Now Norma Knits

I Used to Read

I used to be a voracious reader. We had no books at home, or hardly any (I am not exaggerating about this), but when I entered first grade (we had no kindergarten), I was determined to be reading at an 8th grade level. How could that be? What was I reading? How did I learn? My mother, a young widow with four children ages 5 and under, was too busy trying to be the town clerk (in our home -- a position she took over from my father when he died), grow a garden, keep a house up by herself, and literally just trying to survive, to ever read to us. I might have been reading to my siblings, but I don't remember doing it. And again, how did I learn? It's a mystery.

My nose was in a book close to 24/7 until I stopped pleasure reading for a period of time in my late 20s. I was a young mom, I was working full time, trying to remain fit, going to lots of canoe races and such, and producing 500 pages of transcript a week. There was no time for pleasure reading.

At some point I started to resent that, and so I made a rule to myself: After all the work was done, and when I went to bed, I would read every night for at least a couple of hours. I did. And I would go to sleep at 2 a.m. I kept that up for many, many years. A couple or three decades, even. 

But now I hardly ever read. 

That is not really accurate. I read a ton. But it's almost all on the internet, and it's almost all either news or spoof news or little snippets of mostly nothing of any substance. No novels. No in-depth magazine articles, no investigative journalism, no biographies, no treatises on ancient history or gardening or health or living the green life. It's sad, but nothing seems able to hold my interest anymore. 

I got the Kindle, and I have read more since I got the Kindle than I have for a long time, but I still have trouble finishing anything. I'm certainly buying a lot more books (it's so easy to make that click and lay down your 10 bucks for a Kindle book), so at least I am doing my part to help the industry. I tried listening to books, and I got an audible.com account. They put me to sleep. 

I have tried several different genres. Right now, my reading list includes:

The Land of the Painted Caves, Jean Auel

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

When Everything Changed:  The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, Gail Collins

The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee, Sarah Silverman

The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett

The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language, Melvyn Bragg

Dead or Alive, Tom Clancy

The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee

I'm somewhere in the midst of each one of these. A fairly eclectic collection, wouldn't you say? But none of them can hold my attention. I do not feel the excitement of reading anymore. I read something and think, "Yawn, yawn. Been there, done that. Trite, formulaic, predictable, I know already what the ending is going to be," etc.

[Special Abigail story I have to add in here: Abigail was a rather late learner in some things, reading included in that list. We just had to be patient, and she would extremely suddenly "get it." She did not seem to learn things methodically, incrementally, but would just go from 0 to 60. For two years, it seems, she could not learn to tie her shoes. Then one morning she got up, announced, "I have figured it out," and tied her shoes. Same thing with riding a bike and, it turns out, reading. And on the day when she finally learned to read, she could read just about anything. But when that happened, she was sitting in her car seat in the car. I was driving. She said, "I thought I would feel really different when I could read. But I don't."

I laughed at the time (without letting her see my laughter), and I laugh every time I think of that moment. I think she thought bells and whistles would go off. I think she thought sparks would fly and fireworks would go off. She described that she thought the world would change colors and a literal door would open and everything would look different. I think she was defining orgasm at age 6. I also think she thought that I and her dad had really misled her about what a wonderful thing reading is. I think she experienced what she had been hoping for and waiting for the first time she saw a Shakespeare play with me in England when she was 8. For her, that was the moment when everything changed colors and sparks flew and a key had unlocked a door.]

Anyway, back to the topic at hand:

Have I used up all my reading brain cells? Have I developed late-onset ADHD? Attention and focus have certainly never been an area of deficit for me, and that is rather an understatement.

I did finish The Help by Kathryn Stockett not too long ago. I loved it.

I thought I had my love of reading back. But nope. Like Abigail back when she was so young, when I start something new I get excited and hopeful, but then it fizzles. I keep waiting and wishing and looking for something more, and then I give up, never finishing it. 

Where has the pleasure gone?

And right now, a few author friends who have sent me books to review are getting a horrible sinking feeling in the pits of their stomachs.*

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*But don't worry, friends. I will get a grip on it again. I hope. ;-)

 

Well, It's Wednesday. Time for A List.

1.  The Lee Ann Stash Sale is behind us, and with the exception of a certain buyer that all of my Facebook friends already know about (no, it's most definitely not you Mel! bahaha), it was all good. Very good! And I hope that one little bit of unpleasantness is truly behind us. Remains to be seen, I suppose. Sigh.  

2. But thankfully, in contrast to that, all the other buyers were pure joy, and ESPECIALLY a new blog reader from Burlington (Hi Cecilia!) who bought two lots of the sock yarn. When I noticed that she was from Burlington, I offered to delete the shipping charges and deliver the yarn to her, since I'm down there all the time anyway. Well! I did that, and what a coincidence, what a story and what a connection we have!!! She needs to read captions -- I provide captions! And I explained to her the little-known fact that anyone who needs CART can and should request it -- for classes, speeches, theater -- what have you. It just so happened that I had only just barely come from picking up my new business cards, and she got the first one out of the box. She told me I had opened up a whole new world to her. It was a perfectly wonderful and sweet story to counteract the sour experience from the couple of days previous.

