Local politics gets interesting

Last night I was at a high school info night, checking out one of many possible schools for Elaine for next year. A friend of mine who is a municipal civil servant rushed up to me, suggesting things I should tweet about local politics. She, indeed, is too smart to tweet about her employer. (I was saying things like calling the mayor "an ass and a terrible orator." I know, fightin' words.)

Of course, I didn't take these pictures

There is both a lot to say, and not much to say. You may have seen Jon Stewart say a few things. You may have read about our mayor in the Economist a few days ago, or seen his ridiculous news conference yesterday, via Gawker. We've even made the Times of India. Here's a timeline of events, but it ends in October, and the fun really started just this past week.

It's just gob-smackingly stupid. How did this guy get so far? How much farther will he sink before he realises he's actually in trouble? He only smoked crack because he was in a drunken stupor. (Oh, well, that's okay then?) He regrets getting hammered in public. He's embarrassed and would like to move on now, please. (Um, no.)

I have a number of friends who know a lot about addiction and alcoholism, mostly from a professional point of view, but some from personal experience, and they are unanimous in saying it's all very interesting and newsworthy and crazy, but really, the guy needs to step aside, get to rehab and get some help. It won't stop him from being a jerk, probably, but it might slow down the train wreck. 

I'm going to City Hall next week to nudge him.

(If all of this makes no sense to you, I am glad. There are actually better ways to spend one's time than thinking about Rob Ford, lying, crack-smoking mayor of Toronto.)

This blanket is getting weirder

My blanket of scarves now includes all I ever knit of my Louvre floor blanket (three whole squares)

and a swatch I made in 2006 for a hat. I know, who swatches for a hat?

When we went to Mull in 2005, we saw some gorgeous rusty chain. So I eventually had to make a rusty chain hat. And I guess I was very careful with worrying about the gauge on the stranded knitting, so I actually made two swatches, this blue one and a grey one.

There is a niche on the other side of the blanket which needs filling in, so the grey one will appear eventually.

Then somehow I have to wash the whole thing, which is made of wool, acrylic, silk, cotton, mohair, viscose and something angora-like. That will be an adventure! I suspect I will toss it in the machine on gentle and see what happens.

Anyone watch QI?

The lovely* and talented Stephen Fry hosts a British TV show called QI, which stands for Quite Interesting. They have been making it for 10 years now, but I discovered it on YouTube about two or three years ago. Last spring or summer, my Stephen was tickled pink to get an e-mail from the QI elves, as those who slave away to make the show are called, asking if they could use his video of dominoes falling over.

They didn't actually end up showing his video, but Stephen Fry got his own set of dominoes and knocked them over with a bright pink feather. It was fine, but he did not say "boom" like my Stephen, which I think is what makes the whole thing so exciting, really.

*Proof that Stephen Fry is lovely:

Sort of knitting content

Once upon a time, in 2006, I showed you Stephen's favourite sweater. The cuffs were fraying and there were holes appearing and it was a wreck.

I can tell you that it is still his favourite sweater. It was terribly, terribly falling apart -- the cuffs were totally frayed, the buttonband had come unsewn from one side, there was a big dropped stitch disaster on the shoulder -- and I felt like the queen in Franklin's video. (He talks about it here, but the video doesn't seem to be on that page anymore. So, here ya go.)

 

I kept refusing to mend the sweater. He has other sweaters. I would knit him a blue one, or green. Cables, whatever, just let me make you a new sweater. No, he says, I like this sweater.

Finally, I was somehow tricked into mending this one. I reattached the buttonband, mended a few holes, hooked up the dropped stitch, and hacked the cuffs off and reknit them. Here you can see the renewed sweater with plain black cuffs and the old bits I'd cut off.

He is actually very grateful and loves his new-old sweater even more now. I still mean to make him a replacement one day, but since I've put it off for seven years, a while more won't hurt.

Adrift and rudderless

Well, it's day two and I am drifting dangerously already.

Our neighbourhood party last night was a fine success. I must say that my après-party day has not involved much action. I emptied the dishwasher and picked up a few stray glasses and took various plates and things back to people, and played a lot of Facebook Scrabble.

We now have at least 3 big pieces of brie in the fridge because everyone thought it would be lovely to have some brie. Also, the veg and dip, usually a surefire munchable dish, was apparently too much to handle, so we've got a ton of raw veg all nicely cut up. I wonder if you can make brie-vegetable soup.

Oh, look at this: brie and vegetable pie!

I think that is my good deed for the day, finding you that recipe.

