Life as a Spectator Sport

I had all kinds of projects planned for today. Take a load of trash to the dump, make bread, do laundry, get my end-of-month invoicing done. Maybe work a little on the cap for my grandson. Maybe work a lot on the cap for my grandson. Okay, work all day, don't do anything else at all.

Clarence yelled, "When is my supper going to be ready?"

"Whaddya mean?" I yelled right back. "You just had lunch." I glanced up at the clock so I could tell him the time if he demanded proof, and it was 4:30. Four hours had disappeared, and I hadn't even noticed.

At least the hat is done. Tomorrow for trash, bread, laundry, invoicing. Where the hell did this week go, anyway?

This is Mission Falls 1824 wool, a Canadian superwash merino, and the cap is from their book, Just Kidding. I assume that the scorpion and (reindeer? Horse with horns?) on one side, and the cat and dog on the other are stylized Peruvian motifs. The directions said it needed one skein of each color, and I really thought I was going to run out of the dark red. I used all but about six inches of it, and nearly all the gold.

I love Fair Isle patterns, but I must have woven in and cut off a hundred ends of yarn. I have a Fair Isle sock pattern on order that is ten times more complex than this, and I have to wonder whether I'm nuts to even think about it.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Small miracles

Sometimes a thing comes into your hand so perfectly that you know it was meant to be there.

This morning started off with a fizzle. We ate breakfast, drove back to Milton, West Virginia, from Barboursville, where we stayed last night, and parked in the Blenko Glass Works visitors center parking lot. And then we discovered that Blenko Glass Works has no handicapped access. You can get into the visitors center with a wheelchair, but that's as far as you go unless you can climb two flights of stairs. Nothing in their advertising or on their website warns the visitor about this, and I was vocal in my dismay. The clerk just gave us a look and said shortly, "Well--sorry."

So we drove away from there in a pretty bad mood. Yes, perhaps I should have called ahead to make sure. But Clarence and I have visited a lot of tourist-type places over the last few months, and they were all handicapped-accessible. Every single one. We would have visited some other places too, but their advertising, and their websites, warned that they were not accessible, for various reasons. So I think we can be excused for assuming that this one would be.

With no other specific plans, we went back to the hotel, packed up the car, and headed home. Just east of Beckley, I noticed a sign for Tamarack, and on impulse, suggested we check it out. Tamarack is an arts-and-crafts place selling mostly West Virginia handmade items, and has a reputation for high-quality products. I had meant to visit there before, but all my previous trips into West Virginia were on a timetable that didn't permit personal stops, and I suspected the prices were beyond my comfort level.

Well . . . the prices are consistent with the quality, which is usually the case. I bought something for Kate for Christmas, and looked with interest, but no motivation to buy, at a lot of other things. We were about to leave when I heard what I thought at first was recorded violin music, lovely and haunting. But the melody stopped, and started again. Real music? Real people playing music? I followed the sound like a hound on a fox trail.

It turned out to be Tish Westman, who with her husband Greg makes bowed psalteries and other folk instruments. I had wanted a bowed psaltery ever since I saw and heard one the first time, but had never had the money. Tish finished playing and thrust the instrument into my hands, no doubt noting the gleam in my eye. "Would you like to try it?" she asked. Well, of course.

I fished about for something I remembered, and came up with that lovely old Alfred Burt carol, "Some Children See Him."

Some children see Him lily white
the infant Jesus born this night
Some children see Him lily white
with tresses soft and fair

Some children see Him bronzed and brown
the Lord of heav'n to earth come down
Some children see Him bronzed and brown
with dark and heavy hair.

There are other verses, but you get the idea. I sang it first in high school in my mother's chorus, and had always liked it, so it's not surprising it came to mind. Coming to hand was another matter, but the music just flowed from the instrument, with only a single missed note.

I found myself standing there amazed and mortified, so choked up I couldn't speak, tears running down my cheeks. Everyone was terribly solicitous, patting my back, trying to figure out why I was so affected. I don't know myself. Perhaps it was the unexpected facility with the instrument, though there are few from which I can't coax at least some recognizable melody. But this sounded, if I do say so myself, as if I knew what I was doing with it.

