The Compleat And Actual Adventures of Marcella White Campbell

YouTube for Kids Is Not An Oxymoron

Monday, January 16, 2012

From the time my child could pull himself upright, he was fascinated by trains. And not steam trains or Thomas the Tank Engine, either. He has always loved commuter trains and buses. The good news: we live in a big city, so there’s plenty of opportunity for him to indulge his obsession hobby. The bad news: try finding public-transportation-themed toys, shows, and videos for children.

Enter YouTube.

There were and are no children’s shows about subway trains (if you know of any, please drop me a line, and I’m not kidding). But, on YouTube, I found literally thousands of train and bus videos—short or long clips of Japanese commuters being crammed into subway trains, videos of German bus drivers making complicated U-turns, and even promotional videos produced by our local transit authority.

The same YouTube that is the world’s primary purveyor of keyboard cat videos is also the best place on earth to find footage of an Orion VII hybrid electric bus in action. My son wasn’t really looking for buses with faces—he just wanted to look at buses and trains moving around. And that, YouTube can provide.

So how can you make this work for you? Maybe (probably) you aren’t living with a tiny bus enthusiast. But if you have a slightly obsessive kid — if she knows the difference between a dozer blade and a front mounted scarifier (truck lingo!) or is on track to become NASA’s first preschool astronomer — YouTube is a great way to find nonfiction videos on a variety of subjects. Plus, if your DVR can connect to the Internet, you can show the videos on your TV. (That really comes in handy when you have a sick kid.)

Search Tips

Start with official YouTube channels. Great general examples: NOVA, the Smithsonian, NASA, and England’s National Railway Museum.
You may want to turn SafeSearch on.
Most important: always watch every video first — without your child. Halfway through, that innocuous model train simulation may turn into a weird computer-animated crashing-spree. (Ask me how I know.)
Make a safe playlist. That way you can decide which videos are appropriate ahead of time, without a preschooler crying uncontrollably in the background because you had to close the bus clip with the expletive-laced soundtrack.

And if you do have a commuter train enthusiast at home, here’s our old YouTube playlist.

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Powered by Junk in Trunk

Sunday, May 15, 2011

I’m built like a mullet. Business in the front, party in the back.

What is it about an awkward ten-or-eleven-year-old that screams, “please call attention to my body?” That was the time when my body started developing; my family fretted that I might be swaybacked and admonished me to stand up straight. At dances, the deejays urged me (over the microphone) to move out into the center of the dance floor to show off my body. I tried on the clothes my peers wore — tight leggings and Day-Glo biker shorts (shut up, it was the late 80s) but the image reflected back at me was distorted. The other girls didn’t get cat-called walking up Market Street.

The strangest thing about what was, in retrospect, an entirely reasonable discomfort with moving directly from little-girlhood to sexual objectification is that I came of age during the glory days of what can only be called The Butt Song.

Sure, songs about a particular body part were nothing new; sure, that Queen song exists; sure, the blues could certainly get plenty, well, blue after the kids went to bed. But the beauty of the blues is raunchy innuendo. There is nothing subtle about the frank statement that opens Baby Got Back:

I like big butts and I can not lie.

– Sir Mix-a-Lot

The posterior-themed hits of EU (1988), LL Cool J (1989), Wreckx-N-Effect (1992) and Mix-a-Lot (also 1992!) overlapped my sixth- through tenth-grade years. (By comparison, Fat Bottomed Girls was released the year I was born.) They targeted my body type, and they were performed by Black men about Black women. I didn’t need a deejay to point out these songs were about me.

But the songs didn’t make me feel any better. A lot of ink and webspace is expended complaining about how women of color don’t get held up as standards of beauty. Over and over, when confronted about their controversial songs and videos, the aforementioned rappers insisted, and still insist, that their songs do celebrate Black female beauty. Let’s be real: we all know these songs are not about shoring up the self-esteem of Black teenaged girls, but about dividing the world into two camps: women worth having sex with, and the rest. I found — and find — my membership in the first camp a dubious honor.

Times changed, rap became hip hop and moved on to discussing even less appropriate body parts, and the rest of my body caught up with my rear end; still, I remained uncomfortable with the space it took up. I thought of it like that guy rummaging through my recycling bin on trash day: What is it doing back there? Should I say something? Will it go away if I ignore it? Cleavage is one thing; it can be trashy, but it can also be classy, as any opera diva will tell you. Not so for bottoms. Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lopez both have celebrated rear ends, and, in both cases, have found their bodies used as well-worn punchlines.

