Ganske mye garn, gitt!

My next yarn foray in London was to I Knit London, south of the Thames near Waterloo Station. My colleagues at UCL were appalled to hear that I had ventured into enemy territory, but actually I really dug the no-nonsense vibe down there. It kind of reminded me of some of the Mexican neighborhoods I've been to in cities like Chicago and Phoenix. Which is to say: yeah, a little scruffy, but also lively and full of interesting things to see and do. I didn't have my camera along with me, so I didn't get any snaps of the shop or of Lower Marsh Street where it's located. The selection itself was a bit disappointing, at least for someone looking for British yarns and with my very narrow tastes. I ended up buying a gorgeous skein of Canadian Handmaiden Seasilk:

It's the most amazing green. What sold me on this yarn was the store sample of the ubiquitous Swallowtail shawl by Evelyn A. Clark. There are something like 10,000 of these registered on Ravelry, and the sample in the store made out of this yarn was to die for. I started knitting it almost immediately (and knit the whole way on the train from London to Edinburgh last Friday) and found it pretty easy, considering that it's lace.

As everyone always says, it's almost impossible to take good pictures of lace in process--it just looks like a blobby mess--so there probably won't be any photo documentation until after it's finished, I'm afraid. But I promise that I have made it through the fourteen repeats of the bud pattern, have dutifully inserted a lifeline, and am letting it sit for a few days before starting in on the Lily-of-the-Valley pattern with its legendary "nups." Should be interesting.

In Edinburg I tracked down the K1 Yarns Knitting Boutique, which was as charming as could be from  the outside:

(It's the bright blue storefront) For some reason, however, I remained for the most part un-charmed by the selection here, again given that I was looking for British yarns. They did have a fair amount of British yarn (after all, they produce their own line of yarns), but there is something about the color palette they offered here that left me cold. In fact, I found the colors themselves surprisingly (and off-puttingly) cold. I really wanted to buy at least a skein of something to support a small independent yarn shop, but the only things I came close to liking were produced in Germany I think.

Since I had to go to a department store or two anyway to look for other things, I stopped off at the yarn department in Jenner's of Edinburgh. Much to my delight, I found a bag of discontinued Rowan Silky Tweed on sale for 50% off. It was a beautiful blue-ish teal, so even though I have more than enough sweater projects to work on, I snapped it up.

The saleslady there gushed about how fabulous this yarn is to work with, so I'm excited to give it a try. I may make an Hourglass Sweater to replace the one I frogged a couple of years ago. I always really liked the fit of the one I made, and it was an incredibly useful garment to own (unlike many of my sweater projects). We'll see.

But for right now, I'm starting in on a different project entirely, a pullover called Porticus (Ravelry link here) that I'm going to knit out of all that green shetland yarn I bought in Denmark a couple of years ago. The yarn is a light fingering weight which I'll double to get the right weight. This design is pretty much perfect for me: it's top down, has a high neck, waist shaping, and mostly plain stockinette but with some interesting detailing. I really hope it works out, especially since I'm not all that happy with how the Graystone tunic turned out. I finished it while in London (hence the starting of the Swallowtail):

It almost works. Unfortunately I got worried that it would be too tight over the hips so I did a couple of extra increases that in the end turned out to just make it look lumpy. I'm going to wash and block it and see if that helps at all. If it doesn't, it's really not that much to rip out and reknit. The problem of course is that spring is coming and it is pretty much already too warm to wear this. Ah well, there's always next winter!

ETA: someone on Ravelry recommended a different yar shop in Edinburgh, McAree Brothers. Filed away for future reference:)

London, Loop, og Liberty

Golly. I hardly know where to begin after having spent a very intense week in London and Edinburgh. I was there for work as a visiting professor, which I'll write about on my academic blog later if I can gather my thoughts on the experience. And I think I'm going to have to break up the shopping and crafting updates into separate posts here too, since there's just so much!