So I came home with a handmade 25 note bowed psaltery and its accessories. I did balk at buying a case for it. It's so beautiful I intend to leave it on top of the piano. I went out to West Virginia with the expectation of buying some art glass, and ended up buying a musical instrument instead. Sounds like a good tradeoff to me.

Word games

A political observation, if I may.

For a couple of weeks now, I've been voicing--privately--my frustration with the semantic silliness taking place between the news media and the White House. Is Iraq having a civil war, or just sectarian violence? The current administration apparently believes that Americans won't support their war any more if the conflict is called a civil war.

Well--you know what? They're right. It isn't a civil war. It's anarchy. There is no effective government, no effective police, no effective military. Anywhere else we would call that anarchy, and I'm tired of yelling this at the radio every time I hear another futile and pointless argument over what terminology to use.

This morning, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, asked for his opinion, said no, it wasn't a civil war, because in a civil war you have two sides. This conflict, he said, has about thirty sides. Excuse me? That isn't anarchy?

Maybe now we can argue about how many sides the conflict has, instead of whether it is sectarian violence or a civil war.

Regardless of what anyone calls it, we destroyed a country, destroyed a centuries old reputation for American honor--deserved or not, and destroyed our own economy. What a legacy to leave our children.

Sunday, November 26, 2006

One of those days

My mother asks for a Thanksgiving Day report. Hmm, I had hoped to just forget the whole day. No, not because of family feuding, not at all. Dinner was terrific. No political wrangling (though we're all in agreement there anyway). Nothing burned, and only the cranberry sauce forgotten. The table was beautiful, the wine was good (if I do say so myself, that having been my only real contribution), and I'm sure dessert was great too. I fell asleep while the othes were playing poker, and woke up just in time to rescue Clarence from falling over asleep himself and get us out of there.

No, the problems were mostly self-inflicted. We were about 60 miles east of home when I discovered I had forgotten the bag that normally hangs on the back of Clarence's wheelchair. It holds his medications, a change of clothes, his blood sugar meter, and when we aren't carrying the little refrigerator with us, it also holds his insulin in an insulated case. All of that was still sitting on the living room floor. I was on the phone with Shelley when I discovered we didn't have it, and inititally told her we would have to just cancel the trip. It was late enough in the day as it was, and an additional two hours would have put us there just about in time to have dessert and head up to the peninsula to the hotel. I couldn't justify a 500 mile round trip and a $100 hotel stay for a meal, no matter how congenial the company.

But it was clear that Clarence really wanted to make the trip. So I called his doctor's office, got the answering service, had the doctor on call paged, and told her what had happened. She listened to his list of medications, said that Lasix and Clonidine were the only ones he absolutely could not skip for 24 hours--besides the insulin, of course--and called in the necessary prescriptions to a Walgreen's in Virginia Beach near Greg and Carol's house. I thought we were set, and headed on east.

Somewhere along the road, it occurred to me that perhaps I ought to look for a hotel room nearer their house. I had made a reservation at the hotel where I usually stay when I'm in Tidewater on business, surprised that any room was available at all at such short notice. When I was lucky enough to find another hotel, I called the first one back to cancel the original reservation. "What was your name again?" the clerk asked. "Um, we don't have a reservation for you for tonight. Did you make it in another name, maybe?" No, I hadn't made it in another name, and what's more, by then they were full. I was not amused, but less indignant than if I hadn't already found somewhere else.

We arrived in Virginia Beach, I dropped Clarence off at Greg's house, and went straight to the drug store to pick up his meds and insulin. The pharmacy was closed, and I thought, "Oh no! We've taken so long to get here that his prescriptions are sitting there behind a locked door and nobody is going to agree to get them for me." It was worse than that.

"Our pharmacy wasn't open today at all," the clerk told me. "Nobody could have called a prescription in."

So it was back to round one with the answering service and the doctor, who claimed she was transferred to a voice mail and didn't know the pharmacy was closed. We found another Walgreen's, she called the prescriptions in there, and I sat in their waiting area for a blasted hour waiting for them to be filled. By the time I got back to Greg's house, dinner was on the table.

