Eight days in an egg

Going…

going…

gone!

I closed off the egg more than a week ago, and I’m sorry it took me so long to post these – turned into kind of an exciting week, in a friend-of-mine-was-deathly-ill-in-the-hospital kind of way.  (She’s recovering.)

So yeah, the next time I got in the egg I was in there for about three, three and a half hours, and I cast off.  That part was hard – trying to knit just over my head, in a very small circle, and turn round and round without losing stitches… or my place… Probably would have helped if I hadn’t somehow wound up with only a black yarn left on the needles!  I can knit backwards, if not very well, but I wasn’t able to figure out how to knit backwards and upside down.  I couldn’t even figure out if that would actually help.  So I just turned around a lot, and listened to the people outside giggling as elbows and knees poked out various places inside the egg.

Tracy took some pictures of the closed egg before I came out.  She had me “pose” inside, so I am thinking of them as the Amazing Dancing Amoeba Pictures.

Then I steeked a little hole in the back and climbed out, which was neither graceful nor, as it turns out, quite as secretive as I had intended, since to my surprise there were two video cameras and three still cameras pointed at me  Tracy’s son Edward was there – he’d been talking to me when I was inside the egg, and his mom took his picture sitting with me.  I think he was a little disappointed that I didn’t have wings when I came out.  I ran around outside the gallery flapping my coat tails for a while, to make him feel better.

 

Seven days in an egg

It is definitely getting harder to climb into the egg. Between the web of attached strands, which makes perfect sense when one is in the egg, but is rather a complicated tangle when one is not, and the ever-narrowing tube I’ve got to stuff myself through, it’s a bit of a trick.

The egg is knit in the round, and the majority of it has been knit on three circular needles, so I’ve got three rounds spiraling up over each other at all times. This was partly so that the knitting could expand fully over the needles – I definitely could not just wrap one circular needle around myself and still work – and partly so that it would be easy to keep track of increases and decreases – one needle does all the fancy stuff, and the other two just knit.

I started from four stitches and increased until I had a mat I could sit on, and from that point I’ve been knitting stockinette in circles around myself. For the first four days I had to turn around a lot, and kind of wished that I had a big lazy susan in there to sit on so I could just spin around. Once the egg walls got high enough, though, I was able to stay in place and just sort of tug the fabric round a bit and knit over each shoulder. This was faster, but meant that I was kneeling in one position for a long long long time, so each method has its disadvantages!

I am now at the point where I will be removing one of the three needles, because I’ve decreased so much they are just flopping around all over the place. I am probably also back to turning around in circles, because as of last night I am pretty much knitting right up in front of my face, and pulling the fabric around is going to get awkward. In fact this whole last stage is going to be a bit awkward, since what comes after “knitting in front of my face” is “knitting on top of my head”. I expect to be closing the egg on Tuesday afternoon, and I will quite possibly be attending Mark Reinhardt’s yoga class on tuesday evening, because assuming I can still move at all, I will probably need it!

As far as closing the egg goes, I am decreasing back to the original four stitches and casting off. This thing really is as egg-shaped as I can make it, given that I am sitting inside it and may not actually have the best perspective on the whole thing. But it is roundish, and wide at the bottom and tapered at the top and warm and cosy and soft inside, so it sounds pretty much egg-like from here.

Last night was the winter ARTcrawl, which was heaps of fun. Peter Moffat got some good pictures of me in the egg, as did Sonya and a few random pedestrians, so I will post more pics as soon as I have them. I have been taking pictures too, but since I have to be out of the egg to take pictures OF the egg, they don’t look like much. This makes me realize though, that I should bring the camera in with me on Tuesday and take some pictures inside it, just for yucks.  (YUCKS, not YOLKS.  Really, people. Control yourselves.)  There’s quite a bit of room in there though.  I mean, not like, living space, but I can definitely move around in there.

If you are in the Chatham area and weren’t at the ARTcrawl last night, you should go check out Laura Moore’s exhibit at the Thames Art Gallery. It will make you want to hug an acorn.  It is good thinky-stuff too, but really I wanted to fondle it.  Which fortunately Laura is entirely ok with.

 

Five days in an egg

The egg, day four.