Then I started running, and I learned the word glute.

Your backside is just a bunch of fat covering giant muscles. If you have big glutes — the muscles crossing the entire back end all the way around to the hips — then you have a secret hill weapon. Like me. Regardless of how in- or out-of-shape I’m in, every time I return to running, I attack hills like an elevation monster. A few weeks ago, a physical therapist showed me that if my glutes got even stronger, they’d protect my knees from further injury, and I could run pain-free.

Yesterday morning, midway through 5.5 miles, I experimented with my stride, and, suddenly, there they were. Glutes! I stopped shuffling, and my knees were pumping, and I ran the fastest consistent miles I’ve run outside a race, with less effort.

It turns out my body doesn’t exist merely to be looked at or covered up, and that I have a body built, in its own way, for running in San Francisco. And it only took me a third of a century to figure it out, just in time to have a pre-teen of my own. Hopefully, she’ll weather the transition better than I did; hopefully, all the years of girls-only sports and feminist girls’ magazines will bear fruit at exactly the right moment, inoculating her with an emergency dose of self-esteem. Alternately, maybe she’ll have to come to terms with her own body in her own time, just as I did with mine.

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Hearing the Silence

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

My grandmother’s mother, Mary Salter, is a mysterious fruit on our family tree, not quite shaded in. We know very little about her; she died around 1930, leaving two little girls under four who would torture themselves, for the rest of their lives, trying to remember her face.

Family lore suggests that Mary was a street musician, playing the guitar and singing on street corners for coins. No one knows what songs she sang, when she was born, or what killed her, only that her life was brief and hard. We don’t know how she felt about that. We can only wonder what she would have said, if someone had asked her.

Vowing to “give the voiceless a voice” has become a cliché, and it’s not surprising. Any given member of a historically silenced group, given a forum to do so, feels an almost oppressive responsibility to air the grievances and suffering of those who could not or cannot. There are many hidden ellipses in the history books, places where the marginalized were glossed over or ignored. The more you read, the more you see them.

I recently read an interesting book (African Queen) about Sarah Baartman, a woman you might better know by her stage name, Hottentot Venus. Brought to Europe from South Africa in the early nineteenth century, she was exhibited to confirm intellectuals’ assumptions about deviant African sexuality and physiology; her body – too exposed, too voluptuous, too alien – became a legal and political battleground. Despite Sarah’s celebrity, despite all that was written about her, none of her own words remain: we can choose between interpretations and translations of her court testimony or a few contemporary newspaper articles with their own agendas.

This disappointed me. After all, I’d picked up the book to discover Sarah’s story from Sarah’s perspective. The number of times the author suggested we imagine “what Sarah must have felt” eventually depressed me, once I realized we would never know. It wasn’t the author’s fault: the words aren’t there. At the center of the controversy over Sarah’s brief life and swift death, even over the repatriation, hundreds of years later, of her very bones, is a silent Sarah.

I can’t stop thinking about Sarah and Mary, this week. After a year or so’s hiatus, I’m reading up on “the feminist blogosphere” (another cliché) and the same argument that was going on when I left is still raging. Feminists from traditionally silenced backgrounds — in this week’s case, the editor of an academic work about redefining feminism to include the silenced — are still feeling marginalized and ignored, and other, more “mainstream” feminists are still feeling put-upon, still coming up with responses that scream Why do they get upset when it even looks like they’re being silenced? Don’t they know how much work we all have to do?

There is a very simple answer to all these questions. We all know our history; we all know about the ellipses and the gaps. Stories get left out. Our stories. And, here’s the thing: history is being written right now. Every time a new book doesn’t get written about, every time a discussion refuses to acknowledge the diversity of female experience, there’s another gap, another silence. One day, future generations – the little girls all around us, steadily growing up — will look back at what we wrote, looking for all the stories. What will we tell them?

