Things That Amuse Me
I’ve been studying French since I retired. I know, it’s probably somewhat useless. Given the current pandemic crap, I’m not likely to be traveling anywhere soon where I might actually use this skill.
It is definitely more challenging to learn a new language at nearly 65 than it is in high school. I’ve resorted to making flash cards. If you see me walking around muttering the days of the week to myself, I haven’t lost my mind. At least not yet.
I finally rounded the third corner on my deadline-knitting-baby-blanket. My husband just came up with the best explanation of short rows ever.
The body of this is a big square, knit out from the center. When you finish that, you turn the thing on it’s side and knit the edging back and forth all the way around. The corners are mitered so it ends up flat when you are done. There are various ways to do that, this pattern uses short rows to add more fabric at the corners.
I laid this out and was explaining this to John. He got up off the couch, and with an “ah-ha” look, said (and mimed) “it’s like you are at the inside corner of a marching band turning a 90 degree corner”.
Exactly.
I am reading Mariana, by Monica Dickens. This was republished a few years ago by Persephone Books. If you haven’t discovered Persephone, you should. It’s a London bookshop that specializes in republishing books by relatively unknown women authors from the 20th century. So far they have published 137 books. I have several on my bookshelves, and every so often treat myself to a new bunch of half a dozen or so.
I have a stack of these I haven’t read yet, so pulled this one off the shelf.
This is a delightful book, and after I read a bit, I went back and read the introduction. Monica Dickens turns out to be the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. Her writing style is quite different than his, but equally enjoyable.
One thing led to another, and I pulled Bleak House off the shelf and added it to my “currently reading” pile. I believe the last time I read any Dickens (Charles, that is) was in the late seventies. I was in my second year of medical school, and decided for some insane reason to take a night class in Victorian literature. I guess studying pathology and pharmacology until all hours of the night wasn’t enough of a challenge. Probably my favorite book I read for that class was Middlemarch, and I don’t recall which Dickens we read.
We’ll see how long this lasts in the paperback version. The print is tiny, and it’s a pretty cheaply bound volume, so the pages are starting to come out. I might end up finding a Kindle version if it gets to the point of holding it together with a rubber band.
The Persephone books all have that same pale grey cover, with lovely endpapers (including a matching bookmark) in every book.
What are you all reading this week?
I posted a photo on Facebook a couple of days ago, of part of my fake tortoise shell straight knitting needle collection.
I had a whole bunch more of these upstairs in a big crock. Some are paired up, most just loose and jumbled together.
These tend to get more fragile as they age. I found a handful of broken needles when I sorted through them.
I soaked the whole bunch in water overnight and am now working on pairing them up and tying them together with a bit of yarn. The ones that were already paired are held together with rubber bands, which tends to leave a sticky residue on the needles. Once they’re all cleaned up and sorted, they’ll be a lot more fun to use.
And no, apparently I don’t need to buy any more of these.
I’ve gotten sucked down the ancestry.com rabbit hole again this week. It started when I saw a patient in my office with the same last name. We talked about possible relatives for a bit, and when I got home, he had sent me an extensive genealogy of his family. It turns out that his grandfather and my grandfather were brothers.
I had been on ancestry.com for a while, but gave it up a few years ago. Well, this spurred me on to get to work.
So far I’ve traced the Meske side of my family (Meske is my birth surname) back several generations, to my great great great grandfather in one branch, and 5 times great grandfather in another, he was born in 1712 in Germany.
We haven’t known much about my mom’s side of the family past her parents and grandparents. I was able to find the ship manifesto from when they came to this country in 1905. They were the last of the family to come over, It was my grandfather Johann, grandmother Josefin, daughter Antonina, and another daughter Gladys, who is on the ship log as Wladyslawa, I think. It’s hard to read. She was 14, and a big line was drawn through her name, with a notation that says “trachoma”. She was not admitted, and was sent back to Europe. Can you imagine that? We had heard this story before, but had not seen paper documentation of it previously. No one in the family knows what happened to her.
Here is a photo of the document.
Click on that to make it bigger. Their names are right where that dark horizontal line sits. One of the challenges of finding relatives is that a lot of names got changed when they came to this country. And there may have been multiple alternate spellings in old birth records and baptisms, etc.
I just need more hours in my day. I’m still knitting, but everything looks about the same, so no new photos.
No matter how many dozens of socks I’ve made, I am still amused by turning the heels. It turns a three dimensional piece of knitting into a two dimensional thing, then back into three dimensions.
For those of you who aren’t sock knitters, the cuff of the sock is at the bottom of the photo, the heel flap (the part at the back of your heel) is at the top. You knit the cuff around until your sock leg is long enough, then knit the heel flap back and forth (the two dimension part) until IT is long enough.
Then the magic happens, where you turn the heel into the little part that goes around under your foot.
Then you pick up all the other half of the stitches and knit the foot.
Magic!*
*I didn’t really finish that sock that fast, the last photo is the first of the pair.
There are few things that amuse me as much as when striped sock yarn turns out to match perfectly.
I didn't even have to try very hard to make that happen. Mostly I don't try at all, and just have mismatched socks. These are going to be very cheerful when done.
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