Four days in Havana

Last winter, when it was cold and miserable, my friend and I started talking about going somewhere hot, where we would have no troubles or cares, and be warm! As negotiations continued, it turned out that neither of us really wanted to just be warm, and we wanted a holiday that would be more interesting than an all-inclusive at the beach. So, heck, let's go to Havana, Cuba!

Then assorted husbands went on assorted trips (Did I tell you about Stephen going to Japan for two and a half weeks in April, right into the middle of the film festival?) and various school things happened, and finally, we booked 4 days and 5 nights away.

Yeah, and I took over 300 pictures... They are mainly of buildings! I will try to give you a chronological whizz through our trip.

This was taken from the hotel room on the first morning. The sun is coming in from the sea; the railing there is around the hotel pool. Already overwhelmed with the colours!

We set out to walk to the old town. I think the fence is up because people are renovating, but it might just have been a fence. The detail of the carving along the top is lovely, but the green of the fence is lovely, too, so you get the whole thing and not a close-up. 

This is a completely odd place. There are something over 100 flagpoles, and a big plaza with revolutionary slogans on the walls, all facing the United States Interest Section, the old American embassy. Apparently they used to hold rallies here, especially during the Elián Gonzáles case; it is called the José Martí Anti-Imperialist Platform. I'd love to see it with flags flying. 

We continued our walk down the Malecón. You can see the buildings were once grand, and are now, bit by bit, being restored. Will Starbucks buy one and beautify it? 

I had heard about this seawall-road, and imagined it all wrong! It is a wide sidewalk beside the sea, indeed, but we had to dash across 6 or 8 lanes of traffic to get to it. The view is wonderful and the people watching lots of fun, but it is not a nature-lover's seawall. 

The view westward. The pale, low building with two towers on the right is the Nacional Hotel. The old stone foundations holding pools of scungy water just below the walkway... I can't tell you anything about that! 

Please note, no swimming or fishing. We saw loads of both, though. 

A cute pink Fiat 650. Oh, my, the cars might need their own day here. 

The cars I don't have any pictures of are the several Mercedes sedans that whooshed by us down the Malecón that first day. First a couple of motorbikes came along, sending everyone to the side of the road, then a police car or two and 5 or 6 big black Mercedes, carrying who knows whom? That was the one and only time we saw anything like that.

I can't show you everything in the old town at once, but I'll cover the Cathedral. 

Voilà, the cathedral. 

Very boring floors, I am sorry to say. Cuba did not have access to a lot of great stone in the 18th century and most of the walls are made of limestone and coral-bearing stone. Nice enough, but wears a lot faster than marble or granite! 

Three little stained glass windows. You can see a palm branch in the middle one. I really liked these simple geometric colourful tidbits. 

Of course we went up the tower. This is the roof of the church. 

Very rickety stairs up, big bells to dodge (not that they were ringing, but they were very large and the tower was made to fit them and not them plus tourists); not for the faint of heart. 

We wandered about town a bit more and found this, which we titled Riding the Chicken to Prosperity. You must click to enlarge. Look at her shoes, if you can. What is going on here? 

This is my friend admiring a doorway. Some things are all fixed up, but look at the sidewalk in front of her. I think it will be a while before Havana is overrun by American tourists. 

I'll end for today with a spot of colour again. We found this little boutique hotel, which I don't know the name of, and we had a drink in its courtyard. All yellow and blue, huge open skylight, plants, all very refreshing.

This is going to take some time. You've seen about half of one day. Yikes.

Even more movies

Finally today I can wrap up the last movies I saw at Hot Docs.

For the Record struck me as better than the blurb had led me to believe! It was interesting to hear about the people who do the jobs of court reporting, captioning for television and real-time transcribing of classes and talks for students and others. The contest about who is fastest was the grand finale of the movie, but if I were editing it, it might have been quite a different movie. (But of course, I am not editing it... ) It reminded me of Norma, our own knit-blogger steno-machine whizz.

The second movie I had to choose from a short list was Shoulder the Lion. Weird. Blind photographer, musician with tinnitus and a visual artist who sustained horrible head injuries in her boxing career! Her art went from this -- nice, yellow and red and blue, to this -- red and black and skeletons. You can hear the grating soundtrack and see the jostling text in the trailer at the first link. Interesting and I'm glad I saw it, but not a fun movie, really!

The next was really a fun movie! All the Time in the World is the story of a family with three small children who went and lived in the woods of the Yukon for 9 months. They all came to the Q&A after the show and were completely delightful. All filmed by the mom, with occasional help from other family members and something called Trusty Tripod in the credits. Highly recommended.