The Cocooning project is going very well.  I’m making at least four inches a day, and I’ve got lots and lots of strands attached to the egg now. Navigating the window has become awkward.  I am constantly worried that I will forget to bring scissors in with me on the last day, and will be unable to get out.

I’m knitting with three circular needles, one strand for each, so the rounds are spiraling over each other.  Knitting the bit as each needle runs behind me is a bit of a crunch, as it is slow and annoying to have to turn around all the time, but the egg walls are high enough now that I can just sort of lean and knit over my own shoulder.

The yarns I’m using are all either recycled or leftover yarns from finished projects, some mine, some donated by other knitters.  I love that people gave me old yarn, it just helps to point up the interdependency of the whole craft thing.

The response so far has been very encouraging, and I’m even going to get to be in a book!  But, I don’t know what I’m allowed to say about that yet, so I will give you more details later.  It’s very cool, though.  You’ll like it.

 

Nothing happening

I got nothin’ today, so I will tell puppy stories.  Friday’s vet trip was canceled due to a flat tire on The Wreck, so we went today.  Hera weighs 31.6 lbs.  By the time she goes for her final set of shots, she will be bigger than Bryan was – and less than four months old.  Go, Hera!  The vet says she’s in great shape and has very strong legs – no surprise to me, who watches her gallop around trying to keep up with Ulster all day!  She can pace him as long as he maintains a steady lope, but if he actually breaks into a run she can only sit and watch the dust cloud.

31 lbs puts her neatly in between her litter-brother Diesel, who weighs in at 34 lbs, and her dainty sister Kitty, who is a delicate 27 lbs.  Diesel and Kitty live with Stalkermom and The Ed, and are actually the reason we have Hera at all.  Their dog Charlie had to be put to sleep, quite unexpectedly, last fall because he had cancer.  Charlie was an awesome dog, and everybody was of course shocked and upset, and feeling a St Bernard sized hole in their lives – which is a pretty big hole as you can imagine!  With only Rexie, Barney-the-yorkie and Hannah the Newfie running around their yard, things must have seemed too quiet… no wait, with Hannah barking things are never too quiet.  Maybe they were just confused by occasionally being able to cross a room without tripping over a dog.  Anyway, they went looking for a St Bernard.  And, they found Diesel.  Except that while they were finding Diesel, Kitty found them… she is a big-time flirt, and basically indicated that if they were looking for a puppy they couldn’t possibly do better than her, and anyway she wasn’t going to climb down off CK’s*  lap any time soon, so they might as well just admit she was wonderful and let her in the car.  So being sensible people, CK and The Ed adopted Diesel and Kitty.  To be fair, they left, discussed the matter – and called from the next Tim Horton’s they passed to say they’d take Kitty as well.

This is where I come in to the story.  The puppies were too young to leave their mother when they were first seen, so about  a week before The Ed and CK were allowed to bring their pups home, they went back for a visit, and brought me along.  Hera stood out because she was oddly marked – she has a lot of white – and also she was an independent little cuss, didn’t have a lot of patience for snuggles and flattery.  She was the only one not yet adopted.  She also had a small disfigurement in her personal puppy-area which the vet had said would probably right itself with time (and is doing so) but which combined with her personality probably didn’t make her all that attractive to potential puppy-parents.  Also she was the largest female in the litter.

Sure enough, when we went back to pick up Diesel and Kitty, Hera was still not spoken for. And so, after some embarrassing and completely ridiculous debate (because not nearly as much debate as you would think there ought to be in a situation like this) my mom bought Hera for me.  I’m pretty sure even the breeders thought we were crazy.

Hera’s size and independent streak are working out just fine for her at my place.  She’s  able to stand up to Ulster’s rough play, and she’s just affectionate enough to hide behind me when he gets a bit scary.  (Happening less and less often as she grows!)  She loves pets and cuddles, but not when she is trying to go to sleep.  She goes to sleep and wakes up rather like I do – slowly – so there are amusing periods of groggy puppy on either side of nap times.  She is fascinated by chickens, and her only real problem right now, which I imagine time and growth will correct, is that sheep are the most terrifying creatures on earth.  I suspect she has actually had nightmares about sheep-attacks.  She is also very interested in the cat, but after a few days of “you did what?!” Velcro discovered that it is fun to play mind-games with the dog, and enjoys teasing her, so that keeps everybody occupied.

