years go by, will I still be waiting...

This end-of-the-year moving house saga was a real side tracker. As I've been packing, it occurred to me that there were things I managed to accomplish this year:

de-stash the yarn collection: I've done two things to de-stash the yarn - I've knit from my stash, obviously: socks, blankets, scarves, shawls, sweaters (I need to photograph a bunch of this stuff and put up the specs on Ravelry). I also culled my stash and took a HUGE bag of yarn to a yarn swap to give away. I also donated some yarn to Knitting Behind Bars, which the founder of my knitting group started.

And then I bought more yarn at Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival at the beginning of May. However, I knew I would be doing that and had a plan for what I was looking for, which resulted in a reasonable and not overboard haul. (I believe the correct term is "stash enhancement adventure.")

re-commit to the morning writing, reading, exercise, and cello practice routine: I did really well with the morning pages until I went to Paris in late May. I kept a travel journal while I was there, but when I came back, I struggled to pick up my morning writing pattern again. At least in the handwritten form. I've done quite a bit of journal writing on the laptop since May.

As for reading, I've gotten through a fair number of books this year, both physical and electronic. I particularly like Daily Lit online. I've gotten through quite a few classics this year using that service - the latest being Villette by Charlotte Bronte. I've just started The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. I'm still wandering through the tome that is The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt, and I'm still enjoying the atmosphere of it; really is a savory read. I also just finished the latest Anne Rice novel, which I got through in an afternoon - I'll do a book review of that later.

I went for near daily afternoon walks until the weather got yucky hot. All that exercise served me well as I continually got lost in Paris. Speaking of lost, my weight is down, also thanks to exercise and getting back to a real foods diet.

Morning cello practice was hit or miss. I was too conscious of my neighbors being able to hear me, even with a mute on the bridge. I seemed to be less worried about it with evening practices. I think this will be less of a problem in the new house - no downstairs neighbors, and my practice room doesn't share any common walls with the new neighbors.

post a blog entry once a week: Including this entry, I have 44 posts for the year, so that's not quite one a week. I think that posting more about my cello lessons and practice, in addition to what I typically write about, will up the numbers next year.

finish short story/novella/novel: I completed a draft of a new novel, and then realized how utterly boring the story was, so I set about revising it, which involved introducing a new character. The second draft is better, but meanders too much. Way too much. So I'm into the third draft now, plus I've outlined several other stories. I also investigated publishing e-books, and my first novel will be available as an ebook early in the new year - I got image use permission for the cover art, and I'm getting help with formatting and uploading. I'm hoping to get the current writing project wrapped up and e-pubbed next year as well.

make a cello commitment: I bought a cello in July, after a year of lessons with a rented instrument. Having my own cello has been a great investment and a nice upgrade from the rental. I've signed up for another round of lessons with Ben. I finished two etude books, and Ben is starting to talk "ensembles" and "quartets" and "trios" and "duets with a pianist." I think he's crazy.

So besides the above, I went to Paris for my 35th birthday in May. I really like Europe, and I plan to go back. I've surprised myself with the international travel in the past couple of years, in that provided I'm armed with a guidebook, a map, a metro/tube/bus pass, comfortable shoes, an umbrella, a water bottle, some snacks, a towel, and a backpack to put it all in, wandering around an unknown place doesn't faze me a bit. It's nice to know I have an adventurous streak.

And as you've heard ad nauseum, I decided toward the end of the year that 11 years in my condo was enough. With the help of a fabulous realtor, in the span of about 30 days, I found a townhouse, put an offer on it, which was accepted, submitted paperwork right and left, put my condo on the market after getting new carpet, got an offer on it, submitted more paperwork up and down, and had the air ducts cleaned. I'm moving in mid-January. I'm calling it the Treehouse from now on - "townhouse-in-the-trees" is too much have to type. It's not technically in the trees, but it's pretty damn close.

movie review: The King's Speech

I went to settlement on my new townhouse this morning. Although it was nerve-wracking to sign all those papers and hand over a huge chunk of money, it went as smoothly as anyone could hope for. The sellers are nice people, and they were easy to deal with. I'm well aware how lucky I am for how everything has worked out with this home transition. I will spend the last days of this year packing, so I'll be ready to move later in January. Seems like a fitting end to the year actually.

I had the rest of the day off, and I needed a distraction after all that important paper-signing and money-handing-overing, so I went to the movies. I'd been keeping an eye on local showings and finally, The King's Speech was showing nearby, after a long period of limited release.

This movie is about King George VI's ascension to the throne, after his brother Edward abdicates so he could marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, and just before the start of World War II. More importantly, it's about George VI's quite noticeable stammer, which I'm sure made speech-giving an agony, especially in a position such as his, and with radio broadcasts of important events becoming more popular.

Colin Firth has come a long way from Mr Darcy to George VI. If you're looking for him to be a romantic hero, this film isn't for you. He's a hero in it, certainly, but a bashful, self-doubting, uptight one. It's painful to watch him literally stammer through speeches and conversations, even with his daughters - the scene in which he tells them a bedtime story will make you sigh and wince at the same time. I don't know how or with whom Colin Firth prepared for the role, but he was stunning. The gulping, the hesitations, the furtive nervous looks. The man did his homework, that's for sure.

Helena Bonham Carter played Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, George's wife. She gave an incredibly balanced performance - sympathy with George's problems but not sinking into pity, an authoritative royal manner but not dictatorial or annoying, and just enough wit and humor to make her fun. I suspect a great debt is owed to the queen mum for supporting George throughout his reign.

Geoffrey Rush is the king's speech therapist, Lionel Logue. He's portrayed as also something of a psychotherapist, as there is some emphasis on the emotional and mental things that can make a stammer worse or better. An interesting aspect of this relationship is how the therapist takes the king out of himself, tries to get him to relax, insists on calling him "Bertie" (the king's full name was Albert Frederick Arthur George, and he chose "George" as his name on becoming king, supposedly in a move to provide continuity from his father, who was George V). Lionel is a bit eccentric, but sympathetic with those who have trouble speaking, and he's good at his job. You learn some interesting things about him during the preparation for George VI's coronation. There are a few scenes that focus on Lionel's acting ability - I'm not sure what the point of them was, I have to admit.

Most of the funny scenes occur between Lionel and George, especially when Lionel points out that when George gets angry and starts swearing, the stammer disappears. I think it's this scene that got the film its R rating. The St Edward's chair scene is the tipping point between them, and really, the whole point of the story - everyone has a voice; if someone takes it away from you, or suppresses it, or mangles it, take it back, even if it means getting help to do so. There was great rapport between these actors to make the relationship appear believable.

Timothy Spall makes a great Winston Churchill, without going overboard into parody. Derek Jacobi is the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he probably has the worst line in the film (after Colin Firth finally makes a successful speech, he responds by saying, "I'm speechless!"). Jennifer Ehle is Lionel's wife (coincidentally, she was Lizzie Bennett to Colin Firth's Darcy in Pride and Prejudice). They only have one little scene together. I liked the parallel of her support of her husband and Elizabeth B-L's support of her own.  Subtle, but well done.

The climax of the film is George VI's speech to the nation in which he announces that England was now at war with Germany. He starts out hesitating and halting, but Lionel is right there with him, coaching him through it in a small, claustrophobic-looking room. The background music for this scene is the second movement from Beethoven's 7th Symphony. A great piece, and one I'm putting on my list to learn for cello someday. Perhaps the way she does it.

One of the captions at the end of the film states that Lionel was with George for all of his speeches and that they were friends for the rest of their lives. George even inducted Lionel into the Royal Victorian Order, which is only given out of gratitude to people who perform a personal service for a monarch.

I'm saving the gushing for the very end - thank me as you will. I really wanted to see this movie when I first heard about it - partly because I thought the premise was intriguing and partly because I wanted to see if Colin Firth could pull it off. I was not disappointed on either front. I loved this movie. I can't remember the last movie I saw that I could say that about. I've heard Oscar rumors about Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush. It would be well deserved for both.

a sneak peek

A glimpse of something coming to an e-reader near you in early 2011:

Photo by Gary Cowles

upgrading

I'm not an early adopter of anything. I tend to observe for a bit and see how a thing develops and what people think of it and what they do with it, before deciding if it's worth my time, effort, and money.

