My stepmom, Barbara, died yesterday of liver failure. She was the mother of a son, a grandmother, and a great grandmother. She took care of my father in his illness and until his death. She loved to laugh and she loved her family, and she was generous and warm with me and my sister.
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?
What is a Nostepinde, you might ask? I asked the same thing when I was searching online for a ball winder. For reasons I’ve never quite understood (letting knitters view the yarn in a relaxed state?), yarn stores sell yarn in completely useless skeins, which must be wound into a ball before use. Otherwise it turns into a tangled ball of mess.
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!
I love knitting. I love yarn. I love yarn shops. I love bamboo and birch needles. I love starting projects. I love finishing them. I love photographing my knitting. I love looking at other people’s knitting (commercial, machine, and hand-knitted) for ideas about pattern and color and yarn.
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!
My sister used to live in Marietta, GA. I was reading a great food blog about Atlanta, the Blissful Glutton, which reviewed Tasty China, a restaurant in Marietta that served Sichuan style food. They specialized in cooking with Sichuan pepper, which provides a numbing experience/taste.
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.
Glad my sister and her family followed Peter Chang to the Knoxville area.
We’ve been watching Mad Men. We missed the first season, but heard enough about it at the launch of season two that we caught up with Netflix and DVRed this season. We’ve been enjoying it, especially me because I work in Internet Marketing and have worked with several advertising agencies. So, it is fun to see the field in its early heyday.
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.