3.  I did my second run in the Couch to 5K program yesterday. It was great, but not super-great. Cardiovascularly I was not truly challenged, but there was pain in my feet, legs and hips, and so I strove to run slowly and pay very close attention to my form. YES I HEAR YOU! I'm going to get some new shoes and get them properly fitted. "Properly fitted" with air quotes. Because I have done that umpteen times before, and "properly fitted" when you have arches as high as mine and feet as tender as mine is perhaps a relative term. This is a problem indeed. But we shall try again and we shall go and spend more money on more running shoes. Why not! It's only money! Sigh again.

4.  The Couch to 5K podcast is simply awesome. I love the music choices for their tempo and pleasantness, and I love the nice British lady saying, "well done!" and ... well, the weather was absolutely gorgeous yesterday and it was such a pleasure to be outside that almost nothing could be wrong, and the time flew by. Except that pain in my... oh, never mind. 

5.  Then I did a more challenging bit of Pilates than I did the other day, and it was not quite as boring as the first one.

6.  I'm really trying not to be a malcontent here. Work with me, will ya?

7.  Mr. Jefferies wishes to express his disdain with the Pilates, too. WTF am I doing on the floor on a mat and standing and doing things like pumping my arms if I'm not intending to play with him? It makes absolutely NO SENSE WHATSOEVER. And so he licked the salt off my toes when I was doing standing stretches and he grabbed my fingers when I was doing those flutter pumpy things with my arms. And he was quite put out when I whispered "no." He went to his mat and glared at me for the duration.

8.  The Pilates definitely took away some of the pain. So I am becoming a believer, and maybe with continued practice -- if I can take the boredom of it all -- it will help to balance out the running pain enough that I can continue. Maybe. 

9. Speaking of British, one of the lecturers in my remote CART job yesterday morning had the most DELIGHTFUL heavy, thick-like-treacle-on-a-cold-day Yorkshire accent. She clearly comes from so deep in Yorkshire that she is probably not from the land at all, but from somewhere out at sea. I was completely charmed, Anglophile that I am, though I had to really work to think, at times, WHAT THE HELL IS SHE SAYING?! 

10. And speaking of even more British, I've been spending some of my leisure time watching the Chuders -- I mean The Tudors.  I'm still in Season 1. Abigail watched the first episode with me. Her observation at the end:  "I don't like him." [referring to Henry VIII.]  I informed her, "You're not supposed to."  But it is definitely good entertainment for me.  

11. Abigail's boyfriend Jeremy took this photo of Mr. Jefferies and had this puzzle made from the photo, then sent the picture to me to include in the blog. Isn't it sweet?

And last, but definitely not least:

11. Mr. Jefferies also wishes to inform everyone that he has REALLY MISSED HIS LONG WALKS. Even though it's Mud Season here, and it can be less than pleasant to walk in the mud and the deep puddles and up and over and around the giant piles of snow down St. Albans's sidewalks that are in various states of disrepair, there is now enough dry land and roadway that we can actually get out and walk if we choose our route carefully. It represents FUN! and FREEDOM! and OMG, all the wonderful smells and the birds and the squirrels and the peeeeeeeeeoplllllllle!

12.  It's sort of acting a little bit like SPRING! REJOICE!

 

I'm Blate, I'm Blate.... For a Very Important....

Oh, never mind. I'm blogging late. Trying to be funny. Not happening. Whatever. 

So... I've been sore, and trying to avoid knitting because of that. What a PAIN, literally. It's because I know no moderation. You already know this about me. I have TIME. I KNIT. I forget to take a break, I forget to stop, I forget to stretch, I forget to... well, I was going to say I forget to eat, but that would be a lie. I never forget to eat. I wish that would happen once in a while, but that is never a worry over here. So I don't notice that it's hurting while I'm doing it, but when I stop, and when I'm trying to sleep or even after I have slept, OUUUUUUUUCH, pangs of hurt and/or deep-tendon- and back-, and deep-muscle aches. 

You don't need to tell me, "WELL then, STOP DOING THAT." I already know. And you certainly don't need to be a pain in my ass by telling me I'm knitting wrong. I get it. Yes, I knit English. I am a thrower. And yes, maybe you are another style of knitter, but stop getting up my nose about it. Because I don't believe you. Entire cultures knit the way I do, and entire cultures knit full-time and maybe they hurt and maybe they don't, but it is not WRONG. It is just the way I knit, it's the way I enjoy knitting, and I'm too set in my ways to change. Plus, I don't want to!  

My knitting physical stresses are added to by my professional physical stresses and (in spurts) my exercise stresses and my gardening activities' stresses, and all day long, day in and day out for 30 years or so, I am pounding away on my forearms and elbows and shoulders. I suppose something's gotta give. The damage is done, and the damage is deep, and from time to time it flares up in a very big way.