Take smartphones, for example. My biggest beef with them is that I don't necessarily want to be "connected" and "available" at all times. I find that idea rather scary, to be honest. And I don't use my cell phone much at all anyway - so rarely in fact, that the phone company called me to ask if I wanted a lower-cost package since I always had plenty of minutes left over every month (I took them up on that offer).

iPods are the exception. I was a fairly early adopter of the iPod, largely out of practicality. At my last job, I traveled somewhat regularly. I can't read in any kind of moving vehicle because I get an instant nauseating migraine. Before mp3-style audiobooks were available, I would lug at least two books' worth of CDs and a CD player in my carry-on luggage to have something to listen to while tooling around in the aforementioned moving vehicle. With the up-and-coming (at the time) audible.com, I felt fully justified in buying an iPod for both efficiency and sanity while traveling.

However, I have not, until recently, upgraded from my little iPod Shuffle. It's traveled all over the world with me and was even treated to a UK/Europe plug adapter for charging AND a handknit case to hold the headphones, pod, and charger.

One thing that had got me leaning toward some sort of upgrade recently was ebooks. I love the concept - portable ereaders are great if you're waiting in line or for an appointment or a meeting or want something to read while eating lunch or lounging in a coffee shop and don't want to tote around a book in your briefcase or purse. (I have been known to have a book in both.)

So it was a nice surprise to get a 32 GB iPod Touch from my mom and stepdad for Christmas. I've already loaded audible onto it with a handful of my favorite audiobooks (seriously, if you get stuck somewhere, you want Stephen Fry narrating a book to you - really, you do; I know of what I speak; your blood pressure will thank you). I dived into the ebooks as well - some Wodehouse, some Gaiman, all the Jane Austen novels, and the complete works of Oscar Wilde: my physical copies of each set of the latter two are doorstopper-worthy, so I'm tickled by the idea that I can access them in their entirety on this credit-card-sized device. I wonder what the Lady Author and the greatest aesthetic writer who ever lived would think of that?

And just for kicks and giggles, I added a stash of Crowded House, Keane, Zoe Keating, Apocalyptica, Kate Bush, Pomplamoose, and Florence and the Machine songs. I'm toying with the idea of loading the Bach cello suites onto it as well, but which version do I want? And then Mom and Steve also sent me the complete works of Chopin...

And Ben and Emily told me about the cello tuner and metronome apps...

And Autumn and Erin told me about to-do list and grocery list apps...

Oh dear, I've adopted, haven't I?

Anyone know where I can donate my iPod Shuffle?

dusty

Look closely at that thing.

Does this mean my dreams are dusty?

It wouldn't surprise me actually - years of insomnia and panic aren't really good for dreaming.

However, the i and p aren't as bad as they used to be, so maybe my dreams were just sitting around waiting to get through, and when they finally did, the catcher filtered out the dust for me.

I've had a few good dreams recently.

In one, I'm looking up at a huge dark wicker chair with back and sides flaring out like wings. The chair is floating next to my mom's closet in some house I don't recognize. All her best clothes were hanging from the bottom of the chair, like they do.

And flying dreams, I have lots of those. No planes or gliders or kites or anything, just me with arms outstretched zooming around and dive bombing just for kicks and giggles, and getting that buzzing funny dizzy feeling in my stomach that I also get when I drive down a hill or a long stretch of road too fast.

The writing dream is my favorite - sitting at a table wrapped in a fuzzy sweater, writing by hand by candlelight, and there's a man with dark hair standing behind me, leaning down to read over my shoulder. He  rests his cheek against my head and his hand on my shoulder - my right shoulder, which is good, since I'm left-handed, so when the words come out of my head down my neck and through my arm and hand onto the page, I don't want my left shoulder weighted down with anything or there might be a back-up of words, and I get moody when that happens. I don't know who he is when I'm awake, but I seem to know who he is in my dream, and he likes what I write even if my handwriting is bad and the story is plodding along and there's too much passive voice. He knows I'll fix it eventually, and he just tells me to keep writing because he wants to read more of the story

My sister bought this dreamcatcher for me at a shop near the beach years ago. I'm about to move it for the first time in 11 years. I hope there aren't any straggler dreams that haven't come through yet because my time in this condo is running out.

long tones

We spent part of my last lesson on long tones to focus on bow control (for non-cellists, long tones, are, um, well, exactly what they sound like - drawing the bow across a string for a certain period of time).

We started with 15 seconds per bow draw on open strings, trying to go for even volume and pace from frog to tip, with no scratching or skips. It's amazing how this exercise amplifies how wobbly one's bowing really is (not to mention how long 15 seconds really is).

Ideally, I'm to work up to 30 seconds per bow draw; however, given how yucky it sounds at 15 seconds, it will be awhile before I get there.

We then tried out varying the volume to counts of four - dividing the bow in quarters to gradually increase volume, and also counting 1, 2, 3 to get to the middle of the bow, then a quick middle-to-tip on 4 for the loudest tone, and then doing it all in reverse for kicks and giggles. It's still a long tone practice, but with an added layer of volume.

I'm also working on #88 in Book 2 of Dotzauer Grant - Ben calls it a "one-and-a-half position" exercise (third finger where fourth would be in first position). So far, position shifts aren't too much of a bear for me - I tend to get in the right vicinity and back again without much or any pausing to figure out where to go (although I've noticed that if I overthink position shifts, I overshoot them. Funny that). 'S more a matter of honing more and more precisely - a comes-with-practice thing.

slur where you want to

The only good slur is a musical one.

Do you think that will catch on as a quote?

Likely not.

Oh well.

I have officially graduated to Book Two of Dotzauer Grant's Fundamentals of Cello Technique. This series is my primary source of etudes.

I love etudes. (The "why" of that is a whole post in itself, but not the point of this one.) I even love etudes that annoy me.

The last one I worked on from Book One was annoying, which somehow is a fitting end to the book. It shows that I'm not just mindlessly playing them to be able to play the notes and leave it at that. I get into them enough now to have an opinion on individual ones.

This etude (#80) is almost entirely sixteenth notes. There are a few shifts and extensions, and then there are the slurs all over the place. (For non-cellists, playing a slur means playing two or more notes with the bow going in only one direction, as opposed to changing the direction of the bow every time you change the note. It's a neat trick.)

I am used to slurs occurring at the beginning or end of a note grouping or covering an entire note grouping. This was my first mistake. Note groupings help readability, but otherwise, one shouldn't think of them solely as groups and play them as such, even though they (maddeningly) look like groups. Anyway, this etude puts the slurs in the middle of a grouping and across groupings. The immediate problem I had when I first tried this piece was that I either wanted to play separate bows throughout or rearrange the slurs to occur at the beginning and end as I was used to. My bow hand was so adamant about this that it would go in the direction it wanted to go, regardless of what was on the page.

Of course, Ben-the-cello-teacher wasn't going to let me, or my bow hand, do that. Do you remember Ben? Here he is.

Whenever I get stuck or stubborn like this with a bow hand technique, Ben says, "let's work it out on a scale first." Since I always warm up with a scale or two before a practice session, my left hand movements are pretty automatic, so I can focus more on the right hand. It's how I learned slurs in the first place. Ben's idea again.

Funnily enough, this etude runs very like a G scale in notes involved, so that's the one I used. It took slowing the movements down to molasses pace before my right hand caught on to the pattern, and then there was the inevitable, "oh, I get it now!" So in practice sessions, I played the scale a few times at faster and faster speeds, and then without pausing, launched into the etude - getting a running start with the scale and then sliding right into the piece, in other words. The etude was suddenly much more manageable and much less annoying.

Clever fellow, that Ben.

baroque bowing

Several of my cello friends blog about details of their lessons: techniques they learn or discoveries they make. I love reading these blogs, although they often leave me mystified because I’m not yet at a playing level where I can fully understand what they’re getting at to be able to apply it to my own practice (nothing makes me more aware of my own ignorance like cello does; Kermit is right – it really is not easy being green). I suppose reading these posts also leaves me overwhelmed because of all the detail – how do they keep it all in mind and active when playing a piece? That is a skill I would love to have.