Doin' it

I will attempt NaBloPoMo again, posting every day this month.

This post, however, will be terribly short as I have to dash off to meet my sister-in-law, come home, make a cake and have a party for some wonderful neighbours who are moving away.

I can tell you that I have made these.

Get square pretzels (yes, some newfangled invention, I am sure) and put a Hershey' kiss on each one (one tends to be limited by the number of kisses in a package).

Put them in a slow oven, maybe 175F, for about 5 or 6 minutes. When they come out, quickly squish a Smartie on each one. Put them in the fridge -- mine continued to melt for a while till I figured this out.

Also, it's probably a good idea to put parchment on the cookie sheet before you even start!

Until tomorrow, then!

Part of the knitting pile

I've been knitting a bit, and sorting stuff out a bit.

I had started on a pile of Arthur's old socks: cutting the toes with big holes off and reknitting new, whole, longer toes. I did one successfully, but the second one was a big waste of time. I got him to try it on to see when to start the toe decreases and the sock was too small around to fit his ankle and leg comfortably. So, the new bit got ripped back and the old bit is sitting somewhere awaiting its fate.

Since my good intentions were thwarted there, I decided to cast on a whole new pair of socks. If you can't do something quick and small, just do something bigger. Harvest Dew recently caught my eye, and I had just the yarn to make the slip-stitch pattern look like dragon skin.

This is some On Your Toes I had in the big box o' sock yarn. If Arthur plays his cards right, he might even get a matching pair this time, unlike the singles I've been making him lately.

My other big pile of half-done knitting-related stuff is this:

This is a blanket of scarves! Some are long and one or two are wide, and there are a ton of bits that will get stuck on the outside of this.

These are a few sock yarn squares (and one apparently left over from 2006's blanket).  (Oh, heavens, I just looked back through old blog entries looking for this blanket. I knew I'd started in England, which means before the summer of 2006.... I finished it all up in 2009, with a 2-year hiatus while I thought of how to border it! And I know the sock yarn blanket was a fantasy thought up many years ago as well.) Anyways, this strip will get added to the scarves and then I will think up the next bit! I have a pretty huge number of squares that "will one day be blankets." Now it looks like they will all be one blanket!

Meanwhile, I seem to have lost half a sweater back. I know it's around here somewhere...

Wow, I just learned about some great designers

Lotsa links here, folks.

I learned something brilliant about these cups Thursday night. (They are on Ebay; you can buy them.) 

I saw a movie called Design is One. Massimo and Lella Vignelli are Italian-American designers who designed everything. Just everything. 

This was American Airlines' logo for over forty years. I hear they've updated.

Subway maps come and go; this one is in the Museum of Modern Art. 

How about some comfortable clothing? They designed that, too. And some stunning silver jewelry.

.

They even designed a church. It is a lovely looking place, with a heavy plain altar ("God's table") and variable seating and this gorgeous silver.

Wait, I was telling you about the cups. The original design of the cup is shown in the white one on the righthand stack. The plastic flows smoothly, and so the top of the handle forms an opening in the top of the cup, and if you are a greedy North American with your coffee up to the top, it overflows and makes a big mess. Of course, a cool Italian would just have a bit of espresso in the cup, a demitasse, modestly and elegantly. The company that made the cups eventually put a bit of plastic at the top so people could have their giant cups of coffee, but Massimo says in the film that people are now learning that perhaps he was right in the first place, and they want the original look. 

Wow, I was so impressed... Watch the movie if you can! 

This might have been a normal week

I started this post days ago. It was my first "normal" week for a while!

First there was the beginning of school, the going-back hustle and bustle. Then came the film festival, which I semi-blogged, before going off to BC for most of the next week. When I came back we had two catastrophes at once: internet failure and bed bugs, which we think we picked up on holiday at the end of August. (We called in the big guns and have had no indication of a bug in the house since.)

Let's see... then what? Ah, the first week of October I was called to a jury panel, so I sat in a room with a hundred or two other people waiting for the wheels of justice to turn.

On the first day of my jury panel, I asked the man at the metal detector by the front door about knitting needles, and he seemed to suggest that non-metal ones would be okay. I asked the guy who was hanging around in some official capacity in the actual jury panel room and he told me no knitting needles. That was okay, because I had a 500-page novel to read, but the next day, having finished the book, I decided to call the office and ask again. The woman there said of course I could knit, but just bring "the flexible kind of needles."

