When to knit or not to knit?

My friend JayJay, fellow-knitter, -blogger, -mommy, and -professor, asked in her comments if we have house elves or how else I get so much knitting done. Sadly, rent for the house doesn't include the services of house elves, and the majority of cleaning gets done by yours truly. Since I have a full-time job (at least during the semester) and a toddler, JayJay wants to know when it is that I get a chance to knit.

Ever since Conrad was born, DH and try very hard to do work at work, that is, not bring work home with us. This is difficult, particularly for DH, whose teaching interferes with his research, which means he needs to do research "on his own time," i.e., on weekends, at nights, and during summer breaks. It's much easier for me to leave work behind; I have a teaching position and am not expected to do research. While "getting ahead" nevertheless depends on my research record (one of the ironies in my job), I put research on the back burner for now. When I come home, I'm home. I work my butt off at the office and do all class prep/email/"service" (faculty meetings, advising etc.)/research there, usually four days a week. The last two semesters I had Fridays off, and I use that day to clean the house and do the laundry (incl. ironing. OMG, I hate ironing). I could (and should) do research on Fridays and wait with the cleaning until the weekend when DH is around, but I really want to spend weekends doing fun stuff with Conrad and DH, without worrying about dirty bathrooms. So, for now at least, Fridays are cleaning days. I don't mind Fridays; they give me a chance to listen to NPR all day long (local news from 9-10, two hours of my favorite news/talk show On Point, The Story at noon, then I switch off the radio because I can't stand Fresh Air's Terry Gross, and the radio's on again for the BBC News Hour. By 3 pm I'm usually done).

DH and I pride ourselves in not watching TV, which is, in truth, a big fat lie. We don't have cable, but we do have Netflix. Over the years we've watched a number of series (mainly British mysteries, such as A Touch of Frost, Wire in the Blood, Inspector Lewis, our much beloved Inspector Morse; also American shows such as The Wire, Mad Men, and Big Love), and these days we watch about 45-90 minutes of Netflix on most days after Conrad's gone to bed and we've cleaned up whatever Conrad- and/or dinner-inflected messes there are. The TV is downstairs, in the finished-but-unheated basement that is, for the most part, a Conrad-free zone, and we're never tempted to turn it on unless in the evenings. And even then the TV is just background noise; DH usually checks relevant soccer information online and I knit. That's when I do "complicated" knitting--anything more involved than stockinette or garter stitch. I guess I get about six hours of knitting done this way per week. Earlier this year I also started going to knit night, which adds two to three hours of knitting to the weekly tally, albeit "light" knitting, that is, nothing complicated. So now we're talking eight to nine hours of knitting.

In addition to "complicated" knitting downstairs, I keep a project of "light" knitting upstairs: a garter or stockinette stitch something, on which I work whenever I'm watching Conrad and am able to squeeze in a row or two (or sometimes just half a row) while he reads. But mostly we play together, so I don't knit much. (I started this very easy, stockinette stitch cowl in February and am hardly near the end. That's "upstairs knitting.") I also knit when I talk to my mom on the phone, usually during Fresh Air on Fridays. One of our little family traditions is for DH to read out loud one or two pieces from The New York Review of Books on Saturday mornings, while we're still in PJs, and I knit during that time. Let's say I get one to two hours of "upstairs knitting" done per week.

That's nine to eleven hours of knitting per week. You tell me: is that a lot? I have given up almost every other leisure activity for knitting: I hardly read for pleasure anymore except those 20 to 30 minutes in bed at night before I fall asleep (usually dropping the book in the process and then waking about again from the noise); I hardly ever go to the gym or the swimming pool (but we do go for long, long walks and hikes on weekends with Conrad); we no longer visit friends or entertain them (we still haven't made friends here); I'm very bad about staying in touch with friends via email or over the phone; I don't facebook; I seldomly blog; difficult to admit, but I also don't read as many blogs anymore; I stopped going to art shows; I no longer cook anything that takes longer than 30 minutes to make (we're fans of Cook's Illustrated 30 minute recipes).

(Gosh, I'm getting depressed just writing this. Knitting stole my social life! I'll end up as the bag lady who keeps thirteen cats at home and dies without anyone noticing it. No, seriously, it's not that I knit every free second I got. I spend most of my free seconds with Conrad and DH, so hopefully I won't die alone and forgotten. It's those free seconds after Conrad has gone to bed that I spend knitting rather than reading, socializing, etc.)

Here's when I don't knit: I never take knitting on the bus or to the doctor's; that time is reserved for reading one of the half a dozen of magazines we subscribe to (my fave: Harper's). I don't knit on the airplane (try that with a toddler!). I don't take knitting to work; if I do take a longish lunch break, I meet with DH and we read different sections of The New York Times, which we get for free on campus (awesome perk of the job). If I were to go to bars, the movies, dinner parties, restaurants, soccer and other games, or concerts, I wouldn't knit there (we don't go because--you guessed it--we have a toddler, not because we're that anti-social). We don't drive enough for me to take knitting along in the car. In short, I'm not the knitter who always carries a project around with her.

So, JayJay, that's how I get my knitting done. For spring break we went to see my in-laws, and I knit more than half of the Amelia cardigan during those 8 days or so, because my in-laws are just gaga over Conrad and won't share him even with his parents. :) I knitted a lot during that time.

Now you tell me, when do you knit??

Ten on Tuesday: Ten Things I want to do in 2012

Woohoo! It's time for New Year's resolutions, although Carole prefers us to think of them as goals. DH and I sat down Sunday morning and came up with a very detailed plan; I'm giving you an abbreviated version:

1. Healthier lifestyle
I know I know, we all want to lose weight and train for a marathon. I'm no different (even though I don't want to train for a marathon). The pregnancy weight is off (all eighty-three pounds. Yup, you read that right), but I was on the big side before getting pregnant. To lose twenty-five pounds would be awesome. To reach this goal, DH and I thought of many small changes in our daily routine that hopefully will help us get fitter, slimmer, and healthier. (Small changes such as "plan meals ahead," "three meatless dinners per week," "desserts on days that start with S" [this last one is a suggestion from Michael Pollan], "no sugar in coffee"...)

