A week or so ago I received an email from a reporter for a local paper. He noted he was doing an article on bloggers in our county and wondered if I’d be willing to answer a few questions. Since my online journal isn’t something I’ve kept secret, I figured it might be fun.

Tuesday night he called to do the interview. I’m sure I came across as more than a little distracted – I’d just got home from work and was in the process of setting up food for the cats. Now that Allegra is on her special food, every time I open a new can for her, I have to give the other cats wet food as well, to distract them from the fact that she’s getting ‘the good stuff’ on her own plate on the kitchen counter. So I was on the phone with this poor guy, cats hollering as if they’ve been starved for weeks on end at my feet, trying to pay attention to what he was asking me while simultaneously keep all the other (healthy) cats off the counter and out of Allegra’s food. Still, I think it went fairly well and hopefully I managed to say a few vaguely intelligent things amid the cat food-induced excitement, and at the end he noted that he’d like to get some pictures and he’d have a photographer contact me.

They called to set that up the next morning, prompting me into a small bit of cleaning panic, since the desk where my computer lives tends to be a good place for piles of stuff to spontaneously generate. I figured there’s no point in pretending I’m anal about cleanliness, because when one lives with pets there is no such thing as pristine in one’s house. Besides, it was as good an excuse as any to do a little much-needed sorting and tossing and putting away.

The photographer came out this evening – a very nice guy with the sort of camera that thoroughly intimidates us ‘point and shoot, dummy’ types. He wanted pictures of me at my laptop, and naturally, since I was sitting at my computer desk, Allegra decided she needed to up and settle into her spot. I’ve had a folded towel next to my laptop for years now, for the cats to sit on, and also for my feet, since when I lean back and put my feet on the desk, I inevitably have at least one, if not three, cats on my lap and on my legs, and it’s nice to have a little padding under the ankles while I’m sitting there, trapped under pounds of purring fuzz. The photographer actually wanted to get a few shots of me with one or more of the cats – although Allegra was the only one willing to be cooperative – so we posed her as much as one can pose a grumpy cat while he snapped lots of pictures with his intimidating camera.

Other than that, it’s been a mostly quiet week. We’re settling into a routine for Allegra’s new diet. Richard finally succumbed to yet another bout of the winter ick that’s been making the rounds – this one has had him out of work all week and glued to his nebulizer (oh, the joy of asthma). Richard spends his evenings (and his mornings and his afternoons) coughing and sniffling and waiting for the antibiotics to kick in. I spend my evenings frantically working on the doll for my niece – a doll full of far too many tiny knitted parts, which has necessitated more than one late night of work – and occasionally tracking down Allegra and plopping her in front of her food to entice her to eat, eat, eat.

Let’s say that you are sitting in a comfy chair in your library at home, working industriously on knitting up a doll for your niece’s fifth birthday. You are using pale pink yarn because you are in the process of making the head piece.

Your perpetual kitten Azzie decides to come ‘help’ by bapping the ball of yarn onto the floor and you think “oh, how cute.” He pokes at it a few times but then it no longer seems to appeal.

And then, lets say that the phone rings and you have to set the knitting down and walk out of the room for all of about 30 seconds to answer it.

What do you suppose you might see upon returing?

Let’s check the hall outside the library first, what say.

That would be Sebastian peering around the corner, wondering just what the heck happened. Also, note the presence of the very cool lava lamp nightlight on the wall.

Now let’s poke our head into the library. What do you suppose we will find there? Could it be Azzie, looking oh-so-innocent? He has *no* idea how the yarn happened to wrap itself around the feet of that chair, and then go skittering out into the hall. Really he doesn’t.

I ask you. Would this face lie?
(this entry cross-posted to Knit One, Purr Too)

This morning I sat at home with tiny knitting needles and worked furiously on the first section of the topsy turvy doll I am hoping to have finished in time to mail up to Seattle for my niece’s birthday, and Richard headed for the computer room to scan through the huge stack of Lord of the Ring DVD’s, looking for the scene’s we’ll be using for tomorrow’s Sunday School class. My dad called to find out if I’d mind if the recorder group played the prelude, which also reminded me that I am the accompanist tomorrow (ack – guess who hasn’t practiced a bit!), so I dashed downstairs to my piano at that point and discovered that the price for my forgetfulness was one hymn with five sharps and one with six flats, plus one that would have been a bear to play even without all the added accidentals. If Richard is not sick of hearing that hymn played over and over and over this afternoon and evening, he’s got far more tolerance than I.