I’ve avoided writing posts about my lessons and revelations because as such a beginner, I’m not sure what words to use to describe these things in a way that would be useful not only to me, but to anyone reading the entries. Pretty much all of my cello friends are way ahead of me in skill, so my learnings and discoveries would be old-hat yawns. (And we’ll take it as a given that non-cellists would want to skip these posts.)

I have been keeping a handwritten cello journal, however, at the request of my teacher. I log my daily practices and include what pieces I’m working on and any relevant notes (or more often than not – frustrations) with each piece. It’s rather sparse as journals go, which is odd for writer me. With just about any other topic, I can write volumes. With cello, not so much. I get finger-tied and only seem to manage a one- or two-line Twitter post or a vague and cryptic phrase in a journal entry. The desire to write about it is there, but the words aren’t.

And it’s annoying The Hell out of me. Something must be done about it.

So I’ve decided on an early goal for 2011 – more blog posts about my cello lessons and practices. If only for the sake of a personal need to better articulate what I learn so as to, er, learn it better. Or something. Anyway, they may be clumsy and vague and oh-so-obvious, and I apologize in advance for that, but hopefully, they will get better and more interesting.

Here’s my first go at it, because Michael asked:

I’ve been working on Handel’s Bourrée for a couple of weeks now. A light, skip-hop-jump piece with some position shifts and slurs to make it interesting. I’ve got the rhythm fairly accurate, and I can play it at a decent pace.

I’m slightly off with the fourth finger in the position shifts in the second half of the piece, especially after coming from a first-finger extension from second position. I tend to want to keep my first finger down (and with my long fingers, I can very nearly get away with it), but I’ve figured out that if I lift it as the fourth finger goes down in second position, the fourth finger is more accurate since my hand has more range of motion to go further south, which it can’t have if I use my first finger as an unhelpful anchor. (Go ahead and yawn here if you need to.)

I’m at a point in my cello studies where I’m starting to pay more attention to the layers of a piece instead of focusing solely on playing the right notes at the right time and calling it a day, which results in only really half-learning a piece that doesn’t sound very musically satisfying.

One layer of the Bourrée is volume. There are a number of sections that go from piano to forte. My teacher pointed out that the obvious thing to do to play louder is to put more weight on the bow with the right hand. However, there are other ways to get volume.

Since this is a Baroque piece, if I were to play it on a Baroque cello with a Baroque bow, weight on the bow would not be an option. The gut strings and the bow shape wouldn’t allow bow pressure because it would just be a mess of strings mashed against fingerboard and stick mashed against hair. In plain language, yucky-sounding.

Instead, we played around with how much bow to use – shorter sections for piano, gradually increasing to just about full bow length for forte. At the moment, the difference in sound is very subtle to my ears, but I’m hoping more practice will make it more obvious while still having a nice, smooth, watercolor-like gradation (slowly bleeding one into the other, rather than hard stops between). This method of volume is more in keeping with the Baroque style and therefore the thing to do in a Baroque piece. (Bloody obvious, right?)

Oy! It took me a ridiculous amount of time to write the above six paragraphs. Quite unlike me. How do you all do it?

on the market

Right. In my last blog post plus one, I listed a bunch of things I was taking on this fall. I added something to the list because I'm just on the greener side of crazy:

I decided to sell my condo and move somewhere else.

I know people do this everyday, but I've been in my condo for 11 years, so this is a big change for me.

And a fast one. I started looking at places before the economy tanked, and then decided to sit tight for a bit, Just In Case. I started looking again recently, found a few I wanted to see, contacted a realtor for one of them, and then things really got moving. I contacted a lender and got a pre-approval letter, which took all of 10 minutes, and had a copy of my pre-approval letter in my e-mail inbox soon after. This is about when the dazed feeling started to settle in.

I saw several more places, and was appalled at what people do to their homes, and they think they can sell them in that condition. Maybe they can. Not to me, though. And architects and builders these days have wacky ideas for layouts, which in no way amuse this potential buyer. In several instances, my realtor and I were both wondering "WTF?" as we were walking through. It's good to know that I'm not alone in my ideas about house set-ups that make sense.

I was expecting to possibly have to move out of the county to find a nice place that was reasonably priced, and I had resigned myself to that. Then I saw a townhouse just down the road from where I am now, and it was perfect - just the bit of upgrade I was looking for, more room, more storage space, a bit of yard for me to learn how to garden, cute overall, quieter neighborhood, and both interior and exterior were well-maintained. So we started the paperwork. And then it all went wrong.

The owners didn't want to do a contingent contract - meaning my offer was contingent on me selling my condo. Not unreasonable on their part, so I didn't mind that bit. I could put enough down with an FHA loan on a non-contingent contract.

But here's a piece of trivia to keep in your back pocket: You can't have two FHA loans at the same time. Maybe lots of people know this, and I'm just ignorant. The lender caught this as he was getting ready to approve my final loan application - I had an FHA loan for my condo. No one ever told me this could be a bad thing. Nor did I read it anywhere. FHA loans are handy because you don't have to have as much of a downpayment. Conventional loans require at least 10% down, preferably more. I didn't have enough for a downpayment with a conventional loan. Since I hadn't sold my condo yet, that meant I couldn't take out another FHA loan for the townhouse. So we couldn't submit the paperwork for it after all.

Not a week later, someone else put a offer on the townhouse, and it was accepted, so it's off the market. The listing said "Contingent (kick out)." I was curious what that meant, so I looked it up:

A term that refers to a real estate contract contingency that's often used when a home buyer places a house under contract with the understanding that he must sell his current house before finalizing the new purchase. 


Sellers holding a contract with a kick out clause continue to market the home. If they receive another offer the buyer has a specific amount of time as stipulated in the clause to remove the contingency and move forward to buy the house, whether his existing house is sold or not. If the buyer cannot move forward, the seller can back out of the original contract and sell to the new buyers.

In other words, the owners accepted a contingent contract with a buyer...a week after saying they wouldn't do the very same thing with me.

This is when I got irritated.

I decided to put all my focus on selling my condo. My realtor sent a "staging consultant" to advise me on how to present my condo to the best advantage for photos and walk-throughs. I had a couple of cosmetic things to fix, and then it was a lot of "get rid of as much clutter as possible," which is a standard thing they tell home sellers. I never thought I had clutter, given that the condo is so small, so there's no room for it. Since I discovered freecycle.org, I've gotten rid of a lot of stuff. I re-organized some things, and got rid of even more stuff. However, personal family photos that you might have on your mantle are considered clutter. Displays of collections on shelves are considered clutter. The stager told me that potential buyers aren't there to see how I made the place homey, they're there to look at room size and whatnot for THEIR stuff. So I started packing stuff up even before I had a buyer, let alone someplace to move to, but I latched on to the idea of "act as if." It's one thing to say I'm going to move, but actually packing stuff up makes it much more of a reality.

Then the realtor suggested new carpet - apparently carpet allowances aren't the thing these days. I did have old carpet, so I went ahead with replacing it - that happened last Friday. I piled a ton of stuff into my dining room and kitchen (the only two places with bare floors) and holed up in the kitchen for the day with knitting, my laptop, and a bunch of Futurama DVDs. It was an odd but nice way to spend most of a day.

I managed to get Lyra-the-cat into the bathroom, but couldn't catch Tristan, who is surprisingly good at hiding where he can't be gotten at. The carpet installers said not to worry, if they needed me to come get him as they moved stuff around, they'd holler for me. So he spent the day dashing from one hiding place to another amid pushed-aside furniture.

Once the carpet was in and the installers had left, I let Lyra out of the bathroom...which is when she started chasing and hissing and swatting at Tristan. She acted as though she didn't know who he was, like he was a new cat in her territory (they've been here with me for three years). I assume this was because with the old carpet gone, all the familiar smells were gone too and that somehow blocked her sense of who he was. So I had a fun time this past weekend trying to keep them apart while making my condo look presentable again. At least I got to watch the Rally for Sanity online while I tidied. I would have liked to have gone to DC for the day, but I was on a deadline.

It took a few days, but Lyra and Tristan are friends again. Here is evidence from last night:

For several days before this, if they got within three feet of each other, there was hissing and swatting (mainly from Lyra). For them to peaceably lounge on the couch in bored contentment mere inches from each other like this is major progress.

Anyway, pictures of the condo were taken, papers were signed, and it's all live and official now.

