Fragments and notes

Wow. Look at the weather back East. It was in the 70s here in So Cal today. (By the way, Jack, Laura is my model for learning to take self-portraits with a digital camera.)

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A really classy sweater, knit by Bonne Marie.

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Pleasant Valley by Louis Bromfield. Excerpt. The farm is now a state park. A documentary has been filmed. Bromfield is one of the authors on The New Agrarian's Reading List, although I didn't realize that when I came across Pleasant Valley in the library.

I was aware...of what it was that attracted me to Europe and most of all to France; it was the sense of continuity and the permanence of small but eternal things, of the incredible resistance and resiliancy of the small people.[...]

It occured to me that the high standard of living in America was an illusion, based upon credit and the installment plan, which threw a man and his family into the street and on public relief the moment his factory closed and he lost his job. It seemed to me that real continuity, real love of one's country, real permanence had to do not with mechanical inventions and high wages but with the earth and man's love of the soil upon which he lived. (p. 7. Illustration of Bosquet, 237-42.)

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Found tucked away in Border's religion section: The Care of the Earth, by Joseph Sittler. A collection of sermons. One quote from "The View from Mount Nebo" about the experience of viewing the promised land from a distance, like Moses, but never actually arriving there. Sittler describes those whose experience of the Christian life is not necessarily "warm and fuzzy" or full of "blessed assurance":

The people of Mt. Nebo are the obedient children of both participation and detachment. They know and they do not know fully. They participate because they come from the tradition and tuition of the faith, and have been so deeply formed by it that they cannot escape its terms, its claims, its ethics. And they do not want to.[...] They want to be open to the renewing power of the Holy, but at the same time, while they participate, they do not fully enter.[...]

For many of us tormented by this precise perspective, this means that we must sometimes envision with the mind what the heart cannot yet confirm, must see and affirm with clear intellectual sight what we have not been given the grace to celebrate in actual life.[...]

Hunger, unabated, is a kind of testimony to the reality of the good. To want to have may become a strange kind of having. (pp. 45-46 and 48)

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Finally, (for now), an interview with Eugene Peterson.

[Interviewer] Many people assume that spirituality is about becoming emotionally intimate with God.
[Peterson] That's a naïve view of spirituality. What we're talking about is the Christian life. It's following Jesus. Spirituality is no different from what we've been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. It's just ordinary stuff.

This promise of intimacy is both right and wrong. There is an intimacy with God, but it's like any other intimacy; it's part of the fabric of your life. In marriage you don't feel intimate most of the time. Nor with a friend. Intimacy isn't primarily a mystical emotion. It's a way of life, a life of openness, honesty, a certain transparency.

[Interviewer] Doesn't the mystical tradition suggest otherwise?
[Peterson] One of my favorite stories is of Teresa of Avila. She's sitting in the kitchen with a roasted chicken. And she's got it with both hands, and she's gnawing on it, just devouring this chicken. One of the nuns comes in shocked that she's doing this, behaving this way. She said, "When I eat chicken, I eat chicken; when I pray, I pray."

If you read the saints, they're pretty ordinary people. There are moments of rapture and ecstasy, but once every 10 years. And even then it's a surprise to them. They didn't do anything. We've got to disabuse people of these illusions of what the Christian life is. It's a wonderful life, but it's not wonderful in the way a lot of people want it to be.

Move away from the computer

I just had to figure it out. The issue with my new camera was that I hadn't actually been taking pictures; hence nothing to download. Pressing the shutter halfway focuses the shot, and then you press the shutter the rest of the way and take the picture. Next, I played around a bit with the photo software.

This image is reduced to 33% of an image first reduced to 50% of the original, 338x253 and 88,098 bytes.



This image is reduced to 33% of the original, 676x507 and 174,487 bytes.

[12/09/2006: Deleted picture to obtain more disk space.]

OK. This is going to be fun. Next task: download the oversized images on my site, resize them, and upload again.

[Update 11:07 PM: Still haven't moved away....Did some quick trimming of image sizes. Last night I was at 9.6 MB out of 10; now I'm down to 4.72 out of 10.]

Shopping spree(s)

So that was a productive morning for my credit card. First, last night after attempting to upload a nearly 1 MB picture of the scarf below, I got a message that my web space here was too full to accept any more pictures. So I deleted a bunch of uploaded pictures that I'd never linked to and managed to squeeze in two of the three pictures I wanted to show. I know those file sizes are ridiculously large, and although there probably is some software resident on my computer I could use to make them smaller, I decided it was time finally to get a digital camera so I could post more, but much smaller and faster loading, photos here.

I had a vague idea of what I wanted—nothing too fancy or expensive because, based on the past twenty years I've owned my Ricoh KR-10 Super and not having purchased anything more than a flash, I know I'm not an avid photographer. I wanted good enough quality pictures, especially for macro shots of knitting.

So I went to Reed's Cameras this morning, received excellent help in picking out a camera set up, and walked out with a new camera and photo printer. I got a Pentax Optio MX, 3.2 megapixels and 10X optical zoom, and a Hi-Touch Photo Printer 631PS. I don't think I'll do much printing of my own pictures, but it will be nice for printing pictures I receive via e-mail.

I was not looking forward to deciding which camera to buy. It was definitely the right choice to go to a downtown camera shop that's been in business for years and get professional, mostly uninterrupted service. The large electronics stores would have been overwhelming. The prices were comparable to what I've seen online and, instead of paying shipping, Pasadena got the sales tax.

Then I drove over to Burbank to visit a knitting store I'd not yet been to, Unwind. They happened to have a sale on some of their winter wools, so I picked up 12 balls of Tahki New Tweed in a loden green. I also bought a couple skeins of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sport in # 132 Jay Pond (light blue and tan).

