Category Archives: This Never Happened To Pablo Picasso

Just Like China Cups

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In ancient Poor Impulse Control history, I published an annual report in January-February-ish. The reason for this was that when your knitting and crocheting friends and relatives joined the Choir Invisible, you may have mailed me their yarn, unfinished projects and stuff I might not be able to identify. I get a lot of that. Anyhoo, I finish some projects and take others apart. I give their tools away. Of the yarn, I make blankets for animal shelters. Above, please see an image of a blanket in the process of becoming a warm, soft thing.

In 2019, when the pandemic made everyone go their own special kinds of crazy, I was sitting on a pile of scarves and hats I couldn’t mail to anyone, baby blankets hospitals would no longer accept and cat blankets. Time sort of became a blur and my usual methods of keeping track of what I sent where went straight to hell. Looking back on it, I sent dozens and dozens of hats and scarves to organizations that gave them to at risk people. I sent out cat blankets, which I remember packaging up and daring postal workers to challenge me about bales of blankets. What I can say for sure is that if you sent me yarn, I made it into something that helped someone, and thank you for trusting me.

At the beginning of 2023, my oldest friend Trout was in the hospital – had been mostly in the hospital since the previous May – where she turned wool I couldn’t crochet with into 10 blankets for the shelter in our hometown. I’d just taken maybe 25-30 to an animal shelter in the town next to mine. After Trout died, I delivered 42 blankets to the shelter in our hometown. Trout had volunteered there years before, when her health still permitted that kind of activity. The shelter workers were overjoyed to receive our handiwork. Yesterday, Lala and I delivered 24 blankets to that same shelter. That makes the running total for this year between 91-96.

Trout left behind the largest stash of yarn I’ve seen yet. I’ll make a special list of the art supplies I’ve dropped off hither and yon, and if I’m feeling especially saucy, I’ll take a picture of the only reasonably disastrous craft room with just a small percentage of her fabric and yarn piled everywhere. Twice, Pete has opened that door and muttered, “Jesus Christ.” No, Jesus has nothing to do with it.

If you sent me craft supplies, thank you. If you need to talk to me about craft supplies, let’s talk in comments.

Hanging Around With You

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Happy New Year to you and you, and possibly you, too. The world is different this year than in others, but Pete and I went for a walk on the first day of January with our cameras, as we have done for a long time. Unlike other years, I lost concentration for a moment and fell in someone’s driveway, so at least there was comic relief.

Close up picture of a decorative cabbage with several drops of water.
It’s a cabbage. People have those.

As I’m typing, a winter storm is dumping snow on locales to the south of us and it may move this way. When I went out to feed the chickens earlier, the air had a spooky quality to it I didn’t recognize. Even now, at home two years into the pandemic, new things reveal themselves. For instance, I have the nerve to turn up and call myself a blogger. Imagine the nerve!

I Just Can’t Handle It

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It's a trap!

Pete and I found this bracelet on a garden wall on New Year’s Day, like an offering to the gods or a crow.

News happens faster than I can blog anymore. I gave up years ago in real life, but I do think about it. Can I take apart news stories and put them back together with bloggy masking tape and spit? Yeah, but I’d rather have my hands in bread dough and not have a nervous breakdown. So here we are.

Years ago, Dad died and left me homework: learn how to bake decent bread. I’ve been working my way through Dad’s cookbooks, but none has been as interesting as the late Carol Field’s The Italian Baker. Many recipes begin with a starter called a biga. If you want to bake bread tomorrow or in a few days, you gather yeast, flour, water in the right proportions, mix them and leave them on the counter overnight. The next day, if you’re not baking, you refrigerate the biga. You can freeze it if your dance card fills up and you just can’t watusi toward your loaf pans. Anyhoo, making a biga is effortless.

My daughter Miss Sasha asked me a few days ago what made a good cookbook. I said there were certain principles involved in baking and if a recipe writer asks me to depart from them, I’m immediately suspicious. Most cakes and cookies work this way: cream together butter/oil + sugar; add eggs one at a time; add flavorings; add some flour + some liquid, flour + liquid; add chunky stuff. If a recipe starts with flour in my mixing bowl, our relationship is off to a rocky start and our product will be inedible. A baker must trust a recipe writer. A recipe writer must offer directions for basic, medium and more complex recipes, let the baker work her way up and develop confidence.

Field does this. I can’t follow a recipe to save my life, but every one I study lets me produce decent loaves of bread. We eat them at home! I take them to work and foist them on my unsuspecting co-workers! When they dry out, I feed them to the chickens! I buy flour by the bale at Costco, but it’s all good. I’m not just baking bread, I’m stimulating the economy. Thank me!

And speaking of me, my daughter – again: Miss Sasha – wrote a book, which you can buy on Amazon. It’s called This Doesn’t Make Me An Expert, it is very interesting and full of surprises. Once chapter in particular blew me away, but they’re all good and I learned a lot reading it. You can buy it in print or in electronic form, and you should because reading is fundamental and you can’t spell fundamental without fun and mental.

Faith And Hope And Charity

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Wut?

I’ve always been afraid gravity would lose its grip on me.

Here we are in the dark of January. It’ll be another two and half to three months before we can quit thinking of murdering people who touch us with cold feet. They deserved it! No jury would convict us! COLD FEET!

But I hope you will curb your murderous urges. Spring will come soon and you’ll think you were out of your mind to take out the garbage in January wearing flip flops. Shoes were a hassle. You were just taking out the garbage and you couldn’t find your other boot. One of the cats was probably wearing it, to go with the gloves you find everywhere, migrating around the house at night like there’s some sort of glove exchange you don’t really understand. By you, I mean me, and I’ll bet my feet are cold.