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All The Crafting Ladies

Friday, April 29, 2011

I’m knitting a shawl out of fire-colored Madelinetosh yarn, and when I say “Fire-colored,” I don’t mean orange, I mean the shawl looks like it is on fire and made of lasers. I don’t think much of the fact that I knit, now, or that I could, technically, sew something (something rectangular, that is), or that I am currently avoiding Lacis because I don’t want to feed my secret (not so secret) cross-stitch habit. (Okay, it is weird that I am reading books about Hardanger embroidery.) I craft, and it’s become part of who I am.

I didn’t grow up “crafting.” Sure, I had crayons, color pencils, and such, but I grew up at my grandparents’ house, and I never saw one of them do anything I could call “crafting.” My grandmother was certainly capable of sewing her own clothes, but, for her, that sort of thing would have been “work,” and not the fun kind of work, either. If my grandmother had a craft, it was cooking. She could make a cobbler from scratch, and like it, too, I think, but she would probably have thought my knitting a shawl ludicrous. She had left Arkansas for San Francisco for a reason, and it was not to darn socks.

My mother grew up with home economics. I used to listen — jealously — as she recounted the skills forced upon her in junior high school: cooking, sewing, homekeeping. She had five brothers: she wanted to take shop class like them, but was stuck with the meringues and dirndl skirts. She was very good at all of it and seemed to take pleasure in forgetting all of it soon thereafter. (It should be emphasized that my grandmother sent my mother to secretarial school for a reason, and it wasn’t to darn socks, either.)

I wanted to craft, too, though I didn’t know what that meant, and I failed at it, consistently. When a family friend left her knitting needles and a handful of yarn behind, I tried to knit, though I had no idea how and only made knots out of the splitty pastel acrylic and metal needles. I cut up perfectly good jeans to try to make pillows; I had no stuffing, so I used balled-up perfectly good clothes, and I had no sewing machine, so I used rubber bands. The weird thing about all these bad craft adventures is that 1) if I had asked for crafting supplies, I would have been given whatever I wanted and 2) I was always at the library and bookstores, but it never occurred to me to ask for any craft instruction. I didn’t see why I couldn’t muddle through it myself.

This is probably my biggest crafting flaw: my hubris. Overweening pride fuels my reluctance to turn the car around when doing the craft equivalent of driving at top speed up the wrong side of the Autobahn. I’m like a two-year-old: “I can do it myself,” whatever it is, whatever the book says. (This colors my cooking, of course, as well, and has resulted in some unexpected successes [charoset sorbet] and truly spectacular failures [lamb on fire].) I’d try to invent my own way of braiding friendship bracelets, then, when it didn’t work, throw the embroidery floss down in a huff and go read one of the weirder Oz books.

I’ve changed my ways, a bit, since. Now, instead of trying to invent crewel embroidery, I go to the other extreme, and check the whole shelf out of the library. Then I go home and try to muddle through myself, but that’s okay; it turns out, I’m usually a solitary crafter, especially when I’m learning a craft, probably because of the hubris. (Also, if I’m with other people, they notice that I am calling the aida cloth nasty names when it does not live up to my expectations, and, if they are the wrong sort of people, they ask me to stop.) I still mess up royally at least once a week, whether it involves sewing a pillowcase without measuring the pillow it’s for, or never knitting a gauge swatch, or putting a frozen capon in the oven because clearly that ought to work.

But back to the shawl: the directions are clear, and it’s looking lovely, setting whatever I set it on or near aflame. Of course, I didn’t do a gauge swatch; I’m not using a high stitch-definition yarn, despite what the directions suggest; and I’m pretty sure I have already skipped a row. But I can do it! I’ll muddle through! And, when I’m done, I’ll have a finished object that is mine, all mine.

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Run for Your Life

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Yeah it’s still the same
Can’t you feel the pain
When the needle hits the vein
Ain’t nothing like the real thing

Yesterday, I ran across the Golden Gate Bridge and back. At Vista Point, where you can actually see how ridiculously photogenic San Francisco can be, and how clever it was of Irving Morrow to insist on a red-orange bridge to stand out against the green hills and verdigris water — my headphones cued up a certain Gnarls Barkley song.

I smile knowingly when I hear this song on a run. Of course, runners love to repurpose any song mentioning the word “run,” even in passing, for motivational purposes at mile 11 or as the backbone of a blog post. Run (I’m a Natural Disaster), however, is not on my playlist because it has a run-friendly title, but because I am actually running from something, out there at Ocean Beach watching waves crash, out on the 500-mile Bay Trail where the sun always seems to be baking, even in the rain.

