The Second Act ... or Is It?

Hello from Tucson! I'm settled in and starting classes today. This is the first chance I've had to get to a campus computer lab, and in less than 48 hours I'll be headed back to the East Coast to take care of some unexpected housekeeping in Charleston. As one of my favorite bloggers, Cass says, le sigh.
In the meantime, I'll be composing blog posts from the road so that I can update you on (a) the road trip (here's a teaser, guardian angels abandoned semi-truck drivers to protect me) and (b) these kindergarten-like first days of classes (yikes!). I'll also be composing a post with pictures of my completed flags for Norway and Sweden.
Today's philosophical lesson? Karma is not as simple as you think. It is not just give and receive. It also includes this complexity: if you ask your husband to tune up the car and he doesn't do it until 20 hours before he leaves the country so that you end up having to take it back in and get brake work done, do not resent him. Put it in a bubble and blow it away. If you get grumpy, karma will make you drive fourteen hours with a bad tire so that you have to put air in it five times en route as well as other engine trouble, none of which could have been prevented by said tune up anyway.

Intermission

Hello all. I'm afraid this is going to be my last post for a couple of weeks - and it doesn't even have any crafty goodness in it. My mother arrives in town tomorrow to help me drive to Buffalo over the next three days, then I'll be - as my friends here keep saying - in the Buff for three days before driving from NY to AZ. I'm hoping to be back in AZ by the week of the 18th but I won't have any internet for the immediate future. Classes start a week later, so I should at least have access to campus internet by the end of the month. I'll still have email and will be able to read your comments - thanks for the kind words lately.

We do - 99% - have places to live. One landlord (Buffalo) decided they'd like a credit check at the last minute but I don't think they'll find any problems there. The other is supposed to get us word today but we're first in line. At least if something falls through in the Tucson scenario if I get desperate I can stay with my mom a little while and drive down to search in person.

And so today is going to be my last full day of packing. Tomorrow will be packing and cleaning the kitchen/bath, and then the next day - goodbye Charleston! I won't be able to craft much in the next week either because I'll be driving, but at least we'll only have one vehicle Buffalo-to-Tucson, so I can work on the five o'clock tank or one of my three half finished mitts while my mom drives!

Hopefully I'll be able to get back to you all with good tidings by the month's end!

Happy Crafting - Jennie

A Tender Happy Place

Everyone, hold your breath. (Figuratively, though if you want to do it literally, that's up to you. I'm kind of long winded.)

First, assuming that my future roommate's lease application passes muster, I will actually have a place to live in Tucson.

Second, assuming nothing goes wrong with the place I'm trying to rent for Mr. Man in Buffalo, he'll also have a place to live in a little over a week when he comes home from Turkey. We haven't done any application or paperwork with them yet, but so far things look good. (I'm hesitant, of course, because five places have gotten closer to the deal being done than this and fallen through.)

Third, I'm going to make truck arrangements tomorrow, so even that's not secure yet. (I've been waiting in case things went wrong, but at this point I've got to make them or I won't have them in time.)

I say this is a tender place to be in because it feels a bit like climbing a house of cards. Last night, my mother suggested that maybe it would be best to ship my stuff instead of driving it. That may have been secret code for, do I really have to come help you drive your menagerie to New York? I offered her an out and she didn't take it though, so keep your fingers crossed on that front as well. Even if she bailed, it would just set me back two days and the price of a plane ticket while I wait for my husband to fly down here and drive the truck.

I keep talking myself in circles. Instead, it's time to go meet my packing quota for the day! Maybe then I can make time for a little crochet. I have another mitt half done.

Is anyone else doing the 198 Countries Peace Project? I've got Norway and Sweden. I may have to put the mitts aside and use those as my brainless projects for a while. At least the flags are simple, though not the same shade of blue!


Norway on the left, Sweden on the right.

Belated Wonder

Hi again. Sorry that this weekend was an off weekend. I helped some friends move away, then spent Saturday getting ready for an unexpected house showing. When I finally was ready yesterday afternoon to do the prep work for the blog, my camera batteries were all dead.

A night in the charger later, I can finally show you my new toy.

One of the friends who moved to Chicago is a professional photographer, and this was an extra tripod he had that he was going to toss. It's too lightweight for his professional rigs, but it's perfect for me, so he let me have it! Go free stuff! (I should add, we have a history of trading with these folks. Five pairs of shoes and god knows what else before now.)

Obviously it's not at its full height here. It's probably less than five feet tall even when fully extended, but it's still about two feet taller than my old tripod. I'm really excited.

On other fronts, the latest apartment for Mr. Man has fallen through, again! But this time, the owner is a real estate agent who is going to look around a bit for us, so maybe he'll find something. My own search seems to be going much better. I've found a good house and a fun-sounding roommate and assuming all the lease application stuff goes through, I've got a place just over one-and-a-half miles from campus and - wait for it - even closer to the knit shop. I'm jazzed, but I'm starting to worry something will go wrong with this one, too.

Rather than spending the day finishing the second mitt - about one third done - I'm going to be spending it walking in to get the faxed application and running other errands.