So just shut up already; I do not believe you that changing my way of knitting, given all that, is going to change whether I experience pain. I'm 51 years old, I've been over-using my hands and my forearms and my elbows and my shoulders for a long time, and they are kind of a mess. Knitting in a different style (I've tried) only makes them a different kind of mess and just slows down my knitting to an awful, horrid, putrid, unenjoyable (and yes, just as painful -- actually more painful) crawl. I consider myself lucky that I don't have arthritis -- only muscle and tendon and joint pain. I gave up kneading my own bread years ago for this very reason. Knitting, stenoing, typing, lifting weights, riding a bike, using the computer mouse or tap-pad, using a garden spade or weeding -- they all use my forearms and hands and wrists, and they're tiiiiiiiiiired and they need a ressssssssst. (And now I've got Lilly Von Schtupp in my head. Thank you.)

One person hilariously claimed that I was stupid and I was knitting WRONG ALL WRONG, and that in her highly intelligent and superior [and the only way to knit] method, there was NO MOVEMENT of her hands or her elbows or her forearms. No use of those muscles and tendons or joints whatSOEVER. No USE of those muscles and tendons and joints of the hands and wrists and forearms and elbows! This is really the kind of magic I am looking for right now! Disney fairy mind-controlled knitting! No hands or arms or elbows or shoulders needed! I wish.

I was going to say just F.O.A.D., but that would be rude, so I won't. Well, I will to a couple of people, but not to you. I know, RIGHT?

Ahem. *taking off cranky pants now* 

I am trying to heal, so as much as I wanted to knit yesterday -- because I truly have THE BUG and I truly want to see David's sweater finished and my mother's sweater finished, so that I can work on two other sweaters I want to work on -- well, it's just [assume Dana Carvey's voice in his George H.W. Bush impression] not gon' happ'n. Instead I watched a lot of Eddie Izzard on my computer. And I rewatched Julie and Julia again on the telly, just because it was there. My lack of the ability to figure out the TV remote, and/or the ability to figure out what the hell is on, are epic and pathetic at the same time. I really do want to figure that out someday.

Nah, I really don't. And anyway, by the time I do, the technology will be obsolete. Not worth the effort. 

But I have been doing some more decluttering and emptying of shelves and bins. I've got more piles of stuff to go to various charities, and I've listed some more of my yarn stash on eBay.

Rowanettes, activate!  

There is some Rowan Cork, perfect for knitting the Log Cabin Socks in Handknit Holidays:

And some Scottish Aran Tweed, the same yarn that I used to knit my Garter Yoke Cardi that is featured in my banner above. If you are small or extra-small, this is enough for a cardi of the same type:

I've also got some random balls of Felted Tweed that I haven't gotten around to listing yet, but I will this afternoon. Perfect for lots of little mitts or a stripy sweater:

Go have a look. And a heads up: I had an "oops" moment with the Magpie Tweed, and found two more skeins of it. I THOUGHT I had more. I found it in a different bin. And so I've had to list it separately. 

There will also be a sweater's worth of Jo Sharp Silkroad Aran Tweed added this afternoon:

But first, I gotta eat. (see above)

CFLs are a Big Lie

CFLs are propaganda at its best. I'm not sure who they are supposed to be helping, but the way they are being shoved down our throats, it must be big business or something. I'm fed up with them, and I'm not gonna take it any more.

I try to live green. I really do. I do everything I can, but these freaking light bulbs are such a ripoff. And to top it off, I broke one the other day, and I got all freaked out about the mercury. In my house. On my hands. Probably up my nose and down my lungs.

How can that be green or healthy, in any way whatsoever?

I have tried to feel so good about buying them and replacing all my light bulbs, but the feeble light they give off is just getting me down. The package says, "To replace a 60-watt bulb! Only uses 14 watts [or whatever it is -- I have not fact-checked this for complete accuracy, as you can probably guess.] of electricity!"

Then you get it home and it's like a tiny candle's worth of gray, cold light, but without the warmth and charm of a candle, that only struggles unconvincingly to turn on. It's only GIVING you 14 watts worth of light, NOT 60. It's all a big lie. You can't read with them. They're unreliable even about turning on. They burn out often and early, even though the boxes say they last practically indefinitely. It's all a bunch of BIG LIES. I've HAD it with these stupid bulbs. Had it! 

No amount of Vitamin D capsules is gonna help this.

There. I said it and I'm GLAD. 

Facebook and Twitter, They Have Their Good Moments (Wherein "Moment" is Defined as "A fleeting microsecond.")

Over time, I have grudgingly decided that Facebook has my vote as a thing that can be useful and also can provide some entertainment. Here are a few reasons why:

1. I found The Oatmeal there. (10 Things You Need to Stop Misspelling) Res ipsa loquitur. Good Lord.

2. I found The Oatmeal there. (10 Things You Need to Stop Tweeting) Too much truth in this. 

3. Oatmeal. (All About Irony and What It's Not) Made me laugh.

4. A whole new appreciation for OATMEAL and apples.  (What it's like to own an Apple product.)

5. Oh, all right. I'll stop with The Oatmeal. Now we shall move on to title names of Facebook pages that are ironic and inadvertently hilarious. Such as:  Grammar matters. "THEY'RE going THERE with THEIR friends. It's called grammar, use it."  (The irony might have been heightened even further if the person who started this site had misspelled "grammar" as "grammer" -- the site is full of other grammatical errors, as well. Sigh.)

