Merry Christmas, San Diego Style!

Last week we went out on a friend's boat to enjoy San Diego's annual Boat Parade of Lights. It is a uniquely coastal holiday experience, and I thought you all might enjoy it. Happy Holidays!

Stuff I've Learned Lately

1. "Christmas vacation" means something different to kids who are out of school than it does to parents who are working. (I actually already knew this; I just manage to forget it every year until I am once again forcefully reminded.)

2. The parent who works at home totally gets the short end of the stick when the kids are out of school. Fortunately, that's not me this year.

3. A 13-year-old boy has a very loose understanding of what constitutes adequate vacuuming.

4. My dogs don't like to go outside to pee when it's raining.

5. Dog pee smells really, really bad if you don't notice it for a couple of days.

6. Waiting until Christmas week to do the Christmas shopping is probably not a good idea.

7. Amazon Prime is worth the price.

8. Credit cards can actually smoke if you use them too much. (This isn't true, but certainly seems like it should be.)

9. Judges make mistakes.

10. Pointing out the judge's mistake may not lead to the result you are hoping for.

11. Even good bosses are not always right, but you don't necessarily want to point out their errors, either.

12. Not getting paid for your work does not make you any less responsible for doing a good job, numbers 9, 10, and 11 notwithstanding.

13. It is entirely possible to work full time and still run a home. All you have to do is warp the space-time continuum. (I'll let you know when I get that figured out.)

The Joy of Christmas

Or, as I think of it, the month of scattered pine needles. Pine needles on the floor, pine needles stuck to your socks, pine needles in the curtains, pine needles in the dogs' fur. I know I'm not the only one who hasn't finished cleaning up the pine needles from last year's tree. It's probably a good thing, really, since if it weren't for having to move the furniture around to accommodate the tree, that corner with the oversized chair would never get vacuumed.

Every year, we get our Christmas tree the Saturday after Thanksgiving weekend. I suppose you could call it a tradition. In our case, I think it's just because the only way we can keep track of all the holidays we celebrate is by keeping to a pretty strict schedule. My mom was raised Catholic; my dad was raised Muslim; my husband was raised Jewish. When people ask how I'm raising my kids, I tell them "Tolerant." But despite my best intentions, the holidays get a little complicated. One day a few years ago, we went to a party celebrating my cousin's return from the Haj, came home and lit the Hanukkah candles, and then went to a Christmas party. My kids used to confuse Moses with Santa Claus. And I once overheard Older Son explaining to Younger Son that we light the Hanukkah candles so that Santa can see the stockings when he comes down the chimney.

This year, I totally got slammed by Hanukkah coming much earlier than usual. I keep the Menorah with the Christmas decorations and pull it out the Sunday after Thanksgiving weekend, which is our traditional Day of Decorating. This year, though, Hanukkah struck the Wednesday after Thanksgiving, four days before the Day of Decorating. I realized this on Wednesday evening, right after I got home from working all day, and after the sun had gone down. I managed to locate some leftover Hanukkah candles in the laundry room cabinet, under the hot glue gun and the old pantyhose, but the Menorah was somewhere in a box in the attic, and I wasn't about to brave that place in the dark. I melted some candles to a saucer and used that for our Menorah. What it lacked in sophistication, it made up for in...nothing. There was nothing redeeming about it. But at least we had candles.

Today was the traditional Day of Decorating. Last night, the KH and I got the tree up (I wonder how many marriages break up over that?) and hauled all the boxes of decorations out of the attic. We piled them in the living room, and this morning, I awoke to the sound of Younger Son asking plaintively if I was ready to start decorating yet? He's been asking in much the same tone for a week, so I'm getting used to it.

I wasn't ready, naturally, especially since the KH was gone for the day, leaving me to wrangle The Champions of Sibling Rivalry by myself, but a cup of coffee and some oatmeal made it seem at least possible. I opened all the ornament boxes, sorted the ornaments, and then remembered that I bought all new, dog-friendly ornaments last year. They were nowhere to be found. I completely unpacked every box. No ornaments. Finally it occurred to me that they might not have made it out of the attic. I strapped on a headlamp and went in, carefully avoiding the exposed nails, loose fiberglass insulation, and anywhere that looked like it might house spiders. After some rummaging, I found the missing box right near the entry, under the baby jail we used to contain the puppies. I reflected on how smart it was of me to pack all the ornaments I wanted in a single box near the entry to the attic last year so that I wouldn't have to haul out all the boxes again this year--while I was repacking all the boxes and dragging them back upstairs to return to the attic.

With Younger Son's help, I tackled the tree lights. I got the first strand on without too much trouble--if you understand that this means no more trouble than one would expect to have crawling around and around a spiny tree shoved up against a wall with furniture all around it and a lamp that has to be straddled cautiously with each trip around. Younger Son handed me the second strand and I began my journey again. Around and around and around. It wasn't until the end of the second strand that I realized it was the wrong one. So back I went again, around and around and around. And then back the other way for two more strands. Then we plugged them in. Since only half the bulbs were burned out, I called it good and moved on to the ornaments.

I called in the kids, who immediately began fighting over who got to hang which ornaments and who got the prime spots on the front of the tree and whose ornament was where first and who always gets the best of everything and how much better life would be if they were both only children. I cranked up the Christmas carols and pretended they were noisy elves. After about ten minutes, they both lost interest and disappeared, leaving me in relative peace, until I heard Older Son asking me if there was a faster way to thaw bacon.

Bacon? I didn't recall giving permission to cook bacon. In fact, I wasn't even aware we had bacon in the house. I am not a bacon fan. I don't like the smell, and I hate the grease that gets all over everything. I am absolutely certain that, even wacked out on morphine--which, sadly, I was not--I would never have given The Walking Disaster permission to actually cook bacon in my kitchen. And yet, it was undeniable that he was asking how to thaw bacon faster, and I suspected the question was not merely for personal interest. Also, I was wondering how he was trying to thaw bacon that it wasn't fast enough.

I headed for the kitchen to find him carrying a drippy handful of half-frozen bacon, that he had just removed from a large bowl full of water, across my freshly mopped kitchen floor. I screamed. He jumped. The greasy water splattered everywhere. I caught him before he dropped the wet bacon into the hot pan on the stove, but not before the dogs discovered the rare treat that is bacon grease on the kitchen floor and flung themselves upon it gleefully. By the time I had it sorted out, Older Son was banished to the garage, the dogs were banished to the laundry room, and I was frying wet, splattering, half thawed bacon with my feet sticking to the kitchen floor and every window in the house wide open.

Eventually I made it back to the decorating. I had almost finished the tree when the sound of frantic squawking came in through the window. I ran out to the chicken yard, thinking the gate was open and one of the dogs was harassing the chickens, only to find that one of the girls was missing, and the noise was coming from the neighbors' yard. I ran back through the house to the front yard and down to the neighbors' house. I was about to ring their doorbell when I heard screaming from the backyard, so I ran in the back gate to discover Mimi the chicken floating in the pool while Max the dog barked at her from the edge and Heidi the neighbor tried to reach her with the pool pole. Mimi was the picture of calm amid the chaos, sitting in the water like a duck, not even paddling and making no noise at all. In fact, she looked a little smug, having defeated the Great Canine Menace, who is afraid of the water. Heidi the neighbor successfully fished her out of the pool and I returned the perfectly happy, albeit sopping wet, chicken to her yard and finished the decorating.

I can hardly wait to see what the rest of the season brings. Thank God I'm working tomorrow.

Treading Like Crazy

Things are going about as you would expect when one parent who has always been at home goes back to work in an office, leaving the other parent, now at home full time but also still working full time, to contend with all the various and sundry household and family chores that necessarily arise as a result of kids and pets and chickens and laundry and shopping and cooking and other chores.

That is to say, not perfectly.

So far, though, we are keeping our heads above water by treading frantically. Things are a bit messier and less organized than I would like, but I'm learning to let it slide. I don't think the dust buffaloes are actually dangerous, after all.

The four-day weekend was a help. I did a truly enormous amount of laundry, vacuumed the house, watered the plants, did the grocery shopping, and lavishly petted several seriously disgruntled dogs. We hosted Thanksgiving, which involved a whole lot more shopping and cooking and cleaning. I am proud to say that, three days later, I finally finished the last of the dishes. The boys had a sleepover here Friday night. I woke up to the Great Nerf Gun Battle of 2010, Older Son broke my favorite vase (a wedding present), and Heidi peed in three different spots, yet they all survived, so again--proud of myself. And a dear old friend of mine came to visit on Saturday and showed off her baby bump--a huge deal, since she and her husband (in their 40s and 50s, respectively) have been trying for quite a while and have been through two miscarriages in the past two years. Saturday night is Date Night, so the KH and I went out for Afghan food, sans children--who have been home for nine straight days. That was great on many levels.

I felt so inspired by all this that I put a double batch of sourdough batter out to rise last night, thinking I could bake today and have enough bread for the week. As I usually do, I warmed the oven slightly and put the dough in it to rise before I went to bed. This morning, the KH got downstairs before me and decided to make cinnamon rolls for breakfast. You can see where this is going, right? My double batch of sourdough, responding to the delightful warmth of the heating oven, rose and spread and overflowed all over the oven, to the grave detriment of both the oven and the dough. I probably should have stopped while I was ahead...or at least, less behind.

Despite all the activity--or maybe because of it--I have been knitting. Here's proof:

This is a progress shot of Flame D'Amore, the top down raglan I've been working on. The yarn is handspun merino and merino-tencel plied together. It's about a dk weight, but I'm knitting at a worsted gauge, so the sweater is light and drapey.

I am basing the design on Francis Revisited, but mostly making it up as I go. I'm very happy with the way this is turning out. As you can see, it's a fitted design (Bertha and I are the same size), with a moderate cowl neck.

The edges are rolled, because I like rolled edges. I'm planning on elbow- or full length sleeves. I like the short sleeves, but I find longer sleeves are more wearable. Especially now, since my new office is just a couple degrees shy of "arctic". I'm not kidding. It's so cold that my nose runs and my fingernails turn blue. I have taken to wearing sweaters under my suit jackets and I am planning to knit a pair of fingerless gloves to wear while I'm working. I didn't start this with the idea of wearing it to work--hence the casual style--but I'm going to try it with a jacket and see if I can pull it off.

At some point I do have FOs to show you, but it's not easy to find time these days for a FOtoshoot, so I'll just leave you with the song that's running through my head, "Just keep knitting, gotta keep knitting..."

Whirlwind

Just stopping by to say I may not be stopping by as often for a while. I started a new job on Monday, and may I just say...wow. How do people go to an office all day, every day, and still have time to do anything else? It's been 15 years since I worked full time away from home, and if you do the math, you can see that was before I was married, before I had kids, before I had a house and a community and responsibilities. The past three days I've been taking part in an intensive training program, which has been super exciting and interesting, but also exhausting. I don't want to go into too much detail, so suffice it to say that it is a very fast-paced, formal, professional environment. Virtually everything I am doing is brand new to me. I just got my first assignment, which is awesome, high-profile (think national news), and deadly serious. I'm kind of stunned, actually. I am tremendously excited, because it's a great assignment and a huge opportunity, but I'm also scared sh*tless. And I start...tomorrow morning.

Mr. Yarnhog has been terrific. He is totally supportive and excited for me, and he has really stepped up, shuttling kids and cooking and taking on household chores, but he still has to work full time, even though he works from home. It's a huge adjustment for both of us and it's going to take a while to work it all out. So I need to go do twelve loads of laundry, shovel the house, resuscitate my garden (which hasn't been watered in a week), locate the bathrooms under the accumulated filth, do the grocery shopping, bake bread, walk the dogs, make sure the kids are still alive, and take them to the dentist. Oh, and we're having a birthday dinner for Oldest Son tonight, so I suppose I should figure out what I'm going to make and do something about a cake. Holy smokes. How do you all do this?!