2. Explore locally
We live in one of the geographically most interesting states in the country, and we better make the best of it! We want to get to know the city, the valley, the Wasatch range, and Southern Utah.

3. Get back into the saddle
We used to bike all the time, but I haven't mounted my bike in 2011 more than a few times. It's time to get back on my bike! We can't wait to get a Chariot carrier to pull Conrad behind us on our bikes. With biking, we're going to kill two birds with one stone: get fitter and explore the area.

4. Make new friends
Have you noticed that it gets harder to make friends the older you get? "Meeting people" doesn't just happen anymore unless you make an effort. I'm channeling my efforts towards the knitting crowd and daycare parents.

5. Make a decision
A career decision, that is. Tenure-track jobs are hard to come by these days, no matter where you live and what your field is, and I don't know for how long I want to be "adjuncting," always in the hope that something more will become of it, but without any job security (or much of a salary). So, I'm considering leaving academia. In order to go back to school. Ugh.

6. Knit more. Read more. Spend less
I have enough yarn and patterns to make twenty-six sweaters and a number of socks and accessories. I have enough books to keep me reading for a decade. I swim in yarn and books. I do not swim in money. It's time for some financial conservatism. We have everything we need (once we have that bike carrier)--so why buy more?

7. Spend the summer at home
No European travels this year, for the first time since I've moved to the US. We'll be either here or at the other gorges place. I look forward to a very relaxed summer.

8. Become multilingual
We speak English and German at home, and we want to add a third language to the mix. We have grand plans to learn a bunch of different languages (certainly French and Latin, which we both had in school), but currently I'm in love with the idea of learning Swedish (or Norwegian, which would allow me to get around all of Scandinavia, or so I'm told).

9. Share cooking duties
DH likes to cook but doesn't have much time, I have more time but don't like to cook. In the past it was either DH cooking or ready-to-eat soup from Whole Foods. Since we want to lose weight and save money, I volunteered to cook three times a week. DH will cover three nights, and on Saturdays we cook together. Oh dear oh dear. I got the Crock Pot out; I'm confident that I can master chopping and throwing things together and turning on a switch... :)

10. Have fun
Blog! Sew! Go to knit night! Do yoga again!

The Bean says Happy New Year!

TDC

I'm an inspiration to my husband! I'm his muse!

Well, probably all wives (husbands, partners, etc.) are inspirations to their husbands (wives, partners, etc.), so I need to clarify. The resurrection of my blog inspired my husband to revive his own. For a long time he blogged about what he considers to be interesting dinner party conversation topics (thus his blog's name, The Tuesday Dinner Club, or TDC), such as food, books, arts, but he stopped writing in 2010 and didn't blog for a year. His most recent post is a very short summary of the past twelve months, and I'm going to copy & paste his entry to bring you up to speed (a lot of this you already know, and I apologize for the redundance). Here we go, I'm plagiarizing quoting DH:


What happened between last November and this one? I had hoped to build blogging momentum through NaBloPoMo, but I quickly fell off the wagon. We were yet again struggling (mentally and physically) with job applications on top of our regular teaching and research duties, and this time around we were also preparing for the imminent arrival of The Bean. TB made his grand entrance at the end of January 2011 and promptly began keeping us exhaustingly and exhilaratingly busy tending to his every need. M. naturally took point in terms of Beancare, while my normal work duties continued unabated, along with the job search, which thankfully turned out much more more positively this time: I landed a nice job in Salt Lake City.

The new opportunity meant an immediate amplification of stress and disruption, of course. House hunting, renting, packing, loading, trucking, flying, unloading, unpacking, shopping, repairing, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, and so forth. And a conference in the US, half the summer in Germany, a conference in Sweden, new employee orientation .... and suddenly a teaching job for M., so last minute that there was no time to find daycare for TB. Up to this point, we have been juggling two full-time jobs, one full-time Bean, and an incomplete house. What spare time we've had has been largely devoted to sleeping.

But we've made steady progress and things are finally seeming to settle down. It seems reasonable to start writing in this space again. With some effort and discipline, regular TDC blogging may even prove sustainable.

I'm still thinking about what to write about in the rebooted TDC. The old categories, of course: writings read; art and music appreciated; movies, plays, television watched; items eaten, imbibed, and cooked. (...)

(See, my blog takes off where his ends: books, art, movies, food... it's all good and well, but what about "things knitted"? Well, for that you have yours truly. [Add to the list: "things sewn." Did I whet your appetite? Good.])

At some point this month I will go into the "suddenly a teaching job for M." and "a conference in Sweden" bits. Not now though. Now I need to go to bed and cry myself to sleep: the darling "TB" is starting daycare tomorrow morning. I'm a mess because of it; I hope he will fare better tomorrow than his momma.

Dear __________,

Dear Blog,

Before June slips away entirely I wanted to let you know that I do love and care for you, that I even have three finished projects to show you, and that you need not be jealous of the baby, thinking perhaps that he is consuming all of my attention. No, let's not blame Conrad (although my five month old sunshine is about to start crawling and needs constant supervision). Why else I've been neglecting you? Well, first there was my BFF visiting from London; she brought her husband and her baby bump along, and together we did a lot of walking in cold, rainy Boston. The day they left the sun came out, the weather turned hot and humid, and I realized that I didn't have three but two weeks to pack the whole apartment into 170+ moving boxes. The first 100 were easy to pack: books are a packer's friend (and the mover's foe). The others? Oh my. Packing up a kitchen must be one of the evilest jobs evah, topped only by packing those last twenty percent of one's possessions that takes eighty percent of packing time. You know what I mean: you think everything's packed, and then you look at the windows and think, whoa, what to do with curtain rods and curtains? Throw them in a box with the bathroom trashcan, the desk lamp, the hallway rug, the coffeemaker, the book you were reading a minute ago, and that roll of toilet paper that's still left out.

