LotusMonkey’s Neighborhood

I began knitting Jaden's baby blanket today.  I casted on my circular needles and told myself I was going to be finished with the blanket by August.  Oh the joy of yarn wrapped around my fingertips as I wave the simple pattern that will bring joy through many winter months until Jaden outgrows it.

I've committed myself, in fact, I've committed myself to a deadline.  

Tis the season for christmas knitting and I have committed a major fail. Here is the glove I made for my grandpa.

glove of the BFG

Monstrosity

I do not have midget hands. In fact, my fingers are quite long for a girl. I had my dad try it on and his hand drowned. You should have heard his fingers, they were screaming, "help! I can't breathe!" Notice my sweet bracelet in the above? It's a rubber band.

This has severely dampened my holiday cheer. In fact, it drove me to drink. I have successfully frogged the glove and started working on my mom's sweater. Gloves are the devil. On the bright side (she could choke... haha. jk.), it snowed last night and it's still snowing and it's quite beautiful. I adore snow and it finally feels like christmas.

So take a final look at the BFG's glove that is no more. Also my parent's backyard.

Oh the weather outside is frightful

Don't you love suburbia? You can see two of my neighbors households.

I do love christmas music (and you should too), and so I will leave you with one of the happiest christmas songs ever sung by the illustious band, Hanson.

06 What Christmas Means To Me

I have a new phone number. It came with an unexpected bonus feature: a window into the life of its previous owner. As far as I can tell, Jane Doe didn't tell a soul that she'd dropped this number and now her life is calling me. In one month, I've learned:

• She's employed. This I learned when her employer called me at 5:00 AM to see if she could work the daytime shift.
• She's involved in some sort of child custody dispute. I found that out when the district court left a message on my voice mail.
• English isn't her native language (She'd requested an interpreter; the court wanted to know what language she needed.).
• She has bought at least one item from Sears. Since I was standing at just the right angle when the sales clerk typed "our" number in, I saw the computer display, which is how I learned Jane's full name and street address.
• She didn't register the number with the Do Not Call registry, so I can't tell if the large number of debt relief calls I've been getting are what anyone gets in today's economy or if they were calling her specifically. Since I did register the number, at least those calls are going away.
• While I've given Jane a generic Anglo-Saxon pseudonym, when I Googled her real name, it appears to be fairly common among African women, especially near Ethiopia.

Privacy? What privacy? Please note that I was handed all this information except for the origin of her name, and Googling that was hardly complicated. If I were a nasty person, I'd be well on my way to committing identity theft.

Quite naturally, I've started wondering how many places I've used my old phone number at and what someone will be learning about me fairly shortly. I update it when I can, of course, but I'm not going to catch every instance. What are those stores where I've shopped once, left my number behind, and will never be back to erase it? (Sears, probably. I only seem to buy something there once every five years.)

I get why the stores are using phone numbers as identifiers. Everyone has a database nowadays. Names are way too easy to misspell. Social Security numbers are verboten. Phone numbers are unique and everyone has theirs memorized. Plus, now you can take your number with you when you move, up to a point, so they're more reliable than they used to be. But, okay, now I'm getting just a little uneasy about all the privacy/identity issues that go along with this. And no, I have no ideas about how to get around it, so I won't do anything; I'll just fret about it quietly in the back of my mind.

I'm trying to finish packing and getting ready to go back home for the Holidays, so this might be my last blog post till the new year. I wish everyone who reads my posts the happiest of holiday seasons, and great new things in the new year.

Meanwhile, I'll sign off with a top ten list, of the things I like best about this time of year:

10) The excitement and anticipation of spending the holidays with people I love;

9) Shopping, for someone other than myself;

8) The meaning behind Advent. It's a time of waiting and preparation, and its color is purple. What's not to love?

7) Turkey, ham, sweet potatoes, and cranberry sauce;

6) Better yet, apple pie, pumpkin pie, and fruitcake;

(I know--what kind of nut likes fruit cake? Ummm...me)

5) Charlie Brown Christmas specials;

4) Christmas cookies--both the baking and the eating part;

3) All the crafts projects. When I do crafts, it takes me back to my childhood, and the wonder of the whole season. Most of the time nowadays, I wonder if I'll have time to finish everything in time for the big day;

2) Snow. Lots and lots of snow, please. Enough so I can't get out the door. Then I'll have more time to complete the presents in time for the big day. See #3;

And my top reason why I love this time of year is...drum roll please...

