Bookmark

The book I bought, Knit One, Purl a Prayer, is good so far. At the end of each chapter, she has a knitting project, and I am doing the first one, a bookmark that I am going to give a friend who recently had surgery, and I am giving her a book to put it in. I am almost done. I will probably finish tonight, although I am quite sleepy, so maybe I'll wait until tomorrow. When it's done I'll take a picture.

Since I am knitting this for a friend and integrating prayer, as I knit I've been praying for my friend. Sometimes I just keep her in my mind as I work, sometimes I think verbal prayers. This evening, I've been trying different phrases with the stitches, like, "Lord, bless [name]" with each stitch, then more rhythmically, insert needle to "Kyrie" and complete the stitch to "eleison." Or one stitch "In the name of the Father," next stitch, "and of the Son," next stitch, "and of the Holy Spirit." Or insert needle to "Lord," wrap the thread to "have mercy," pull the stitch complete to "on [name]."

It's a little project; you cast on just 10 stitches, and I guess it's about 50 rows. I just have 4 more rows to go, then I'll have to cast off, and there are instructions how to make a tassel.

Read on

Got a new book today.

Tally ho

This time around with my knitting, I am keeping track of my pattern by these marks.



I had to google what to call them. At first I tried "hash marks," and that could qualify, but it also means marks on a sports field and the "pound sign" or "number symbol" # (also known as a "hashtag" by people savvy enough to tweet). But the more precise term seemed to be "tally marks."

Since I need to knit 4 rows then purl 1, I can make an upright mark after each knitted row, then slash across after I purl a row.

The flaw would be if I forget to make the mark after each row, and that is a real possibility. However, this is still likely to be more accurate than my unassisted memory.

There's also the issue of my handwriting. You might notice in the 3rd group, the 3rd line has a squiggle next to it. Was that just a sloppy stroke on the 3rd mark? Or was it a 4th mark that I made tinily and messily because I was sleepy? I asked myself that this evening, and decided to go with the sloppy 3rd stroke hypothesis. I knit a row and the purled a row. I had actually gotten up and gone on to another activity before I remembered to go back and make the purl slash.

So not a flawless system, just less flawed than no system at all.

Little House

Yesterday was Laura Ingalls Wilder's birthday. I loved her books, starting in third grade. When I was in that grade, and I guess age 8, my family moved from one state to another. In the new school, on my first day there, when it was time for the teacher to read a story out loud to us, she read the next chapter in the book she had already been reading to the class. It was the chapter in On the Banks of Plum Creek where mean, stuck-up Nellie Olson gets her comeuppance by getting leeches on her legs in the creek and screaming and being horrified. My classmates shouted with laughter.

Later (I don't know if it was the same day), we went to the school library where we could each check out a book. We sat down at tables and the teacher told us that the quietest table could go first to pick out their books. We all tried to be quiet, but she chose a different table than mine. The girl next to me said, "Oh, they'll get all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books!" I can't remember when I got one to read on my own--I may even have previously read Little House in the Big Woods without knowing who the author was--but from about that time, I read her books through and through.

In older grades, when my mom would take me to the public library, I usually checked out multiple books, maybe six or eight. I would pick out ones I thought I might like, then get one or two of the Little House books to re-read. Even as late as seventh and eighth grade, a friend and I would play "pioneers," which simply consisted of pretending to be pioneers. We may have been influenced by some other books, like Caddie Woodlawn or On to Oregon, but our primary ideas of pioneer life came from the Little House series.



By the way, I did not really like the TV series that Michael Landon created. It wandered far, far from the books, and was basically a TV show where the characters happened to have the same names as characters in the books. Also, it was emotionally overwrought and manipulative in ways that Laura Ingalls Wilder's writing never was.

Thumbs up

I'm ready to start my next attempt at knitting a scarf. I know how to cast on using my thumb and one needle--isn't it amazing, I have the muscle-memory of how to do that with the technique I learned as a 10-year-old--over 40 years ago!--but I just couldn't remember the very first thing, which is a slip-knot to start everything off. I could just tie a knot around the needle and go from there, but part of the mystique of knitting is that everything can be pulled apart and brought back to one long thread if you want to. A slip-knot can pull loose easily. So I looked again at videos. The first one showed a method of casting on that was a complicated stitch requiring two needles. Did my grandma teach me wrong? So I looked for casting on with thumb. Then a British lady showed a method using her thumb and one needle, but you had to guess how many stitches you were going to cast on and leave a "tail" long enough to somehow get woven into the stitches. "This is the 'tail' thread and this is the 'ball' thread..." then up here, over there, and through something else. What on earth? So I tried again and found a lady who showed a very easy way to do a slip-knot, followed by the easy method my grandma taught me, which turns out to be the simplest method, good for beginners. That's me.



Did you hear her say there are 35 methods of casting on? Crazy.

Binding off

I mentioned that I went back and looked at the knitting pattern I had chosen and discovered I was supposed to be knitting four rows, then purling one, but I had been knitting three then purling one, and I also kept loosing count. So I wanted to start over, but I just couldn't bring myself to unravel what I had already done.

