You get to be in my special high-school drama geek club if you knew right away whence cometh the title of this post. For those of you who didn’t watch enough Monty Python as teenagers (or since), it’s from the bit in The Holy Grail where the peasants are grubbing about in the muck and they get into an argument with King Arthur about the legitimacy of his government. And what do I have in common with medieval peasants these days? A condition in the blood vessels of my fingers that I’ve only ever read of in historical fiction of that vintage. I’m going to show you a picture, but you needn’t click for big unless you’ve got a morbid fascination with skin conditions or you’re thinking you might have the same thing:

See the inflammation on the right fingers? At first, I thought it was some kind of repetitive stress syndrome from too much knitting and writing, but the trouble was in spots that didn’t make sense. When the first joint of my right pointer flared up, I got scared. I’m a thrower. The swelling is in just the place where the yarn crosses the back of my finger. What if it was some kind of nascent wool allergy? But the pinky I loop the yarn around for tension is fine. I asked my doctor about it, and she gave me a blood test for rheumatoid arthritis. Yikes. The same day, I was browsing over at Domesticat and read about her recent finger trouble. I relaxed a little about the arthritis, because her fingers looked as puffy as mine and she said she had something called Raynaud’s Phenomenon. But I read up on that, and my symptoms are decidedly less transitory. Plus the swelling was turning red and itchy. Something tickled my brain. What was that problem people used to get in the winter on their hands and feet before the days of indoor heating and Thinsulate? Chilblains, my friends. Chilblains occur in folks with poor circulation who are exposed to prolonged damp cold. It’s damage to the small blood vessels, and once you have it there’s nothing you can do except try to keep warm and apply corticosteroids for the itching. Oh, and try to keep the skin from breaking, because then you can get nasty lesions. Ew. They’re supposed to go away in 7-14 days, but I’ll probably get chilblains every winter for the rest of my life, although in some people they don’t recur. (I’m crossing my fingers as much as possible.) We’ve turned the heat up, although I hate to waste the energy and money. I mean, why else do we have heavy wool sweaters?

The upshot is it’s tough to knit these days, especially with wool. And you know how it breaks my heart to have to cut back on the knitting at all. I can still knit Continental fashion, but it’s so much slower for me. I am soveryclose to finishing the sleeves of Mr. Garter’s Fishtrap Aran, and then I get to steek. And I have this waiting for me:

This is undyed Unspun Icelandic wool from Schoolhouse Press, in Cream and Blacksheep. (Psst, don’t miss the shameless plug for Zimmermania at center top!) No, the pictures aren’t out of focus; the yarn really is that soft and loose. Icelandic wool has quite a long staple, which is why it hangs together at all in this state. As far as I can tell, it’s just been gently pulled into yarn form – there’s really no twist at all. I’m guessing it won’t do so well for projects requiring stitch definition, but it should make a very soft and warm simple sweater. My pick? EZ’s Rorschach, which is so shockingly underknit that I can’t even find an example on the internets to show you. It’s from Knitting Workshop, and it’s also available as an individual pattern from Schoolhouse (scroll down to #30). I guess I’m just going to have to hurry up and knit it so I can spread the Rorschach gospel myself. As you probably guessed from the yarn I chose, it’s a white sweater with a black stripe – a cardigan in Elizabeth’s beloved garter stitch with a black stripe running up the back, around the neck, down the front, and around the hem to accent the mitered construction. It’s worked, with EZ’s inimitable and original genius, in two halves from the center out to the 3/4-length sleeves, which are blousy and narrow suddenly to hug the forearm at the cuff. Then it gets six i-cord button tabs up the front for big black buttons, and a belt at the natural waist. The overall effect is very ’60s mod, and it feels au courant right now. I love it. I hope you’ll see it here soon! Although I may have to pause to knit myself some more gloves…

This post was going to be a rant about the evening news on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, but we woke up to such a pretty coverlet of new snow that all the piss and vinegar went out of me. You’ll have to wait for my vitriol about the immorality of devoting the first half hour of the ten o’ clock news to shootings, beatings, kidnappings, robberies, accidents, and the impending apocalyptic doom of a little winter precipitation on a day when we’re supposed to be remembering one of the great human forces for peace and justice, a man who (according to a recent poll Mr. Garter read) the bulk of American schoolchildren think might have had something to do with the end of slavery. (And don’t get me started on the bullet points for the eleven o’ clock news: 1. DRUG-LAYING CHICKEN 2. GIRL FIGHT)

Anyway, it was beautiful this morning. Beautiful and treacherous, as it turns out. Mr. G. was to drive me in to my Art History class on the way to an early dentist appointment. After we slid around a corner and bonked into the curb — blessedly missing a sign post or anything else more substantial and higher off the ground — we realized we’d better take it very easy. Downtown Portland is hillier than you might imagine, and as we watched other drivers begin to slide on the first hill, I told my hubby to go home and let me walk the rest of the way. I got some entirely enjoyable wintry exercise and slid into my seat just a few minutes late. We discovered halfway through class that the university had officially closed, but the professor was willing to keep teaching and we students were willing to keep learning, so we used the full period.

The snow hadn’t stopped, and the quad was hosting a snowball fight among about twenty Japanese students. A boisterous bunch of young Pakistani men had started a pick-up soccer game. I didn’t hear English spoken for three blocks: the only obvious Americans out were the photography students, silently and seriously composing shots of the shrouded trees in that irresistible queer snow-light.