Seems to me that after all this time there has got to be some more fibre stuff kicking around that I can show you.  I’ll have a dig through pics and see what I can come up with for next time!

*For those of you coming in late – Stalkermom/CK = same person, my mother.  She admitted last year to stalker-like tendencies, so I figure I can use the niknames interchangeably.  Hi, Mom!

 

Beginnings and Endings

Here’s day two of the egg:

Photo by Diana Martin, Chatham Daily News

Hera and I actually made the front page with this yesterday… presumably it was a slow week. We were at least below the fold, under Haiti!

And as an example of how things have been going this year – Blackie passed away yesterday afternoon. That’s what it’s been like. Kinda good thing, really really sucky thing. My karma is totally tipsy.

Blackie wasn’t a surprise, though. She’s been failing, and when I went out yesterday morning I was pretty sure we’d come to the end. So we had some cuddles, and I told her again what a beautiful perfect sheep she was. She died peacefully. And I dealt with the things that had to be done and then ran and hid in a shop window and knitted another four inches of egg. It is up above knee level now, and I am feeling pretty good about how it is going.

Also, I finished a sweater. Local artist Hank Bos is responsible for this, or at least that is what I am claiming.  See, there is this piece I’ve got in my head about wind farms, and Hank was encouraging me to get working on it.  I am not ready though, because wind farms make me angry (an immense oversimplification) and I don’t want the piece to be angry.  Or at least, not aggressively so.  So I had kind of pushed it to the back burner and stopped thinking about it.  Hank is a very encouraging sort of person though, and talking to him got me thinking about it again and trying to figure out how to tone down the anger or anyway channel it usefully.  And I decided that if I could work through some of my hostility on another project, maybe I could kind of get it out of my system and look at the idea with a clearer head.

So I made a sweater:

I think it worked.  I feel better now.  Also, I have a new warm sweater.

Here’s one final picture for the puppy fans:

See?  Bigger.  Eleven weeks.  Don’t they look sweet?  That’s because they are sleeping, unlike this very moment when they are thrashing around on the floor wrestling.  Actually they’re cute then too, just more dangerous.  And last night, Hera had her first big St Bernard drool!  Raven tried to take a picture, but it didn’t show up very well.  Baby’s first slobber, we’ll have to put it in the scrapbook.

 

Wow, that sucked.

By which I mean, the last year. I was VERY relieved to see that the giant wolf did not eat the world this past solstice, since if it was ever gonna happen, I would have thought this would be the year. It would just figure.

Fortunately, by the time solstice rolled around the bad things that were continuing to happen had started to be the sort of things that are funny when you talk about them later, which was a definite improvement, believe me!

Oh, there was some good stuff. Louie the Squirrel grew up and met a girl-squirrel and started a family. There were a few amusing weeks where he lived outside, but would break into the house and steal nuts from his dish whenever he was hungry – nothing like taking a nap on the couch and being startled awake by a squirrel landing on your face!

After Bryan and Gallahad died we started losing chickens to predators – coons and foxes, and the 3pm schoolbus were the major offenders. So we decided that we had to get another dog.

This is Ulster. He is a Big Brown Dog. (We’ve told him that’s a compliment.) People say that raising a Chocolate Lab is like raising an ADHD child. Actually, although I don’t know much about it, I think it is more like raising a mildly autistic child. Ulster is very, very focused on [whatever it is he's interested in], to the exclusion of all else. It isn’t that he doesn’t listen – he doesn’t even hear. So training him is being, let us say, a challenge.

Fortunately, he kicks arse at his most very favorite activity, Playing Fetch. So whenever I’m frustrated and can’t find anything to praise him for, I can just go toss something across the yard and bingo – good puppy. Anyway, he’s only just coming up on his first birthday, he really is still a puppy. He’ll calm right down in ten years or so.

Thing about Ulster is, he is a Dog. A dog’s dog. Doggie doggie dog. He likes fetch, he likes going for long walks gallops in the fields, but what he likes best of all is playing with other dogs. He tries to play with the sheep, but they don’t like it. It doesn’t matter how many toys he brings Freyja, all she does is butt him and run away. We bring him over to The Ed’s to play with their ever-growing menagerie of pups, which is great because everybody sleeps well after, but he has no one to play with at home.

