Socks!!!!

I finished my socks! They're really nothing fancy or anything, knitting-wise, but the self-striping yarn ended up pretty cool. And they fit.

I learned a lot while I was making them, especially about getting the stripes to match. I figured that they either needed to be pretty close to matching, or completely opposite of each other.

They are definitely worthy of being Nicki socks.

To Steph and Nettl

(who I think of as Kaye and Lynette)

Your anniversary is in a couple of days, but since tonight you're going out to celebrate it, I thought I'd post my wish for you today. I love this poem. I know that it's how I feel about Jim and I'm pretty darned sure it's how you feel about each other.

Tin Wedding Whistle by Ogden Nash Though you know it anyhow Listen to me, darling, now, Proving what I need not prove How I know I love you, love. Near and far, near and far, I am happy where you are; Likewise I have never larnt How to be it where you aren't. Far and wide, far and wide, I can walk with you beside; Furthermore, I tell you what, I sit and sulk where you are not. Visitors remark my frown Where you're upstairs and I am down, Yes, and I'm afraid I pout When I'm indoors and you are out; But how contentedly I view Any room containing you. In fact I care not where you be, Just as long as it's with me. In all your absences I glimpse Fire and flood and trolls and imps. Is your train a minute slothful? I goad the stationmaster wrothful. When with friends to bridge you drive I never know if you're alive, And when you linger late in shops I long to telephone the cops. Yet how worth the waiting for, To see you coming through the door. Somehow, I can be complacent Never but with you adjacent. Near and far, near and far, I am happy where you are; Likewise I have never larnt How to be it where you aren't. Then grudge me not my fond endeavor, To hold you in my sight forever; Let none, not even you, disparage Such a valid reason for a marriage.

Something's gotta give

I'm really in a quandry. My apartment is a complete disaster area. I have been trying to get it cleaned, although I can only work for about 10 or 15 minutes before I'm completely wiped out and have to rest. I did finally work out a system where I work as long as I can and then set the timer on the microwave for 10 minutes. That's usually enough rest time, but having the timer go forces me to get back up to turn it off so I get back to working rather than getting involved in something on the computer or knitting.

The trouble is that there's a lot of stuff that needs to be thrown away. Much of it should probably be recycled, but that's even harder to manage. The problem is that in order to get to the dumpster, I have to climb stairs and I can't climb the stairs with things in my hands. I have to hold on to the railing or I'm likely to fall. I'm seriously afraid to even attempt to go up the stairs without holding on.

I've asked Jim to do it and he says that I just need to put it near the door, but then he doesn't think about it when he comes home. He's been working so much -- he leaves home at 4:30am and hasn't come home until nearly 8:00pm every day for the past week -- that I don't want to nag him about it. He takes care of the regular day-to-day garbage without being asked, probably because it gets to the point where he doesn't have any place to put his coffee grounds in the morning.

It's getting to the point of being like those overly-cluttered places that you see on the news or in movies with crazy old people. I've never been like my mom whose house is almost scarily clean, but it's getting to me now. I'm starting to get depressed. Claustrophobic. And I can't forget even for a minute that the days when I was able to do just about everything on my own are gone, probably forever. Coming to terms with my own limitations is really hard.

No matter what I do, I'm afraid I'm going to hurt Jim. Nagging him hurts him. If I do it on my own, or at least try to, he'll feel guilty for not doing it. I could, I suppose, find a "handyman" sort of person and pay him to come in and do it, but that would make Jim feel bad, too. Above all, the last thing in the world I want to do is to make Jim feel bad in any way. He has been so good to me and he works so hard that the thought of adding any more of a burden to him of any kind is unacceptable.

So I'm pretty much between a rock and a hard place. Good thing he doesn't read my blog. :-)

A little Nicki story

One of the things that I love about little kids is that they take everything literally, not understanding the nuances of adult speech. There was just a commercial on tv that reminded me of a Nicki story.

She was about four years old. We were in the back yard at my parents' house and we could see that the neighbors were working in their yard. I knew that they were building a greenhouse out of redwood boards and heavy plastic sheeting. The boards were propped up against the fence so Nicki could see them. She asked what the Morgans were doing and I said, "They're building a greenhouse."

She looked at the boards and then looked at me and then back at the boards. Gently, obviously not wanting to contradict me but rather confused, she said, "I think it's red."

They still just don't get it

I threatened a while back to talk about politics here. I'm following through on my threat.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is still going around on one television show after another, saying things like "I'm convinced, absolutely convinced, that we saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of lives," as a result of what have been called "harsh interrogation techniques" -- torture. He is saying that with President Obama's absolute forbidding of torture that Americans are in danger of another terrorist attack.

