Identifying an Artist

This is one of my favorite prints, I've come to realize. The title is "The Notch from Rte 23C N. Lexington." I know this is in the Catskill Mountains in New York State

I looked at the artist's signature.  It's not very legible but it looks like it could be the same last name as mine. How frustrating!

Moving to a Smaller Place

This past year has been very stressful and it continues. The stresses just changed.  The ultimate was moving from the largest apartment I ever had to one of smallest.  There were smaller places I looked at. It was extremely difficult finding a decent place that I could afford. It was partly because it was the end of the year.  It was also because looking for an apartment moved to the web.  The owners get to pick and choose who to respond to.  It wasn't like it was when I was younger, the first one to see it with the money and decent references gets the place. Many owners required that the rent only be one third of my monthly salary. My salary was never that large.

I wasn't even able to look at many apartments.  One apartment may have a washer set-up but there was no closet in the bedroom.  The only closet was outside the back door in a mudroom.  Another place was in a nearby downtown city.  The living room was rather small. It had a gas heater and there was something wrong with it. The whole place reeked.  The owner who rehabbed the place didn't even know there was something wrong with it. The view from the bedroom was the side of the house next door.

I had trouble figuring out how to move from a larger place to a smaller place. There's a lot of information about down-sizing, but I didn't find it that helpful.  After pondering about what I should have done, I figured out the main idea should have been to move the most important things to the apartment, and store the rest until later. It might be obvious to some people, but I was so stressed and didn't have anyone to talk to. Everyone always has to vent to me.

I like where I am very much. The only problem is that I am allergic to the chemicals used to soften the water. I can't even drink a little of it now. I can buy a home water distiller but I haven't been able to save up the money. Moving was very expensive.

I have discovered that good windows are important.  I was upset when my old apartment  complex replaced the windows. The wood frame ones I had were good.  They had the screens and the storm windows and didn't leak.  The new ones were the new combinations with double-glazed windows and screens. Man, were they leaky!  I had to tape the cracks to keep the wind from blowing through. If they let in cold, they let in heat. My apartment was so much hotter in the summer.  

The windows here are good. It was never cold in here during the winter. My apartment is the coolest I've had during the summer since 1995.  I also have great cross ventilation as well. There are two big trees in front.  I get to hear the breeze blow through tree leaves again.  

The cats seem happy here. They'll be even happier when I've gone through and emptied all the boxes.  The cats have three views.  Since we are on the first floor now, they have a good view of the birds, squirrels, rabbits, and chipmunks.  We don't seem to have skunks and I"m very happy about that. In Latham almost every warm night ended up skunk scented.

New Shoes

Today I went to a favorite resell store, Something Olde Something New, with a friend. I hadn't been there in a long time, and I hadn't gone out anywhere since the end of September. I really didn't want to buy anything, but I found a pair of shoes. I needed shoes. The stitching was wearing off the top seams and the soles seriously wearing down on my old leather shoes, and the soles wore down on my favorite sneakers so badly they made my knee hurt. I found a pair of SAS ankle boots in my size. I like ankle boots. I don't like the way the cold can leak in through the throat of lace-up shoes. I saved about $150 on the boots and they have never been worn. The same friend had given me tie-dyed shoe strings that I still had in my handbag.  They made the shoes.

I also finished my legwarmers tonight, using a variation of the Easy Peasy Legwarmers from the Knit All The Things! blog. I needed more stretch to the body shoe I knit the entire piece in k3, p1 ribbing. It suited the Plymouth Galway Chunky Paint yarn better and they go easily over jeans now.

I got them done just in time for the first snowstorm of the year. I had better remember to mend my shearling boots tomorrow. Emily has a bad habit of attacking them and putting holes in them. She got both pairs when I forgot to put them away from her. I'll cut a patch of deerskin and glue it on the hole in one boot.  The other is trickier. The leather pulled away from the seam. I have to use super glue to put the edges together. I should sew over it as well.  It's a good thing my older cat has developed a sweet personality.

I'd like to find some kind of cabinet with a drawer on the top and doors on the bottom to store hats and gloves in the drawer and I can close my boots inside.  I think I'll still make the doors cat-proof.

Save the Permafrost

Last night I started listening to Woolly by Ben Mezrich.  Ostensibly it is about the implications of recreating the woolly mammoth using DNA, but the true message is much more important. I don't know why more people and the media aren't talking about it. In creating Pleistocene Park, a wildlife preserve in Siberia, father and son research team Sergey and Nikita Zimov discovered that the carbon stored in the permafrost would holds twice as much carbon dioxide as is currently released into the atmosphere. The destruction of the permafrost would dramatically alter the earth's atmosphere.  The Zimovs also discovered that repopulating the tundra with animals closest to the ones who used to live there to bring back the grasslands and the permafrost captured by them would help stabilize the climate. 