I also looked more closely at the company stock I own, and it turns out I have enough from the sale of it for that magic downpayment percentage. I wish I'd known that sooner.

I looked at some more places today and put in an offer on one of them - a gorgeous place inside and out. It's bigger than the other townhouse I was interested in, but it's the same price - so more house for the same amount of money. That's a yay, I think. More paperwork, but looks to be worth it. Will find out tomorrow sometime if the offer is accepted.

I'm having trouble focusing on work and cello practice and writing projects with this Big Change happening. (I may not get very far with National Novel Writing Month, let alone the Bach prelude.) Now I realize why I put this process off for so long. It really takes it out of a girl, both physically and emotionally. I need to move though. I need the change. I've been feeling stale and cramped for a long time.

One thing I've not been feeling, however, is panicky. Not a shake, not a tremor, not a butterfly in the stomach. I guess if I'm the one initiating something like this, my psyche and my body are okay with it. Whereas when stressful and/or unexpected events are thrust upon me, and I have no control over them, nor can take an action to deal with them, I fall apart. Weird, huh?

shiny new-ish

Ahem:

Welcome to my revamped blog! New look! New pages!

Sorry. Had to get that out of the way. Onward.

For awhile, I've wanted to highlight some of the topics I'm most interested in, rather than just having them get lost in a topic list in the sidebar. I toyed with the idea of a personal web site, but blogger has a lot of features, both new and established, that suited the purpose just fine. If it were possible to have RSS feeds on the topic pages, you could follow specific topics of interest, and we'd be golden, but one can't have everything. Still, I think it's easier to read about specific topics in this new format, should you be so inclined. I've added some background information on each topic at the top of each page as well.

I'm still working on links for a few of the pages, but they all have intro essays. Links are arranged with newest at the top of the list.

So:

Home is the main blog with everything and cherries on top.

Reeling and Writhing is the writing, books, publishing page.

Rumored Cellist is the cello exploits page. It's the thing I'm newest at, hence it has the shortest intro essay.

Yarn Over is the page of fibery crafty goodness.

Girl in a World is the travel adventures page.



Hope you enjoy the new layout.

plunging

I had a little panicky setback last week, which has put me off-schedule with a lot of things - mainly writing projects.

What irritates me the most about this latest round of panic attacks is that I have nothing to panic about at the moment. Life is pretty damn good and humming along. I have a productive routine of early morning writing, day job, lunchtime reading, evening cello practice and lessons, and yarn projects. Throw in a renewed commitment to eating only real food and not junky, processed, food-like products (just because it's dairy-free and gluten-free doesn't mean it's healthy food), which has resulted in some weight loss as a delightful side effect, and some evenings out at the movies and to hear some hard rock cello as played by classically trained musicians from Finland, not to mention fall coming on and lots of creative stuff in the works, and what is there to worry over?

Still, this bout has been relatively mild so far, and I'm grateful for that. In a way, it feels like I hibernated all summer due to the yucky and oppressive heat, which really seemed to knock me flat this year, and the panic attacks are waking me up for fall, which is generally my most productive time of the year.

About that creative stuff in the works - I have a personal website in development, which will have five blog pages on it, including this one, and I'm going to release my first novel as an e-book. I am deep into revisions of the second novel, and while I would like to focus solely on that, I'm itching to try out e-publication. The more I hear and read about it, the more I like the concept. If musicians can bypass record labels and get their music directly to audiences, be they big or small followings, why not do the same with books?

I know quality is the biggest argument against self-publishing. Many people think publishing houses are the filter that makes sure only the good stuff gets out there. I would counter that there are quite a few books that get published through a traditional publishing house that aren't good at all, and they make you wonder what the publishers were thinking. In addition, quality is sometimes a matter of opinion. A book I think stinks may be gold to someone else, and vice versa.

If nothing else, the sheer variety of reading material will improve. We're already seeing that in the indie music scene - musicians that would otherwise be passed over by record labels are being heard and becoming popular, and deservedly so. Pomplamoose, anyone?

So Eidolon House will be my Grand Experiment, my Big Plunge, to see what happens and to see what I can learn and to see what people think of my writing. It will be available as a PDF, and if I can figure out how to get it formatted for Kindle and other e-readers, it will be available for those as well. No idea how easy or hard that will be, so it will be an adventure! Or a royal screw-up!

I'm doing one final copyedit first, though, and that's putting me behind in Phoenix Sonata revisions, among other things. I also need to finish the outline for the novel I will write in November for National Novel Writing Month. I'm looking forward to this one - it will be a fun novel to write, I think. I'm considering a 3000-words-a-day writing goal for this year. That would get me a more-or-less finished first draft in a month. It would also up the stakes for a me a bit. In my three other NaNo attempts, I didn't really have a problem getting to 50K words in 30 days, so a little more of a challenge could be a good thing. Still pondering this.

I've nearly finished crocheting a blanket. It's a star shape, done in green yarn. Actually, it looks like a giant lily pad, and I'm not sure that's a good thing. At least the pattern is addicting and fairly easy. I need to get back to the other blanket and the sweater I abandoned at the beginning of summer. I have cowls to show you, too, knit with handspun yarn from my friend Autumn. I think my next project will be a vest with yarn from the Sheep and Wool Festival.

Cello playing progresses slowly but steadily. Me and the new-to-me cello are quite chummy these days.

And fall's only just beginning...

book review - The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

I think The Little Stranger could be called a thriller. More in the traditional gothic style of thriller though, rather than a heart-pounding, non-stop action, people-running-all-over-the-place, car-chases-and-stuff-exploding thriller. Is there such a thing as a quiet or muted thriller?

See, what quiets this story down are the hard-to-miss elements - class structure and psychology.

Let's start with class structure. The first person to sense something weird going on in Hundreds Hall is the maid, Betty. As a servant, and a barely teenaged one at that, her fears are attributed to homesickness and an overactive and childish imagination. At best, she's not abused by her employers, and they come to rely on her for companionship in the big, lonely house. But even with such decent treatment, her employers wouldn't hesitate to ask her to do some chore or other at a moment's thought - she and they never forget that she is a servant. Even at the end of the story, when she is the chief witness of the final event, she is not believed, and for the same reasons she was not believed at the beginning of the story. Her triumph is that she soldiered through all the events and came out relatively unscathed, which can't be said for other characters.

Next is Doctor Faraday, the narrator of the story. His mother was a servant at the Hall. She wanted him to have a better life and saw to it that he got a better education. He becomes a doctor, but only a local one with not much of a practice, although he does start to make a name for himself and become more well-known and respected toward the end of the story. He might be above the station of a maid, but not by much. He often comments on feeling out-of-place with the Ayres family at the Hall, and with others he considers above himself. The evening party at the Hall is the prime example of this, although he ends up being the hero of the evening when a major event happens. He is ever sensible, honest, trustworthy, sympathetic, the one you rely on for stability, and little seems to shake his beliefs or determination, even when facing impossible things or Caroline's rejection of him in the end. He has moments of doubt, which increase the longer he knows the family and the goings on at the Hall, but he clings to the rational despite that. He's boring, and he knows it. Oddly, this is a good thing because as narrator, he's not getting in the way of the story. I appreciated that.

There's Seeley, a rival doctor, and there's the family lawyer, both of whom are a bit better off than Faraday, and he feels it and lets the reader know it. Dr Graham and his wife seem to be the only ones on his level, as it were, and he has a genuine friendship with them.

Finally, we have the Ayres family. Shabby genteel is probably the term for them. And getting shabbier all the time. Roderick served in the war and was badly injured in it. His sister and mother nursed him back to some semblance of health. He's head of the household, at least for awhile, and then he falls apart trying to contain "the infection" of the house. Faraday attributes this to latent stress from his war experiences (I suppose today it would be called post-traumatic stress disorder) as well as the strain of trying to keep the estate going with no money or resources. About halfway through the story, Roderick's part is done, and he's packed off to a mental hospital. One expects a downward spiral for the family after that, and one gets it, almost too predictably.

The mother is next. Mrs Ayres represents old-fashioned grace and stiff upper lip, and is the most class-conscious character in the story. She is fragile, stronger in mind and resilience than her children give her credit for, at least for awhile. It is the loss of her first daughter, years ago, that is her undoing. It is an oddly calm undoing, too. Unlike Roderick's.

