words in her heart, that she was forced to have me, that she was forced to give up her life in favor of mine. She can't speak of how hurt she must have been by how her parents treated her then. She certainly can't give voice to how betrayed she must have felt, when she found out a few years ago that her parents, who judged her so harshly for becoming pregnant before she was married, had been lying about how long they'd been married, to hide that when they married, Grandma was two months pregnant with my mom.

She can't give voice to her anger, but it always finds its way out. Anger always does. That's its nature, after all.

My mother is the angriest person I've ever met, because 34 years ago she was denied the chance to want to have her baby.

Every baby deserves to be wanted, be it at conception or at some later date, after the surprise has worn off a little.

I'm not grateful my parents got married before Roe v. Wade came down. Abortion being illegal didn't save me, because in all reality, my life was never in danger.

But there's more to life than breathing.

I am the baby no one got to want. A fact which colored how my family, immediate and extended, treated me from the moment they learned of my impending arrival. A fact which colored how I behaved with my family from the moment I learned of it until this very day. A fact which no amount of therapy or medication or positive self-talk can change. A fact which is unchanged by all the protestations of "But we're so happy you're here now!"

Don't get me wrong. I'm a big girl. I've done the shrinkage and the happy pills and the "I'm okay, you're okay!" crap for a long time. I gave up feeling like I never should have been born long ago. Overall I'm pretty happy with how things have turned out. I'm happy with my life, I'm happy to have my life. It's all good.

Well, except that my mother has spent 34 years feeling trapped by my very existence, by a life she was never free to choose for herself, and now lives in such a quagmire of vicious, angry self-loathing that I just don't know if she'll ever be happy about herself or her life (and thus my life) again. We pretty much never speak. She forgets my birthday routinely, and has never made any real attempt to remember my husband's birthday (after 13 years), and has even begun forgetting my children's birthday. When we do speak, civility flees the room almost immediately, and bitterness, anger and resentment come roaring in.

I'm beginning to fear that things will be like this between us until the day she dies, no matter how many times and ways I try to reach out to her.

Illegal abortion didn't save my life, but it still managed to cost me my mother.

No baby should be forced upon its mother. Motherhood should be a choice, freely made, for all women.

I was a baby no one had a chance to choose. I believe all babies deserve to be wanted. Thus I am pro-choice.

Tardy for the New Year

Can you believe it? I can. I'm always tardy. Even when I don't mean to be, something comes up. People keep telling me, "But you have an excuse - you have twins!" The sad truth is, I was perpetually late even without excuses. The "twins" excuse is unnecessary enable...ment.

So, the New Year has begun, and while I was going to avoid doing the whole New Year's thing, I'm afraid I'm kind of stuck.

You see, we'd taken a few pictures of the children being just darling, and so I went to post them up to all and sundry, to say, "Look! See? This is why I haven't sold them off to the gypsies yet."And then I realized that the wee little hooligans have somehow managed to stuff the USB cord into some pocket nether-realm located Who Knows Where, and so the Cute Kid Pictures, as well as several knitting-related pictures, are locked on the camera and who knows when I'll ever be able to free them.

Karma, party of one...

So, my New Year was... a little hectic. I took the kids, sans Caz, down to my dad's for an overnight visit. You see, very late Dec. 22, I commented to a friend, "I almost wish Ben's weird off-and-on fever would turn into something real, so we would have an excuse to just stay home for Christmas. This attempt to travel is /seriously/ getting me down." Approximately six hours later, in the dawning hours of Dec 23, I woke up from a dead sleep. If the proverbial dog is as sick as I was, then for the love of all that's holy, someone needs to put that poor thing out of its misery, because leaving it that way is simply cruel. Or, to put it more graphically and directly: I spent about an hour and a half sitting on the toilet with a bucket in my lap, wishing for the sweet sweet release of death. I'm still not sure where my liver wound up. I finally began to feel like a person late Christmas Eve, and was recovered though still delicate on Christmas.

Caz and the kids both got it a bit too, though no where near as bad. Thankfully, the only people who wound up throwing up were the ones old enough to know to dash to the toilet.

Happy New Year!

So, January 1st was my dad's 10th Annual New Year's Day Ravioli Party.

