Happy Happy, Sad Sad

Mom and I had a good Thanksgiving dinner with our friends J&SH.  SH cooked and his wife JH chatted with us and the other couple (she was a knitter) who were their guests.  I admit to being apprehensive about taking my mask off to eat.  As I’ve said, I’m in so many risk groups for COVID19 that it’s not funny, and these were people who were not in our immediate family group.  It’s always a risk.

The upside of eating Thanksgiving at somebody else’s house is that you don’t have to cook or clean up after.  The downside is no leftovers! — which in this case is a real bummer.  SH is a fabulous cook.  His turkey was so moist and flavorful and he makes the kind of dressing that has sausage in, which is a more northerly tradition (MN) than the down-south cornbread dressing I’m used to.  But, hey, I’m an equal opportunity eater, and it was ‘licious.  (He put real cream in the mixer and whupped it to put on our punkin’ pie!)

I spent Wednesday (TG eve) in serious hygge mode, snuggled in bed catching up on episodes of a YouTube knitting channel that I follow, and knitting some wash cloths with cotton thread to use as a bread and butter gift for our host and hostess.  (This was money well spent!) Whenever they invite us over for dinner, I always take S&JH a little handmade something because they are both such special people.

I juggled the budget this month and bought Bluetooth earbuds instead of ebooks (I’m currently rereading the Harry Potter books this month) and Wednesday was the first opportunity I had to try them out.  No More Wars!*  I got the kind with the little conical rubber things that go into your ear hole as those stay in my ear better than the durn Apple ones that came with the iPhone.  They paired to my Kindle Fire on the first try.  These have enough range that I could go into the kitchen for snacks and to make another pot of tea and still hear what I was listening to, and what’s more, they will go up to 8 hours on a single charge, which is great.  I was one happy camper.  Now that I think about it, my TV has Bluetooth.   I’d have to unpair them from my tablet to get them to pair with the TV, but I could binge a lot of watching in 8 hours . . . . Hmmmm.

I am at the stage in my tooth implant odyssey where an impression is made of both upper and lower teeth, from which the crown for the implant will be made.  (The stage after that is where they stick the crown down onto the peg that was implanted in my jaw, and I go on my merry way.) That appointment was scheduled three months ago, when I had my last appointment to check up on the status of the healing of the bone graft around the post, and was supposed to take place on November 5th.  About a week before that, the dentist’s receptionist called and rescheduled it for the 17th because he was going to be “out of town.”  Then the second week of November, it got rescheduled to the 24th.  Then it got rescheduled to December 3rd.

So, Fridays are a busy day for my mom.  She goes to the beauty saloon at like ye gods! o’clock in the morning to get her weekly wash, set and style, then goes grocery shopping for the week.  I am not an early riser, which was why I was only about half awake when she called me at 8:30 yesterday morning to tell me that she was looking through the obituaries in the daily paper and saw one for my dentist!  Apparently, he died this past Monday (23rd) of COVID19.  So now, I don’t know what’s going to happen.

About two years ago, he relocated his practice to way out in the yuppyburbs (129th Street) in the southwest portion of town and was sharing office space with another dentist.  At the time I wondered if he wasn’t gradually phasing out his practice (he was 76).  I’ll be calling his office Monday — probably along with all his other patients — w0ndering just what’s going to happen now.  I’ve been trying to wrap my head around it ever since mom told me about it.  I’ve been going to him for probably ten or twelve years now and I really liked him.  So sad.

*wars -- Texan for that electrical cord that connects the earbuds to each other and to the electronic device.

A Narrow Escape

We’ve had a cold snap here these past couple of days.  Good sleeping weather.  I had been sleeping with a sheet, a spread, and this pretend fur twin blanket as the weather yo-yo-ed between too cold for just a sheet and a spread and too hot for a blanket, but yesterday, I bit the bullet and winterized my bed.   I have this undyed unbleached cotton blanket that is made out of thread that is about the same diameter as DK weight yarn woven in a herringbone pattern.  It’s wonderfully heavy and “hand woven” looking, and although I have a queen sized bed, I got it in king size because cotton will shrink somewhat in the dryer over time, and I like my covers  to reach clear to the top of the mattress.  My bedspread is heavy cotton, too, in a jacquard weave.  I also have a microfleece blanket in a leopard print that I keep “S”-folded across the bottom of the bed, so I can just reach down and pull it up when I need it.

So, yesterday, I changed my bed, and not only washed the sheets, but the bedspread, too (which took forEVER to dry!).  I washed a load of clothes, a load of sheets and towels, and a load that was the bedspread.  While I was waiting for the bedspread to dry, I took all the garbage out to the alley.

I have this foldable hanger rack in the laundry room so I can hang up stuff right out of the dryer.  When I put hang-up clothes in the dirty clothes hamper, I take the empty hanger and hang it on this rack.  I have just enough hangers for the clothes I have.  If I get something new, I have to get rid of something so there’ll be a hanger for it.