We drove down to Campbell to meet Richard’s parents for the annual Robert Burns dinner – or the annual endurance test called eating haggis. I dutifully ate a small piece, since I figure there are far worse things I’ve had to eat, and while I am never going to become the slightest bit fond of the stuff, the whole point of the Robert Burns’ dinner is the haggis so I might as well. It’s only once a year, after all.

The dinner had the usual mix of entertainment and confusion. There were songs based on Burns’ poems, the Ode to the Haggis, the parade of the mottled gray orc embryo….I mean, the parade of the haggis, dancing, and so on. We didn’t stick around for as much as last time, however, since Richard was starting to get a little wheezy. So after the Immortal Memory was given (a long, dry speech given in a monotone, making it certainly seem immortal, since we were all convinced it would never actually end) Richard and I quietly slipped out and headed home.

Over the last few days I’ve noticed that Allegra has started to feel really old. Mainly it’s due to the fact that she feels as if she’s lost weight, to the point where underneath that thick pelt of fur there is nothing but bones jutting through. She’s acted as if she still has the same amount of energy as before, and the lump on her chin hasn’t gotten any bigger as far as I can tell, but there was something definitely up. Plus it’s been about four months since her initial diagnosis of bone cancer, back in October, and I decided it was time for a follow-up visit, just to see how things were going.

The good news, confirmed by the vet, is that the lump has not, in fact, gotten any larger. There was still a small possibility that it wasn’t cancer at all, even when the radiologist confirmed it as such, but short of doing more invasive procedures there was no way to be 100% sure. Back then, faced with a fairly short life span remaining I decided it just wasn’t worth it to put her through anything traumatic.

Back then she also showed elevated kidney indices in her blood tests, suggesting she’s showing signs of kidney disease. But since we expected that the cancer would be the thing to do her in, and since she’s been notoriously snitty about any sort of cooperation for health-related poking and prodding, we decided we wouldn’t worry about that either.

Now, however, that things seem to have stabilized on the cancer front (if it is, indeed, cancer), we realized it was time to deal with the other issues, like figuring out some way to somehow switch her to a completely separate food than all the other cats, without adversely affecting any of the felines in the household. It didn’t work very well when we’d attempted to do it for Rebecca last year so I wasn’t exactly hopeful it would work much better for Allegra.

Ha. I should know by now to never predict what a cat will do. Luckily Allegra loves her new food (probably because it’s canned food and all cats seem to vastly prefer the canned to the dry). She loves it to the point that she will come downstairs and stand in the kitchen and holler indignantly until one of us gets it out for her so she can nibble a few more bites and hop back down off the counter to go off somewhere for a few hours before she repeats the process all over again.

So…I guess we’ll see how it goes. It could still be cancer in her jaw. There could be other issues we haven’t even touched yet. But at least we seem to have the kidney disease issue mostly in hand at this point.

Today is Martin Luther King’s birthday. Unlike most everyone I know, I did not have the day off. The roads were practically deserted when I drove to work this morning – no traffic at all, not even coming up on the causeway, where there is usually a slowing because apparently people get confused by the prospect of going up a gentle hill.

I was listening to NPR, as I usually do on the way to and from work, and they had a short segment where they had members of the Boys Choir and the Girls Choir of Harlem reading Dr. King’s famous speech. I’ve heard snippets of King giving the speech, of course, and have read excerpts here and there. But I’m ashamed to say that I have never actually *heard* the entire speech all the way through.

By the time I reached work I was nearly in tears. The power and the beauty of those words ring just as deep and powerful as they did when they were first uttered aloud by Dr. King himself.

My older sister teaches second grade, so they have today off from school. But she said that on Friday she was talking to her students about who Dr. King was, and what he stood for. When she got to discussing segregation, her students were appalled. It wasn’t just that it was a horrible thing – it was that they could not even believe that such conditions could have ever existed. No way, they kept insisting. Surely she had to be making it all up, right?

They are young yet – only in second grade. And they have the benefit of attending a school where there are children from many races and cultures, in a place in this country where liberal values are far stronger in our society than the old school ideas of the South – sexism, racism, and elitism. And they are too young yet to have experienced the more subtle forms of discrimination, or if not too young to have experienced them, too young to really grasp what it all meant. They are used to thinking of their fellow classmates as just other little kids – nothing more and nothing less.

I wonder, listening to that speech this morning, read by children older than my sister’s second graders, how many of them would have such a hard time envisioning a time when segregation and discrimination was the norm. I wondered whether Dr. King would have been proud of the progress we have made so far, or disappointed at the overwhelming work that still has to be done.