I had a lot of work to do while I was there, and my hosts had planned a lot of really fun activities for me, so there wasn't a huge amount of time for being a tourist. I've also been in both cities before and seen all the major sites, so this time I used small, independent yarn shops as my guide for exploring. I went to two shops in London and one in Edinburgh, and also stopped off in the yarn departments of quite a few of the major department stores, so I feel like I got a pretty good overview of what's available.

My first stop was Loop in Islington, which also turned out to be my favorite of the shops. I really liked the neighborhood, which was in walking distance of University College London where I was based.

This is pretty much the perfect yarn shop. It's small, but has two floors filled with lovely yarns and it has a quirky vibe rather than the overly sweet pseudo-country style one often finds at such places. For some reason, I usually just ignore the sample knits in most stores, but the ones here (mostly lace shawls) were exquisite. My goal had been to buy some British yarn and to maybe find some buttons to replace the ugly ones on my Plain and Simple Pullover. Loop had both. They specialize in antique buttons and some of them are totally amazing (and spendy). Here's what I ended up with:

The yarn is Juno "Alice Sock," which is a fingering weight silk-alpaca-cashmere blend made in the UK. The color is called "Shadow Cave," and there's just enough to make some kind of simple shawl. I'm thinking maybe of making Henslowe (Ravelry link here). I even got a cloth bag to go along with the purchase.

Later that same day I stopped in at the Liberty department store, and couldn't resist buying some Liberty Tana Lawn. The idea is to make hankies, but I may just admire it instead. They were selling a packet of three hankies there for something like thirteen pounds, and I got enough to make eight hankies for twelve. The pattern is called "Lillian's Berries," I think. The yarn department there was almost entirely Rowan, which for some reason didn't appeal to me at all (Then. More on Rowan yarns in a later post...).

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.

Disiplin og tukt

Brrr! It's icy cold here in Norway. You can tell that it's really cold because even the tough guys at my bus stop in the mornings have hats on. Despite the cold, and despite coming down with a sore throat, I made it through two days of the three-day Bjørnson conference this week. My own paper on Thursday went really well, though I was unexpectedly gripped by nerves, and stumbled a lot over my words in the beginning. Really, I should have know it would be well received, given the fact that I devoted way too much time to revising it.

The next day one of the nestors in the field gave a paper on the same text (Synnøve Solbakken) and he explicitly praised my paper from the previous day in his presentation. I was kind of blown away, to put it mildly. Of course he had two points to criticize, but that is actually the best thing about being engaged in that way. One of the points was something I definitely overlooked, but the other was a point of interpretation, and we had a nice little chat afterward discussing our differing interpretations of the passage (Synnøve's dream sequence in chapter six, in case anyone's interested).

Having given a good paper made it easier for me to focus on the social networking that I really need to do. I put myself out there more than I usually do, and had four or five interesting conversations with people I don't know all that well or had never met before. And to top it all off, my friend S rather unexpectedly invited me to participate in a brainstorming seminar he's arranging this week. It's quite an honor to be invited, and it will give me another chance to network with people who may be in the position to hire (or not hire) me for a permanent position in the next few years. I'm very grateful and excited!

My mom sent us a package, mostly for E's birthday, but it also contained some yarn that she picked up for five dollars at a garage sale. It's about 1100 yards of worsted weight two-ply New Zealand wool in a beautiful brown-gray color:

When she first told me about it I initially thought I would use it to make a matching scarf, hat and mittens, but now that I see how much there is, I'm thinking I need to make some kind of garment instead. This is a color I've been eyeing appreciatively in various contexts, so I'm thrilled to have some to work with. ETA: I'm thinking Cathy Payson's Placed Cable Aran would be a good choice, if only I had the Fall 2007 issue of Interweave Knits. I've put out a request on the book and magazine swap group on Ravelry...