I'm getting agitated just remembering those last two weeks in the apartment. Let's fast forward to the week of moving. (Yes, it took one week.) The minute the last item made it onto the truck (a broom, it was a broom), the moving help had left (two lovely Brazilians who must have possessed super powers, otherwise there is no explanation for how fast they worked), and my recently retired FIL who had volunteered (!) to drive a 26' truck across the country by himself (!!) was in the driver's seat, the sky darkened and released one of the nastiest thunderstorms in Mass history (you probably saw in on TV). Which didn't impress my FIL much, who was ready to go--and then discovered that the truck had some sort of electrical malfunction. Which is why he couldn't go anywhere but instead waited for the U-Haul repair people to fix it. Which took a while. The next day--DH, Conrad, and I had boarded the train to NYC in the meantime, to spend a few days with family--the electronics continued to fail, and FIL had to stop again and wait for another U-Haul repair team. By the end of day two the truck was finally in good shape--and my FIL still in Massachusetts. But now things went smoothly, you ask? Not so. While FIL was racing across the country to make up for lost time, my boys and I were enjoying ourselves in the City, looking forward to our cross-country train ride to Salt Lake City via Chicago. We had booked a luxurious (we hoped) sleeper compartment, but already on the way to Penn Station, pushing the stroller with the Bean, pulling a large suitcase, carrying a giant box with dry ice (nursing moms will know the contents) I got an automated phone message from Amtrak informing me that our train had been cancelled due to flooding in the Midwest and that "no alternative connection" was available. WTF! sums up our immediate response as well as the general mood that followed. It was lovely to spend two more days with our family, but man, it was not lovely to dish out moula for a crappy last-minute flight (I hate flying, full stop).

At last we all made it: DH, Conrad, FIL, moi--we all were tired and cranky, and crankier even we grew when the previous tenant (the owner's son) had not moved out by the time we parked our truck in front of the house and the moving help arrived. For me not to lose my mind I took the baby and strolled away... I don't know anymore how far or where I walked, but by the time I returned, FIL, DH, and three college kids had performed a miracle, and we had officially moved into our house (which, BTW, is gorgeous).

Now, dearest blog, that was nearly two weeks ago. Have we completely moved in? Of course not. First we binge-shopped at IKEA to fill all that empty space (a dining room! Holy cow, we have a dining room! And a family room! Conrad has his own room! Get this--there's even a laundry room!), then spent one week building furniture, and only now are we slowly unpacking boxes. DH has missed plenty of work and currently works 26 hours a day to catch up, while I unpack for about ten minutes and then play with the Bean for an hour in our own backyard (my botanical knowledge is almost nil, but I successfully identified roses, sunflowers, lilies, poppies, lavender, and irises. Oh--and a peach tree).

So, now you know why I have neglected (but not forgotten) you. Whenever something exciting happens (plumbing problems! Salty drinking water! How do I take care of this gorgeous garden and backyard? There are snow-topped mountains in every direction I look! I've witnessed some serious yarn-bombing! There are three parks within walking distance! The LYS is OMG-awesome! The Bean started eating solid foods! And he received a letter from the White House [no kidding]!) I would like to write you about it. Alas, we didn't even have internet until yesterday. And my camera cable is only-God-knows-where. I can't show you pictures even of my FOs. (I also don't know where two of those three FOs are.) Really, all I gotta say is, we'll be here for a while, and I'll collect plenty of SLC impressions I can blog about. Gosh, we are so excited to live here!

Three paragraphs about Salt Lake City

One
We Got House! Currently we're renting a large apartment that is, however, in a dump of a building with neighbors from hell in a not-so-great neighborhood. Last week we zoomed to Salt Lake to see if we could do better there. Many rental houses and a quick consideration of becoming house owners (*gasp*) later, we're happy renters of this little house:

For just two-thirds of what we're currently paying for rent we got a ton of extras, including a backyard and two fireplaces. I've never lived in a house or had either garden or fireplace. I'm excited, like, big time. Especially since everyone we've talked to says that our neighborhood is awesome. I can't wait to discover its awesomeness (although I do dread the cross-country move).

Two
Utah is the most conservative state in the country, and the most conservative county in the most conservative state is located less than fifty miles outside Salt Lake. Or so Jon Krakauer writes in his description of Mormonism, Under the Banner of Heaven, a book I'm reading so that I have a reply ready when the next person tells me a polygamy joke the minute I say we're moving to Utah. What I'm learning is that the Mormon church condemns polygamy as an outdated custom practiced today only by a misguided few who have been excommunicated by the church. I suppose that's good news. What's bad news is that Mormonism appears to be a religion based, in part, on the complete submission of women and children to their husbands and fathers. The biggest threats to the Mormon church, according to the LDS apostle second in line to become LDS president, are "the gay-lesbian movement, the feminist movement, and the ever-present challenge from the so-called scholars or intellectuals."* This really bothers me. I'm a scholar, feminist, and gay rights advocate. Throw "pro-choice" and "environmentalist" into the mix, and you know where I stand politically. If the views of ordinary parishioners really match the official positions of the LDS church, I worry that living in Salt Lake, where half the population is Mormon, will require a lot of adjustment on my part, and not because of the mountain climate.
*Boyd K. Packer, cit. in Krakauer.

Three
While cruising the streets of Salt Lake in search of "For Rent" signs, I ran into and talked to four people. All of them were very nice. The first was an older gentlemen who gave me a tour of his garden and invited Conrad to visit often and play in his treehouse. (Conrad can't quite roll over yet, and climbing trees will have to wait for a few years.) The other people were women and--yay!--knitters. All three mentioned the knitting group at Blazing Needles, a LYS that's just a twenty-minute walk from our house. I was given phone numbers and invitations to meet for tea. Despite my second paragraph misgivings, it does seem like SLC is going to be a fun place to knit.

Ten on Tuesday: Ten Favorite Health and Beauty Products

It's been a while since I've participated in Carole's group blogging enterprise, but this week's topic caught my attention. Beauty products! Love 'em!!

1. La Roche-Posay Toleriane Riche Facial Cream saved me as a teenager, and I'm still a Toleriane fan. I used to have pretty bad facial eczema, which sucks at any age, but it really sucks if you're a teen. I used to get prescriptions for this stuff, now I buy it myself and use it religiously as soon as dry-skin season starts (that is, heating season). It helps with dry, blotchy, itchy skin. Love it!