We all have our own prejudices, based on culture, gender, age, race, and color of skin. What we do with those prejudices, however, is our own choice. Do we act on them and refuse to look any further than our own self-imposed blinders? Or do we overcome them, and try our hardest to treat every person as an individual, looking for their character and their values instead of at their physical appearance.

What a wonderful world it would be if every child could be just as appalled as those little second graders were – that anyone could dare to think that someone was less of a person because of where they were born or the color of their skin; that someone deserves hatred and scorn because of where they come from or who they love. We have come so far since Dr. King first made that speech. But we still have so much further to go.

My mom’s birthday was on Friday, but we could not assemble the family until this afternoon. Yesterday, in between checking out the knitting machine and going to the play, I baked a cake, and this morning, before heading off to church bright and early to practice with the recorder ensemble, I frosted it. Mom prefers white cake with white frosting and coconut – something which the entire rest of her family (all three of her sons-in-law being notable exceptions) despises. So I made a Bundt cake and put coconut only on parts of it, figuring this way it was still decorated like she wanted, but there were enough uncontaminated parts that the rest of us would still be willing to eat it.

My older sister and her husband and the two boys drove down from Napa after church, and after meeting and conferring (and a little oohing and aahing over my parents’ shiny new Prius) we all headed off to lunch, and then from there back to my parents’ house for cake and ice cream and presents. I made her a knitted hooded scarf (pictures can be seen here).

After the birthday festivities were over my dad and the oldest nephew, who is six, headed across the street to the elementary school playground to ride bikes. The little guy was thrilled because he’d finally decided it was okay to remove the training wheels, and he knew his Grandpa liked riding bikes, so they brought their bikes (or in the younger one’s case, their tricycles) with them to go riding. The rest of us made our way over just to watch, and to take bets on how old the youngest nephew will be when he finally gets his first concussion. This child barrels through life without looking first, laughing the entire time. Luckily there’s only so fast you can go on a tricycle, no matter how furiously you pedal. I say luckily because the younger one would get going as fast as his little legs could go, but he wouldn’t pay any attention at all to where he was going. He missed running into the same wall by mere inches more than once, and came within a hair’s width of tumbling head over wheels through the fence along a ramp by one of the classrooms. My sister would holler out ‘Look where you’re going!’ but my little nephew is King of the Oblivious and would just keep on watching anything but forward. It was hysterical.

The older one tends to be a little more serious, now that he is a big boy in first grade – this is the one that’s been known to do math problems just for fun. While he was riding around, my dad pedaled slowly by him, and dinged his bell. My nephew noted that he didn’t have a bell, and since he was right near us I replied that he’s got a birthday coming up this summer and maybe we could get him one as a birthday present.

He got a thoughtful look on his face at that. “Oh. Well. I don’t know. If I invite you, that is.”

He’s too young yet to realize quite how that came out – in his six-year-old brain, presents come from people who come to your party, and it’s entirely appropriate that he’d much rather have his little friends come over to his birthday party than his boring old adult aunts and uncles. But Richard and I just cracked up, and immediately had to share his response with both his parents. It became the afternoon’s most repeated phrase. “Well. If I invite you, that is.” In about ten years we’ll be gleefully dragging out this sort of story whenever he’s being particularly snotty to his parents, just for the embarrassment factor. Little kids are so much fun.

Since we had so much fun last weekend getting together and doing yarn related things, our little band of intrepid knitters got together again this afternoon. This time it was so the mom/daughter duo could demo to the rest of us the glory that is the knitting machine.

I have to admit that I was not entirely sure what to expect. When I hear the word ‘machine’ I think of something into which one feeds yarn, then presses a button and poof, out comes a sweater. And somehow that seems remarkably like cheating. But these things look nothing at all like I imagined. Over the course of about an hour I learned how to do all sorts of nifty things on one of the contraptions and I think I am now sorely tempted. They are pretty handy little devices, and I could certainly see how they could be useful, but I think I need to ponder whether or not I actually *need* one.

Things have been a little tense in our family because with Oracle’s recent hostile takeover of Peoplesoft, all the Peoplesoft employees were told they’d get a registered letter sometime this week letting them know if they still had a job. My dad is one of a number of people I’ve been very worried about, so it was nothing short of a relief when he called this morning to tell me that he, at least, is safe. Of course, that’s no consolation to the over 5000 people whose letter arrived with unhappier news, but at least everyone I was worried about is safe. For now.