1) This time of year reminds me of what's truly important in life, and sets my soul back on the straight path, just in time for the new year.

Here's hoping you can also take the time to enjoy what you love best about this season. See you in the new year.

Lafayette is doing well. Most of his time is spent trying to kill my hands or feet. I have the scratches and bite marks to prove it. He has also been escaping outside! I hope he sticks around. My fear is he may just take off or get hit. So I try to watch him most of the time. Here is a rare moment of sleeping bliss!

The Lion Sleeps

Because I now have a boyfriend, I have a completely new outlook on life. Specifically, I'm obsessed with knitting socks and travelling to the moon. Ok, most of that is a lie but a truth. I am obsessed with knitting socks, and I do have a boyfriend, but I'm pretty sure the two aren't related. In fact, I just wanted to tell everyone that I have a boyfriend.

Aren't I hilarious?

In my last post you saw one of my g-ma christmas present socks and I just finished the other pair yesterday. The second pair turned out stunning and I want to keep them. But I made them for a size 7.5 foot and my feet are definetly 9 to 9.5. I somehow managed to shove my gigantor feet into them and take a picture, however, and this is the blurry but beautiful result.

Santa's mistress

Oh Christmas tree...

Notice how I artfully inserted a christmas figureine? That was not by accident my faithful readers. It was also from the book Sock Innovation and the patern is called Devon. I'm sure you needed to know that information. I used Happy Feet by Plymouth Yarn and I love it. It's not as fabulous as the Ty-Dy yarn from the socks before, but still pretty damn soft.

As I was saying in the opening, I have a boyfriend (I'm trying to see how many times I can say it before a) he dumps me or b) you stop reading). He recently introduced to me this famous Green Bay punk band and they are pretty spectacular. Since most of the music on here is pretty emo-tastic, I thought putting some raw grit in would make a great contrast to the inwardly feminine yarn that accentuates the body politik...

Ok, that last part was bullshit, but the music is awesome.

I've now finished my first distance education (DE) class. While I have learned stuff about research methods, I've been more interested in what I've inadvertently learned about my MBTI type. (For one thing, Agada's 1998 study shows that there are significantly more ISTJs and INTJs in library and information science than in the general population. I don't know whether I'm pleased that I'm in a "natural" profession for my type or annoyed that I apparently can't think outside the type box.) But when I'm not bumping into the occasional interesting bit of research trivia, I've also had the occasional MBTI-related insight.

To begin with, I figured that introverts should take well to DE. You can compose your answer in private and send it off when you're ready, unlike a live class where you need to fight the extraverts for air time and blurt things out to keep up your oral participation score. And all of this was true and I appreciated the peace and quiet, but I was surprised at how hard it was to stay focused. There's introversion, and then there's the feeling that you're lost in a gray fog, unable to connect with anyone or even think straight. I dutifully read (most of) the assigned readings, posted half-hearted comments as required, even managed to post responses to other people's comments on occasion, and still felt like I was in a vacuum.

The semester crept on. One week, the professor asked us to prepare a list of research questions, partner up with a classmate, and exchange feedback. Out went the questions, back came the responses. And boom, everything snapped back into place. Some part of my brain that had gone into hibernation roared back to life. It analyzed her questions, probed for weak spots, nodded approvingly at the best questions. It scanned her feedback to my questions and calculated how to integrate her points. And after it finished the assignment, it began analyzing its own resurgence, and that's where this blog entry comes from.

In MBTI-speak, everyone gets an introverted function and an extraverted function. One is dominant, the other functions as an auxiliary. Me, I get Introverted Intuition (Ni) as the dominant, aided and abetted by Extraverted Thinking (Te). Emphasis, apparently, on "extraverted." In the isolated environment of asynchronous DE, Te shut down. That left Ni with nothing to focus it, and let me assure you, Ni does not focus on its own. Enter the gray fog: half-formed thoughts floating around, never brought to completion.