Cool breeze come on in
Sunshine come on down
These are the teardrops of the clown
Circus is coming to town
All I’m saying is sometimes I’m more scared of myself

I’m not always sure what I’m running from. Sometimes, it’s destiny of the most mundane kind: will I be the first woman in my direct maternal line to outrun high blood pressure? Other days, there are invoices breathing down my back, and I have to get away someplace where Quickbooks cannot thrive. When I’m finally relieved from a day of relentless summer-vacation parenting, complete with three squares and, say, a Trader Joe’s trip, I know exactly what I’m running from: death by a thousand chores. But, when I overcome inertia to start moving at 5 mph on a perfectly clear spring day, in the best city in the world, while everyone is at school or work, why am I running?

Yeah I’m on the run
See where I’m coming from
When you see me coming run
Before you see what I’m running from
No time for question asking time is passing by

It’s lovely out there, lovely and wonderfully lonely, even when there are people on the path, even when they smile. At a certain point, organized thought gives up and goes wherever it goes to think up new terrors, and then the party really gets started. Voices enter the conversation, pointing out what I ought to be doing, or how much I sucked at the last thing I was supposed to be doing, but, far enough into my run, I just don’t have sufficient brain power to engage with them anymore. When I run, I get really dumb. I giggle at the truth of Cee-Lo’s words, and maybe think about being hungry, and if there is a Luna Bar in the glove compartment, and if it’s melted yet.

Either you run right now
Or you best get ready to die

I have to run. There’s something in me that needs to be pounded out, and I’m better for it. There’s something behind me — maybe a million little somethings — that I need to scramble away from. I know it should just be a metaphor, but it’s not. Maybe that’s why, when I can, I prefer to run in a straight line, not a loop: every run, I get a little further away.

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Welcome to Wherever We Are

Friday, April 22, 2011

I grew up in a 1984 Cadillac Coupe de Ville.

The Cadillac was once the American car’s American car, a car designed for riding cross-country highways like Route 66 in comfort, and the Coupe de Ville was the last model before Cadillac started downsizing and redesigning its iconic lines. I remember when my grandfather bought the new Cadillac, at least the third in an unbroken line of American-made luxury sedans; the previous car was a deep green (Daddy says his favorite color is green because money) with a black interior that burned treacherously hot on road trips into Nevada and Sacramento, anywhere it got really hot. The new Cadillac was burgundy inside and out, and smelled so strongly of new car that it made me nauseous for the first year.

Still, I didn’t complain much, because I loved road trips.

I loved riding to Reno and Tahoe in the pillowy backseat of my grandfather’s Cadillac only marginally more than I loved riding to Mendocino and Fort Bragg in my mother’s beat-up Celica (license plate: 181 SIN. True story). I would read until I got carsick, then attack my sister’s side of the backseat in the hopes of finally liberating the Armrest Buffer Zone. I would only go so far, though; my grandmother had a plastic comb in her purse, her version of NATO’s standing army. It kept the peace, most of the time.

I never understood the whole “are we there yet?” thing. First of all, whoever was in the front seat would have been singularly unimpressed; second, whether it was my grandparents, my mother, or my uncles in the front seat, the road trip was a treat. Riding was part of the fun; I eagerly looked out for distance signs (on the 80 East, Sacramento is 90 miles from San Francisco forever) and boundary signs, especially the San Francisco boundary sign on the 80 West, signalling we were home again.

This is how obsession begins.

As an adult, riding in the passenger seat on endless trips down the 5 South or the 101, or driving to and from San Mateo County, the place where Target lives and money is spent, I began to see the humor in a certain kind of boundary sign. I really love city welcome signs, the ones clearly designed by the chamber of commerce to promote the greater glory of a place. My favorites have lofty slogans attached, like Daly City’s “Gateway to the Peninsula.” The more incongruous the slogan, the better; Redwood City has a great sign on El Camino listing its sister cities, Colima, Mexico, and Zhuhai, China.

