Alle gode ting er tre...

Third time's a charm, right? I've been trying for months and months to make a longish sweater/tunic out of fourteen skeins of charcoal gray Garnstudio Drops Alpaca yarn, and failing miserably. I initially bought the yarn to make a cabled turtleneck from one of my ancient Vogue Knitting magazines:

The yarn was way too dark to do justice to so many fussy cables, so I frogged the project and started in on the very popular Still Light tunic:

I actually came really close to finishing this (just one arm to go), but a nagging voice in my head kept telling me that the style wasn't right for my figure at all, so it's been stashed away in time out for a long time. Recently, I decided to make a clean sweep of it, and just frog the whole thing. Rather merciless, don't you think? My latest plan is to make a monochromatic zigzag dress (without the stripes, obviously, but with the same texture):

So far I'm really liking it. It's addicting to knit in the same way the Bulgarian Pleated Skirt from this summer was. I'm not sure if I have enough yarn, but I think it will be okay to use a different dyelot.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention another smaller project that I'm not totally happy with. I was trying to use up some magenta (!) yarn someone gave me, and came up with this little girl's cardigan (Ravelry link), which I plan to give to the daughter of a friend:

I'm actually finished with the knitting, but got a little demoralized because I ran out of yarn only two rows into the six-row bottom edging, so it curls. All I need to do is sew in ends, block, and find buttons for it. Maybe the blocking will help with the curling bottom edge? It's kind of cute, no? But totally not my cup of tea.

So I guess the good thing about all this is that I am knitting again, but still kind of bumbling along, without much success other than the Selbu mittens.

Opphold

The absurdity in my quest for permanent residency here in Norway continues to increase. When we left off the last time, I had received a letter on Christmas Eve from the police saying that I didn't have documentation for taking 250 hours of Norwegian instruction, and that I thus needed to get a waiver from my local municipality. Of course the local municipality was closed for the whole Christmas break, so I couldn't actually apply until after New Year's Day. Then, as is often the case, the one person responsible for this kind of think was so busy that she wasn't able to get to it until today, the sixteenth. This morning she called me with information that makes me really fear for the future of Norway, a country about to be strangled by bureaucracy.

You see, it turns out she can't actually give me a waiver regarding the 250 hours of Norwegian instruction because, through a strange legal quirk, she doesn't think I'm required to have it. Although I moved to Norway this time in 2008, I have spent lots of time here before, including in 1993-1995, while I researched and wrote my doctoral dissertation, and it seems that--at least according to the local municipality--I am officially in "the system" as a 1993-model rather than a 2008-model. Unfortunately, the police don't agree, and they still think I need either proof or a waiver. Gah!

After talking to my local bureaucrat, I called up my case worker in the police, and had a conversation about all this. She's not sure she can give me a residence permit herself, and thinks that she may have to forward my case to the Immigration Directorate itself. Luckily, in the time that has passed since I submitted my application, I have managed to get a PDF-file of my university transcripts from the US, and she thought maybe seeing those might help.

Both of the women I spoke with were very nice, and assured me there's no real danger of me getting deported. There is just no way either of them can, well, think independently and critically, and make a decision in a case like mine, which is outside of the norm. They are completely locked in to bureaucratic protocol. On the one hand, I totally understand, and am trying to be really patient, but on the other hand this makes me want to scream! I still can't believe that it's the language requirement that is holding me up here. Anyone who's met me knows I speak and write Norwegian pretty much as "near native" as you can get without actually being a native. It's just totally crazy.

