Balls.

If I haven't posted anything on this blog for like eight days, it's been because I've just been too busy, not because I haven't been productive enough! I've been knitting and knitting, wrapping presents, and making calendars, being musical, and listening to books on tape. I've been up until some ungodly hours, and it's been really great!

So first off, merry Christmas! I hope all of you had a wonderful day of celebrating or not celebrating, or just existing.

Second off, projects! Here are some highlights:

Laura's leg-warmers ended up coming out pretty great. The last couple of days I've been typing up the pattern so I can post in on Ravelry. It's more complex than what I usually knit, so it's been a challenge to write everything down and make sure it's correct. I kept Laura waiting for these until the last present on Christmas, and it was really exciting to give them to her. : )

I finished Laura's leg-warmers around 11:30 PM on December 23. Around 11:30 AM on December 24, I started working on Momo's ear-flap hat. Because I had less than a day, I decided I should probably not use size 2 needles and fingering-weight yarn. So I dug out some dark green and some really pretty multicolored sparkly yarn I don't know where it came from! Anyway, I'm really happy with how this turned out!


During this time, I engaged in some serious literary adventures via the CD player. I listened to the books-on-tape for Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy, Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan, and a really bizarre CD called The Best of Shel Silverstein.

I'd been kind of hankering to read this Beowulf translation since I'd come across it in the BU bookstore a couple of weeks ago. I'd picked it up because of course Seamus Heaney is amazing, and I'd read about thirty pages, which made me eager to continue. Listening to the audiobook was, of course, very different. I think in some ways it made the story easier to follow for me. Beowulf uses several large-scale digressions, which were easy for me to be confused by. But if I just zoned for a couple of minutes, we got back to the main story and I didn't totally lose the thread. I'm hopefully going to listen to this again before returning it to the library and focus more on the significance of the digressions.

At first, it was hard for me to really feel too chuffed about Beowulf. Beowulf is one of those macho, brilliant fighter-heros who keeps going for glory and riches and carnage. I guess that's not quite my cup of tea. But I've been working to think about Beowulf as he fits into his culture as a whole, and of course he's a good person. Of course it's good to kill monsters that are attacking innocent civilians, to help out neighboring kingdoms, and to be a good and just king. But it's also a factor for me that his motives for killing the monsters seemed as much about self-pride and glory as they did about protecting "the people" who are mentioned just a few times and are usually portrayed as helpless, pagan, and without meaningful occupation. It just felt so painstakingly aristocratic.

Maybe this is not a big deal, and I should just accept that that's how this poet thought about things, and that's fine.. I mean yes, as a literary work, as something to study to learn about historical context and old English literature.. yeah but as a work of literature that's going to change my life and inspire me? I wish I could have related better to Beowulf and that he was a character I really admired. Maybe on a second listening. : )

The Best of Shel Silverstein was a pretty insane thing to listen to. It's got several poems read by Shel Silverstein but also a bunch of classic country songs by Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, etc. Then there are a bunch of songs by this band Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show and a couple by Shel Silverstein himself! I had no idea that Shel Silverstein did country music.. especially songs with titles like "I Got Stoned And I Missed It!" Anyway, it's really fun. You should listen to it.


For Christmas, I received a drop spindle!! I learned what a drop spindle was this summer in Ireland when Anna and I went to a stitch n' bitch. I didn't realize you could spin without a spinning wheel, and ever since I've been sort of itching to try it out. So Momo found a lady in Maplewood who sells spindles, and last night I got started!

Spinning is actually a fairly straightforward process. My mom gave me this great book called Spin It, and it walked me through this: You tease apart the fibers of raw wool, hook them with the spindle's hook, and twist. When it's been twisted enough, you tease out more fibers and twist those. When you get enough yarn, you wrap what you've spun onto the spindle's shaft, hook the yarn, and keep going, wrapping as you go.

So last night, I gave it a go. It didn't go marvelously. My yarn was super thick and super uneven. Here's the ball I made:
But around 2 AM last night I called it quits and got some good sleep. This morning I tried it again. I think the sleep helped me reprocess the process, because it felt a lot smoother, and my yarn became correspondingly smoother too! I'm still breaking the yarn sometimes, and it's still not quite even, but I'm definitely making progress and am having a really good time.

What I'm loving is, this process is unfamiliarly organic. With knitting I'm used to rigid counting, stitches in neat rows and columns, measurements, and pattern charts. Spinning is just so totally unlike this. There's no "hook 14 fibers and twist 30 times." It's just not measured, because how could you measure raw wool, except maybe my weight? So I'm just spinning, trying not to pull the fibers too thin and break it but also not leave them too thick and slub it.

I suppose this organicness makes sense, that maybe I shouldn't feel so surprised. Because this is really the stage where you're imposing some kind of order on the wool. You're dividing and twisting it and saying, "Stay here," so then you can knit it in patterns. It's sort of new to me to think about textiles as an imposition of order. I don't know how much I like thinking about it this way, but maybe it is.


Tonight, Momo and I made peanut butter balls. That's what the picture is of, at the beginning of this entry. They're covered in chocolate but full of peanut butter and rice crispies. My grandma used to make them at Christmas when we visited, and I ate them a ton. On Monday, Momo, Dad, and I are driving down to Kansas where I'm going to visit Carrie, and then go to visit my grandma. She's living in an assisted living facility now, and apparently she likes it there.

love, Jimmy

Freakishly tempestuous obsession

The other day, I got a start on the leg-warmers for ________. I had to rip them out once because I wasn't happy with how they were starting, but now I'm pretty pleased with what I've got so far, and they're about nine inches long so far. The trouble is, I started out making them a bit too narrow. ________ wants them to be form-fitting, but if they were too tight that would just be uncomfortable. But I'm compensating by making the tight part the ankle and increasing up the leg.

