Never mind that it’s 59 degrees F and raining. The calendar says it’s July (and my husband has been wearing shorts out of sheer stubbornness), and if you’ve read this blog for any amount of time you know that means Tour de France fever! Yes, I’ve once again got a hand in organizing the international knitalong (we’re over on Ravelry and we’re happy to welcome latecomers for a few more days if you’d like to join us). My friends and relations find this somewhat hilarious and/or bemusing, I think. Maybe it’s the fact that there are nearly eighty other fruit bats out there from Australia to Holland who love to watch cycling and knit at the same time and then talk about it on the internet. In years past I’ve taken on a really big challenge for the 21 days of the Tour, most recently designing and knitting Footlights and Daisy Daisy.

This year’s going to be a bit different. With a baby due in five and a half weeks, there are some things that need to be accomplished. I’ll try to put some nearly finished projects to bed so they won’t be abandoned for months once I’ve got my hands full of squalling newborn. And this poor baby has very few handknits made by its own mother (happily several aunties-to-be have been filling the void — those gifts deserve their own post!), so I’ll try to remedy that, beginning with Carina Spencer’s Small Things Romper, to which I’ll be adding a special touch:

I shall call it the Lanterne Rouge romper. (The Lanterne Rouge is the guy who finishes dead last in the Tour. Now do you get it?) Cute snailie isn’t mine; I borrowed his chart from Adrian Bizilia’s wonderful Norwegian Snail Mittens (in Clara Parkes’s The Knitter’s Book of Yarn) and modified it just a touch since it doesn’t need to fit on a mitten. In addition to nodding to the Tour, this snail is a sort of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” tribute to the soggy summer we’re having. His less adorable and far more voracious brethren have left my hostas in tatters.

Tomorrow morning I get to cast on! Since the powers that organize world sports have seen fit to schedule the Tour prologue at the same time as the Argentina-Germany soccer match, there may be a bit of squabbling over the remote, and I’ll probably have to go back and watch both events in full later in the day. Good thing the weather outside isn’t tempting.

Dear Minnow,

The cat (he’s the one that usually stomps on you twice daily in his enthusiasm to say goodnight or goodmorning with a headbutt to my face), when he is in an impish mood, sometimes has a fight with the bathmat. He wrestles and bites it and pummels the stuffing out of it with his hind legs. Every now and then it feels as though you are doing something similar to my bladder. (Probably not the biting; I know you don’t have any teeth.) Kindly ease up there.

Thanks,

your mother

We’re having fitful, tempestuous, Wuthering Heights weather: pelting rain and hail, tree-thrashing gusts of wind, bursts of silvery sunshine dazzling every bead of water on the leaves and raising clouds of steam from the roofs, then another front blustering through to lash the branches and fling rain at the windows again.

I’d like to be curled in a comfortable chair with a bottomless mug of decaf Earl Grey, stirring in a spoonful of fresh cream from the top of the glass bottle of Noris Dairy milk that’s delivered weekly to our neighbors’ front porch. (Three families are now collaborating on this milk order, and it’s so good I’m not sure we can ever go back. It’s quite the little collective we’re developing: I bring the eggs for four families from the farmer who’s a parent at our school; our immediate neighbors orchestrate the milk order and grow vegetables on our sunny side of the shared driveway; the neighbors across the street go halvies with us on a CSA share of more vegetables. I never imagined city life would be like this.) I’d have a great book in my lap, ideally a world mythology compilation illustrated by Alice & Martin Provensen back in the late ’50s. (My friend and librarian Maureen has kindled in my soul a hot desire to trawl the internet for ex-library copies of children’s classics long out of print. I am determined that Minnow should know and cherish ancient tales of heroism and love and dastardly deeds and outrageous godly scandal. And the Provensen illustrations are unsurpassable. I’m not sure what it says about my promise as a mother that I’m chiefly concerned that my child should have plenty of handknit sweaters and a library worth devouring. Is it weird that I’m more interested in shopping for musty old books than for adorable outfits and nursery decorations?) And of course I’d be knitting. Since this is fantasy, I’d be making a cabled sweater in a toddler size out of undyed Saxon Merino from the Catskill Merino Sheep Farm. (I have only just read about this yarn in today’s Knitter’s Review, but it’s calling to me strongly. That the yarn comes from sheep tended by a man with a love of Proust and a sheepdog named Poem is, I’ll admit, a significant contributor to the weakness in my knees. I have thus far resisted the urge to buysomerightnow, but it has occurred to me that I could hunt this yarn down at the Union Square Greenmarket in just a few weeks’ time.) This sweater would also bear a motif of stylized red foxes around the hem, because I’m in the mood for foxes.

This is all in my daydreams, see, because I actually need to polish off about five baby sweaters before I could start anything like that. But look who finished a quilt top:

Where would you like to be?

Wow, you guys love babies! We so appreciate all your congratulations — it’s remarkable to think that Minnow already has well-wishers from Australia to the Netherlands. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, y’all.

The queue of woolen garments to make for my little one wraps around the block, as you can imagine. But if all goes well, I’ll be bringing him or her home in the early or middle part of August. Just for fun, I looked up some recent August temperatures for Portland. Last year it was 95 degrees on 1 August. The year before that we hit 96 on 5 August. The 11th itself hasn’t been too bad recently: 82 degrees at most, so if the kid comes right on time we should be okay. But the 15th two years ago reached 100 degrees. In sum, wool probably won’t be the fiber of choice for a coming home outfit. So in an atypical move, I purchased some cotton-blend yarn: Kollage Luscious. I’m going to cast on Brandy Fortune’s Milk Infant Top and make some matching stripey pants or longies (we’ll see how the yarn holds out… it was on clearance so I won’t be getting more). I love the white and green of the original, but I only had two colors to choose from — luckily they go together and remind me of cinnamon toast.

(I need to try again at making the actual cinnamon toast. This uber-healthy bread we’ve got right now is too dense and I didn’t apply the prodigious amounts of butter that would have been necessary for really pleasing toast. Also I think the cinnamon toast of my childhood may have been made with cinnamon sugar, not just straight cinnamon.)

By rights I should be getting loads of knitting time during the many, many Holy Week services we have to sing, but alas, I’ve been moved back to the front row in full view of the congregation so I’m not allowed. Tonight alone I could have knit through three baptisms as well as the lengthy sermon. Well, maybe not the baptisms… we were still holding lit candles at that point. Turning the pages of my music without setting fire to them, the sleeves of my robe, or another soprano’s hair is challenging enough; knitting while holding a candle might really go beyond what’s possible. Instead I’ve had to amuse myself by choosing names for my child among the composers in the hymnal. How does Horatius Bonar strike you for a boy? No?

Anyway, now to bed. The first call for the choir tomorrow morning is at 7:30, and I might need to make another attempt at cinnamon toast beforehand so I can stay upright. Happy Easter if you celebrate it.

P.S. I think Minnow may be developing a fondness for the communion sherry during all these extra services.