Pottering About

I don't have anything pithy to share today; we have a short stretch of remote schooling, and my mind has turned to mush.  I also realized this weekend that I feel best when I'm doing stuff that is not computer- or phone-based, and so have tried to limit my time where I can.  (Yesterday was a complete disaster in that regard; turns out being off my phone and computer for more than 48 hours left me with a lot of loose ends that needed tying up).  Today has been more intermittent, so that's good.

I'm pottering with jewelry making, and made an orange bead necklace to match the earrings I showed earlier this month.  I've been wearing it with an orange jersey dress I thrifted last month.

The silver earrings below are a pair I bought last year on etsy (they are styled after Aethelflaed's earrings on The Last Kingdom) and I love them, but the original earring post was so thick that they hurt my ears.  I realized if I swapped the post out for an earwire, the earrings would be a lot more wearable.  It was a three-minute fix and I've worn them a bunch of times since then.

A while back I cleared out a bunch of jewelry I wasn't wearing any longer either because it was too heavy, not my style, or was broken, and I realized I can harvest them for parts for new pieces.  I have in mind to make some gifts as well. The owl charm (below) was a pair of earrings originally, and while I like the owls (it is our school mascot), they were too big for my face.  So I separated them from the earwires, added a jump ring and put one on a necklace chain.  I'm saving the other one for a possible teacher gift.  I made the earrings to coordinate.

On the Thanksgiving prep front, the turkey went into the crock pot last night and spent the night cooking.  The smell was disorienting in the night, but it looks pretty decent today.  I had ordered a breast and, much to my dismay, got "upgraded" to a full turkey for free.  The frozen turkey was bigger than the space in my freezer and I couldn't quite fit it in my 7 qt crock pot.  In a bit of a panic, I baked it frozen at a low temperature for two hours yesterday, covered with foil and sitting in a water bath, just to make it flexible enough to break the sternum and rib cage so that I could fit the thing into my crock pot.  It was a tight fit, but I made it!  

Today I roasted the sweet potatoes, and made one of the pies.  I need to take things in small bites, so I have a list of what I need to make each day, so hopefully on Thursday, I only have to reheat most of it.

We're nearly into the Nativity fast as well, so I'm also trying to have us eat down the non-fasting food in the freezer and fridge.  

 

Andrea Mowry came out with her Stripes pattern last week, and I immediately threw my knitting queue to the wind and dove into my stash to cast it on--I very rarely do this!  The picture above is from my attempts to figure out which colors to put where.  I think I have enough to make it, and in similar colors to her cropped version on the cover of the pattern (which I adore, by the way).  I was determined to make this a stash-buster sweater, so I am using light worsted superwash on a few stripes, but my tension is such that it works out okay.  I've just had to adjust my row count. The not-nice thing is having to swatch all the yarns for gauge, but at least three are the same yarn in different color ways, so that helps.  

I don't love short rows, but I found a little tutorial for picking up wraps that is better than anything else I've seen, so that helps.  I also figured out how to read on my kindle while knitting, so I've been enjoying Sarah J. Maas' Throne of Glass.  I just finished re-reading the Court of Roses and Thorns series (ahead of the next book's release in Feb) and was eager to stay with the author's style and genre.  I don't like Throne of Glass quite as much (and her writing has improved since that one), but it is a long series, so I can see sticking with it.

That's it for me today!  I'm off to knit a few more rows....

The Count of Monte Cristo Discussion Guide

 

We have our first reading group meeting tonight and as promised, here is the discussion guide I wrote for the evening.  I will read Iago's monologue from Act 2, Scene 1 of Othello, in which he plots his revenge, and my co-moderator will read William Blake's A Poison Tree to start us off! 

The Count of Monte Cristo Discussion Guide

 

Good literature is in a larger conversation we are having with ourselves about what it means to be human. As such, there are often echoes of other work or new bits of dialogue.

        What “echoes” in The Count of Monte Cristo for you?

        What new bit of dialogue is Dumas adding to this larger conversation?
 

If you were unjustly imprisoned, what would sustain you to survive (spiritually/emotionally)? How would you not give in to despair?
 