I decided to look online how to complete this piece and get it off the needles, but I couldn't remember the correct terminology to google. I know when you start you "cast on" x number of stitches, but to "cast off" in order to finish sounded like it would also bring up sites about fishing or boating. So I searched for "finish off knitting," and found a video that showed the process. That lady called it "binding off." Every skill has its jargon, and I am learning the language of knitting as well as the skill. So I bound off my knitting piece and showed it to you in this video.

Noiseless

You know, I just looked at that pattern again online, and it's supposed to be knit 4, purl 1. Oops.

Meanwhile, I'm awake in the middle of the night. I woke up to a continuous high-pitched noise. I have tinnitus, so at my first groggy wakening I thought it was that. But it was louder than that. I wondered if it was some clock, unhooked phone, or electronic device in my house. I wandered around and was putting my ear near suspected culprits. My tinnitus masks the hearing in one ear, so I can't always tell what direction noises come from. (We sense that by the minuscule difference between when one ear hears a noise and when the other ear hears it. The ear that hears it first is closer to the noise.) It was louder when I was near a window. I stepped outside and it was louder outside. I went to the front of my house and back again. It seemed like it was slightly louder in back. I stood around wondering if it was perhaps an alarm coming from a business in that direction. (Meanwhile, it was not freezing cold out and a little breeze blew. Pretty mild.) I came back in the house and wondered whether to call the police to report the noise, since I really didn't know where it came from, and, if I did report it, whether to call a non-emergency line or 9-1-1. I fired up my computer to see if maybe anyone on Facebook or anyone else was talking about it, and as I was googling "high pitched noise Lynden," it stopped. So, problem solved, mystery unsolved.

Again

Last night I knitted four rows again. Knit 3, purl 1.

In stitches

There's a page on Facebook that I follow called "Lost Pets of Whatcom County." It is to help pet owners find their lost pets, a cause dear to my heart. Once my dog was missing overnight and I was distraught. Fortunately, he had been picked up by animal control and was spending the night in the pound, not trapped somewhere cold, thirsty, hungry, bewildered, and wondering why I didn't come find him. A page like "Lost Pets" can only work if people look at it. But sometimes it makes me sad to see that every day there are several pets gone missing just in this county, and their owners are saying, "Please help me find my cat, my dog." They post pictures. Poor animals. Poor people.

Sometimes I feel sad about news and politics, too.

But on the up side, I knitted four rows this evening (knit 3, purl 1)--that is, if I counted correctly. I found that when I paused after a row of knitting, the next time I picked it up, I was wondering how many rows did I knit since the last row I purled? Much close examination and counting of what seemed to be rows would ensue. So I decided that every time I pick it up I will knit 3, purl 1, so that I always know where I am the next time. But at a certain point tonight I looked at my work and asked myself am I on my first or second row of knitting? Much close examination and counting of what seemed to be rows ensued. I did lay it down after the purled row so next time I know where to start and just have to pay attention so I don't forget where I am part way.

When I was  little girl (about 10) and my grandma taught me to knit, I would periodically get the stitches so tight on the needle that I could no longer poke the opposite needle through. Then I would give it to my grandma, and she would knit a few rows to get it to the right looseness. This time around, that's not happening. If anything, my stitches are exceedingly loose.

Isn't that interesting?

Longer light

Today when I left work, it was still light out. This is about a month plus a week since winter solstice. If the days shortened at the same rate they're now lengthening, probably the last time it was light when I left work was a month and a week before solstice. So I guess I drive home in the dark about two and a half months of the year.

It was dark by the time I got home, but the point is that whole drive was not in darkness.

Cloudy all day

As I was driving home, late in the afternoon, I noticed that Mt. Baker and the Twin Sisters looked pretty, even with the clouds low. I have often taken pictures of them on clear days, but not so many in this mood. So I drove out to the Hannegan Road, where the view is unobstructed and took a few pictures with my phone. They are not the sharpest, since it was a phone picture. Even though they are to the east, they pick up a little color from the sunset in the opposite direction.

Here they both are. Baker is harder to perceive, but the Sisters are quite visible:



And here is just Baker:



The fields have standing water in them because we have had a lot of rain and the ground is saturated.

Fun guy

I was at my sister-in-law's place today. It was unseasonably mild weather today, just like spring. (I saw later on the news that we almost set a record high temperature for January.) So we did a spring-like thing, and when I was walking out to my car, we wandered around her yard and looked at the flower beds. She has daffodils just poking their tips out of the ground.

Her son-in-law at one time set up some hollowed out sections of tree trunks as planters and planted young trees in them. The hollow sections are growing some pretty fungus.

Look at this:



So cool. And this one has pretty fungus, plus the way the bark is separating from the trunk is pretty:



Nice, huh?

