Guts

Got some major work done about a month ago. This stuff is buried and takes time and labor to get to. I like my mechanics because they take pictures and share them with me as they tell me what's going on with my car.

Vegas

I was in Las Vegas at a conference for a few days, and I got out on the strip one evening. I have very low tolerance for the scene but thought that this was nice in its understated (compared to the visual noise around it) manner.

What I deserve

From the Kundert: 12g of bfl, silk, alpaca, shetland. 3ply on the right and 2ply on the left. Source: Phatfiber's September box ("forest"), woodenspinner.com.

Preceded by hula practice and a day of engineering business.

All to commemorate the passage of a prime number year.

2 cuffs ...

...or why I now knit one pair at the same time, instead of one cuff first and the second cuff two years later with the same yarn and same needles.

Made

So! Allegiances were declared, existing contracts terminated, and new relationships formed. Why is it, then, that these people -- who made the declarations, terminated and initiated new connections -- are the ones sighing and bemoaning their situation?

Heard

Recently encountered:

1. How could words no longer suffice if words affected her so deeply? Words were how information was received; words were used to respond to words that she read. Some words were daggers. Other words could only be spoken. She used words to carry herself away; she read words to be carried away with. Words formed the basis of understanding, and she justified actions with a carefully constructed set of words.

2. Blaine collected particular items - they were pictures, slips of paper, figurines - ephemera that represented the spirits of people she was with. She surrounded herself with the relics and curated them. Some got dusty, fell off the shelves or disappeared over time.

3. People marched from one place to another. Well, sometimes they marched. At other times, they walked. Some limped. From one destination to another, whether it was in the dustbowl, the desert, or across the country, throngs of people carried what they valued: children, guns, family histories, cattle, packages held together with scraps of rope. They traveled slowly. The side of the path was strewn with discarded items. Occasionally a person chose to step aside from the moving mass and watch the procession proceed in its own direction.

4. Good story, wasn't it? ...where I walked out of there slowly, with my dignity intact? Well, I fell apart a few days later. But Lenny caught me. He unfolded me and reminded me of who I was. He knew what I was made of, and he let me be that person.

NW India in NW Oakland

"Threads of Transition, Patterns of Change: Rabari Textiles of India", September 9 - December 7, 2011, is in the gallery of A Verb for Keeping Warm, curated by Kristine Vejar from her Fulbright research in 2001.

It is particularly interesting to track the development of these textiles within the context of events of the time: the January 26, 2001, M7.7 earthquake in Gujarat, India, the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US, and the flow of funding through non-profits instead of directly to communities. The acceptability or rejection of some techniques were decreed by elders as a response to behaviors associated with the sociological structure of arranged marriages. This paragraph is too dense with information. Rather than parse it out, I refer you to this article that covers the subject well.

Reading

McPhee, John. Assembling California, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1993.

A map of California comes in handy.