It's a little odd, actually. My mom is the Italian one - she's half Irish, half Italian - but when they divorced, my dad somehow wound up with custody of Grandpa's ravioli recipe, as well as the giant board and rolling pin he fashioned specifically to allow for the making of ravioli.

Shortly after their divorce, my dad was going about starting new traditions for himself, and settled upon an annual New Year's Day ravioli party. Dad starts really early simmering sauce and cooking sausage and the like, my sister arrives fairly early to roll out dough and spoon out the filling and close up the raviolis (Dad did it the first few years, but eventually got tired of getting scolded how he was doing it wrong, so now Sis does it) and then there's always a few people who are there early-ish as well to crimp the edges and score the tops three times with a fork.

This was my second time going, and the first time I actually arrived in time to not only attend dinner, but help (a bit) with assembly. The kids were a little too enamored with the Christmas tree for me to leave them unattended too long. (News Flash: The presence of a tree, mysteriously located indoors, covered in lights and garland and shiny things, and adorned with a hundred or so little figures which are all roughly the size of toddler playthings, is more temptation than the average 2.5-year-old can resist for longer than 2.3 nanoseconds.)

It was a nice time, despite trying to keep the kids out of too much mischief, and in a nice bit of timing, I actually saw the sun for the first time in like two weeks. Somehow the two weeks before New Year's had just been nothing but gray gloomy clouds, and if the sun did come out, invariably it was a day when we were all too sick to leave the house. So for part of the afternoon, the kids got to run around in my dad's blessedly fenced back yard (oh, how I long for that glorious wonderful day when we too will have a back yard in which the kids can play without me worrying about them (too much)) and I even stood out there and enjoyed some sunshine too.

The whole thing kind of does a number on me, though. Because, you know, when my grandfather throws a ravioli party, even though there will be like 50 people attending, he still manages to make so much that everyone is adviced to BYOT (Bring Your Own Tupperware) if they want to take home leftovers.

My dad, on the other hand, grew up with a different ethos - my dad's mom has this astonishing ability to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner for a dozen people, and wind up with everyone eating as much as they would like, but still have practically nothing left over. It boggles my mind, not just for the ability (which takes my own goal of getting really good at getting entree and all side dishes to be ready at the same time and rolls it in an alley somewhere), but also because... I tend to lean more toward how my mom's family does things.

Leftovers, to me, are the extra prize inside for a meal well made.

I've honestly never comprehended the whole "struggle to deal with Thanksgiving leftovers" business. Turn the leftover turkey into enchiladas? What? But why? Either nosh it straight, or throw it on a plate with some leftover stuffing and leftover cranberry sauce, and have your own Thanksgiving Instant Replay! The closest I come to "make a different meal with your Thanksgiving leftovers" is, well, open-face turkey sandwiches. Which, let's be honest here, is nothing like a "different meal" at all.

Which is not to say my way is the only way - if other folks are happy turning their T-day turkey into enchiladas, then that's grand. But it's totally not how my brain works at all.

So when my dad throws his Annual New Year's Day Ravioli Party and doesn't send people home with tons of leftovers... it really throws me for a loop. I try to tell myself it's a Zen thing, where I should just be in the "now" of the ravioli and not expect to be able to re-live the event for a week afterwards, but... man. To me? It's a failure to maximize output for the effort. Or, you know, just a missed opportunity. Why go to all the trouble of simmering sauce and making special fillings and making dough from scratch if, at the end of the day, there's not going to be anything but sauce left?

It's a big head-scratcher for me, is what I'm saying. It's also more reason for me to want a house of my own some dang day, because then... oh holy kolackys, I'm totally going to throw ravioli parties that make people literally sit down and write home about.

OOOH! I almost forgot to mention! In light of the Italian-themed occasion, I decided it would be the perfect opportunity to finally get to make Crazy Lanea's almond cake, which she shared with many of us at Rhinebeck. Caz, being my minion in all things baker-ly, got cozy with the MixMaster and whipped it up.

It was, in a word, heavenly. I'm now on a permanent lookout for occasions when I can reasonably (or even unreasonably) find an excuse to make this cake. OMG. And it was very well received as well - after a big meal of ravioli and sausage and meatballs and garlic bread, it was a nice way to have a bit of something sweet that wasn't going to land like a brick in the gullet.