Keep you fingers crossed for me (or something similar, if you're busy crafting). :)

Semi-FOs and Semi-Frogged Projects

Time for crafty goodness. Of late I've been working on one of the mitt designs I've mentioned before. I've also been spending a LOT of time looking for housing since so far everything I've lined up or thought I lined up had fallen through, so I haven't been crafting as much as I'd like to. But, I did make the time to frog the two balls worth of yarn you see about - these are the size of large oranges, so this was no small effort when done by hand. I've still got 2-3 mystery panels of the cream, which is an acrylic yarn and about two-thirds of the shrug in gray left to frog. I can only do it when I don't need my hands, and since I've been TV free for 15 days, most entertainment I have involves holding a book or using a keyboard. :)


Here - above and below - you can see what I think is the neat thing about this design. On one side - the reverse of the hand - you can see the spiral technique, and on the other, you can't. No awkward joins, like in the round can sometimes have, and the use of gradual increases and then decreases in stitch height really make the spiral pop.

My main complaint is that the thumb hole looks ungainly. It's finickiness on my part. As you can see, I haven't bound off yet, so my plan is to half-double crochet around the thumb hole once or twice to provide more protection for the pad of my thumb. The need for these mitts - oh mother of invention - comes from the fact that my wrist that is more prone to inflammation sits right on top of my hot laptop battery when I work, so I need some padding between hand and computer. My knitted mitts are great when it's not 80-plus degrees out, so these are meant to be lighter and trimmer.


Think happy thoughts for me as I try to find housing and make the mate to this lonely mitt. Another design involving mesh is on the way!

Weekend Wonder #10 Fieldwork

Hello again. I wanted to do something a little different for this Weekend Wonder. I've mentioned a number of times in the last few months that I was spending the day outside doing fieldwork. Well, as a preservationist, I'm a theory and policy specialist. Knowing that, you might wonder what my fieldwork is.

Once upon a time it was outreach and legal consulting, but I've been involving myself in interpretation more and more over the last few years - the process and theory of how we convey history or heritage to the public. A project that evolved out of that - I'll spare you the long details - is the work I've been doing this year with the help of a great photographer, my research assistant. Our focus is on how the use of repeat photography can be a tool for interpreting urban change.

First, we spent weeks in various archives trying to find the best photographs - those that were old enough to be interesting, best situated to be retaken, and most likely to either show interesting change or an interesting lack of change. An example is this photograph taken early in the twentieth century from a major park in Charleston, Marion Square.

From left to right you can see a hotel, the statue of John C. Calhoun, row houses, especially an elaborate house that is taller with the Classical cupola of the orphanage behind it, and one of the tall steeple churches Charleston is known for.

Second, after we picked out these pictures, we went out and tried to rephotograph them as accurately as possible using transparent overlays and all kinds of little tricks. About one in three was unrepeatable. For example, there are a couple beautiful panoramic shots of this square that were taken from a distance. Where those photographers stood is now inside a building. Fortunately, this one was one we could retake, but not one of our most accurate. Here's the new shot:

You might not notice if I didn't point it out, but the statue and hotel, now substantially blocked by trees, aren't in the exact same vertical alignment. We could figure out fairly precisely where the photographer stood, but the park has been relandscaped many times. All you would see if we took that shot would be trees. Our solution was to move about fifteen feet closer. It captures the significant and less obvious changes. All of the houses are gone, as is the orphanage. They've been replaced by that parking garage and college buildings respectively. The church still stands, but its polychromatic stucco has been replaced with a single darker color. In combination with the white trim, it really changed the look of the steeple.

We have over twenty pairs like this, as well as a handful of shots that we retook much more casually because the change and demolition was so complete, there's nothing left to line up on. Some of the shots are wonderful, but some are slightly off because of a difference in camera equipment or because of new construction that prevented us from retaking from the exact right location. Now that our camera work is done, it's my turn to take over as the writer.

And that's my Weekend Wonder! On that note, I'll be back soon with another post about the new computer mitt I just crocheted after I take some pictures. Have a good week!

Productivity? Really?

Today is the most productive day I've had in a week if you don't count writing. Part of me doesn't count writing. I enjoy it so much that if I spend fourteen hours on it in a day, I feel like I'm getting away with something. It's only after four days of that pace that I start to (a) feel the brain fatigue and (b) remember I should clean the house.
I got up at a good time, did what will hopefully be the last of the fieldwork I have to do for the collection of essays I'm working on. Then I cleaned the house for a couple hours. Because hunger's creeping in, I've decided to take a lunch break, update my blog, check facebook, finish my loan paperwork (yay for gradschool!) and then decide where to go from there.
One thing I'm thinking about doing is frogging a couple pieces that have been in my frog pile for a while. I've got two panels on something that may have been supposed to be a sweater when I first started learning to knit. I could probably make it, but it would be way too heavy for Tucson, so I think I'll frog and use the yarn for experimenting instead. The other big item is the shrug that didn't work as planned. I've been thinking about crocheting one from that yarn or, in the alternative, using it to make mitts I can sell. Hmmm. Thinking...
I would like to add one more thing, which is a discovery I've made. It is possible, at least for me, to lose stuff in a mainly empty house. A student gave me a lovely going-away present of a book wrapped in a reproduction of a map of Venice. (When I teach historic preservation, I spend a couple days talking about Venice.) For weeks I kept that paper on top of my crates of books so I could frame it to protect it while I move. Now that I've unearthed the frame, I can't find the map anywhere. Hrm.
Hope all is well with you!
PS I'm also still not even beginning to catch up on other people's blogs. That's my goal for tomorrow. I plan to post here again Thursday - let's see if I can do it!