Hoo boy, when the catcalls start rolling in you know it’s been too long since your last post! I only wish my absence had been due to over-celebration of Mr. Garter’s birthday, as certain readers have begun to speculate. Alas, the 28th saw an emergency trip to New York City on sad business. My brother’s girl, whom I regard as my own sister, lost her mom to cancer. Her death was sudden and shocking despite the fact that we knew her chemo treatments weren’t working, and it left her daughter with no surviving relatives. My whole family flew out immediately to support them, and they are fortunate to have a bountiful and devoted group of friends who will help them through any crisis. Those two kids are up against the kind of responsibility and strain nobody 24 years old should have to face, so send them a few good wishes or a prayer if that’s your style.

The positive notes of the trip were the chances to spend time with my family, my friends at my former job, and of course my beloved Spiders. A visit or two to The Point is always welcome, although I was very good and didn’t buy any new yarn. (Not for lack of trying, but no one seemed to have the color of Debbie Bliss Cathay I needed for a project I’ll unveil the week after next…)

I had to return home to sit for an art history final this morning. It was one of those tricksy exams that doesn’t cover anything you were sure you’d have to write on, and instead throws you curveballs you didn’t think you’d have to handle because the material was from before the mid-term. I thought I’d figured out the professor’s style, and so I was sort of crushed that I didn’t get to hold forth on Vanderlyn’s Ariadne and Protestant views of the nude. Nor did I get to use my knowledge of cavetto cornices and the Egyptian Renaissance, peripteral columns, Archibald Alison’s associationist aesthetic, the significance of the invention of the lead tube in 1837, or even Frederick Church’s gruesome poisoning by those new-fangled cadmium paints. I feel so thwarted, darn it. I think I achieved a respectable grade all the same, but it wasn’t a very satisfying experience. Ah well, there’s always Part 2 of the course next term.

In other news, the holiday knitting crunch is here. I’m afraid Mr. Garter’s Fishtrap Aran won’t have sleeves in time. Here’s what it looks like these days:

 

I think I’m about eight inches shy of the top of the body, but I need to measure the armholes of some of his other sweaters to be sure. He’ll never wear it if it pinches his armpits, and I can’t say I’d blame him. Down with armpit pinching.

I’ve finished the first raven mitten, and hopefully I’ll have a picture of it for you in a couple of days. I missed the good light for photography today. Only three more to go if the neighbors are to have warm fingers! At least they finally got a new boiler – the old one broke and they had to pin blankets over the windows and use their oven to heat the house for several weeks. I was feeling badly I hadn’t started their mittens earlier in the season.

It’s definitely mitten weather in Portland – cold and dry. A scouring easterly came through while I was gone and did most of the raking for me, although I suspect most of my leaves have just gone to annoy the neighbors across the street. Poor things, they bought a property without any deciduous trees and probably imagined they were going to have it easy with the yardwork. There’s a pointer for you if you’re in the market for a house: be sure to ask your realtor about the prevailing winds! Tangentially, I think it’s a pity we Americans have such an impoverished vocabulary for our winds. Other people have names for each one, as you can see here. Now I’m fantasizing about a family of mitten designs named things like Squamish and Williwaw and Matanuska. But for now, it’s back to the holiday knits. No use fattening up the design notebook when so many gifts are wanting!

It was a fine weekend Chez Garter. We even saw the sun for a fleeting instant or two, which, if you’re not in the Northwest and haven’t seen our record downpours on the evening news, you might not recognize as a phenomenon akin to trumpeting angels “busting out of the clouds,” as I liked to say when I was a tot. Saturday Mr. G and I raked leaves and sawed fallen branches, I planted hellebores in the front garden, we caught up on much-neglected house cleaning and grocery shopping, and then on a whim I baked gingersnaps. We capped it all off with dinner with our favorite neighbors: skewers grilled under the back porch overhang, just out of the rain.

This morning we fell into our Sunday routine: cyclocross. Since most of you probably don’t know about this remarkable sport, I thought a little photo essay might help you get your bearings. Cyclocross is madly popular in Belgium, Italy, Portland, and a select handful of other places where grown adults enjoy the excuse to wallow in the mud and drink a lot of beer in the name of sport (and subsequent recovery). Essentially, it’s cross-country steeplechasing with bicycles, so the course always includes as many mud pits, obstacles, hairy descents, and lung-burning climbs as the designers can manage. Everyone gets utterly filthy, most of the injuries are only flesh wounds, and the competition is serious but friendly. The aforementioned awesome neighbors sucked my husband into this bizarre world, so of course I relish the chance to go out and cheer.

Here’s Mr. Garter getting ready for the start:

 

On course:

Over the barriers:

  

And after 45 grueling minutes, happy to be done:

Mr. Garter is still a beginning ‘crosser. Next year he’d like his own cyclocross bike – “Black Beauty” here is on extremely generous loan from my cousin Bryce.  He’d also like to learn to remount like this guy:

I still haven’t figured out how they do this without experiencing excruciating pain and compromising their fertility, but judging by the number of little kids out there cheering for mom and dad (or competing themselves in “Kiddie Kross”, which is as adorable as it sounds, particularly when they’re still using training wheels), all is somehow well.

Cyclocross seems to be a pretty great sport. It’s an enthusiastic and friendly community, and most of the athletes – male and female – are pretty easy on the eyes, too.

