Scientific Experiment

It all started last year at this time, when my daughter invited nine of her closest friends over for a birthday sleepover.  Everything was going great until the day before the party, when I got a gnarly case of Strep Throat.  Yeah, I know:  I think that one was Mother of the Year award number 6.  Rather than cancel/ruin Lindsay's party, Phillip bravely threw himself on the grenade and hosted all 10 little girls down in the living room, while I convalesced in an upstairs bedroom.  It worked, in that nobody came down with my crud.  It also entitled Phillip to some massive Karmic Payback.

In the interest of fair play, I handled this year's little girl birthday party SOLO.  We had a sleepover at a local hotel (the kind with a swimming pool and breakfast buffet - I may be slow, but I'm not dumb), while Phillip stayed home, grinning smugly to himself.

The girls were very well-behaved.  What you may not know about 10-year-old girls is that however demure and mannerly they may be in their normal habitat, when exposed to members of their own species, they become VOCAL.  And by that, I mean LOUD.  Way. Loud.  And High-Pitched.  There are some 10-year-old girls that only dogs can hear.

When you take the same 10-year-old LOUD girls to an acoustically perfect indoor swimming pool enclosure, you are setting yourself up for auditory discomfort.  When you stay in said enclosure with them for (I am not kidding) 3.5 hours, you are going to experience some temporary ringing at best, and permanent hearing damage, at worst. 

That's where the Scientific Experiment comes in:  As knitters, we are all familiar of the soothing and restorative powers of our work.  I wondered, (around the time my ears began to bleed) could knitting actually distract me from physical pain, as well as irritation?  Could working on a sweater relieve the discomfort inflicted by squealing little girls in a tiled pool room?  What choice did I have, but to try? My Observations:

Hour 1:    Okay, this is not so bad.  As long as I can keep the rhythm of my stitches consistent, the racket does, in fact, recede a bit from my focus.  Drop a stitch, however, and all bets are off.  Man, are they loud.  How can so much noise come out of such small people?

Hour 2:    My prediction was that by this point I would have half a sleeve, and the sound level would have receded from my consciousness to a dull roar.  Instead, I have 1/4 of a sleeve, and a headache.

Hour 3:    Things are looking up:  Either the small mermaids are beginning to tire/become hoarse, or I have begun to experience hearing loss.  I still only have 1/4 of a sleeve, having stopped to serve drinks and snacks.  Feeding them was probably a tactical error, in terms of their energy levels.

Hour 3.5:  I have triumphantly arrived at the end of the party.  Or at least that's what the clock says.  Extracting the reluctant merry-makers from the pool remains to be seen.

Overall, I would say that the party was a success.  The experiment proved that while nothing short of tarmac-approved airport hearing protection would have been appropriate, the knitting did help keep my nerves intact.  As a bonus, while Phillip was still somewhat smug, he was extremely sympathetic to my pain, and even poured me wine when I got home. 

Karmic Debt Settled.

Mischief Managed.

Sorry, what did you say?

A Name For The Baby

The baby in question is of course, not a real baby, but my book; heretofore referred to as "My Book", "The Book", or in moments of impending doom "The @%$#$O! Book".

The process of becoming a writer is much less predictable than the process of becoming a knitter, or at least it has been for me.  When I knit, I have a general degree of certainty that Yarn + Needles = Knitwear.  It may not be the knitwear that I intended, but I am pretty well guaranteed that with enough tenacity, and possibly wine, I will ultimately end up with a final product which is knitted. 

With writing, the equation seems to be a lot more ephemeral.  I often find that Time + Inspiration = Drivel.  And other times Deadline + Desperation + Crashing Hard Drive = Brilliance.

Such seems also to be the nature of naming books.  Back when I decided that what I really needed to do was write a book (sometime after deciding that I needed to design a sweater, but before deciding that I needed brain-enhancing vitamins), the title was one of the first ideas which suggested itself to me.  It was as organic as the designs themselves.  The name was perfect; it was descriptive, it was pithy, it was original.  When a publisher decided to actually make my book, it was also the first thing to go.  Apparently, there is a lot more to know about the naming of books than I knew.

