Now Norma Knits

Favorite Things

You know how when you see something every day, you don't notice it anymore?  That happens a lot in my house.  I've got a lot of stuff.  A lot of collections, quite a lot of space.  So it isn't until I do the seasonal cleaning and rearranging -- which, let's admit, does not happen every season or even every year -- that I remember to notice some of the things I have.  One of my favorites is this:

Is that not adorable?  It's my mother and my aunt.  My mom is the one on the right, I believe.  I'm only guessing that, because she's always been known as "the sad twin," she claims.  But in this photo both girls look pretty sad or tired or overwhelmed, which makes it all the more precious to me.  In the same way I'm drawn to winter scenes and gray clouds in paintings, the sad face in photos is often the more beautiful and compelling face.  I remember that doll from when I was a little girl.  It had a porcelain or ceramic face and legs, that, by the time I had it handed down to me, was broken, paint-chipped, and rather ugly and scary.  Or maybe I'm the one who trashed it; who knows. 

This is in a grouping of other old family photos, and where it was before, I had failed to notice it anymore.  So I moved the entire grouping to a more visible location.  When I do that, oftentimes visitors will say, "You've got a whole lot of new stuff."  Nope.  Just moved stuff around.  It's like going shopping.

I'm trying to put up a brave fight against this cold.  It's a virile one.  Fevers and chills. 

A'right, Then. Yank It Is

Not to give up the Godiva name, I'm going to go with "Yankee Godiva."  I love the ring to it, and how it has the same sing-songy number of syllables and sort of rhymes with Lady Godiva. 

I'm using the same pebble rib stitch pattern that I started out with rather than the stitch pattern in the real Yank pattern, but I'm otherwise following the pattern as written.  Well, except for the fact that I'm knitting it in one piece 'til the armholes.  And I've ripped out the first attempt and started over with the right number of stitches, so Margene would stop mocking me. 

Two nights ago I managed to reknit the entirety of the ripped-out yarn, plus a little more, and I'm making great progress and a gorgeous squishy fabric on US 9s.  I was not able to knit a single stitch yesterday.  Cleaning help arrived at 9 a.m. and I announced to her that I would be working alongside her.  Together we moved furniture, moved paintings and pictures, washed and moved around pottery and other objets d'art, deep-cleaned, and emptied and moved the cabinet that houses the blue pottery collection to a location that is, as I thought it might be, far better suited to it.  Suddenly it is the focal point of the living room and looks like a million bucks, whereas before it was rather invisible in the dining room. 

We lightened up and rearranged colors for the spring/summer look.  It's amazing how just moving my own stuff around makes everything look fresh and new again.  It's quite economical and saves me from the urges I sometimes get to hire a dozer to knock the whole thing down and start anew.  It's also amazing that the dried-flower-and-herb mini Christmas tree was still sitting on the coffee table, no matter how tasteful and pretty it might be.  The robins arrived yesterday; it was time to lose the Christmas tree.

All of this was, of course, rather ill advised since I just had my back put back into place the day before by the chiropractor, but I felt up for it and wanted to take advantage of the help.  At mid-afternoon, I made us grilled mozzarella, pesto, and dried-tomato sandwiches and seltzer water/tart cherry juice/lime drinks that we scarfed down and then continued on with the cleaning and organizing. She really has a great eye for the placement of things, and I'm sure (since she said so repeatedly) she had much more fun doing that with me than cleaning toilets and floors.  (Though we did that, too.)

We made a very big dent in it, but there is still much to be done.  The cleaning help has really been quite slack for many months -- I think because I'm so busy and things get so chaotic around here, they think I don't notice.  But I do.  I have that French-Canadian/farm-girl blood in me, ya know.   So I think I showed her how it should be done (and I do think she noticed) -- down on my hands and knees with a bucket of soapy water, reaching into the corners and around the table legs and into cracks and crevices and baseboards that had clearly been ignored for too long.  For many years, in fact, I refused to buy the cleaning lady (it's the same one we've had for 20-something years, but she now brings an assistant -- it was her assistant who helped me yesterday) a mop.  I'm sorry, but a floor cannot get adequately clean with a mop.  But after a lot of years, and she and I were not getting any younger, I took pity on her and bought one.  I sort of regret that decision. 

