Nine+Taylers+Make+A+Manne

The world lost a Teacher yesterday. A dear and unique man, with a most infectious laugh. A stop by his office very often led to a discussion about something else once business was taken care of. Maybe Celtic languages. Or typefaces. Or computers. Or a story about the department in the 70s. Or why he had a dried chunk of dirt wrapped in plastic in his desk (it was a peat brick from Scotland, which of course led to another conversation). Or how his latest cooking class was going. Or books.

Gems of conversations, each one held dear.

He was kindness, calm, generosity and philosophical wisdom all rolled together with a twinkle in his eye, a smile, and a bottle of Diet Coke in his hand. He is the reason I didn't give up on one particularly bad day. The books he passed on to me when he retired are cherished and regularly put to good use.

He taught me an enormous amount about teaching.

Once, during a discussion about bell towers and carillons (a topic arrived at by a perfectly logical course of discussion that I couldn't replicate if I tried), he recommended a particular book. Today I can't get it out of my head.

To my friend and mentor:

"The voice of the Bells of Fenchurch St. Paul: Gaude, Gaudy, Domini in laude. Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth. John Cole made me, John Presbyter paid me, John Evangelist aid me. From Jericho to John A-Groate there is no bell can better my note. Jubilate Deo. Nunc Dimittis, Domine. Abbot Thomas set me here and bade me ring both loud and clear. Paul is my name, honour that same.

Gaude, Sabaoth, John, Jericho, Jubilee, Dimity, Batty Thomas and Tailor Paul.

Nine Tailors Make a Man."

- Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors

Many, many people will miss you dearly, Hank.

I will miss you dearly.

Toll the bell nine times. The world has lost a Teacher.

*sigh*

We lost Tiger on Wednesday evening. It took us by surprise, but was mercifully quick, and we were with him, at home. In retrospect, it's surprising he lasted as long as he did, even though that very day we were still holding out hope that he'd rebound and pull through like he did last month. But really, he was nearly 17, and he had been through too much. It was his time.

Dammit.

DH and I are melancholy on and off. We're grateful for the good long time we had with him. He had a wonderful life, and he was a joy to us every day of it. Sweet, curious, gentle, affectionate, persistently yet kindly demanding and without a cranky thought in his fuzzy little brain. We knew it was coming, but I don't think you can really be ready to lose one of your guys.

I'm mostly fine until I try to find a couple pictures to post, and I start to go through my archive. There are a lot, thankfully. He was with us since spring 1996, when he was three years old. I even found some short MPEG movies, but I don't think I'm ready to share those yet. Later.


ca. 2004, age 11, in the old apartment


late 2008, and very comfy thank you

Hug your fuzzy ones. Give them a treat and a skritch and a belly rub if they are so inclined. Feel the love returned back tenfold.

Not entirely unlike The Exorcist. Also, mittens.

I started a pair of fingerless mittens using the skein of yummy soft Malabrigo chunky. It's an almost instant gratification project. I'm using this pattern. (note: you have to have a Ravelry account to see it). The left mitt is almost done, see?


I was too lazy to pull out the swift and ball winder for a single skein last night, so I wound the pull ball on the nostepinne.*

In other news, we've cleaned up cat barf five times today between two cats. Tiger is slowly recovering from a serious illness and occasionally, much like a scene from The Exorcist, has trouble keeping his food down - this was one of those days. Both of them are getting over a persistent cold, the main symptom of which has been one or the other sneezing on us at every opportunity. To make today even better, they're both working on hairballs. To top it off, Ford got into my glass of milk this evening with predictable results.

The onslaught seems to have abated for now, thank goodness. Tiger is resting comfortably out front on his chair, the poor thing. Ford has decided to take out his frustrations on a piece of scrap paper, and is shredding it into little bits as I type. And he's still eyeing my glass of milk, because "cause" and "effect" mean nothing to him when there's milk involved. And also, he's hungry. Can't imagine why.

That's pretty much it, here. Mittens and cat barf. I think I need a vacation from my vacation.