Cass

Just a quick thought related to the video I posted a few minutes ago. I once saw some TV event where they were paying tribute to Cass Elliot. The remaining living Mamas and Papas and Cass Elliot's daughter were all on stage, and Michelle Phillips said that Cass was in heaven watching them, sitting on a star and "wearing a size two." And I thought, wow, she really doesn't get it. Heaven is not where Cass Elliot wears a size two. Heaven is where Cass Elliot is her true self and she and everyone else can perceive her beauty. Because we're not blind there.

Winter's night

Hm. January. Not Christmas, not spring. It's a month.

It's amazing how quickly the holidays fade from consciousness. Three weeks ago, New Year's Brunch. Today, sack lunch.

I'm trying to stay awake until bedtime so that I can sleep through the night. I started to feel drowsy at 7:15 p.m., or thereabouts. Well, maybe I'll allow myself an early start tonight.

Good night to you. Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you.

This day

Today in the U.S. it is a holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He absolutely deserves honor. He lovingly stirred the conscience of a nation and greater justice ensued. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.



God grant that right here in America and all over this world, we will choose the high way; a way in which men will live together as brothers. A way in which the nations of the world will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. A way in which every man will respect the dignity and worth of all human personality. A way in which every nation will allow justice to run down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. A way in which men will do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. A way in which men will be able to stand up, and in the midst of oppression, in the midst of darkness and agony, they will be able to stand there and love their enemies, bless those persons that curse them, pray for those individuals that despitefully use them. And this is the way that will bring us once more into that society which we think of as the brotherhood of man. This will be that day when white people, colored people, whether they are brown or whether they are yellow or whether they are black, will join together and stretch out with their arms and be able to cry out: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

Let it fly

Is the past tense of knit knit or knitted? I wanted to say, "I knit(ted) two rows this evening, or to be more specific I knit(ted) one and purled one." But I wasn't sure which way to say it. So I googled "past tense of knit," and it turns out knit is a verb in transition. A transitional verb, as it were, which is not the same as a transitive verb. A transitive verb, if I recall correctly (and I think I do), requires a direct object. The verb hit (which rhymes with knit and, like knit in traditional usage, is not inflected in the past tense) is transitive. "He hit" is not a complete thought. The verb needs a direct object, as in "He hit the ball." Knit does not need a direct object. "I am knitting" can stand alone, or I can specify "I am knitting a scarf." Or perhaps I am knitting a nerd flag.

Atmospheric

I have not seen the heron again in the mornings walking by the creek; however, this morning the half moon glowing over the tree tops was also worth seeing. It was clear and sunny here in Lynden, beautiful vistas as I drove out of Lynden to go to work, then as I approached Bellingham I drove into a bank of fog covering that city. It cleared up by lunch time.

Some books

I'm reading two interesting books right now.

One is on my Kindle. It's Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi and it's written by Amy-Jill Levine, who is a New Testament professor at VanderBilt Divinity School. She is Jewish, and it's informative to read her analysis of what the parables meant to First Century Jewish listeners. She's completely respectful of Christianity, and take it on its own terms when she talks about it. She has little puns and jokes throughout her writing that I enjoy.

I already own a print book by her, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, that I have only dipped into.

The second book I'm reading is a print book, and it is The Decoration of Houses by Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr. Edith Wharton, of course, wrote those great books about New York society life, The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, and another of her best known works is Ethan Frome. I believe Ogden Codman is the photographer who took the pictures that are included in the book. I wanted a print version rather than an e-book precisely so I could see the pictures. Wharton is writing for a wealthy turn-of-the-(last)-century audience, so she talks about your drawing room, dining room, ballroom, and so on. Not entirely relevant to my late 20th Century ranch house, but I am hoping to gather some useful principles, even if the details vary. And it's interesting just to read her descriptions of architecture and decoration.

Water fowl

In the mornings when I walk my dog, it's light out, so I often take him into the back yard and more or less walk the perimeter with him. Part of the perimeter is the creek, and on Thursday and Friday morning I disturbed a blue heron into taking off. Both times it was in the same section of the creek, where there's a gap in the shrubs behind our picnic patio. In the summer, that's where my great-nieces and -nephew go down to dabble in the creek, but in the winter the water is much higher and faster. I wish I had seen the heron standing in the water, but both times I was unaware of his presence until I heard the noise of his taking flight, but at least I do then see him fairly close up while he takes off.

Last week, I saw a couple of ducks swimming in the creek a couple times. When they realize I'm there, they just let themselves drift downstream away from me. I could see a male and a female, and downstream another male. They are mallards with the green head.

Here's a video from a couple years ago of ducks like these (or the same ducks?) in the back yard.

It's kind of a thrill to see those wild birds up close.

History

Still reading the Queen Anne bio.

One of the major events of her reign was the union of England and Scotland into one kingdom: Great Britain. One monarch ruled both countries starting with James (the 1st of England, the 6th of Scotland), who was already King of Scotland and then inherited the crown of England from Elizabeth I, but each still had their own parliament. Under Anne, the great-granddaughter of James I, the parliaments were merged. They are still united today. Quite recently, Scotland held a vote whether to continue with the union or separate and they voted to stay united. It was touch and go.