Just call me task master.  

And when she left at 6 p.m., I was spent.  I had to just SIT.  There was no energy left for creating a meal or knitting a stitch.  But the place looks damn good. Well, some of it, anyway. 

 

A clean coffee table is a beautiful thing.

Yurt Sweet Yurt and Other Stuff

1.  I want one!

2.  The Thomas Crowne Affair (the 1999 version), I've mentioned before, is my all-time favorite fantasy movie.  I want to be Rene, and I want my Pierce.  I'll take that one to my grave.  Yesterday Cookie asked me, "Yes, but what happened after the plane landed?"  Easy:  They continued to live in mad passionate love, engaging in their high-risk hijinks 'til they died. Rene's character, sadly, is working on cirrhosis of the liver, but I've decided that she continues with her green drinks and gives up her alcohol, so they live happily, dangerously, and hotly ever after. Cookie said I'm such a romantic.

3.  I don't know what took me so long.  I've been searching for the "right" gym music for such a long while.  In a "duh" moment, I ran across my collection of Broadway Musical CDs and started loading them on my iPod.  They're perfect!  Up-tempo music that I like, and that tell a story, and since I know the plays and the song lyrics by heart, they keep me engaged and the time flies.  Yesterday was The Lion King.  The day before, The Man of La Mancha; the day before that, Les Miserables.  I've got Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Phantom of the Opera in the lineup.  I have lost or misplaced Chicago.  I have to get my hands on that one, because it's one of my favorites and has just the right attitude for kicking butt at the gym (and in life).   

4.  I'm making good progress on the little 2- and 1- and 3-pound weights that I'm restricted to right now because of my injury.  It turns out that a couple of the macho guys at my gym have injuries, too, and so we can work out together with our cute little pink weights and our isometric exercises.  I can hold the plank position (as per Cindy's instructions) for about three hours.  Not really.  But it seems like it.

5.  I'm also making good progress on the first sleeve of La Boheme.  Loving the increases. I took several photos, but they're all blurry, so fuggedaboutit. Anyway, I'm doing the knit into the stitch below, like I would for a mitten thumb gusset, and it's the best-looking sleeve increase I've ever tried. This sweater is a super-simple pattern, and it is becoming my simple little masterpiece. The best news is that after the wash, the body of the sweater did indeed return to exactly the right size when it dried. Phew. 

 

124. All About The Macramé Hanger in My Blue-Cabbage-Rose-Papered Dining Room

I love it how the readers pick up on something and turn a post into something that wasn't originally intended, thus opening up another post.  See how this symbiotic relationship works?  Neato. 

This story is insipid and banal, though; I'm warning you. You might rather spend your time doing something useful like flossing your teeth or picking your belly-button lint.  But first, Rilona time-lapse photography continues.

May 3, 2008, ~2:30 p.m.

A few weeks ago I decided to repot my rattail cactus. It's been underachieving on my windowsill in a too-small pot.  That type of cactus really needs to be hanging, but I don't have any nice hanging pots.  I am rather fond of this Asian pot that my mother gave me several years ago, and it was empty, having been vacated by the moving-up of something else, so I put the cactus in there. But that didn't solve my hanging dilemma.  I seemed to recall that somewhere deep in a drawer (and it turned out it wasn't too deep and wasn't too far away -- right in a kitchen drawer) I had a macramé hanger that I got a few years ago at Home Depot.  Nothing too special and certainly not vintage Norma or anything, although I was a teenager in the '70s and macramé was as hard-wired into a '70s teen as an iPod is to the 2000s.

