Waiting

I am impatiently waiting.

We are setting records for warm weather around here. It has me twitchier than normal. I want to be outside Doing Something.

I planted a few lily of the valley bulbs earlier this week, and the soil was really too wet to do even that. I have plans for a new bed at the side of the house: daisies I'm digging up from a friend's yard*, echinacea, purple love grass, a perennial grass that I'm going to transplant from elsewhere, and some white bleeding heart alba. But for now, I wait until it is dry enough to work the compost into the soil.

The only thing to do is to plan. I started a Gardener's Journal last year, so this year I tried to plot out my little yard and the perennials that are already planted.

Click to enlarge**

It's not much, but at least it's Doing Something. The tragedy, of course, is that I have a fairly brief window in which I want to be outside working. Once it gets around 90 degrees or the mosquitoes arrive, I lose interest in doing anything but the most necessary outside tasks. It's a flaw of mine that I promise to work on every summer.

Knitting doesn't help when I get like this. I am working on the second sleeve of the Talamh, but it's difficult to maintain any sort of momentum when I know it will be too warm to wear this for the next six months.

*True story: I asked my friend if I could have some of her daisies. When she said yes, I informed her I would be bringing a shovel and bucket to her husband's birthday party. I'm glad we're close enough she loves me even though I'm weird.


**If anyone really wants to know what's planted where, I'm happy to tell you. I do realize that my life has limited interest though. C'est la vie.  Well, ma vie anyway.

In Which I Plug a Couple Websites

I was trying to figure out if the blog was a good place to share this, and then I remembered it was my blog and I could do whatever I wanted.

Not knitting. Not gardening. MUSIC and BOOKS.

It's a minor annoyance of mine that I might not know about an album release by my favorite artists or book release by my favorite authors until I stumble upon it months later.

If Facebook can tell me about the children of people I haven't seen in fifteen years and don't care about, there has to be an easy technological way to fix this problem.

Apparently, there is.

www.authoralerts.com lets you create a free account with your e-mail address and enter your favorite authors. They keep track of upcoming releases. I haven't been e-mailed by them yet, so I can't say exactly how this will work, but all signs point to it doing what I want.

http://www.music-alerts.com/ is a piece of genius that lets you enter musical artists separated by commas. Then it creates a feed that can be added to your reader. I use Google Reader obsessively, so I added it there. I found out about recently-released or soon-to-be-released albums from Train, Ingrid Michaelson, Evanescence and Counting Crows that I added to my wishlist.

Both websites are free. In fact, the music-alerts website doesn't even require a login. Author alerts requires a login with your e-mail address.

I hope this is helpful information for you! If not, rest assured that I'll be blathering on about my usual topics again soon.

Get on Board

I've been feeling unsettled. Part of it is because the weather has been so strange. It's hard for me to be excited about spring when I don't feel like we've had a proper winter. Do you know I didn't wear long underwear or shovel snow even once this winter?*





Still, spring is here. Yesterday evening I took my fern outside. The poor thing held on throughout the winter, but I felt it breathe a sigh of relief when it felt the breeze. I'm hoping it will fill out some now.











I planted crocus bulbs for the first time last fall, and I have a couple of blooms already.

The Buddha is meditating on the passing beauty of a spring bulb.




















The peony has started to sprout.










The daffodils are in bloom. They certainly don't seem upset about the unseasonably warm weather.











Even the sedum has decided it's a good time to get going again.

There's nothing to do besides get on board and accept the changes. In that spirit, I made these for a baby shower I'm attending this weekend.

Saartje's Booties knit in Knitpicks Felici fingering in Positively Pink colorway

Newness is everywhere.



*I'm going to be honest. I hope you don't know that. That would be creepy.

Rituals

I've had a bad cold for a week. Saturday I was shopping my shelves for a movie to watch, and I was trying to decide between two Hs: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or Hatari.

I asked Andrew for his opinion, and he said, "Well, you are sick."

Right. Hatari it is.