Since my editor delicately informed me of the "New Working Title" of my project, its name has changed about 4 times that I know of, and probably more than that.  It seems that these things are decided by committees, or at least by more than one all-seeing human, and certainly not by anyone so lowly as the author.  I have hated every single name given to my book so far, until yesterday.  I so loathed the last one that I actually forgot it, which is probably for the best.  I was embarrassed to ask again what my own book is named, and I put it off for about two months.  When I finally summoned the courage to inquire, I received a whole new answer.  Thankfully, this one is much better, and I really hope it will stick. 

The whole experience with the name got me thinking about the nature of books and their covers, and of course, judging them thereby.  I realize now that the name given to my book is much less important then the guts inside of it, and the guts are much less likely to be changed at the publisher's whim.  As an experiment, I visited my favorite random name generator for a brainstorming session, which yielded some truly remarkable monikers.

If my book were:

A Tavern:                                       The Laughing Devil
A Fantasy Realm:                         Good Glimmering Barony
A Corporation:                              European Power Semiconductors
A Tree-Being:                               Madhazel
A Western Character:                  Edith "Bad Kid" Byrd
A Pirate Ship:                                The Dreaming Executioner
A Rampaging Giant Monster:    Gogospew, the Blasphemous Dweller of the Howling                                                                           Universe

So what's in a name?  Nothing.  And Everything.  On different hours and different days, my book could have been named any one of these, quite accurately. 

I'm dying to share the name of my book with you, and I promise that I will.  Not today, though, because the fact that they have finally chosen one I can live with means that telling the world prematurely could jinx it.  Also, how lame is it to make a big announcement that the baby has been named, and then CHANGE it later because somebody at the publisher had a different idea?  No, the day will come, and we'll all welcome my little monster into the world library with the appropriate publisher-sanctioned fanfare.  Until then we'll all just have to wait patiently for the arrival of little Wolfgang Nebuchadnezzar, and hope for the best.

The Sweater Gets Redder, and Other Developments

See?  Now it's way more of a red sweater.  I always think sweater tubes look so weird at this stage:  A testament to the many wonders of blocking, I guess.  It looks like something a boa constrictor would wear. 

My horses don't look much like the Dala horse I looked at for inspiration:
 

but they feel like her, so I guess that's enough for me.  Here is something I betcha didn't know:  It's danged hard to take pictures of your own hands while you are knitting something:

This is one of my attempts at a photo of binding off the top of a sleeve steek.  Doing it is way easier than writing down how, and photographing it is way easier than sketching it.  You may remember that my excuse for making this sweater is that I need to provide illustrations that support the techniques in my book.  The hope is that the illustrator who will actually be making the drawings has a clear idea of what I'm talking about.  So far I'm not sure which is harder; the showing or the telling.  I'm supposed to have all the pictures done on Friday, but true to knitting, this project has expanded to fit the time allotted to it.  I have no idea whether I'll make it or not.

Speaking of ongoing projects, today is the 10th birthday of one of my favorite people:
 

which means that while I wasn't looking, she managed to swallow a decade, whole.  I'm not very good at math, but Phillip explained to me last night that we have now been the parents of this particular smally for more than a quarter of our lives.  Quantifying things is hard when you are not good at math, but what this means to me is that if my life had only four phases so far, they would look like this:

1.  My own first 10 years, spent mostly running, jumping, singing, and knitting in trees.
2.  The second 10 years, spent acting on stage, railing ineffectively against various unfairnesses, and forgetting about knitting in favor of boys.
3.  The third 10 years, spent forgetting about other boys in favor of the one I married, and remembering about knitting.
4.  The last 10 years, since meeting this wee person. The time it took her to go from throwing up on me to rolling her eyes at me was a lot shorter than I expected.  She still looks cute in sweaters though, so I think we'll keep her, at least till adolescence.