Another issue in Anne's reign was the emergence of party politics. The Whigs and the Tories formed parties and competed with one another. Prior to them, of course there were differences of opinion in Parliament, but not political parties as such. During our American Revolution, those who opted for independence were Whiggish, and those who wanted to remain British colonies were Tories.

And a third big item in Anne's reign was the 7-year War of the Spanish Succession. John Churchill was the great British hero of that war, which is why he became the Duke of Marlborough.

And then there was the question of who would become monarch after Anne died. Poor Anne was married to a Danish prince (whom she loved) and experienced I think 16 or 18 pregnancies, but had many miscarriages and several infants who died. She had one son who survived  until he was about 10 or 12 if I remember correctly, but then he died, too. So she had no direct heir. There was a Catholic Stuart in exile in France, Anne's younger 1/2 brother, although she claimed to believe he was not her father's son. But the main reason he was barred from the throne by an act of Parliament was that he was Catholic. Instead the crown was to go to a descendent of a Stuart princess who had married into Germany--George I of England, who also ruled the German province of Hanover. I think the law is still in place in Great Britain that the monarch must be a descendant of that one princess and also may not be or marry a Catholic. There is a British prince today, Prince Michael, a cousin of the current Queen Elizabeth, who gave up his right to inherit the throne (should everyone ahead of him in line die) by marrying a Catholic.

Cozy with a book

Tonight I'm wearing my winter robe. It's dark purple and semi-fuzzy. Long sleeves, high neck. Feels so cozy.

This morning my drive was foggy most of the way to Bellingham, then it ended quite suddenly. It's intriguing that fog is a cloud lying on the ground.

I'm reading a biography of Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch of Britain. Her friend, then enemy, Sarah Churchill, first Duchess of Marlborough was quite a piece of work. (Those are the same Marlborough/Churchills from whence sprang Winston Churchill.) After Anne came the House of Hanover, which is the current dynasty, although their name has changed, first to Saxe-Coburg-Hesse when Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, and then to Windsor during World War I, when they wanted to shed their German name.

Aren't those some interesting historical facts?

Ordinary

Today was back to work. It was a workaday day, but fine. No high ups, no low downs. Just ordinary, which is good.

My sister recently wrote a blog entry praising normal after she recovered from a severe bout of flu. After I had kidney stones, I looked up the Jewish prayer to be said after urinating (or other business):

Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe,
Who fashioned man with wisdom, and created within him many openings and many cavities.
It is obvious and known before Your throne of glory,
   that if but one of them were to be ruptured,
   or but one of them were to be blocked,
   it would be impossible to survive and to stand before You.
Blessed are You, God, Who heals all flesh and acts wondrously.

Industriousness

Well, I accomplished a couple things today. I paid some bills, so I will no longer have the lurking feeling that I have unpaid bills out there. I have as many things as I can on automatic payment, but a few holdouts make me pay consciously. And I did some laundry, so that I can feel the complacency that accompanies a stack of clean underwear. The only downside to the laundry was that, even though I checked every pocket before doing a load of darks, a tissue snuck into the washing machine, and all the clothes have white shreds on them. In some circles, that's a fashion statement. Right?

Wintry mix

Today there is snow on the ground. I was not expecting that. The forecasts I had seen said a warming trend and rain. But it's hard to get an accurate forecast when you live in a small town. All the local TV stations are based in Seattle, which is a couple hundred miles from here, so what might be accurate for them might not apply up here. I find the closest to my weather is if I can find a station that reflects conditions at the airport in Abbottsford, British Columbia, Canada. That's only a few miles away.

I was outside walking the dog around my back yard, which is in a declivity. I could see that in less sheltered spots the wind is blowing. It's cold. The snow is not deep, just covering the surface, if that. It is slushy, half snow half melted half rain. That's three halves. I did see some leaves with icicles hanging on them, because the snow melted, started to run off, and then froze. That's a silver thaw, but there's not enough snow to make it a true silver thaw.

Other than walking the dog, I've stayed indoors. If one has the chance to stay home in bad weather, one might as well. If today had been a work day, I would have ventured out, but I have seen plenty of reports today of cars sliding into ditches or colliding with each other and the like. No thanks.

So that's the weather report, I guess.

The play's the thing

Tonight when I took my dog for a little evening walk after dark, all the Christmas lights in the neighborhood were doused. One house did still have a lit tree in a window, but that was it. Yesterday, quite a few houses were still lit up, but now it's over.

For some reason, the first sentence I wrote made me remember the line in MacBeth, "There's husbandry in heaven tonight." Oops. I misquoted. Banquo said, "There's husbandry in heaven; / Their candles are all out." He was chatting with his son, Fleance, and their dialogue established that the moon was down, it was past midnight, and not many stars were visible. I taught MacBeth to high scholars a total of four times, I believe. Once as a student teacher, once each year that I taught in Christian schools (i.e. two years), and once when I taught English online. Or did I teach it online? I can't remember now. I know I taught Julius Caesar online and also at least one year in the classroom. I taught Romeo and Juliet at least once, to ninth graders.

I don't miss teaching. The classroom part could be good, but I hated, hated, hated grading papers. In fact, let's change the subject.