As far as I can see, never before in the history of our country has a former member of the executive branch waged such a campaign against the new resident of the White House. It's unseemly and it smacks of being a poor sport because the opposition party was the one that replaced him.

I've begun to wonder if Cheney is doing this as a way to, as they say on legal tv shows, affect the jury pool in case some folks get their way and those who authorized torture during the Bush administration are arrested and tried for their actions. Cheney is giving a defense to keep himself out of prison because he knows he broke laws in what he and Bush did.

The most striking thing about this, though, is that whether or not lives were saved is completely beside the point. This is a nation of laws and the only thing that Bush and Cheney vowed to preserve, protect and defend was the Constitution. Back in Dec. 2005, Bush claimed "As president, I took an oath to defend the Constitution, and I have no greater responsibility than to protect our people, our freedom, and our way of life." He was wrong. His responsibility was to protect, preserve and defend the Constitution.

I belonged to a politics discussion list for a number of years and at one point the discussion centered around the "ticking time bomb" scenario, where there is a bomb set to go off that will kill hundreds or thousands of people and you have a terrorist with you that you know is aware of that bomb's location. The question was whether, in that particular instance, torture would be okay.

The more conservative members of the list didn't see a problem with torture in any case, but definitely agreed that in this case it would be perfectly fine. At least one of the more liberal members said they would do it and plead not guilty if brought to court for their actions. I said that, no, neither one of those was acceptable. If I were in the position as outlined and if I fully believed that torture was the only way to get the answer in time to save people, I would use it. And then I would turn myself in to the courts, plead guilty to the charges of breaking the laws against torture, and accept whatever punishment was deemed appropriate.

There seems to be a pervasive belief that if one does a bad thing for good reasons, it ceases to be a bad thing. But I don't believe it to be the case. It's still a bad thing and before we do bad things we have to be willing to accept the responsibility for doing them.

Should Bush, Cheney and others from the previous administration be prosecuted and punished for their illegal actions? I don't know. Once again being a Libra rears up and I can see two (at least) sides. I think it's likely a mistake for a new administration to investigate and prosecute previous administrations. It sets a bad precedent. But it also sets a bad precedent for nothing to happen to people who break the laws, even if those people are at the highest level of government. Remember the whole thing with Clinton? Supposedly the reason he was impeached was because he broke the law by lying to Congress and not because he had a really stupid affair. In the '90s, the Republicans were all in favor of the absolute rule of law. Now... not so much, it would seem.

There was a person on Bill Moyers a week or so ago who suggested that what Obama should do is to pardon Bush and Cheney, even before charges are brought against them. It would avoid the problem of one administration prosecuting the previous one, but, in order for the pardon to actually go through, Bush and Cheney would have to accept it, admitting what they did. Sounds to me like the ideal solution.

Socks and Denial ... Denial and Socks

When Nicki was little, but old enough to understand that people gave each other gifts, it occurred to me that I should come up with something that she could give to me for Christmas, birthdays, whatever. When I was a kid, my dad had two things that he needed on a regular basis -- a key case and a wallet. Each would last about two years before wearing out and it went to me to be the one to replace them each Christmas. There was no surprise to it, but at least they were things that I could afford and it pleased me to see him use them on a daily basis.

At the time that I was trying to come up with something, I had just bought some knee-high boots. I realized that I needed to wear them with relatively bulky socks in order to be comfortable. I bought some and got a kick out of getting what I thought were extremely tacky-looking socks with crazy stripes, weird-colored argyles, strange patterns because I knew they would be hidden in the boots. I could look very "put together" and stylish, all the while wearing something completely outrageous.

It hit me that socks were something that Nicki could give me. She could have fun looking for the most outrageously tacky pair of socks she could find, they weren't very expensive for a child's budget and they were something that I knew I would be able to use. It was a very special thing between the two of us. I sort of let it be known in the family that no one else was to give me tacky socks. That was Nicki's domain alone.

Over the years, she gave me some of the most outrageous socks I could ever hope for. We would laugh together when I opened my present at how truly ugly some of them were, and she would laugh again when she saw me wear them. My last birthday before she died, she gave me a dozen pair of socks, including two pairs of Christmas socks and a Halloween pair with skulls and pumpkins.

Naturally, some of them have worn out over the years or been eaten by clothes dryers. I'm not much for darning, so when a pair has become unwearable, I've placed the remnants in a special part of a dresser drawer. With her being gone, I've been running out. I bought some at The Joy of Socks, but it's just not the same.