How much do you value your security and position? What would you do if those things were threatened? (vis a vie Villefort’s betrayal of Edmond)
 

If you knew you were going to be imprisoned, what sorts of things would you commit to memory to stay sane? (Father Faria clearly has committed vast stores of knowledge to memory in order to teach Edmond as much as he does)
 

How do you think you’d react to unjust imprisonment?
 

If you were reduced to a number, how would you hold on to who you are?
 

Why do you think Fr. Faria does not try to talk Edmond out of his schemes for revenge? Is he supporting Edmond by saying nothing? Do you think Fr. Faria agrees? Why or why not? (And how does that square with his role as a learned priest?)
 

If you were to find a secret treasure like Edmond, how do you think it would change you? How does the treasure change Edmond, for better or worse?
 

Think about Edmond’s death wish in chapter 5. How does that compare with Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech? How are they similar or different?
 

Why do you think Edmond rewarded Caderousse, even though Caderousse admitted to abetting Danglars, Villefort, and Fernand in their conspiracy?
 

What is Dumas trying to say about the power of money?
 

Are the Count’s actions justified by the ends? Why or why not?
 

Is it ever okay to do a bad thing for a good end, or does the bad thing leave such a spiritual stain that there can’t be a good end?
 

Does Edmond’s quest for revenge ultimately outweigh the original wrong done him? What would be a virtuous response?

Edmond ruins Villefort and Danglars by making a calculated assessment of their characters. Does the fact that Edmond’s revenge is enacted in a passive way relieve him of the moral responsibility? Is it better or worse than if he had done something more directly to ruin them?
 

What do you think of Villefort’s fate and Edmond’s response? What about Danglars? (p 206/212). Do you like Edmond? Is he a “good” guy or a hero? Why or why not?
 

Do you think Danglars’ repentance was real? What about Edmond’s forgiveness? What does it mean to forgive? What does it mean to seek redress of wrongs?

Is love of money the root of all evil?

What do you think of Edmond’s offer to sacrifice himself to save Albert for Mercedes’ sake?
 

Why do you think Mercedes married Fernand?
 

How do secrets poison a family?
 

Do you think Edmond’s repentance at the end made up for what he did? Was his revenge justified? Why or why not?
 

Did Fernand take the easy way out? What would have been the narrow path?
 

Do you think Edmond has developed any virtues or insight at the conclusion of the story? Gained new vices? Does his quest for revenge help or hinder him?

What do you think of the ending? Was there anything about this story that especially surprised you?
 

Bonus question: In the 2013 movie The Railway Man, a British army officer is tortured in a Japanese labor camp; many years later, he confronts his jailer about the torture. How does this confrontation compare to Dantes’ journey of revenge against his accusers?

 

Discuss amongst yourselves.  😉 

Dwell

It is no secret that I value the past, and that I think we as humans benefit from knowing where we come from so that we have a better understanding of who we are.  Christopher Beha has a brilliant (if brief) article in Harper's about how our future-facing predilection does us no favors as a society:

“For most of human history, time was understood to proceed in cycles—the annual cycle of seasons; the generational cycle of life; in a longer view, the civilizational cycle of ‘ages’—each returning us to where we’d begun. For better or worse, people could be reasonably sure that a year from now they would be doing the same thing in the same place, just as a lifetime from now their children would be doing as they had done. There was still plenty of uncertainty—mortality rates were high, natural disasters arrived without warning—and a desire to manage that uncertainty through divination. But the occasional flood or fire or plague was ultimately just another link between the future and the past. The obvious cost of this regularity was fatalism, summed up starkly in Ecclesiastes: ‘The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.’
 
“If you wanted to put your life into a larger context that might give it meaning, you looked to the past—the age of heroes, the age of gods, the time of the covenant, the time before the flood or the fall. It was then that some lasting standard had been established against which your own life could be judged. You related your present circumstances to history by telling stories about it.
 
“I’m engaging in just this kind of narrative work here, so you’ll have to excuse some oversimplification. Of course, a linear sense of time has always coexisted with the cyclical one. And periods of great economic, political, and social disruption have seen surges of apocalyptic thinking, when the focus shifts from origins to endings. But in most places at most times, the emphasis has been on continuity, on the regular rhythms of life, and meaning has most often been found in the past.”

~Christopher Beha, Future Sense, Harper's, December 2020 issue (accessed online, 11/18/20).