2. Foundation used to be a big problem because of aforementioned eczema, until my dermatologist suggested (somewhat hesitantly) to try Teint Idole Ultra by Lancôme. I haven't touched any other foundation since then, and because I'm so happy with it all my other make-up products are Lancôme as well. (I don't use make-up often: only when something important is happening at work, when I go out, and when I have one of those I'm-the-ugliest-duckling-in-the-world days and need a confidence booster. I usually use some pinkish blush, a little bit of green eyeshadow, and brown mascara. I'm pretty minimalistic.)

3. I hardly ever use lipstick but love lip gloss. My favorites are Aveda Lip Shine (in color Beet Root--which is no longer available online *gasp*) and C.O. Bigelow's Mentha Lip Shine Vanilla. For less glossy but moisturized lips I use Burt's Bees Beeswax Lip Balm (in a tin) or plain ol' Blistex, either with a hint of color or, in weather like today's, the medicated kind.

4. Constant companion: Herbacin Kamille hand cream. It's one of just a handful of East German products that survived German unification and is still manufactured today--and available in North America, for instance at Whole Foods and on Amazon. This is the best hand cream, like, ever.

5. Chanel No. 5. Nuff said.

6. After a hot bath (a Saturday morning essential) I like to pamper myself with Weleda Lavender Relaxing Body Oil. I love Weleda products, and for the Bean I got the Calendula Baby Oil for future baby massages.

7. I have seriously cracked heels year-round. Neutrogena Norwegian Formula Cracked Heels helps--as long as I don't forget to use it (which I do most nights). It's no longer on the Neutrogena website, but I assume the company's new Foot Cream is identical.

8. Redken Extreme Conditioner makes for very soft and silky hair, but recently I replaced all shower/hair products with paraben free stuff. The Whole Foods brand lavender shampoo and conditioner don't leave my hair quite as soft, but (hopefully) healthier!

9. Entirely ridiculous, but even after ten years in the US I still haven't found (a) a toothpaste and (b) a roll-on deodorant that I like, and I make all visitors from Germany bring Meridol and 8x4 Mild und Soft. The toothpaste is gum-friendly and whitener-free; the deodorant is what my mom gave me when I was old enough to use it, and I've never tried anything else.

10. Ok, I give up. I've run out of "favorites." How about house beauty (i.e., cleaning) products? I love everything Method, preferably when it smells of lavender. The sea minerals dish soup is also awesome.

Happy Tuesday!


***Can you tell that waiting-for-baby is getting boring? I mean, I just took a photo of my toothpaste.***

Brain Child

I can't help but brag. Today a copy of my dissertation arrived in the mail, printed on archival paper and properly bound, just as it is shelved in the library.

The stats...

Pages: 403
Paragraphs: 2.186
Lines: 12.333
Words: 136.415
Characters (no spaces): 776.027
Characters (with spaces): 911.634
First day of writing: Oct 6, 2008
Last day of writing: Aug 2, 2010
Days between those two dates: 666
Number of actual writing days: 94
Activities on non-writing days, in order of frequency, from high to low: "nothing" (vacationing, knitting, socializing, working out, cooking...), teaching, feeling guilty about not writing, research related activities (reading, taking notes, thinking)
Average number of words written per writing day: 1.451
Self-imposed goal of words written per writing day: 1.500
Date of submitting the first draft: Aug 10, 2010
Date of submitting the final (pre-defense) version: Nov 1, 2010
Time spent between these two dates revising the dissertation: every waking moment not spent teaching or keeping bodily functions going
Date of defense: Nov 19, 2010
Revisions required by committee after defense: 19 typos, one factual mistake
Time it took to complete final revisions: less than an hour
Occurrence of situation in which this few revisions are required: rare (per anecdotal knowledge)
Post-defense feeling: disbelief
Feeling today: "glad it's over," pride
Estimated number of months by which finishing the dissertation was delayed because author was knitting (a hobby the author picked up in March 2009): three

Happy New Year!

Dearies,

Worry not: everyone is happy, healthy, and well chez Wollgut, and I very much hope the same is true for you and yours and that you have had a splendid holiday season.

May I explain the long blog hiatus in just three bullet points?

--It happened: I'm now Dr. Wollgut. It hasn't sunk in yet! The writing, editing, revising, defending... it's all a blur.
--I'm hugely, enormously, gigantically pregnant, and still have three more weeks to waddle around on elephant feet before the Bean is scheduled to arrive.
--Did I ever mention that last semester I worked not my usual part-time teaching job but had (and still have) a full-time appointment and had accepted an additional part-time teaching gig?

The last seven months have left me breathless and my knitting needles idle. But the past ten days or so--during my winter break, which in January will transition seamlessly into maternity leave--I've been obsessed with knitting, and I have several little things drying on my blocking board. Photo shoot and blog update are to follow! It feels awesome to be back. :)

Happy New Year!

(Moi, on Christmas Day.)

Bean Prep

Howdy! I have great news: carpal tunnel syndrome is on its way OUT, and I started knitting again. Hurrah! I still have to wear a brace at night--apparently I sleep with my head on my left wrist--but typing is no longer as painful, and knitting isn't much of a problem at all. Still, I'm taking it easy (the knitting, that is; I don't have a choice but edit the dissertation like a maniac, and that won't change until my November 5 deadline), but slow progress is better than no progress. After two months of a little bit of knitting here and there I finished a baby blanket:

The pattern is Jared Flood's Tweed Baby Blanket, and there's nothing I don't love about the blanket. Love the garter stitch, love the fan-and-feather border, love the yarn (Knit Picks' City Tweet DK), love the colors, love everything. I had dreaded picking up 440 stitches and making an i-cord bind-off, but neither one was terrible.

Today the third trimester starts (?!?!!), and there isn't much evidence other than my growing belly that soon there's going to be a baby with us. So I made my first baby purchase. Just to have something to look at. I've been staring at these all day long:

So cute! Whether or not we'll use these is besides the point. It was an impulse purchase, but since the pair cost less than a fancy espresso drink--which I no longer buy--I don't feel bad about it.