Caroline was the character I grappled with the most. I kept picturing her as an older, frumpy woman; however, I think she was meant to be younger, but stout and healthy. That Faraday would find her attractive seemed odd to me, and their relationship fizzling wasn't a big surprise since she had an air of reluctance about it all the way through. I wanted to root for her at the end. I wanted her to succeed and start a new life after all the tragedy she'd been through. It was disappointing that it didn't happen, and her exit was abrupt.

Now for the psychology. This book has an even rhythm - almost too even. Things are humming along, normal as anything, for about a third of the book, then (finally!) something weird happens in the house. Things settle down for awhile after that, and then something else weird happens in the house. This goes all the way through to the end. Is that to lead the reader to think that this is nothing more than a chronicle of the destruction of a mentally unbalanced family? Faraday certainly wants to believe that's all it is. In a number of scenes, he's rather condescendingly trying to get the family to buy into his idea of the true cause of their troubles - war weariness, lack of money, just the three of them in a crumbling house. After all, it's safe, logical, and sound, and perhaps makes the manifestation of events a little more bearable for those involved.

Interestingly, Faraday is never in the house when the mysterious happenings, well, happen - he sees the result of them and hears about what happened from the family, which lends credence to his theories. Still, the events are described in such a way that it's easy to see why the family are inclined to a supernatural explanation, and why they're frustrated that Faraday doesn't believe them. The story ends with finality for the family, but none for what caused it. I have a guess about who the "little stranger" was, and I'm not sure why this wasn't brought out more explicitly. The ambiguity of was it all in their heads or did something supernatural cause events isn't satisfying.

One thing that was satisfying was the narration. Faraday narrated the story in a first-person voice, and it actually worked really well. It read smoothly and naturally and believably. Unlike the first-person narration in The Swan Thieves, which sounded clunky and forced. Obviously, first-person point of view is hard to do well. Sarah Waters definitely knows what she's doing with it.

Another strong aspect of the story was the house itself. Waters captured the atmosphere of a crumbling English estate just after the war just about perfectly. And she shows it decaying even further throughout the story, which lends weight to the supernatural possibilities and the menace of the place.

Overall, it was a good story, well told. I quibble with the ambiguous ending, but not much else.

My next read is The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt. It's a doorstopper!

movie review - Scott Pilgrim vs the World

I'd point you to this review, and say, "what she said," but I rarely do movie reviews, since I rarely go to the movies, because there are rarely any movies that I'd want to see, so I thought it would be a nice change from book reviews.

Let's get my ignorance out of the way first, shall we? I'm not a gamer, never was as a kid either. I've dated a few gamers in my time, but never got into it myself. I've read some comic books/graphic novels - mainly the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman and a few by Alan Moore, and more recently the Hatter M series by Frank Beddor and the Fables series by Bill Willingham. But that's it. I do want to read the Scott Pilgrim series after seeing this film, though.

It was solidly funny all the way through, with the touches of seriousness just when needed. The special effects were in the gamer style, which even a non-gamer like me could get. The acting was pretty damn near perfect - Michael Cera in the lead plays a geek with surprises: without depth in that character, this wouldn't have worked; Ellen Wong as the starry-eyed, naive girlfriend who grows up a little; Keiran Culkin as the gay roommate and conscience. The story was solid, and nothing was wasted, not even Ramona's constant correction of Evil Exes rather than Evil Ex-Boyfriends. The soundtrack would make great workout music. There's lots of violence in it, I warn ya - done in a kung fu/Matrix sort of way. The defeat-by-coffee creamer was the funniest though.

My only beefs with the film were that the finale seemed to go on a little too long, and I couldn't figure out who Scott would end up with. Scott facing himself didn't need to be there, but the twist was fun, so I almost didn't notice how long the ending was. Almost. And having not read the comics the film was based on, I don't know how it ends on the page. Perhaps the point was to keep the audience guessing until the very end? I'm satisfied with who he ended up with. I'd have been equally satisfied if he'd ended up with the other one, possibly even the third one. Or was she the first one? Anyway, Scott picked one. Can't ask for more than that. And who doesn't love to see a geek win? However awkwardly and clumsily he goes about it.

A fun film, and well worth seeing. I can't remember any kind of movie like this when I was a teenager. How disappointing!

I mainly wanted to see this film because Edgar Wright directed it. The first of his films that I saw was Shaun of the Dead. I watched it late one night while eating Ghirardelli chocolate squares and snuggling under blankets in a hotel room in San Francisco several years ago. Now, I'm not into horror films At. All. But I loved Shaun of the Dead. It's the perfect film for horror film lovers AND for those dragged along to see them or for those who would never otherwise watch them no matter how much dragging was attempted. Who would have thought you could make a horror film deliberately funny?

I went to see Hot Fuzz when that came out. I'm not into cop films either, but I loved Hot Fuzz for the same reason I loved Shaun of the Dead. Lovingly tweak the nose of the genre and do it well, and you have my interest.

Somewhere in there, I discovered Spaced, which is one of the funniest sitcoms I've ever seen. And for the record, I liked where it ended.

So anytime I hear that Edgar Wright or Simon Pegg or Nick Frost or Jessica Stevenson have a new project out, I take notice. When is Paul coming out?

Oh, that review I linked to at the beginning? I'm in the author's demographic to a T, and agree with all her points, which the professional movie critics have obviously missed. What she said.

And I SO want Ramona's hair. When it was pink. I'd never get away with it at work though.

book review: The Forgotten Garden

Huzzah! One I actually liked!

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton is a detailed, slow read, but really worth it.

The story is told from the third-person perspectives of three women - Eliza, Nell, and Cassandra. As such, it skips around in time. It actually reminded me of several Doctor Who episodes where the story is told out of order, chronologically speaking, but as you see bits of it, other bits make sense and/or take on more meaning, and you eventually get a complete story. It's actually not too hard to keep up with the time shifts in this book. The location and date is listed on the first page of each chapter, so you're immediately oriented as to which main character you're tagging along with.

Speaking of characters, there are a lot to keep track of, and not just because the story is told in three time periods. Cassandra is Nell's granddaughter. Cassandra's mother more or less abandons her with Nell when Cassandra is a kid. However, Cassandra and Nell get on well together, and as Cassandra gets older, she starts helping Nell run her antique shop. After Nell dies, Cassandra is left not only with the remnants of Nell's life, but also her belongings, including a cottage in Cornwall and the beginnings of a mystery. Cassandra's own personal tragedy seems too briefly touched on, and I sense it was put in merely to give her more in common with the other two women. It doesn't quite ring as true as the traumas the other two women suffered.

Nell's sisters eventually reveal to Cassandra that Nell was a foundling. She arrived on the docks in Australia as a four-year-old with a white suitcase and no name. The sisters' father took her in and she became one of the family. Just before her wedding, Nell's "father" told her of her origins, which she could only dimly remember - time having fuzzed them out and replaced them with her adopted family. As a result, Nell canceled her wedding and withdrew emotionally from her family. Eventually, she decided that she wants to know who she really was. We follow Nell a bit as she finds out her real name and pieces much of her background together, but she has to abandon this endeavor abruptly. Years later, Cassandra picks up where Nell left off and finds the remaining clues.

Eliza is the pivotal character. She is referred to as The Authoress throughout much of the story, and she had the worst life of the three women. Her mother, Georgiana, coming from a rich old family in Cornwall, runs away and marries a sailor. He dies at sea, leaving her with twin babies. She doesn't want to return home to the family seat disgraced, so she takes lodgings in a filthy hovel in London, making what money she can. She dies of tuberculosis, and her children are left to fend for themselves, under the abusive gaze of the lady of the house, who constantly threatens to send them to the workhouse, although they each bring in rent money via various forms of child labor. One twin dies in an accident, the other, Eliza, is sent back to the family home, much to the displeasure of Aunt Adeline, who married into the family after having been Georgiana's companion, and who lives for respectability and for advantages for her only daughter, Rose, whom she feels should be given precedent over Eliza. However, Rose, who is an invalid, and Eliza get on well together, so Eliza manages to earn her keep, as it were, as the BFF of the daughter of the house.