So we basically made the 500 mile round trip, with the $100 hotel stay, for little more than a meal anyway. But the company was good, and I enjoyed making the rounds of the yarn shops in town on Friday morning.

Here is one earflap of the hat I'm making for my youngest grandson for Christmas.


It's an Inca style cap with Fair Isle animals around the crown and a stub of I-cord for decoration at the top, made of Mission Falls superwash merino, lovely soft stuff. It's going to be a bit big for him, but I couldn't find anything I liked in a more suitable size. So he can peek out from under the edge of the hat this year, and next year it should fit him perfectly. I could have fiddled with the gauge, but I really don't have time to fool around too much. Besides all the knitting, I have end of the year deadlines on two stories, and in spite of the time of year, there is certainly going to be some work to do as well.


Tomorrow, I'm heading for West Virginia to do inspections and also to visit the Blenko Glass Works near Huntington. I've wanted to go there for several years, but couldn't justify either the expense or the time off from working. But since I have work to do in that direction anyway, I'm going to take an extra day and spend it at Blenko, one of the most famous of American art glass manufacturers.

Saturday, November 25, 2006

Socks!

The first one of the pair I'm making for Shelley, with the heel turned and the gusset completed:


And my clodhoppers in the pair I finished in San Francisco:

In the "People are strange" category . . .

One of the disadvantages of having Clarence travel with me is that he wants to eat a lot more often than I do, and with his diabetes, I can't exactly claim that it isn't convenient for me to stop for a meal. So I've been eating a lot more than usual too, and gaining weight I don't need to gain. One way around this was to skip lunch, but it's boring to have to sit there for half an hour while he eats. So I've been taking my knitting in with me and working on it during his meal.

I assumed I would get some comments, but they have been really off the wall. One man stopped by our table yesterday and said, "I see you like sewing too." I thought I must have misunderstood him, considering the background noise level. I thought he must have asked if I liked sewing in addition to knitting, but when I said "Excuse me?" he repeated the question exactly as it had sounded the first time. A little confused, I answered, "Yes, I like sewing too." He smiled, and told me that his wife "liked to be doing sewing like that too." I'm afraid that marriage has a definite communication problem, if she has allowed him to think for any length of time that what she was doing was sewing.

Later, a woman asked what I was making. Before I could tell her, she volunteered, "Is it a blanket?" I'm not quite sure how anyone could mistake the six-inch-long leg of a sock--with the beginning of a heel at the end of it--for a blanket, but I shook my head and corrected her. She thought it was a pretty sock, with which I agreed. I'm making this pair from Marks & Kattens "Clown," a cotton/nylon blend that works up into gray, blue, lavender and tweedy white stripes. Shelley saw it at Greg and Carol's house and approved. Carol, of course, hinted that it would be nice if she was to get a hand-knit pair of socks for Christmas too, so before we drove home, I stopped in at the yarn shop where I used to shop when I live there, and bought three balls of Cascade Excitation for her. It is cotton and spandex, in charcoal and white with a little nubby blue thrown in. I have no idea how it will knit up, but it looks like it will be nice.

Pictures coming soon.

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone

Clarence and I are off in the morning for a five hour drive to my son's house. I had intended to do nothing at all for Thanksgiving. Perhaps drive down to Greensboro and eat out somewhere, but certainly no more than that. But Shelley called and asked, "Mom, aren't you coming to Greg and Carol's tomorrow?" and I foolishly agreed that we would. I say foolishly because we've been on the road all week, we didn't get home until after 10:00 tonight, it is now 1 am, and in order to get there at any reasonable hour tomorrow, we'll have to leave by 8 am. I am not going to be awake at 8 am, much less able to drive. So it's going to be an interesting trip. On top of that, the only hotel where I could get us a handicapped room is all the way up on the peninsula, 40 miles from their house. So stuffed with Thanksgiving dinner, and probably half-sloshed on Thanksgiving wine, I will have to drive for a good hour after leaving their house. Maybe I'll just leave the wine in the car and drink it after we get to the hotel. That should be interesting.

Here's another picture, to lighten the mood a bit. These are some of the enormous fermenting vats at the Robert Mondavi Winery, extending far back into the shadows of a vast cold space.