So then, a hat on the good ol' 6 mm wooden circs. Ah, but yarn, what yarn do I even have? Things are still in a state of turmoil here and there (due partly to the lack of a "normal" week for some time) but I found a bag of miscellaneous balls of 4-ply that I once bought on eBay. I figured two strands of this held together with half a ball of leftover sock yarn would be about right, and cast on for this hat.

That took care of Wednesday (and the bag of scraps) and then on Thursday we all had to troop upstairs to the sixth floor to sit in a courtroom and perhaps be picked for an actual jury. I got one step closer, but didn't get picked ultimately. One week: a book, a hat and a lot of sudoku puzzles.

Also in the last little while, I finished a sock I started for Arthur an age ago. Lucky me, he tends to wear single socks, so I am not fussed about making another right now.

This summer I got on the bandwagon and made a honey cowl for Elaine. She picked the yarn, and she's even worn it once already. It was fun, but next time I will put an end-of-row marker right from the beginning, because you can see the "seam" line jogging around there. The picture is upside-down, and shows the earlier-knit bit at the top.

All together now:

My present project involves sewing together a bunch of scarves no one ever wears. A crazy old blanket is emerging.... I got a few scarves sewn together before I remembered various half-started squares blankets. Will dig out the squares and see what happens then!

Saturday sky

Today the sky is clear and wonderful. The moon is out at 5 pm, the trees are beginning to turn, and that old CN Tower is still poking up above everything. 

And cameras and cables and computers are all within reach. There may be a knitting post shortly!

The crazy way we do things

I assume I am not the only one who plans projects like this.

I had some extra yarn I'd bought for a cowl for Elaine, and I still had the receipt, so I took it back to the shop and swapped it for some lovely pale grey laceweight merino. So keen, I look through Ravelry for patterns. Lots of ideas, so many ways to do things, going from one scarf or shawl to another...

Finally I realise I own that perfect pattern, and have even begun to knit it with some other perfect yarn. I think I have about 3 inches done...

Will I now pick up that 3 inches and make the perfect shawl, or will I attempt to "quickly" do something with the new perfect yarn?

(Will I ever get organised to show you pictures of the cowl, a hat, a sock or two that I have knitted?)

Joe and Gabrielle

I've seen two more movies.

Tuesday was Joe: super brilliant, super miserable, based on a novel by Larry Brown.

Nicolas Cage plays Joe, a guy with some issues... He tries hard not to get too pissed off at people, but every once in a while he sets his dog loose on a nuisance or puts a cop in his place. He has an iffy job; pays his underlings cash for the probably illegal work they do; drinks and smokes too much; but kinda has a heart of gold. He takes on a young worker with even more issues, but of a different sort: he has a violent, drunken daddy, a sister who suddenly stopped speaking for some reason, a useless mom. He, too, has a heart of gold. As they say, he's on the fence: is he going to turn bad or escape the crap and do something worthwhile?

There's a lot of just awful stuff that happens in this movie. I wouldn't have chosen it myself, and would be careful who I recommended it to. But it was perfectly cast and acted, the settings were wonderful, and it certainly did not get sentimental or preachy about anything.

That guy's head was in the way through the whole dang film

Nicolas Cage and Tye Sheridan, already an award-winning actor at age 17, and the director, David Gordon Green, were at the theatre for Q & A after the movie, which is always a great bonus. A woman in the audience said she thought the movie was about the failure of hyper-masculinity in a failed America, which the director disagreed with. I think she was bang-on, actually.

Today I got to the cinema at 8 am to see Gabrielle, a lovely, gentle movie about a woman with William's syndrome (which I had never heard of) who falls in love with another mentally challenged member of her choir. She wants to be independent, have her own apartment and her own boyfriend, like her sister does. She is pretty resourceful and so happy a lot of the time, but gets lost when she strays off the usual route and is terrified by the noise of a smoke alarm.



It's a nice, slow movie with a lot of music and singing, and (*spoiler alert*) a happy ending. The director answered questions afterward, and we learned that the actress who played Gabrielle indeed has William's syndrome, but the man who played Martin, her "chum," is a professional actor. And that really was Robert Charlebois.

I kind of hope tomorrow's movie doesn't have anything to do with mental illness, but I'm not holding my breath. It's called A Touch of Sin and promises to be violent and crazy.

The Dog

This is the movie I saw yesterday. It's a doc about the real-life story behind Dog Day Afternoon, and so much more.

 

Lucky for me, there are clips of Dog Day Afternoon on YouTube, so I wasn't going in complete ignorance, because I was 15 when it came out and I never got around to watching it when I got older.

