It is hot.

Last week, when the temperature in Richmond reached 102, I read that was a new record. That it had broken the record set in 1948: 100 degrees. This afternoon, weather.com said it was 101 degrees.

In order to keep the peace between Kennedy and G, we have moved Kennedy out onto the porch. But on these days, I let her in during the hottest part of the day. She is sitting on my lap right now. As long as I keep them separated, my theory is, she and G will not fight. I hope that the stress will not cause G to pee everywhere. So far she hasn't. Or if she has, I have not detected it.

Kennedy:cute::me:scary

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Here is a picture of Sullivan in a hat I crocheted before he was born. It was way too big for his tiny newborn head. In fact, it seems I managed to make a hat that fits him perfectly at exactly the same time as all previous high temperature records in Richmond are being broken.

Sullivan, forced to wear a hat during the hottest week in the last fifty years

A pattern:

The blue yarn is a dk weight bamboo that my moxy passed along to me when she decided not to knit a skirt out of it. (I think this was probably the right decision, although I bet the skirt would have been cool, and I kind of regret that I will not get to see it.)
The contrast colors are various sock yarns.

I used a smallish hook. Maybe a D? E?
Make five granny squares. Sew them together into a cube, minus one side.

Voila! Hat!

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I walked home from the library on Wednesday, and I remembered that when I moved from Arizona to Indiana, I looked out the window somewhere in Tennessee and realized that I could see the humidity. It was not especially foggy. It's just that in the desert you can see further on an ordinary day.

Tucson, Arizona

When I first got to Tucson, I would get dizzy looking up at Mount Lemmon. At first, I thought it was just because the mountain was at a particular distance that I found unsettling. Later, I realized that it was probably because of the dryness; it didn't seem right for something so far away to be in such sharp focus.

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I finally took a few pictures of dresses on doll house kittens.

If you look through the other pictures on flickr (which I am not recommending), you might notice that the first few were accidentally up-skirt shots of that little kitten in front, and the plaid flannel dress is kind of falling off the kitty on the right. It's all very upsetting.

I just remembered that I once predicted that if I had too much time on my hands, I would make matching clothes for dolls and people.

Oh dear.

Cecily Retells Fairy Tales part 1

I wanted a real nap, but I agreed to take a pretend one instead.

Cecily said, "Child, it is time for you to go to sleep."

"Will you tell me a bedtime story? Rapunzel or Goldilocks or Little Red Riding Hood."

"Okay, I'll tell you Little Red Riding Hood. Little Red Riding Hood was walking in the woods. He was going to visit all his friends. Then he met a hungry bear. The bear ate him. Then the bear ate his friends. And they lived happily ever after."

"It doesn't sound very happy. They all got eaten by a bear."

"Oh, but they didn't want to go on living."

found poetry (part 1)

MS Word asked if I would like to help make their software better, by sharing some sentences it had corrected in the month since I've been using Word 2010:

1.
asymmetrical
asymmetrical
asymmetrical
at the table across form me, and she's totally
nondenominational
nondenominational
nondenominational
nondenominational
ficus
ficus
ficus
she does not wear make up at all

On Talking to Strangers

I have been thinking about these conversations we have every day. The ones with strangers, where you know exactly what you're expected to say, even though no one told you.

Like this one: "Hot enough for you?" "Tell me about it!"
Or this: "Think it's gonna rain?" "You know what they say here in [Maine/Michigan/Indiana/Richmond]: if you don't like the weather..." "Just wait five minutes...!"
It doesn't have to be about the weather though. There's also the woman at the vet's office: "I see you both got the memo about wearing pink shirts today!"
And the standard: "You have a nice day." "You too--don't work too hard."

I think I like these conversations. It's like participating in a nation-wide performance art piece, everyone knows the script. I don't exactly love talking to strangers, so these conversations are good practice for me.

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A few weeks ago, I got an email from a friend, with this question: "Have you an idea of how I should do the corners of the border on Cecily's coverlet? Do I have to miter them? How do I do that?!!!" And I thought, "Miter? Isn't that something they do with wood, where the pieces are cut an angle to form a corner? I have no idea."

Have I made it clear that I don't know anything about quilting? That I just boldly and foolishly do it anyway?

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LAUNDROMAT

I had to go down to Libbie and Grove to do my laundry. (The drainpipe is not working, the plumber is coming, never mind. I love laundromats, anyway.) Someone had left a lot of change in the machine, which I did not notice until after I had put my ten dollars in, and the quarters were already piling up on top of each other. Three people were sitting in the chairs, talking about the economy. "Did any of you leave some change in here?" They were so pleased with my honesty, commenting over and over. And I said, "Well, I hope someone would do the same for me." But honestly. They were sitting right there. Who would see $4 of quarters in the bin and not ask if someone left it there? I may have done noble things in my life, but not in this case.

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On the way from work to the bus yesterday, I walked by no less than four discarded banana peels. I kept wishing I would accidentally slip on one. It would have been so funny. I was thinking, a cartoon gorilla must have come through before me, maniacally tossing empty banana peels.

I heard a girl calling out, "Ma'am! Do you have a phone I can borrow?"

And my first thought was, you're supposed to be suspicious about this sort of thing. She could be a con artist, a criminal. Then I got mad for thinking that. I want to trust people. I think the risk of living in constant fear is greater than the small risk of being mugged or taken advantage of.

She wanted to call Target to find out how much it would cost to repair her bike, but she couldn't figure out the word she wanted and she kept saying, "The lubes the lubes the interlubes the tubes." She seemed to feel guilty about using my phone, and after two transfers and three times waiting on hold, she shut the phone and handed it back.