Sort/hvitt

I've been struggling with how to sum up 2011 in a blog post. It was kind of a messy year, with lots of thinking and fretting and frustration, and very little to show for it. I think it's symptomatic for the year that I:

• have more yarn stashed and more unfinished knitting projects that usual, and was only able to finish small projects (and not even always then) 
• made lots of plans for remodeling our house, but did  none of them 
• was judged to have professor status in my field, but don't have a permanent position to go with it  
• did a lot of thinking about the cabin book, but had to put it on hold so I only have about 90 pages to show for it all 
• had a lot of publications, but none of them count for very much because of the venues in which they appeared (note to self: be pickier about where you publish from now on) 
• experienced two deaths in my extended family but wasn't able to go through any rituals of closure because I live abroad
• did everything I could to prepare to apply for the one job I really want, but still can't apply because it hasn't officially been advertised yet
• still don't have my permanent residence permit worked out yet
• struggled with sleep issues and got almost no exercise

2011 is a year I am happy to leave behind. I'm not a person who does well with loose ends, ambiguity, risk, or uncertainty. I haven't felt like I have much of a support network, and I've been edgy and unsure of myself for most of the year.

I don't really have any new years's resolutions, but I think what I need more than anything right now is more order in my everyday life. We took a big step in that direction over the Christmas break by finally installing wardrobes in our house-with-no-closets. We also slightly redistributed how we're using the rooms in our house to better suit our patterns of activity. Things still aren't 100%, but it's much better. We still need to get a few more shelves and wire baskets from IKEA to finish out the wardrobes (though we did pretty well in guessing our needs, actually). The more things falls into place, the easier it is to eliminate the remaining pockets of chaos. This also means knitting from stash, as the amount of yarn I have is really starting to make me anxious, grateful as I am for all the free yarn I was given.

I'm also really looking forward to work this semester. This will be my first semester without teaching since 2007, and I'm so excited to maximize the opportunity. I'm also really stoked about all the conferences I'll be participating in this year. I really want to make the most of the opportunity to network and present good work in a stimulating manner.

I'm trying to think positively. It's not all black. In fact, in my knitting at least, things have been very black and white recently. First up, I finished the Fana pullover for E:

This was out of that Peer Gynt yarn that my colleague gave me. The black was originally red. As you can see, the finished product (a size 12!) is very big on this 7-year-old, but not nearly as big as I was expecting. Yikes, he's growing fast. And yes, that is a Playstation controller in his hands, I'm afraid. Resistance was futile when both son and father insisted.

Next up is my first ever pair of Selbu mittens:

The pattern is from the "Selbustrikk" booklet (LVS-5) published by Rauma Ullvarefabrikk. It's a women's mitten (pattern number 7) made with Rauma "old series" 2-ply yarn and one 2mm circular needle. They're not blocked yet in the photograph, and in fact I'm cheating, since the second thumb isn't yet knitted. If I had waited until I finished the thumb it would have been too dark to take a picture today!

All in all, I was super happy with the yarn, and did a much better job of the shaping than I have in the past on mittens. I was also thrilled to find this two-sentence piece of advice in the pattern booklet:

For at mønsteret i småmønstrede flater, skråstriper og lus skal bli jevnt, må trådene ikke bytte plass. [...] Strikkes det med begge trådene på venstre pekefinger, må trådene ligge i samme rekkefølge hele tiden.

To keep the pattern in areas with small patterns, angled stripes and spots even, do not switch the order of the strands. If both strands are carried on the left finger, they have to stay in the same order the whole time.

I have been doing two-color knitting since I was sixteen, and I never knew this. It makes a huge difference in the finished product, though it means the two strands get much more tangled. Previously, I have always twisted in order to avoid tangles, without paying attention to where the colors were placed as I was carrying them. So yay for an old dog teaching herself a new trick!

Pax Syriana

Ok. Every once in a while I get a glimpse of the "big picture." It's really not that hard to see what's really going on in the world (who has the power, and what they're doing with it). It's there in plain sight. Yet somehow, it's impossible to do anything about any of it. It's like we in the west are a bunch of really well-fed, luxury consuming serfs totally beholden to our overlords, with not even the spark of imagination to think a critical thought about why or how we're being exploited. 