Eliza has quite an imagination, which was an obvious escape from her circumstances. She starts to write down the fairy tales she makes up to entertain Rose, and eventually gets them published. She also gets to know the house staff, the gardener in particular. With her uncle's consent, she helps the gardener restore a garden next to a cottage on the estate. There is a hedge maze that separates the cottage from the mansion. Years later, when Rose announces that she is engaged, Eliza moves to the cottage in a sort of self-imposed exile as well as to be out of the way of the newlyweds, but still near enough should Rose need her. She's rather more passive and naive in adulthood - blindly agreeing to anything Rose wants in hopes that Rose will be happy and always need her. Personally, I liked the more adventurous, mischievous, and defiant Eliza as a child than the woman she became. Once Rose and her husband return from a trip, Eliza plans to travel, but her plans abruptly change as a result of tragedy, and she disappears.

Eliza moving to the cottage and then being gone from their lives are joyous events as far as Aunt Adeline is concerned. Bluntly, Adeline is a scheming, selfish bitch for whom one's place in society is everything, something that Eliza could care less about. She very nearly lets down her guard after the tragedy, but manages to contain it. She's interesting, if loathesome.

Rose is slightly annoying and weak-minded. She has a bit of her mother's selfishness, and she does not have a close relationship with her father, which is far more his fault than hers. While she understands her mother's obsession with societal standards, she can't resist Eliza, who is the most authentic and lively person in her circle.

There are a line of people who pop up to give Cassandra information about aspects of the mystery - they serve their purpose and then pretty much go away.

If there is a pointless character in this story, it's Rose's father. He was close to Georgiana (his sister), felt abandoned when she ran off, instigated the search for her and her children, and insisted on Eliza being brought to live in the family home, despite Adeline's protests. He's a photographer who often goes on expeditions for months at a time, hence the lack of relationship with his daughter. He becomes obsessed with photographing Eliza, as she is his only link to his sister, but she manages to elude him. He's rather like a living ghost roaming about the place. I was never sure what to make of him, other than as a barrier to Adeline throwing Eliza out on her ear.

Frances Hodgson Burnett makes a cameo appearance in the story, so the similarities to The Secret Garden are not coincidence. Thankfully, Morton doesn't dwell too much on the connection, but just leaves it as a nice bit of detail.

Morton did really well with the settings - Brisbane, Australia; London and Cornwall in the UK. You definitely get a good feel for the atmosphere of each place. I've already put Cornwall on my list of places to visit someday.

The whole thing does have a layer of melodrama running through it, in a Dark Shadows sort of way (if Johnny Depp really does go through with the film version and plays Barnabas Collins, I'm SO going to see it). I was in the mood for that kind of thing at the time, and the parallels between the lives of these three women, not to mention the connections between them, are intriguing and distracting enough, so I found the melodrama amusing more than irritating. I can see that others might roll their eyes at it, though.

It's a relief to find a good read after several duds, although it was short-lived. The book I started reading after this one didn't hold my interest At. All., so I had to abandon it. I've just started The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, which looks more promising.

book review: The Swan Thieves

I could sum up this review in one sentence:

This would have been a great story if it had been told entirely in third-person point of view.

No no, there is too little. Let me elaborate.

This is Elizabeth Kostova's second novel after The Historian. Now, The Historian is also written in first-person point of view (hereinafter referred to as "POV" so I don't have to type it out over and over again). For whatever reason, this didn't bother me at all. Either it was better written or my narrative viewpoint taste has changed in the last few years or I perceive POV differently in The Swan Thieves. I dunno.

The novel is primarily told from Dr Andrew Marlow's POV. Dr Marlow is a psychiatrist recounting a patient case - essentially, this novel is an extended patient history. His patient, Robert Oliver, is a gifted painter who nearly slashes a painting at the National Gallery in DC. Robert is brought in for psychiatric evaluation, which is how he ends up in Marlow's care.

Dr Marlow is also a painter, so he does take an artistic interest in the case. He also breaks a lot of professional rules in the pursuit of resolving this case, including traveling all over the place, getting involved with one of Robert's ex-loves, even yelling at Robert at one point, and no one he works with seems to notice this or question it except the doctor himself, and then he only acknowledges it briefly before he plunges ahead anyway. He also goes to the National Gallery to see the painting that Robert nearly destroyed. While there, he glimpses a woman who also seems to be interested in the painting.

Robert is not an interesting patient. The story is about him, but in the sense that the doctor is finding out about him from everyone but Robert himself. Robert says little to nothing until the end of the novel, and even then, it's not much. Instead, he draws and paints the same person over and over again (Marlow provides him with art supplies). We're only reminded of Robert when Marlow goes to check on him periodically and finds that he's still not talking. Instead, he has a packet of old letters, which he leaves out for Marlow to read early on in the novel. The letters are between a painter, Beatrice de Clerval, and her uncle by marriage, Olivier Vignot, who is also a painter. They were written during the Impressionist movement. I think the best adjective for them is "charming." A slight bit of simpering in them, but not too bad. Actually, I think these letters have the most authentic voices in the whole novel. And oddly, Beatrice's and Olivier's scenes are the only ones written in third person. I'm not sure why.

Dr Marlow, renowned for being able "to make a stone talk," contacts Robert's ex-wife since Robert himself won't volunteer any information. The doctor visits the ex-wife, Kate, in North Carolina. Over the course of two days, Kate tells Marlow all about her relationship with Robert. These chapters are told from Kate's POV as though she is talking to the doctor. In other words, still first person POV, but now it's Kate's, not Marlow's. Kate seems a little bitter, and Marlow's musings on her lead the reader to think he's attracted to her. Then he meets Mary, Robert's ex-girlfriend and the mysterious woman who was interested in the painting at the National Gallery. Mary is also a painter. In fact, she started pursuing an art career after taking a painting class with Robert. We get her POV on Robert, and Marlow also writes about being attracted to her.

All this is meant to parallel Olivier's attraction to Beatrice, but the parallel doesn't quite work, mainly because it's too obvious a parallel. Chapters mirror each other, and only change out characters and time period. Something more subtle would have been appreciated.

This novel presents what's called a "slow build." It's not a quick read - facts and details are revealed gradually, and parallels are drawn between the Beatrice's life, Robert's life, and Marlow's life. I don't mind reading novels that do this. In fact, I rather enjoy sinking down into all that story. However, in this novel, it takes so. bloody. long to get through all the people recounting their memories of other people and Marlow figuring out who Robert's painting subject really is and why she's important. Things only start to pick up in the last quarter of the novel. I had to repeatedly fight the urge to skim and/or read ahead.

One thing really threw me. Kate tells Marlow about an incident in which her mother, who had been living with them for awhile, is dying. She calls to Robert, who is elsewhere in the house. When he comes into the room, he stares transfixed at the scene in front of him - the daughter kneeling on the ground cradling her mother and looking up at Robert. A couple of chapters later, Marlow sees one of Robert's paintings that depicts this scene but the subjects are wearing different clothes and are on the street. He states that he can't imagine where Robert got the idea for it. I had to go back and re-read the chapter in which Kate describes the scene with her mother to make sure I hadn't read it wrong. Marlow heard the story and then saw the painting, so of course he knows where Robert got the idea from! Possibly that was an editing blip and the Marlow-seeing-Robert's-painting scene should have come before the interview with Kate. Although, other plot details would have to change to make that work. Later on, the Beatrice's letters reveal a similar scene, which Robert would have read and then seen the image of in the scene with his wife and mother-in-law, which he then painted. Even I got all the connections, and that's saying something.

Overall, it's the awkward first-person POV that bugged me the most in this novel. I think it was the overabundance of detail - settings, people's facial expressions and mannerisms, what they ate, endless descriptions of how they feel and how they suffer all their angst. It's far more detail than makes sense for first-person POV. It's as though the whole thing had originally been written in third-person POV, and then changed to first-person at the last minute before being sent off to the printer. I understand the whole suspend-disbelief-this-is-fiction-after-all argument, but it's hard to do that when the voices don't read naturally and sound forced and almost silly in their descriptions of scenes and conversations.

I don't know what it is about second novels not being as good as the first ones, but I'm down two for two now, which doesn't bode well. I hope my next book review will be more positive.

socks!

Yes, it's 90+ degrees outside most days, and I'm knitting socks indoors with that lovely invention called air conditioning running in the background.