And now that I'm so close to being completely done with grad work and decided not to do anything but knit baby clothes in December, I placed a huge order with Webs to have everything ready for a post-defense knitting marathon. You heard right: a marathon! I'll be in pajamas all day long, lounge on the sofa, listen to NPR, and knit knit knit. How about it? I've been daydreaming about December for weeks, especially once it became obvious that I wouldn't be able to make it to Rhinebeck this weekend. There's just too much "footnote fiddling" to take a weekend off... *sigh*

Here's recent me (already three weeks old and four pounds behind):

I Got Mail!

International mail at that. And look what was in the big, padded envelope: a hand-sewn bag, made specifically to my liking by DW! Thank you, danke, merci, and kiitos!! I won DW's giveaway of one of her farmer's market bags, and, folks, it is beautiful! Don't know if I want to throw dirty 'tatoes in there or juicy heirloom tomatoes. DW, you made my day!

So much so that I thought it's time for a blog post. It's been two months, and the reason for the long hiatus bears the evil name of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Either one of two causes is to blame: (1) dissertation or (2) pregnancy (personally I suspect that a combination of the two was at work).

As to (1): As perhaps mentioned before (ha ha), I had a busy summer. I typed, deleted, and typed some more for about twelve hours a day, every day for two months, but at the end I did finish the darn D. In mid-August I submitted the sucker, and while I'm still in the process of revising it, the dissertation is for all intents and purposes done. The defense is scheduled for November, and I'm in blissful denial about the details. In any event, my left wrist gave up just a few days before I turned in the opus magnum.

And (2)? Things are going really really well. The Bean is the male kind (it's a boy it's a boy it's a boy! Hurrah hurrah!!), and he and I have already made it past the halfway point. Not that evidence was needed, but the ultrasound pictures clearly show that the boy is absolutely adorable. A complete cutie. A couple of weeks ago I started noticing his movements, and by now he's advanced to handing out pretty solid kicks. Even Hubs can feel the boy! The only downside to pregnancy: increased amounts of fluids, which in my case caused CTS. Meh.

Because of CTS I can neither
(1) type nor
(2) knit.

Now you understand why this blog has taken the route of Sleeping Beauty and is temporarily hibernating. Not being able to knit for baby really sucks. Not blogging (or emailing!) sucks, too.

And now you need to forgive me, but that's as much typing I can do in one day... I'll leave you with photo a yours truly...

Surprise Baby!

Quick recap... here's photo of the Baby Surprise Jacket I finished a week ago...

Cute, eh? And soooo soft and cuddly. I asked you to guess who it's for, but no one dared to make a wild guess (chickens!). Since I can't keep mum about it much longer I'm just gonna blurt it out, right after I go through a list of candidates.

'Cause candidates there are many! Besides three tiny ones born to friends just recently, there is big time baby news in the family.

First, there's a November baby on its way. Proud mamma: my step-sister.

Second, a boy is arriving in December. Surprised papa: my little brother (barely out of his own diapers! school).

Third, a January baby is also on order. Its tentative name: Beanie. Its over-joyous, over-the-moonish parents are... drum rolls... champagne cork pops...: moi and the Hubs. We! Us! Beanie parents! YAY!!!!

That's three cousins all being born in the span of three months! My poor father, who says he doesn't much like kids (which we don't believe, since he is a great dad to us), is a bit overwhelmed by the prospect of triple grandfatherhood. Tee hee. I, on the other hand, couldn't be happier--for my brother, my step-sister, but most of all for us! The Beanie--who got its name at the first ultrasound, where it looked like a two centimeter long lima bean--has long been awaited, mostly in talk. When we got down to business, so to speak, we didn't expect that the Bean would turn up within just a few months. We found out in May, and what I remember from our England trip most vividly are the frequent stops to Boots to get more pregger tests: I successfully peed on sticks in London, Oxford, York, and Manchester!

Perhaps now you can guess why there wasn't much knitting or blogging in June. 'Cause I was in the bathroom, thank you very much. Morning sickness translated in my case into afternoon-evening-night sickness, although it's gotten much better over the last couple of weeks. Now I throw up only at midnight. Progress!

I'm totally fascinated by the pregnancy changes. I mean, you hear this stuff about weird appetite and the whole morning sickness thing, and it's all true (creamed herring bites, anyone? Some OJ with that?). But the craziest thing is my sense of smell, which especially during the first two months was über-human: I could smell California from here. Now that I'm in my second trimester things are returning to normal. I suppose this will change again once there's a bump to carry in front of me. (Hel-lo bump.... where are you?)

Good night now. The Beanie needs sleep. 'Cause this week it's growing from "medium peach" to "small grapefruit" size--and that's a lot of growing!

(Oh... the cardi? Yes, for the Beanie. Can't you tell? It's green! Like green lima beans!)

Happy Anniversary!

From my carrel in the library I have a splendid view of Sage Chapel, Cornell's nonsectarian chapel. Two years ago, minus an hour, I was getting ready to walk into Sage for a pretty special event:

Happy second anniversary, Hubs!

(More news on the BS[J] to follow!)

Ithaca: June in a Flash

Goodness! Seriously. A blink ago it was June 6. And now it's the 4th-of-July weekend. Time swooshes by especially fast when one's busy, that's the lesson learned in June.

We traded in our Beantown residence for a summer abode in Gorges Ithaca, New York. We went to grad school here, and the Hubs was asked back to teach math camp to kids who where math superstars in their respective colleges, where math, however, wasn't taught as rigorously as perhaps it should have been. These kids are now getting ready for prestigious grad schools, and to prepare them for what will no doubt be a very different academic setting, they participate in an 8-week super-intensive math program at Cornell. And the Hubs is one of their professors. The program is very, very, very intense; the students work extremely hard and are in class between 10 am and 11 pm every day, six days a week. The Hubs is in his office by 8 am and doesn't leave till 9:30 pm.