So, Ulster got a puppy for Christmas.

This is Hera.  She is a St. Bernard, about seven weeks old in this picture.  Ulster loves his baby sister.  He was so excited when we brought her home, and he plays with her very well.  She chews on his face.  She’s eleven weeks now, and going in for her second set of shots this morning, so I’ll find out what she weighs.  A LOT, is my guess.

Hera is going to be a cultured puppy.  She has been to the theatre, when I went to get measurements for a Moliere double-bill I’m starting to costume, and she is helping me with an installation I’m doing at ARTspace.  I am knitting myself into an egg.  There is a story about it here.*  So as you can see I am still actually hiding, I’m just now doing it in a very public venue.  I choose to consider this a step forward.

*There are no pictures yet, as I just started working on Tuesday.  Sonya at the gallery is taking pictures every day of the progress, and the Chatham Daily News took some pictures too, so I will be able to post some eventually.  The pic with the article is Velcro hiding in a sweater – which, appropriately enough, is now being unravelled to become part of the egg.  The sweater, not the cat.  Obviously.

 

Some of Where the Heck I’ve been

Only the most utterly recent bit, actually, but the pictures are cute.

Meet Louie:

He’s about 8 weeks old. Don’t know what happened to his mother, he was found in Windsor, desperately and unmistakably looking for someone to take care of him. He was dehydrated and starving when we took him in, but he’s recovered now, growing lots of long grey guard hairs, and there’s no reason he can’t be released to live a happy, normal squirrely life once he’s old enough.

Except for the part where his best friend is a cat, yes.  Right now they are rolling around together on the floor – Velcro outside Louie’s cage and Louie inside, but still – nose to nose and paw to paw.  And just my luck, the camera is down on the front porch.  But, Velcro looked after the bunnies too, and that didn’t seem to do anybody any harm.  I’m sure it’ll be fine.  Anyway, it’s the chickens he’ll need to watch out for!

Speaking of chickens, we had seven hatch on Mother’s Day.  MommaHen is doing a great job, although I think she’ll be cutting out as soon as they’re old enough, rather than hanging around as some do, just so she can get some sleep!

I love that picture.  I think it should inspire a movie about the Chickie Gang.  I’m thinking something like The Dubliners, only with five yellow chicks, one black chick and an egg.

I did rip back the sweater, BTW.  You’re a tough crowd.  It’s knitted back a bit past where I was when I frogged it, seems to be going ok.  It’s going slow, but so is everything else I’m working on.  It is spring.  You may recall from last year that “spring” does not involve a lot of sitting on the deck sipping lemonade.  We’re even building fences again; we have some new pasture for the woolly darlings.

And here’s the sweater that I’ve been meaning to show you since last time:

I love this sweater.  It is Ysolda Teague’s Vivian.  It may or may not be the best sweater in the world, but it is by far the best sweater in my closet.  The shaping is flattering without being too extreme, the cables are great, the fit on the sleeves is great, I love this sweater.  I may actually knit it again so I can have two, is that weird?  With so much knitting to be done in the world… ok, maybe, maybe not.  But I still totally recommend this pattern.  If you’re on Ravelry, you can look it up and you will see that it continues to be flattering on a wide range of figures, too.

 

It’s not exactly denial

So I am knitting this sweater:

And leaving aside the really embarassing amount of time I have spent worrying about whether it has “too much colour” for me to wear, it is going pretty well, and I am happy with it.

Except, I am knitting it one size too large. I thought I might be knitting it one size too large, and now that I am well into shaping the waist (it has shaping, or this probably wouldn’t matter at all) it is very very clear that I was right. It is a bit big. It still doesn’t really look big to me, but careful and repeated cross checking of all the measurements involved shows that look big or not, there is “a bit of ease” and then there is “too darned big”.