My parents had been a little concerned about the job thing as well, beyond just the initial worry, because apparently they received word their new car had arrived earlier this week, and they didn’t think getting a new car would be a good idea when my dad might be losing his job. Luckily the dealer was willing to wait a few days, and so we all headed off to the latest DMTC play last night in their brand new silver Prius. Yay – it’s becoming a family thing!

Theirs is silver, while ours is blue, and theirs is a 2005 while ours is a 2004. But otherwise the interior looks pretty much the same. I could see my mom being just as confused as I was when I first got mine, since putting the thing into drive, parking it, and turning it on and off are a lot different than what we’d been used to. Next up – to convince both sisters that they should get one too (or if not a Prius, at least one of the newer hybrids).

I have to admit that we’ve tended to be a little hesitant with each offering over the past year from DMTC, since the quality has been rather unpredictable. But tonight was a reminder that they can actually do pretty good work. They put on Evita, which can be difficult if you don’t have good singers. But the guy they had as Che and the woman they had as Eva Perone were full of energy and talent. So with the knitting fun, and the fact that my dad and all my friends still have their job, and the nifty new car, and the after-play pie, it was a very good day.

********

Oh, by the way, today is my Journalversary. I’ve been doing this exactly five years. Wow!

It being a brand new year, tonight was the kick-off meeting for all the councils for the church. Even though I’ve attended this several times in the past, this year I got to attend in a very different role. I am no longer the secretary of the Administrative Council – no, this year I am now the chair of the Board of Trustees, which is the group in the church responsible for the physical needs of the building – painting, repairs, landscaping, that sort of thing. When they asked me if I’d be interested, the woman doing the asking noted that they knew they could count on me to push to get things done. And this is certainly true – if something *must* be done I can side-step those pesky procrastinating tendencies and get it finished, dragging people along with me kicking and screaming if necessary. It’s all those things that *should* be done, but aren’t as important, or have no end date, that I have a problem with.

One of the other members of our 20’s and 30’s group is also on the board with me, and when it came time to figure out who was going to be the vice chair, since no one else wanted to do it, she volunteered. Each of the new councils sat around the table and came up with a quick list of projects that we wanted to focus our attention on in the first part of the year. And then we all came back together to give an overview of those lists and to tell everyone else who the officers in each group would be. When she and I identified ourselves as chair and vice-chair, both our moms, who were attending as members of a different council group, took one look at each other, raised their hands, and to much laughter of everyone else, objected. Seems that the perception of people on the Board of Trustees is older people, and neither of them felt old enough to have children who are now heading that sort of group. Heh. Admittedly I’m not sure either my friend or I feel quite old enough to be heading a committee of this nature either, but such is the price we pay for becoming responsible adults (shh, I’m still trying to fool myself that I’m not quite old enough for that either!).

Of course, by volunteering to be involved in this committee, while I no longer am responsible for typing up minutes, this does mean I’ve signed myself up for few years of workday Saturdays spent at the church doing little repairs and such around the building. I am telling myself it will be good for me.

Addendum: Richard, upon reading my entry from yesterday, wryly remarked that it does not read as if written by an agnostic. It made me laugh, since I can see his point. But I guess *my* point is that I can still be excited by being involved in this project; energized by the enthusiasm around me, and looking forward to participating, even though I may not necessarily share their same beliefs. My section focuses on service – something that I find important, and something that I know I can write well about. One can still be agnostic and believe in that.

A month or two ago my mom made an offhand comment that the Disciple Board was looking for people to help write some new curriculum. Since I actually enjoy writing, I noted that I’d be interested in getting involved. I didn’t think much of it until late December, when I got an email from my mom, with the subject line ‘Careful what you wish for’. Turns out that the board was thrilled to have a layperson actually volunteer to take part, so even though I’ve absolutely no curriculum writing experience at all, somehow they decided to include me anyway.

The kick-off workshop was the past two days. All of us writers drove (or flew) in to Sacramento and met at the conference offices. It was more than a little unnerving to be sitting in this room, surrounded by mostly clergy – and not just regular clergy, but clergy with multiple publications under their belt. There I was, just a little layperson, and while I’ve done a pile of writing in my day, somehow technical manuals, white papers, and magazine articles aren’t quite the same.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, and it did take them a while to get around to what they were looking for. But by the end of the sessions yesterday evening I knew what I was supposed to do, and I could see I wasn’t the only one itching to go back to the hotel and get started.