I've been thinking that it would be nice to go to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. I once mentioned that to my sister as a thing to do in the years that there is no Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College, and she seemed to favor the idea. The Festival happens every two years, and we just went there in April 2014. I think it would be nice to go to Ashland maybe in the fall. When I look at their schedule online, it looks like they fire up in June and start shutting down in October, so maybe September would be a good time for it. We'll have to keep thinking and talking about it, although we wouldn't want to wait so long that tickets sold out for the dates we want. It looks like one can already buy tickets online.

A most restful day

I stayed up last night to greet the New Year at midnight. I was with my parents I even was wakeful enough to stay awake a good hour or two after I came home. I woke up at 9:00 this morning and went to brunch at 10:30 with my parents, sister-in-law, niece, and two of my niece's children. I spoke to my sister on the phone in the afternoon.

At some point in the late afternoon, I felt sleepy, so I lay in the recliner with a quilt on top of me and my dog on top of the quilt, and it was so cozy that I fell asleep for hours. When I woke up, it was dark, and I wondered if I had slept well into the night, but it was only around 7:00. I got up and walked and fed the dog.

Happy New Year to you and yours.

Order, order

I'm reading a book on my Kindle about getting rid of clutter. I sometimes read books about de-cluttering, organizing, and simplifying life. They're a sort of fantasy literature for me. I read them and I dream about what it would be like to have an orderly household. I imagine it would be really nice. I have achieved it in the past, and perhaps I will again.

This author, Marie Kondo, recommends discarding over storage. She suggests organizing by category, starting with clothes. Get all your clothes from everywhere in the house and put them in one pile. Take each item in your hand and ask yourself whether it gives you a thrill of joy. Keep only those items that give you joy and get rid of the rest. Then take the things you've kept and decide where they go. She has further suggestions about folding, etc., but that's the gist.



Her book was originally written for a Japanese audience, so her advice about organizing good luck charms from Shinto shrines may not apply, but the idea of respecting yourself by respecting your belongings is worth considering.

Feet

Sometimes when I say, "It's freezing outside!" it's just hyperbole meaning I feel cold out there, but today it literally is freezing. My water feature is frozen over, and the ground feels hard underfoot.

Two trains of thought related to "the ground under foot." One was remembering how a few years ago I was troubled by painful plantar fasciitis, which is a shooting pain in the heel. The first standing on my feet in the morning was sometimes agonizing. One day I was in the parking lot of a grocery store and, walking from my car to the store, I walked on pavement, then over a grass median, and then pavement. I noticed the pain in my feet decreased when I walked on the grass, and I realized that I was walking on hard surfaces most of the time. I also realized, upon reflection, that I wore mostly flat shoes that did not cushion my feet from the pavement. Also, I live in a basement apartment where under the flooring is the cement foundation of the house--not even as much give as a wood floor. So I invested in better-cushioned shoes and, even in the house, where I  used to always be in stocking feet, I started to wear slip-ons with some give--often Birkenstocks. Sure enough, my feet soon stopped hurting.

Those thoughts took less time to think than to write, and then a fragment of poetry came to me, "nor can feet feel--." The context is, "Nor can feet feel, being shod." That's kind of against the point of my wearing shoes for my feet's health, but it is about walking on unnatural surfaces. It comes from Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, "God's Grandeur":

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Not a bad poem to contemplate as we approach the New Year. I tried to find a good recording of this poem on youtube, but they were all either accompanied by music or not a reading I cared for. Apparently several composers have also set it to music, but I didn't care for any of those renditions either. Just the word, please.

Uneventful

Clear and cold today. I visited for a few hours with a friend then went grocery shopping, then came home and walked and fed the dog. I almost forgot to feed the dog, but he reminded me. The evening ahead looks good for reading, or knitting and watching TV. Or both! Maybe I could knit in a kind of frenzy, like a Barbara Pym heroine. (No Fond Return of Love)

Clink

I was cleaning my kitchen (oddly enough) when I realized I hardly have any coffee cups. A moment's reflection told me that the majority of my mugs are scattered throughout my car's interior, where they make gentle clinking noises against each other whenever I go around a corner or over a bump.

I managed to fill the dishwasher even without them, so they can wait until tomorrow.

Christmas Eve 2014

I went to a candlelight service at my church this evening. So much that I liked about it.

1. It was on Christmas Eve. There have been times when we've had a candlelight service for the evening service of the Fourth Sunday of Advent, but that's just not as satisfying. You should light the Christ candle on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.

2. We sang all traditional Christmas hymns: Joy to the World, What Child Is This, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Away in a Manger, Good Christian Men Rejoice, and so on. My only caveat in this department is that we sang in a register that was a little high for me. We had two song leaders, a man and a woman. The woman, I know, is an alto, but perhaps the man is a tenor. Anyway, they launched into the songs high enough that I couldn't get the high notes. To be fair, I'm out of practice, plus singing throughout the service--the service consisted only of songs and Scripture readings--started to wear on my throat. I would have liked to have a good cough session to clear the pipes, but that would have been too gross to do in the sanctuary.