In addition to this being an anticlimactic story, it is accompanied with an anticlimactic photo.  It was gray and rainy yesterday and this looks pretty bad with the flash. The plant is only now starting to recover from being repotted. I think it's going to be happy in its new pot, but it doesn't yet look its best. Only question is, are the flowers that this cactus is supposed to throw out going to clash with the pot?  (answer: Yes.  I didn't think of that when I potted it, of course) And neither the pot nor the hanger coordinate with the dining room.  At least not now.  I swear, I used to care about this stuff more.  I did.  Really.

Now, about that dining room:  See that something-or-other to the left of the hanging pot?  That's our leaky, horrible, rotten sunroom.  It has been nothing but trouble since we constructed the house. The company that sold it (it was a kit) went bankrupt shortly after it was done. This thing was designed for the Pacific Northwest, where it must not ever RAIN (haha), not the extreme weather conditions of the Northeast, where we do indeed get precipitation and freezing and thawing and snowfall and ice.  Just a hunch here: This might explain the company's bankruptcy.

Anyway, after many years of hiring people to patch it and repair it and try to upgrade it, hemorrhaging money all along, it is slated to be torn down and rebuilt properly, hopefully starting in June, with a pitched roof to shed the snow and weather-tight windows.  As part of that project, the dining room is going to be opened up a bit and it will be separate spaces, but they will flow into one another. That is when I will finally get rid of the dreaded blue cabbage rose wallpaper that I loved so much in 1990, but now?  Not so much.  I figure when the cute contractor is working on the adjacent sunroom, he will provide nice-enough companionship that I won't mind stripping that wallpaper.

What?  My bad?

Okay.  In its (the wallpaper's) defense, I offer the following.  a) I was young.  b) People's tastes change.  c) Reread b and add:  "A lot." d) When I was in psychotherapy in 1990, one of the million and a half things I realized is that a lot of my decorating choices were born of trying to recreate my paternal grandmother's home, which is where I had a little bit of stability in my childhood. e)  I'm over that now.  f) This is my china pattern, which I do still love:

Wedgwood Rosedale.  It's discontinued.  Many of these pieces I hand-carried back from London in 1983 and 1993-94, so they are pretty special to me, although I've evolved into the kind of person to whom fancy china and crystal means less than it did then. I like having nice things, but .... meh.  This china has been used only a handful of times in 26 years.  Seems kind of silly.  Plus, it really wouldn't work in a cave or an Airstream. Or is that just me? I guess why NOT set a nice table, even in a cave? I know the psychology of the thing is, if I couldn't have nice china, I'd be coveting it.  We humans can never be happy, it seems.  But the thing(s) I want right now have less to do with things like china and more to do with experiences.

g) A friend who was a decorator went to a decorating show in approximately 1988.  She came back and excitedly said, "Look at this wonderful wallpaper I found for your dining room!"

h)  Anyhoo, I thought it was great for a lot of years, so I guess I got my money's worth.  Now it's just about the dread of pulling off the Band-Aid.  It is a bitch of a job, removing this high-end vinyl-coated wallpaper, and it wrecks the walls. I hired someone to take the wallpaper off one of the bathrooms recently, and my walls and ceiling are a mess, so I don't want that to happen to my dining room. And I can't paint over it, because it is vinyl-coated, not that I'd want to do that anyway.  I like doing things right if I'm going to do them.  All I want now is for my dining room walls to be a nice smooth shade of dark burnished gold or plum or mocha (all of which I finally realize will not only coordinate with my china and my pottery and my antique botanical prints, but will actually make those things "pop") or....anything at all, I guess, other than blue cabbage roses.  They're so twenty years ago.

118. What Time Is It?

It's time for the vinca to bloom.   

Time for the pulsatilla to flower.

Time to eat asparagus.

Almost time for Rilona to bloom.

Time for seedlings to thrive.  This is the first time I've tried Gardeners Supply's Deep Root Seed-Starting System, and I wholeheartedly endorse it.  The seedlings are far ahead of the ones I started at the same time in the smaller APS seedstarting system I had heretofore sworn by for probably 15 years.  Sadly, I see that the Deep Root system is sold out.  Hopefully they'll get more next year.