In the knitting news, the infinity wrap is coming along.  I have six skeins of this yarn, and I haven’t used up one ball yet.   The yarn is a 2-ply DK weight, 100% wool yarn from Green Mountain Spinnery  called Ragg Time in the colorway “Bessie 9461.”  One ply is dark, the other ply is various shades of blue, so the color tends to be heathery.  It’s a very grabby yarn and it doesn’t want to “flow” through my fingers.  I can only knit on it for about an hour or so before I have to stop as it “fights” me and tires out my hands.  Still, I like the color and it makes a good dense fabric on US9’s (5.5 mm) needles.   That white bit at the bottom is the provisional cast on because  I’m going to have to Kitchner the durn thing together.    At some point, I’ll take a length of yarn and wrap it around me so I can measure how long I need to make it.  I just hope 6 skeins (@ 306 yd/279 m each) is going to be enough yarn.   We’ll see.

Today after cardiac rehab, I went to get my car inspected and the oil changed.  When the guy was doing the inspection, he brought to my attention that the license plate number on my last-year’s registration sticker did not match the license plate on my car, and when he ran the license plate number on my sticker, it was for a Nissan SUV (my car is a Toyota Corolla sedan).  Now that I think back, when I got my last year’s registration sticker, there was somebody else getting theirs at the same time, and I bet the lady gave us the wrong stickers.  Here all this time, I’ve been driving around with somebody else’s car registration sticker (and somebody has been driving around with mine!).  I would have never known it if the guy at the oil change place hadn’t said something.  But if a cop had checked me, I would have gotten a ticket for driving around with false registration!!  I got my 2021 registration sticker at the same place I got my 2020 one, and told the clerk about the mix-up.  (She didn’t seem nearly as excited about it as I thought she should be. . . )  But, you better believe I checked the plate number on the new sticker she gave me!

Baking in My Dreams

So, Tuesday, mom and I had talked about what to do for Thanksgiving since it’s just the two of us, and I was going to suck it up and clean my house and cook the dinner and have mom over, and then Friday, she tells me we’ve been invited to a friend’s house. . .  But, in the meantime, at cardiac rehab on Wednesday, I only did 40 minutes on the treadmill before I caved because I knew I was going to Wal-Mart afterward and would have to hike over to the “non-grocery” side, nearly to the garden dept,  for a new shower head (see below) and pick up some teethpaste en route.

Whilst at Wal-mart, I got a frozen turkey breast (frozen so solid you could have shot it out of a cannon!) and had to ask two different stockers where the heck they’d hidden their cranberry sauce (neither of whom knew).  (Now that I mention it, I don’t think one of them was real sure which end was up . . .)  There are apparently two schools of thought on where to stock cranberry sauce.  Some stores stock it with the vegetables (???) and some stock it where it’s supposed to be — with the fruit.  (cranBERRY sauce– duh!)  After wandering all over half the store, I finally found one little box of cans of Ocean Spray jellied stuck way up on the top shelf above the canned pineapple where you couldn’t have found it with GPS and a homing beacon.  (sniffs in annoyance)

Anyway, neatly threaded into Tuesday’s conversation about what we were going to do for Thanksgiving, was one of those oh-and-by-the-way’s — her shower head was not spraying properly, would I come look at it?  (We have hard water here in the flatlands, which is not surprising as there is a sizeable chunk of limestone between us and the aquifer.)  (The combining form for “water” is “aqua-“, n’est-ce pas? So why does “aquifer” have an “i”?!?) The problem with her shower head was that since it was probably old enough to vote, it had become calcified beyond the power of CLR to revive it.  What it put out was more of a half-hearted rivulet than a spray.

So, when I went to cardiac rehab on Friday, I had an adjustable crescent wrench, Teflon tape and a new shower head in the car seat by my purse.  (Why, yes, I am a Toolbelt Diva.)  I stopped off chez mom on my way home, and it was only a matter of moments before she had a new shower head in her shower. (Don’t I wish a lot more of the world’s problems could be solved with an adjustable crescent wrench and Teflon tape. . .)

I couldn’t stand it.  I cast on for an infinity scarf like I was talking about.

Anyway, what with all the treadmill time (40-45 minutes a pop) I’ve put in during cardiac rehab sessions (not to mention 10-15 minute wind sprints on the top and bottom bicycle), and Wednesday’s  Wal-Mart Invitational 10K Grocery Shop, when my alarm rousted me out at 9 o’clock this morning, it was plain by the way I felt that I wasn’t done sleeping yet.  After a brief breakfast in bed (some of my morning meds must be taken with food), I rolled over and sounded* like a sperm whale going for squid.  I surfaced to breathe at about noon, again at about 3 pm, and again at about 6 pm, and when I surfaced at a little after 9 pm, I knew I was done sleeping.

