Sassygoat’s Blog

So much going on in the world, and in my own life, to mourn and to celebrate. On a personal level, the mourning is caused by Sweetybabe’s mother’s sad slow march toward death from a brain tumor. Joann was diagnosed with a glioblastoma multiforme in February, at which time the prognosis was that she would live for 6 months. She is now at home receiving hospice care. And yet there’s an element of celebration — of the life she had, the joy she brought to others, and this opportunity for her family to come together around her. The Boy is going out to visit her (we’re in Minnesota, she’s in California) later this month to say goodbye to his Grandma. We’ll be out there visiting as well in a few weeks. This week we spent some time reading through some poetry by Mary Oliver and others, finding poems that we thought might resonate with Joann, that could be used for her to give to her caregivers as remembrances, and distributed at her memorial service.

On a national level, it’s the disaster in New Orleans. I had visited there a few times, and the unfathomable becomes more real when I imagine the people I met there and the places I visited — the little antique shops, the glass studio, the sushi bar where I tried steamed edamame for the first time, the great art studios where we first discovered the art of Michael deMeng, the fortune teller who read Sweetybabe’s palm. All gone.

On a planetary level, the summer has mostly passed as well; and yet I look forward to and celebrate the renewed feeling I get in the fall — new school shoes, new books, the return of sweaters, apple crisp, crispy leaves, cool evenings. But before the summer is entirely gone, I leave you with this poem by Mary Oliver:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean–
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down–

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

- Mary Oliver

Mmmm, yeah. Had a little wine. Needed it. Writing without pronouns, the way my manager talks.

Okay, I’m knitting a Rogue. Absolute dream to knit up. Minor complaint: acres and acres of stockinette in the upper-boobal area as well as the back.

Check out this variation from dragoncrafter on LiveJournal. Isn’t it beautiful? Doesn’t it make you want to knit another Rogue? (Even wine won’t convince me to rip out and begin again. But really. As a zillion other bloggers have said, this pattern is sooo fun. There’s no room for boredom, because you get a little challenge in the cabling, where you have to stick your tongue out and try to figure out which the hell row you’re on, and then you get to chat with your friends again or concentrate on your movie while you do the stockinette. And it’s not all that hard — a lot of us in my Rogue-along are doing it as our first sweater and our first cabling project — and it looks soooo impressive. There’s just no focking this one up. But okay, it’s a slog through the stockinette.) But dragoncrafter’s variation would cure that! And how did she come up with that pattern? Does one just pull that out of thin air, fashion it from mere ideas, whip it into a concrete series of “-” and “|” just from one’s head? Unbelievable. Oh, by the way, the tree chart is here. Un-focking-believable.

Must go get more wine.

Oh! But first! Okay, wait while I get the wine and then I’ll tell you. Okay, I’m back. By the way, it’s a 2002 Sauvignon Blanc from Silverado Vineyards in Napa Valley. It’s okay, but not great. It’s left over from a little wine tasting that SweetyBabe and I did. We much preferred the 2002 Au Bon Climat Chardonnay from Santa Barbara. But this Sauvignon Blanc was better than the 2001 Josmeyer Riesling from Alsace.

Okay. Have more wine. Ready to tell you about Habu Textiles. Still not using pronouns. Fellow Rogue-along-er Rebecca just got back from a trip to NYC. She didn’t get a chance to go to Habu, but her travel story made me go back to Habu’s website, where I see some kits have been added since last I visited. I want to make this scarf from linen paper & silk stainless steel (I don’t even know what that means!) and this silk & wool stainless steel jacket and this paper moire and silk bolero jacket. Rebecca’s organizing a Habu-along. Whee!

When SweetyBabe and I were in Chicago a couple of years ago, we lucked upon the Julius Meinl Cafe where we literally had the Best Coffee Ever. As in, we both tasted our drinks and got all wide-eyed and southern-belle-looking and it was sooo good, all coffee flavor and no bitter. We’ve been ordering our coffee from Julius in Austria ever since. Sometimes Julius sends a little gift along with his coffee, like an advent calendar or some pens. And Santa brought some Schokoladevariationen too. (I could have linked you to the English version of the site, but it’s more fun trying to make you guess what flavor “Weisser Mohn mit Zimt” might be.) I love Julius so much that when I grow up, I wanna be Master Roaster Helmut Smutka. In fact, you can start calling me that now.

Okay, so I let things go for a while. Sometimes life gets in the way of blogging about life, not to mention learning how to upgrade to WordPress 1.5 and how to make one’s blog look like all those other cool blogs. But have no fear, future readers of Sassygoat! The bleat goes on, and the knitting content has been building up in my head if not on my blog. And of course, Sorcha has been providing ideas for content all along –NO, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG! YOU SHOULD BE WRITING ABOUT THE HUMBOLDT FROG WE ATE LAST NIGHT! — Sorry, Sorcha, that was Humboldt Fog, and it was chevre, not an amphibian. That would be goat cheese.

And oohhhmygosh, SweetyBabe and I did some fantastic estate sale shopping this weekend! Fock! (We also watched “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster” and loved the way their drummer Lars Ulrich sounded when he swore.) After Saturday’s estate sale purchases, I got her to make the ultimate pronouncement: “You’re right; you’re always right.” That was in response to my purchase of some vintage knitting patterns, once she saw how highly they were valued on eBay. For all of SweetyBabe’s luscious scrumptious intelligence, she cannot comprehend the obsession that is knitting. I did my best to try to explain it to her, but I think she still remains skeptical. In doing further research today, though, I found some very interesting numbers:

Fock!

Sassy is a quality I aspire to. It is a favorite word of, and is embodied by, my SweetyBabe. To me, it incorporates style, verve, and attitude. Dictionary.com/sassy includes the following:

1. Rude and disrespectful; impudent.
2. Lively and spirited; jaunty.
3. Stylish; chic: a sassy little hat.

I like all of those! Despite being a confirmed goody-two-shoes, I think I’ve always had a fair amount of sassiness in me, too. In fact, the following examples from the above link bring back some memories….

adj : improperly forward or bold; “don’t be fresh with me”; “impertinent of a child to lecture a grownup”; “an impudent boy given to insulting strangers” [syn: fresh, impertinent, impudent, overbold, smart, saucy]

And just wait until you see the sassy shoes I bought this weekend — with the help of my SweetyBabe, of course. I was going for the generic black loafers, but she, who was born with the ultimate style super-powers that I can only aspire to emulate, convinced me to get these instead.