Whenever I get too deeply in my head, too deeply in my own obsessions and excesses, my too-muchness, life has a way of reminding me to slow down.
Way back in January I said I was going to resurrect the old knitting and sewing blogs. I had plans. Big plans. I should know better. I was always the kind of child whose eyes were too big for her stomach. I still am that child. I want to do everything, to know everything, to miss nothing, and even as I recognize that I cannot physically do that, neither can I manage it psychologically. Another part of me wants to sit on the grass and stare at a dandelion for hours, to be lost in dreams, to play, and to let my imagination run wild while the world slips by unnoticed.
For a while I managed three blogs. For a while I didn't even manage one. You know what? It doesn't matter. But what does matter is that I rediscovered something and that is sometimes my own tendency not only to overthink, but my tendency to allow my own ideas and inspirations and general mental peripatetic overdrive leap far ahead of what is actually important. I am not a knitting person as distinct from a sewing or needlepoint or embroidery person. I am not a gardener or a cook. I am all those selves and more. There is no one thing I am driven to come home and focus all my energies on, at least not consistently. The more I try to compartmentalize myself and my interests the more confused I grow. I need to hop from pile to pile, and sometimes I need to knock all my piles down and let them reconfigure themselves in news ways.
All of this is a long way of saying that all I have energy for is one blog. Actually, all I have interest in is one blog, one life, one me. So sometimes, if you are not interested in x or y, I may bore you to tears. There are days when I bore myself to tears. So be it.
So what has happened in the ten or eleven days since last I wrote? Precious little. Precious little is a good thing.
I spent two days mostly knitting, not this past weekend, but the one before that. I finished the sleeves on the purple cashmere sweater and blocked them. You can see them just above. While they were blocking I finished the front edge of the sweater. All that is waiting now is for me to seam those sleeves and attach them to the body of the sweater. Haven't done that yet, the story of my life.
That same weekend, I rounded up the remaining yarn from the multi-yarn striped cardigan I have also been working on and divvied it up into two equal parts. I wanted to make sure that the sleeves would be identical in their stripe sequence, and that sequence already varies slightly from the body of the sweater because I ran out of two yarns. Very little knitting has been done since, but I do hope to finish this second set of sleeves over the course of this week. No rush. I cannot wear either sweater until the weather cools, and yet I am itching to start something new.
I also opened my birthday presents from 2020. You might remember that I promised to buy myself some fermentation crocks. Smaller crocks than the giant 3 or 4 gallon crock I already own, which is too large for me to lift when empty, much less haul around when it is full of cabbage, or anything else for that matter. Since I am not feeding an army of teenage boys, there is no reason for me to make gallons of sauerkraut at a time. But Covid-19 also happened last year and I was not able to order the crocks I wanted from Sarah Kersten studio until May. As you can see I went a little overboard. Remember what I said about excess?
At least they arrived before this year's birthday. Due to my reduced energy levels, it took me a day to open all the boxes and unwrap the crocks. They are still sitting on my dining room table. Now I have to figure out where to keep them. I had already prepared a nice fermentation shelf downstairs in the cool basement, but if I want to actually use these crocks this summer, they need to be in the kitchen, because I don't have energy to chop and prep and haul pottery up and down the stairs. As it is, it took me three days to clean up all the packing materials and haul it out to the recycle bin. But I did. And before recycle pickup. Sometimes my joy in small accomplishments is almost too big to contain.
This past Saturday was one of those days my cardiologist warned me about, one of those days where the best option was staying in bed or perhaps lounging on the sofa. I suppose it could have been a perfect knitting day. Instead it was a cookbook reading day, a reminisce and dream about food day. I have owned Marcella Hazan's first cookbook, The Classic Italian Cookbook, since 1980. Marcella Hazan taught me about Italian food, and the book is now, 40 years later, stained and falling apart. I knew I would need to replace it but had been dithering, loath to part with an old friend. Then I happened upon this book, a compilation of Hazan's first two cookbooks, in my local second-hand bookstore for 75 cents. Of course I bought it. I spent Saturday in my pajamas, wrapped in a cuddly blanket, reading both cookbooks and cross referencing the recipes to be sure that everything I cared about in the first book was included in the second. Only two recipes failed to make the cut, and I understand the rationale, even as I myself am loathe to give them up. I am not planning on letting go of the original book anyway, at least not at this point as I have space and it holds too much sentimental value. Needless to say, I also discovered a lot of new-to-me things I want to cook, next time my cooking hat is on anyway. And those two recipes? They are pretty much a part of my culinary DNA, my mental repertoire, but a back-up copy has been made. I have forgotten things before, doubtless I will do so again.
Hope you are having a great week. Today is chemo day, and another cycle begins.
