Treading water

I wrote this on Instagram a few days ago:
I am propelled by #coffee lately. Such important #protest and scary virus news in the world...but I am still #homeschooling, cooking a lot and managing kids and dogs. Even managing our household is a lot right now. I am lucky and safe but still very tired...

But I wanted to update the blog.  And I wanted to tell you about our garden, which is growing so well just now.  (much farther along than this one photo we took a few weeks ago...)  I also wanted to offer up a couple links to articles that have run recently.  This ran in the Vancouver Jewish Independent:
Rabbinic planting advice

This second link is not really about Shabbat specifically, more about how to keep ourselves and our old dog eating and alive and propel everybody forward during this hard time:

Jewish surety in Shabbat ritual

There have been a lot of afternoons like this one though, where our world has been small, we played in the yard, and focused on how grateful we are for what we have.  It's more than enough.

For those who have followed me a while, you may know that I've written about social justice issues for a long time, too.  Here are a couple links on that...one from this blog in January, 2019.  Sadly, none of the injustices taking place are new.  It's been happening for a long time.

An instagram post about how justice is long overdue.

This piece on diversity went live yesterday...

In a strange twist of fate, my piece on peaceful protest and diversity, written several days ago, went live yesterday on the CBC Manitoba website.  Here's the link:
Acknowledging diversity--warts and all

Meanwhile, horrible things were happening in Charlottesville, Virginia.  I grew up in Virginia, and I spent two happy summers at summer camp in Charlottesville.  My stomach was twisted in knots all day about what just took place there. 

 Let's not let violence and hate win.  Peaceful protest is the way forward--and using our critical thinking skills? Essential.  I'm so sad that hate (and lot of outsiders) took over--with violence against diversity, against African- Americans, and against Jews--hate took over Charlottesville yesterday. Let's vote for peaceful protest and love.  Love wins.

Lost: 1 worry bear, 1 week, 1 batch of jelly

This weekend, the CBC-Manitoba ran my piece, Bottling Sunshine:Canning teaches mom essential coping skills.    Aspects of that essay summarized this past few days.  To start, last weekend my crew had their first lemonade stand.  This required at least one grown-up on duty the whole time, as neither of my twins can pour a full pitcher of lemonade yet, nor make change.  (they just turned five, that's understandable!)  After I worked behind scene and made the lemonade and cut up the watermelon, I discovered that my lovely professor had been filling up the spare moments (there were a lot of them) by picking more Nanking cherries from our yard.

(We also then caught one of the twins eating the watermelon and then putting it back in the container for customers...but that is another story. :)

We pick these cherries every year from our yard.  The boys love to help.  Usually, I make them into a jam, but this year, I decided to try a jelly instead.  After an ill-fated trip to Canadian Tire to find a jelly strainer, I rigged one up with cheese cloth and a colander instead. (This piece of equipment is also called a chinois, but since that seemed terribly embarrassing --who came up with that name?! It's inherently problematic in our bilingual world... when I asked a customer service person for it--hint, she was Asian--I decided we wouldn't be calling it that anymore.  She was gracious about it, btw, as she also was frustrated that the store didn't have one.  Who comes up with these terms for kitchen tools?! Ahhh!)

By the time everyone was done picking, eating, and wearing cherry juice all over their shirts, faces and hands, we had what amounted to something like 14 quarts of cherries.  Yeah.  I know this quantity because I used the largest slow cooker to soften them, in two batches (by boiling, you can get rid of the pits more easily).  The first batch of jelly did not become jelly.  It became roughly 10 cups of cherry sauce.  Turns out our particular cherries are oddly acidic or low in pectin or something, so I re-canned them with more pectin.  It was a colossal pain to redo, but then I ended up with 9 cups of jelly...and a lot of pulp.

For the first time, I figured out how to successfully do fruit roll in our dehydrator.  It was pretty easy, actually.  Roughly 6 cups of chopped fruit/pulp, then you puree it in a blender, add honey or sweetener if you want (I did banana and honey because cherry pulp is sour!) and then you sort of paint it on parchment paper and pop it in the dehydrator.  It took 10 hours at 135F, cooking on our front porch while we slept.  Since the natural fruit roll that we usually buy is $7.50CDN a package, this struck me as a good idea.

Unfortunately?  Fortunately? I had to do more jelly the next day (all that extra picking!) so we ended up with 17 cups of jelly and two batches of fruit roll.  If I never see another cherry this year?  It will be too soon.  Getty Stewart's cookbook was a huge help, as always, in dealing with this quirky prairie fruit.  I think I am grateful for her cookbook every summer!