6. Which brings us back to Oatmeal: (Semicolons.) and yes, yet MORE 

7. Oatmeal. (How to Suck at Facebook)

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Twitter: Still "meh" 99.5% of the time (see #2 above), but it has been useful to me on a couple of occasions, and it, too, has provided some entertainment -- well, at least once, anyway:

I am not sure how I ended up following "Mrs Stephen Fry" on Twitter, but OMG, funny. You know all about me and my love affair with off-colour British comedians, no? So if you don't share my love, well pfffft, you're hardly worth my time, but seriously folks, this is a little info about the real Stephen Fry, and the Missus is of course a fiction, but oh, such a wonderful character she is! It's one of the only things I give a whit about in Twitter!

The night before last, there was this in Mrs Stephen Fry's tweets, which, as it was of course intended, put me straight into a fit of tears-streaming-down-my-face hysterics:

Goodnight, dears. I was hoping for a quiet night but Stephen's vuvuzela is raised and ready to blow.

Another Pet Peeve: "Begs The Question"

Holy shit. 

(Disclaimer: Hey, this is not intended to be mean-spirited against anyone. I hope you will read it in the lighthearted, but still peevish, way it is intended.)

I was excited to be led to this list of new food-related reads by BlogHer since, you know, I LOVE GOOD FOOD. And I'm thinking of attending the BlogHer convention this year -- you heard it here first! (But I'm still not sure yet, so pretend I didn't say anything.) -- so I'm following that whole scene quite closely. I think it could be great fun and maybe open up some new horizons, new doors, new windows, and etcetera and so forth and what have youuuuuu. But does it beg the question, am I going to go? No, it does NOT. 

That linked item up there is a great list of new-to-me food blogs. But I had such a hard time taking it seriously, because I went into spasms (and sadly not the good kind) at every single intro of every single blog. 

Why? Because it misused (over and over and over again -- about what, a dozen times?) the phrase "begs the question." I guess if you're going to jump off a cliff, do it with style, eh? Go big or go home, or whatever. 

But oh.my.god. It was like I was being tasered.  begsthequestion, begsthequestion, begsthequestion. There, you unruly little weasel! See if you try to be high-and-mighty AGAIN! And once more just for good measure, bzzzz-begsthequestion-BZZZZZZZZ. It was begsthequestion Tourette's.

Sidebar: I adore this piece, and this is where I unapologetically stole the Tourette's:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Back in Black - Glenn Beck's Nazi Tourette's
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

I don't got no Ph.D.'s in English, and Lawd knows I'm not perfect and I make mistakes too. I'm not even sure why I know this about begs the question. But apparently it's a yolk yoke I have to bare bear. It's a tough one, I know, and even some literary elite and incredibly well educated pundits and speech-givers and journalists and professors misuse it, so I guess any old randomly chosen blogger can be excused from misusing it. The phrase seemingly doesn't make sense. It SEEMS like the phrase "begs the question" should mean some proposition or situation or other is begging for the question TO BE ASKED.

Right?

Not.

Thank you, Grammar Girl, for making it clear. Thank you, Wikipedia, even. And thanks to this site, Beg the Question/Get it Right, for referring to it as BTQ Abuse. That just about made my day.

But I suppose it will be another one of those bastardizations that, through common misuse, will become the acceptable norm. And then I will just have to put myself out of my misery by eating poison mushrooms or something. 

Fixing Things (A Little Bit) or "I Might Have Overdone It Just A Little Bit Yesterday Afternoon"

Man. The yard is a mess. I have spent a good part of the last three years -- at least -- walking around with blinders on about the front gardens, because all my focus has gone toward the food garden in the back. That's all I really care about anymore. I don't even see the perennial flowers that I spent 20 years acquiring and nurturing. They used to be the apples of my eye, but I truly couldn't care less about them anymore. 

I resent the mess. I resent the work that it takes to keep them up. I resent the people who told me years ago, before I knew anything about flower gardening, that perennials are low-maintenance. They're LIARS. BIG.FAT.LIARS and miscreants! Perennials are CONSTANT constant CONSTANT maintenance, particularly when your yard has become engulfed by that miserable horsetail weed. Once that thing has taken hold, it is impossible to eradicate. 

And I don't mean difficult or improbable. I mean impossible. Literally. There is no herbicide that will kill it. It propagates by spore, by cuttings, by runners. It lives through frost, it tunnels under rocks, it tunnels under and eventually makes its way through landscaping fabric. Plastic? HA! If you dig it up and you drop a microscopic speck (which of course you WILL), in a crack in the concrete, it will propagate. If you burn it, it will laugh in your face. It makes mint look like an impotent and naive wannabe.