I'm trying to be disciplined, however, and finish up the Riborama pullover. Once I finally got the second sleeve done, the body has (as anticipated) gone much faster. I'm down to the waist, and I'm just going to keep going until I run out of yarn. I've done some slight waist shaping, and I think I may continue some gentle increasing over the hips to make it kind of an a-line tunic. Here's a shot:

The color is way off. It's really hard to take good pictures these days, since the light is so low even at ten o'clock in the morning. The green is much more intense that in the photograph.

I've been participating in an academic writing group on Ravelry for the month of November. We all stated our research/writing goals for the month, and have been posting daily updates (most people petered out after about seven days, unfortunately). I've found that quite helpful, and it has certainly encouraged me to squeeze in even a tiny bit of book-related work on days when I otherwise wouldn't have done so. The potential shame of having nothing to post is a very motivating factor for me!

So even with the Bjørnson conference craziness, I did some planning for the book on Thursday, and a tiny bit of writing yesterday and this morning (about 500 words). I am now about thirty pages short of my goal of 170 pages, and most of that is spread out among the various chapters. There are a bunch small sections I want to add throughout, so it was helpful to write up a list of those missing bits. Some of them are the hard parts that I've been avoiding, others are new material that I haven't yet fully processed. I was feeling overwhelmed -- like, how do I even get started on these last thirty pages after my two week fling with my conference paper?! -- but now I'm more on track. I started this weekend with the easiest of the new sections, and even though it's not very good, at least I have written something. I have had such fun and flow with this project that it's only to be expected that it would get hard at some point.

Interior link of the week: The Swedish furniture design firm G.A.D. They have some lovely, minimalist/modernist furniture made with materials from the island of Gotland. It's very puritanical furniture, which suits my current ascetic mood.

Flink pike

Traumatized as I was by last night's attempt to follow a meme designed for earnest homeschooling stay-at-home mothers, I really had to make up for things today, and golly it turned out to be a fun day. It started out with the brilliant idea to use up the left over mashed sweet potatoes in the fridge for bread. I scanned my cookbooks but didn't find anything, so I went to the internet and found this recipe for "healthy" pumpkin bread. I had to modify it some, but not much. Here's the result:

I'm glad I took a picture, because it's already gone! It was really yummy, gaining the stamp of approval from E and his friend who was over playing, KE, and me. I had to make some modifications on the fly, so here's the recipe for my version:

• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1 1/2 or 2 cups (didn't measure) mashed sweet potatoes (could also use pumpkin)
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup sour cream
• 1 egg
• 2 tablespoons of melted butter

Mix the dry ingredients first, then add the wet. Pour into a bread pan lined with baking parchment, and bake for 1 hour in a 175 degree (celsius) oven. E did most of the mixing, which I think he actually really likes doing.

After baking, E and I ran some errands. We stopped by the green grocers, dropped off outgrown clothing at the UFF bins, picked up some staples at the grocery store, and did some fun shopping at the Kiwanis barn again. They're open from 10-12 on Tuesdays, so it's not often I can make it. I scored a great set of glass mixing bowls (kind of like this). It was missing one bowl, and when I got home I discovered that one of the two glass bowls we already have is the missing link, and it's even originally from the same set. Woo-hoo!

As if that wasn't enough domesticity, I also did a bunch of laundry and made a huge batch of hummus (recipe from Camilla Jensen's Bønner og linser, my current favorite cookbook) :

That's a full sized dinner plate. You're probably thinking it looks like cottage cheese. It's very lumpy because I mashed the chickpeas by hand with a potato masher. I still have a ton of chickpeas left over. I may try to put together a salad with the rest. The hummus isn't the best I've ever tasted, but I consider it a pretty decent first effort.

The universe rewarded me for my efforts. My good friend L from back in Eugene sent me a box of yarn from her stash! It was such a treat to open up the package and find:

Score!

Harrytur

We had to get the car serviced and replace the muffler, so we decided to get it done in Sweden, where prices are a little lower. We also just wanted to get out and see something different before winter sets in. We drove three hours to Karlstad, where we walked around and shopped while the car was being serviced. We stayed the night at a hotel, and then took a leisurely drive back home today. E was cranky and whiny pretty much the whole time. The trip was kind of a test to see how he would do, and unfortunately the verdict wasn't good.

