We took our planned midwinter break but abbreviated it by a couple of days due to the kiddo’s illness. It was a 4-hour drive to our rented cottage through Michigan winter and we drove through a variety of weather – warming melt, rain, fog, freezing rain, snow. Everything except frogs fell from the sky. The kiddo managed to get in a few hours of snowboarding, and Brandon did two full days of skiing. The strange weather continued and one afternoon the ski lifts closed for thirty minutes due to lightning – a crazy contrast to last year’s trip when we were skiing in temperatures dipping into the teens Fahrenheit.
Light on the ski hills; the drive; our favorite ‘up north’ craft beer in the cottage hot tub; exploring local bookstore and coffee shop when the kiddo felt too tired to snowboard
So the drives there and back were stressful and yet compelling. I find the starkness of Michigan winter roads beautiful. I grew up among them. They can be bleak and sometimes despairing but since my Pinterest board has filled up with images that brought that same feeling, even if they are not technically Michigan made or inspired, I’ll let you decide for yourself whether they appeal.
A sometimes weekly roundup of things that made our five day grind more bearable (or bogged us down or were just simply on our minds).
Starting with the worst – just to get it out of the way- I can only hope for that vile twat Pam Bondi, to paraphrase Taylor Swift, that karma is on her scent like a bounty hunter, step by step from town to town. I pray that her actions never give her a moment’s peace or rest in this lifetime and the echo of what she has done and continues to do with smug impunity follows her into the next life and the next. She’s got a lot of cleansing to do. Or – and this is a better option- she can rot, along with every monster she is protecting and shielding.
Speaking of things that are sour – sourdough. (I know, and I in no way mean to make a jest, but how can you make a graceful segue?) I bought a sourdough starter from King Arthur (named “Charlie” by household vote) and spent 3-4 days trying to coax him to life. He was alive but unresponsive. I did some troubleshooting and some temperature testing and realized that my kitchen in the depths of February, despite being south-facing and one of the warmer spots of the house, is too cold. He wasn’t warm enough! I considered putting him in my daughter’s bathroom (which is definitely the warmest room in the house) but quickly discarded that idea because, you know, hygiene (there is such a thing as a fecal plume and while my daughter would murder me for saying it, it’s not unique to HER bathroom, it occurs in EVERY bathroom). No one wants that kind of culture in their sourdough. So I ordered a cheap mug warmer from Amazon and in the meantime he is snug in his sourdough crock in the microwave with a hot water bottle and my friends, he is bubbling away!
Sporting events making me cry. Firstly, I’m going through some adjustments with my anxiety medication so I’m experiencing a wider and less predictable range of emotions, but every time Ilia Malinin takes the ice to skate for the US at the Olympics, I get teary-eyed. (He and my nephew also bear a slight resemblance to one another.) The way the Japanese figure skating team supports each other in the box and their overall graciousness and dignity makes me feel emotional. The US athletes who are able to verbalize their love for their country, their pride at representing it, and their distress at the actions being taken by the current regime (they’ve clearly read the memo about the freedoms the US is supposed to be based on) only to be disrespected by the overstuffed mouthpieces of said regime – makes me weepy AND furious. Breezy Johnson’s hand knit headbands. And last but certainly not least – Bad Bunny’s halftime show. I don’t even think I can talk about that explosion of joy and vibrancy and community and culture, culminating in parallel messages of love and hope and inclusion, without bursting into tears. Chapeau, Mr. Bunny, and thank you for showing us what America truly is and can be.
Lastly, my stats are showing that there may be a few new faces visiting here – if that’s the case, welcome and feel free to visit my “About” page to get a feel for what I am about. If in reality these are just bots slithering around, ew.
We have a few days off for the kiddo’s midwinter break and were supposed to have a nice extended trip up north to see my mom, run a frozen 5k, and then go further north for skiing but sickness has (again) become a plague upon our house. We’re hoping to salvage a couple of days of skiing early next week if nobody else comes down with it but we shall see.
We’re doing a better job with food efficiency. I have been a meal planner and a weekly shopper for forever – I think this goes hand in hand with my organizational and emotional well-being requirements as a working parent. I make a weekly meal plan, write it on our kitchen board, and do a shopping trip for that meal plan every Sunday. However, despite that organization, it always seemed as though we ended up with uneaten leftovers at the end of the week that had gotten lost behind the pickles. Brandon has a strong reluctance to throw food away, while I tend to believe that leftovers have a short shelf life and should be thrown away rather than gambled on in the big game of botulism roulette. He’d be as distressed to see me throw something away as I would be to see him eating something that I knew was SEVEN DAYS OLD. So gradually, instead of buying sandwich bread and cold cuts for us to take to our respective jobs for lunches, we’ve migrated to main meals that are leftover-friendly, stored properly and visible in our fridge, and packable in our lunch boxes the following day. We make sure there are things like fresh fruit, crackers, hummus, chips, cheese sticks and yogurt on hand to supplement for breakfasts and snacks, and it’s made a big impact on the efficiency and cost of our meal planning. Also – not as much of a cost saver but more as a fun addition- I got a stand mixer for Christmas and I’m baking a lot more on the weekends, too, working my way through 100 Cookies by Sarah Kieffer (everything has been good so far but the peanut butter cookies were a little salty?)