Get the picture? 

You think I'm exaggerating. I'm not. 

It is estimated to have been around 30 million years. Just stop for a second and let that sink in. 30 fuckin' million years. You think a little RoundUp is going to faze it? Pshaw!

It was around at the time of the dinosaurs and it will be around at the time of Wall-E. In fact, I'll bet you 30 million dollars that that little freaking green thing that they were so excited about at the end of that film will prove to be a sonofabitching horsetail. Mark my words.

You've probably gleaned by my rant so far that the horsetail is already rearing its ugly head in this year of our Lord 2010. If that is not a sure sign of spring, I guess I don't know what is. Of course, the horsetail is not the only weed that has overtaken the perennials. Oh no, there are plenty more. But the others I can (sort of) deal with. The horsetail just makes me want to set myself on fire. 

So, long story short, I have begun to set myself on fire. But it's taking a slightly different-than-traditional form, this particular strain of pyromania. Yesterday afternoon I meant to go to yoga. But three hours after I stepped outside to -- well, I can't really remember what I went outside for -- I shakily made my way inside the house and collapsed. I had apparently gone a little bit mad out there, and started digging and digging and digging -- to Indonesia or Vietnam or Cleveland or something -- searching for every little piece of horsetail I could find -- an activity which by definition is, in a word, INSANE. So the whole setting-myself-on-fire thing? Not even a stretch.

BUT here is one thing I know: Horsetail is happiest if left alone in crappy soil. So surprisingly, if the soil is healthy and rich and CULTIVATED OFTEN, as it is in my vegetable plots, then it's easier to keep ahead of the horsetail. 

Which I WILL BE DAMNED IF I'LL DO to perennial beds, especially after they are all nicely mulched and whatnot, and supposed to be all LOW MAINTENANCE and all. 

Am I rambling? I fear I am. But whatever. I can hardly move my arms. And my elbows, which just BARELY got the All Clear from Cindy The Wonder Therapist, are shouting at me, "You IDIOT! You should have just gone ahead and set yourself on fire and saved yourself some trouble."  

Because, out there with all that digging (and I forgot to mention also the pruning of overgrown shrubs), I dug up a fairly good-sized stump and removed some smaller shrubs and fought almost to the death with a false indigo. The false indigo won. It's still in the ground, and I'm the only one Almost Dead. 

Word of advice about planting a false indigo: DON'T. Don't go getting all tingly in your loins when you see one in full bloom at the jardin botanique de Montréal and rush right home and go to the nearest nursery to search one out. Non, non, non. Do not do it. Or if you do, make sure you KNOW where you want it. Make sure you KNOW it only makes those gorgeous blue sweet-pea-like flowers for about 13 seconds a year, on a day in June when you're probably going to be gone to work anyway and won't even see it in bloom anyway. And make sure you know that it becomes GARGANTUAN and it is almost as IMPOSSIBLE TO DIG UP as the freakin' horsetail. I bet you there was a horsetail somewhere in that thing's genealogy. As long as you know all those things before you put that ring on your finger and you still want to marry this thing, knock yourself out. But don't come crying to me if it strangles your children or gives the neighbor herpes. It's right there in the name: FALSE. 

So where was I?  

Oh, yes. Turning the perennial beds (they're less beds than they are huge amorphous blobs, vast territories, almost as vast as the Yukon -- and perhaps that is one of the problems -- lack of cohesive design, but whatever -- another rant for another day) into places to plant things I care about. As in, fruits and vegetables. 

Yup, Norma's version of The Edible Landscape, comin' right up.

Or: 

Maybe I have just gone a little bit stark raving pyro. 

It's My [Blog] Birthday And I'll Say What I Want To

So here it is, my sixth blogiversary, and it's not the joyous occasion a blog anniversary usually is. At least it doesn't feel like it to me. Because, you see, I have something to get off my chest, and I've realized that I cannot write another half-decent post without first shedding this. It's a long one, and I'm not kidding about that. If you want to stay and read, you might want to empty your bladder and buckle up your seatbelt.

I'm not here today to have a contest, to ask for your eleventeen-thousand comments so you can win a prize and I can have my ego stroked, or to have a generous giveaway. I am here today to buck the trend of the usual sappy blogiversary post about how much I love this blog. I'm just a rebel that way, and I'm tired and cranky and in pain and put off, and I frankly need the catharsis. 

I have written almost every day for six years. It should be obvious: I love the blog and I love my readers. Love them and respect them and need them in that symbiotic way that maybe only another blogger can understand. I have built up strong personal relationships with many, many of my readers. I cherish the real-life and "imaginary" friends I've gained, and all the other fun and interesting things that have happened to me as a result of this venture. 

Oops, now I'm drifting away from my thesis. Aw, fuckit.

In the past week I've gone for long walks, I've had long chats with some of my most important confidants both in person and in emails, I've gone for massages, I've taken time away from the internet. I've spent a good deal of time thinking about this. And I've come to the conclusion that it's just as I thought: Some people are asses, and they're not gonna get any better.

