mostly idle

Subtle signs that the Christmas Knitting Season is upon us, aka Future Christmas Presents:

Subtle signs that I have false hope regarding what can be accomplished before Dec. 25th, aka Not Future Christmas Presents:

Future Prospects (Hope Springs Eternal):

Don’t mind the gratuitous advertising…

So, having cleared a few projects off the “in progress” list, and in a wild fit of enthusiasm, I declared today to be Wash Day – as in Hand Wash The Delicate Knitwear Day.

Lookit what I finally finished (and washed):

Now that I’ve got the thing off needles and blocked, I understand why it was taking me 45 minutes per row – damn thing’s as big as a double bed…

You can really see where I had to patch in the new color. I waver back and forth between thinking it’s a charming border accent or a really bad hack.

Here you can kinda see why I had problems matching the color… The top (on the right) starts out quite dark, and progressively becomes more blond until you get to the bottom, where I tried to blend a dirty blond and a light olive lace weight. I think I got the colors right, the only thing I could wish for it that it hadn’t been quite so dark. But it is what it is, and as I say, I’ll just tell everyone it’s a charming border accent.

Yeah… that color change is really obvious… oh well.

I, I am He who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins. ~ Isaiah 43:25 NRSV

As we approach the mid-way point of my Grand No-Days-Off Adventure, a couple of things have been brought to my attention. Things about other people and their overall health and their plans for their holidays that really, I was better off not knowing. Things that kinda make you say to yourself: Okay, you know what? I’m not going to get angry about this, but I am going to remember it. And the next time you find yourself in a spot where a little bit of give from me would go a long way to making your life a little easier, I’m going to be the one to stand on my rights.

As my grandmother used to say, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

But here’s the thing – when I’m at work, I spend a lot of time just staring out an office window watching bundles of paper roll by, and last night I got to thinking, not about my co-workers or even about myself so much, but about God. God, who blots out our transgressions for his own sake. It’s a bit of a strange thought, really – that it is for God’s own sake that He remembers not our sins. I tend to think of it the other way around – that God has forgiven my sin for my sake, and now that He has already come so far on my behalf, well, I need to pick up my socks and finish better. That’s the way it was presented to me, anyway…

But for God’s own sake, He blots out our transgressions – He is not keeping notes or taking names for later. He is not sitting up on His Throne thinking to Himself: Okay, you know what? I’m not going to get angry about this, but I am going to remember it… And He’s not – not doing it for our sake; it’s for His own. There is something about choosing not to remember that God does for His own sake…

I thought about choosing not to remember the choices other people made that backed me into this place. I thought about what would be different if I just chose to let it go – and the only thing I can think of that would be different would be, well, me. I, the inimitable whiterose of mostly idle fame, would be infinitely better off if I just tossed this particular yarn out of the memory stash and got on with the rest of my life not carrying it around with me.

And if I’m better off without this one ball of yarn, perhaps there are a few others rolling around in the stash of my mind that I could do without, too.

Due to colossal miscommunication in the Greater Universe, I am not In Charge of Things. Because if I were, I would not be working for the next 10 days straight. (Actually, I wouldn’t be working at all. If I were In Charge, and everything in the universe was guided by my whimsy, well, let’s just say that things would be very different, and leave it at that.)

Okay, here’s my theory – all parents damage their children. I’m not talking future-episode-of-CSI damage, I’m talking slightly warped. I also believe that there’s nothing you can do about it – after all, all parents started out as children who were damaged by their parents, and so on, and so on, and so on. The other side of this coin is that children damage their parents, and if I can’t go by a laundromat without thinking of the time I got spanked for dropping a basket of laundry that I told Mom was too full to carry and she told me to carry it anyway or else; well, Mom had to physically move to the city to get away from the hypnotic hallway of the fruit stained ceiling. (Mom still asks us How? but I don’t think it’s the how that she doesn’t understand. How you get over-ripe fruit to stick to a ceiling is pretty obvious. I think it’s the Why? that keeps her up nights…)

So here we all are. Warped, unhappy people going about our warped, unhappy lives. Moments of wild panic interspersed among long stretches of quiet desperation – until you find someone. Someone who fell on the same battlefield, someone who bears the same scars – a fellow survivor. Finally, here is someone who understands why you are the way you are, and the full implication of exposure to certain harmless-looking elements over time (say, like an entire childhood) – and for just a moment, universes overlap.

And speaking of the collision of universes, Jay, I was at your Mom’s yesterday. The conservatory is coming along beautifully.

Reg the Painter is gone (for now). My room, nay, my home, is my own again. I’ve been dragging my feet on belonging retrieval, though – I thought I’d take a bit of time and decide how much of this stuff I could live without if I really tried.

