Lørdagsk(a)os

What is this, you say? Why an entirely new and unplanned project. The other day E came home from preschool wearing a hand-knit sweater that wasn't his own. Apparently he had gotten cold, so the teachers put it on him. Imagine how horrible that made me feel. The one he wore home was obviously knitted out of sock yarn, and a good weight for indoors. I immediately dropped the linen tunic and dug out my sock yarn. This is what I have come up with: 200 stitches in the round with 2.5mm needles. I'll split at the armholes and probably knit the arms shoulder down. Not sure about the neck yet.

Saturday is always pizza night in our house. It used to be that I made them all myself, but then KE started getting interested. I still make the dough, but he has otherwise taken full responsibility for his own weekly pizza. As you can see here:


Most of the time E isn't interested, but this week he was, so he got his own mini pizza. I absolutely love the way he spread his toppings:

What's up with all the mushrooms jammed together? Meanwhile, my own pizza is exactly the same as it always is. The only change in my standard ingredients in the past five years has been the addition of mushrooms. Otherwise it's tomato sauce, spinach, cheese, onions, and black olives. I know lots of people will think that sounds gross, but I totally dig it, week after week:

The day was a long one. We started with watching the sons of some friends playing soccer at a local tournament, then went to the mall to get slippers and boots. Unfortunately, E is still rather randomly hitting me. It's so weird. Today he went into his room to hide under the covers and yelled for me to come find him. I thought he was playing hide-and-seek. When I lifted up the duvet he smacked me full force in the middle of my face and was furious with me because I hadn't done exactly what he wanted (whatever that was). It bent my glasses.

It really upset me, partly because I got so angry that I had to leave the room, partly because it just hurt so much. I wasn't spanked as a child, and no one has ever hit me. I don't know how to react to what my brain processes as a violent attack, even though it's my own young son doing it. I'm sure I'm not 'supposed' to blog about this kind of thing. Everyone's children in the blogosphere are always perfectly behaved, heartbreakingly creative, exceptionally smart, and artfully dressed at all times. Mine's all that too, but there's no denying that something's going on in our relationship that needs to be worked out. I wonder at times if it's because I'm the one who works away from home, that somehow he's punishing me for being less present in his life.

familien min...

Just got E off to bed, and I'm feeling a little traumatized. Unfortunately, he's been in a long stretch of acting out, and it comes to a head in him hitting me pretty hard. It's so distressing. I have never been hit by anyone in my life, so the fact that my own son is doing it is hard to process. We would be less concerned if he showed remorse, but he doesn't. In so many other ways he's really perceptive and sensitive, so I just don't get this. I'm really hoping it will pass, and of course totally paranoid that it's some kind of red flag for a major personality disorder.

This morning I got an email from my Dad containing two snapshots that a college friend of his took. Apparently the guy recently scanned them and sort of randomly sent them to my dad. They're amazing:

That's my dad standing on the steps with the dorky hat and beard. My mom is (rather obviously) the woman sitting on the steps. In this next picture she's the brunette:

Apparently my dad sent these to her too, and she could barely recognize herself. She said it was only because the woman looked like me that she knew it must be her. She figures these were in their last year of college, sometime in 1964-65. She can tell by the hat, since it is "pre-stetson" and pre "the hat he got from my dad"...whatever those were.

Finished the front on the linen tunic, sewed the shoulder seams, and knitted up the neck edging. Now all I need is two sleeves and seaming and I'm done with number 12. This evening, however, I'm going to climb into bed early to read a murder mystery, André Bjerke's Døde menn går i land from 1947. It's background reading for the cabin book, really!

Rødt

There are not many things that I hate, but I have to admit that I actively hate the color red. It makes me anxious. I find it visually jarring. It drowns out other colors. I don't like the way it is overloaded with symbolic meaning (love, sports cars, lipstick, a red dress, the devil...). There are some orange-reds and blue-reds that I really like, but the closer you get to true primary red on the color wheel, the more I cringe.