It Ain't Just a River in Egypt

This is the progress I've made on my happy knitting.

What's that you say? Smaller than in the last picture? Ah, but that's only because you didn't see the part where I finished the whole raglan, separated out the sleeves, and tried it on. And it was too short. Way too short. Which I knew it was going to be several inches earlier. Not suspected, not feared: knew.

How, you ask? Well, first, because I calculated my row gauge and it was apparent to me that increasing every other round would give me a raglan only five inches deep. I even calculated that increasing every third row instead would give me a raglan that was the right depth. And then I started knitting and increased every other round anyway. My rationale was: "I always increase every other round for a raglan and it always comes out right. Even though, in this case, the numbers tell me I should increase every third round instead, I am going to disregard that, because I always increase every other round and it always comes out right."

So I knitted for a while. And it was pretty clear pretty early on that I was increasing at a rate that was going to get all my increases done well before the raglan was deep enough. But I thought, "Eh," and kept knitting.

When I had only two increase rounds to go, reality began to assert itself a little more forcefully, as I realized that the only person this raglan was going to fit would be someone under three feet tall. So for the last two increases, I increased every fourth round. Because surely that would make up for the entire rest of the raglan and magically add three inches, right?

Inexplicably, it didn't. But, hey, I'm a knitter. I can make it work. I continued to knit without increasing for an inch or two, until my raglan line stared to morph into something less identifiable and even I had to admit that it didn't look quite, um, right. At that point, I decided it was probably good enough, separated out the sleeves, and tried it on.

Yeah. Nothing like a fit test for a reality check.

I momentarily considered possible work arounds involving steeking and grafting and messing with the space-time continuum, and then I finally bowed to the inevitable and ripped. Hard.

It's a good thing I like the yarn, because it looks like we're going to be spending a lot more time together than I initially planned.

How Yarnhog Got Her Groove Back

Note the lack of resemblance to a black, fingering weight camisole. (Or a green angora lace shrug. But we will not speak of that.)

A week or so ago, my knitting get-up-and-go...got up and went. I've been struggling ever since. Not just with knitting, either, as you can tell from my last post. It seems that when the knitting ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. Logically, then, finding my happy place with my knitting should bring back the happy to the rest of my life, right?

And this is my knitting happy.

I have a sweater's worth of this gorgeous (if I do say so myself) handspun, which has been maturing in the stash for a while. I had a design in mind for this, but my interest in the concept waned during the spinning and I never did cast on. After spending an entire morning perusing my Rav queue, and then everyone else's Rav queues, and feeling nothing more than a passing flicker of interest in any of the patterns, I decided what I really needed was yarn inspiration. A quick trip to the stash reminded me of this beautiful yarn and I was off and running.

This will be a top-down, raglan, cowl neck pullover with elbow-length sleeves, similar to Francis Revisited. It would actually BE Francis Revisited, except that I don't want to knit this yarn at the very open gauge required by the pattern, so I had to rewrite the pattern to accommodate my worsted weight handspun, and while I was at it, I made the cowl a little smaller, shortened and narrowed the sleeves, and decided on rolled edges rather than seed stitch trim. So the pattern is more of an idea than a set of instructions. I'm okay with that.

After a plain grey tank top and a plain black camisole, I'm loving this nubby, soft, variegated, red yarn. I'm also loving the fact that a round is something less than five million stitches. As soon as I cast on, I felt like I had exhaled. It felt like that moment in yoga class when you've done all the exercises and you finally get to the part where you close your eyes and relax, and you take a deep breath and feel your joints loosen and your bones sink into the mat. Just like that. And that's a good feeling.

So the rest of my life should be smoothing out any time now...right?