They put us all up in a hotel for the night, figuring that having a place with no distractions would help us get the ball rolling, and they were, of course, right. I stayed up pretty late last night scribbling madly, trying to get a sense of how to put all my ideas into a six-day structure. I’d been worried I’d have nothing at all, but it turns out I managed to churn out pages of notes. Not, mind you, that most of those will be useful for the final product, but at least I felt as if I’d managed to come up with something cohesive.

Today you could almost feel the energy in the room. We all went around the table and talked about what we’d come up with. The guy who tends to focus on the more academic was assigned the week which focuses on the brain of Christ, and even though we all agreed he was probably giving the students far too much to do each day, we also all decided we wanted to take that week’s class right then. The woman who seemed to wear her heart on her sleeve (and I don’t mean that to be mean, but rather to note that she was so very full of life and love and energy) was assigned the week focusing on the heart of Christ and the subjects she came up with took our breath away. I went through my notes, and the room was full of positive feedback and suggestions.

We’ve all headed home now, with several weeks to finish up the project. Ultimately this will become a six-week class for adults, planned for introduction at this year’s Annual Conference. I am still more than a little overwhelmed by being surrounded by all those amazing people for the last two days, and feeling more than a little undeserving to be in the same project with them. But I’m excited about my topic – since it’s rather near and dear to my heart. I know that my part, of all of them, will need far more feedback and help, since I don’t have the theological training and background the rest of them have. But that’s okay. It was an amazing experience and maybe, if this actually works out, one of these days I’ll get to do it again.

Friday night was the usual craft night. I brought along a bag of yarn and spent the evening starting and ripping out the same baby blanket over and over. I finally settled on a pattern that seems to work with the yarn (which, by virtue of its mohair content, has a wispy quality that creates the occasional knitting issue), which means that the evening might be considered not very productive, except that I am going to call this my version of swatching and thus useful after all.

Last month at craft night one of the other women mentioned a really nice yarn store in Walnut Creek, and somehow or other we all decided we ought to do a field trip. We did that today, meeting at the craft night hostess’ house, and piling into one car to begin our journey. It was just four of us – me, my knitting-enabler friend, and a mother and daughter team who are funny and smart and who have been a recent and wonderful addition to our craft night gatherings.

The yarn store is tucked away in a tiny strip mall across the street from the Kaiser hospital, right next door to a quilting shop, and it doesn’t seem like much at first glance. But then you open the door and walk in and you are surrounded by a selection of yarns that would make even the strongest get a little dizzy. We wandered the aisles, reverently touching skeins of this yarn and that yarn, swooning over the colors and the styles and the textures. We were not the only women in there experiencing this place for the first time. I had come with projects in mind, and with a short list of yarns to track down, since I knew I’d be tempted to buy, and figured I might as well buy something I needed. So I poured over various wool and cotton blends and compared yardages and weights to what I needed, and I must admit that I did succumb to the lure of a silky soft selection that I do not need in the slightest.

It was while I was digging through the colors of the yarn that I did not need (but ended up buying anyway because I simply could not resist) that the day’s excitement happened. Turns out the daughter of the mother-daughter trio ended up chatting with the manager, and to make a long story short, we were given permission to fill up a sack with an assortment of yarn, to take home and swatch for the store, for free. Free!

We were like kids in a candy shop. She and I skittered around the aisles, picking up and discarding skein after skein, looking for things that had not already been swatched (for those of you non-yarn addicts, since many of the yarns have unusual color combinations or textures, having a swatch already knitting next to the yarn display lets the buyer get a sense of not only what it might look like when knit, but also what it will feel like, since it’s often impossible to tell that just from picking up the skein). We ended up with a dozen skeins, and probably could have taken more but we were still half convinced that this was all somehow a joke and she’d make us put it all back. Free yarn! We were going to get to play with yarns that were new to us, to see how they worked, how they felt, whether we would ever want to justify the expense of getting enough to make a real project later! It was a knitter’s dream.

We were pretty much giddy the rest of the day. We left the shop carrying bags of new fiber goodies and headed immediately for the California Pizza Kitchen for lunch. Once there, we could not stop talking about that wonderful bag of yarn just waiting for us in the car. We ate our pizza and talked about knitting and yarn and other yarn stores, and more about knitting, and had a wonderful time.

Back at the starting house we piled all the free stuff onto the table and then divvied it up between the four of us. We’re meeting again next week (they’re going to demo knitting machines for us) and our goal is to for each of us to have our swatches completed by then. There is also talk of another lovely knitting store in Benicia, located quite conveniently next to a tea shop. I sense more field trips in our future. And if all goes as we are hoping, the owner of the shop in Walnut Creek will like our swatching so much she’ll let us do it again. Yum!