Last week, I read a bit more in Kate Davies' Wheesht, and the chapter on making within limits was particularly interesting to me.  Like people who fetishize post-apocalytic futures, there is a certain impetus in makers to work outside limits, break boundaries and rules as a kind of freedom from creative constraint.  Kate points out, however, that true creativity is often found in placing firm lines about what you make, and creating within the sphere of what has been established.  Or to put it another way: you can't break the rules unless you learn them in a deep way to start out with, and perhaps you can reach greater heights on a tether than drifting aimlessly, without an anchor to the ground.

This morning, an e-mail reminded me of Paul King's excellent book, The Antimodern Condition, in which he argues (essentially) that to be modern is to live without history, without limits, without tether to place or time, which sounds freeing, but in reality is very anxiety-producing.  I don't think anyone would argue with the idea that ours is anxious age.   

Writes King, 

"Anxiety is inherent to all forms of modernity and is indeed a product of it: modernity creates anxiety and this is because modernity demands change.  Anxiety is the flipside of flux and transgression.  Modernity cannot accept the world as it currently is, and so we are anxious for change.  But then the effect of change is to make us anxious about our futures and our place in the world.  So we are anxious to create change and anxious because of change.  It is not, we might say, a question of status anxiety, but of anxiety as status" (51, emphasis mine). 

I suppose the message of these three things coming together this week is that I must make peace with the world as it is, and take things as I find them rather than as I would wish them to be.  Moreoever, I must work within my limits, something that is admittedly difficult for me.  I am ever-prone to trying to exceed myself physically, and collapse from the strain eventually.  Yesterday, after dropping off my kids at school, I began to think I might start writing again at long last, and mused which of the in-progress stories I should pick up first.  Or perhaps set to formatting the finished novel for possible independent publication?  I was torn.  It felt like picking up the strands of a weaving that I had let fall off the loom when we were locked down for six months.

My musings turned to ash in the afternoon as I received word that the next few months will be punctuated with (thankfully) short bursts of remote schooling for my kids starting today.  (No soup for you).  Piglet will be learning from home through December 4, with the rest following after Thanksgiving.  Piglet is the most independent of all my kids, and has done quite well, but today has still needed quite a bit of help from me to navigate the technology, so my morning has been very punctuated.  For some reason, when my kids are schooling at home, my brain turns to absolute mush and I can't manage to do anything at all.  I'm just stuffing things into the cracks to keep everything running before we drown.  I struggle to feel like a valuable member of society or even of my household, shuffling from task to child to meal preparation and back again, doing everything, but doing nothing particularly well.

I suppose that is the limit for me in this time, and perhaps for all time.  To accept the world as I find it, my children for who they are, and work within those limits. 

Talking Tuesday: Sonnet 116 {read aloud!}

 

 

 

 

Yarn Along: Give Me All The Charts!

~knitting~

Another finished object!  I finished my Beamer last Friday and blocked it over the weekend.  I swore off lace charts after the Gemini, but after struggling through the lace charts on this pattern (I swear, I knit this entire thing at least twice, given how many rows I tinked back to redo), I really like charts now! 

 

Kate has a wonderfully intuitive way of writing a knitting pattern, and for the first time, I got the chart process.  Like something opened up in my brain to "get it," finally.  

 

The success of the Beamer, and general enjoyment of knitting it, led me to immediately cast on another lacy shawl, this time with some stashed Capra yarn and another Kate Davies lace pattern from the Bold Beginner Knits book called Footfall.  It took me a bit to get the pattern established.  I had to start over once or twice, and then somehow dropped a stitch on either side of the set up chart, so my first repeat ended wrongly on both sides, but I figured out where the problem was after tinking back a couple of times, and now am doing well with it.   The color is Magnolia Heather, but it is more pink-purple than it looks in the photo.  The color in real life is so pretty!

The process of following a chart is very enjoyable to me right now, so I'm all: Give Me All the Charts!  I decided to dip my toes into colorwork, as my primary block about stranded knitting is the charts, but after doing the lace, the colorwork charts made a lot more sense to me (that whole new space in my brain is doing quite well, thank you).  I bought the Mackworth Sweater pattern during sale in the spring, and even bought a mini pack of Stroll Tonal to try out the technique but the whole thing languished over the summer.  Just as well, as I think it would have frustrated me earlier.  