Since my relatively recent return to knitting, I've been reading about a lot of people making socks. I've never made true socks before. Some slipper-type socks, but not socks that anybody could actually wear with shoes. they require the use of really fine yarn and little tiny needles, both of which I have avoided like the plague.

I decided to give them a try, though. I bought some extremely expensive yarn and made my first pair for Jim, as the first thing I've ever made for him. He liked them a lot. I've just finished my second pair for him. "Just" as in within the past half hour.

I've been thinking about how Nicki liked to knit and it would likely have been a logical progression for her to learn to knit socks by now, continuing our tradition of tacky socks by making them herself, rather than buying them. There is quite a trend these days of rather outrageous sock yarn, including self-striping yarn. I got several different colorways of it and I'm going to make myself socks next. The first one is this combination of blues and purple and green called "Martinique." I know it's a form of denial to imagine that she's making them for me, but that's okay. Denial's what gets me from one day to the next, or, as Lennon said, it's what gets me through the night.

A bit of a dilemma

I'm on the staff of a message board where people come for support for a web-based portal. The portal allows users to create a whole website around a forum. There's a lot of packaged code that comes with the portal, but the real reason that it shines is that it allows users to write their own code to do all sorts of interesting things. My specialty on the support board is to help people with custom code and I often write whole applications for people. (I've got one currently that I started a long time ago which I need to get finished. I don't like it, though, so I keep putting it off.)

I get annoyed with people who don't ever come back and tell me whether the code I wrote for them did what they needed it to do or not. About a fourth of the people fall into that category. Half or a bit more of the folks I write for are really nice and both tell me that it worked and give me a nice thank you. And then there's the ones who get effusive with their thanks and their compliments on my coding skills. I get a little uncomfortable with those. They tend to overestimate my ability -- I'm not really that good at it, just better than they are -- and it starts getting almost creepy. I tend to think of the original movie Bedazzled, where Dudley Moore says to Peter Cook "You're wonderful! You're marvelous!"

I went to the message board today and found a new topic which had been started by another staff member. It was a poll, with the title of "Do you think JPDeni is the Major Mighty $foo?" ("Major Mighty $foo" has become synonymous with something like "da bomb".) The only options are some form of "Yes", along with "Who is JPDeni" and "What?"

I really hate this. It makes me mega-uncomfortable and all I want to do is go away from the site and never come back. At the very least, I want to delete the topic (which I can do because I'm on the staff) and tell them that I don't like it. But I also don't want to embarrass any one or make them feel bad, either the person who started the topic or the ones who have responded. I know the intention is to be complimentary and nice, but I just hate it.

It's not that I can't take compliments. I can. It's just that at some point it becomes too much. Also, when they do something like that, I feel like I'm obligated to do more. I've come to the point recently where I decided to back off a bit on the custom code. I don't have time any more to do anything for myself and so many things that people ask for are things that I really don't enjoy coding. With this, they've set a level that I'm supposed to live up to and, if I don't -- if I'm just a regular person -- then I'll have let people down. It's rather like the old notion of a man putting a woman "on a pedestal." It's kinda nice at first, but then she realizes that one step outside of a narrowly confined area will cause a very nasty fall.

I don't suppose I'll do anything. I'll just hope it blows over. I hope it's soon.

Happy May Day!

When I woke up this morning and realized that it was the first of May, I remembered something that happened when I was a little kid. For several years up to the time I was 10 or so, my mother and I would put together a basket of flowers -- just a little one -- to give to a special neighbor. The deal was that the flowers were to be given anonymously. I would tiptoe up to the neighbor's front porch, put the flowers down, ring the doorbell and then run away. I guess it's a nicer version of the flaming-bag-of-dog-poo trick.

It was a nice thing to know that someone got a little smile and something pretty out of the blue. I guess it goes along with the way my parents taught me the concept of "pay it forward" without knowing the phrase. Giving for the sake of giving is a reward in itself.

Side rant: I have read where people have said that, since giving makes the giver happy, it's really a selfish thing to do and that's why they don't give anything to anybody. It's hard to believe the lengths some people will go in order to justify the things lacking in their own character.

I don't know why or when our little May day tradition stopped. I guess we just forgot about it for a couple of years and it faded away. But it was a nice thing to do.

I was looking online for May Day traditions and couldn't find anything about leaving anonymous flowers. I can't imagine that my mother made it up, but possibly it was some regional thing in the small area where my parents grew up. Has anyone else come across this?