Where the part that is like denial comes in is not my inability to see the actual size of the sweater, but my total obliviousness to what I actually am shaped like. I know what my measurements are – I make clothes for myself, I take my measurements regularly. I just don’t seem to be able to translate those numbers into an even slightly accurate notion of how much space I take up in the world. My vision of myself seems to be a sort of an amorphous blob that, like a hamster, can squish itself through and into relatively small spaces, but sort of bubbles out again on the other side. I’m not sure that I have any clear idea of the boundary between “myself” and “other stuff”. (Come to think of it, this may explain why I bump into things so often!)

Hang on – let me take stock of my self-image a moment. I am kind of short, I have big eyes, an indistinct hamster-y sort of body, and a tendency to overcommit myself. Holy mother of purl, I think I am a shmoo!

Anyway. The appropriate thing to do at this point (about the sweater, I mean) would be to say some bad words, frog it and start knitting the right size. I don’t want to do that, but I know it is the right thing to do.

Problem is, I am not following a pattern, I am writing one. And it’s going really well: I like the proportions, the math is checking out, I’m happier with it so far than anything I’ve yet knitted “all by myself” as it were. I’m afraid if I go back to square one at this point, I will jinx it. So what I would prefer is to keep going, finish the sweater in this size, make sure it all works, and then worry about the math adjustments for other sizes, which I was going to have to do anyway.

And regardless of whether it fits me or not, the size I am knitting is pretty well in the middle range of “the sizes people tend to be”, so it seems like working out the shaping in that size is a good idea, it will be much easier to make accurate adjustments up and down from the middle than trying to make a big shapely sweater fit little people, or a sweater made for the broomstick folk fit nicely on the curvy types. So it ALSO seems like the reasonable thing to do is to keep going.

And yet. The longer I keep going, the less likely it is that I am ever going to knit this thing in my size, at least in the forseeable future.

Do I finish it, only to rip it back? Do I rip it back now, and risk screwing up my pattern? Do I finish it, grab my lantern and go wandering the earth searching for someone one size larger than I am who might like this sweater? Is there a chance that I would knit the sweater again in my size if I used different yarn the second time?

Maybe I could just eat a lot of pasta?

 

Vanishing Cows

Ok, let’s lighten things up a bit here.  The sheep are still all ok, Momma Hen is seriously considering moving out of the house and resuming normal life as a Hen, the weather is warming up, and Vellum has discovered a few shoots of green stuff that actually seem to be attached to the ground somehow! They’re really tasty – he keeps getting this goofy, dreamy look on his face as if to say “Wow, can you imagine if this stuff was everywhere? That would be sooo cool… I could just walk around and eat whenever I wanted!”

In short, although I don’t want to speak too quickly, I think we are getting on top of this “March” thing.  Speaking of which, I fixed my calendar:

So.  The other night, (I don’t know what night, it’s all a blur – maybe a week ago Sunday?) at about 2:30 AM, Raven, who keeps later hours than I do, was going to the bathroom before bed.  Our bathroom window faces the driveway on the side of the house.  Glancing out the window he saw, in the bright moonlight, a large animal walking up the drive towards the yard.

His confused thoughts were, quickly: a)The sheep are out; b) Why would the sheep be heading back into the yard; c) That is not a sheep; d) That is a cow.  Just as he was getting to “There is a cow in the driveway”, a rather large bull came trotting along, following the cow.

Raven ran up the stairs to wake me, and I who for some not very good reason wasn’t asleep yet quickly threw on a sweater and ran outside with him to (I don’t actually know what) do something about the cows.

There were no cows.

Now, our property isn’t that big, and cattle – well – are.  It took me maybe three minutes to get down the stairs and outside, and it did not seem reasonable to either of us that in that time two cows had simply vanished.  But there continued to be no cows.  We checked in the yard.  We looked up and down the road, we scanned the surrounding fields.  (Not a lot of trees around here, and did I mention the moonlight?)

The cows continued to not be there.

At this point I might have begun to question Raven’s arguably questionable sanity, except that in the light of the flashlight I found:

cow tracks.  Very large, very fresh, very clear in my muddy spring driveway, cow tracks.  They came up the drive, they appeared (although it was dark and quite muddy) to go down the drive… and they vanished.  Rather like the cows.

Eventually, we got to sleep.  The next morning in sunlight, I could see with utter clarity that two cows had come along the (dirt) road past my mailbox, turned up the drive, grabbed some hay from the bale at the back of said drive, turned around, proceeded back to the road… and vanished.