Mostly I don't think about it. But then enough of the evidence and criticism that's out there starts to stack up, and it becomes impossible not to see, even if just a momentary realization. This fall, two works of fiction and a number of on-going news events got to me.

(Mediated) Reality:

• Try following the Julian Assange extradition and rape charge case. Without falling into the whole Cult of Julian trap, I am convinced that Assange's Wikileaks project is on the side of right. Admittedly I haven't done any real research (only the Swedish documentary film, Wikirebels, and this long panel discussion with Slavoj Zizek), and I think I'm probably more of a supporter of the breakout group (led by Daniel Domscheit-Berg), which split from Wikileaks in protest of Assange's leadership, than I am of Wikileaks itself. Nonetheless, I get the sense that with Wikileaks Assange created a new model for regaining control over state-corporate interests, which were just on the bring of locking up total control of, well, everything. It's amazing to see how these state-corporate interests are managing Assange.
• Try following the related case against Bradley Manning. There's a good summary here.
• Or how about examining the ironic scenario in which President Barak Obama, a candidate I supported and voted for, commemorated the sixty-third anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but refused to veto the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a piece of legislation that now makes it legal for the US government to incarcerate US citizens at any time, for any reason... If you (like me) thought Obama was more ethical than his predecessor, you (like me) were sadly mistaken.
• Oh, and in case you thought model social democratic states like Norway or Canada are innocent of this kind of thing, think again. Take a gander at this analysis of the Keystone Pipeline proposal that Canada is keen to implement. 

Fiction:

• I read H.G. Wells' Nineteen Eighty-Four for the first time this fall. I could care less about the "critical tradition" that seeks to label the novel either prophecy or satire. That's totally missing the point, which instead is that Wells describes in exacting details the motivations and processes of perpetual global war; this is a playbook that the U.S. and its allies and corporations are following with chilling accuracy.
• Just last night KE and I watched Stephen Gahan's Syriana (2005). Like a lot of the critics, we were confused by the multiple story lines and not quite sure who all those people were, so it certainly wasn't an entertaining film. But by gum it sure hit home. I dreamed the movie, and woke up filled with the sense of hopelessness and utter corruption that it seeks to convey. The movie is an adaptation of Robert Baer's exposé, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War Against Terrorism (2003), a book I may have to read. The title of the movie is apparently taken from the diplomatic term "Pax Syriana"; there's an interesting online Q & A session about the film with the director here where he discusses the term, among many other things.

Here's a quote I really liked from the Gahan interview: 

I found the war on drugs to be a war on an abstraction, a war on brain chemistry, a war on human nature. And I find the war on terror to be another war with an abstraction at the heart of its semantics. And I don't think that our democracy exportation project is working very well. If anybody had been with me in Damascus and the Syrian desert in '02 speaking to the Iraqis that I met, they wouldn't have been very optimistic about the democracy exportation project either. I think the war on terror has succeeded in creating more terror, more terrorists, a less safe America and a less safe world. 

Gah! Where do we even start?! And that's not even touching on the rabid responses to the Occupy Movement, to the Arab Spring, and the 99%. It's crazy that all this is happening, and the cause-and-effect processes are as transparent as they are, yet our lives are still so utterly dominated by entitlement, entertainment, and completely irrelevant and counterfactual "issues."

ETA: I need to start a movie list. It starts with The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2000), coincidentally a merciless (and probably correct) critique put together by the late Christopher Hitchens. Kissinger appears to be the mastermind behind the last four decades of US foreign policy, and his legacy was carried on by the likes of Paul Wolfowitz...

O jul med din glede...

This last week three internationally known figures died, Christopher Hitchens, Vaclav Havel, and Kim Jong-Il. Clearly the side of reason of humanity lost in the balance, if you're counting such things. This article by Hitchens on Kim Jong-Il from Slate last year is a nice commentary on both men. To get a sense of Hitchens' strength as a public speaker, check out his no-holds-barred comparison of Christian theology with North Korean totalitarianism here.