The library was locked up tight (apparently they really mean it when they close school here — they don’t just cancel classes), so I went to the art museum. My term paper this time around involves studying their holdings by George Inness, Ralph Blakelock, or Thomas Eakins, so I thought I’d take the opportunity for an early look. I also saw the rest of the wonderful Egyptian exhibit that’s visiting Portland. I went a couple of months ago with Mr. G. and his father, but I took so long that they both lost interest and wanted to go home, so I had to hurry past the reconstructed tomb of Thutmose III and some other fabulous material.

Now I’m home by the fireplace, listening to gangs of jolly kids squealing all the way down the excellent sledding hill behind our house. It’s a perfect knitting day. I’m not going to allow myself to dwell on giant folders of legal documents. I’m going to go watch adorable little tots bundled from stem to stern enjoying the snow for an hour or so first.

I’m dying to show you how the Raven mitts came out; my neighbor has been happily wearing them for ten days now. But due to some technical difficulties Chez Garter, I can’t access any of the pictures I took. They’re backed up, so if McGrumpy the server winds up needing an emergency trip through the mail to the server doctors and they erase everything (it’s happened before), all will not be lost. But I’ll need to beg your patience for a few more days.

In the mean time, I’d like to thank you all for your kind reception of the Axel mitts. I’ve been wearing Mitt the First around the house while trying to spin enough yarn to complete Mitt the Second. There’s plenty of roving left, happily. We’ll see if I can achieve anything like the weight and twist of the first lot six months after the fact – don’t hold your breath.

Not much knitting progress to report from the past week, unfortunately. The Fishtrap sleeves are creeping along and have reached about 10″ each, but I’ve been swamped with the world’s dullest work: indexing case files for one of my father-in-law’s malpractice suits. (He’s the one suing the delinquent lawyer, not the other way around. I’d like to sue the delinquent lawyer’s entire staff for incompetence and a failure to grasp the basic principles underlying chronology.) Anyway, five fat boxes stuffed with legal documents stand between me and a beautiful long weekend, and they make me want to weep. Can you tell I’m procrastinating by blogging about absolutely nothing when I should have my nose in a ream of worker’s comp claims? Sigh. Please send a career. Or at least some tasty alcoholic beverages.

It’s the week where I edit reports at the school where I work. It’s one of them new-fangled progessive schools where they don’t believe in grades and report cards — oh no, carefully crafted multi-page narratives for every child. (I think this is tremendously laudable, just so we’re clear.) The teachers write their reflections on the students’ achievements of the term, and then I brandish my red pencil to help bring them up to our director’s literary standards. Last night I brandished until I was cross-eyed, and then I decided it was a good time to take pictures of my Retro Rib socks.

See? I really did finish them! You can also see here a prime example of why you should never delay casting on that second sock, my children. Look closely at the ankle region of the left sock. Ignore the fact that my feet are on the kitchen counter (it seemed like the thing to do at the time, to get them into the light) and observe that unsightly pooling. That is what happens when you allow the first sock to languish mateless for so long that you forget what size needles you used to knit it. I peered closely at that first sock and compared it to some other socks. I knew I’d made the feather-and-fan socks on #0’s, and the Pig War socks on #2’s, and that lone Retro Rib looked like it fell somewhere in between. So I cast on the second with #1’s. Alas, I got the barber-pole stripes right away. Silly me, I blamed the yarn. It is hand-painted, you know, and it was from Claudia’s early days in the business. (I just saw a new batch of this same colorway, Ingrid’s Blues, in the shop, and it was completely different: indigo midnight and chestnut. It called to me. But I was deaf and virtuous.) And then I got that really goofy separation you see on the ankle, and I figured it was a smack upside the head from the knitting gods. It wasn’t until I realized my heel flap was coming out awfully long that I became suspicious about the needles. Sigh. I switched to #0’s right away, so the feet match pretty well. As long as I wear pants, no one has to know that the left sock is an inch taller and a mile whackier.

While I had the camera out, I thought I’d show you my tree. It was the middle of the night with no tripod, so why not, right?

  

Behold our tree. It may be the ugly duckling of all Christmas trees, but we think it has character. We like that it has three noodly appendages instead of a top (or a middle, for that matter). We cut it on my parents’ property back at Thanksgiving and tied it to the roof of the car, and the trip down the I-5 corridor left it somewhat battered. It broke one of the noodly appendages whipping about in the breeze. But we knitters don’t come by way of the turnip truck, so I scrounged up some #2 dpn’s and splinted it, as you can see on the right. (Maybe. It helps if you pretend you’ve had a snort or two of holiday nog and can’t quite focus.) And yes, that’s a rooster on top of our tree, not an angel or a star. Vive la France.

Actually, these last two pictures are rather a poignant commentary on my state of mind, since the next thing I did after taking them was to step over to the computer and buy my parents tickets to a play — one ticket on Thursday the 21st (the last remaining ticket, it turned out) and one ticket on Thursday the 28th. I had a little meltdown. Then I saw this and it raised my spirits a bit. Fortune smiled on me this morning, though. During my plaintive call to the nice lady at the box office, a second ticket for the 21st magically became available. My parents’ Christmas gift is intact, and they won’t even have to enter the mosh pit that is the stand-by queue.

Now I’m going to take myself off to bed before I do you all in with my rambling. After all, there’s much more editing to be done tomorrow, and a family dinner party to produce at the end of it. Thank goodness for husbands like Mr. Garter who manfully endure being sent out to hunt for ingredients like ripe mangoes and cilantro while simultaneously entertaining the in-laws. (Thanks, sweetie.)