Later that morning, a pickup came by.  They were moving very slowly, clearly looking for something.  “Have you, um, lost some cows?”  I asked.  “Why yes we have!”  So I told them what little I knew of their cows moonlight adventures.  They examined the tracks.  The one fellow in the truck was along specifically because he is a good tracker.  He agreed, unfortunately, with what I had already determined – the tracks stopped at the foot of our drive.

All day they looked for their cows.  More and more people got involved.  Every now and then a car would speed past, presumably following some lead, and then slowly crawl back, passengers hopelessly scanning fields they had already searched and searched again, when the lead turned out to be a bust.

Finally, as the sun was setting, we saw a strange parade coming up the road:  The cow and bull, ambling happily along the side of the road followed by a number of (very tired looking) guys on foot, three cars a minivan and a 4-wheeler.  Raven tried to take a picture, but he was hurrying and the light was awful:

I wouldn’t believe me either, but some desperate photoshopping on the above, and look:

Cows.

The tracker had eventually managed to pick up a sign of them considerably further down the road.  They had left the road, walked up the treeline for a couple of fields, had themselves a little party by a creek, followed the creek halfway down to the lake, and were circling back along the edge of another field by the time he caught up to them.  Must have been ten, fifteen miles of tracking cows through mud.  Good times.

 

Under my rock

That’s it.  As of now, I am banishing March.  Who needs a month named afther a none-too-stable god of war anyway?  Next year I’m skipping it entirely.  Or maybe, because my brother and his daughter both have birthdays in this otherwise stupid and vindictive month, I shall re-name it.  Perhaps I could call the empty space between February and April after Persephone, that would be nice.  Either that, or after one of those Medieval Saints who were out hunting and found a stag with a glowing cross and became lifelong vegetarians, someone like that.

Honestly, I thought the Vanishing Cow Episode was an attempt on the part of the Universe to lighten the mood a little.  (It was funny – I’ll tell you later.  I don’t feel funny right now.)  Sadly, all it was was setting us up for the one-two punch.  And like suckers, we fell for it.

Thank you, by the way, for all your comments and emails, they were really really sweet and I appreciate your thoughts and support.  I have been trying to respond to everybody, but if you haven’t had an email from me please forgive, I’m kind of losing it right now.

Galahad is dead.  Tuesday morning he was fine, by Tuesday evening he just seemed a bit funny, and by Wednesday afternoon he was dead.  That is the short version.  The long version involves a whole lot more frantically attempting to save him, plus a vet who never has shown up.  Or called.  (Not Bryan’s vet.  He is wonderful.) And a couple of nervous breakdowns, and you know.  Crap.

What we think (are increasingly sure the longer everyone else stays healthy) is that he was poisoned.  Not intentionally poisoned by some asshole, I hasten to add.  If that was the case I would be hiding in the bushes with a beartrap and some arrows, or something.  Poisoned ones.  No, I mean that the only thing that changed from Tuesday morning to Wednesday afternoon is that Tuesday I opened a new package of his milk replacer stuff, prior to which we’d been using stock left over from lambing last winter.  I do not know whether he was maybe allergic to something in the new stuff, if it was different somehow, or if there is actually something wrong with the milk.  I can probably call the government and arrange to get it tested, and I think I’d better, just in case.

He had no symptoms of illness.  He was eating until late Wednesday morning, his pooper was working fine, his urine was clear (TMI, sorry) there was no fever, no congestion, his pulse was ok.  He was alert, his eyes and skin were clear.  Unfortunately, his body seemed to be shutting down, bit by bit.

You know how bad this month is being?  Here’s how bad this month is being: The GOOD news right now is that Blackie had a miscarriage.  That is good news because we didn’t actually think she was pregnant and she really oughtn’t to have been, and she’s ok and will be much healthier for not being pregnant.  Still, for that to be the good news I feel that I am not in my happy place.

I’m going back under my rock for a bit now.  Or maybe I’ll just go hide out in the barn and cry.  I can hug sheep that way, and the hens will come and visit.  They love to climb in the hay.  When I come out again, I will tell you the Vanishing Cow story.  Also there has been intense knitting happening, because that is a good thing to do when you’re stressed and under a rock.