In this season of more people--both known and unknown--dying than I like to think about, it is comforting to be preparing for Christmas with a very eager 7-year-old in the house. Last year I figured out that waiting until Christmas Eve to put the tree up (the Norwegian way) just didn't cut it with me. I didn't feel like Christmas was even here before it was over. I missed having a pile of presents to admire. It made no sense to put up the tree in a rush on a day otherwise filled with cooking and socializing. So I insisted that we put the tree up a week before Christmas this year, and I'm so glad we did! There was a little tree growing in an unfortunate spot in our yard, so KE cut it down, and E and I decorated it yesterday. Here's the result:

Probably not everyone's cup of tea, but we like it. It's great to have a small tree, since then we only use a few of our most beloved ornaments, and don't feel the need to fill in with mass-produced stuff. There are ornaments (and crazy plastic icicles!) from my Dad's childhood and paper heart baskets made by KE's mother, who died in 1970. E got really into it, and was thrilled to see a small pile of packages. He was particularly intrigued by the gift labels, and upset that the biggest package didn't have one. Being a take-charge kind of kid, he quickly took matters into his own hands:

That says "FRA MAMA ÅG PAPPA TIL EIVIND HILSEN MAMA ÅG PAPPA" (roughly translated: "from mom an dad to Eivind from mom an dad"). I love watching him grapple with language!

Today I finished up the last task of grading, and did the last bit of gift shopping. I'll do a little work tomorrow and Wednesday while E is in school, but otherwise I'm going to go into vacation mode. I've been doing a little desultory knitting with the Peer Gynt yarn my colleague gave me. My dying experiment was in one sense a failure (I didn't get blue or purple), but in one sense okay, since I'm always happy to have black yarn. I decided to start making a traditional Norwegian Fana pullover for E with it. I've gotten to just below the star pattern on the body:

That should look pretty good on a red-headed kid. I'm not really aiming to finish this by Christmas, though theoretically speaking I think I could. My main focus now is just to relax and get my head readjusted before the new term starts. I'll be having a totally different type of semester, with virtually no teaching (only about four guest lectures plus a couple of conference presentations). It's going to be all about a job application and finishing my cabin book manuscript.

Not sure how much I'll be posting, so have a very jolly Christmas and enjoy the solstice! For those of us up here in the far north, it's wonderful to think that after Thursday the days will be getting longer again. Now if only we would get proper snow...

Festivitas

Okay, I'm finished with my pity party, and feeling a bit more on top of things after making it through E's birthday party preparations. I'm trying not to let the fact that one kid complained to me "This is the most boring birthday party EVER" get to me. I know that E had a grand time, and, as far as I could gauge, the other six boys were having fun too.

I had fun making "godteposer" (the little gift bags of candy that kids always get at birthday parties here). I decided to give in to the Christmas season and came up with this:

Contents: pepperkaker, Smørbukk caramels, brente mandler, and miniature candy canes.

Eivind requested brownies instead of cake, so I stacked brownies on a plate and stuck candles in the pile. It wasn't elegant (and I totally cheated and used Betty Crocker boxed mixes!!! Don't tell my Mom!), but combined with vanilla ice cream it was pretty popular. We didn't have any planned activities, and for the most part, it seemed to work out great (the killjoy kid being the exception). The boys (yes, I'm afraid it was all boys) E invited are super sweet and enthusiastic. One of them had a notebook and pencil along with him (his mother tried to get him to leave it behind, but he insisted), and he wrote down all sorts of useful information, like the names of the guests who had arrived. Forfatterspire? They're all so quirky and smart and unedited at this age, that it's really fun to observe them. Two of the dads (whom we know pretty well, but who didn't know each other) stayed for coffee and we adults had a nice time chatting too.

I had been really stressing about this birthday party, so it's a big relief to have it squared away.

Sukk

Blah. Not a good day to look at other peoples' glowingly fabulous blogs. Nothing went right today. Off to bed.