And then, while we all lingered over dessert, my step-mother's sister broke out a legwarmer she was working on for her daughter, and suddenly there was a whole bunch of us gabbling on about knitting. I showed off the boys' sweaters to my aunt and grandmother, who both were very complimentary about them (I would have had the kids wearing them but um... tomato sauce, y'know? Eek. Also, Dad's place is not so big that he can pack 20-plus people in there without it turning into a sauna.) And then my youngest step-sister mentioned that she had started to try to teach herself knitting, but hadn't managed it. So my aunt sat down on one side of her, and my stepmom's sister found a spare pair of needles in her bag and my step-sister found her ball of yarn, and they taught her how to knit. It was. Pretty. Damn. Cool.

Enough Yakkin' Thorny. What About The Knitting?

Oy. Well. There's a report coming, honest. The whole "no way to make the camera talk to the computer" thing kinda puts a damper on it all, for the moment.

But I will say - I've been in a bit of a wiggy slump all the sudden. Nothing seems to quite be going right - lots of mismatches between patterns and yarns, and several false starts, and everything that I /do/ currently have OTN, is all complicated and difficult to do when the kids aren't sleeping, and believe-you-me, the kids? They ain't sleepin' much lately. Which gives us the double delight of cranky kids during the day, and then a mama with not enough time to herself at night, resulting in cranky mama 24/7. It's been... not our prettiest around here, despite the weather being very cooperative and allowing us to go outside and play in sunshine several times this past week.

Anyway, point being - they're too cranky and overwrought and freaksome for me to attempt any but the most mindless of knits (as my aunt describes it - "idiot therapy") while they're awake, and they're awake pretty much all the time I am it seems.

Didn't You Start This Making Veiled References to Resolutions?

Crap. Busted!

Yeah, I did.

I don't really do the whole resolutions thing. I mean, I love the idea, but... I've got a weird Intense Need To Self-Sabotage thing that I haven't managed to get shrunk out of me in over a decade of on-again-off-again shrink-visiting, so true resolutions are mostly just a laundry list of all the things I'm going to keep myself from achieving. Which, really, is just more depressing than I can stand.

However, I do dig the whole, "New year! New start!" vibe going around, and Caz and I did have some good discussions over the holiday season about what we want and don't want in our lives, and how to achieve making those necessary changes. And so I do have some general changes I'm going to try to make in my life this year.

1. I would love, by the end of this year, for us to have a much more organized household. Hell, I would love to see us lose about half the clutter we've got too, but I'm not going to get too far ahead of myself here. Even if we have every scrap-o-crap we've got right now, so long as most or all of it has a place where it belongs, where it gets put away and out from underfoot and not in the middle of everything, I'll be happy.

2. I am going to do my darnedest to go to Maryland Sheep & Wool and Stitches Midwest this year, and to that end I am going to

3. try, without making some big grand commitment to it or anything, to follow some of the basic tenets of the whole "Knit From Your Stash" thing that everyone seems to have joined. MDS&W and Stitches MW will be my two big exceptions, obviously.

4. In an attempt to prevent this year's "I hate people"-a-thon during the few weeks before Christmas, when I had a ton of people I needed to provide presents for and no way to do it, I'm going to try to keep at least one gift item on the needles at all times this year. And not just start some gift and then stick it in a corner until July, either. Actively on the needles, I'm saying. I'm sure there are tons of people who do that kind of thing all the time, but I've pretty much always knitted for myself and my immediate family, and so this is going to be something of a change. But as I mentioned to Meg the other day, suddenly the idea of knitting a pair of socks for someone else doesn't seem insane. It's like it became a more everyday kind of magic, one I don't need to hoard quite as carefully as I have in the past. Having a week's worth of knitted socks for myself might have something to do with that, I admit.

5. Submit some of my writing to someone, somewhere, for publication. Really. I mean it. Honest.

I think that's it. I've had a lot going on in the headspace, but not enough time/inclination/clarity to actually write it all down. But I'm going to work on that and see if I can't make more progress. And today's project, aside from hanging out at the LYS/coffeeshop (to knit, not shop - see #3) and having samosas for lunch, is going to be finding that blasted USB cable so I can finally blog up some of my pictures and make like this is a fer realz knitting blog and not just Ramblemania 2007.