Flyt

Since nothing else I try knitting seems to be working, I gave into temptation and finally started in on the cashmere yarn I bought back in August. I'm so glad I did:

 The (free) pattern is Lava Flow Cowl (Ravelry link). Since I have more than enough yarn, I added an extra cable repeat, and will make the cowl much longer so that I can wrap it twice. I love reversible cable patterns, like the bronze stole I knit out of Rowan Kidsilk Haze a couple of years ago. So even though I'm a little disappointed in the bland color, I'm very excited about the project. Oh, and check out that provisional cast on at the bottom. Duh, that was so easy.

E said the funniest thing on the way to school the other day. He was telling me how cows have four stomachs, and he informed me in all seriousness that the first one is for soda, the second for meat, the third for rocks, and the fourth for candy and grass. Natch.

Knall!

A colleague of mine was cleaning out her attic and was about to throw out a couple of bags of yarns from the 1980s, which the name on the labels caused her to pause for a moment; it was Sandnes Peer Gynt yarn, and apparently she thought of me immediately (I love it that I'm apparently now associated with Peer Gynt in the minds of my colleagues in Nordic literature), and decided to ask if I had any use for it before she pitched it. Well, duh, of course I wanted free yarn, especially of that kind of high quality. We arranged a transfer at her office, and I've got it all safely home now.

My heart sank a little, though, when I saw the eleven skeins of the most garish cherry red you could ever imagine:

Anyone who knows me well knows that I have a deep, almost pathological aversion to precisely that kind of red. But since this is over 2000 meters of perfectly lovely yarn, clearly I'm going to need to look into options for dying it. I've been thinking maybe Kool-aid dying, perhaps using blue or purple to make some kind of purplish color...

Thankfully, there were also seven skeins of the basic creamy white, but unfortunately that is divided between two quite distinct dyelots:

and:

Since this is often used as a contrast color in stranded patterns, that's not really a problem. It will be fun trying to come up with projects for all this yarn. And if that weren't enough, there were also three unidentified skeins of what looks to be fingering weight wool in an extremely dark navy blue:

This is really appealing to me for some reason, though I have no idea what do do with it, or even how much there really is. Somehow it is shouting "garter stitch" at me.

All this added to the yarn I bought in Finland back in August means that I've suddenly got a really big stash to deal with. That's not really a problem, except that I seem to be knitting so slowly. The "Ung høst" pullover is taking forever. I'm a few inches into the raglan shaping, and the number of stitches in the round doesn't seem to be decreasing at all:

 
I had envisioned this as a quick project to get back into the swing of things, and it's been dragging on now for two months. There are just too many other things going on, I guess.

I dvale

My knitting mojo is gone. I've been progressing slowly on the Ung høst pullover, and I had hoped that I might even finish it this past weekend, but alas no. I had a little trouble working out how to set up the raglan decreases in a way that looked nice with the 3 x 2 ribbing that makes up the body and sleeves of the sweater, so I ended up having to rip out about 5 cm of raglan decreasing and start over again. But (as always with frogging) it was totally worth taking the time to fix it, as it looks much better on the second attempt.

Otherwise things are very low key and low energy around here. We're sort of hunkering down for the onslaught of winter, and enjoying a spate of sunny (though cold) autumn days. Even the smallest tasks seem insurmountable right now, though I am slowly working through things, both on the home front and at work.

Today will be kind of crazy. I've been invited to a seminar where Norway's most renown novelist will be giving a talk this afternoon. I'll have to throw myself into a taxi right after class and high tail it up to a conference center high above Oslo to catch it. I didn't plan this (just got the invitation on Friday), but I'm teaching one of his novels in today's class. Serendipitous (though it would have been better had I been able to bring the students too).

Enebarn/ønskebarn/yndlingsbarn

Recently on a forum I frequent, a discussion of playing favorites came up. The conversation was prompted by an article at Time Magazine (I'm not a subscriber, so I couldn't read the whole thing) about how parents always have favorites among their children, and how the kids always know, no matter how hard they try to hide it. Parent/child relationships are incredibly complex, as I am reminded every single day with my son, and this discussion prompted me to reflect yet again of the myriad reasons why I chose to have no more than one child.