3. The symbolism of light spreading through the church, starting from the Christ candle, and going person-to-person, is simple and beautiful. One has to stop thinking symbolically at the end of the service, when everyone blows out their candles and throws them in a box on their way out the door.

4. I saw some dear people: (A) The couple who are the "shepherds" of my "household of faith"--which is a grouping of people assigned to a particular elder, deacon, and shepherd(s). This couple are my dad's age, but very fit and spry. The man is an old friend of my dad's from their youth. They are always friendly and caring. (B) The couple who lead my small group. They are both so good and kind. The woman is someone whose kind, friendly spirit I've admired for years. A couple years ago, when I was thinking I needed some partnership in my prayer efforts, she called me out of the blue to invite me to join their small group. She said that the group had been thinking about how to expand, and my name came to her when she was awake in the middle of the night. I believe that that was the prompting of the Holy Spirit, and I'm thankful she was responsive. Both of these couples spoke to me warmly and wished me a merry Christmas. (C) I saw other members of my small group around the sanctuary, and chatted with another on our way to our cars. (D) An elder, whose good opinion I respect, smiled happily at the sight of me and greeted me gladly. (E) A woman who has always been kind and friendly to me smiled and me, and I gave a little wave back. There were other glances and smiles exchanged. They all helped me feel a sense of belonging.

I've been struggling with church attendance this year, but I thought I should at least meet the lowest level of commitment and come for Christmas. When I was girl, and my father was an Air Force chaplain, we always had a Christmas Eve candlelight service at the chapel, and it was always packed with people who normally didn't come. My dad said these were the "C & E" church members--they came to church only at Christmas and Easter. I think for Roman Catholics that seriously is the basement level of commitment.

I still am a member of my church in my heart and mind, but I am not doing my part towards corporate worship. Fodder for a New Year's resolution. Or (what the heck) even repentance.

Now that I've waited until late in the evening, it's time to start my marathon of gift wrapping for the celebration tomorrow with my family.

Home body

I've been browsing through Nancy Mitford's The Water Beetle which is a collection of articles. She has one called "The Tourist." She asks, "Why do hundreds of thousands of human beings feel impelled to leave comfortable establishments for the certain misery of the voyage and the uncertain amenities of the arrival, not to speak of danger to life and limb?" She replies to her own question: "The answer is that the modern dwelling is comfortable, convenient, and clean, but it is not a home. Now that people live on shelves, perched between earth and sky, with nowhere to sit out of doors, no garden where they can plant a flower or pick a herb, they are driven on to the road for their holidays. All human beings need some aesthetic nourishment and the inhabitants of ugly towns form the bulk of the tourist trade."

That may or may not be statistically provable, but it spoke to me. I love to stay home. I love vacation days where I don't have anywhere to go. And it's because where I live, I can sit out of doors, plant a flower, and pick a herb. Just one of the reasons I wanted a house, not a condo.

It's also a family trait. I once was at a family reunion where one in-law remarked to another, "You must not be a Kok because you like to go places." So I took an informal poll among my cousins and found that a significant proportion of us do indeed prefer staying home to going almost anywhere. I seem to recall that my mom once read an article that said this quality was common among the people of the province of Drenthe, the Netherlands, where the Kok family originated, so that it took a strong motivation (poverty, one assumes) to take them from their homes to the New World.

Cedar

There is a type of cedar on my lawn. My dad planted it as a little shrub, but he does not like to prune or trim plants. He likes them to grow naturally. So here's what it looks like now.



You can just see the roofline of the house on the left in the lower side of the picture.

On the side of the cedar that faces the deck, I cut it back enough to make room to walk and stand.



So, from this side, you can see into the network of branches.



Birds love it in there.

A couple things

Chopped the red-twig dogwood back summer before last. Now it has new growth, and you can see why it has its name.



Swans flying overhead.

Roast this

On my way home today, I stopped at the drug store. While I was browsing, a Christmas song came on the loudspeaker. The Christmas song was "The Christmas Song," sometimes known as "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire." For me, the most familiar version is that by Nat King Cole, which I've embedded below.

But this was not the familiar version. It was a female singer who was putting her own mark on the song. For instance, she was not bound by the melody but felt free to improvise her own tune. And, whenever a slight increase in volume might be called for, she would bellow and belt the lyrics. Finally, she had that manner of singing high notes that you hear so much today from women pop singers: she would sing the note, then slide her voice down, as if to indicate that she could hit a high note but not sustain it, then up and down, up and down, like a roller coaster, until one was praying for the next syllable so that she could get off the vocal carnival ride. I don't know who she was, but I'm not a fan.

Palate cleanser:

First Sunday of Advent

From the Catholic Lectionary (I bolded what I liked best)

Isaiah 63:16b-17, 19b; 64:2-7:

You, LORD, are our father,
our redeemer you are named forever.
Why do you let us wander, O LORD, from your ways,
and harden our hearts so that we fear you not?
Return for the sake of your servants,
the tribes of your heritage.

Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,
with the mountains quaking before you,
while you wrought awesome deeds we could not hope for,
such as they had not heard of from of old.
No ear has ever heard, no eye ever seen, any God but you
doing such deeds for those who wait for him.

Would that you might meet us doing right,
that we were mindful of you in our ways!
Behold, you are angry, and we are sinful;
all of us have become like unclean people,
all our good deeds are like polluted rags;
we have all withered like leaves,
and our guilt carries us away like the wind.

There is none who calls upon your name,
who rouses himself to cling to you;
for you have hidden your face from us
and have delivered us up to our guilt.
Yet, O LORD, you are our father;
we are the clay and you the potter:
we are all the work of your hands.

1 Corinthians 1:3-9:

Brothers and sisters:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I give thanks to my God always on your account for the grace of God bestowed on you in Christ Jesus, that in him you were enriched in every way, with all discourse and all knowledge, as the testimony to Christ was confirmed among you, so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will keep you firm to the end, irreproachable on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, and by him you were called to fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Mark 13:33-37:

Jesus said to his disciples: “Be watchful! Be alert! You do not know when the time will come. It is like a man traveling abroad. He leaves home and places his servants in charge, each with his own work, and orders the gatekeeper to be on the watch. Watch, therefore; you do not know when the Lord of the house is coming, whether in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning. May he not come suddenly and find you sleeping. What I say to you, I say to all: ‘Watch!’”

My thoughts: The day of Christ's return is not a scary threat, a day to be dreaded. In Isaiah, the prophet longs for the Lord to come suddenly, acknowledging that, if he did, he would not find his people doing right or being mindful of his ways. The prophet wants the Lord to manifest his power and majesty and in so doing to rescue his people from their sinful ways. Jesus tells his disciples (that's us) that God has given each of us work to do and we should be found doing it. It's like a surprise inspection in the military, or your boss coming back a day early from vacation, or your parents coming home earlier than they told you when they left you in charge. The apostle Paul praises the Corinthian church for their diligence in God's work and assures them that God will keep them faithful, so that when Christ returns they will not receive reproaches. Our very faithfulness is possible only as a gift from God. He is the potter, we are the clay, the work of his hands; he keeps us firm to the end.

First snow

I heard the wind picking up last night, then at around 11:30 p.m. saw a traffic warning online for snowy driving conditions on the freeway not all that far from here. So I looked outside and, sure enough, snow.

This morning some was still there.



More than just snow--it was cold. The pond was frozen.



The northeast wind--a cruel blast from the Fraser Valley--blew all day.

Semper Fido

Knitting, cleaning, blogging, whatever, I have a faithful companion.

Purls of wisdom

Okay, after joking about it many times, I'm literally going to knit a ravell'd sleave, and this time I mean it. (Anybody want a peanut?)

Since about the age of 10, I've known the knit stitch. My grandma taught me to cast on and knit, and that's as far as I ever got. I never learned to purl. My one completed knitting project was a coaster. It was rather rectangular, too short one way for setting a glass on it, too long the other way. Such as it was, I gave it to my mom as a gift and who knows but that it is in a drawer or a box somewhere in the very house in which I now live.

Anyway. I asked my talented sister-in-law if she would teach me to purl. I've tried looking at drawings and videos, but I can't learn a three-dimensional craft from a two-dimensional instruction. She said she would, so I ordered some yarn and knitting needles off Amazon. I ordered cotton yarn because if I succeed in making a scarf, for instance, cotton won't make me itch like wool does. My sensitive skin--it's that delicate flower thing. (I recently read that Wagner needed to wear silk clothes because of his sensitive skin.) It was a large skein, which I wound into a gargantuan yarn ball, and yesterday after our Thanksgiving dinner, I learned to purl.



I cast 40 stitches onto a size 10 needle and knit a row, then purled a row. Knit a row, purl a row, and so I've been going on.



I've made noticeable mistakes, but I try to recover them on the next go-round and in any event just keep knitting.



One side.



And the other side. It is not inconceivable that I shall master this.

The day after

It's the day after Thanksgiving, a quiet day for myself. Yesterday was the time spent with dear family members, and I loved it. I have dedicated today to much-needed housework. Already I have filled the dishwasher and set it running. I have a portable dishwasher, if that's the correct term (it is on wheels, and if I moved out of this house I could take it with me), that renders the kitchen sink inaccessible while running because it has to be hooked up to the faucet.

The dishes were piled high in the kitchen. This happens not because I am averse to loading the dishwasher but because I am lazy about unloading it. After it runs, it tends to become the place I go for clean dishes, while dirty dishes pile up in the sink and on the counter. Today I am remedying that situation. I will have to empty this load out and run another one.

I also plan to do multiple loads of laundry. And clean out the fridge. Vacuum the floors. Put stuff away. Clean the bathroom.

But, of course, right now I'm taking a break. I stepped outside to take a picture recording that on this date one can see the creek from my deck, which means the water is high.



See it? One can also see the sheds and buildings of the lumber yard on the other side of the creek. During the summer the trees' leaves hide them.