Time for the blue grape hyacinths.

And the ruffly daffodils.

It's time to do a Tabata workout with my Gymboss timer.  The Gymboss has a setting that makes it super-easy to program eight intervals with 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off.  It works GREAT, plus it's lightweight and has a strong clip to attach it to your clothes. It came WITH battery included, and the shipping was fast and inexpensive.

And it's also time to buy new (old) clocks.

  Of course you know which one is my favorite.

I don't know what is up with the thumbnails on Typepad.  Is everyone having this problem?  They seem cloudy to me.  When you click on them to make them full-size, they are clearer. [Edited to add:  I guess the thumbnails are only cloudy on the preview.  They published clearly.  Phew.]

Worth The Wait

We have developed a very low-stress approach to the holidays in this household and in my extended family. We have pretty much everything we need all year long, and we've abandoned gift-giving in the traditional sense.  There is a little bit of a loss of the element of surprise, but it cuts way down on hassle, stress and obligation, getting things one doesn't want, not getting what one wants, and worrying whether you've got the right thing for someone. I do very little seasonal decorating -- unless I'm in the mood (which isn't often anymore).  I don't buy gifts -- unless I'm in the mood (which isn't often anymore).  People don't buy me gifts -- unless they're in the mood (which isn't often anymore). I usually send out less than 10 cards. I find that lack of: 1) keeping up with the Joneses, 2) the stress of fighting the shopping crowds, and 3) those astronomical January bills, to be the biggest gift to myself.  So freeing.

Even though the budget here is far from unlimited, what with us still paying off tuition loans and still supporting our daughter, and still holding off on quite a bit of deferred maintenance on our home, if I want to buy a new pair of boots, I do.  If I want to buy a pair of fairly expensive Italian jeans, I do.  In my older age, I have far fewer wants.  Material things....well, have you seen the bumper sticker that says, "The best things in life are not things"?  Most days I feel that way.  I do still have longings and wishes and wants -- I think that's part of the human condition -- but not many, and the longings and wishes and wants I have are mostly not for things.  In fact, most days I'd like to unload probably 60% of the stuff I own and 50% of the space I occupy.

But once in a while, I want something, or I want to improve, and make useful, something I already have.  I try to choose well, so the things I attain will have lasting value and appeal to me.

I bought these four antique botanical prints 12 or 13 years ago, when I was living in England.  I mentioned them in the blog a month or so ago, and until that time they'd sat in a drawer, out of sight but not forgotten.

Professional framing is a luxury. I gasp every time I hear the price of matting and framing. These prints mean a lot to me, and I wanted to have them done well, in a manner which befits them, so I waited for a time when I could feel comfortable to have it done. 

This is my so-called holiday gift this year. ("so-called" meaning it is largely irrelevant to the holidays -- it's just that I chose to have it done and it just happens to be around the holidays, so I am calling it a "holiday gift," even though no holiday gift is expected or necessary)

The framing is complete, and the mats are beautiful. It's hard to tell from the photo, but the outer mat is linen. When I was working with the talented fellow I've had do lots of framing for me over the years, he handed me about 60 cream-colored mats.  I knew what I wanted, and it wasn't there.  I said, "Do you have any linen?"  He looked at me with that look, and a pseudo-annoyed gleam in his eye, that says, "Oh, that Norma.  There's just no pleasing her."  But the thought was thought in a very approving way, I could tell. 

He hunted in the back room 'til he found a linen sample that was dirty and dog-eared, because it had been around so long and apparently no one had chosen it before, or at any rate, in a long time.  He apologized for the state of the sample, and he rubbed it with an eraser to get off some of the dirt. We both knew it was The One. You can probably tell from the photos that they are triple-matted in what I think is a tasteful and understated presentation, and the gold frames we chose together are in keeping with the British antiques.

It was worth the wait.

(Please pardon the setting sun's glare. It's a good thing I had them put UV-blocking glass on, hm?)