*A fancy name for a very useful stick.

It's sentimental, I know

A simple thought for the season:



I quite like the songs, too.

*tap* *tap* Is this thing still on?

Dum, de dum, de... Oh crap! I have a blog!

Things have been a little crazy the last few months. Autumn is over. Solstice was Monday. I am tired. I'm also mostly on vacation. When I declared myself to be on vacation yesterday afternoon, I felt guilty about it for exactly 3.4 seconds. Then I remembered what I've been doing for the last four months (longer, really, since I was also teaching in the summer and last Jan-May).

From September to now, I have:
- Taught a class of 140 students, with 2 TAs. Finals still need to be graded, but I'm working through that. The first part-time job.
- Finished and submitted the written version of my Big D proposal, 70+ pages. The other part-time job.
- Defended that proposal orally, in a 1 hour presentation to the faculty and graduate students of my department. I am now *officially* ABD (All But Dissertation).
- Given two conference presentations, on different topics, within 2 weeks of each other in October.
- Done the final re-read on a joint paper so that it could finally be re-submitted.
- Tried, with medium success, to attend my weekly band rehearsals, occasional quintet rehearsals, and SCA meetings.
- Helped out with two full-day SCA events in September, and played 4 or 5 concerts, between the band and quintet.
- Helped to nurse a very sick kitty (Tiger) this past month. We almost lost him, but he's doing much better now.
- Not fallen apart, mentally or physically. Mostly mentally.

That last one is huge. I can't tell express how huge. A year ago I was in complete shut down. I still have *days*. I still don't like getting out of bed most of the time. But I can, and I do, and that's what counts. I still drop balls (see that bit about the final exams still needing to be graded!), but I usually catch them on the first bounce.

Of course, there has been knitting and otherwise playing with string. The double-knit hat from hell is has been finished since September, and even now it's almost too warm to wear. It's a hat for the coldest of the cold sub-zero plus windchill days:


My model prefers to retain his anonymity

I also just finished this scarf, probably my longest-term WIP ever, started on July 4, 2001. I hadn't bought my own set of knitting needles at that point, and started it on a pair of Gram's old 1950's metal needles (pink). I'm not fond of knitting on metal, and the combination of yarns was extra frustrating (mohair and rayon). I would do an inch or two and then put it up for a year. Long ago, I declared it would be done when I ran out of one or the other yarn. I finally, blessedly ran out of rayon Monday night! I present the lace scarf, final length just over 7 feet (before blocking):


Lace scarf from Knitting for Dummies, started July 4, 2001, finished December 24, 2009.

And then there was this little guy, made not quite in time for Remembrance Day.


Pattern available from Laura Chou, Cosmic Pluto, and please donate to the Royal Canadian Legion Poppy Fund

There has also been yarn shopping therapy, oh yes. I have plans for all of these...


Top to bottom: malabrigo chunky, some worsted-weight merino-silk blend, and DK alpaca.

There has also been spindle-shopping therapy. First, the good deals:


Inexpensive beginner pine spindle bought, along with four of its siblings, at Pennsic from Baron Tancred of Tancred's Tangled Wood (no website). Boat-anchor spindle by Roger Hawins (Peterborough, ON), bought for a holy-crap-whattadeal price at Gemini Fibres.

And then the other very good deal, but not due to the price:


A Forrester supported spindle with yellowheart whorl and birch shaft, and a paduak bowl, bought at Gemini Fibres in Mt Albert, ON.

I was torn between this bowl and a purpleheart one that had a small hole in the corner to hold the spindle, but the yellow whorl and orange bowl are beautiful together in a uniquely warm way. The fibre is this cochineal-tin dyed roving that I bought at Pennsic in 2008. Now I just need to learn to use a supported spindle properly!

In eight minutes it will be Christmas Day. Nothing special planned, we prefer no-stress holidays. We'll have the usual lunch at the in-laws, perhaps a board game or three, some knitting, and possibly our traditional trip to whichever local Starbucks has the honour of being open so that their employees don't feel like they're there for nothing. Overall, it's going to be a good day, that much I know.