(I notice I'm saying "one" instead of "you." That's because I've been reading Mitford books.)

And so we have entered the holiday season and the journey into the heart of winter.



No sitting outside drinking coffee in the sunshine on a Saturday morning for the next four or five months.



The pond is full of rainwater and fallen leaves.



The vines among the leaves and frozen flowers are like tattered streamers after the party is over.



St. Francis keeps a solitary vigil until spring.

Oh the world!

I recently read a "biography" of Nancy Mitford that was composed mostly of excerpts from her letters. Her friend Harold Acton put it together not long after she died. Nancy Mitford is the author of the incomparably English novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate yet she lived from 1945 to her death in 1973 in France.

The two novels I mentioned are hilariously funny, yet poignant. Later, she turned to writing biographies, and I am now reading her life of Madame de Pompadour. What I've read by her has not shown much interest on her part in religion (although no antipathy toward it either), so I was interested to read in her letters, in the years of the illness that eventually took her life, the remark "The longer I live the more Christian I become—Christian civilisation with all its faults has been by far the best in historical times, do admit."

Sometimes she had so much pain from her illness that she longed to die, but when she had relief from the pain, she wanted to live. She said, "Oh the world! how much better off we shall all be in the next one. And yet one’s pretty house, the sunshine, the bird’s moving in for the winter, Hassan and his niceness and all one’s friends can’t but attach one to it." (Hassan kept house, cooked, and cared for her in her illness.) I relate to that because I often think that this world is so beautiful that I wish we didn't ultimately have to leave it, even for a better one, and what I like best are my yard, my deck, my neighborhood, my dog, my family. Simple pleasures are the best, as the baked beans commercial used to say.



I was a little disappointed that, in my Kindle edition of Madame de Pompadour, the introduction, by Amanda Foreman, had several mistakes concerning Nancy Mitford. After mentioning Nancy Mitford's father's aversion to sending his daughters to school, she says, "Nancy was only half-joking when she claimed that the one novel she had read in her life was White Fang." Nancy Mitford never said this about herself, it was a line she put in the mouth of her fictional character "Uncle Matthew" (a character based on her father, Lord Redesdale), who said it was such a good book he never had to read another one. A couple sentences later, Ms. Foreman states, "She achieved instant fame with her essay 'The English Aristocracy,' a witty analysis of class-based habits of speech, in which she coined the terms U and non-U, meaning 'upper-class' and 'the rest.'" In fact Nancy Mitford wrote that essay some time after her novels had become wildly popular. Then, "After the war, Nancy moved to France and lived in a charming house in Versailles." Actually, Nancy Mitford lived in Paris from 1945 through 1966 and moved to Versailles in 1967. All these facts are in the book to which Ms. Foreman is writing the foreword. All she had to do was read the book to get it right.

Amanda Foreman, by the way, is the author of a biography I've read and enjoyed, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. I trust her research in that work was of a higher caliber than this.

Where is the answer?

We've been having windy weather. That seems to happen a lot in October, although, come to think of it, it's November now. Anyway, a couple days ago I stopped at Winco, the big-box grocery store, on my way home from work to pick up a few items. When I came back out to my car, I saw a shopping cart rolling across the parking lot with no visible means of locomotion. I said to myself, "The grocery carts are blowin' in the wind."

Naturally, this led to my singing "Blowin' in the Wind" (or such parts of it as I could remember) the rest of the way home. I knew it was written by Bob Dylan, and I've heard his version, but I prefer Peter, Paul, and Mary's rendition. I like close harmonies and melodic singing.

Judge for yourself. Here's Bob Dylan:



and here are Peter, Paul, and Mary:

Replicake

Today the wife of one of my co-workers "experimented" with making a carrot cake, and she brought the result in to our office. I had a piece, and I proclaim the experiment a resounding success.

Further studies are warranted, however, to make sure the result is reproducible.

Sunday noon

Today is a cloudy day with light rain. Washington rain. It's cool out, but the wind is not adding any extra chill. Wet leaves are all over the pavements.

Yesterday, Saturday, I slept in a long, long, long, long time, and it felt great. I didn't wake up until 11:00. One more week until we "fall back" an hour. Lucky Europeans already did so today.

In a little while, I'll go over to my sister-in-law's and we'll eat a nice Sunday dinner she'll have prepared and then we'll work on our stitching. I'm on the last flower of a pansy pillow, then I'll fill in the background. She is in the last stages of a large and complex needlepoint of Rembrandt's Night Watch.

This evening, I need to do enough laundry to get me through the work week. It's been many years now that my typical pattern is to do the most necessary weekly laundering on Sunday evening. That is because I tend to wait until the last minute to do almost everything. I don't know why I do that, I just do.

Oh, well.

Town sky

By the time I got into Lynden, about 6:00 p.m., the sky to the west looked like this:



In my back yard, this glowing hump of cloud showed over the trees:



When I took my dog for a walk, this giant thunderhead was due east, as I looked down South Park Street:



Here it is closer up:



And closer yet:



Cool.