I also signed up to take a class on combination knitting with Annie Modesitt. Aside from being taught to knit at boarding school, I've never taken a knitting class as an adult. I've heard good things about Annie and, although I've done continental knitting by following a book, I've never really knitted extensively with it.

Well, I'd hoped this would be an illustrated post and took some pictures on my new camera to do so. However, after taking a few shots and nothing was there, I read the manual, which stated next to the Caution! symbol, "Always charge the battery after purchasing." So the battery is charging now.

Lacy scarf

[Edit 04/10/06: To view photos, click here.]

My mum's belated birthday gift arrived in the mail today [edit: that is, my gift to her—her gifts to me are never belated!], so here are some pictures.

[Removed photo 4/10/06]

Pattern: Vine Lace Scarf
Pattern from: "A Trio of Lacy Scarves" pamphlet by Catherine Vardy, Fireweed Originals. Purchased for $0.25 at a sadly now-closed thrift shop that had a wonderful section of linens and handicraft items.
Wool used: Cherry Tree Hill Suri Alpaca (I think; I've temporarily misplaced the label) in the Northern Lights colorway.
Where purchased: Skein in Pasadena, CA, with the counsel of Larry.
Needles: Crystal Palace bamboo double-pointed U.S. 7 (4.5 mm)
Started: September 2004
Completed: February 2005
For whom: My mother's birthday gift
What I learned: How to knit with lace-weight wool on large needles. With only 58 stitches cast on, the 8" bamboo double-points were a definite advantage over the 14" needles.
Blocking method: Washed the scarf in cool (or maybe warm) water with a touch of Woolite. I should have added vinegar to stabilize the colors, which did run a bit. After rinsing, I rolled the scarf in towels to absorb the excess water, and then pinned out the scarf taut on a towel laid over the carpet.

[Updated 3/5/05]

[Removed photos 4/10/06]

Mid-day update

I took a sick day from work today, although I don't have anymore sick time accumulated, so it will be a day without pay. I'm feeling out of sorts but not so much sick in the sense of having a fever. I'm tired and worried about loose ends, and because things are in a momentary lull at work after a number of weeks of intensity, I thought it would be more productive to stay home. After all, work is affected if I'm distracted by a sense of things undone. Enough of rationalizations.

So I did a big load of laundry at the laundromat first thing and hung it out to dry. Although I now have my own washing machine, occasionally it's more efficient to do one big load in the enormous laundromat machines. And once I'm all caught up, I can do smaller loads at home more often. It has clouded over now, however, but I'm hoping the 30% chance of rain will hold off. Nothing like the East coast around here, though. It's in the mid-60s today and has been fairly sunny the past few days.

Then I dropped off my car at the mechanic's. For some reason he was closed last Saturday, and my car has been leaking transmission fluid rather worrisomely. Just one of those niggling things I needed to deal with. Nothing major. Just tightening of bolts was needed.

Next, I prepared three small packages for mailing. One was a very belated birthday gift for my mother, a picture of which I will post here once she receives the package. I just needed to weave in two loose ends; it had been finished, washed, and blocked for weeks now....Then I got an address for another small package I've been wanting to send to my former pastor. Finally, I wrote a card and prepared a third package, which has been waiting to be mailed since last September or so. Then, a short walk to the post office and three more items off my mind.

Now, a quick lunch of leftovers from the church dinner last Wednesday as I write here.

Part of the motivation for today comes from Pioneer Melissa's Six Week Tweak challenge (see her March 1, 2005 post). It continues the frame of mind I've been in recently and will bring me almost to my fortieth birthday, which is fraught with all sorts of potential for serious life examination.

Finished knitting project!

The second fingerless mitten is finally finished! I sat down in front of the television and knitted it from the thumb to the fingers, including weaving in the ends. Part of the motivation came from organizing all my knitting projects and wool. Most importantly, all my knitting notions are now conveniently stored in a large cutlery holder. The long straight needles are in the large knives section; two shorter vertical sections hold double points; the third vertical section has circulars; one horizontal section contains crochet hooks; and the other one stores darning/tapestry needles, scissors, stitch holders and markers, tape measures, and other items. It is so handy to know exactly where to find the tool I need at the moment I need it.

Darfur

A friend recently co-authored an op-ed piece on Darfur, Sudan, that was published in The News & Observer from Raleigh and in the Contra Costa Times. The piece is reproduced in full in a post , "'Hotel Rwanda' Morally Implicates Us All," at a website that keeps track of what's happening in Darfur, Sudan: Passion of the Present.

The op-ed piece encourages people to watch the movie "Hotel Rwanda" in light of the current situation in Darfur. The authors point out

what is most important about the film's depiction of recent history -- namely, that genocide is a moral issue that implicates us all.

Preventing and ending it is our task as moral agents, a task that cannot be outsourced to diplomats or saints.

To place genocide in the moral realm acknowledges that it results from the intents, decisions and choices of people. While a variety of choices culminated in the 1994 genocide, the Clinton administration, when confronted by the facts, chose not to stop the bloodletting. [...]

"Hotel Rwanda" also can inform our actions in the present. In fact, Rwanda has much to teach us with regard to the current massacre in the Darfur region of Sudan, where an estimated 70,000 Darfurians have died and another 1.8 million have been internally displaced by government-sponsored militia.

The authors, Tiffney Marley and Tammy Williams, both from Duke University, lay out how ordinary U.S. citizens can respond and then exhort churches to take action.

As active Christians in the church community, we especially urge churches to prioritize genocide as a "pro-life" issue. It is ironic that some congregations in our own black church tradition who observe Black History Month have neglected to address black-history-in-the-making in contemporary Africa.

Please read the full article and respond.