As I have written before on this blog, E is a fourth generation only child. I'm not really sure why my Grannie was an only. I've always assumed Great Grannie would have liked more children, and I imagine Grannie would have liked to have siblings too, though I've never asked. My dad was an only child by mistake--he had an older sister who died very soon after birth. As far as I know I was a deliberate only. My parents were aware of the population explosion, and my mother (one of five siblings) has told me that she would have had more if my father had indicated he wanted them, but he never did. I didn't have E until I was 37. I had pretty much decided that I wanted to be child-free until I met KE, who definitely wanted kids. Our compromise was one, and in terms of my own situation as a mother I have not regretted it. E, though, has never been as unquestioningly satisfied with being an only as I was when I was a kid. I don't ever remember wishing for a sibling. He has talked about it a lot.

Family constellations and choices are incredibly personal. I know on a very visceral level that I don't have it in me to manage the balancing and juggling and negotiating that it takes to have more than one child. I struggle enough as it is to carve out time for myself and maintain my sense of who I am with one child and one partner in my life. You don't miss what you've never known. I've never had siblings or more than one child, so the sense of loss that other people with larger families assume I must experience is a complete non-issue for me.

I find it provoking and irritating, though, that so many people continue to comment negatively about families with only children. About a year ago a friend of mine who currently has one child commented that she wanted more so that they could be a "real" family (ouch). I said carefully that I felt we were a real family, even though we weren't a very big one. She was sensitive enough to apologize profusely. A friend in graduate school said (half?) jokingly "oh, that explains everything" when I revealed that I had no siblings. Well, yes, in some ways it does, but in other ways it doesn't. In that case it seemed pretty clear that my status of being an only child explained only my negative characteristics for that person, and not whatever positive characteristics I might possess. (I'm guessing that person would say that the fact that the comment continues to nag at me is an example of one of the problems with being an only child: not always dealing well with teasing. Whatever.) A few years later, at a work conference, a very strange women I hardly knew who had had a baby a year or so after me accosted me at cocktail hour and insisted that I should be planning on having another child. I experienced it as incredibly invasive and rude. She would not let up, and I had to tell her to stop harassing me, and walked away from her. A few years later I found out through the grapevine that she herself had not had any more children, and that she had sent her child off to live with her mother rather than raise it herself. Very weird.

In general, being or having only one child in a family is no better or worse than any other constellation. In my specific case, it is definitely better for me. Whether or not it is better for my son remains to be seen.

But in any case, here's to the families of the world with only children! And a word to the wise: those of you who make other choices, please don't treat us like there's something wrong with us.

Belgfrukter

This week was høstferie, the fall break, so both KE and E were home. I had to teach Monday and Tuesday, and had full six (!) hours of lectures to attend on Friday. We're all three in various stages of getting over last week's colds, so our energy level was pretty low.

I was feeling a little adventurous cooking-wise, and ended up making two different legume stews that both turned out pretty good. No pictures, because no matter how good it tastes, I can't get gloppy stew to look good with my minimal photographic skills.

The first dish was with red lentils, onions, garlic, ginger (we've rediscovered ginger, and are using a lot), carrots and celery. I looked a little bit at this recipe while making it (I'd love to make the actual recipe someday, as it looks really good too).

The second dish was a black bean chili. This time I actually followed a recipe, and again was really happy with the result.  I used dried beans that I soaked for 24 hours, and I made the chili the day before we ate it. It too was really good. I ended up substituting paprika for chili powder (which we didn't have), but otherwise kept close to the recipe. I used lots of garlic in both recipes; KE has been pretty skeptical of garlic, but he appears to be coming around. He mentioned that now that we're eating way less meat, the strong tastes of spices and garlic are more appealing, kind of as a replacement for meat flavors. I've always loved garlic, so that's great news for me. The other good thing is that both these dishes were painlessly vegan. It's actually really easy to implement vegan cooking, at least for someone who is interested in exploring the world of legumes!

I've finished the first arm and started the second on the Ung høst pullover I've been working on. It will be fun to put all the parts on one circular needle and start the raglan decreases. Bottom-up raglan projects are so fun because the progress is really visible once you get to that phase.