I say most:

Ultimately, not everyone looks as good in spandex as my husband.

Oh, and knitting? I worked on the toe of the second Retro Rib sock warming up in the car between races. I’m one row of Kitchener away from being able to close the book on those babies and put them on my feet where they belong. Didn’t make the Socktoberfest deadline, but let’s all say huzzah just the same! Pictures soon.  And next time I’ll show you the fruits of my plant-dyeing.

What a week. It began with a midterm exam in art history, for which I studied in between freelance jobs and my school job. Once the test was behind me, I started outlining my English paper. Wednesday I had to devote entirely to a proofreading job. The poor characters in this sorry text have only three gestures between them: furrowing their brows in concern, dropping their jaws, and running frustrated hands [sic] through their hair. The author is also laboring under the delusion that “glimpse” is an intransitive verb synonymous with “glance”. Proofreading this manuscript felt like touching up the gingerbread work on a bicycle shed.

So when I woke up Thursday feeling like a hangover victim, I was mildly intrigued at this empirical evidence that bad prose has lasting physical consequences. Alas, further study will be necessary to settle that hypothesis: it turned out I was getting a cold. I took the bus into town for my afternoon class, but the professor to whom the English paper is due failed to appear for the second class in a row. Peevish at this waste of energy and proofreading time, I trundled home and just managed to get the manuscript to the post office on time. I spent the evening writing an article for the school newsletter.

Friday I dragged myself out of bed and in to school, feeling as though I ought to have a company of dwarves named Sneezy, Snotty, Slimy, Drippy, Teary, Throbby, and Mucus to sing my theme song: Sniffle While You Work. By the time the last of the parents had inched through traffic to collect their children, I was fit for an evening of nothing but nursing my box of Kleenex and my mug of tea and watching Anne of Green Gables. This was bad for my English paper, but good for the Fishtrap Aran. I’ve made up the ground I lost in ripping plus another half a chart repetition.

Today I felt better enough to accompany my cousins to a performance of The Witches, by Roald Dahl. It was a delightful adaptation of the book, with some wonderful acting. It was pretty scary for kids, but deliciously so for six-year-old Sam, who loves that sort of thing. The best part was listening to him comforting his slightly younger cousin Adrian, pointing out that the Formula 86 Delayed-Action Mouse-Maker was only food coloring.

I also felt better enough to put some more thought into the yarn I’ll be dyeing tomorrow. Option B, the blue sweater, has the lead in the polls over Option A, the orangey-terracotta version, so I did a little swatching to see what I’d be getting into either way. TGIS can stand for Thank Goodness It’s Saturday, but Chez Blue Garter it has another meaning: Thank Goodness I Swatched! I’ll show you pictures of the sorry results tomorrow.

Orange, it turns out, does not play well with the other children. So it’s back to the drawing board for the Fair Isle Yoke sweater. In the meantime, I thought I’d measure out some sock yarn to see if I can dye it self striping. Grumperina’s latest caught my eye, and I thought it would be nifty if I could do two shades of green and have them alternate in synch with the cables. I knit up the first eight rounds of Hello Yarn’s pattern modified ala Grumperina, then ripped them out to see how long my color repetitions would need to be. Um…really long. I had to use most of the furniture in my living room as a niddy noddy. You should have seen me circling around the back of the couch, around the marimba stool, past the coffee table, over the rocker, and around the purple chair, paying out yarn as I went. I felt like a medieval penitent making the equivalent of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem in laps around a garden maze. 400 yards of sock yarn, my friends — that’s a lot of trips around the living room. And it may all be for naught if I can’t keep the resulting enormous skein from tangling hopelessly in the dye vat. Putting it in indigo will probably be a two- or three-person job. Let’s hope some of my classmates are up for the experiment.

Yesterday I started a couple of classes at the local university. Just for fun, to flake some rust from the intellectual hinges, maybe to decide if I want to gear up to go back to school in a more serious way. It’s been five years since I earned my BA in anthropology, environmental studies, and education, and the focus on those subjects meant the neglect of other natural proclivities and budding interests. So I signed up for Early American Art & Architecture, and also for The English Novel. And bright and early yesterday morning, I pedaled my bicycle (a well-used commuter bike we acquired from our neighbor, not Domitilla, who is too pretty to be trusted to the bike thieving environs of the university) into downtown and found the art building in time for my eight o’ clock class.

I’d forgotten how much delight academic settings afford me. The first day of school. . . it’s heady, like walking the edge of something unknown and thrilling. Between classes I walked the city with a spring in my step and an eye to the lively details — the spire of First Presbyterian Church thrusting over the rooftops, the mustard leaves falling from the ash trees, the autumn roses blooming in the Park Block gardens, a gay flock of preschoolers harnessed together for a field trip to the library. (I may also have sprung into Knit/Purl and gotten a little lively near the cash register. They had the shade of Rowan Yorkshire Tweed DK I’ve been questing after.)

Hours later, my backpack stuffed to the gills with heavy new books and supplies, I cycled home again to try to read the lengthy introduction to the annotated Lolita while knitting my Baby Surprise. I wish for the baby it’s to warm that he may love learning. From his parents he’ll get smarts and inventiveness. I hope he’ll also be blessed with a fire of inquisitive spirit. If I could weave fibers into his sweater to tickle his curiosity, that’s what I’d do.