I am the author of Grounded and the editrix of the What Would Madame Defarge Knit? series of knit (and crochet) pattern books where the patterns are based on characters from classic literature.
You can find out more about my young adult novel Grounded: The Seven, book 1 including sock patterns based on the characters in Grounded here and at the book’s official website.
My knitting/dying friend of the blog Cross Pollinating with Linda McKittrick has offered up The Chiltepin Challenge: Write a Creation Myth. Take a gander and give it a shot–and let her know I sent you!
Monday, September 27, 2010-Tuesday, September 28, 2010
DH drives me to airport after spending frantic morning at last-minute self-employment deluge. Appear to have left without hair brush. Figures.
Trip begins auspiciously with gluten-free beer in Delta Terminal bar/sushi bar of the Tucson Int’l (snort) Airport.
Guess I shouldn’t snort. They have GF beer. Surrounded by happy travelers with lovely smiles. Sat next to only funny Jewish Couple from Detroit, MI. They tell me about website: Old Jewish Men Telling Old Jewish Jokes.
Land in MN airport on-time (go Delta!) with no travails. Lured to Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant by siren smell of pizza. Happy to settle for a Chinois Salad which may (or may not) have GF dressing. I have faith and am rewarded.
Money exchange around corner staffed by an engineering/creative writing dual-majored young man. Praised him up and down–more smiles. Armed with British Sterling (or at least paper with Queen’s face) I depart from gate 6.
I sit next to the nicest missionary ever. Indian by birth, but has lived everywhere and before becoming a missionary, ran architectural firm in New Delhi.
!
Watched Ewan MacGregor in Ghost Writer. So. There it is.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Managed to get about 2-1/2 hours of sleep. There was no gluten free meal for me on the plane, regardless my confirming it twice, so was happy for the Chinois Salad as there was no breakfast on the plane.
This was my cobbled together meal–leftovers from First Class and Steerage. I love that he left me the pat of butter even without the bread. Nice of him to take the bread off, anyway.
Landed in Heathrow without a worry. Tramped along, queued up for Passport Check, meandered off and got bags, got lost looking for Heathrow Connection as opposed to Heathrow Express. Found that they left from the same track.
All was good.
The hat was a lucky guess. It’s turned out to be very handy in misty rain and wind. That, plus it looks pretty nifty.
The double D is pronounced “th”. So, yeah…Wales was neat.
This was taken on the train to Brenda and Tonia’s place.
It got dark and cloudy enough that trying to take a pic out the window really only took a pic of me. Here I am on two hours of sleep. I think that’s not so bad.
What you can’t see is the sign that says “Potatoes Filled To Take”–I just wanted to take the whole shop back to the US. A corner Deli with a take-away potato service. Ah me…
This is the tidal bay in southeast Wales. I’ll have to look at a map to point to the exact location, but the two ladies you see looking out the window were…yes, knitters. Shortly after I took this, they turned to me and asked what I was doing as they were fascinated by a stitch I used. They were LOVELY and we had quite a nice time until they had to de-train. Shortly after I de-trained myself and found a pub at which to wait for Brenda and Tonia.
. 
The pub. They had some excellent Welsh Cider, for which I cannot recall the name, and were absolutely NOT, “and keep off the Moors…” to me at all. I’m always a bit nervous in a small local pub. Don’t want to ruffle the locals or intrude too much. The chap at the bar was quite lovely, though, and impressed that (a) I was in Wales and (b) had wanted to come to Wales for a good bit.
Truman the Wonder Pup. I was quite smitten.
Then again, I didn’t have to get up with him at the crack of O-My-God-Not-Now every morning.
The drinks trolly. I didn’t get a pic of the really nifty one. It had a spout and a button and the trolly captain would push the button to get the hot water for tea or coffee. It was a rawther brilliant design. 
Okay, the double L is pronounced “th” as if Sylvester the Cat were saying it but with a bit of a wider mouth. I’ll try to phonetically present it here: thla-ne-thly. I’ve been practicing since I heard the train announcer say it.