My last movie was Haida Gwaii: On the Edge of the World. Lots of stunning vistas, of course, and a look at the community there who work together, Haida and non-Haida. I have a couple of connections to the islands and would love to go back! This won the Best Canadian Feature Documentary Award at the fest. Super, go see it if you can!

And now I have to go pick out a few choice photos to share with you from my trip to Cuba! Yes, a friend and I spent four days in Havana and I came back with over 300 pictures. Gimme a moment here.

More movies

Well, it is a good thing I wrote a few things down when the Hot Docs festival ended! It's been only two weeks, but my mind has been otherwise occupied.

I saw 11 movies altogether. Most of them seem to have involved music or comedy, which is always a good thing.

Mavis! is about Mavis Staples, who has been singing gospel and pop and everything for decades! There is a trailer here. It was toe-tapping and enchanting and made me want to sit down and chit-chat with the grande dame herself.

Lowdown Tracks was also about music-making, but the musicians it dealt with are homeless or transient or just plain poor, and in Toronto. Some of the people were working out drug problems, several had been abused as children, most were regaining some stability. (I'm sure there are many more street musicians with similar stories who are not as articulate as these.) There was talk of a record for sale, but it was going to be a bit complicated and I'm not sure how that has progressed.

Monty Python: Meaning of Live was, duh, about Monty Python and their 2014 live shows at the O2 in London. They joked that they needed to pay someone's mortgage, but really they needed to pay off lawyers after a brouhaha over Spamalot. A trailer is here, and of course, the Mick Jagger ad for the show is here. It was great to see a bunch of old guys reliving their youth on stage! And since I had seen the old movie the week previously, it was double the fun.

I think on the same day as seeing Python, I saw Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead,  a movie based on this book about the National Lampoon. I was not a great fan of the magazine and didn't know that much about it, but I had to pick up a couple of extra movies (I *had* to) from a limited selection, and this seemed better than a movie about the Taser. It turned out to be full of completely awful humour, really funny awful humour. We all cracked up at things that were shockingly politically incorrect. Totally offensive and fun.

There are still more to go, but enough is enough for one day, and I am too tired right now to find you any pictures. Lame, I know.

A quick look at the scarf

It has, I think, finally properly become spring. This morning I looked at the forecast and cut my solid green yarn because it looks like even nighttime temperatures will be above +3ºC from here on in.

On your left, winter; on the right, spring

I did have to go out to get more green, though, a week or two ago. You can see that it is more vibrant than the previous. I don't think it will matter much in the final riot of colour. As the temperatures dip in November, I'll have that nice bright green to look forward to. 

You can see a couple of warm teaser days there before winter gave us its (almost) last blast

Last year at the Hot Docs fest, I worked outside in a tent for a day or two, and needed hats and mittens (though I see I didn't blog about the misery of those shifts). Now it is lovely and sunny, but you can see here that last week, during the first days of the festival, we got a few cold days again! 

I have been seeing two films a day for a while now, and have another two today. Getting worn out, I must say. I'll report back soon about more movies, a bit of knitting and future plans.

It's Hot Docs time again

Every year at the end of April, Toronto is all documentaries, all the time. At least, my Toronto is! I am volunteering again this year, and I had a package of tickets so I will see about 9 or 10 movies this year, I think.

The volunteers get to rush the industry screening of the opening night film, so I got in to see Tig on Thursday. Comedienne gets cancer (on top of everything else), becomes famous. Life goes on, in its usual crazy way.

All photos taken from the Hot Docs site

I was glad to see that she was coming for a Q&A after the show, so then I knew it was more likely to be a happy cancer movie than a sad cancer movie. It was a great story about a really miserable year, and indeed it does have a happy ending! I told Elaine the basic outlines of the story and she asked how long the movie was, because "that's a lot of plot for 90 minutes." Super all round. I can't find a trailer, but here is an interview with Tig at the fest.

My next movie was an oldie but goodie. Pleasure at Her Majesty's is a movie made in 1976 documenting a show to benefit Amnesty International by the Monty Python folk, Peter Cook, Dame Edna, and many more British comic geniuses.

You can apparently see the whole thing on YouTube, but if you click here you should just get the Lumberjack Song (with a bit of a duel beforehand). I wanted to applaud the acts in the middle, but it was, of course, just a movie... Later this week I am seeing Monty Python: The Meaning of Live, so I can see how things progressed! Shall I see the Dead Parrot sketch almost 40 years later?

Today I took the kids to see Being Canadian. They have a web page where you can watch the trailer, which looks a bit dumb, but the movie is not especially dumb -- just quite funny! Famous and not-so-famous Canadians talk about history, maple syrup, hockey, insecurity, curling and donuts.