Monday, November 20, 2006

Yet another picture

I took this picture because I liked the symbolism of that single line of bare footprints in the sand. I didn't anticipate that, because of the early morning lighting, it would look like a bas relief of footprints, rather than the depressions in the sand that they actually were.



I've ordered a print from Shutterfly of the shot taken from Land's End, with the bridge in the background. If I like the work they do with that one, I'll probably order a print of this one too.

I'm dying to get my Mamiya back, though, so I can play with processing the film myself. In the "old days" (back when that roll of C-22 was purchased), I did my own b/w processing. I never tried color, having been convinced that it was too difficult, but I think I'd like to try it now, especially as I plan to replace the vanity in my bathroom with twin laundry tubs. Hopefully I won't stain the tubs so badly with developing chemicals that I can't wash clothes in them!

Sharra, Linda, Traci, Patricia, Jennifer . . .

We're on our fifth caregiver for Clarence. At least, I have hired someone. It remains to be seen how well she will work out.

Sharra was the first, and so far the best. But she had moved to the area to be near her boyfriend, and when they broke up, she moved back home. Linda was the niece of a friend, and she was fine too, as long as we were living in Shelley's apartment. When we moved back home, she said it was too far for her to drive.

Traci brought her boy friend along with her. Clarence said he roamed all over the house, opening doors and drawers and picking things up on my desk. After her second visit, we started looking for someone else.

Patricia did a fine job when she showed up, but the last two times I needed her, she didn't show up. I ended up having to dress Clarence and carry him along with me at the last minute. So we'll see how Jennifer does. One thing I already know about her is that she talks non-stop. I had to literally break in to her monologue a couple of time during the interview to tell her important things and ask questions. But Clarence seems to like her, and she nodded enthusiastically when I emphasized how important it was for her to be dependable. We'll see.

This week I have to drive to Front Royal, most of the way to Maryland, to inspect one store, and to Richmond for another one. Because of the distance, it will have to be a two day trip, and because I have no choice but to take Clarence along, we'll have to stay in a hotel. If I were by myself, I'd be able to stay with Kate. Grr.

Saturday, November 18, 2006

More pictures

Part of the grounds of the Beringer Winery. More artistically arranged, perhaps, than the minimalist architecture and landscaping at Robert Mondavi, and less homey and fun than the Cakebread ambience, but impressive nonetheless. The photograph is a bit over-exposed, unfortunately, the result of having to snatch a picture in between groups of people, and relying on the camera to get the exposure right. Oh, for the old days of light meters and levers. And Blogger seems to have cropped the bottom ten percent of the image too. Maybe I'll try again, and maybe I'll just leave it alone. It's not exactly an award winning photo to begin with, but I like the memories it brings back.


UPDATE: I reloaded the picture so the whole thing is there now.

I took my old Mamiya C33 to the camera shop in Blacksburg to have it looked over, cleaned and adjusted, if necessary. The camera guy was practically drooling over it. "I had one of these in the Navy!" he said, grinning wide. "And it was the first camera I bought when I started working professionally."

There was an old roll of C-22 film in the case with the date "Oct 1974" on it, which is a good indication of the last time I made regular use of the camera. I did a good bit of photography during the next couple of years, but only with the 4 x 5 flat film back. Wish I knew what became of those pictures, some of which weren't bad at all.

When I get the camera back, work and weather permitting, I'm going to begin a project I've had in mind for years, to document as many old country churches as I can. There are half a dozen historically significant "rock" churches in the adjacent counties, some of them having been constructed of local stone to begin with and others being faced with rock at some later point. I want to get good pictures of them all, and then, I hope, take pictures of some of the churches I've seen on my inspection trips. Many of them are still in good condition, still being used by active congregations, but others are in every condition from disrepair to falling down. I put off photographing one church because of the weather that day, and came back to find it had been bulldozed. So I don't want to wait any longer to begin taking these pictures.

Friday, November 17, 2006

Say it ain't so!

The board of directors of the Golden Gate Bridge have decided to explore the possibility of corporate sponsors to help with an 87 million dollar operating deficit.

One has visions of it becoming the "Coca Cola Golden Gate Bridge" or, as Dave Pell at Davenetics groans, the "Golden Arches Bridge." But the directors, in an article in SFGate.com, say corporate branding will not be permitted on the bridge itself, or on the tollgates.