Someone left behind a paper on the train…
The horror… the horror… More in the next post.
So here we are, nine years out from–for better or worse–the most exciting thing to have happened to me, ever.
And I wanted to talk a bit this year about the “exciting” thing.
The word exciting has come to take on a positive meaning. The original meaning of “excite” was slightly different. Let’s check with our friend, the Oxford English Dictionary.
(ksat) [a. Fr. exciter (= Pr. and Sp. excitar), ad. L. excitre, freq. of excire to set in motion, awaken, call forth, instigate, f. ex- out + cire to set in motion.]
1. trans. To set in motion, stir up. a. fig. To move, stir up, instigate, incite. Const. til, to, unto; to with inf. or that (with subord. clause); also simply. Now only with mixed notion of 5, see below.
a1340 HAMPOLE Psalter Prol.,
e sange of psalmes..excites aungels til oure help. Ibid. ix. 25 Antecrist sall..excite him [God] in his synn to punysch him. 1398 TREVISA Barth. De P.R. V. xxiii. (1495) 131 Oxen ben excited to traueile more by the swete songe of the heerd than by strokes and pryckes…
b. To provoke, challenge. Obs.
c. In physical sense: To set in motion, stir up (so L. excitare harenam, Sallust.) Obs. rare1.
2. To rouse, awaken. a. lit. To rouse from unconsciousness. rare.
b. To call up (a departed spirit). Obs. rare.
c. To call forth or quicken (a faculty, feeling, etc.) from potential into actual existence; to rouse up, awaken (what is dormant, sluggish, or latent).
3. To induce, elicit, provoke (actions, manifestations); to bring about, occasion (active conditions).
4. To affect by a stimulus (bodily organs or tissues), so as to produce or intensify their characteristic activity.
5. In modern use: To move to strong emotion, stir to passion; to stir up to eager tumultuous feeling, whether pleasurable or painful. Also intr. and absol.
6. a. Electricity and Magnetism. To induce electric or magnetic activity in (a substance); to set (an electric current) in motion; also absol. b. Photography. To render (a plate, etc.) sensitive to light; to sensitize.
I bolded the ones I’m talking about (and of course, I left out most of the cool OED dates and quotations and things. Love that stuff though. Old habits die hard).
So, I’ve been feeling awfully awkward about thinking of 9/11 as an “exciting moment” in my life. It was a horrible day. Of course, for our school, the next 6 months were worse, but for so many—many too many—families 9/11 was life-changing in the most obscene ways.
However, those of us who came out alive, we experienced the largest—and probably longest continuous—adrenaline surge we’ll ever have. Even the memory of a drug-free childbirth (also looong) has been mollified by endorphins, convincing me that it wasn’t so bad and that we should, perhaps, do it all over again in a couple of years. (Um. No. We’re not going to. I’m just saying).
We didn’t get endorphins with 9/11.
Unless I’m misremembering my anatomy/physiology class, I believe one of the results of adrenaline is that you experience things in a heightened state. This is why being in a car accident we all say, “and then everything went in slow motion…” Just like a movie camera, our minds speed up so we can process things quickly—and save our lives. When a camera speeds up, it uses more frames per second to capture a given image. That means if you play it back at a normal speed, everything will slow down.
So my memories, even nine years later, are still shockingly distinct. One picture, one airplane overhead, one blog post, and I’m absolutely back there. I think that’s the adrenaline too.
Yet I still hesitate to call it exciting—even though it was, living on the edge like that. I imagine battle is similar, though I know 9/11 pales by comparison if only in it’s relative brevity. But there’s something about not knowing what will happen next in a life-or-death situation that focuses your mind so amazingly.
Yet there’s no comparison to other more appropriately “exciting things”:
These kinds of things are exciting in acceptable ways, I think. And they are all wonderful.
But they too carry the same weight—if we allow them to—of the original meaning of “excite”—to set in motion, to provoke, rouse, and awaken. All of my bulleted moments above set in motion the framework of much of my life. Exciting stuff to look back on.