I can be an ass, too, of course. I'm sure I have been many times --inadvertently and, I suppose, purposely.

This medium is a weird one. I'm not sure exactly how long it's going to last. There are the truly noteworthy bloggers who make Big Money through their blogs. There are the ones who try to make big money, and fail, and abandon their blogs in relatively short order. There are business blogs and political blogs and various other types of blogs. There are lots and lots of paid blogs or bloggers who blog only for money or to promote their products or promote themselves in some way.

What the hell am I? The hobby blogger. Hm. What am I doing it for? It's an outlet, it's a way to relate to lots of great people, it's a way to practice writing. But I don't write highbrow stuff, or even great lowbrow stuff, and I really don't think that my writing has improved over the past six years. I reckon I have my very good days, but they are few. It's sort of a journal or a memoir in the making, I suppose, but why? I don't really know. I'm apparently a verrrrry sloooooww worrrrk in progress. I spend a hell of a lot of time on this thing, trying to use it to do good, to run it sensitively and ethically and really a lot like a business. But it's only a hobby.

Over time, I've made a few missteps in this blog. I've used the word "retarded." That bothered a few people, some of whom are good friends and they sensitively and sensibly brought to my attention why it bothered them that I used that term, we talked it out, and we are still good friends. We do things with and for each other, and we support each other, both outside and inside the blog world. 

In contrast to that, at least one person delurked from out of the ether just long enough to tell me that while she had been reading my blog for a long time and loved most everything I wrote and loved seeing my stories about her birthplace, that it was inexcusable that I had used that term. None of my explanations worked for her, things escalated in our correspondence to the point that she made veiled threats to me about possibly using legal action to get me to remove the offending language (to which I said -- I think this is a direct quote -- "Pffffffffft"), and as far as I know, she no longer reads here. 

It is doubly irritating when someone opens a complaint with, "I have been a faithful reader and love everything you have done for the last three years, but this one thing, THIS ONE LITTLE THING, bugs me enough that, although I have never commented to say GOOD JOB or I'M ENJOYING YOU ever before, I AM coming out of the mists to heckle you when you have missed the mark just this ONE TIME."

FOR FUCK'S SAKE, people.

One time I passed along a post that someone sent me that I thought was funny at first, but it hurt the feelings of some of my readers, and I realized in the end that it might not be all that funny to many. But it WAS FUNNY, in an over-the-top kind of way, in its ridiculousness. But some people were hurt, so I took it down. I regret that now. 

I know my readers well enough that there will be many inquiring minds out there, so to quell the curiosity, it was this. I don't care what you say -- it IS funny. It is well written, it is over the top, it is ridiculous and inflammatory, and smart, and true in places and not true in places, and it is funny. If there is a version out there (seems like there must be) that is the "Fuck the North" equivalent and I saw it, and if it were well written, I'd think it was funny and I might well post it. But we Damn Yankees are more like the British -- we know how the hell to laugh at our own foibles. 

Here is what I really don't like and I really have no room for in this space, which I pay for and which is MINE: People who do not have a sense of humor. Or maybe I just don't like people who don't have the same sense of humor I do. 

I, for instance, do not think, for even the time difference between a gold and silver medal in short-track speed-skating, that any of that "oh, that kid just fell off a roof straight onto his face" kind of America's-Funniest-Home-Videos humor is funny. I do not think fart jokes are funny. I do not think toilet humor is funny. But thousands of people do. 

Apparently some people think my finger is just NOT ON THE PULSE of what is funny. So be it. But I reiterate: I pay for this space, and it is mine. I do not ask for a thing in return. 

I have a strong sense of gallows humor. I worked in the courtroom for what seems like a hundred years. There (or rather, behind the scenes in the anterooms of the courtroom) you have to laugh or you'll die. Same with the operating room or the pathology lab or the morgue. 

I love over-the-top brainy humor. I love tongue-in-cheek humor. I love ethnic humor and even blonde jokes. I used to be a blonde. It was the self-deprecation that I loved, NOT poking fun at someone ELSE, but poking fun at mySELF. I looooooooooovvvvvvvvvvve self-deprecating humor. I love cultures and people that poke fun at themselves -- the British, the Jewish, the Canadians, even (maybe especially -- one degree of separation, ya know!) the rednecks. I love pro-male/anti-male and pro-female/anti-female humor, as long as it's smart and perceptive of the human condition, and I love humor wherein we poke fun at our own aging or our own sexual inadequacies. I love off-color humor at times, and I love farcical and stupid humor, as long as it's so stupid it's actually smart.

People who are so literal and flat that they can't laugh at themselves or ever laugh at others without thinking it's ALWAYS MEAN? They can go jump off a cliff and get out of my blog. Seriously. 

