Rays of Sunshine: Year-End 2020

My husband remarked sometime this fall that future historians of our era will have to microspecialize in 2020, as in, "I'm an expert on October 8, 2020."  It has been a year in which we lived a century.  Here are some (not-so) quick takes from an epic year.

1. We survived Covid in the early days of the pandemic.  My infection was brutal (but not hospital-inducing); the rest of my family less so.  

2. My kids learned to get along with each other during the six-month lockdown in this tiny house, and continue to develop their relationships with each other in unexpected ways.  Yes, they still fight, still annoy each other, still know how to push each other's buttons, but on the whole, the four of them can rub along okay, which is something I never thought I'd be able to say.  We did many puzzles and played lots of Scrabble and other word games this year.

3. The kitchen garden was a source of delight to me all summer and fall, and I'm looking forward to digging in the dirt in the late spring.

4. While I wrote less this year, my final Slezkine essay remains my favorite, although my latest Crawford tribute comes close.

 

5. I'm pleased to announce that my novel, All This Without You, will be published in mid-February.  I'm working through the final formatting and galley proofs now.  Pre-order will be available in a few days.  My first novel, Deliverance, finally got the cover I wanted from the start.

6. The kids discovered shchi, kuleyabaka, and pirog this year, and my fasting menus got a bit easier as a result (if more labor-intensive).  

 

At the same time, I crossed some kind of culinary Rubicon this year, and have enjoyed making some nice-looking meat, fish, and cabbage pies (with pre-made crust; I'm not that invested).  

 

The food shortages of the spring put my long-neglected bread maker to work. 

After 8 months of heavy use, it went to the Great Appliance Store in the Sky.  RIP, you served us well.

 

7. I fell down a few crafting rabbit holes this summer and fall, including jewelry-making, which I completely enjoy, and dyeing, which I do not. 

 

 

I also returned to making art this spring and summer, and am holding these new creative endeavors under the broad umbrella of This Living Hand Designs. 

 8. After stalking various listings for used pairs, I finally found a pair of Blundstones on ebay for a great bargain, and they are pretty much the best things ever. My transitional shoe crisis solved! So stompy.  

9. With hair salons closed for months, I learned how to cut both boys' hair, and have continued the practice since.  My husband had me trim his hair once in May in desperation, but has since returned to his barber, much to my relief.  I trimmed the girls' and my own hair once, since we don't need regular cuts.  It's not perfect, but it will do!

 

10. My sewing stalled out this year, but I made a few things I really loved, including my cropped linen Emerald tops, and a laundry cycle's worth of underwear.  

11. I dipped my toes into more challenging knitting, including lacework and colorwork, and find I have a an appetite for charted work. 

I also discovered some new-to-me designers and have enjoyed some new patterns.

12.  I discovered some truly enjoyable book series this year, including the All Souls Triology, The Court of Thorns and Roses series, and the Throne of Glass series.  The Throne of Glass series was an unexpected delight, and I binged all seven (rather large) books in about a month's time this fall.  I dipped back into the Court of Thorns and Roses series again this week in anticipation of the next book's release in February.  I guess I'm into supernatural fantasy now?

Wherever this year has taken you, and whatever difficulties you've experienced, I wish you peace and joy in the year ahead.

 

Happy New Year!

See ya on the flip side.

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....

Talking Tuesday: Toward Telos

My kids went back to school today (hooray!).  In the rush of all the last minute back to school stuff that needed to happen yesterday, I had lots of ideas for the things I wanted to do when the house was empty again for a good period of time--the first time in six months.  There are shelves to clear out, rooms to paint, things that need repair and maintenance, and general chaos of lock down to be sorted and organized, to say nothing of getting back on a regular writing/art making schedule. 

Our walk to school was oddly quiet--we are still not fully open here and most schools are teaching remotely, at least to start the school year.  The hustle and bustle of the city is no more, its energy drained by the extended lock down.  And there are many places that have shuttered for good; it is hard to know what will replace them if the high-rise offices that largely drive the surrounding commercial corridor do not bring their workers back to the office.

I wrote last week about Matthew B. Crawford's latest book, Why We Drive.  I finished the book over the weekend, and there is still much more to write about it, but I have to sort my thoughts first.  I read back through some of the pieces I wrote about Crawford's earlier work, out of curiosity, and was struck by one theme that runs through all three books: that of human agency as necessary for human flourishing.  What that means is that in order for us to find meaning in our lives, we need to feel that we have some control over what happens to us and the decisions we make about our lives.  In practical matters, it is about working through the physical reality of our lives (i.e. fixing things).

Increasingly, Crawford notes, individual human agency is being leeched away in dribs and drabs, and that power locked into a black box of algorithmic technology, unaccountable to anyone except perhaps the gigantic tech corporations who make such boxes.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and giving it over to black boxes (and the faceless corporations who control them) is a sure path to human misery. 

There is a lot to unpack there, and I want to keep this brief today, so I'll just leave it there for now. 

Talking Tuesday: It is Good That You Exist

There's an old George Carlin routine that goes, "You know how when you are driving on the road, everyone going faster than you is a maniac, but everyone going slower is an idiot?"