I had hoped 9/11 would provoke a new spirit of openness, generosity, and harmony among those of us who are still here. I had hoped life would slow down, people would take more trains and drive gas-fueled cars less, we would linger over a meal out of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” with family, friends, and a bottle of really good wine.
And some of that has come true.
Mostly it hasn’t.
People still work insane hours, don’t have enough down time to recover from work, fly and drive everywhere, seem to be forced into faster and more and harder at every turn.
That sounds exciting, though, doesn’t it. Provoked, Set in motion.
So I guess 9/11 was a moment that excited us all—not in the happy spirit-of-a-new-baby, but in some kind of race. Are we trying to cram it all in because we don’t know when the next hit will come? Or are we just propelled along by the sheer grand tonnage of our society’s lemming-like need for speed?
I don’t know.
I still wish we’d all be a little less excited and a little calmer. I know I need the down time to be with my kids and recover—frequent mini-recoveries
I wonder if we need to come up with a word for survivors of harrowing moments? What do soldiers say? How do they describe surviving an IED attack? Even though they’re trained for those experiences, and we weren’t, I can’t imagine the human body would respond differently. I know we’re calling the aftermath PTSD, and that’s fine for what it’s worth. But that’s not what you call the experience itself.
All I know is everyone at my school was lucky—blessed. Not everyone associated with our school was so lucky. There were tangential losses of family members and friends. And those losses affect me to this day, which is odd. I can think about the death of my own grandmother who helped raise me with nary a tear, but people we lost that day who I didn’t even know—that chokes me up.
I was lucky enough over this last year to have a chance to work with the 9/11 Memorial Museum. The good work they’re doing has been calming to me. Just knowing they’re out there, cataloging, charting, collecting, saving. They’re piecing the story back together and rescuing it from the crazies who do things like quote my students in their insane screeds trying to “prove” it was a bomb and not a plane (dude. I saw the planes. Really. P-l-a-n-e-s) that brought the towers down. Someday—God willing and the creeks don’t rise—we’ll get to see the museum and the memorial fountains and the park. I don’t much care about the tower. But I do care about the fountains. It was wonderful to work in Lower Manhattan for a time and it will be wonderful to have such a lovely green space to find peace in.
Someplace a little less exciting.
Alasdair Post-Quinn over at the Twist Collective made a tutorial which–yes, is a little precious and slow but also—is rawther comprehensive regarding an elegant cast on for Double Knitting color work.
Add to that the very clear tutorial at KnittingHelp.com (scroll down for the “Double Knitting” video link near the bottom of the page) and you’ll have learned a ton in under 20 minutes. (Plus Alasdair’s pattern is gorgeous!)
Then get a copy of Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously by Adrienne Martini (thanks Meg!) and pat yourself on the back for only having go so far as to attempt double knitting rather than a Starmore Tudor Rose.
Resist the Tudor.
RESIS
Working on a design, I had to fiddle with weaving in ends as I knit.
And here’s what I wound up doing in the middle of that (to keep my sanity mostly).
Evidently I need to practice with the new template…
cute pic of Thing 2 and robot magnets for yer enjoyment.
…and then there are good days that are made good by bloggers like this.
LOVE the art.
(Heck, love the template, too!)
I read books illustrated by Gorey when I was a kid, but never knew there was a name for the little buggers.
Well, now some genius came along and took the alphabet book idea one step further. So, for all you Lost-slash-Gorey fans, here’s some extra cool fun.
MD Merch.
This is the line on Friday.
Were we here on Saturday you would see a sea of people who stretch from one edge of the picture to the other, and off to my left about a quarter of a mile.
Glad to be here on Friday.
MamaO is Heather Ordover, author, designer, mother and knitter... not necessarily in that order. You can get posts from this blog sent directly to your inbox by signing up below, Follow her on Twitter and Like her on Facebook if you're feeling friendly-like.
Vogue Knitting Winter 2013/2014
Hugely gratifying beyond my capacity for speech is having Vogue Knitting Winter 2013/14 give praise to my new book, Grounded. Read more...
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