However, knitting socks in summer is not as odd as it sounds, really:

• Socks are small, so I don't have a lot of knitted fabric in my lap like I would if I were knitting a blanket or a sweater - two projects I've put on hold due to the heat of the season.

• They're portable projects, so I don't have to have a ton of yarn with me, but if I'm going to be stuck in the doctor's office waiting room an hour past my so-called appointment time, I have something to do to improve the inevitable blood pressure reading before the half-hour finally-in-the-exam-room wait that precedes the seven-minute visit with the actual doctor.

• Socks knit up fairly quickly, despite the small needles and thin yarn. It's truly amazing how many rows you can churn out in a doctor's office waiting room.

• I can practice new knitting techniques on the small space of a sock before I attempt them on something larger, thereby eliminating most of the strange looks my cats give me due to the swearing at the inanimate object in my hands whose real task is supposed to be keeping me calm and happy and feeling all productive-little-house-on-the-prairie-pioneer-woman-despite-living-in-the-suburbs-like.

• Ripping back to fix a mistake or to start over isn't as traumatic or frustrating on a smaller scale.

• I'm only dealing with about 64 or so stitches on the needles in an average pair of adult-size socks, and even fewer for kid-size socks.

• I only need one skein of about 400-ish yards of fingering-weight yarn for a pair of socks (compared to seven to twelve or more skeins for a sweater or a cardigan or a blanket). This is great for the budget of a girl who went to Paris and bought a cello in the space of about a month recently.

• There's no lack of sock yarn or sock patterns in the knitting world. Seriously. I mean, jeez.

• Hand-knit socks can be custom fit for foot length, width, heel, arch, extra-pointy toes, etc., which makes them preferable to store-bought socks.

• They can be practical and interesting looking, or dare I say "pretty," all in one.

• I can get a little wild with sock design and color since, especially in winter, they'll be in shoes and under pant legs, but only I will know my crazy socks secret, which will remind me that color will indeed come back in the spring rather than just being one of those wacky concepts that I sometimes hallucinate about.

For all that, though, I've only recently come around to knitting socks as a routine project. I attempted to make a pair several years ago, and things went so very terribly wrong (poor instructions, too complicated a pattern, wrong yarn, wrong size, unwieldy double-pointed needles (DPNs) creating ladders, holes in the gussets, I could go on...). I assumed I was not meant to be a sock knitter.

Then a whole slew of sock knitting books were published, and they were more interesting and had far better instructions and visuals than what I'd been using, which made the process look more do-able. I also learned magic loop technique (knitting small circumferences with one long circular needle), which means I don't have to knit socks on DPNs. And then there are all the YouTube videos - instead of trying to figure out something from text and pictures, I can see the technique in action. Knit Picks has a series of sock-knitting videos that are really good - clear instructions and demonstrations, and Kelley Petkun talking with her hands is hilarious.

I wanted to try knitting a pair toe-up since I like the idea of trying it on as I go to make sure it fits properly as well as eliminating the risk of running out of yarn before the foot is finished, not to mention knitting the leg portion until I do run out of yarn, so no leftover bits that I can't do anything with.

I got Wendy Johnson's Socks from the Toe Up book and actually squealed when I saw the gusset heel sock pattern because you don't have to pick up stitches in this pattern - just increases and short rows with no wrapped stitches for the heel. Love that! I also learned Judy's Magic Cast-on, which creates a seamless toe.

So using the gusset heel pattern, I started a pair of toe-up socks. However, I didn't want to do just stockinette stitch for the majority of the sock, so I went looking for a stitch pattern that would be easy to memorize and would give the top and the leg of the sock some texture and interest. I found Hermione's Everyday Sock pattern (yes, that Hermione), which is actually a cuff-down pattern, but looks just as good knit toe-up.

Combining the two patterns resulted in these:


And they don't look half-bad with shoes:


Knit with One Sheep Hill Superwash Merino fingering weight yarn in the Fading Roses colorway. I used Knit Picks Harmony wood 40" fixed circular needles size 2 for these. Great needles! Nice point, smooth wood-to-cord join, no kinks in cord when folded for magic loop.

I've got a tidy stash of fingering weight yarn that I use to make lightweight scarves, and it now can also be used for socks. When I look at sock patterns now, I'm just looking at the stitch pattern on the top and leg of the sock, as I can adapt it to my beloved gusset heel pattern. Oh, the possibilities!

Using the magic loop method on one circular needle or using two circular needles with toe-up socks also offers one other advantage - knitting two socks at the same time:


The same number of rows, the same height on the leg when they're worn, no having to keep notes on number of rows or changes made on the fly, and NO second sock syndrome!

This is my only concession to efficient knitting. I don't knit continental style. I don't knit backwards so as to avoid having to purl stitches. I don't do cable stitch patterns without a cable needle. In other words, I don't knit to be efficient. I knit, as the amusing T-shirt slogan proclaims, so I don't kill people.

This yarn is also from One Sheep Hill - a merino and nylon blend fingering weight in the Juniper colorway. The pattern is Gridiron by Anne Hanson (I unashamedly visit her blog regularly for the knitting and yarn pr0n, and maybe one day when I have more knitting confidence, I'll attempt one of her shawls. I do have two skeins of some deep dark green fingering weight yarn from Fearless Fibers...)

ghostly book review

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger


This novel is by the same author who wrote The Time Traveler's Wife (the book is SO much better than the film!). I had high hopes.


The story is about two sets of twins - Edie and Elspeth, and Julia and Valentina. The latter set are Edie's daughters. Now didn't I read somewhere that twins skip generations in families? Or am I making that up?


Anyway. Edie and Elspeth haven't spoken for many years. Edie lives in the US with her husband and daughters, and Elspeth lives in London, next to Highgate Cemetery. Her companion, Robert, lives downstairs. He is a volunteer tour guide at the cemetery, and he's writing his thesis about its history and inhabitants. Elspeth's neighbor, Martin, lives upstairs. He has OCD. He washes things, counts, enters rooms a certain way, and hasn't left his flat for months. His wife leaves him and returns to Amsterdam at the beginning of the story. She can't take living with him and his illness anymore, especially since he doesn't seem to want to get help for it.


A great deal of the story is taken up with Martin dealing with his OCD and his wife walking out on him. His storyline is the most solidly resolved of all of them in the novel. He is also the most believeable character of them all. It's obvious Niffenegger did a great deal of research to convey the OCD in a way that wasn't creepy or mocking in any way. You understand why he has his odd rituals. You sympathize with him. However, his storyline feels distractingly inserted into the main plotline, and I'm not sure how it's supposed to support the main story. Especially when his son makes a swift appearance at the end of the story and is suddenly a new focus for Julia. That came across as thrown in at the last minute.


Robert, in turn, is also dealing with his grief over losing Elspeth and getting to know her nieces. He eventually finds out what drove Edie and Elspeth apart, and it was something I'd anticipated toward the beginning when it was clear something had happened years ago between them. He goes along with things too easily. He's pining. It gets annoying after awhile. It's also not clear where he gets his income.


Elspeth dies of cancer, and leaves her flat and most of its contents to her nieces, with the stipulation that they live in the flat for a year and that their parents never set foot in it. After the year is up, they can do as they please - sell the flat and its contents and use the money for whatever they want. She also asks Robert to remove some papers from her flat before the nieces arrive. (This is how he finds out her Big Secret.)


Julia and Valentina are just out of their teens. They are extraordinarily close. They do everything together. They even dress the same despite how silly it looks given their age. Julia is the stronger and more outgoing of the two. She is Valentina's protector and sometimes caregiver. Valentina has a weak heart and also has asthma. They are mirror twins, so Valentina's organs are not where they normally would be. Instead, they are are opposite to Julia's.


Valentina isn't too keen on going to London, let alone living there for a year, but Julia wants to go, and they do everything together...


I liked Valentina's character better than Julia's. Valentina's nickname is "Mouse." At the beginning of the story, she is timid and weak. A kitten comes into her life (go figure). She changes and starts to gain some independence. You want to cheer her on. Julia is bossy and can't see beyond her and Valentina spending the rest of their lives together. Any other possibility doesn't occur to her. Even at the end, she is left stunned and disbelieving that things did not work out according to her plan. But then, she never really had a plan, other than maybe getting a dog.