Yes, that. 

Lately, I have a sort of spiky feeling inside me, one that doesn't want to give people the benefit of the doubt, doesn't want to give way, doesn't want to try to understand.  It's the ragey feeling that Carlin describes so well. It's not generally how I think about people or life in general, so it feels awful to feel like this.

I keep going back to Ulrich Lehner's bit in God Is Not Nice, where he talks about the most basic definition of love. It is acknowledging: It is good that you exist. 

That's it.  Everything that proceeds from that statement then determines how we treat the other person and interact with them.  Sounds simple, but it isn't, not really. Not when you get down under the statement and think about what it means to say: it is good that you exist.

I keep thinking too how we are all grieving--as a nation, as a world--for all that has been lost in the past months, and for all that will not be in the months to come.  We're not very good at grieving, culturally speaking, so it comes out in weird ways.  There's been denial and anger, depression and bargaining, but I don't think any of us has come to real acceptance of the thing.  That life is never going to be as it was, and some things are going to be forever changed. 

Does that mean we will always feel out of control and crazy?  No.  Does that mean that the current stage is the "new normal?"  Of course not.  But it does mean that this maelstrom of grief has to be gone through in order to emerge on the other side in a place of healing and growth.  If we don't go through it, the grief will continue to haunt us, to leak around the edges until it has its way.  There's no way forward but through the tunnel.

It's a messy business, all of it.

Of Birthdays, Jade Songbirds, and Haircuts in the Quarantine

I'm 41 today, which feels about right.  My body is getting older, and I can feel it (and see it).  But that's okay, really.  My body is my home, and I'm settled in for the duration. 

A couple of weeks ago, I fell in love with some cotton lawn on Hart's Fabric website, but paused a bit about the price.  The cost was above my usual comfort zone, but it was extra wide yardage, and I knew I could get a dress out of my usual yardage enough left over to make an Emerald or a dress for one of the girls.  I've been impressed with how lawn wears over time, so hopefully it will be a dress that sees lots of wear.

I knew that the Lepidoptera dress was a fail for me, and wanted to have one more lawn dress option in my hot weather closet because the heat is just never-ending this year.  It started around Memorial Day weekend, and there really hasn't been a break since--high humidity, temps in the 90s most days.  Gross.  It also means that while I can technically get more than one wearing out of my clothes, I generally don't like to because it is harder to get the fabric clean, which means it wears out faster. 

This summer reminds me of the summer of 2011, when we had six weeks of heat dome that included temps over 100 degrees plus high humidity.  I was 7-8 months pregnant with Birdie at the time and we don't have central AC (and in 2011, we only had one floor unit in the office/guest room to keep the computer cool), so it was a fairly miserable summer. She was born at the end of August, just ahead of Hurricane Irene (apt, given her personality).

But I digress, as usual.  So I bought the fabric (admittedly, somewhat impulsively, but I decided it would be a birthday dress) and made it up almost as soon as it arrived, shortly after finishing my husband's replacement kombu.  I've gotten away from florals these past couple of years, and while this is technically a floral, it is somewhat more botanical than ditsy print (and those colors!!), so it works. 

I did have to make it in stages because of how my sewing time was that week, but I even made my own bias tape for the neck binding!  I did the continuous method for the first time, using an 8x8" square and it worked a treat!  My husband spotted my bias tape maker case sitting on a cabinet after I was done and was intrigued.  

My only change to the pattern was to put a bit of elastic in the back of the waist ties for comfort.  I don't know why I didn't think of this before--my one complaint about this dress pattern is that while it is very comfortable overall, the ties need to be adjusted throughout the day because: woven fabric. 

So I split the waist tie in the middle, added about 11" of knit elastic to the gap, zig-zagging the edges to the elastic, and then ran it through the casing with a bodkin.  (I did this with Ponchik's Butterfly dress ties as well and it worked a treat). What a difference!  So comfortable, unbinding, but yet flattering waist-shaping.  I also think it doesn't shift around as much in the casing.  Perfect in disgusting heat. 

Incidentally, I cut my hair Monday, after being unable to get a haircut myself for probably two years.  I've been cutting the boys' hair every month or so since early in the lockdown, and cut my husband's hair once (that was nerve-wracking!) and cut the girls' hair over the weekend--just a little trim for them. 

My hair has gotten increasingly unwieldy not because of the length but because of the frizz and thinning.  I've had to get pretty creative to cover the areas where my scalp shows through.  I still do curly girl hair care, and it does help, but the ends were thin and scraggly, so I flipped my hair over after a wash and trimmed off about 1.5" all around, cutting carefully in sections.  My hair is so thin this wasn't too hard, but  I ended up cutting long layers in my hair by doing it this way. 

That said, the shorter layers actually look pretty good!  I probably just need to find a salon that is open (it is still hit or miss for that here; we aren't totally in green phase yet) and get the back trimmed up even more, because what is scraggly still is the ends on the bottom in the back and I can't reach that as well to get a nice even cut.  I'm wearing my hair up almost all the time right now anyway, so it's not that noticeable, but once it cools down, I'll probably want it down again.