The woolly mammoths were part of the fauna of the Pleistocene grasslands. It turns out the most recent mammoths died only 3,000 years ago making the recreation of DNA much more possible.

By Mauricio Antón - from Caitlin Sedwick (1 April 2008). "What Killed the Woolly Mammoth?". PLoS Biology 6 (4): e99. DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060099., CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11781070

To be completed.  This is too important not to be on the web.

Destashing

I am destashing my yarn because I am moving. I hope I don't have to get rid of any more than I want to. I bought the yarn because I was unhappy with the knitted goods in stores and decided to make my own. Colors, fiber and quality were the issues.

Most of my yarns have intended projects. I just haven't gotten to them yet for various reasons, such as:

• When Emily was young, she loved attacking my yarn. She would swoop in, grab in her mouth and try to run off with it. She stopped after three tries, but then the yarn was wet. I had to wait until after she was three years old. She thinks knitting tools are cat toys and she loves circular needles. She also likes to knead yarn, the nicer the better.
• When I attended a knitting group, I learned not to take anything very detailed, or else I would end up taking out most of it at home. Therefore I have several vests and sweaters started but not completed.
• My friend Kay ten Kraft of Sliver Moon died tragically and then I didn't feel like knitting.
• After I started my present job, I worked over-time all I could because I needed the money. 
• Once I had a shift to 11 am to 8 pm. It was difficult getting anything done.
• My mother broke her hip in August 2014. I sprained my right shoulder pushing her in a wheelchair that September. It took over a year for it to heal since I'm on the computer all day at work.
• March 2017 my mother broke her right leg in two places. She became ill from c. diff and an untreated bacterial skin infection with a few weeks of her stay. I was her only child and my schedule was sleep, work, and visit Mom until she passed away.
• Now I have to move.

When I can't knit, I tend to read about knitting. I love the collection of knitting short stories in three volumes whose names I can't remember right now. One of my favorite stories is about the skating knitter by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee.

I haven't found very many mystery skeins. The biggest mystery is why I have 20 skeins of Peace Fleece Mir Atlantis Periwinkle Worsted.  I know I wanted some for Christmas many years ago. I don't recall needing 20 skeins.

A Good Birthday

I  actually had a good birthday this year.  Not taking the day off from work was a good thing to do.  My cubicle was decorated with balloons and crepe paper streamers, and I got a card signed from almost everyone on my team.  Two different people sang the birthday song for me, a supervisor when she saw me on the floor and a co-worker as I was leaving for the day.

That evening, since I had hurt my hip a few days before, I decided not to do much of anything, except treat my hip, with inactivity and ice.  One of my favorite bands is Nightnoise, an Irish band inspired by folk music but sometimes their songs were touched with a different genre.  Below is their song "A Different Shore."

I was still missing four of their albums.  I decided to look on ebay for them.  There were a lot.  Generally in the past the prices ranged from 7 to 12 dollars and more.  Not this time. The highest I paid was 6 dollars and the other were between 3 and 4 dollars, and shipping and handling were all free.  I could not pass up these prices.

Saturday night two friends and I went to a favorite local diner for supper.  We had a great time together and the food was delicious.

Why Birthdays?

I can't remember the last time I enjoyed my birthday.  It seems like there's always a cloud hanging over it.

My birthday is August 8. When I was growing up, there were always media stories about the bombing of Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9). What a cloud to hang over an intelligent child's birthday: World War II and the world's biggest bombs so far.

I think my family, essentially my parents, stopped fussing over me when I started school, and I was an only child.  Unfortunately I was an only child who was very intelligent and wore glasses starting in second grade. The bullying was firmly entrenched by junior high. I think what got me through those years was thinking that puberty would strike those kids in high school and they'd forget about me.  Fortunately I was mostly right about that. I didn't really have close friends in school.

Adulthood has been a disappointment. Although I'm a very intelligent and talented person, I was never able to translate that into a well-paying job. America is still class conscious.  Working in offices as an administrative assistant, I discovered that I didn't count socially.  I didn't believe in church enough to go to one. I couldn't afford to go out to many venues at all, but I did things when I could.  Cupid was always looking the other way.

I have some friends, but I don't know how many really know me. None know me like my mother did.  As for social events, single women without significant others rank way down on everyone's priorities.

This is my second birthday without my mother.  Now I don't get any birthday cards at all in the mail. I feel like people should be able to enjoy their birthdays and celebrate their lives.  I guess I just don't feel like I have anything to celebrate.