IN PARTICULAR, it is NOT OK to lurk silently, to be entertained by my musings day after day -- even if the only reason you are lurking is because you think it's train-wreckish -- and not build a relationship with me to say hello once in a while so I at least recognize your name -- and THEN one day, because I make one comment or post one post that strikes a nerve with you, delurk in order to throw a turd in my living room or a rock through my window, and then leave. 

Last Saturday I posted a short post here relating an incident of generation gap misunderstanding with my daughter and her boyfriend that was funny. Yes, it was. FUNNY. My daughter thought it was so funny that when it initially happened, she sent it on to many of her college and law school and high school friends with a note that said, "I love my mom!" 

Vote of confidence if I ever did see one. 

Funny. I'm not just patting myself on the back here. It was funny because of my "stupidity," which is what we were laughing at. It was a misunderstanding that, later when I knew the context, was hilarious. Ridiculous. Sad. And funny. There IS humor in the tragic and the sad. There simply IS. 

And here is what happened, deconstructed to a point that it will probably take all the funny out. But this is probably what the flat-affect humorless literal people (who I wish would go away and STOP READING MY BLOG) would want.

My daughter's boyfriend posted in his Facebook status, "RIP Boner." I had read about the suicide of an actor in Vancouver, but I did not ever watch or know the details of the show that he acted in, so I did not know the name of his character. My daughter's boyfriend is, as I have mentioned many times, a professional hand model. In our everyday parlance, we all slightly provocatively, for its comic effect, refer to Ryan's "hand jobs." So when he posted "RIP Boner," I wrote, "I cannot tell you how bad this sounds," or something of that ilk. 

Here is what I ACTUALLY thought he meant by "RIP Boner":  His younger brother Jack is a bit of a wacky and funny wildcard, and I thought that perhaps Jack and Ryan had had a dog named Boner, and that the dog had passed away. Forgive me, dog lovers, for thinking it funny and making a joke about the possibility that a dog named Boner had passed away. Very insensitive of me, I'm sure. 

But the truth was stranger than my imaginings, in that an actor, who USED TO PLAY A CHARACTER NAMED BONER, had died. 

Do I NEEEEEEEEED to explain the joke to the literal thinkers? The flat-brained people? The people who want only family-friendly content in blogs? The Republican female lobbyist from Wyoming (WTF?!) who has never, ever read or commented on my blog previously, perhaps? 

SIDEBAR: The internet is a small and very revealing place. Me, I'm a completely open book, I live in a glass house here, and I'm honest and truthful and open, and I'm vulnerable. You might think you can take an anonymous shot at me and crawl back into your self-righteous cave and I might not be able to know who you are. But you are wrong.

When my daughter, through her tears of laughter, explained to me what Ryan was referring to, and what a dumb mistake I had made, we both couldn't stop laughing. We were NOT LAUGHING about someone's suicide. Anyone who thinks we were is an idiot. And when I wrote about it in the blog, I did not in any way say the suicide was funny. Any Janet-come-lately who thinks I was is a fool and can't read my plain words. 

So anyway. I took that post down, and I now regret it. It is cached in Google, but I'm not going to go through the effort to repost it and all that crap. Water under the bridge and all that. You can find it if you care to look for it. 

I will continue to write here, and I will continue to write what I think. If my wit is lost on you or if it misses the mark on any particular day, well, you know what? I don't get paid for this, and it's possible I might write something in a way that is easily misunderstood, or sometimes I might fall flat on my ass. This is my place, and I pay for it. It's my exercise room, my own personal half-pipe, if you will. I might look and smell like hell in my sweatpants, and make a total asspass* in practice today. But maybe tomorrow I'll hit the perfect McTwist 720 and nail the landing. 

Or not. But you know what? You get what you pay for. You don't have to say, "Yay, Norma! You are so wonderful!" all the time,** BUT, especially if you are a complete stranger, you do not have the right to come here and say "Shame on you" for anything, anything, anything I write, unless the "shame on you" is in jest. And you are fully allowed -- encouraged, even -- to take the piss out of me as often as you like. And you are not allowed to judge my morals and my sensibilities. Not.ever. 

Wait, I take that back. We make judgments about people all the time and it is perfectly within your right to judge me and my morals and sensibilities. But if you don't like me or what I stand for, JUST GO THE HELL AWAY. Full stop.

So happy friggin' blogiversary to me. 

The picture I wanted to post to match my mood is the Johnny Cash middle finger one -- you know the one. But instead, I decided to go for the ironic and post Sweet Norma Jean. So I'm giving you the Southerner's equivalent of "Bless your heart."

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*when you fall on your ass but going so fast that you pass people on your ass -he pulled the old ''asspass'' on me, and flew right by!  (hilarious Source: http://www.abc-of-snowboarding.com/snowboarddictionary.asp)

** But I live for the comments -- the thoughtful, funny, insightful, and smartass comments that most of my readers leave. I read and relish every single one, though lately I have not been able to answer them all as I have in the past, because there is only so much time in the day. As one of my blog friends recently said, "I've read you long enough to know that you might be snarky at times, but you are never mean-spirited." It is my earnest attempt to be exactly that. I have been extraordinarily fortunate over the years that incidents like this have been extremely few. Perhaps that is why this one bothers me so much. I will not make the rash statement that I will delete every comment of someone who disagrees with me or who gently (constructively) criticizes something I have written. That would be silly and Narcissistic and ... yes, I will use the word as it is defined ... retarded. However, in the future I will have absolutely no compunction at deleting mean or rude comments and banning the commenter. I'm just so over the bullshit.  

