Romanens rom

So I'm back from my conference and working out the kinks and jetlag from the trip. Other than the dancing, the conference was, well, kind of boring this time. I don't know what happened, but somehow I just never quite got into it. I did get a lot of positive feedback on my own paper, which was gratifying.

Right now, I'm desperately trying to pull together my MA-level literature seminar for the fall. I need to get the book order in asap, but there are still a lot of question marks. The course is NOR4410 "Samtidslitteratur" and the subtopic is "romanens rom." I'll have about seven novels that all use space/place in interesting ways. There are a few that I've already definitely decided to use:

1. Nikolaj Frobenius' Teori og praksis
2. Kari Hotakainen's Juoksuhaudantie [On the Homefront]
3. Dag Solstad's 16.07.41

Then there are a bunch that I'm toying with. I'm basically trying to limit it to the last 10 years, but there are a couple that are a little older than that.

1. Erlend Loe's L
2. Mikael Niemi's Populärmusik från Vittula
3. Hanne Ørstavik's Like sant som jeg er virkelig

And then, finally, there are some books that I've only heard of, but that might work really well.

1. Peter Törnqvist's Kioskvridning 140 grader
2. Mala Naveen's Desiland
3. John Erik Riley's Heimdal, California
4. Monika Fagerholm's Den amerikanska flickan 
5. Helle Helle's Ned til hunderne
6. Mette Moestrup's Jævnet med jorden

Crikey. I'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed out about making the choices. I think I have the primary theory book figured out, thanks to a conversation at SASS though: Ann-Marie Mai and Dan Ringgaard's edited volume of space/place theory, Sted.

No knitting to report. Or rather, there is, but I haven't taken any pictures and have too much work to catch up on this week to spend time blogging about it (or the rest of my Chicago trip)...

Fremmedgjøring

I've just been putting the finishing touches on packing for my trip to Chicago (almost forgot about my passport--yikes!). I have a very clever little change purse with separate sections for different currencies, and as I was scraping Euros and US coins and bills out of a drawer to take with me I was struck with the realization that American coins (quarters at least) looked strange and almost unfamiliar to me! For some reason (maybe the differing images for each state?), they look smaller and less distinctive to me. I've never had that happen before. American money is my money, but suddenly I was thinking "Hmm, where are all the colors and the holes in the coins?"

I think I'm going native...

Påsketur

I'm finding it hard to squeeze in blog posts these days. We went away for a few days to our neighbors' summer cabin on Hvaler, which was lovely. No photos, as I forgot to bring my camera. The weather was spectacular, as was the company, the food, and the setting. We took a day trip to Sweden, which was a disaster, though. E was really tired or something because he had a complete melt down that lasted for most of the trip. It was awful. He also ran out into a street from between two parked cars and was almost hit by a man on a bicycle. It was one of the worst moments of my life. Thankfully we got off with just the scare.

It was lovely to come home to an even greener yard. E had a buddy over to play today, and then this evening we got an SMS from his parents saying they'd just discovered that he has come down with chicken pox. Argh! Such bad luck, especially since I'm leaving for Chicago the day after tomorrow. We don't know yet whether the boy was infected at preschool or somewhere else. If it was preschool, then E should be coming down with it very soon. If not, we have a window of time.

My knitting is pretty uninspiring right now. I'm working on the cabled pullover, and still concerned that I chose too dark of a gray for it. I am also working on a project with some yarn that my friend L gave me last year. I found a pattern in Tine Solheim's book, Maskeball. It's not listed on Ravelry yet, but it's a short jacket with a ruffle, of all things. I'm almost done with it (huge needles) and am regretting that I didn't double the yarn. It would have been a firmer fabric, but since it's mohair there's virtually no chance of ripping it out and starting over.

Otherwise, I'm spending a lot of time looking into iPads. My trusty MacBookPro is on its last legs after six years of heavy daily use, and I am trying to figure out if I can downgrade and still meet most (though clearly not all) of my needs. Lots of research to be done. Don't be surprised, though, if I make a (calculated) impulse purchase in Chicago...

Motevisning

I actually have two sweater reveals today, plus an updated snapshot of one from last year. This wave of sweater pictures has more to do with the fact that I discovered a neat-o retro clothes hanger (and the thought that I could hook it over a rock in our yard) than anything else.

First up is the gray cowl vest:

I'm still planning on adding sleeves, but for now I think I'll get some use out of it over this new white tunic I bought. This lace weight silk-merino blend is just so exquisite, and still manages to be warm despite its gossamer feel.

Then today I finished the Francis Revisited in Noro Silk Garden:

It's a smidge tight on, but since there's silk in the blend I'm guessing that it will relax quite a bit once I start wearing it. In general I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. It pretty much corresponds to what I had envisioned when I started the project.

Yesterday was a crazy day for me, with all those big deadlines looming: job application, US taxes, and a bunch of small publication stuff. I had decided I was definitely going to reward myself, and I have to admit that I went a little amok on my shopping spree. I bought a sweater's worth of yarn (Garnstudio Drops Alpaca in color 0506 dark gray), some new (cheap and practical) clothes, and a spring scarf, which happens to go with my blue Miss Honeychurch sweater from last year:

We're on Easter break here now, and then right after the holiday I head to the US to go to my beloved SASS conference. Can't wait: old grad school buddies, badly behaving senior colleagues, up-and-coming former students, fantastically supportive and nice senior colleagues, hilarious dancing, my dearest friends, what more could I ask? It will be a hoot to give my paper on The Troll Hunter as well.