We thought Karlstad was a very nice little town, but not much of a tourist destination (no fault of Karlstad! It's just one of those places that's probably nicer to live in than to visit... much like Nesodden). None of the local attractions seemed worth the effort to track down. The riverfront is lovely, and there are lots of great old houses and buildings. It kind of reminded me of Turku in Finland. Karlstad did have one nice yarn shop in the center of town, Stick&Sy. I found myself irresistibly drawn to some yarn from Öland. I think it must be all the autumn colors that are out now that made me buy it. I haven't really got a clear idea of what I'm going to do with 300 grams of single ply variegated lace weight yarn (!!!), but I'll figure something out eventually.

Notice that it's nicely wound into balls? I finally broke down and bought a skein winder, after all these years. I was cheap though, and didn't buy an umbrella swift to go with it. Boy was that a mistake. I have never come across a yarn that tangles as much as this one. I still have one big clump of yarn to untangle after the ordeal that was the winding of these three balls!

Oddly, we had more fun in the much smaller town of Årjäng, which is an hour closer to Norway along the E18. Here are E and KE in front of the local tourist office:

What is that thing looming in the background, you ask? Why, the Årjäng Troll, of course:

Built in the 1970s and still going strong as a kid-magnet. Also along the route home we pulled off the E18, lured by a sign that said "Vikingcenter." What we found was an interpretive center that was closed for the season and what appeared to be a pseudo-viking market place for kids. Oddly there seemed to be a class field trip in progress with the kids learning CPR. The site was lovely, though, and the little viking boat on the misty lake was pretty darned evocative of...something at least:

Love the anachronistic touch of the life preserver. Did the vikings have those? There was one mound on the site that could easily be a real grave mound. There was a sign on it that said "Kung Sorgs grav," though. We weren't quite willing to believe that there really was a "King Sorrow" buried there.

Bøker

Yikes. I looked at two of my regular blogs today and both of the authors were writing about books that are in preparation to come out. Meanwhile, my own second book festers and wanes. It's been more or less done since March 2007, and over two years later I still see no signs of it being published any time soon, despite the fact that I actually have a publisher for it! None of the three articles I revised this winter have come out yet either. So tiresome. Or rather, I'm so impatient. Boo hoo.

Of course I'm supposed to be slogging away at book number three, but that just doesn't seem to be getting off the ground. Little projects keep getting in the way, and though most of them are at least tangentially related to the larger project, it sure doesn't feel like I'm getting anywhere.

I'm closing in on finishing the Ibsen article. I think one more day of revising and I'm probably at a point where I can submit it to a journal. I spent a couple of minutes today checking out potential journals. The university system in Norway has a two-tiered ranking of publishing venues (journals and publishing houses). You get a lot more "points" (a.k.a. "money"!) for your home department (and thus you) if you publish in tier 2 venues rather than tier 1. I had originally thought of submitting to Ibsen Studies (duh, it's an article on an Ibsen play) but that's only tier 1. I discovered a journal that I've never even heard of before called Nordic Theatre Studies that is tier 2, so obviously it's worth submitting it there first, since the pay off is larger for the same amount of work. And if it gets rejected there I can always still submit it to Ibsen Studies of course.

If I can just get this thing off my desk, then I can dive back into the Hamsun paper that has been on hold since March. I just picked up the books at the library so I can start reading them again. it's the first "wanderer" trilogy that I'm going to write about: Under Høststjærnen, En Vandrer spiller med Sordin, and Den sidste Glæde. They are by all accounts "bad" Hamsun novels, but I love them dearly for all their weirdness. It is such an interesting period in his career--the transition from the proto-modernism of the 1890s to the reactionary realism of the interwar years. From just reading the first 10 or so pages of Under Høststjærnen I can tell I'm going to have a ton of material to work with!