The class had been noticeably low on feedback until this assignment. I think the discussion requirements were supposed to keep us actively connecting to each other, but our comments almost never made the leap to real discussions. They were just mostly one-off posts, rarely connecting to each other, never referencing past comments. With this assignment, there was finally something that required analysis (Thinking), not just insight (Intuition).

So now that my research class is over, I finally have something I want to research. How do other people's extraverted functions—dominant or auxiliary—work in DE? Maybe it's too simple to say introverts will like DE and extraverts will struggle more; maybe it's more like part of you will take to DE and the other part needs contact to work well. So I think I know how Te goes under in DE, but that still leaves the other extraverted functions (Sensing, Intuition, and Feeling). What would've it been like if I'd been someone with dominant Introverted Feeling and my Extraverted Intuition shut down? Aargh—all these questions and no easy way to answer them!

Wherein I discuss misplacing many things

The Christmas season is upon us, and I will preface this missive by saying that I don’t expect to create missives for the next two weeks, because I plan to enjoy a family vacation, and I won’t have ready access to computers. That being said, I wish all of you the merriest of merries and the happiest of happies, or as one of my dear readers once said, “Happy HannaChristKwanzSolstice” just to hit most of the bases. I think we’re missing Ramadan and Diwali in that mix, alas, but it’s not for lack of trying.

Please note that I am actually sending this missive on the Solstice, so it’s all good.

I’ve been noticing a trend recently. It began a week ago, when I got back from the US galaxy and realized I’d left my beloved favorite pillow laying on my trusty bed back home.

A note about this pillow, as I was trying to explain to my beloved husband last night over inter-galactic teletransmission: I once had the very best pillow in the world, for me, that is. I had it from ever since I could remember, and it even had a stint of being covered with a Donny Osmond pillowcase and Osmond family bubblegum cards (what can I say?)…I lost this pillow on an ill-fated trip to Canada. For all I know, someone in the laundry room of the Toronto Four Seasons saw that pillowcase and figured it was just right for her own daughter.

The pillow was as loved for its consistency as for anything else. It was foam, but holes had been drilled through the foam to create just enough support without being too hard. My head sank to just the right depth, while my neck remained cradled in comfort. It took me twenty years to find a pillow even remotely like it, and I didn’t trust myself to buy it at the Bed, Bath and Beyond when I first found it. What if it didn’t live up to my memories of my first pillow? I finally went back and bought it, but sadly there was only one left, and I’ve never seen its match again.

That would be the pillow sitting on my bed back in the US Galaxy. My back and neck are sadly missing it as we speak.

That was just the beginning of misplacing things this week. For example, I was going to start making my daughter’s traditional Christmas dress on Saturday, during my snow-in, made the trek to the car, which was, I swear, where I last saw the bag with the material and the pattern, cleaned off one door to avoid avalanche, and it was nowhere to be seen.

I searched the bottom floor of the space pod. I searched the second floor. I searched the attic and the basement. I even searched my mother’s house. There was only one place it could be, right? That would be the US Galaxy.

I called the hubby, described the package, told him I would pay the shipping charges to US Beta overnight. After lots of search time, he called to tell me there was no sign of the bag there, either.

????

I finally went to the US-Beta JoAnn Fabric (thank God they have one) and rebought all the ingredients. Because that’s one tradition I’m not breaking this year, come Hell or high snow falls.

I am not the only astronaut having misplacement issues. My mother prepared for the snow-in by bringing over everything, including the box of the brand new boots she bought. The only problem was that, when she opened the box, no boots were inside. Thus, she was all the more snowed in, unable to walk outside, until we could dig out the other house. We found the boots sitting next to her old bed. Now, tell me someone, why they were there instead of here?

Other things that are in the wrong place all the time—my mother’s customary after-church sherry, papers for doll club and band, Christmas card fixins, to-do lists. You name it, it’s in the wrong place.

It’s all the result of living too many places at once. My mother works at her other house, sleeps, eats, bathes, and dresses here. But more than half of what she needs to do that is still somewhere in limbo.

My family is in the US Galaxy, I work here in US-Beta. I sleep, eat, bathe, and dress here, but my heart is still at home.

Till next time—

COL C.