But there was this dream I had just before I woke up.  I was in a kind of farmhouse kitchen, at this big beautiful antique farmhouse kitchen table making pastry dough.  I was wearing a bib apron made from cotton feed sacking and the long-sleeved t-shirt I had on had the sleeves pushed up past my elbows.  I took the dough out of the big crockery bowl and plopped it directly onto the table, with sprinkled flour and everything, and began to work it.  I rolled it into a “worm” with my hands and used a roller to roll the “worm” out flat into a rectangle  about a foot wide and about 2 feet long.  I thoroughly dusted the surface of the dough with a mixture of coarse-ground brown sugar, cinnamon, allspice, finely chopped nuts, and minced raisins.  Then I began to roll one of the long edges in toward the center.  I went round to the other side of the table and rolled the other long edge in toward the center.  I grabbed the ends, lifted the whole shebang off the table and plopped it onto a large greased baking sheet (one of those heavy duty kind about an inch deep with a rolled rim), pinched the ends and guillotined it into two-inch sections with a pastry knife.  I covered it with a cotton tea towel and let it rise.  Once it had risen, I spooned jam made from pureed cherries down the center trough and put it in a hot oven to cook.  I have never seen nor heard of sweet rolls made this way, but they were delicious!

*sound, verb,  to dive down suddenly —used of a fish or whale.  (This is the 7th of 7 separate dictionary definitions of the word "sound".  Any wonder why English is such a booger for a non-native to learn? )

 

The Art of Hygge

hyg·ge

(pronounced:  ˈh(y)o͞oɡə,ˈho͝oɡə/)
noun
a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being (regarded as a defining characteristic of Danish culture).

See, this is what we should have been doing while we’ve been sheltering in place — rearranging, revamping, renovating those sheltering places to make them more hygge.   Instead of going stir crazy or spending endless hours playing with our phones, we should have been relocating and repurposing furniture and re-allocating space to make that medium-slow* make-shift, stuck-off-in-a-corner “home office” into a decent workspace, or rethinking and reconfiguring  the furniture in the den so you can watch the big-screen TV without that distracting window reflection on the screen and without having to go to the chiropractor to get your neck readjusted after you decided to binge watch all the Harry Potter movies (and hitting up Amazon for a couple of flat-pack end-tables so you have a place to put the the snackies, the drinkies,  and an organizer for the umpteen remotes that keep sliding off onto the floor and getting kicked under the couch.)   (Oh, and sofa cushions and a warm microfleece lap robe . . . )   It’s time to up our snuggle game, people!

 

*half-fast.

Replacing The Lights That Failed

I finished my little iPouch, but haven’t had a chance to use it yet.  Now that I have a photo of the finished product, I can post the pattern in Knits From The Owl Underground.

I’ve nearly finished the second ball of yarn on the Irene shawl, which is coming along slowly but surely, a couple of rows at a time.  One more ball to go.   It’s in Malabrigo sock yarn on a US6 (4.0 mm) needle, so it’s pretty slow going.  I’m pleased with how it’s turning out, though.  It will be an asymmetrical triangular shawl with the triangle being scalene — none of the sides will be of the same length.

I want to do one of these projects now.  The one on the left is a very large circular — “cowl” I suppose you’d call it.   You put it round your waist, give it a twist into a figure 8, and put the top loop of the “8” over your head.   If you knitted it as one long strip, you’d have to Kitchner it together, though.  I like how it provides warmth without dangling bits and needs no fasteners to keep it on.  I’d have to make it wider, though.   I like the  “mobius” shawl on the right for the same reason — no loose ends.  There is a mobius cast on that allows you to do it without having to Kitchner it together.   You have to cast on all the stitches along one edge of the shawl — the trick is figuring out how many stitches you need because the shawl only has one edge!  I’d have to use my 60-inch circular needle for that one.

I had to take a shower in the (relative) dark the other day because the light “bub” in the shower burned out.  The master bedroom in the duplex has this really goofy en suite with the sink, counter,cabinets and mirror just out in the open at one end of the bedroom, not closed off or anything.   The toilet and shower are located in a little room off to the side which can be closed off with a sliding door.  Fortunately, the “water closet” portion of the little side room also has a light.  Of course, in order to replace the burned-out bulb, I first had to figure out how to get to it.  Turns out the outer ring pulls down on two long strips, far enough to get to the bulb.

Then, last night, I was heading toward the kitchen in the dark when I noticed a flickering light coming through the frosted window beside the front door.   I have these two yard lights which are on sensors and turn on automatically when it gets dark.  I have LED bulbs in them which are supposed to last 10 years.  Guess what.  The bulb in this light up near the porch was flickering — malfunctioning — so I had to figure out how to replace that one as well.  Turns out, all I needed to do it was a straight screw driver.

We’re getting our fall color now.  There are a fairly high percentage of oak trees in this section of town and their leaves turn this marvelous deep red.  This one is across the street.  It hearkens to that shade of red Frank Lloyd Wright liked — which he called “Cherokee red” — and used extensively in his buildings.

There’s a local landmark — the smiley-face bush — which started out as just a round topiary bush at the corner of this house at an intersection along a major north-south street.  The then owners of the house cut eyes and a smile into with hedge cutters to make it look like a smiley face.  Apparently, it’s in the deed to the house that whoever owns it has to keep up the smiley-face bush.  The current owners go all out and have set googly eyes into it and add various seasonal accessories.  For Halloween, they had the bush dressed up as Frankenstein’s monster.  Now they’ve got it dressed up as a turkey.  I snatched this photo the other day while I was stopped at the traffic light.  You may need to click on it to enlarge it so you can see it.