Who are these signs talking to? I always wonder. Obviously they all originated with some committee, a group of town boosters or the Chamber of Commerce; but are they designed to change hearts and minds? They certainly say a lot about how people inside the city view it, or at least want it to be viewed. The slogan “Gateway to the Peninsula” isn’t just on at least two separate monuments in Daly City, it also shows up in official literature and even in its history. “Preen all you want, San Francisco,” it seems to say. “If you want Burlingame, you gotta go through us.”

Lately, I’ve been tooling around Northern California, taking pictures of population signs and city welcome signs when I see them. I’ve thrown up a Tumblr, just to put them somewhere. I’m hoping to get at least one from every Bay Area city, which should keep me busy for a while. In the meantime, it’s not about getting a great picture of the Concord population sign, parked on the gravel shoulder on Willow Pass Road while cars roar by, inches from certain death; it’s about the journey, right?

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What’s Up

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

I am sitting in my house, alone. Lunches have been made, children have been dressed in ironic thrift-store T-shirts, a husband wore his new socks today. The coffeemaker clicks, periodically, to remind me that it is there, waiting, and that the fair-trade coffee boiling away on the hot plate isn’t going to chug itself. The guinea pigs know how lucky they are I haven’t eaten them yet; wisely, they are crunching leftover parsley without a single errant squeak.

I’m sitting at my mango wood dining room table writing a blog post. It’s been the better part of a year since I was a regular blogger. I liked having a captive audience for my ranting and assorted observations. It was fun! Even if it was usually also work! The summer of 2011, however, got in the way. Well, no, I got in the way. The summer only helped the process along.

You have heard of depression? As it turns out, there’s more to it than the black-and-white portion of a Cymbalta commercial. There are many flavors — Manic, Low-Grade, Postpartum, more than I care to list here. My flavor is Major.

Major has been hanging out with me for decades. When I was in high school, Major was the small-town boyfriend I just knew I was gonna ditch when I blew that popsicle stand and headed off to college in the big city. When I got to college, Major was the small-town boyfriend I was still seeing who nobody knew about. The second quarter of my freshman year, all of 1998, midway through my first pregnancy, two years into my master’s degree, midway through my second pregnancy: there it was again! At any crossroads, following any achievement, and, sometimes, for no reason at all, there it was, dragging me back into the dark.

I fought Major. Mostly alone. I’d been hiding or minimizing it for so long that I thought it was just part of my personality to find life unbearable for months at a time. I thought the coping mechanisms — eating; drinking; hiding — were just part of my personality, too. Mostly, I thought I was just a flake who canceled appointments, dropped out of commitments and didn’t finish novels.

This summer, Major almost won. It was a close thing. It had been a difficult summer, full of driving people to camps and driving home from driving people to camps and going and fetching them because of catastrophes and being very grateful we had health insurance and glowering at budgets for hours at a time. I let down my guard and Major almost, almost snapped me right up. (Procrastination can work in your favor.)

Even after all that — after the classes, groups, meetings, action plans, prescriptions, journaling, I still shoved Major back in the closet. Everything was going to go back to normal soon, so why change now?

Only now it’s not clear what’s normal and what’s Major. Do I really hate talking on the phone, or is that just Major? Is everyone’s house as messy as mine? When I mix a post-dinner cocktail, am I drinking a tasty beverage — or self-medicating? Am I Type-A because of anxiety, or Major because I’m Type-A? Am I still allowed to be a Hater of most things great and small (people who say their dog is analogous to a human child; Chico’s; eating cake; KeSha) or is that just Major keeping me from jumping into the rushing stream of humanity, or whatever?

Frankly: dunno.

Things I have figured out, since Summer 2010: I am a writer, whether I am writing or not. I love crafting, from making tiny crosses with colored thread to knitting sweaters out of sheep to putting stickers on other stickers. I have Opinions and I have been known to Share Them. I want to be putting food in my mouth all the time, preferably the best food, even if cooking does not float my boat the way it once did. [Corollary: I am currently as many pounds overweight as I have years.] Running makes me feel like a superhero, the graphic-novel kind who beats up on the bad guys not out of duty but because it’s fun.

I’ll be teaching myself new things until there are no more new things. I miss singing in front of people. The bulk of my shoes will probably always be bi-curious. The people in my nuclear family are quirky and very funny and don’t care whether or not I have more than two Pulitzers as long as there is cereal and they have clean underpants. I am not a homebody — that was definitely Major talking. My friends are quirky and very funny and don’t ask me for cereal or underpants. I need to see them more.