And moi? Well. I said I went to grad school here. Truth is, I'm still in grad school. I would have been done by now if I hadn't been given the opportunity to teach last year, but since I taught and published and yadda yadda, I didn't get my dissertating act together and. Am. Not. Done. Yet. So, the Hubs' schedule suits me well: I'm also up on campus each morning at 8, go to my library carrel from which I have the most amazing view of campus, the town, and Cayuga Lake, and write like a maniac till the library closes at 9 pm. Then my brain usually is kaputt and I fall into bed and don't move a toe till the next morning.

Still. It's all very awesome. We love Ithaca and are so happy just being here (even if we don't have time to do anything, say, exciting: see any of the state parks, for instance, or bike around the lakes). I'm not complaining at all. It feels great to be productive, and I'm beginning to see the light at the end of the dissertation tunnel. (One. More. Chapter.) I'm a bit panicky about finishing; I thought I'd have another semester of fellowships but then the university where I taught last year offered me a full-time lecturing position for this coming year (Yay!!! Very exciting news!). Once I start teaching in September I will have zero time to dissertate. So, the pressure is on. Pressure in Ithaca is totally fine, though. (Pressure in Boston usually ends in back pain, or so I noticed earlier this spring.)

And now, can you guess what the knitting chez Wollgut is doing? It's taking a summer snooze. It went on vacation without me. It's probably at your house. While traveling in May I managed a tiny Multnomah shawlette, but I haven't had the time to block it or to take photos of it. It's hanging out with the yarn I optimistically brought along to make three sweaters (!) this summer (!!). Ha!

And that's all, folks. You have a splendid holiday weekend (should this weekend be a holiday for you). Enjoy watching the World Cup (I'm watching the really exciting games in my carrel, on a screen split between ESPN 3 and my last chapter) (Go, Podolski! Go, Özil! Schweini! Lahm! Müller!). And if you're neither into football or July 4th festivities, make yourself a perfect weekend in whichever way pleases you!

Rabbit Hole

Into which I fell sometime earlier this week. It's the end of the semester, which usually means chaos. This time it's chaos and then some. A lot of it is work related, but in addition to the normal stuff--writing and grading exams and planning last-minute review sessions to calm down the panicked kids--I've also been busy moderating at a couple of academic events (the task of which is both nerve-racking and delightful) and interviewing for a part-time teaching position for next year (I got it!). The week went by so fast I hardly had time to plan our trip to Europe, which starts on Tuesday. In fact, I know I'll be going to Oxford, I just don't know yet how and when I get there, or where I'll stay.

Yes, Oxford. I'm very excited! Many hours of watching the brilliant British detective series Inspector Morse made us want to visit the town. Between conferencing in Berlin in early May and attending my BFF's wedding in York at the end of May, the Hubs and I will have five days of real vacation. The Berlin and York bits are planned perfectly, only the "five days of real vacation" are as of yet unorganized. I don't mind so much; the conference organizers put me up in a fancy hotel, and for the wedding we will lodge at a posh B&B. Who cares if we spend our Oxford nights on the street? Turns out, the Hubs does. Wherever we end up, I'm sure it will be lovely. And the wedding will be absolutely wonderful. It's my BFF, she's getting married--need I say more? (My tiny complaint is that I'm losing her to Great Britain. What's up with that? Wonderful as he is, why does the groom need to be a Brit?)

Once we come back from Europe we're home for exactly three days before we move to upstate New York for the summer. The Hubs teaches Nerd Camp at Cornell (aka summer math school), and I will finish my dissertation. We sublet an apartment from a friend of a friend of a friend; it's a lovely place in one of the most gorgeous Victorian villas in town, with a porch, a beautiful garden, and easy access to a great walking trail. Although we're there to work, it will feel a little bit like vacation, or so we hope.

You guessed it already: lately it's been too busy here to knit anything at all. I'm hoping to get some peace and quiet on the plane (this is mental peace and quiet) to start something small. Perhaps Multnomah. Perhaps Damson. We'll see. I'm going to wind yarn tonight and wait till inspiration hits.

In case I don't get a chance to write before I leave: I wish y'all a happy May!

* * *

The following photo sums up today's attempts at trying to deal with Boston's drinking water supply crisis (read here for info):

Water? There's none left. Every store offered the same picture: empty shelves as far as the eye can see. We started drinking diet coke. I don't know how we will wash dishes with diet coke. Brush teeth with diet coke?

Frohe Ostern!

My tech-savvy grandma emailed a photo this morning:

Yupp, that's me. Easter 1981, at my great-grandmother's house.

Bits and Pieces

First I shout out the news about my blogiversary, then I disappear from the blog? Yes, something like that. We spent last weekend with family in New York; the occasion was a sad one, but being with family was wonderful. (Really, the Hubs has the bestest family.) Since our return I've been running to stay in place just catching up with work I had neglected because of the whole ouch-my-back-hurts situation: I realize that it couldn't have been 387 papers I graded, 174 students I saw during office hours, or 39 meetings I attended, but the numbers give you an idea of the magnitude of the 'catching up' enterprise. This week really has been a bit too much.

First, since you asked (you did, didn't you?), my back has gotten better but is still not quite right. At last I saw a doctor, a specialist in "non-surgecial orthopedics," who told me after a two-minute exam that it's probably a herniated disk, that I'll need to have an MRI done, that, if it's bad, I'll get series of epidural steroid injections and, if they don't help, I should consider surgery. Well, duh, thanks. Since I've been through this whole thing twice already, I am fully aware of the surgery option. Since twice before I got around surgery by treating and thus relaxing the areas around the disk (through acupuncture, Tui Na, TENS, lots and lots of walking and stretching, and a positive attitude), thereby giving it a better chance of healing on its own, as opposed to aggressively attacking it, I was disappointed by the doctor's approach. I'm gonna remain a Posimist (a positive optimist) and do my walking and leave to doctor be. (He did request an MRI, and I'm waiting for my insurance's OK. Last time it took six weeks to get it, and that was when I was still a student in NY with NY student insurance coverage. This time I'm also a NY student with NY student coverage, but I reside in MA. This has proven difficult expensive before, since my insurance doesn't feel entirely responsible for the bill as soon as I move a toe across the NY border.) End of today's health report.
OK, just one more detail: I'm not supposed to ride the bike yet. But since riding the bus is brutal for my poor disk, the doc prescribed a monstrous back brace that gives me the waistline of Scarlett O'Hara but literally takes my breath.