I spent an hour one morning working on different color combinations for the color charts, and then started swatching.  It took me a bit to get the hang of having two or three yarns in my hands, but I think I have it now!  I'm very dominantly right-handed, and knit English, so stranded knitting seemed hard from that aspect too.  I don't crochet very well because of needing to have the yarn in the left hand.  After reading a bit on different stranded techniques (including about yarn dominance), I experimented with different ways of holding the yarn, and it turns out that holding one in the left and one in the right actually works best for me.  Who'd have thought!  

I'm super pleased with my little swatch, and totally enjoyed making it.  I'm not happy with the yarn (too much halo and not enough stitch definition) or color combo for the pattern (not enough contrast in the tonal yarn), although I like the color family.  

After asking around for yarn recommendations, I ordered some Jamieson and Smith 2-ply in a similar color scheme to see if that looks better.  Since J&S is made in Shetland, where Fair Isle comes from, I imagine it will work swimmingly.  

~reading~

 

I'm currently obsessed with the BBC show Victoria (about which more below), and so bought a couple of books to read more about her, since most of my working knowledge is about the latter half of her reign, during her widowhood.  I started We Two last night and had a hard time putting it down to get a good night's sleep!  I plan to read the Victoria biography after that, and possibly another book that contains Victoria and Albert's correspondence.  

The Count of Monte Cristo is the first selection for the reading group I mentioned yesterday, and I'm re-reading the Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas on my kindle because it is untaxing when my brain hurts.

 Kate Davies' new collaborative journal about Shetland craftwork also arrived last week, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

~general crafting~

 As long as I'm trying new things with knitting, I figured I might as well fall down a few other crafting rabbit holes.  Sometime this summer, I thrifted a little knit dress to wear as a base layer in a particularly unbecoming shade of beige, intending to dye it, but then chickened out when I started looking at Rit dyes and considering my washing machine.  My marigolds have been decent (but not plentiful), so I decided to buy additional dried flowers and alum and have a go at dying the dress naturally.  From my reading, it looks like marigolds+alum is the easiest entre into this sort of dyeing, and I'm eager to try it.

And while I know the handmade jewelry market is totally glutted, I wanted to experiment with making some of my own, as my favorite pieces have been purchased from etsy artisans.  I've made simple earrings in the past, but wanted to try something a little more artistic.  I found a few supplies and had some fun with beads!  Picasso jasper, amazonite, and jeweled agate are speaking to me at the moment.

 

 ~watching~

Victoria, obviously.  I wrote a little about it last week, and I'm on my second viewing of the the three seasons, and it is just as enjoyable the second time around.  Tom Hughes and Jenna Coleman knock it out of the park, and the costume designers obviously know their business.  (Says the historic costumer who gets annoyed when they get it wrong).  It is also the first time I've seen Paul Oakes play a genuinely nice guy and likeable character.  I really like the relationship between the two brothers, Ernest and Albert.

Tom Hughes is pretty interesting to me as an actor, so I'm trying to find other work he has done.  Some stuff I've seen before, like The Game, which is an excellent BBC series set during the 1970s Cold War of Britain, inside MI:5.  He was also in Red Joan, which I wrote about sometime this summer; that is also a great film, and he was very good in it.

In September, I forgot to mention that I rewatched all of the Shetland series (how I love Douglas Henshall!) and the moody landscape and wonderful soundtrack to that show just sucked me back in.  It had been long enough since I watched the first few seasons that I couldn't remember the details, so it was like watching for the first time!

I am trying to get into the second season of The Spanish Princess on Starz, which is the latest in the long line of Phillipa Gregory adaptations.  I enjoyed the White Queen and White Princess, but have found The Spanish Princess a bit slower to get into.  I find the story very compelling, and the production values are quite high, so I don't know why I'm not super into it.  It covers a period of time that most people don't know about Catharine of Aragon: the first 25 years of her marriage to Henry VIII, long before Anne Boleyn was even a shine in her father's eye.  There have been some surprises for me as well!  Did you know that she rode into battle against the Scots while heavily pregnant?  Henry was away fighting in France, and there was an uprising on the border, so she rode out with the army to put it down (and succeeded).  