Feeding and watering the wildlife. Whatever we may be saving on our food is probably going straight out the back door and into the bellies of the local animals. I say this in jest but I am not complaining a bit – feeding and watching birds is a huge joy for me in the wintertime (I don’t tend to feed in the summertime). I make sure I have ample stocks of black-oil sunflower seeds at all times and during the extreme cold snaps, I add more expensive bags of fruit and nut and songbird mixes. I cycle between unroasted, unsalted peanuts in the shell and a more cheap ‘critter mix’ for the furry residents. With all that, we attract titmice, a host of sparrows, finches, siskins, chickadees and juncos. We have several mated pairs of northern cardinals and bluejays (who love the peanuts and wait and watch for me to bring them out in the mornings) and no fewer than eight pairs of plump mourning doves, who flap and titter and flutter and settle on the heated birdbaths like it’s the backdrop for a ‘70’s swingers convention. We have several species of woodpeckers, including flickers, red-bellied, and downy. The seed and suet that falls on the ground attracts the neighborhood black, red, fox, and gray squirrels, and in the blue hour, our deer will come up to drink out of the birdbaths as well. Last week we had four young bucks, and in the mornings, the fresh snow also shows tracks of rabbit, possum, skunk, and the neighborhood red fox. I think we’re going to invest in a Ring camera for the backyard so we can start documenting our winter wildlife and once I upgrade to a zoom lens for the Canon I bought last fall (that lens is a hefty $2k price tag) I’ll hopefully have way better pictures to share.
This last one is an improvement just for me, since Brandon has always been really good at it, but it’s staying off my phone more. I simply don’t have the capacity for doom scrolling with everything going on in the US right now and so I’ve gotten a lot better at putting my phone down in the evenings and being more present. The trend of ‘analog bags’ has been all over my Patreon and YouTube vlogs lately – these are just bags that you pack up with things that keep you off your phone. It’s fun to see what other people put in theirs – art and journaling supplies, needlepoint, books, markers and coloring books, puzzle books, etc. While I haven’t gone so far as to lean into that, mostly because I already have knitting bags strewn all over the den and don’t need another dust catching bag that will drive Brandon crazy, I do feel like the time I’ve saved by putting my phone down has resulted in a big uptick in knitting and reading productivity (I also joined a January ‘Pages’ challenge on Storygraph that helped motivate me to do more reading).
February is here and I hope to fill it with lots more birds and deer, gradual creeping light into the morning and evening skies, baking in my kitchen and crafting in my spare time. I’ll still light the candles in the evenings and keep the fire going, but it would be nice to be able to start running outside in cold clean air without worrying that I’ll slip on a patch of ice and break a bone. I hope wherever you are, you are well and safe, breathing in hopes and joys, and celebrating your wins, too, even if they seem small.
The Melt the ICE knitted hat pattern started making the rounds several weeks ago. A yarn store in Minneapolis, where ICE agents have wreaked so much misery, drafted the pattern and offered it for sale for $5. It’s based on a historical Norwegian knitted hat that was used to protest the Nazi occupation of Norway in the 1940s, and proceeds are being donated to Minneapolis immigration aid. The pattern has raised over $250k so far!
I used Cascade 220 worsted superwash merino and mine came together in about a week – the seven inches of 1×1 ribbing took the most time. It’s a fun and easy pattern, and now that I have the feel for it, I think I’m going to make a second one with a few modifications. I’d like a longer cuff (despite the distinctly unappealing concept of spending more time on an additional two inches of 1×1 ribbing). I’ve also seen some knitters making them longer and pointier and I’d love that aesthetic for my next one.
I also had a skein of red fingering yarn from West Yorkshire Spinners in my stash that was perfect for tiny ICE melter hats. This is a private pattern not on Ravelry that I saw on the Antifascist Knitting subreddit. (You can find it by searching for “A Pretti Good Hat Keychain” on Ravelry – the pattern drafter posted it as a project and provides the full pattern in their notes). They suggested making keychains out of them, although they also would be really cute just pinned to a coat or a bag. I made three, and they each took about a half hour of concentrated effort.
Knitting like this has been criticized as performative, but this pattern has raised real money for a community that has been under siege and desperately needs support. What is happening in our country is not acceptable. We are seeing the rapid increase of brutal authoritarianism and a masked, untrained, heavily armed police force that has no oversight. Despite being on camera taking struggling women into portajohns, beating and kidnapping men, women, teenagers and children (many of whom actually are American citizens), using children as bait, and outright murdering two protesters, the federal government has told us we can’t trust our own eyes. The Vice President has even stated that they have full immunity for anything they do. Which leads me to ask – what would any of us do if we saw an ICE agent raping a woman? Or harming a child?
We know what the administration will do. The men who murdered the protesters have been protected and taken to safe houses, rather than being immediately jailed and required to stand trial in accordance with our justice system. These are the actions of an authoritarian regime and untrained, violent vigilantes who have been armed and mobilized for shows of political retaliation, fear and force. The people they are terrorizing, racially profiling and targeting are not criminals or drug dealers (Trump has pardoned too many of those for anyone to believe that has anything to do with it) and the protesters are being demonized by the same administration that pardoned the violent offenders of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. (Don’t even get me started on how this administration has tried to rewrite the history of that horrific event.)
Knitting, donating, calling my representatives, and speaking out – it feels woefully inadequate but at the moment it’s all I’ve got.
Six Ten 