As it turns out, not much… the yarn (quelle suprise) was the first to return. But I did cull it quite ruthlessly. If I didn’t have a project in mind for it or a burning love for it, it didn’t get to stay. I am satisfied now with all of the yarn that I own and its future prospects.

The two CD’s I have had in the car for the last three weeks have worn a little thin. The rest of that collection was the next to return. There wasn’t a lot of sorting to do there anyway – thanks to the beauty of iTunes, I only buy the CD when I love every song on the entire album. That hasn’t happened since the fall of 2008. (I lie. Two weeks ago I bought James Taylor & Carole King Live at the Troubadour. But before that, 2008.) But I do need to get a better iPod…

And I think today we bring back the movies. I think this because in a stunning display of ADD last night, I found myself watching crap television. And every couple of minutes, I would think to myself, this is crap. I should go get [fill in DVD here]. And somehow, every single thing I thought of to watch instead of crap tv was mysteriously out in the garage. How extremely inconvenient is that? I almost went out and started hauling them in right then, but was stopped by the thought that people hauling boxes of stuff in and out of residential buildings at 1:00am isn’t suspicious behavior at all. Nope. Nothing to see here, folks. Nice doggie – is that a badge?

Okay, this is no longer a friendly little painting-of-house project. It has become instead a direct assault on my sleeping patterns and indeed, my very sanity.

I have a bit of a reputation for being able to sleep through almost anything, so when George put this whole painting project in motion, I thought it would be inconvenient, but that I would be able to roll with it. After all, the girl who slept through two thunderstorms and golf-ball size hail ought to be able to cope with a little painter-boy. As it turns out, Reg the Painter has mad skillz of his own – for example, the ability to step on the squeaky spot in the floor directly above my bedroom approximately 7,422 times per hour. ALL. MORNING.

And speaking of direct assaults on my sanity, let’s talk yarn deprivation. Most of the stuff I value in this world (AKA yarn) was moved out to the garage when it looked like the painting of my room was imminent. As it turns out, not so imminent after all – and much like George, who (after three days without television) was reminiscing about the good old days when we could watch TV right in our own living room; I am feeling the yarn shortage. Sure, I can go out to the garage and fondle the occasional skein, but really, it’s only been a week. Have some pride and a little self-control, girl.

And speaking of pride and a little self control, one of the three projects which I kept in the house pending the painting of my lair is now complete. It’s a pull apart surprise scarf, and it’s a pretty apt name. You work a plain piece of stockinette with the complete intention of dropping half the stitches just before you are done. You tell yourself when you get started that it’s a lovely plan and will make a lovely scarf, and you knit with enthusiasm.

About halfway through the ball of yarn, it begins to dawn on you that you have put an awful lot of work into something that you’re going to deliberately lose half of before you can call this project finished. By the time you’re ready to cast off, all you can think is that you’re a masochistic idiot and you’ll be buggered before you do anything this absolutely ridiculous again, but now that you’re here, you’re going to see it through if it kills everyone:

And then, after a severe amount of deliberate unraveling, it turns into this:

Which is so absolutely adorable that you’re already planning when you can do it again, except that the other ball of yarn that looks like this is in the freakin’ garage.

So I guess we’ll just call it and work on a pair of socks instead.

The yarn is the not-brown “Downpour” colorway redeemed from the great yarn purge of 2010. Sock model provided by the Coca-Cola Bottling Company, green wall provided by Brintech Painting.

Let me start by saying that there is no possible universe in which this job does not need to be done. Desperately. I will also state, for the record, that I have been a full and willing participant in the planning stages. (By participant, you understand that I mean that I have listened to my uncle rehearse the reasons why we needed to paint for the six weeks leading up to this week, and agreed with him every. freaking. time. he brought the subject up. I was also required to view 16 cards of white and green paint samples and consider and comment upon all their various combinations.)

The house needs to be painted. Neither George nor I want to do it. Reg the Painter does want to do it. Simple solution, right? The much discussed color scheme of green with white trim upstairs and all white downstairs & in the bathrooms was passed along. I suppose our first clue that the full complexity of the plan hadn’t been completely understood was this:

This is what Reg the Painter returned from the paint store with… percentage wise, and considering the house is pretty evenly split between “upstairs” and “downstairs”, that’s a lot of green paint and not-so-much white. Still, maybe he didn’t want to get the big bucket o’ white paint until he was ready to paint downstairs…

Reg showed up bright and early last week and laid down The Plan – ceilings first, walls second, trim last. Cool. He even had a plan to paint the ceilings that didn’t involve much movage of furniture – even cooler. He laid down drop cloths on floors everywhere, covered everything else with plastic, took down the light fixtures, and fired up the paint sprayer. So far, so good. Day One, he loaded up the green and did all the upstairs ceilings except the bathroom. Day Two, he came back and did all the downstairs ceilings and both bathrooms. Except… still green.