This guy, who calls himself the Dog, did a few crazy things in his life, but his main accomplishment was screwing up a bank robbery so badly that someone made a movie about it, and that was his claim to fame all the rest of his life.

The whole story is wild. Nice wife and two children; gay sex in the army in Vietnam; the whole Greenwich Village scene in the late 60s and early 70s; marrying men long before gay marriage was an issue; bank robbery; prison; infamy; cancer....

I wouldn't have chosen this movie if I'd picked my own tickets at TIFF this year, but I'm glad I ended up with it. Today, Joe.

It's a new month

I have been knitting more and more. I will even have a couple of things to show you in the next few days.

I started a hat last September. I remember trying to knit it in the lineup at the film festival, but didn't get very far because of my tennis elbow. I worked on it last week and now just have to finish off the top and sew a few ends in.

I also started a Honey Cowl. I know, everyone is doing it! I was in the yarn shop with Elaine and she picked out some nice yarn, so she gets a new fall cowl. I've knit up one ball and have three more. I think I'll only need two, though... but it's hard to see what it will be like wrapped around one's neck when it is jammed on a circular needle. I aim to finish this in September.

I also have knit a row or two on a sock I started a million years ago. That, too, can be finished off this month, I believe.

I'm sorry I have no knitting pictures for you now, but here is our most successful weird perspective picture from our holiday last week:

She will just pluck him up there. See how very alarmed and worried he looks. Yeah, okay, we still have work to do on this idea, but we are improving!

Cyber-cousins at the Falls

Niagara Falls. What a weird town.

We have been for day trips a few times over the years, but this last weekend Arthur and I stayed overnight to have a visit with 3 other mom/kid duos. These were some of the E-mail Mommies and their kids, the Cyber-cousins. The moms and I have been e-mailing since 1996, when we were all pregnant! When I went to New York in 2007 I met up with some of them. At that time Helen wrote a super write-up of what this group is and means. I have known these women for 17 years, but met 2 of them for the first time this weekend, and another for the first time since about 1999.

Three-quarters of us met at the hotel and wandered through a park to the Hard Rock Cafe for lunch. On the way the kids all took a zillion pictures of flowers. All doing the same thing, each in their own way. This was when Arthur first sighed that we should have brought the big camera. The fourth family joined us for lunch after battling traffic and we all had a good chat. It's weird... we all are quite familiar, though we'd never met. We end up having a lot more in common than just 16-year-olds.

After lunch, it was off to the Maid of the Mist. We have never done this before, but with only me and Arthur it seemed like half-price! And it was so cool, we will likely insist on doing it again one day with the whole family.

rainbow in the mist

Everyone gets a blue plastic poncho to keep them dry. This turns out to be necessary, in fact, as we did go into the spray! Here we are up close and personal with the American falls.

This is Maddie, who stayed drier than the rest of us. 

This is what she might see! Camera hidden under protective blue plastic!

Arthur, post boat ride, perhaps wondering what he has got himself into. Did I mention the three others his age were all girls?

Here we are: the slightly damp, accidentally colour-coordinated moms.

After our adventures, we had a bit of a chill-out in the hotel before setting off for dinner. The original plan was to go up the Skylon tower, get a great view and have a really expensive meal. But we figured that would be immoderate of us, so we went to Margaritaville! And perhaps indulged immoderately in teasing our children and making them accept pirate hats and balloon princess hats and swords and magic wands. They even got the crayons out after a while. 

The next morning people had to start on long drives home, long lines at the border and all that jazz, so things broke up around 11 am. I look forward to a meeting one day of all of us! There are about 20, including one in Australia and one in New Zealand. We'll have to do it soon before the kids start wandering off on their own! 

I'm not sure whether there was a morning train, but we had tickets on the 5:45 pm train, so we had a few hours to kill. 

I asked at the hotel how to get to Lundy's Lane and Drummond Street. Oh, the guy said, that will take maybe an hour to walk to! When he heard we were looking for a thrift shop though, he said we would come to one closer in if we just headed out on Lundy's Lane. So we trekked off through the touristy part of town, up the hill towards the 1812 battlefields and, we hoped, the thrift shop. The tourist centre is full of chain restaurants, "attractions" like Ripley's Believe it or Not and a wax museum, and hotels. We approached the area where the actual residents must spend time, but I still didn't see a bank or a grocery store. (I spent $4 to use an ATM in town!) We finally saw the shop the man in the hotel mentioned, after about half an hour, and noticed that it was exactly at Lundy's Lane and Drummond! Sheesh. 

