Knitting: December 2008 Archives

It sometimes feels to me as if life has two strands, and that their developmental processes are reversed. The physical strand - the health and strength of the body - deteriorates over time, while the internal life of the mind, spirit, whathaveyou - tends to grow richer over time.

If we're living Twizzlers (or oversized DNA, as I keep picturing it), one of our strands is always in a state of decline, and one is always in a state of growth.

Not sure what to make of that, but I thought I'd put it out there.

My so-called holiday week has been a bit like that. A lot of up-and-down. Spent yesterday and today largely rendered immobile after having hurt my back doing one of those ordinary activities that seem to prey on aging backs like vermicious knids on little orange men.

A friend came over yesterday (as we'd planned weeks ago) for what we were pleased to call our Anti-Christmas. We made cookies. We ate them all. (I finished the last half-dozen by myself, after she'd gone home.)

We watched a really brilliant movie. We drank a velvety, spicy wine (goes great with nutmeg-brandy sugar cookies, by the way). We ate a little of my leftover (but homemade) lentil-tomato soup, as a nod to nutritional value.

We knitted. We posed Spiderman in funny scenes. We texted and sent silly pics to friends in faraway places.

I said, at one point, that if it weren't for the horrible back pain, it'd be a perfect day. And she said, "Ah, but if someone weren't in horrible pain, it wouldn't be us, would it?"

True true.

PS. Reading back over this, I realized there's an error in logic here. It's not as simple as that one thread is always in decline and the other is always improving. In the second half of life, that pretty much describes it. In the first half, physical prowess improves until it reaches a peak, usually in young adulthood. But there's a narrowing of personal possibilities after a certain point in childhood, and then a somewhat stagnant period in young adulthood (I'm sure everyone in the world would argue that point with me, but I think there's some truth in it) before the mind/spirit starts to grow richer again. And it does seem that the body is weakest when the mind is strongest, and vice-versa. I could be completely wrong, of course. Just taking the (raw, unformed) idea out for a spin.

So I rode home in an ice storm last night, and when I arrived, there was so much snow and slush and road grit in my drivetrain that I thought, "I have to take pictures!"

Of course, by the time I'd de-Gore Texed myself sufficiently to pad over to where the camera was, half the gunk had melted off the bike. So just mentally double what you see here, and please, be impressed.

There was nearly an inch of untreated, unplowed snow on the bridge. I cycled up it, and down it, reminding myself of the strategies I use when driving a car in snow. They apply quite similarly, except that for "use your gears to slow you down," you substitute "use your legs to slow you down."

I would not have wanted to be on a freewheel that night. It'd be skid city.

Also, I heard later that the ice storm that started to kick up about 20 minutes from my house eventually laid down some serious black ice. And that would have been a problem for me, controlled-skid neophyte that I am.

Anyway, it was quite an interesting experience to ride in unplowed snow. Not as difficult as I would have expected, but the slushy bits were more difficult than I would have expected. Turns out you don't want to ride in the tire tracks of other cyclists; you're better off choosing the pristine snowfall - it gives you a bit of traction.

I got more yarn for gifts today - family gifts. From here until deadline time it's all about the family gifts (and has been, for a while now).

I'd like to say that there's nothing so bad that brunch with my girls can't cure, but it's not quite true.

It's almost true, though.

I had a great day today, even though I had bouts of grumpyness and frustration, even though the wind nearly blew us into another county, even though I haven't ridden either bicycle in two days and am uncertain about the future of these knees for tomorrow. Okay, wait I'd better not start talking about that - it will send me into a downspin.

So, leaving that aside for the moment. Brunch. Happy happy brunch. My favorite omelette: egg whites, spinach, scallions, made perfectly at a certain place where once there was a very cute French boy who hit upon me by remarking, after I'd given him a Ginger Altoid, that it was very sexual. He meant sensual, of course. By which he meant to imply sexual. It was a whole delicious curly-headed incident, witnessed by Miz Fury, my mom, and my sister. I turned absolutely bright red and wanted to take him there, on the table.

Oh dear.

Where was I?

Oh yes, brunch. No French boys today; they are a rare and timid species, the pretty curly-headed French boys. They only make their appearance on the first springlike day. They pop their sweet flirtatious little heads out, suck your Ginger Altoid, pick up their handsome tips, and then sashay their lithe little behinds away for the rest of the year. No doubt to Paris, or Provence, where it might be warmer than it is here.

But the omelettes are still damn good. And then we did some errands and wandering, and making of silly dirty jokes (which are our forte), and we went and drank grog (arrr, why is all the rum gone?), and knitted, and talked about the difficulty of getting a straight answer from a straight man. And I rolled my eyes a lot, and fixed a couple of stitch mistakes for Special J, which made me feel useful and magical.

And we went yarn shopping. And I picked up two different kinds of crack - I mean Malabrigo - for gift knitting. Glorious purple Silky Merino for mom, and burgundy Chunky Merino for one of the bike boys (not that one, a different, though equally handsome one). The burgundy is much less orange than it looks in the photo - it's a nice dark brick red.

Lord, is there anything that yummy yarn and dear friends can't fix? No, there really, really isn't.