The still-greenness part of the plan went unnoticed by myself and George until the plastic started coming down and we were allowed back into the “painting zone”. Oopsies.

My house / is a very very very green house… Of course, it’s only the ceilings (at this point) that are green. But we’re thinking that it’s easier to carry on with the green now that it’s there anyway, so it’s a good thing we picked a green we both liked.

Days Three and Four – Reg the Painter has not been back. Which is good, because it means that the new ceiling paint has cured and I was able to have a shower in my green-ceilinged bathroom. But it’s also bad, because one day Reg is going to come back and paint the walls in my bathroom, and then I’m going to have to go another 2 days sans shower – ick. But that’s a worry for a future time.

Today’s worry is how much more of my stuff I can get into the garage in front of where I park my car before I have to resort to street parking. I’ve already moved the cds, the dvds, the cookbooks, and the yarn. Not all of the yarn, you understand; just the stuff that I thought I would be able to live without for a (…gasp.sob…) week. At this point, I believe that I have moved enough stuff out of my room that whatever is left will be easily moved to the center or stacked on the bed, thus freeing up a passageway around the room for wall-painting.

But having to move everything has really brought home to me how much ‘everything’ I have. I could have sworn that I just went through a huge purge session, and here I am again, looking at my things and trying to think objectively about how much of it I really need, and how much I’m only keeping for guilty or sentimental reasons.

It’s gotta be the paint fumes. Green paint fumes do strange things to the mind…

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
~ Worstward Ho, Samuel Beckett

I wasn’t aware of how much surviving July had taken out of me until I recently realized that I have at least seven knitting projects on the go, all variations on a theme, which would be garter stitch. In fact, the only projects currently underway that offer any kind of mental challenge at all were started back in May (or earlier) and haven’t been significantly knit upon since July 9 – the official first day of the Calgary Stampede. Coincidence? I think not.

Not that I’m trying to blame the Stampede for my descent into ennui; at least, not directly. It just kinda stands out as being the kick-off of a very long month. No, seriously. A long, long, month. At least three times as long as normal. You’d have thought I would have had more time to blog in there. Actually, I kinda did – I just didn’t have anything to say. So I knit multiple garter stitch patterns instead. (Potholders, dishcloths, scarves, baby blankies? Anyone? Anyone at all?)

So, what do you do to turn that frown upside down? ~ One of the guys on the dock last night told me not to smile so much, I was going to break something. I told him I couldn’t help it, he made me feel all sunshiney inside. I’m surprised the dock didn’t collapse under the weight of all that sarcasm. ~ A different guy brought me pizza. Actually, looking back on it, that helped. Thanks, Yaggi! ~ Because that’s what good girls do, right? When the going gets tough, tough get going, etc…

Which got me thinking about the little life experiment I’ve been running for the last little while – the one where I experiment with getting a life. ~ I got a sticky note from a friend the other day. It said, “The world is full of people who will go their Whole lives and not actually Live one day. She did not intend to be one of them.” It also had some information about a church with Sunday afternoon services on it. eh. maybe. ~ So far, the end result of the experiment is that a lot of the things I did that made me a *good girl* are no longer part of my repertoire. The last one to go was “blood donor” – the last time I went into the clinic to donate, I was temporarily suspended from the active donor list due to a health / medication conflict.

So, if I’m not a *good girl* – and any evidence that I might have been is, at this point, largely behind me – then what am I? ~ One of the people I work with has been having a particularly crap month. The icing on the cake was that she was in a vehicle accident last week. I offered to drive her to/from work for a couple days, until she could get the insurance stuff sorted out. She declared me to be the bestest person ever. I told her to take it back or I’d leave her ass on the Deerfoot. That’s the same as Jesus asking that guy why he (the guy) called Him (Jesus) good, isn’t it?~

When I started this adventure, I had a meditation from Richard Rohr that seemed like a good idea at the time:

… you can stand naked before the naked God without shame, knowing you will always be received as you are. The point is not the perfection of the gift but the giving of the gift. “I am who I am, who I am!” the soul shouts. That is all you are and it is apparently more than enough for God. All we can give back to God is who we really are, which is, without a doubt, the most courageous act you will ever perform.

See, but here’s the thing about getting naked… it’s very, ummm, naked. And while naked can seem like a good idea when you’ve got piles of clothes all around you; you’ll find it’s not such stellar thinking when the piles are gone. So I guess that makes this is the part of the adventure where we discover that the foolishness of God is greater than man’s highest wisdom. Right?

I said: RIGHT?!?