And Mounties. It will thrill and amaze you, and you can already download it from iTunes, apparently!

So far, so good! I have two more volunteer shifts to work and a few more docs to see; Stephen is in Japan; I think the kids are getting fed and getting to school, so it's all just fine.

How's the weather been?

The temperature scarf is steadily coming along, row by row.

It's now been one whole season, from Winter Solstice to Spring Equinox, and this is what I've got.

It fades off into the distance... 

Getting very long for a quarter of a scarf, I must say. 

That is about February and March. The dark days of winter were really dark, as I had to use my "-15ºC and below" yarn almost every day for a while there. You can see things have lightened up a bit recently, though. 

We had the Tease Day a week or two ago, when it got above +10 for a bit. People were out in shirt-sleeves, but it didn't last. Today it even snowed a bit! I am really looking forward to using more of that yellow, I tell you!

Tailspinning

I started this Tailspin shawl when I was out in BC at the beginning of February. Nice garter stitch with a bit of excitement once in a while. Of course, a top-down shawl that starts small and grows is always so fun at the beginning! "Whee, I am zooming along and will have this finished in no time."

The pattern calls for leventy-million colours, and I just wanted to use two. The white is some Rowan Fox Fibre cotton I recently bought from a fellow Raveler, but it must be about 30 years old, if I know my yarn history right. The blue is "upcycled." I once bought a Rowan Denim hand-knitted cardigan on Ebay, which I sort of knew wouldn't fit me. Elaine wasn't interested, so this blue is from the sleeves. (And taking apart someone else's knitting, especially in this yarn which shrinks and tightens up when washed, is not much fun.)

After a while, I thought the blue and white was not as great as I'd thought. I thought it looked like an industrial tea towel, and Stephen thought maybe a prayer shawl. And then there's the blue and white country kitchen.

Some vintage dishes I saw last weekend

Nice enough, but not quite the look I was after.

So I threw in a ball of dark navy, to at least zing things up a bit, if not make me into a French sailor.

I had a ball of Twilley's dark denim, which I bought in Cambridge in 2005! Time to be put into a shawl, for sure.

Unfortunately, I didn't read the pattern properly and put the dark blue triangle right on top of the previous one! Didn't notice for many rows thereafter, and no way I'm ripping back. More zing, I figure. 

My next trick was to jiggle things a bit to end up with a white triangle. 

The rows are now about 450 stitches, so I am making no promises about when this will be finished! Slog-o-rama! I am on my 4th ball of the white, and will likely get most of the yarn from two sleeves into this.

It will be a giant, scallop-edged tea towel, perhaps.

And enough of that for now. I will tell you what I did this past weekend.

Arthur is looking into universities for next year. (Yes, he used to be cute and 8 years old, and now he is 18 and thinking of leaving the nest! Still cute, though.) So at the beginning of the school March break he and Stephen went to Ottawa, and last Thursday he and I set off to a couple of other places in southern Ontario.

Of course, as well as universities, we had to check out the secondhand shops. So I saw those blue and white cups above in a very lovely junk shop in Peterborough, along with this table of coloured pyrex. Oh, my!

The river there had been frozen over until quite recently, and now it is thawing and making these great stripes of ice, slush, water, whatever. Like agate or something! Stunning. 

We travelled by train, and it was generally pretty boring, but on the way home I noticed the woman across the aisle was knitting! Kinneared her... 

And that is what I've been up to lately.

Small thrills

Today I am cutting the yarn I use on the Temperature scarf for the lowest temperatures. Nothing below -15ºC is forecast for the next week, and I'm hoping that's the end of it for the season!

These lists

This is the list left over from January 2014. 

1. second mitten (Can take this off now!)
2. Malabrigo scarf
3. Botticelli
4. Sunday Best
5. that beautiful golden shawl you might not have seen but I have knitted about an inch on it

And this is what I added in January 2015. 

1. Temperature scarf. This is ongoing and won't be finished till Dec 20, 2015.
2. I started Samen over the holidays. (Done!)
3. Those Kaffe Fassett squares. A finite project, one would think, but you know what happens when my attention is diverted.
4. I have one sock done for Elaine and one done for Arthur and they both need to be pairs. (Elaine's done)
5. I have a number of bits of a blanket that have to be dealt with. I was going along just fine, and then some breeze blew me off course. 