Today was a really nice day. The sun shone, I did some cleaning, we went to the library and to the grocery store without incident, E got to visit a friend, KE got to go to a soccer game, and we all went out to Thai food afterward at our local restaurant. Now I'm just trying to stay awake long enough to watch an episode of Treme.

"Mit Bonde-Hyte et Konge-Slot skal blive"

What's missing from this picture?:

The answer is snow! Its gone. All gone. I am ecstatic. The grass is on the verge of becoming green again! Today was a gorgeous day and we were outside for nearly all of it. I took a whole bunch of pictures of the house and the neighbors' houses because we are gearing up to stain the house later on this spring, and I'm hoping to make a few small adjustments to the color scheme. I've never been wild about the red roof - brown-red base - ochre trim - blue door - combination. I don't really like any of the colors individually very much, and together I find them grating. So change may be afoot. Here are some of the factors to consider:

1. The house to the south really dominates our yard:

As you can see, the two base browns are fairly close, but they don't really coordinate very well. The next house up the street is pretty much the same reddish brown too, so it would be nice to distinguish ourselves a little bit.

2. There's a big white house behind ours that totally looms over the terrace:

It's actually a fairly attractive house, but we feel like we're under surveillance, so we're thinking of putting up a fence. Even though it has a big new addition, it's a fairly traditional house, and it would be nice to connect with it visually in some way, since it's so dominant.

3. On the north side there's an unassuming red house:

I think a darker brown would look better next door to a true red than our reddish brown. The neighbors both died a year ago, and we're not sure yet what their heirs are going to do with the property, so it's a bit of an unknown factor.

4. The house that shares the property line with both the red house and ours has my favorite color scheme of them all:

It's not really visible from the street view of our house, or from most of our yard, which means that it wouldn't be a big deal if we copied the scheme. I love dark brown (bordering on black) houses with white trim. I think their roof is a little too bright, but I'm seriously thinking of trying to go a few shades darker with our brown and then change the ochre trim to a warm (creamy?) white to emulate but not copy this. Not sure what to do with our blue doors, though. We'll do a dry run on the garage during Easter break, then if we're happy with the result, do the whole house once we're done with school.

I sat out on the deck and knitted and read and dozed for most of the afternoon. Got the body of the Noro Laurel sweater finished and started on the cowl neck. I'm basically satisfied with it:

The sizing is turning out totally different from the Laurel I knitted out of a different single ply worsted weight yarn on the same needles. Very strange.

Sportsidiot

Let me start by saying that I have no experience with the sport of cricket. For some reason, though, KE and I decided to watch the last half of the world championship finals in cricket, which was broadcast on NRK yesterday. Much to our surprise, we were both intrigued, and ended up watching it to the end. I'm most surprised at myself, because cricket is a little like baseball, a sport that I have always loathed. We had a lot of fun trying to figure out the rules. I think by the end we had made sense of the basics, and though we were a bit disappointed that underdog Sri Lanka lost to India, we thoroughly enjoyed watching it.

I think cricket has to be the best knitting sport ever invented. After all, yesterday's match lasted eight and a half hours, and the pace of the game is slow enough that one can work on even quite complicated things. After all, if the players themselves can drink tea and get massages during the game, the level of attention required of the spectators  can't be all that high.

So I knit and knit and knit on the striped Noro sweater, and then quite suddenly decided to start ripping it out and start over. At one point I made a mistake in the waist shaping (yes, I had really gotten that far!) and took it off the needles to frog back to the mistake. Once it was off, I decided to slip it on and see what the fit was like. As I had feared, it was a smidge tighter than I would like, so I made the snap decision to start over. If you look closely, you can see both versions in the photo:

Aside from it being too small, two things bothered me about the first attempt: 1) the technique I used for the raglan increases looked incredibly sloppy, and 2) I hate the first 5 cm or so of the color combinations of the striping. After it gets to the blue-gray bit I really like it but before that it's just ugly. In version two I'm able to fix both problems (and make it bigger), so I think it was worth it to start over.

Stygg som juling?

This week I finally did something I've been dying to do for a really long time, namely go to a Zumba class. As a middle-aged and highly sedentary person, I really need to get moving. I have a past as an active salsa dancer, but since my courting days are over it's not really an option any more. I also am a person who hates "working out," so a normal "spinning" or aerobics class is right out. But Zumba is really more like dancing than working out. The mother of one of E's friends happened to mention that she was going later on the evening I picked him up at their house, so I jumped at the opportunity and went too.  It was the most fun I've had so far this year! I'll be going every Wednesday for the rest of the spring and hoping that the instructor offers it twice a week in the fall...

Even though I'm not quite done with the Cowl Vest, I couldn't resist getting started with the Noro Silk Garden yarn. First I had to wind it into balls to see how many knots it has. Noro is notorious for knots and it really kinds of matters if one is trying to control the variegation in a pattern. This is what twelve balls looked like after winding, and as I later discovered, I missed a few knots.

I decided pretty quickly that I wanted to make Francis Revisited again, since it's a really good fit and a very quick knit. My plan was to knit stripes of two rows each, and I had visions of it being spectacularly beautiful, given the colors in the yarn. Unfortunately, so far I think it's what my Grannie would call "as ugly as home made sin." See below:

One of the things about Noro, however, is that sometimes the whole effect turns out kind of fantastic, even if the details aren't so great. So after putting it away for a couple of days and pulling it out again, I've decided that I'm going to keep going for a while longer, just to see if maybe it gets a little better. Otherwise, I suppose I could start over with two other balls and hope that it turns out better, but there's no guarantee...