In other news, you may remember a certain twin's Worry Bear?  Alas, Worry bear #2--the first one pictured here--is MIA or perhaps, RIP.  The good news about the travelling day camp is that you go new and interesting places every day.  The bad news is that between the swimming pool, the parks, the hikes, other adventures and a certain pair of shallow pants' pockets, we lost this guy last week.  We did have Worry Bear #1 as back up, but he just wasn't adequate.  Not squishy enough, not comforting enough...something wasn't right.  The loss of #2 was a little traumatic.

Yup.  You guessed it, I also spent several hours knitting worry bear #3.  This one is out of Rowan Pure Wool dk, a superwash yarn, and I stuffed it with Cheviot wool, so at least it won't felt if it ends up in the washing machine and dryer...again.

My mom said I might as well memorize the pattern, which was funny, because I make it up as I go along.  No two worry bears are alike.  Hmm.  I wonder if anyone else needs a worry bear pattern?

I also produced three challahs, 1 loaf of spelt bread, 1 banana chocolate chip loaf, and numerous other things for meals and snacks last week.  This travelling camp makes people ravenous, and packing twin healthy lunches and snacks takes a lot of time.

All this foodie and textile production--doing and redoing (my life story right now)-- hopefully lines us up for a smoother time this week.  No canning scheduled right now, because there are 5 medical appointments/tests scheduled for two of us (me and one twin) this week.  Six if you count next Monday.  Luckily, the Professor will manage a twin appointment or two so I don't have to do them all.

So, nothing deeply meaningful is happening over here...I squeeze in work where I can...but at the same time, every bottle canned, every fruit roll, every new worry bear produced? In some ways, I am taking ahold of traditional age-old women's tasks, (with significant help from the Professor) and making them new and full of love for folks in my household.  I'd argue that I do it differently, in a more feminist construct, but the love is love--it's not gendered.  It's the same, every time, no matter what we call it.

Gray February

Most exciting things first:
This weekend I submitted an opinion piece to the CBC and it went live less than a day later:
Why Manitoba needs a more diverse teaching force

I'd want to point out, of course, that good teaching is crucial, but it is only one part of this assessment; we have no idea if Manitoba's students' test scores are representative of their skills, if the tests done were biased, on and on.  There are a lot of unanswered variables in social science, but, well, this is only one essay about the U of Manitoba's faculty of Education's new diversity admissions policy.
You can't say all that in less than 1000 words. :)

The best part of it all, I felt, was reading the (as usual) mostly knucklehead comments, which sort of illustrate why a diverse, effective teaching force is a good thing. (in aiding tolerance, for instance, which was seriously lacking in some comments) Then there was one absolutely erudite comment about the certification standards from a really qualified Manitoba teacher, educated in Britain.  That made my week.

Other things that are making my week... We have completed our first weaving, with a lot of Mommy help.  These were done on picture frames, using loopers cut from wool socks with holes in them.  The warp was cut up felted sweater strips, leftover from all the wool soakers I made for cloth diapering.

We've had perhaps another 2 or three more preschooler viruses since the last time I posted...digestive issues, colds, coughs...; to be honest, I've lost track.  I have become remarkably zen about the whole thing.  When someone is too sick for preschool, or needs to come home, I take a deep breath, drop all my plans...and just resign myself to returning to the couch with whoever needs me.  I've not done a lot of things this winter.  Oh well.  The house is pretty mucky, too.  I'm thinking of trying to clean up this week, since Didi (my mom, twins' grandma) is coming to visit, but I don't have high expectations.  It doesn't help to expect too much, cause then I feel upset with myself when things are back to basics all over again.
Perhaps because of the great retirement sale at Shuttleworks or maybe just because I needed a pick-me-up, I decided to go crazy and order the bulky flyer set ups for both my Schacht Matchless spinning wheel and my Majacraft Little Gem.  Maybe it was my Valentine's Day gift to myself? This is, I think, my first big wheel-related purchase in maybe 8 years.  It's been a bit of adjustment to figure out how the new things work, but it's exciting, too.  I see very big skeins of handspun in my future...someday!

Before I switched the flyers on the Majacraft, I amazed this kid, home sick, by whipping the wheel out of its carrying case and setting it up so he could check it out.  He was stunned; I don't think he had ever seen how it folded it up before.  He got to treadle and do some wool teasing, which he enjoyed.  (fluffing up locks of wool into clouds for spinning.)  I was rewarded for all this with a seriously firm admonition to "Clean up, Mommy, your office is very messy."  He then offered helpful hints.  Great.  Thanks, kid.