Yesterday E and I took most of the day to go to the Technical Museum. He had so much fun on the preschool field trip there that he has been asking about going there ever since. We had a really nice time, and he was so patient and good throughout the long travel time to get there. We had to take a 5-minute bus ride, a 25-minute ferry ride, and a 30-minute tram ride each way. He really got into the museum displays, and though he claims that driving the cars was his favorite part, I think he actually had the most fun at the telephone display. They have a bunch of old phones hooked up to an internal switchboard, so museum visitors can call each other from various booths. It was a fun day! (I admit I had another garter stitch shawl with me to work on, so I didn't lose patience once.)

Confession: there was another big Garnstudio yarn sale at Tjorven. I have been coveting the Drops Lin yarn for half a year, and at 40% off I just had to get some. I bought 14 skeins of black 100% linen. It's so glossy and smooth--much nicer than the Louet Euroflax I bought in the fall. It will be such fun to experiment with the Lin. I'm thinking a loose tunic, and if there is any left over a crocheted traveller's bag.

Påvirket tilstand

Lessee here, had a glass of wine, sho I'm a wee bit fuzzy... had a fabulous evening on the town along with two lovely friends from grad school (you know who you are...). Just wanted to get a quick update in before I go to bed.

I had trouble picking up the stitches around the body of the Whisper Cardigan on Sunday. Which is to say that I was too cocky to bother to count how many stitches I had picked up. When I got about 2 inches into the 3-inch ribbing band I realized that I probably had too few. I counted and I was almost 100 stitches short! Aghast at my knitting hubris, I ripped it all out and hid it in a drawer while I lick my wounds.

To console myself I started knitting the plainest possible shawl, a garter stitch triangle in gray Rauma Alpakka Inca. For some ridiculous reason, I had to get a pattern as I was sure I wasn't going to be able to do it. The pattern is as follows:

• Cast on 2 stitches.
• Knit every row, increasing one stitch at the next to the last stitch of each row.
• Continue until it's big enough.
• Cast off.

For this I paid 40 crowns? (actually I initially bought the booklet for some of the other patterns) I know there are dozens (hundreds?) of simple shawl patterns available for free on the internet, including the very popular Karius and Baktus shawls, but somehow I needed it written out in a format that was familiar to me (like a Raumagarn pattern). It's irritating to be so dense, but screwing up the Whisper Cardigan so royally really has me questioning my knitting acumen.

I also couldn't resist the big 40% off sale on Garnstudio yarns. It seemed foolish not to stock up if they had anything decent, so I squeezed in a visit to Tjorven on Monday, since I had to go to campus anyway. I bought a motherlode of two yarns (14 skeins of each, since I didn't have a pattern in mind for either).

Merino Super Fine (DK weight) in "Brownmix":

I didn't realize that the Merino was actually superwash. It has a much better texture than the Karisma that I used back in January, though, so I think this will work better.

Silke-Tweed (sport weight) in "Gray Green":

Tuesday I had a day of ridiculous meetings with a professor from China who wants to establish closer contact and exchange with the University of Oslo. It was frustrating for all sorts of reasons, but mostly because yet again someone is proposing to study Nordic literature in English. The de-Norwegianification of Ibsen through the Ibsen Studies all-English MA program here in Oslo is bad enough already...

Today I spent much of the day with my Mom sightseeing (first tried to write site-seeing) in Oslo. We had lunch at the yummy Café Celsius, tried to go to the Museum for Contemporary Art (it was closed in preparation for the opening of a new exhibit tomorrow), went to the Architecture Museum to see the Snøhetta exhibition, went to the Opera House to climb around, walked most of Karl Johan, then stopped into Husfliden to check out the Spælsau yarns there.

I discovered much to my amazement that Rauma has always had a spælsau knitting yarn--it's only recently that I've become aware of the wonders of spælsau (a very hairy Norwegian breed of sheep), and I though one could only buy weaving yarn (single ply). I'm so excited! I want to use spælsau for everything now, as it apparently wears like iron, and really isn't all that much more expensive. Plus the colors they had were lovely. I didn't buy any but was sorely tempted. Had I not bought all that Garnstudio stuff I probably would have. Sorry all you soft yarn people out there. I like mine hard as nails!