I have no firm plans for today--maybe I'll put together my Cedar Sweater pdf at long last, or cut out some more gigantic undies (more on that in separate post), or work on something for a friend.  Or maybe I'll just knit in a chair and watch something.  Or forge on with Slezkine.  Maybe all those things!  The day is my oyster!

Excavating Truth in the Liturgy

*I started this post almost exactly one year ago, as Pentecost was this past Sunday.  Funny how that is--I've been turning idea over in my head for more than a year, a vertical spiral of excavation in itself!  

(2019)
I was standing in the choir this morning, and it was Pentecost, so all the music for the first half of the Liturgy was different than the familiar Antiphons of ordinary time.  I started thinking about repetition in the services and wondering (again) why we repeat everything so much.  I explored this a bit in my novel, but I keep coming back to it; there is a particular scene in the book that echoes in my mind a lot.  It occurred to me rather suddenly that the repetition allows us to excavate the Truth of the Liturgy, much in the same way doing a 12-week run of a play allows a theater actor to excavate the truth of the text in a play.

(2020)

Last month, I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in a book group discussion via Zoom on Eugene Vodolazkin's most excellent book, Laurus.  I read the book several years ago, and was completely floored by the brilliance of his text and the complexity and facets of the story.  It is one of those books that is hard to describe to others, because the depth of the spiritual meaning lends itself to interpretations on a lot of different levels. 

One theme that Vodolazkin revisits again and again is the malleability of time, and how our modern ideas of time are just that: modern ideas.  Time exists for man, not the other way around, and the meaning we assign to it, and how we experience it, say a lot about who we are as a people.  

(I wrote my master's thesis on how the Eastern Orthodox Church thinks about time and how that thought is embodied in physical space as a historical matter.  So I have some skin in the game on this topic).

In the medieval Russian context of the novel, time operates on a vertical spiral, rather than the progressive horizontal line of the post-modern psyche.  In our context, time ever marches onward, toward a (theoretically) brighter future, because: progress.  What has happened before is hardly relevant then, because it does not help us go into the future.  We need the new, the novel, the curious, in order to maintain our experience of forward movement. 

In the medieval world, the novel was viewed with suspicion, and not easily accepted, simply because it was novel and new.  The idea is that you continue to plumb the depths of what you know for ever greater meaning and complexity.  To take that idea in a concrete context, if you understand the presentism of liturgical time (as in, everything is always present in the Eternal NOW of God--everything past, present and future is always happening), when you go to the service of Pentecost, you are not only remembering the event of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples in the upper room, you are mystically present with them and experiencing the actual descent of the Holy Spirit in that moment.  It means all of history is present, and can be examined for additional meaning and facet. I found myself praying: "Holy Spirit, come dwell with us!" throughout the service this weekend. 

I suppose I find this theme interesting and important because it gives the lie to the consumer self.  That is to say: I am more than the sum total of my desires, and I can transcend these things for greater spiritual meaning.  I've pondered a lot on material things these past months, as we've faced grocery and household shortages, learned different ways of doing (rediscovering older ways, really), and figuring out what is really necessary.  Human connection and understanding are necessary.  (Extremely so, as we've found through our isolation.  We are on yellow phase now, and had some friends over for dinner the past couple of nights, and the kids are having a hard time coping with the sudden abundance of riches in this area after months of poverty in spirit). 

Even the new green growing things in our newly installed kitchen garden are a way of experiencing the vertical spiral of time.  The plants that are there now, some of them will renew themselves next year, and we will experience the plant again, but in a new way, with the knowledge and experience of this summer.  Some of the plants will need to be replanted, and we learn to know a whole new existence.  Some will bolt by summer's end and make way for the hardier plants we can seed in the fall to eat in the early winter like kale and spinach.  There is a whole world in that garden. 

It brings me to the passage from Wheesht that I posted on yesterday's Yarn Along post:

(As an aside to that post, I have often wondered what it was like for the company of Coriolanus to live with that level of anger and muscular intensity over a large number of performances.  Did it stay with them in their lives off-stage?  Did it inform the work that came after?  What knowledge or wisdom emerged from excavating the truths of that play over that many performances?) 

 

It would be tempting to look at the new ways of doing that have developed in our household during the quarantine, or to see the growth of the kitchen garden and think we should leave the city for a more rural existence, but we have no strong reason to leave the city, and many reasons to stay (church, school, work, well-established health care providers, friends and neighbors, all slowly and painstakingly built and maintained over the past 13 years). 

Just as the repetition of the church services teaches me to delve more deeply into the Truth of the liturgy, to find new spiritual truths to examine and understand, the repetition of our city routines and the basic rootedness of it, even when it is hard, even when I get sick of the things that make it hard, is still worth doing and excavating for meaning. 

Sometimes the truth to find is subtle, and only reveals itself slowly, over many turns of repetition.  Sometimes it is more obvious, and shows itself on the first revolution, but adds nuance with time.  Sometimes we can only see the facets when we have gone around it and up or down a few times. 

But it is always worth finding.  Keep digging.