So basically I’m making a lot of rambling, paragraph-like lists. And I’ll probably blog more. And that’s What’s Up. See you later! Preferably outside.

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Thelonious Monk, Trinkle Tinkle (1971)

Monday, March 14, 2011

I’m walking into the kitchen at my grandfather’s house, and my uncle Charles is there, watching TV on the little color set on the tiled counter. He’s watching the new Ken Burns documentary, and I’m preparing to slowly edge out of the room, because The Civil War (Parts 1-199) nearly robbed me of my will to live.

“Marcie!” he says, excited. Charles is the only person on earth who is permitted to call me Marcie, and his excitement is so contagious that I forget to run away before I get sucked into whatever he is so excited about.

“Listen to this cat,” he says, just as the image of a bespectacled piano player (who looks oddly like my uncle Jewel) pops up. “He’s a genius.”

It’s Thelonious Monk. The name sticks with me, even after I completely forget about our exchange in the kitchen.

Years later, I’m walking through the Borders at Stonestown Mall and I see a listening station, and one of the choices is Thelonious Monk’s London Collection. I remember that cat’s name, so I press the relevant number and Trinkle, Tinkle begins to play and before I know what is happening I have played the track three times, standing dumbfounded with my enormous grad-school backpack still on.

Before, “jazz” was Ella and Ellington, smooth and silky. But now, it’s like I have installed a jazz upgrade. From Monk I move to Coltrane, and from Coltrane to amazing crazy Miles Davis. My world expands to include new sounds and tempos.

But my world contracts, too, and we lose my uncle Charles, who loved KBLX, who was our best dancer and could calypso better than anybody, who gave me Monday, Monday by the Mamas and the Papas and gave me bebop and Getz and Monk, Thelonious Monk cornering a melody and making it his own.

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Louis Armstrong, West End Blues (1928)

Monday, November 8, 2010

Once, I spent my weekends in a tiny, cramped, cluttered apartment in Cal’s married student housing. A certain Phd student in rhetoric, Mark — who, implausibly, had custody of three little girls from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon — made a point of opening our My-Little-Pony-addled minds to culture. On Saturday morning, we’d wake to the sounds of Duke Ellington, Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, and Count Basie. Early morning sun, coming through bamboo shades, glinted off of framed prints: a Romare Bearden collage, an iconic James Van Der Zee photograph.

James Van Der Zee, Couple Wearing Raccoon Coats (1932)

Mark adored the Harlem Renaissance, adored New York, adored jazz music. He was the first food snob I ever met. As the oldest daughter, I had the privilege of hand-grinding coffee beans with a wall-mounted grinder, while sausages fried in a seasoned cast-iron skillet that Mark had surreptitiously lifted from my grandfather. He baked fresh chocolate chip cookies or popped buttered popcorn on the stove, either of which we would pack into a big paper sack and tuck away into his grad student messenger bag, so we could sneak food into the Grand Lake Theater, where some classic Disney movie would be playing for the Saturday matinee.

Alternately, we might pile into the yellow Volvo and visit the Lawrence Hall of Science, or hike back and forth across Wildcat Creek in Tilden Park. In the early evening, we might play Chinese checkers or Othello or, best of all, Scrabble. He was a rhetorician — he knew all the words — but sometimes I could pull off a surprise victory.

Children don’t understand divorce or blended families, not really. How do you explain to the kids in your regular life that you spend weekends with your ex-stepfather having adventures and listening to old records? (“It’s Complicated” doesn’t work on eight-year-olds.) You don’t. My weekdays were full of homework, Cabbage Patch Kids, and Ramona books, shuttling between my mom’s and my grandparents’. During the week, jazz, hikes, and the smell of hand-ground coffee vanished, leaving me unnerved.

So, sometimes, I would call the first phone number I ever memorized and leave a message on the answering machine. When the machine picked up, the first notes of Louis Armstrong’s immortal West End Blues trumpet solo played, and I felt better.

Mark finally graduated and was offered a position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the summer before fifth grade. Still a broke student, he couldn’t afford to take most of his belongings, so he told me to come pick through what was left after he was gone. My grandfather drove me across the bridge.