I like to look at crockery and doodads in thrift shops but Arthur heads straight for the T-shirts. This time he found the holy grail of used T-shirts:

I got myself this cute little set (almost too cute and little; could be a challenge in the morning to get a spoon in the sugar bowl's wee opening) made in Occupied Japan. I love ceramic fruit and veg!

Finally we just diddled around town; we did some tasting in a hot sauce shop and then tried to get into the casino (no go; the bouncer kinda knew that Arthur was not 19) and eventually even walked to the train station. On our way we saw lots of old houses just waiting for someone to invest a load of money to fix them into nice B&Bs. And quite a few nice B&Bs, mostly full up. 

And a butterfly on a butterfly bush. 

It was great fun, really. Niagara Falls is a great place to go to look at a big waterfall, but after that, things get a bit weird. Eating and monsters will only entertain people for so long. Someone needs to come up with the next generation of amusements. But if you are with friends, even friends you have never met before, it is all good fun!

Sleepless Knights go to Niagara Falls

This past weekend Arthur and I went to Niagara Falls to meet some of his cyber-cousins. That is fodder for a whole different post, but this one is about our other travelling companions, the Sleepless Knights. 

We took the train from Toronto. It was okay. Arthur played games on his phone and the Knights just lounged around with a napkin. 

At last, Niagara Falls. We are waiting to go on the Maid of the Mist, and are looking across at the American falls. The knights did not actually get to look at the water thundering and pouring down beside us when we were on the boat because we didn't want them to get wet. They are an excitable lot at the best of times. 

After our boat trip, Arthur, the cousins, the e-mail mommies and I had dinner at Margaritaville. Sir Gawain would have loved it but he can not be trusted in a bar with fancy drinks and women on stilts, I believe.

We got the fancy hat, the lei, and the blue balloon sword (blown up and tied by the woman on stilts; ultimately left in the drawer of the hotel dresser to confuse future travellers) then got back to reading. 

Natural wonders are all very fine, but a good book is such a treat.

The Sleepless Knights were delightful companions on this trip. They are good at travelling and questing and all that. Their adventures are actually much more entertaining than mine and the people/ creatures/ damned dead that they run into are worth getting to know, for sure.

(Disclaimer: I actually bought this book; and then I entered a contest and won some book-related stuff. Some years ago, I attended the wedding of the publisher, but he did not force, compel nor pay me to take the knights to Niagara Falls.)

Sunshine and revolution

This past summer I was hanging around the book sale at our street party when one of the neighbours appeared, not with yet another John Grisham novel to donate, but with two huge, enormous, gigantic, brilliantly coloured posters.

They were amazing, and the woman who was running the sale and I quickly each handed over ten bucks and took charge of our posters without bothering anyone else with the information that they even existed. All's fair in such situations, indeed.

Mine was a bit ripped on the bottom, and in my excitement to show Stephen, I quickly unrolled it and ripped it even more. It is on crappy, cheap, old paper. There are traces on the back of paint from the printing process.

Can you guess who these happy people are? The happy handsome dudes, the happy guitarist and the happy astronaut? Is he really an astronaut, one wonders, or maybe a deep-sea diver?

They are all working happily together with these guys, Fidel and Che.

Enjoying the sunshine and the music and the bounty of the land and all that stuff, in poster-paint colours, in Cuba.

I think the guy below Che is Raul Castro. You can see an old picture of him here. At first we wondered why Shakespeare was on a Cuban poster.

My neighbour said she brought a few of these back from Cuba in the 1970s and these two were the last of her stash. I am so glad she figured it was time to pass them on.

I looked into framing this. It is about 3 feet by 5, so a piece of glass to cover it would be horribly heavy and atrociously expensive. I hemmed and hawed about it for some time, but finally just stuck it up with pins. I'm sure it has suffered graver troubles in its time. One day I will treat it properly. And now it makes me smile whenever I see it!

Saturday sky

I've been meaning to get back in the habit

 of a Saturday sky picture for ages. 

Tonight's sunset was just what I needed.

Finished! Finished something!

I knit a hat! I even sewed the ends in and everything, and it is done!
I asked Arthur to model it and he put it on his knee.

The brown is some handspun I got in exchange for a bunch of magazines, and the creamy colour and green is old stash, wool with a bit of viscose. Pattern (what? Mary used a pattern for a hat? Well, sorta) is the Basic Bulky Man Hat, but I didn't do the 4-point decreases at the top. Just the usual 8 decreases around a few times, down to 4 stitches to make a teeny i-cord bump.

It's so delightful to wear a double-thick wool hat in August.