So our new and improved list:

1. Malabrigo scarf
2. Botticelli
3. Sunday Best
4. that beautiful golden shawl you might not have seen but I have knitted about an inch on it
5. Temperature scarf. This is ongoing and won't be finished till Dec 20, 2015.
6. Those Kaffe Fassett squares. A finite project, one would think, but you know what happens when my attention is diverted.
7. I have one sock done for Arthur and it needs a mate.
8. I have a number of bits of a blanket that have to be dealt with. I was going along just fine, and then some breeze blew me off course. 
9. And we have to add in a new project: Tailspin. I'm loving it, but I need to carry the instructions around and markers, so it's not knit on constantly. 

Now really, #4 up there is never going to get knit. I have a lovely lot of yarn, and a fancy-schmancy pattern, but no patience for such things. And you know that such a shawl just gets scrunched up around your neck and no one can see the delicate loveliness. I will do something nice with the yarn, but it's hard to say that that shawl is a WIP.

Sunday Best, #3 and the bits involved in #8 are, in my mind, going to be joined up to become a nice blanket, and some other yarn will be used to make me a cotton sweater of some sort. I was making Sunday Best with 3 dyelots of Denim and lost track over the years which was what, I might have used some for other projects, and it's just too hard to recover. I had a baby in mind at one point for a wonderful cabley blankie, but he is almost a year old now and ended up with another blanket! Up in the air. 

So, we will see what I take up now that my mitten is finished. I suspect it will be Arthur's sock, but wait and see!

Another off the list

The lovely golden mittens are done! Really, it doesn't take much time to make a mitten, even one on little needles, with cables, and trying to match the first one. So, a year of waiting and a few days of knitting, and here are my pretty mitts. Unfortunately, it is still too cold for nice, light, wool mitts. (I have a pair of these.)

How cold is it, you ask?

There is one little stripe of "hovering around zero" green in the last week. I think we got up to -3º or so. Mostly the darkest, purplest blue, signifying less than -15º. I never did get a colder colour, but it has been below -20 some nights.

The last two months. They say the cold will last for weeks more; I am sad we didn't book a week in the Caribbean for March break!

A small accomplishment and big passings

First of all, let's look at a pair of socks I finished!

These are the cute little anklets for Elaine, in school uniform burgundy. (They really are darker, but it's a wretched flash picture...) It's not really ankle sock season, though, since it's been -15ºC or so for some days! But it's something off my master list, so that's nice to get them done.

I don't actually have pictures of most of the other knitting I've been doing, but I'll work on that. At least with the cold, it's been pretty sunny.

Last fall I was sort of out of sorts and didn't feel like explaining here, but now I will say my sister-in-law was diagnosed with cancer in May and passed away in October. She died a week before her 56th birthday, way too young, and it all happened so fast. So, that explains why my brother got a whole big sweater for Christmas! And why he and his sons spent Christmas here. And so on...

But, one continues on. Then early this month my sister phoned to say my mom had been taken to emergency, her heart wasn't working very well, they'd taken her back home and she wasn't expected to live through the night.

It's slightly churlish to complain about a 94-year-old dying in their own bed with their family around them, without pain and peacefully, but still, it's a shock and the end of something. Her obituary is here.

My brother, his son and I flew out to BC the next day, with the usual winter weather-related catastrophes: cancelled flights, closed highways, long drives...

Lots of relatives arrived over that weekend and we had a get-together to talk about her, we learned some stories about my dad's attempts at courtship and got caught up with people we don't often visit with. It's curious to me how many of the men in the family are really good at playing pool, for example.

We lived on a pig farm in the Cotswolds in 1965

It was really good to meet up with everyone; I'm sorry we didn't pack up the kids and all go, but I hope we can go to a future gathering.

I am looking forward to a calm and non-stressful few months, now, please.

Just popping in

This morning I looked at the temperatures to knit into my scarf, and I have to use 2 strands of my -15ºC yarn at once. The high yesterday was -19!

Pictures and a bit of catch-up to come.

What a lot of stitches

Samen is done.

Well, I do still have to sew in a dozen ends, but I'll get to that this evening. 

Really.

That is not a baby shoe, but a proper size 7 or 8 adult shoe. Kind of a long wingspan, which is great!

Wedges of stocking stitch with a few eyelets to add excitement.

The last garter stitch chunk used up last bits of all the colours.

I even got some of the beautiful blue in on the cast-off row. The instructions for the cast-off are perfectly clear: k 2 tog tbl, then put the stitch back on the left-hand needle and do it again. I was tbl-ing along just fine, until I realised I was purling instead of knitting! No way I was undoing this... enough is enough! And it is fine. It's almost noon and it's -17º, so a big woolly scarf is just what I need!

Loving all the colour combinations!

A glitch overcome

I knit my two rows on my temperature scarf this morning, and thought, "Meh."