Anyway, I'm trying something new with these leg-warmers: I'm writing out the line-by-line pattern as I knit them, and hopefully I'll be able to publish the pattern on Ravelry when I'm done.. that would be really exciting, so then I'd sort of be a legit designer.

Now while I'm knitting, sometimes it gets quite tedious, because I'm just knit knit knit knitting for like 20 rounds or whatever.. so I've got a few books-on-tape from the library, and I've been listening to these.

The other day, I listened to The Tempest by Shakespeare. I'd started reading once before years ago, but probably because I was bored I had stopped and returned it to the library. But when I'm just sitting there knitting and listening, I don't get bored, which is quite nice. Anyway, I listened to The Tempest, and it was really fantastic! They had different actors speaking each part, which I appreciated since otherwise I wouldn't have always known who was speaking. I didn't know really anything about The Tempest before I started listening, except that I think I knew that it was once of Shakespeare's last plays and that post-colonial critics talk about it a lot.

So as I was listening, I was trying to infer the trajectory of the play since I didn't know how it would end. The thing was, Prospero was a really active character who seemed to have a good head on his shoulders, and so I was kind of expecting the whole time for the play to end a tragedy, that somehow Prospero would mess up, and all his scheming would backfire on him. I thought perhaps the goons Caliban was leading to kill Prospero would kill the Prince instead, meaning that Miranda couldn't have married him, or that Prospero would be too busy worrying about Miranda and the Prince and so would have actually been snuck upon and killed.

But it wasn't at all! I definitely haven't done enough Shakespeare to talk about this very intelligently, but it seems like a strange blend of classical forms - Prospero seems to me like a truly tragic character, because he's trying really hard to improve his condition and yet has this flaw of pride that could so easily undo him, and yet he succeeds as in a comedy. But he's not succeeding because of his blunders, like in a normal comedy, but he's succeeding because of his own actions!! Crazy!!! Anyway, do you have any thoughts about this stuff?

Yesterday, I listened to Steven Levitt's Freakonomics. I remember when this book came out several years ago - I was working in the Plymouth Library, and suddenly it was absolutely everywhere, and it was on everybody's reserve list. I didn't ever have much desire to read it, though, because I was feeling very anti-economics, and because I don't usually read much non-fiction. Anyway though, when I went to see Joanna at the Ridgedale Library at the start of break and asked her for book reccomendations, she told me that I really should read it, so I thought what the heck!

Freakonomics was really quite fascinating! It did feel pretty arrogant and maybe a little bit rude sometimes.. but really the arguments in there are pretty compelling and mind-boggling! I'd definitely reccomend it. It was all about applying economic principles (or, really, the principle of incentives) to problems that normally don't come under the scrutiny of economicst. So they looked at the impact of a name on a child, at teachers cheating on standardized tests for their students, at the impact of Roe v. Wade on crime rates in the 1990's, and other random things. It was great, and this guy is just really really good at argumentation.


Okay so the truth is, all I really want to do right now is knit these leg-warmers. I don't want to look at facebook albums, fill out my Saint Paul College tutoring application, clean my room, or do anything else. I'm really feeling obsessed, like if I could I would just knit the entire day and not stop.

This isn't such a bad thing, but I really do have other things I need to do. In just a few minutes I'm heading to collect Julia, and we're going to plan a mixed-media sculptural installation. This will be a neat new project for me!

love, Jimmy

Moving up the human leg.

This morning, I woke up with a bit of a cold. I'm working hard to fight it off so it doesn't grow big by consuming lots of vitamin C! On the other hand, if there's a time to get sick, I think this is kind of it, because it would suck to have been sick in Boston or over Christmas.. but I don't really want to get sick, so there you are.

Anyway, today I finished knitting the socks I'm making for Tyler while listening to The Tempest book-on-tape, which was pretty super. I'm very pleased with these, so whenever I see him, I'll be able to give them to him.

In Maple Grove, then, is this lovely yarn store I just discovered called Amazing Threads! I trekked out there (after a quick stop at Michael's for some yarn I knew Amazing Threads wouldn't have, since it's all acrylic and "metallic polyester," but still wonderful) and got some excellent yarn for my next project: leg-warmers for ________ except she already knows they're for her, so I guess it isn't a secret.

Anyway, tonight I knitted a couple of gauge swatches, and right now I'm planning out what these leg-warmers are going to look like. I've never made leg-warmers before, so I'm going to do some exploring of patterns on Ravelry just to get my bearings..

It's my sister Laura's birthday today!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LAURA!!!!!

love, Jimmy

Back from Boston and breaking the blog

Okay, so here is the Break Blog. This blog is meant to help motivate me, because here's the deal:

Last summer, I went on the Carleton English program to Ireland. We traveled around the West, read Ulysses in Dublin, met Seamus Heaney, sauteed a lot of vegetables, and very much more. But because Carleton has that strange rule that you can only attend 12 terms during your four years there, all of us on the Ireland program have to take a term off sometime this year. So I'm taking off the winter term, during which I'll be hanging at home and visiting Carleton as much as I can.

I really want to be productive during my super-long old break, and I've got lots of projects I want to embark on that I've been wanting to for ages, just haven't had the time. Now is my chance.

But I realize this self-motivating business is harder than I'd like it to be. So I'm blogging my break, posting my projects, and hoping this will somehow motivate me to keep up the pace! Mostly though, this blog will do nothing if you guys don't read it and squabble when I don't post! Because no post possibly pertains poor productivity!

Thank you all so much!

love, Jimmy

ps: This picture is the Picture of the Day from December 19, 2008. I just got home from Boston this afternoon and came home to find the Christmas lights set up again. They made me think of this picture. : )