 Finally, I am planning to relaunch some older patterns and reknit some too, this year.  I am also working on a sweater for myself, the third time I am reknitting the Cuddle Coat.  Honestly, this sweater design has a curse, it has never had a decent photo of it.  However, the first one (in my little headshot, that is #1, with Harry the dog) is so worn that I have to mend it, the second one was trashed after it was absolutely worn to pieces, and here's the third.  Yup.  That is some boring looking gray/brown knitting!  If you click on it though, you may see the texture, little bits of color, and softness of the yarn.  Feels great.  Looks just like?  February.

In honor of that....stretch of time, cold, dirty snow, cloudy February, I have a brief sale on Ravelry:
20% off all my designs on Ravelry, through the end of February, with the coupon code....you guessed it:
February

Here's some more gray-brown in case you missed it or it happens to be sunny in your neck of the woods.... :)

fixing a hole/we are one

Well, I apparently hit a hot topic with darning. In discussion with a writer friend, I realized the best illustration for darning I could find is in Therese de Dilmont's book, Encyclopedia of Needlework. I own a reprint of this oldie but goodie, but if you follow the link, you'll go directly to the section on mending knitting. It's no longer covered by copyright, so it's freely available on the web. Scroll down to the illustrations...you don't even need the text to see how to darn. The drawings are that good.

I spent most of the day working hard on a sample for book #2--knitting. On Tuesday, I will be driving up to Indianapolis for a photo shoot for this book; I'd like to finish this first. I was inspired by We are One, the inaugural concert...which I listened to on National Public Radio. I hear that if you have HBO, they will replay it again tonight on that TV channel. If you've got nothing else on, check out the concert! (I used my imagination, since I grew up in Northern Virginia, near DC. I know what the Lincoln Memorial looks like, and that helped while listening to the radio!)

I love the message of Martin Luther King Day, which we celebrate on Monday. When I was growing up in Virginia, we celebrated Lee-Jackson-King Day--a terrible contradiction that has since been fixed...but my family always emphasized why the combination seemed impossible. I loved teaching King's words when I taught high school in DC...they always captivated even the most uninterested teenager. In honor of King's words, in which we will one day all join hands, I found a few contemporary essays that display our diversity and complexity:

Just Like Pastrami

and our empathy and tolerance:

Mysterious Connections that Link us Together

and finally, that we must act on that tolerance to make the world a better place:

We Are Each Other's Business

So, if you have a chance to reflect, enjoy these fine examples of how we can all work together, in our complexity, empathy, tolerance, and actions. I am so excited by the next few days and the hope it ushers in for the United States. Meanwhile...as I listen to the radio...I'll be knitting over here.

Please leave me a comment if you've got thoughts on these essays or on anything in this post; I'd love to hear what you think!

on call

The advantages of not celebrating Christmas:
1) It’s a great time to catch up on your work
2) It’s a peaceful time to walk our dogs. No one is on the streets. At all.
3) Movie marathons can be fun, but only with DVD’s. Believe it or not, those who do not celebrate Christmas don’t dig watching the marathon of Christmas usually on the TV or radio this time of year.
4) We can bond with our favorite Chinese take-out place. (psst.Buddhists don’t celebrate Christian holidays either.)
5) We can be on call to help our Christian friends.

Although we definitely did #1-4 this year, #5 ended up being the most important. One of our friends (a Christian clergy member, actually) had a scary car accident on her way home from an 11 pm Christmas Eve service. She is a bit battered in body and spirit but ok. Her car is totaled. We’re going over to her house this evening and will, of course, be on call to help drive her to get to her car to fetch her belongings when the holiday is over.

Another friend called; her family went to visit her elderly father-in-law in Toronto. Apparently the father-in-law is in need of extra help and the family will stay longer. However, her eldest needs to return home so I will get to pick up her college age son at the bus station when he comes back into town in the next day or two.

A day like this makes it absolutely clear to me why we don’t all need to celebrate the same holidays and traditions. Some of us need to be completely without obligations to help each other. Since Jews don’t celebrate Christmas (the birth of Jesus isn’t part of our religious tradition, so we don’t commemorate it) we don’t have any religious services to attend, big fancy meals, or other commitments. We can help out others today. (Likewise, I’ve had some wonderful non-Jewish friends take time out to help me get ready for Passover or other Jewish holidays.)

I guess it’s nice to be needed!

Thanks so much for all your warm wishes for a happy Hanukah and your cheers for my new nephew Noodles. Reports are that he is doing well at home, but the grown-ups are sort of exhausted from his medicalized feeding schedule…every three hours, day and night, via a tube. Still, he is now home, and we are happy. It’s now the fifth night of Hanukah, but having the baby at home with his parents is a gift that we continue to cheer about.

Wishing you enjoyment, regardless of what you celebrate.