NOW, ONWARD AND UPWARD.

And Another Thing!

Remember my HP-Mini netbook? I thought it was great for a short while, and then I was very reserved in my praise. The most I could say at that point was, "It's all right for what it is."  And then I downright hated the little sucker. More than once I resisted the urge to drop-kick it, but only because I'm a grownup.

It was impossibly slow and was pretty much just a plastic brick. So it sat in my suitcase for a while, until I needed to unload the suitcase to use it for my last trip, and then it sat on the bathroom floor collecting dust (true confessions), right where I unloaded it, for goodness knows how long. 

And then one day I had one of my epiphanies. I wondered if it was the freakin' Norton 360, which was maybe just too much for it, that was bricking it up. 

So I uninstalled the Norton 360.

And guess what? 

It's all hearts and flowers and I love that little cutie-pie again. Love, love, love. It's perfect for stashing beside my bed, so that if I have a blog emergency in the middle of the night --  for instance, I suddenly remember that I left it mid-sentence and never finished my post because I had to take Mr. Jefferies out for a pee or had to go watch the latest episode of LOST, or whatever. Or someone has sent me an upset (but polite? pffft) comment that I received via my BlackBerry at 3 a.m. when I got up for a pee (I just noticed there's a lot about pee in this post -- completely unintentional and irrelevant, I assure you) because I have inadvertently offended an entire country due to stupidly having spelled "hat" t-u-q-u-e instead of t-o-q-u-e, or something earth-shatteringly important like that. 

You know. There are those kinds of emergencies that frequently crop up in the middle of the night or when I'm traveling, and they're just so danged easy to fix, now that I have that little mini next to my pillow and I can pull the blog or the email up real quick without waiting for all eternity while Norton 360 tries to scan something that it can't even FIT on. Or Heaven forbid: to UPDATE. Oh, that rotten, nasty, malicious little word. 

Why the hell doesn't Norton say, "Sorry. Loading me onto your little mini laptop is like using an atom bomb to kill a mosquito, and you really should use a different anti-virus software"?  But no. It will say nothing of the kind and it will invade your little mini computer and make it entirely useless and make you feel like a complete idiot for having just thrown money away on yet another useless piece of crap.  

Sigh.

Why is nothing easy and real and straightforward?

Except me, of course.

But anyway, now that we have resolved our little misunderstanding, I again love the little bugger, and it's just such a great size, with a great-sized normal keyboard, and we're all good, even if we are maybe just a little bit stupid.

Here's a picture of it, with the Mason-Dixon Knitting Outside The Lines book and my BlackBerry for scale. 

Isn't it darling?

About the same size as Mr. Jefferies.

 But much less cuddly.

Side Benefits of a Reorganization

One of the things that happens when one is forced (or forces oneself, or hey, does it for fun, if you're one of THOSE*) to go through one's crap is that one rediscovers some great things. 

Moving the books closer to my workspace, for the time being anyway while they are fresh and new again, (do you remember this with your kids' toys, those of you who have kids? Put them away in a closet for a couple of weeks, and then pull them out and woohoo! It's like new toys. Same goes for Mr. Jefferies, but I digress.) I'm having so much fun remembering some of the things I really REALLY wanted to knit early on, and realizing that yes, even though years have gone by, I do still want to knit them.  Such as:

Fair Isle mittens and gloves from Knitting Fair Isle Mittens & Gloves by Carol Rasmussen Noble;

this fab sweater from Alice Starmore's Fishermen's Sweaters,

and more recently, this little cardigan from Knit Circus magazine (Winter/Spring 2009)

Some of the books, even if I feel that the sweaters are not to my taste or are beyond my knitterly reach, are just plain good to look at, like another Starmore book, The Celtic Collection:

Well, that goes for all the Starmore books and Rowan books -- Amazing photography, amazing sweaters -- not all for me -- but I love to look at the pictures.

I noticed that the words "Vintage" and "Classic" are present in many of the books I have bought and things I (still) want to knit:

And things don't have to be fancy or expensive to be desirable and helpful -- take a look at these things in two little Paton's booklets.

CUTE!

Now if I could just conjure up the perfect storm of desire to knit, time to knit, and lack of this annoying tendinitis that seems to want to keep flaring up...
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*I'm one of those who loves to have everything clean, tidy and organized, but I HATE to do it. When it's done it's so satisfying, but I hate the process. A full staff, I've always said, is what I need. 

I found this bookmark in the Fair Isle Mittens & Gloves book. I have no memory of this photo, when it was taken, why, or why it was made into a bookmark. It's a mystery.