It was surreal, coming to that apartment with my other Daddy. I could have taken anything. I wish I had taken the prints, or our special cocoa mugs, but, even then, I sensed that what I really wanted couldn’t be carted away in a trash bag. All I remember picking up, through my tears, was the set of measuring spoons we had used to measure vanilla and salt into the chocolate chip cookies.

Mark left behind the answering machine. For a while after he left, I used to call it so I could hear the greeting, Armstrong’s trumpet inventing the jazz solo. Just as the trumpet, clarinet, and trombone sang their first melancholy chord, Mark’s voice would come in, uncharacteristically glum. I think his weeks were as lonely as mine. I wish I could ask him. After a time, the number was disconnected, the connection lost.

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All The Things That I’ve Done (this summer) (so far)

Thursday, July 29, 2010

This has been a very hectic summer, full of rushing to and from camps and lessons, Janelle Monae, fresh vegetables, and guinea pigs. I have, however, completed some crafting, most of it in the last two weeks.

Knitting

Finally finished the Cat Bordhi Discovery Sock.

Pattern: Discovery Sock from Personal Footprints for Insouciant Sock Knitters

Yarn: Madelinetosh Tosh Sock in Oak

Knitting this sock was an adventure. I learned new techniques (knitting on two circulars); I now have my first completed fingering-weight project; I probably spent more time looking at my own feet than I did as a six-month-old; and my mind was generally blown.

Knit myself a little scarf.

Pattern: Kink by Jodie Gordon Lucas

This would mark the first time I have ever cast on and completed a Knitty project within a month of it going live. I am so proud of me! It was a fun, easy to memorize pattern, too, my purse knitting for three weeks or so.

Yarn: Malabrigo Silky Merino in Nocturnal

I must have had this yarn for three years or more. I bought it right when Malabrigo first rolled out the test skeins, from Imagiknit. I’ve cast on three or four projects with it, but it was only one skein and they never worked out. This one did, and now I have a slinky little merino/silk scarf to throw ’round my neck dramatically before driving off in my convertible Duesenberg.

Started a Top Secret Colorwork Project. FUN.

Pattern: It’s a Secret to Everybody.

I cannot tell you what pattern this is, because then it would be immediately obvious what I am up to. I will say that I like the two-row instant-memorize pattern. The prettiest TV knitting I’ve done.

Yarn: Stitch Nation by Debbie Stoller’s Full ‘o Sheep.

Yarn snob here, no apologies. But! I found Full ‘o Sheep at Beverly’s, and it’s really nice, so far. The colors are gorgeous together, and the yarn is pretty soft for 100% wool. It’s like Brown Sheep without the itchy. I like!

Sewing (I still do this!)

Sewed an envelope pillow on a whim.

Pattern: made up

Knitting will always be my first craft love. But there is something about thinking, “Hey, what if there was a pillow here?” and going away for half an hour and coming back with a pillow that is terribly appealing. Knitting does not work this way.

Fabric: Amy Butler

Not making an Amy Butler quilt leaves you with A LOT of upholstery-weight fabric). When I am done with the storm of sewn handcrafts I plan to unleash on my home in the coming months, we will be an all-Amy Butler household.

Finally taught myself blind hand stitching so I could finish the pillow I pretended to have finished last summer.

Running

Ran two 5Ks and a 10K. Saw the return of Runner’s Knee while training for a half-marathon. (Why, no, I don’t tend to overdo things. Why do you ask?) Back to physical therapy, it appears. I walked for half an hour today without problems; hoping to start limping around Golden Gate Park by next week.

Other things I did

Roasted parsley root from my CSA with potatoes, carrots and cubed pancetta.
Acquired two guinea pigs despite having a lifelong aversion to nonhuman mammals.
Evaluated a lovely new shul (very favorably, I might add). I think we have found a keeper.
Started a new rewrite of an ancient manuscript. What was once 18th century historical romance has become 18th century alternate history paranormal (she said with a straight face).
Figured out how to adapt FlyLady for my own personality: by making simple routine lists and keeping to them.

Plans for the rest of the summer

Continue to write said 18th century alternate history paranormal (continuing to maintain a straight face).
Finish Top Secret Project.
Blog Mad Men.
Get back to training for a half-marathon (hopefully the San Jose Rock ‘n Roll in October).

In short, writing, knitting, blogging, running. Wish me luck!

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