So of course my heart sunk a little when KE picked out the colors for his ski socks. On the one hand, I'm delighted to make them and up for the challenge, but on the other hand I dread weeks of carrying around not just any red yarn, but knallrødt, in-your-face cherry red yarn. I finished the first sock rather quickly, but had to put the second one into time out, due to red overload. I got it out again for the harrytur and then, in a marathon of knitting yesterday, I finished the whole thing up. I am so pleased with myself for actually finishing two ski socks that are each over 90 cm (about a yard) long in a color that I despise. And they actually look kind of cute, at least when hanging over the wood stove to dry:

I also spent some time yesterday swatching that yarn I bought in Sweden. I thought it might work to make one of Elizabeth Zimmermann's "Pi" shawls from The Knitter's Almanac. Here's one strand (rather worse for the wear from untangling it) on 4mm needles:

It's a fun pattern, but I think the yarn is just way too thin for it. I'm thinking about doubling it and trying again. I realized that part of the appeal of the yarn in the store was the way the colors were blended together in the skein, and I'm hoping that knitting two strands together might recreate that effect.

I'm going to let it sit for a while and concentrate on finishing sweater number 12 instead. But after an incredibly rainy day yesterday the sun is out today, so we'll probably try to take advantage of that and spend some time outside. I'm just waiting for the real fall weather to descend upon us, so any day with sun seems like a gift this late in the year.

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.

Søndagstur

E was really eager to go for a walk in the woods to a special place we found a few weeks ago. This time we rode our bikes from home into the woods up to the point where the trail gets really steep, then walked the rest of the way. KE had baked banana-carrot bread earlier in the day, so we took that along to eat. There were also, amazingly enough, still quite a few blueberries. We had a little fire and ran around playing "three billy goats gruff" (all three) and motocross (boys only). We could really feel and see that autumn is upon us.

For the past few days E has been into wearing the crazy stripy sweater I knit for him last summer. Here he is with it, along with the ancient strawberry hat:

And here's the proud baker enjoying the fruits of his labor along side the fire:

And of course yours truly, appreciative of yummy snacks and wearing a sweater that is close to twenty years old:

Ah. All together a lovely afternoon.

Opplysning

I finally picked up a book that I had bought back in January. It's called The Cultural Construction of Norden, and after having read just the introductory chapter I feel like I have reached a whole new understanding of how and why the Scandinavian countries are different from the rest of the world. The authors of the book base the difference in the pragmatic way that Enlightenment thought was received. I'm so glad I've been reading my Holberg this past year, since the Enlightenment is such a key period in the development of Nordic cultural identity.

The question of cultural constructs (of identity, of nation, etc.) has really been on my mind this past week. I was grappling with it one insomniac early morning when I banged out four pages of the introduction to my book (the first real start on the project), and it was at the center of the inspiring lecture by Julia Kristeva (yes, really!) that I attended on Friday. Kristeva was trying to argue for an effective response to fundamentalism (of all kinds) based on particularly European traditions of multi-lingualism, which creates an inherent self-questioning. Somehow this tradition needs to be harnessed, according to Kristeva, in order to counteract the totalitarian discourses of fundamentalism.

So it's a good thing that I'm working on an incredibly mindless knitting project:

Acres of plain stockinette and garter stitch in unbleached linen. If I have learned anything in this year of knitting sweaters, it's that I really enjoy the plainest possible knitting. It's not that I can't do the fancy stuff. I know that I can. I just don't find it very enjoyable, and get much more satisfaction out of knitting things that are quick and easy. I do included stranded knitting in the "easy" category, despite the fact that I've only done one stranded sweater and 1 1/2 stranded stockings this year:
Hmm. I think I'd better get that second sock finished before ski season starts!

I think the reason I like easy knitting is that it allows me to think about other things (like identity construction) in a meditative way.

Random Roundup: three things I found on the blogs I frequent that really appeal to me:

1. I found this really subtle and elegant home tour on Apartment Therapy. This is just the kind of subdued, eclectic, and quirky interior that I wish I could pull together. I love that the person who lives there suggesting making a list of the words that describe your design style/aspirations, then trying to pare that list down to just two words, and using those as a guiding principle.
   