We'll see. Believe me, I'll be checking it out next year on my annual trip to SF.

Here's another picture, if I can get it to upload, one of the cellars at the Robert Mondavi Winery in Napa Valley. One of the cellars, I say. The place is vast. These barrels hold only their Cabernet Sauvignon and Fume Blanc.



More winery pictures later.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Another picture

I had planned to upload several more, but Blogger's image loading function seems to have broken down again. Here is a little plover looking at his reflection, taken on the north beach just below Cliff House:

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

More pictures

Here is the Golden Gate Bridge in 1953, taken by my mother through the windshield of our 1936 Oldsmobile.



And the bridge in 2006, from approximately the same vantage point. I didn't have the other picture with me to use as a reference, so I waited a bit too long to take this one, and ended up being closer to the first set of supports.



The light fixtures are different, and the contemporary picture shows a chain link safety fence along the walkway. Other than those, it's amazing how little has changed in more than five decades.

Saturday, November 11, 2006

The trouble with vacations

The problem with vacations is that you have to come back to the real world. I arrived back home from my San Francisco trip around noon last Tuesday, and by that evening was in Virginia Beach with two inspections under my belt. The rest of the week was spent in Richmond and northern Virginia, and today I drove to Abingdon and back. Tomorrow I'm actually going to stay home.

I want to say something about the elections, but I really don't know where to start. I thought I would be elated at the Democratic wins, but I'm so embittered over the events of the last years that it's hard to feel anything but a numb sort of relief. Maybe, I think, just maybe, Americans are slowly beginning to come to their senses. And then I hear an interview on CNN with a woman who says, "I love President Bush! I think he's done a wonderful job!" and I wonder whether she is living in some alternate reality, or I am.

There was some ironic amusement in seeing some right-wing nut jobs claim that gays in the Republican party caused the GOP's defeat. Some people just aren't having a good day unless they can blame gays for something.

And then there is Ted Haggard, whose homosexuality was known after all--and ignored--by the very right-wing religious leaders who bleated from the pulpit against us perverted queers. Although it has to be admitted that Lou Sheldon's excuse for knowing about it is a little suspect: Haggard apparently insisted that homosexuality is genetic. Therefore, in Sheldon's eyes, Haggard must have been homosexual himself.

Whatever. It's all noise any more. Old men running their mouths and waving their arms to prove their masculinity, like a bunch of old bulls in a pasture. And old women too, even though some of them are younger than I. Women young and old who are so afraid of life that they cling to whatever man offers them any assurance of safety. I have to just tune them all out or it would drive me nuts.

So I started another pair of socks, the previous pair having been finished and worn on this trip. I'll take a picture of them one of these days.

Here is a picture from San Francisco, if I can get Blogger's image uploading function to work. Hint: look at the background. Or click on the image for a larger version. For those of you who know San Fran, this was taken from the overlook at Land's End.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Something new

With all the travel I do, I have so far managed not to ever get online in an airline terminal. The last time I traveled with a laptop was before wireless was anywhere. So I am in the process of remedying that lack, as I sit in the Greensboro airport waiting for my flight to Houston.

This trip came very close to not happening at all, and I suppose something could still go wrong. Clarence woke up this morning with severe pain in one foot, and we spent the better part of the day not packing, not cleaning the house, but sitting in the ER waiting room. "Bring him back if the antibiotic doesn't clear up the infection within a couple of days," said the ER doc.

The expression on my face must have been pretty stark. "I'm about to fly to San Francisco," I said faintly.

"Oh," he said. "Well, maybe someone else in the family could do it for you."

I decided not to tell him that my babysitter was a 16-year-old boy with no driver's license, who really couldn't be expected to take on that kind of responsibility. I just picked up my phone, with a numb feeling of inevitability, and called Shelley to tell her that my trip was probably off. To my great surprise, she said she would stay through Sunday. I thought she had to be back on the road on Friday, and it never occurred to me that she would be willing to spend any more time with Clarence than she had to. But she said she'd do it, so here I sit, only 70 miles from home so far, but on the way, and blogging from the airport for the first time.

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