The Rhythm of Your Heartbeat

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Please fix your nails, lady.

One December afternoon.

Kind, thoughtful people send me scrap yarn by the bagful for the cat blanket project. I can’t thank those enough – or, in some cases, at all, since I have no idea who they are or were. Every year, though, donations arrive with unfinished projects, piles of knitting needles and crochet hooks, notions, patterns, shopping lists; these are the last effects of a stitcher. This year, packages like this arrived twice: once, from a very elderly hoarder I didn’t know, but the second time, the late stitcher was a friend and mentor. She was a much better knitter than I will ever be, and her unfinished projects were daunting. I put them away for another, braver day. Yesterday was that day. It was also Christmas Day, and Christmas cheer might’ve had something to do with it.

My craft room has been disastrous since these donations arrived. Yesterday, I took out a giant homemade knitting bag full of unfinished throw blanket and laid it out on my dining room table to look at it. If I thought I could finish it, I was determined to try. If I could not, I’d tear out the stitches and reuse the yarn, but I was trying to avoid that. After a few minutes’ examination, I realized to my relief the blanket was crocheted. I didn’t know my friend crocheted, so that came as a surprise. My friend was right-handed. I am left-handed, and that matters. I was unable to figure out what stitches she was using or how she had made the very pretty dual colored pattern. Pete said, “If you can finish it, why don’t you give it to her granddaughters?” That was the encouragement I needed, and I decided I would, if not finish the blanket at her degree of skill, finish it to the best of my ability. In retrospect, a strong holiday cocktail might have boosted my confidence.

The blanket was about 7′ long with fringe on both ends. I worked out how she did that, but not why. She had started a row with single crochet. Her stitches slanted right. Mine slanted left. I couldn’t do anything about that, but on the second row, I figured out a solution to the problem that blended my stitches with hers and made the two edges a closer match. No match would be perfect, but this was pretty good.

It was Christmas Night. I texted my friend’s daughter, who is also my lifelong friend Trout, to say the blanket was finished and did she want it? At that moment, her niece was plopping gooey green slime into her hands, so my timing was somewhat off. Trout burst into tears and we agreed to meet up next weekend.

A couple of weeks ago, Paulie Gonzalez and I renewed the blog’s domain name for three years. As a writer and artist, I am not sure where I’m going or what I’d like to be doing, but finishing the work of a beloved stitcher gave me a feeling of satisfaction I haven’t felt before, and this brings us to the photograph above. Here, I declare defeat.

Buoyed by yesterday’s success, I pulled a bunch of sweater panels out of a garbage bag and found my nemesis at the bottom: a zipper. As bad signs go, that one said “Bates Motel.” The bag contained no pattern and no clue how the panels should be assembled. Worse: one of the panels stopped a few inches in. I laid this out on the dining room table and waved the white flag: these cream-colored panels were beyond my ken. After that, I spent two hours pulling out stitches and rolling the yarn into balls. Two hours. Come to think of it, a refreshing adult beverage might’ve helped with that, too.

Three years offers a lot of possibility. I might finish yarny stuff, garden or string words together. I might think the funny thoughts in public places or say serious stuff where someone might hear me. The future is wide open.

 

We’ll Be Able To Fly

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Months ago, one of little Swedish Black hens and sometimes Chicken Chicken started kicking up fusses just after dawn. Local ordinances forbid residents from keeping roosters because sunrise squawking makes the neighbors cranky. Anyway, In June and July, I found myself running down the stairs before dawn and out the back door to shush chickens almost every day. Andie, who is not an early riser, was calling the little hen “Chicken Soup.” I developed a plan: we would identify which of the hens was the complainer, if there was only one, through the clever use of chicken jewelry. Yes, I bought different colored plastic leg bands. Andie and I chased the nearly identical chickens until we caught them and gave them name tags. Sort of. We determined that the tiny hen with the white leg band, LaVerne, was our vocalist.

As a matter of fact, those are hot dog rolls on the ground.

LaVerne, in the corner, evading capture. Chicken Chicken, nearer, acting nonchalant.

The professor from the organic farming course of last summer agreed to take LaVerne to the Chicken McMansion on her farm. When the day came, Ellen arrived with a cat carrier. Andie was working, so I resigned myself to chasing LaVerne without backup.

You haven’t lived until you’ve climbed halfway into a chicken coop in your street clothes. Remind me to burn these garments later.

Note: no part of this is not gross.

Of course I’m dressed badly. How should I be dressed to chase a chicken through gross shit?

This went on for quite a while. Before I climbed in here, I’d warned Pete, “You have two jobs here: take pictures and heckling.” As you can see, it’s not easy to photograph a chicken roundup. Or my butt.

So glamorous!

I am literally chasing a small chicken around the coop with a cat box pooper scooper.

Finally, I got my hands on the little bird, who pecked my hands, but settled right into Ellen’s arms. After a few minutes, we stuffed LaVerne into the cat carrier and off they went. I still get up before sunrise most days, but with the solstice behind us and the equinox ahead, that time is a bit later every morning. Chicken Chicken, without the goading of her sidekick, sleeps in. This morning, I didn’t see her in the run until just after 7.

Wait, I'm not your real Mom?

The recipient of this chicken finds her charming. Her feelings are reciprocated. I feel left out of this lovefest.

Ellen says she holds LaVerne in her arms all the time. I could never get near her. It was obviously meant to be.