There is a new adaptation of Rebecca on Netflix that I thought was good.  Not fantastic, but an enjoyable diversion.  I like both Lily James and Armie Hammer (and Kristin Scott Thomas tears up the scenery as the housekeeper), so it was a fun afternoon.

I suppose what I'm looking for in my watching is things that are comfortable--some old watches, some new watches, but nothing terribly taxing or upsetting.  

~garden~

My garden is still limping along. The kale is hanging on, and the tomatoes are still ripening, so we'll take it! 

I have a naughty squirrel who keeps digging in the pots, so I've put plastic forks and netting up to discourage him, since he was undeterred by cayenne pepper.

 

 

I brought in a few pots to winter inside the house, and will just play the rest by ear as to when I cover the bins for the season. 

This lemon balm plant has done exceedingly well.  I love cooking with it.

 

That's all for me!  Linking with Ginny for Yarn Along!

Talking Tuesday: The Stories We Tell

Image via Blackbird and Goose

 

I'm starting a reading group with the parents at my kids' school, the goal of which is to read good literature and discuss it.  The idea is to cultivate a mind garden that is seeded with good and nourishing plants, rather than being sucked dry by weeds and pests (i.e. doom scrolling).  Some of the selections will be books our kids read as part of the classical curriculum, and others will be works that endure because they speak to the universal human condition.  I'm using some abridgements when the original work is too long to expect working adults to make it through in a month's time.  

This month, we are reading an abridged (and simplified for kids) version of The Count of Monte Cristo, a daring adventure story of power struggles, treachery, double-dealing, treasure hunts, and a quest for revenge.  I've been thinking about the various themes in the story, and how to approach the discussion, and it occurred to me that the stories we tell ourselves really can shape our perception of who we are.  

Movies and television dramas have been telling darker and darker stories for the past 20 years or more, stories of hunger for power, stories that idolize consumption and materialism, stories that feature supposedly "good" characters who engage in double dealing, lying, and general untrustworthiness.  There is now a kind of trope in visual story telling that no character is ever safe from being killed off (often in a gruesome or emotionally wrought way).  It is hard to get attached to characters or even relate to their experiences when you know they might be killed off in the next episode, and bespeaks the truth of a whole generation that has been raised in an atmosphere of anxiety and insecurity. 

There is also now a trope amongst fiction writers that you must take your character to the extremes of what you can do to them.  Whatever has happened so far, be sure to raise the stakes even higher to place your main character (or characters in an ensemble) into the most perilous and fraught circumstance you can think of, and maybe they get out of it, and maybe they don't.  Every scene must crackle with conflict.  Take away everything the main characters hold dear in the quest to solve whatever problem you've laid out for them in the plot.  In other words, always take your character to the brink of their existence, and then see what happens, otherwise, what are you doing writing fiction?  (I don't agree with this, by the way.  I think there are many interesting and deep stories that feature characters who go on a journey that doesn't involve being completely broken by the process).

These tropes don't exactly point to a society that is experiencing high levels of trust and security or one that is dedicated to the attainment of virtue.  There are many smarter people than me who have written at length about why this change has occurred (Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone and Sherry Turkle's Alone Together are both excellent places to start), but that doesn't really matter right now, because this is where we find ourselves.

David French wrote over the weekend about how virtue is only found when tested.  We may say we are brave, or compassionate, or honest, but until those things are tested in some way, we really don't know whether we have them.  And, as French points out, passing a test of virtue doesn't mean you keep them forever and always.  Like muscle definition, virtue is something that must be actively cultivated throughout our lives, not just once.  The continual cultivation means that we are more likely to survive a test of virtue, but we are still fallen humans, and make many mistakes.  That said, we can dust ourselves off when we fail a test, confess and repent, and try to do it better the next time we are tested.  One might argue that the pursuit of virtue also the pursuit of holiness.  

The best place to start is with stories that speak to the truth of the human condition, and to develop the grit to keep going even when it is hard, or seems impossible.  The practice of grit is found in the small everyday things we do, such as how we handle our physical comfort (or lack thereof), how we speak to our families while under time pressure, how we respond to unexpected changes in our routines.  I'm sorry to say that I've failed many of test of virtue over the years, and wish to do better.  To be better.  

Time to get on my knees and pull some weeds.

*If anyone here is interested in reading along and seeing the discussion guide, please leave a comment and let me know.