Second, weather (yupp, I'm practicing for old age by talking about health and weather). It's been glorious. After last weekend's ungodly rain storms that flooded half of NY and MA, the bus route to work, and almost all of my students' dorms, the weather has been just beautiful. It's been sunny and warm, cheering up even the grumpiest of MBTA drivers, postal workers, and campus security personnel. And it's made me incredibly happy. Finally I can wear shoes without socks! (A big bonus when unable to reach one's feet.) Today's plan is to go on a long walk through our favorite neighborhood (which, unfortunately, isn't ours). Think 8 miles or so, with my LYS, the most fabulous bakery of all times, and our local independent book seller on the way. Yay.

Third, knitting: After I used up 200 yards of sock yarn to create a loooong tube to test lace, cable, and lace-and-cable patterns, and was still worried about boring Elinor's judges to death, I scraped the idea of entering the sock design contest. Here are a few ugly results:

Today Elinor posted another blog entry, encouraging all of us design newbies to enter the contest, no matter how "dull" we thought our designs, and I find myself back at square one. I want to be part of this! I anticipate spending all of my knitting time, which currently isn't very much anyway, racking my brain about sock patterns.

And now out into the sunshine! Hope you, too, are having a sunny weekend.

In Bed with Bob

Bob is not the name of my husband. It is the name of an unpleasant visitor who forces me to stay in bed with my legs up on a foam cube cut to my specifications. Bob is the name of my back when it hurts; Bob is the name of lumbar back pain.

Once upon a time, not too long after I had finished a half-marathon and was in pretty good shape, Bob entered my life uninvited. My then-neighbor Amy named him after Bob the Builder (context now unknown), and the name stuck. The first time he visited, Bob stayed for several months and accompanied me to various doctors--from university hospital genius to total quack, and everything in between--; he demanded Vicodine, oxycodone, and morphine; put me in the hospital; and left only after I rolled him into a physical rehabilitation clinic in a wheel chair. At the clinic, somewhere in the middle of rural nowhere, I learned to relax without the use of pain medication but through acupuncture and meditation, and to heal with the help of electric muscle stimulation, afore-mentioned cube, and specific insoles designed for my feet. No surgery needed: Bob left on his own. The threat of Bob's return has curbed my ambition to run a full marathon, but except for rare (and short) visits, Bob is gone.

Now that he is here again I try not to freak out or fear the worst. I try to be zen about Bob. Ice packs, hot baths, walks, time on the cube. As long as I'm not sitting or bending or standing, coughing or sneezing or brushing my hair, Bob is under control. Bob doesn't like me knitting, and Bob surely does not want me to wash and block a new sweater. The Hubs is a trooper, as always, and today he even washed my Olympic sweater. (I know! Totally too sweet. Proudly I put the Ravelympics medal on the blog.) He cooks and brings me tea and helps me into my walking shoes (I can't put on socks on my own, nevermind tie shoe laces).

The confinement to bed has given me some unexpected time to upload and sort photos from our Florida vacation, and here's a mosaic of my favorite photos:



I was over the moon to see palm trees, and I took plenty of photos of those. The kissing couple? My parents. The felt flowers? For my birthday. The astronaut? Cape Carnaveral. I loved to walk at the beach, and just thinking of it makes Bob want to go back to Florida. Maybe he should go there right now and leave me in peace... :|

Ten on Tues-, 'scuse me, Wednesday

Yesterday's Ten on Tuesday challenge was Ten Things You Wish You Knew How To Do. Not at all challenging, since loads of things come to mind (my egocentric self is asking for: how to knit! how to speak French! how to finish a dissertation in time! how to add two extra hours to each day! My world-improving self is requesting: how to improve women's lives! how to end world hunger and poverty! how to end war! how to stop racism/sexism/homophobia!). Having talked to the Hubs about realistic things I wish I knew how to do over dinner last night, I've come up with this list of seven:

1. Read sheet music, sing, and play the piano (I used to sing in different C-list choirs during childhood, teenage years, and early twenties. I've always wanted to learn how to play the piano, and Grandma B. took me to a music school when I was four or five years old to sign me up for piano lessons. Alas, I was turned away because my fingers were deemed "too short" and "too fat" to stand a chance of becoming a world-famous pianist, and in those days [and in that country] children without promising prospects for fame weren't supported much. Because I was predicted to grow to six feet tall I was put on a basketball team, however.)

2. Speak an additional language. That's on top of improving my French, Russian, and Latin. The new language is going to be one of these: Czech, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, or Finnish.

3. Do photography, like grandfather J. and my dad did. Grandpa was a passionate photographer; my dad inherited his darkroom equipment but somehow lost interest in keeping up with photography. I'd love to know how to do it properly.

4. Keep a garden. Again, our daydreams take the Hubs and me to a place where we'll stay longer than a mere two years. We think: house, pets, garden. I want to have an herb garden! I'd love to know how to care for plants.

5. I wish I knew how to speak in public confidently. I still get very, very nervous.

6. Sewing. My MIL used to sew clothes for her family (including four bridesmaid dresses, her own wedding dress, all clothes for the child-version of Hubs...). I think I need to spend a summer with her and have her teach me how to sew.

7. Carpentry. All men in my family are terribly crafty. My dad built a house and completely renovated a rotten city apartment (wiring it anew, building brick walls, taking some down, tiling, redoing wooden floors... ). I think I'd like to do things with wood. (Think built-in bookshelves.)

And here's one thing I used to think I wanted to know how to do well: cooking. I finally admitted to myself that while the Hubs gets a real kick out of cooking, I find it only mildly pleasant. So why force it? It's his Cook's Illustrated subscription anyway...

Voilà!

