Open Hand, originally uploaded by kodama (home).

A year ago I decided to deepen my commitment to acknowledging all that I have received by writing posts on gratitude. This is the last post in the series.

Over the last year, I’ve written about large and small things that have made me happy: knitting, food, local pleasures, yoga, meditation, family, going up north, nature , and friends. By setting a goal of a post a week, I’ve increased the frequency of my posts. I have learned a lot over the year, through persistence and practice I have made myself a better writer, and I have set aside a little storehouse of items that open my heart and make me glad.

Practicing gratitude helped me appreciate all that 2008 contained. What will 2009 bring?

Well, I’ve checked out yarn winders and swifts online, and these mechanized contraptions must be fixed to a table and seem kind of large for my cozy house and not at all portable. One of my favorite aspects of knitting is its portability. I tried weaving, but the thought of lugging a loom around with me (down to my sister’s, up north, on an airplane…) was untenable. Knitting is great, some needles, some yarn, and a bag is about all that is required.

So, clunky mechanized ball winders and swifts wouldn’t do. Through a web search online, I found out about nostepinde (or nøstepinde or nostepinne or nystepinne), which are simple, non-mechanized ball winders. Essentially, it’s a sloped wooden wand around which you wind the yarn. It creates a center-pull ball, so that I can double up the same ball of yarn for my next project. Portable, simple, and beautiful.

I looked online for nostepinde, and I found some on Etsy and around, but then it occurred to me to ask if a friend of mine on twitter, the fine custom woodworker Keith Burtis of Magic Woodworks made them. He was willing to try, and he turned the one in the bottom photo for me. Keith broadcast the woodturning live, and I was able to watch him make it. Cool!

I got it and another for my mother-in-law before Christmas so I kept it quiet until now. Hers is a beautiful walnut nosty. Anyway, I broke out my lovely cherry with a streak of rosewood nosty tonight and created a lovely little football from my new Cascade garnet yarn. It’s surprisingly firm and even with my neophyte winding, the ball is unwinding smoothly as I knit.

Go Nosty! It works great. Thanks Keith!

• Nostepinde winding instructions from Hatchtown Farm.
• Nostepinde winding instructions from Lisa Diak and Grafton Fibers.

We stopped at Chipotle off of I-75 in southern Ohio on our way home from Christmas at my sister’s in Tennessee.

I had never been to a Chipotle, and I was happy to learn about their commitment to naturally raised (non-CAFO) meat.

Mostly, though, I was struck by the quotation on the cup in which I got my rootbeer, from Wes Jackson of the Land Institute:

“If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough”

Humbling sentiment, especially from a paper-ish cup at a quick serve restaurant. But, there it was, a challenge for me to align with and attempt something bigger than myself.

If you asked me my life’s work, I’d likely think for a while and mumble something like “to be of use” or to “live in harmony with the larger world”. But those are both kind of small-thinking. “To be of use” is actually kind of a cop out in its lack of specificity. It’s really just “be busy”, ” be not bored”, ” do stuff” and it is agnostic to the end result. It’s kind of soul-lessly goal-less. I’m essentially asking the universe for a lifetime of busywork. “Live in harmony” means lots of little things - I walk to work, I buy local, I buy organic, I meditate and do yoga so I’m not a freaking lunatic at least some of the time, I work on being grateful for all that I have, because I have a lot. I give to charity, I offer my service in professional societies and volunteer for my meditation community.

I knit a few things, but I could keep myself and my friends warm more efficiently by purchasing machine-made items. By meditating and supporting my meditation center, I’m investing and participating in a community of gentle folk, and I suppose that has ripples outward to the people we all interact with day-to-day, yet that seems kind of…floaty and vague. I’m a project manager by day, working to ensure our clients get search engine visibility and usability improvements to their websites so that they can succeed at their goals. I’m doing a bit of gardening, optimizing my possessions and my weight, trying to be kind to myself as well as others. But so what? So what larger thing am I building? Nothing in particular, it seems. But, it’s really all just getting by, kind of piecemeal.

We had the first day of our annual two-day strategy session at my work, and we were talking about our BHAG - big hairy audacious goal. And the option I could really get behind was to put our collective shoulder to making the Great Lakes area a model in the new economy. With all of the bad news about the auto industry and my personal hopelessness about our ecological sustainability, I am not sure what to hope for here in Michigan. So, without a clear vision, I’m not sure what to work towards.

Yet.

Perhaps a near term goal would be envisioning a future I can work towards. One that doesn’t seem so broken and post-industrial and diminished.

It might seem ridiculous, but the one concrete thought I have at the moment is greening our roofs. When I have flown in a small plane over SE Michigan, I’m amazed by all of the flat black roofs we have on commercial buildings and even homes. Seems like greening that all up would be a good goal. Too small? Unrealistic? Worthy? Going to have to chew on this a while.

My projects on Ravelry

Ravelry.com has just exponentially increased my knitting fun by providing a huge community of ideas, project photos, yarns, patterns, and stories. I’m completely and totally addicted. I have queued up projects/patterns. I have surfed photos of knitted up socks to try to determine the perfect Colinette Jitterbug colorway (I must keep surfing the photos, and testing different colorways in person, doctor’s orders).

Ravelry might be my absolute favorite social networking site (Twitter is its close competitor). It is a closed community, so it is hard to share with my non-Raveler non-knitting friends, but perhaps my knitting bores them (you?) anyway. And, if you need a fix of my current project, you can always surf my flickr knitting photostream. Ravelry is a walled garden, but it is easy enough to score an invitation (just ask). If you knit, join me on Ravelry!