I suggested that she might be able to get help finding the information online at the public library. In my mind, librarians are these magical, kind-hearted creatures who subsist solely on requests for random information. This idea is partially based on experience.

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While I was waiting for my clothes at the laundry, I walked to the ice cream store, then I called Moxy. And she explained mitering over the phone. I listened, but I was not optimistic. I thought, when it comes time to finish the cafe wall quilt, I will find a tutorial online, or I will call her back with questions. Or, most likely, both.

However. The next morning it was my day to hang out with Cecily, and her doll house needed two more quilts, so I decided to make some little quilts. In other words, I decided to rush headlong into mitering. Cecily chose some pieces from a big bag of cathedral window quilt squares, and I sewed, and folded, and ironed, and sewed, and look! Mitered corners:

mitered corner

I sort of get it!

Of course, there are about a million tutorials online. I'll go back to them when I'm ready to do a real (non-doll) quilt. Or maybe I'll go to the quilt shop, and ask for help. Or maybe there is a nice librarian at the public library, just waiting for me to come in and ask for help finding a good book on mitered corners in the quilts section. That's what they do, you know.

Boris the Dragon

The Dragons of Blueland

One of the first chapter books I ever read was My Father's Dragon, by Ruth Stiles Gannett. It is hard to choose my favorite thing about this book (and the two sequels, Elmer and the Dragon and The Dragons of Blueland). It might be the part where the alligators form a bridge across the river, each eating a pink lollipop grasped in the tail of the next. It might be the mouse who says, "I must smell tum-duddy! I mean, I must tell somebody!" Or the fact that there is a place called Popsicornia, not that far from Tangerina. It might be the maps at the beginning of each book. Yeah, it's probably the maps.

I finally decided to put the legs on the Boris doll I knit for Cecily last fall.

Boris the dragon

When I said I was going to put the legs on, Dave insisted on taking a couple of pictures without the legs, "So that we will remember that for most of a year, her favorite toy was a snake that had eaten a dog."

Boris the snake

a list of things I love about this picture kristin took

photo of doll quilt by moxy by kristin

1. Mom's quilt for Cecily's doll house is exactly the right size, like magic.
2. Cecily is holding the matching quilt because, bunk beds!
3. yarn bracelet
4. banjo

a story, what I'm reading, and a monkey

Cecily in ice cream glasses

One time, I took Cecily with me to Target, and I didn't find any of the stuff I wanted: some bowls to eat cereal out of, and some pretty new dish towels. Later I was telling Jessie about it, and I said, "Oh well. Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you."

Cecily asked what that meant.

"It's not really about bears," I said. "It means that sometimes things work out the way you want them to, and sometimes they don't."

A few days later, as she and Jessie pulled into the Target parking lot, Cecily said, "I hope we eat the bear today."

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At work, last.fm and pandora are blocked, but just this week I discovered that raaga.com is not blocked. As a result of this, I have had this song in my head for days now.

I don't like having a song stuck in my head that is sung mostly in a language I don't know. It's a special kind of crazy when the voices in your head speak Hindi and you don't.

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I got Dreaming of Amelia in the mail this week. I like all the other Ashbury High books SO MUCH, I'm really afraid of this one not living up to my expectations. I waited three days to read the first page, while I slowly finished The Elegance of the Hedgehog, which was funny and smart but probably would be a little better in French (because I suspect that bright, likable French-speaking people getting hung up about French grammar is just a different thing from smart English-speaking people getting hung up about English grammar. Split infinitives? Who cares?!).

I finally started Dreaming this morning, and I think I'm going to like it. One minor problem: I love Emily's malapropisms in Secret Assignments, etc, because they seem so plausible. In Dreaming (or, in the first few pages, I haven't gotten far), they feel more forced. I'm starting to suspect Emily, like maybe she discovered that misusing big words is a charming character trait and she's doing it on purpose now. "Foreskin" instead of "foresight"? I don't believe it.

There are a lot of different stories going on at once, and written in lots of different voices, through school assignments and blogs and things. And it's all about Gothic novels. Two examples of Gothic novels in the introduction are Frankenstein, one of my favorites, and Wuthering Heights, which I am not proud to admit I have never managed to finish reading, despite many attempts, starting with the time I borrowed a big pink hard-cover copy from Louis T Graves Memorial Library in Kennebunkport in probably about 1987. I have read Jane Eyre at least four times. But not Wuthering Heights. Maybe now I will finally read it, next, after Dreaming of Amelia.

Note: Sandra Bullock's character in The Proposal has read Wuthering Heights many times. "Every Christmas," she reports. She says it's her favorite book. What is this meant to say about her? That she is romantic at heart, and sad?

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Not a lot of crafting has been going on. I've been sewing tiny dresses for Cecily's doll house dolls. And I need to think of a way to replace the feathers that keep falling off my new straw hat:

cowgirl

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Oh,one more thing. We saw a monkey, at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens:

I love this monkey.

He has a pinwheel and a harmonica.

Once I ate dinner at a Chinese restaurant with a group of Very Important Intellectuals. H, the most important of all of them, told a story about pinwheels, and another dinner guest, who was learning English, did not know this word "pinwheel." Many people tried to explain, with no success. Finally H called his son on his cell phone and asked him to pick up a pinwheel at the grocery store, and bring it back to the restaurant. (For some reason, H's son had left the dinner to run to the grocery store around the corner.) A few minutes later, the son returned, with this.

Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you. That's all I have to say. If you're reading this, I hope you eat the bear today.