I've been worried since about Day 1 that the decrease stitch should be purled on the wrong side, so that it makes a nice sharp line up the scarf. And since I've been working on Samen and making M1R and M1L increases, I was not totally satisfied with my increases on this. I didn't necessarily want to do M1R and M1L, but I wanted to do something other than what I was doing. And, you know, I was still using a bit small needle. So, I ripped out three weeks worth of scarf, reminding myself that I have 49 more to go and I should get it sorted now instead of being dissatisfied while it just gets longer and longer.

Old garter chevrons:

New ones, all knit today! Sharp decrease line, yo increases, and I moved up to a 6mm needle.

As you can see, it has got much bluer, that is, colder! Those indigo bits near the top mean it was below -15ºC, at least overnight. Not much green these days, though yesterday's high was -0.2º, so I got to do some green today. Kind of looking forward to the yellows of +10º!

Samen is almost finished. If I hadn't spent all my knitting time today on this, it'd be done, I'm pretty sure. So, maybe tomorrow!

Plan A

Let's see now, how shall I deal with this over-abundance of projects on the go? From the lists I posted a couple of days ago, I will cull the "likely" things and start with them!

Samen is going steady and I'll finish that before picking up anything else. The rows are now interminable; it must come to an end soon.

Then it will be a toss-up between the mitten and the two socks. I just have to do one of each! It might be a bit much to do them all, one after the other, but I will endeavour to do one or two of them.

And you know what? That is all I'm going to commit to right now! The way I get into trouble is by planning and promising too much, so I'll just stop there.

(I will say, however, that I took a trip to Fabricland the other day and got myself a giant pillow form, which needs the finished Fassett squares to cover it. So that will be a large reminder to get back to those.)

Pictures of the temperature scarf coming soon: I had to add two more cold blue colours!

My Samen

When I finished the grey sweater -- lots of plain knitting in the round with a bit of action here and there -- I just had to move to something still easy (because Christmas) but colourful! So I had a wee bit of fun collecting up some fingering and laceweight yarns to make Stephen West's Samen.

It is a plain ol' shawl, garter stitch mostly, increasing at the centre and at the edges. But the thrilling bit is that every once in a while you work short rows on only one side, which makes a long, asymmetric scarf, and the second thrilling bit is that you use five colours, mixing them two by two, so using AB, BC, CD, DE and then EA, before starting all over again.

Since I did this all on the spur of the moment, I didn't have nicely graduated colours but I did manage to gather enough to get a good start.

I ran out of the orange (colour A) halfway through its second bit, so now A and D are very similar. Also, the one I chose for E is very dark. The whole thing makes me think, "Yeah, it's good, getting out of my comfort zone." I think the orange and the blue are marvellous and I wish I hadn't run out of orange. And I'm going to run out of blue! I have sparkly blue, and somewhere I have a teeny bit of navy Kidsilk Haze that might work.

See, thrilling, right? The suspense is killing me.

Around again

I was wondering about knitting goals for 2015 and looked back at my first post of 2014.

Let's just take a look at that year-old list:

1. second mitten  {oh, still to do!}
2. green sock   {got both of them done, yay me}
3. Elaine's socks  {done like dinner!}
4. the cotton shawl with the miserable edging   {yessirree, done!}
5. Malabrigo scarf  {it makes me sneeze! and I need the pattern with me so it's not subway knitting, but I shall persevere}
6. Botticelli {Oh, I want this! and don't have toooo much more to do}
7. Sunday Best  {This deserves a whole multi-paragraph explanation}
8. that beautiful golden shawl you might not have seen but I have knitted about an inch on it  {yeah, right}

So now. We could just take out the finished items from that list and get this new list:

1. second mitten
2. Malabrigo scarf
3. Botticelli
4. Sunday Best
5. that beautiful golden shawl you might not have seen but I have knitted about an inch on it

However, there are new things to consider!

1. Temperature scarf. This is ongoing and won't be finished till Dec 20, 2015.
2. I started Samen over the holidays. As is the way with top-down shawls, the rows are getting longer and longer, but I am enjoying the garter simplicity and the sneaky stocking stitch wedges. 
3. Those Kaffe Fassett squares. A finite project, one would think, but you know what happens when my attention is diverted.
4. I have one sock done for Elaine and one done for Arthur and they both need to be pairs. 
5. I have a number of bits of a blanket that have to be dealt with. I was going along just fine, and then some breeze blew me off course. 

Now, just leave this with me for a bit and I'll get all organized and sorted and arranged, get back to you with pictures and a plan. For one thing, I want that second golden mitten by March, when I will put aside my big winter mitts for something lighter!

Oh, look over there, pretty!