When I turned to the kids’ ornaments, I moved to bright colors, and for kicks, even though the cotton El. D. Mouzakis Butterfly cotton yarn was thicker, I stayed with the size 1 needles for my nephew Theo’s ornament. His ornament knitted up quickly, and it made a nice, firm fabric, but I was really straining the needles to work the thicker yarn (note to self, pay attention, when things are hard, it might be a sign you shouldn’t do it that way). I snapped two of my precious size ones making his ornament. I finished it on two broken needles. But, I loved the way it felt - firm and easy to fill with stuffing. I finished the day before we drove to their house in Tennessee.

I started his little sister Rebecca’s ornament in the car on the way to their house on size four double pointed needles, the next smallest size I had ready to go. Her ornament is huge compared to his. It looks like it could hold the stuffing for at least two of his ornaments….It looks fine in the photo, but the decreases in particular look open and the ball itself is squooshy and less firm than his (I also may not have brought enough stuffing into the car…). So, I think the optimum size needle is in between the ones and the fours - maybe a metal size two?

Still, I saw her hugging the ornament, so now that the receiver is pleased, who am I to complain?

But it is an object lesson in the influence of needle size. The two balls are made of the same yarn using the same pattern with the same number of stitches. The only difference (other than color and the initial appliqued onto the ball) is the needle size.

Here’s a link to the free knitted ornament pattern, when you’re ready to queue up next year’s projects.

The food at Tasty China was delectable. We enjoyed several items, including hot and numbing beef rolls, fish cilantro rolls (no pepper here), dry fried eggplant (kind of like eggplant potato chips, but numbing), and more. The Sichuan pepper numbed our tongues so that regular tap water tasted kind of like Sprite (carbonated and kind of sweet). After our first visit, we tried to stop there or get takeout each time we visited my sister. Well, eventually the Tasty China founder (Peter Chang) left, and when we visited after that, the food was still good in our book. I think he was gone by fall 2007, and our take out was still a highlight of our 2007 Thanksgiving.

Well, my sister and her family moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and I went to visit in early December. On my sister’s fridge when I arrived was a review of Hong Kong House in Knoxville, about 30 minutes away. Turns out that Peter Chang, the chef from Tasty China, had taken over an existing restaurant, Hong Kong House, in Knoxville and he was cooking up the same yummy menu we had loved in Marietta.

Mmmmm. Here’s a photo of me with the hot and numbing beef roll. Glad my sister and her family followed Peter Chang to the Knoxville area.

Here’s a review in the Knoxville paper.

I’ve been astonished by a few things in the show - how much alone office thinking time the creative team at Sterling Cooper has. I don’t disagree that quiet time is critical for creative work, but I can’t believe the amount of open time these folks seem to have in their schedules. Perhaps it is just for affect in the show…or maybe there really was room in the world for that many martini lunches and that much staring out the window. I don’t know, but my days are much more harried than theirs seem to be. Maybe I’m doing something wrong.

I do know I’m doing at least one thing right. What has most amazed me me is the systematic infidelity on the show, and the effort they need to spend on maintaining the artifice and the relationships (spouse and other). It just looks like an immense amount of work. So much so that last weekend, I joked to my husband that the two of us are much too lazy to make anything like that happen. And that’s certainly a good thing.

I think this was the easiest Christmas shopping season ever. We did a mix of local and online shopping, and I feel in control and not stressed about at least this one thing at this point in the holiday season.

I threw myself on the mercy of Vicki at Ann Arbor’s funky, fun store Heavenly Metal and she set me up with great gifts for the hard-to-buy-for - my sister-in-law and my stepfather. Plus she showed me something nice and something local to give to a work colleague - al dente pasta from Whitmore Lake, MI.

A twitter friend, Keith Burtis from MagicWoodworks.com, made my gift for my mother-in-law, and I’ll be knitting my gift for my mother (though I’ll need another trip to the local yarn store and a bit of time to finish it before Christmas!).

My sister and I decided we would contribute to charity in lieu of purchasing presents for each other, and she helped me choose clothes and toys for her kids.

We did a little online shopping to round out the list, but I feel that I was able to get some personal and unique presents this year with a minimum of stress.

Sitting down to knit the little cap was just like any knitting project I do. I’ve knit several baby blankets for friend and family’s children, and in each one, it was like I was casting a spell of love and good wishes for the young’un, making a tangible blessing that (I hoped) would wrap the baby in love first and a blanket second. In this case, knitting a tiny hat for a small baby I’d never meet brought the baby to my awareness, and the experience of offering the hat was more intense and lasted longer than the experience of writing a check.

I did some exploration of the Save the Children site after finishing the two hats, and I have the sense that the baby hats alone won’t do as much as immunizations, nutrition, antibiotics, bed nets, and the like. So why hats? It’s a strategy to get folks involved and aware of the precarious health of these low birthweight babies. You can write your congressperson and/or senators, call on President-Elect Barack Obama to prioritize child survival, or join one of several online Save the Children communities (including Twitter) to become more involved.

Janet with her knitting, looking swanky in her high heels

I showed her Ravelry.com, the knitting community site to which I belong, so we can continue to share projects and patterns when she’s back home. I missed having her around when I went to the yarn store today to get another skein of the funky mohair to complete the lacy scarf.

Some things are better shared. Wish she were closer. I’ll have to head on over to my local knitting meetup for more knitting cameraderie.