Hatari is a John Wayne film about a group who catch wild animals in Africa to sell to zoos. No human is shot, so it's pretty unusual for a John Wayne film. I adore it.

When we were little and were sick, we stayed home with Dad. He was forced to retire early for medical reasons, so he was the one who was home. Perhaps because he wasn't sure how to entertain us, or perhaps because he feared he'd have to watch cartoons all day, but it was a regular occurrence to camp out on the sofa covered by a lime green sheet, drink Diet Sprite mixed with orange juice, and watch John Wayne movies. The Quiet Man, El Dorado, and Hatari were in heavy rotation. I'm not sure what other John Wayne movies I've even seen, to be honest, but I could quote large portions of dialogue from those three films from memory.

So, Saturday evening found me on the couch in a modified ritual of those early sick days. Instead of lying on a lime green sheet, I was knitting a lime green sweater. I used Diet 7 Up with my orange juice instead of Diet Sprite. I still watched Hatari in its entirety and enjoyed it thoroughly.

I'm feeling better today. The cold isn't gone, but I'm definitely on the way up.

Places to Knit #5502

 A middle school swim meet

I went to watch my niece swim last night. I left with an increased respect for middle-school parents. I saw one dad listening through earbuds, one mom reading, and most everyone else was patiently sitting, talking, watching. 

How? Middle school swim meets are not interesting. Sure, you want to watch your progeny, but they only swim a couple of the events. My niece swam in the second event and then in the last event over two hours later. There's a lot of boring in between those events, and we were sitting on concrete bleachers. Thankfully, I had my sister to talk with and a sock to knit.

3-1 Ribbed Sock knit in Crazy Zauberball in colorway 1153 1511

More people need to learn to knit.

An Old Memory

A friend sent me a link to this video. It's called "The Power of Introverts." I've talked about introversion here and here. Here's what you need to know:

• Introversion does not equal shyness.
• We're not antisocial.
• We really do want to stay home, and that doesn't make us weird.
• We like you and like to be around you, but we also need a break to recharge. This is not a bad thing. It's just a thing.

Imagine an introvert as being a series of electrical outlets. Now imagine people plugging into those outlets and draining our power. That's fine for awhile, but then we will kindly ask you to stop. If you don't, we'll unplug you ourselves and go hide in a closet. This is normal.

In the video, she talks about going to camp and being encouraged to be more extroverted. I had a flashback to Camp...

Huh, what was that camp called?

Never mind. I went there for a week for a couple of summers so I could be indoctrinated in conservative Christian theology sing songs and fraternize with other kids my age.

I think it was the second year. In the free time in the middle of the afternoon, I went back to the cabin, clamored onto my top bunk and read. By some bizarre fluke, I landed in the cool kids' cabin that year, and I remember one of the cool girls* coming down the hill to the cabin to get something. She saw me and was concerned. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing."

"Why are you here by yourself?"

"Because I'm reading."

"But don't you want to be with everybody else?"

I don't even remember how I responded to that. I do remember that all I could hear was a loud voice in my head, "Be with everybody else?  That's what I've been doing all morning! And that's what I'll do at dinner and all evening and at vespers and then again tomorrow morning and then and then and then...." I remember thinking that the weird thing was that there weren't more kids in their cabin reading. And, honestly, I was grateful for that because I wanted to have some time when I didn't have to be on. But, seriously, why were these people together all the time? Didn't they need a break? As much fun as camp was, and as nice as it was to be around other kids who were into Jesus, didn't everyone else feel the drain of spending so much time with other people?

Nope.

It's stuck with me as a powerful example of the difference between introverts and extroverts.

The next time you see a kid with a book, leave her alone. This is not her retreating into some depressing inner world. This will not lead to her cutting herself and singing emo songs.

This will keep her sane.

Read on, girls.

*The cool girl is nice in this story. I know that's weird, but she was.

Third Try's the Charm

THAT is what a cuff is supposed to look like*. Perhaps I will put off buying paint and looking for rocks after all.

Ravelry-ed here

*as opposed to the crap from yesterday