2. I also found lots to like in Soule Mama's home tour on Indie Fixx for almost opposite reasons. It's much funkier and more colorful, but still edited and carefully thought out. It's more stuff than I want in my life, but I really like the functionality of each little corner.
3. Med pinner reminded me of a Norwegian artist whose work I had first seen in a lecture last fall, Kari, Steilhaug. She works a lot with knitting in her art, sometimes using and unraveling bales of used handknit sweaters, sometimes knitting covers for boulders, and sometimes, as in her recent piece, "De ufullendte," in this year's Statens Høstutstilling, compiling other people's unfinished objects and the stories behind them.

Unfortunately, all this aesthetic and intellectual input has quite literally made my brain hurt. I've had a headache since Friday morning. Three days (I'm writing this on Sunday morning, even though Blogger thinks it's still only Saturday) is a bit much. It sucks.

Ting jeg liker i USA

There's just not a lot to like about the US right now, what with all the birthers, teabaggers, and fundamentalists shouting for attention all the time. During my recent trip back, I made a concerted effort to generate a list of things I truly like (or even love) about my country of origin. It wasn't hard to come up with a list of trivial things, in addition to the obvious big three: friends, family, and the wilderness. Here's what I generated while en route to and in Utah:

1. Microbrew beer. I'm not much of a drinker. I tend toward sips rather than pints. I don't really like wine, even after all these years. But oh, how I wish I had taken more advantage of yummy, rich, dark microbrews when we were living in Oregon. D'oh!


2. Tom's of Maine toothpaste. The only toiletry I can't live without. All other toothpastes taste sugary and gross. I bought three tubes in Provo (made a special separate trip by city bus just to find it), and it was even on sale. I mean after all tooth paste is something you put in your mouth, and you do it at least twice a day. Peppermint only, please.

3. Celestial Seasonings herbal teas. For someone like me who can't (okay, won't) drink coffee or regular tea, the pickings in Norway are really slim. Fruit teas like rosehip are too acidic for me. Most people here mistakenly think that black teas with flavoring or green teas are acceptable substitutes for someone who can't tolerate the stimulant in tea. They are not! Herbal teas are teas made from herbs rather than from tea leaves. Technically speaking, I suppose they shouldn't even be called "teas." I always know that with Celestial Seasonings I'll have a wide variety of warm drinks that I actually like, and that won't give me heart palpitations and make me super jumpy. I bought two boxes of peppermint tea in Provo.


4. Starbuck's Coffee Almond Fudge Ice Cream. How's that for specific. I think it's the only ice cream in the world that I truly like.


5. Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. I can watch this on tv here in Norway. No one can capture the absurdity of American political life like Stewart.

6. The Public Broadcasting System's Newshour, or more specifically the Friday evening news round up with Mark Shields and David Brooks. I have a perverse affection for Brooks, even though he is a conservative hawk. Although I think his view of the world is warped, I always want to know what he thinks, and much of the time I actually agree with him.

7. National Public Radio. Norsk rikskringkasting doesn't even come close. I don't think I've ever heard a truly compelling radio report here in Norway. NPR can bring me to tears.

8. For lack of a better term, "roots" music. Here I'm including bluegrass, blues, country, the narrow range of jazz that appeals to me, and "folk" artists like Woody Guthrie. I'm thinking of all the rich variety of music that has sprouted up in various contexts, often associated with poverty and social marginalization, or protest and activism.

9. Enthusiasm. You can say a lot that is negative about the stereotypically upbeat American "temperament"--that it's childish, superficial, banal, two-faced, irritating, hypocritical--but sometimes it's just such a breath of fresh air to be surrounded and lifted up by the enthusiasm and hopefulness.

10. Public drinking fountains. They're just a good idea. I miss having them around here in Norway.

Not quite sure about that last one, but it sure seemed like a good idea when I was compiling my list. I was also jet-lagged and dehydrated at the time, though.

ETA: I came up with a solution for sweater number 12 for this year's 12-sweater challenge. Rather than finishing up one of my two WIPs, I pulled out yarn purchased earlier this spring and started a totally boring (but totally wearable) tunic: