Luck or Fluke?

I have my thermostat programmed to let the house settle down to 55° at night, and then bring the house back up to 63° in the morning, about half an hour before the Jazzman's alarm goes off. (Lest you tell me 63° is not warm enough for humans in houses, I will say that the thermostat for this house is funky. I'm comfortable at 63° It feels like 68 or 70 in other houses.)

Yesterday morning he hit the snooze bar, then turned to me and said, "It's cold in here." Uh-oh. We looked at our Weather.com apps on our iPhones and saw that it was about 14° outside. While he started getting ready to go to work, I ran to the basement to touch the furnace. (That's all I'm qualified to do—touch it. Know how to turn it on? Nah. Know how to do anything other than call the plumber? Not so much.)

I went back upstairs and reported that the unit was cold and silent. When he was ready for work, we went together to the basement. He surveyed the furnace from all sides, then started jiggling the panel on one side. Voila! Heat!!

Now, any intelligent person would have gone ahead and called the plumber. It was, after all, Friday. Not Saturday. Not weekend rates. But, no! I have so much faith in his jiggling capabilities, his ability to fix anything and everything in the house, that I just let it ride, basking in my warm house.

When he came home last night after midnight after his regular Friday night drinking-with-my-buds outing, he thought the house was too cold. He went downstairs (I learned this morning) and jiggled the panel. Nothing.

This morning we woke again to no heat. No amount of jiggling and hitting did anything.

It's 24° outside, with a wind chill of 17°. The thermostat says it's 55° inside, but I seriously doubt it. My feet are blocks of ice, and the cats are hunkered down inside their fur coats.

And I'm waiting for the plumber to come. At weekend rates.

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Update: The installer didn't tighten one screw far enough when the furnace was installed almost three years ago. Installer error. No charge.

Heat!!

Done Frogging

You are to be commended for not complaining when I left my "Frogging" post up for so long. PianoLady did send me an e-mail saying, essentially, "Get off your butt, Woman!" So I am getting off my butt and back to this blog.

I finished the sweater Tuesday a week ago (1/25/11), blocked it overnight, and wore it on Wednesday afternoon to pick up the babes from dance class for Dinner-with-Grandma. Why? Because my knitting buddies Tani and Jen have kids in dance at the same time. I knew they would appreciate my sweater.

As I walked into the waiting room, they applauded. And I smiled!

Tani whipped out her phone and snapped these pics.

Love this sweater!!!



(Okay, I must learn better ways to stand when modeling a new garment. This pic could be sooo much more attractive if I didn't look like a paper doll!)

Hot Off the Sewing Machine

Yes, you're right. I've been absent lately.

My brain is overloaded with the anticipation of changes—job changes, money changes, life changes. (Relax, no changes re family or Significant Other.) As things settle down and become clearer, I'll tell you more. But as I'm weighing and balancing and considering all these changes, I haven't had much to say in this public forum.

So I'll share what's been going on in my sewing room.

My 84yo house shares many features with other houses of its vintage. One of these is an incinerator in the basement, in the room I have chosen to be my sewing room. The incinerator was vented out the basement wall. When I got my lovely new water heater six weeks ago, we asked the brilliant HandymanTom to seal off that vent in preparation for removing the incinerator. Two weeks ago I spent several hours moving the incinerator out of the sewing room and cleaning up 84 years of soot and dust and crud that had accumulated around it. Once I could see the floor again, I moved fabric containers into that space and made more room/less clutter.

I'm far from having a space that makes sense and fosters creativity, but I feel great encouragement about the space after all this work.

The first product of the new space is a bag for tomorrow night's gala benefiting the Montessori School of the Mahoning Valley. The bag will be offered in their "Chinese auction" and is, I believe, the nicest of these mesh bags I've ever made.

Instead of leaving the mesh showing on the outside, I have completely enclosed it. So you get a bag that looks like it's just crafted of beautiful, high-quality cottons, but that has the durability and stability of the vinyl-coated polyester mesh.




The main fabric is an African print in amber, burgundy, rust, green and teal. I bought the fabric at G Street Fabrics in 1996 to make a quilt for the third-floor guest room in my Washington home. I have several coordinating teal prints that I used to accent the main fabric. The bag front features an iPhone-sized pocket and an antique mother-of-pearl carved button. (Click on the pics to see a larger version.)




There's an interior zippered pocket that's padded with quilt batting, so it feels much more substantial than a single layer of cotton fabric. The zipper pull? African beads that I got at the Tucson Gem & Mineral Show about 8 years ago. They've been sitting in my bead stash, waiting for just such an opportunity as this. They're wire-wrapped with a sterling headpin onto a sterling clasp, hooked to the zipper pull.

The bag has been treated with Scotchgard™ to resist stains. The 18" handles are comfortable to hold, or will easily slip over one's shoulder for carrying. The bag folds flat to tuck in the bottom of a suitcase.

Yes, I am proud of my work! I'm hopeful that the bag's beauty will cause people to spend more on raffle tickets than they had planned, thus bringing in more money for our beloved Montessori School of the Mahoning Valley.

I'm Frogging!

No, my headline does not have anything to do with frogs. Or Fire-Bellied Toads, which today's photo shows. Miss Ridley recently got a Fire-Bellied Toad, but I digress.

I've been working on knitting a sweater for the past couple of months. My activity really heated up when we went to Hilton Head for New Year's. It was so cold outside that we just stayed inside and I got a lot of knitting done. The drive down and back each gave me four uninterrupted hours of knitting.

This is a sweater for me! Most things I knit become gifts for friends or the grandkids' teachers. But this is for me!

I bought some beautiful yarn a year-and-a-half ago during a visit to Pocket Meadow Farm in Berkeley Springs, WV, with my friend, Maureen. (If you're a knitter and dying to know what I got, it's Cascade 220 in 8886-Italian Plum and 7802-Cerise, and Louet Riverstone in Kumquat and Carribean.) The colors were chosen to go with two big pieces of mixed-media art that are hanging in my library. Hot pink, purple, mustard and teal. I was going to make a throw for the library. Then I repurposed some rayon tape yarn from another project and it became a throw. So now I don't want another throw. In love with this kimono-style sweater, I decided to deviate from the pattern—which I never do!— and mix up the colors on this sweater.

When I got started on the sweater, I was certain it would take me a year to finish. But the more I got into it, the more I loved it. Now I'm very near to the end—I'm working on the two-inch neckband, and in about eight more rows will bind off and sew the side seams, then block it. And wear it!!!!

I feel like I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Last night I took it with me to pick up the kids from dance for our Wednesday night dinner. I knew my knitting friend Tani would be there, and I wanted to show it off. Of course, with 15 minutes to wait for the kids, I pulled it out and started working on it again.

And goofed up. I have added a stitch somewhere about three rows back. And now I'm frogging!

From Urban Dictionary: In knitting, a frog says "rip it rip it" and fogging refers to unraveling rows of knitted work due to an error found.

I've got an row-and-a-half to frog, and then will go forward again. I'll show you a pic when it's done.

It's for me!!!!

P.S. As you know I sew even more than I knit, I'll tell you the crowd of sewists I run with call it "unsewing", not "ripping"!

On Becoming a Cook - Again

For years I've joked that I don't cook. I confess that I try to always marry men who cook. I have a thousand cute sayings I throw in to divert the listener from the fact that I'm a woman who can't cook.

["Given the number of hours in the day, I'd rather spend them sewing/knitting/making music." - "I'd rather slave over a hot computer/sewing machine/kiln than a hot stove." - and so on.]

Well, I got me a great man a year ago. But he doesn't cook! He likes to bake, but cooking is not his thing. So given that it's not "the thing" for either of us, I figured I'd better step up to the plate.

The Jazzman vacuums. He washes dishes. (Sometimes he insists on washing dishes!) He knows how to run the clothes washer, the dryer, and how to fold clothes and deliver them to the top of the stairs. He doesn't cook? So what?! (BTW, he also paints walls and caulks around drafty windows and fixes broken garage door openers! Maybe I'll start referring to him as Superman!!)

I used to cook. When I was first married, at age 21, I had cooked one meal in my life up to that day. I had a set of cookbooks, "The Woman's Day Encyclopedia of Cookery." I would select one volume of the set per week, select five menus, write down all the ingredients and go to the store.

That's how I cook: I follow the recipe to the last dot over the i. If I'm missing one ingredient, be it celery seed or oat germ, I'm sure the meal will be a total and complete failure. Look in the fridge and throw a meal together? That just ain't happenin' in my house!

As you can imagine, this method of cooking lends itself to placing great stress on the cook. So rather than dealing with the stress, over the years I have cooked less and less. I have one or two "go to" recipes that I haul out if I need to host a dinner, but for the most part, my cooking ended when I stopped at the time of my first divorce.

Now here's the rub. When the Jazzman moved into my sphere, he brought a passel of good friends along. (Insert mental image of me shaking my head and wiping tears of gratitude from my eyes over the inordinate generosity of spirit and welcoming nature these friends, en masse, have shown to me since meeting me!) These friends love to socialize. We go out to dinner. We go to each other's homes. We host and attend dinners. We host and attend parties.

Here's the deal: You can't keep taking without giving back.

Merge those two tangents, if you will: I've got a man under my roof and we both need to eat. and We need to host friends for meals in our home if we're ever to be invited back to their homes again.

The result of that merger is that I'm learning to cook again. And, shock of all shocks, rather enjoying it.

Besides having a few more for-company recipes, I just have to cook a couple of meals a week, and the leftovers carry us through to the next weekend. Today it's Sweet and Tangy Slow Cooker Bar-B-Q Pork. I went down and snuck a forkful a few minutes ago and, Yum!, that is one good dish!

The moral of this story? You can teach an old Southern belle new tricks!

Love and Passion

I'm filled with joyous melancholy (is that an oxymoron?) this week as I look back to my time, a year ago, of getting to know the Jazzman. A line of dialogue from "The Good Wife" episode that aired earlier this week struck me, and reflected how lucky I feel that we have comfortably moved into a loving life together.

In the scene, Alicia's brother, Owen, is visiting, after being caught cheating by his partner and leaving the relationship.

Owen: Love just doesn’t seem to last very long for me. They should put you in a museum.
Alicia: Thanks.
Owen: No. (laughs) It’s not, um… No, it’s just this ability you have. How… how do you make love outlast passion?
Alicia: Is that what I do?
Owen: I don’t know. You tell me.
Alicia: I think it’s not just about the heart, Owen. I think, sometimes, the heart needs… steering.
Owen: I thought you were going to say something profound.
Alicia: (laughs) What was wrong with that?
Owen: “The heart needs… steering.” (both laugh)

I don't know how much steering of my heart, if any, I've had to do in the past year. I just continue to feel that I'm living a charmed life!

Stories to be Told

Today's Daily Thought from Real Simple magazine grabbed me:

“Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t …. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.”   ― Dorothy Allison

I watch and read anything regarding adoption that comes across my radar screen. So many stories are of wonderful, heart-wrenching reunions—hugs, kisses, tears, the sharing of stories that fill the holes of the missed years.

What you don't hear are stories like mine, where a parent or a child is found and doesn't want anything to do with the finder. Those stories don't raise ratings and sell ad time. They're personal—so very personal.

I know how isolated I've felt throughout my life. I know the feeling of not belonging anywhere or to anyone. I know how I felt when I received the letter from my biological mother—written in the ½" margins of my letter to her—requesting that I never contact her again.

I know. But can I communicate it to you in a manner that allows you to really understand and fully comprehend how it feels to me? Probably not.

The unsuccessful or less-than-fully successful stories are the ones that need to be written about. These stories, if added to the library of adoption literature, would help potential adoptive parents and mental health professionals understand how to treat and deal with adoptive children and what these children are experiencing.

How different my life might have been had my parents realized the turmoil that was swirling in my mind, had they been able to sit me down for six months with a sensitive and caring therapist who could help me feel grounded within myself.

But it is what it is. I am where I am. I look in my invisible mirror every day and watch my words and actions to make sure the Little Adoptee is staying inside. I've tried to make a comfortable home for her.

In the meantime, I keep hopping up on my soapbox to say, "Adoptees have needs you can't imagine. You must look for those needs and fill them."

The world keeps changing. Our body of knowledge keeps growing. Maybe ten or twenty or fifty years from now there will be no unsuccessful adoptions.

I can only hope.