After that I dropped my Mom off at the ferry and went up to campus to work for a couple of hours (on the Volvo Lastvagnar article--good progress there!) before meeting my old buddies for dinner. What a good day, and how nice to come home to a sleeping son and groggy husband (KE has a nasty cold).

Bonus tidbit: on the way from Café Tullin back toward the palace I walked by a medical supply store that looked like the kind of place that might sell glass specimen jars for my buttons!

Den grønnkledde

I do not have an obsession with the color green. The following images prove nothing. First off, an update on the re-knitting project. I got a lot of knitting done on the cardigan on the way over to the US:
So far I'm really happy with how it's going. Just a little more on the collar, then the two sleeves to knit and a crochet border along the front edges. Should be easy. Then there's the yarn I bought in Madison. The first photograph was so bad that I took some more snapshots. Here's the Prism Lace Wool (or is that Wool Lace?):
Here you can see that there's some variation in the color, which I really like. Not garish, but not flat either. Then there's the Rowan Kidsilk Haze:
And just to prove that I'm a wild and crazy gal who can really function outside her comfort zone, here's a completely different color, the charcoal gray Lamb's Pride Worsted:
And I feel no shame. I love all these colors senselessly, even though to most people they're ridiculously boring. Still trying to figure out exactly what I'm going to make once the green cardigan is done, and really looking forward to these next projects.

The SASS banquet turned out to be incredibly fun. My friends and I all danced wildly for hours. We even got in a little slam-dancing for old time's sake. I think the new crop of graduate students thought we were pathetic, middle-aged freaks (true), but that's their problem. The utterly uninhibited dancing is definitely the best thing about the entire conference.

Konferanserapport

Still in Madison, with only the conference banquet to go before the long journey back home tomorrow evening. It was a good conference with some pretty interesting papers. I attended and/or participated in two Ibsen panels, two Hamsun panels, and an interdisciplinary panel on Nordic landscapes. My paper on Når vi døde vågner went okay. One of the really good Ibsen scholars came up to me afterward with a book reference that I absolutely should have known about but didn't. I was of course very grateful that he didn't call me out on it in a confrontational and public way.

I haven't been sleeping very well, and thus haven't been socializing as much as I should. I've also had some distressing news about publication of my Cora Sandel book, so that's been eating at me a bit. But all in all it has been fun to be here, and the weather has been lovely. One of the nicest surprises has been so many people here who I went to grad school with, including one who dropped out of the field a decade ago. It was really delightful to reconnect with people from so long ago.

One of them is a fellow knitter, so she came with me to the Lakeside Fibers sale. It was pretty good. I had foolishly had some quite specific things in mind, which of course didn't pan out. Here's what I did end up buying:

Sorry for the lousy photograph. It's taken with the camera on my MacBookPro, using the Photo Booth program. The details are as follows:

• 3 skeins of Rowan Kidsilk Haze in color number 588 (Drab) for a total of 687 yards
• 6 skeins of Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride Worsted in color M06 (Deep) for a total of 1140 yards
• 1 skein of Prism Lace Wool in color 310 (Olive) for a total of 1460 yards. I haven't seen anyone raving about this yarn yet on Ravelry, but it is really lovely.
• plus a copy of Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitter's Almanac just because I really wanted to have at least one book by this iconic writer.

The grand total was $106.69 including sales tax. That's just under 720 NOK, which seems pretty good for that much yarn (enough for a cardigan and two, perhaps three shawls of some kind). It was fun to go with someone else, as our color palettes were completely opposite: while I have charcoal gray, olive drab, and a lichen green, my friend bought lipstick red, hot pink, and white (but she also bought a skein of the Prism Lace Wool in a beautiful variegated dark gray, which I also easily could have gone for).