Five minutes. G'night.

A Magpie in Autumn

Aaaah! *flail*

Elisem is having a sale again. And people, the prices are getting darned good.

So much for my self-imposed moratorium on buying jewelry and other shiny things. I've already bought this pendant

And there are tektites, meteorite beads and dinosaur bone beads. Yes, that's right, meteorites and dinosaur bone beads.

Go, go, go. We'll talk when you get back.

If it were E.T. phoning home, I'd be more OK with it

I press a button near my ear. There's a little *bleep*, and a digital female voice says, "Say command."

"Call home," I reply.

"Did you say, 'Call home?' "

"Yes."

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The province is introducing a law at the end of the month prohibiting the use of hand-held devices while driving. Cell phones. MP3 players. As of the end of the month, you have to be able to operate them hands-free if you're behind the wheel.

If only they could prohibit pedestrians from using the same distracting hand-held devices while crossing the street, we'd be all set. I had two separate potential my-fault-accidents walk out in front of me — without looking, against their signals and into the middle of downtown traffic — while talking on their phones this Friday afternoon. But I digress.

I get it, I really do, and I fully support the law. I don't use my cell phone in the car that much, but I'm certainly guilty of taking and making calls once in a while while driving, and it's a convenience that I'm not willing to give up. What that means, though, is that I'm being dragged kicking and screaming into a little more technology in my daily life than I am completely comfortable with.

I'm of that in-between generation. The internet started to become more widely used while I was an undergraduate in the early 90s, but the web didn't come about for several years after that. I was an early, if slightly reluctant, internet user, but it quickly became integral to how I communicated with friends. I could telnet into a MUSH and talk with them in real-time when I was on the other side of the ocean. Email was a necessity. When the WWW came in, I was in my early 20s, and I acclimated just fine. These days, I check my email compulsively and usually have my laptop nearby. I'm a Mac girl, through and through.

It took me longer to get a cell phone than an ISP. It seemed... too much connectivity. I finally broke down in 1998 after a car accident in Western PA, and we realized how much issue it would have been had we not had family right there with us to help out. Only a handful of people have the number, and to this day, my cell plan is the cheapest one I can get that includes voicemail. I do not have an IPhone or a Blackberry, it's just a basic cell phone. It has a camera, that's kind of cool, but whatever. I do not have data or text messaging. Honestly, I have three email addresses and I check them 50 bazillion times a day. I'm not hard to reach. I have to draw the line somewhere.

Which brings us to today, me sitting in a cafe with a bizarre-looking earpiece sticking out of my ear. I figured I'd try this hands-free cellphone thingy out when it's not critical, so we set it up and I went out to do some errands on a Sunday afternoon. I'll admit, the voice-dialing thing is neat. I knew the phone had the feature, I just never used it.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I was heading out the door, and realized that I look like one of those people that annoy the living shit out of me - earpiece sticking out of their ear, you never know when they might stop talking to you to take a phone call that you didn't hear coming. They talk loudly, and apparently to themselves, in the coffee shop or in the line instead of ordering or paying. I'm reminded of one of those stories where everyone is plugged into their technology all the time and it takes over their minds. I sighed.

"I look ridiculous."

DH stuck his head around the corner.

"Hey, just pretend you're like Uhura. 'Captain, you have a call...' "

I grinned. You know, I hadn't thought of it that way.

"Captain, Priority One message for you from Starfleet," I said in my best phone-professional voice.

"There you go!"

Sometimes, he really knows what to say to make me feel better. If Uhura can have that thing sticking out of her ear and still be awesome, I'm good, right?

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"Did you say, 'Call home?' "

"Yes."

The line begins to ring on the other end, and my husband answers the phone.

"Starbase 5-8-0-0 here."

"Hi, honey."

"You broke the ship again, didn't you?"

I break into peals of laugher. I love that man.