I Was There

You have no doubt come across some of the news coverage celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. The New York Times is running a pretty cool interactive before/after slideshow, a gallery of readers' photos, a graphic detailing the wall complex including the notorious death strip, and the original 1989 NYT article announcing the fall of the wall. Germany's magazine Der Spiegel is offering a "live ticker" running the original press releases by AP, dpa, AFP at the exact time of day they were issued twenty years ago. I have neither graphics nor historical documents; I don't even have photos. But I have a couple of blurred memories:

I was 11 years old at the time and without a clue about the political situation. When I was much younger I somehow thought that it was all a matter of technology: West Germany, West Berlin, and most of the world seemed to be a on a different planet, and traveling to East Germany required an advanced spaceship that we (the East Germans) simply hadn't developed yet. So while everyone could visit us, we could only travel on our own little planet, which included the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Bulgaria. No one ever corrected my space ship fantasy, but once my (step-) grandfather turned 65 and legally left East Berlin to visit his cousin in the West by walking through a much-guarded door at the crossing Tränenpalast, this explanation didn't hold up any longer. During the summer and early fall of 1989 I joined my family watching the (West German) news about refugees who escaped East Germany through Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and about the large protest demonstrations in East Germany in which people demand to travel abroad. In early November, a million people gathered in Berlin to protest the East German regime.

At the time of that massive demonstration, which we could see from my grandmother's apartment windows, my baby-brother needed emergency surgery. We moved into the waiting room of the hospital. On November 9, after successful surgery and a couple of days of supervised recovery, the baby was released home and things went back to normal.

My dad, a civil engineer, and my mom, a lecturer of economics, had, by GDR standard, a pretty good income. We had a phone line, a car, an apartment with gas heat (rather than cockle stoves), and a full bathroom; we traveled twice a year, often to countries in Central Europe. Rent was cheap, food was cheap. Things like color-TV and cassette players, however, were exuberantly expensive. My dad had started working as a cabbie the previous year to buy a Sanyo stereo (which he still owns today), and since he liked driving and since the extra money was nice, he continued to drive a cab a couple of nights per week in 1989. He was on taxi-duty the night of the 9th.

When he returned home, at 10:30 or 11 p.m., he told my mom about this crazy person who flagged his cab to catch a ride to West Berlin. My dad had laughed at him and refused to pick him up. As he was telling the story, my mom interrupted him to summarize the historic news conference she'd followed on TV, during which Günter Schabowski, at around 7 p.m., had announced that new travel regulations would allow private travel to the West (with a visa). Because Schabowski hadn't been part of preparing these regulations and didn't know the details, he responded to a journalist's question as to when these new regulations would come into effect by stumbling sofort ("immediately," rather than the following day, as planned, to allow for border police to adjust to the new situation: that would have been the correct answer). Berlin radio and TV stations declared the wall was open, and tens of thousands of East Germans gathered at border crossings. Faced with massive crowds, the border police, itself without any direction from above, couldn't but let them through. My mom had followed the events on TV while comforting the baby, and she urged my dad to take us (me and my older brother) to West Berlin.

I was asleep at the time. I remember my dad woke me, saying we'd be going nach drüben (over there). I didn't believe him and went back to sleep. Next time I woke I found myself in the back seat of our car, wearing a coat over my pajamas and shoes on my bare feet. My older brother was in the front. We were stuck amidst hundreds of cars at the lesser-known border crossing of Heinrich-Heine-Strasse, and I kept dozing off. It seems to me we waited for hours; my dad says we were moving the entire time. I don't remember much of the crossing; there was a lot of noise and many people were yelling and screaming with excitement. On the other side of the wall Wessis were greeting us, offering my father free beer. He asked for directions to go somewhere kid-friendly, and a West Berlin man took the lead in his car to guide us (and others) to Kudamm, a famous boulevard-style shopping street that was already packed with ecstatic Berliners dancing and hugging each other. We went to Europa-Center (a small shopping mall and once an iconic building of West Berlin) to see the large water clock (picture here). My most vivid memory of the night is standing in my pajamas in front of that clock, with my dad explaining to me how it worked.

My first impressions of the West that night were that things smelled different and that the night--which in East Germany was just plain dark--was colorful and bright. In East Berlin hardly any stores had illuminated shop signs, but West Berlin shone with bright neon signs everywhere. As to the smell: all of West Berlin smelled like a huge intershop (an East German chain of stores offering West German products for hard currency [D-mark or dollars], aimed at Western tourists and, unintentionally, the stuff East German material dreams were made off), an aroma my mom identified as result of the combination of coffee beans, dark chocolate, and washing power, the quintessential content of any West-Paket (a package from the West) arriving in the East for Christmas.

We weren't in West Berlin for very long, and we didn't see the celebrations at Brandenburg Gate. My dad took us home in time to sleep a couple of hours and go to school the next morning. I had math during first period, but our math teacher 'went missing' over night (along with half the students), and a different teacher substituted for him. This substitute teacher happened to be the school's party functionary and, perhaps, even a Stasi informant (thus the rumor). He had spent the night with his sick mother and missed everything. By the time he walked into class he still didn't know what had happened, and he was furious that so many students were absent. We explained to him that everyone was in the West, that most of us present had been to the West already. The man quite literally lost it. He suffered a nervous breakdown that day and was taken from school in an ambulance.

After school my older brother convinced me to go back to West Berlin. At this point people could cross the border but had to provide ID cards. My older brother was 15 and already had his own ID. I didn't, and in retrospect it seems crazy and quite reckless that we crossed the border without our parents. I don't remember what we did that afternoon, but I imagine we wandered among the crowds and were quite happy. My mom went to West Berlin that day with co-workers and she was one of the people who were lifted up to stand on the wall.

Much more could be said, but I do want to keep it short. Just one thing: my parents' marriage, which already was disintegrating before the fall of 1989, fell apart during the next year. My mom met my now-stepfather, who is from West Germany. Within two years of the fall of the Berlin wall I had both, a family in the East and a family in the West. Therefore I don't strongly identify as Ossi but consider myself a child of unification. Everyone in my family has benefited from the 1989/1990 Wende, but one person is bitter about it: my aunt's husband who, as an East German heart surgeon, tried to escape the East, was caught, spent a year in prison, and was eventually 'bought' by the West German government. He paid a high price for his freedom and possibly resents that 17 millions East Germans got it for free.

Anyway. Happy 20th fall of the wall anniversary!