You don't get to know Elspeth well, besides the inventory of what is in her flat and what others say about her. In a way, this makes sense. She's dead. But everyone has a point of view in this novel. To keep her in the story, she finds herself back in her flat after she dies. In fact, she can't leave it. There is very little she can do, other than snooze in a desk drawer. She is glad to see the twins when they finally arrive. She tries to make herself known to them. It takes awhile, but she finally gets through. Valentina can sense her, and even see her after awhile, but Julia cannot.


Valentina becomes friendly with Robert, and Julia does the same with Martin. After hanging around the flat and exploring London, Valentina is the first to get bored. She wants to do other things. Things that don't necessarily involve Julia. A rift starts to form between them, and Valentina becomes obsessed with getting away from Julia and gaining some independence.


Elspeth hovers nearby watching the proceedings. Eventually, the twins are able to communicate with Elspeth via ouija board and automatic writing, although this happened too quickly and conveniently for my taste.


This is also the point where the story started getting weird, and where I stopped liking it.


Now, if Valentina had simply taken her share of the inheritance money and gone elsewhere to start her own life, that would have made more sense in the plot. However, it wouldn't have been much of a story at that point, so I can see why Niffenegger went in a different direction to keep the story going.


No one seems to be disturbed by the ghost thing for long. And lots of people find out about it. That aspect didn't sit right. Neither did everyone only showing the barest amount of reluctance to go along with the absurd plan that develops at the end of the novel. Not enough shock. Not enough "Are you crazy?" and trying to stop it. Again, if there had been, the story would have stopped, and the author was determined to get to the end and wrap things up.


Oh, and about the ending. Abrupt and unsatisfying. Leaves you with a feeling of most of the characters' efforts not being worth it after all. In a way, the ending felt like a set-up for another book, but I doubt that's the case.


The descriptions of Highgate Cemetery reminded me of Pere Lachaise, and I think Robert's thesis might have been an interesting read. In fact, next time I'm in London, I will try to go to Highgate and pay my respects to Douglas Adams, George Eliot, and Christina Rossetti.


I was really looking forward to this book, especially after reading The Time Traveler's Wife. As I said above, I liked it up to a point. But when it started getting strange and absurd, it was too much of a jolt from the flow of the story that had been established and just didn't fit. I don't know if that was sloppy editing or what. I wanted to like this book, but I can't quite bring myself to do it.

his name is Oscar

Today is my cello birthday. I had my first lesson a year ago today. It's also the day before my dad's birthday, so it will be easy to remember. (And we're glad Dad's still around to have birthdays thanks to open-heart surgery nearly ten years ago.)

Anyway, I've had this new-to-me cello for about a month now. I definitely picked a winner. I play this one far more than I played my rental cello. It's amazing how the quality of something can make you want to use it more, or conversely, can very nearly make you go off it. Simply put, I make a better sound on this one, which is starting to improve my confidence. In fact, I play it so much lately, that the cats have taken to sitting near it as the time approaches for my evening practice. They are very into routine.

It's certainly a louder cello than the rental I was using. I got a new mute for it - the heaviest and most expensive I've come across. I'm hoping it makes my daily practicing more bearable for the neighbors. I got the mute from cellos2go.com, and I'm impressed with their service. Nice people.

And I think my cello teacher has a bit of cello envy. Every lesson, he says, " that's such a nice cello" or "that's really a beautiful cello." That's saying something considering that his cello is a professional-level one, custom made for him and likely costing at least three or four times what I paid for mine. He also gets a kick out of my minty green cello case. He says it has "personality." I'm not sure what sort of personality minty green reflects, but there it is.

My cello's name is probably not a surprise to people who know me, and know my interest in the writings of Oscar Wilde, which started in 9th grade English class after reading The Importance of Being Earnest. As I recall, there were only a few of us in the class who thought the play was funny. (BTW, I think the Colin Firth/Rupert Everett film version is hilarious. It's one of my go-to films, along with Bringing Up Baby and What's Up, Doc?, when I need cheering up.)

Oscar feels like an appropriate name because the original was always looking for beauty and perfection in art and in life, but he tempered it with a sense of humor. Consistently good intonation and rhythm still eludes me, even after a year, but I expected that - the cello is a damn hard instrument to learn to play, and I accept that it will take me the rest of my life to learn to play it well. However, even as frustration at trying to get better builds up, the process of learning and practice is still satisfying, and there are those moments when bad-sounding cello is funny. I suspect that the longer I play, the more I will need that reminder.

murderous book review

The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath by Jane Robins

Sounds like a fictional murder mystery, doesn’t it?

Actually, it’s a real case, written as creative nonfiction. Instead of boring, dry statements of fact, books like this are written in more of a literary style, so they read a lot like novels while still being factually accurate. This book does a great job of it. One of the better examples I’ve seen in awhile.

The events take place at the beginning of the 20th century, and the case comes to trial in the midst of World War I. There is a lot of detail given about each of the people involved, written in such a way that you see them as characters in a story.

The background:

A man met a woman somewhere in England and quickly began paying his attentions to her. Their courting was extremely short, and the man soon asked the woman to marry him. He assured her that he had steady work and a decent income that would keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Although she saw little evidence of this and really knew nothing about him, she accepted his proposal. At the time, women had little to look forward to other than working for a pittance that would barely keep body and soul together and/or being a financial burden and embarrassment to their families should they end up as spinsters. A financially poor woman getting on or moving up in the world independently was rare. So marriage, even to an unappealing or unsuitable prospect was, unfortunately, the only way out for most women who were not wealthy.

Before, or very soon after, the marriage, the man asked for whatever money the woman had, which in those days was his right. She turned it over to him without question. Also before, or very soon after, the marriage, he took his wife to see a solicitor and they made their wills, leaving all they each have to the other. Finally, at her husband’s encouragement, the wife asked the solicitor for a life insurance policy, the beneficiary of course being her husband. All this done, the husband made promises of a stable and happy life together, and maybe even some travel to Canada to his new bride.

He took her on a honeymoon in a not-very-exotic British town, and they went looking for a respectable but cheap boardinghouse to room in. The man inquired of the landlords or ladies if there was a bathtub in the house, as he thought it more proper that his new wife have use of a private bath, rather than having to go to a public bath house, which was a common practice at the time. If there wasn't a bathtub in the house, they looked elsewhere for lodgings until they found one that did.

I promise it gets more interesting.

One night, the man found his new wife drowned in the boardinghouse bathtub. Shortly before this, he had gone out to buy something for supper. He and whoever had been called for help tried in vain to resuscitate her. The man mentioned that his wife had suffered from headaches in the preceding days and had seen a doctor. As there were no marks of violence on the wife’s body, nor any evidence of poisoning, the cause of death was determined to be drowning as a result of a sudden fit or faint. She was quickly buried in a cheap coffin in a common grave at the man's request. He left the boardinghouse soon after.

And the kicker:

This tragic scenario occurred in 1910, 1913, and 1914 to the wives of Henry Williams, George Smith, and John Lloyd. As it turns out, these three men were in fact one man going by different names. His real name was George Joseph Smith.

To mangle a speech from Lady Bracknell to Jack Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest: To lose one wife in such a manner may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose three looks mighty suspicious.

Enter Detective Inspector Arthur Neil, the first person to make the connection that something is amiss. The trouble is, with no marks of violence on, nor evidence of poisoning in, any of the three victims, how could Neil prove they were murdered? At most, he could charge Smith for false signatures on documents because of the aliases.

That’s where Bernard Spilsbury came in – a doctor specializing in the new science of forensics, which at the time, was not thought of as reliable evidence. He was almost creepily obsessed with his profession – dissecting dead bodies in the morgue, and conducting chemical experiments in his home lab late into the night, keeping careful, detailed notes on what he found. He was called in to perform post-post-mortems on the exhumed bodies of the wives, and his testimony at the trial was the making of him.

What I appreciate most about the book is that Robins doesn’t shy away from pointing out the flaws in the investigation and in the conduct of many people at the trial. In other words, she points out that forensic evidence, let alone the manner in which it was presented in court, was certainly not as reliable at the time as we think it is now. (And even now, it often comes under close scrutiny for possible contamination or tampering.) Therefore, from a 21st-century perspective, the case probably shouldn’t have turned out the way it did.

I’m also impressed with Robins’ characterizations of Bessie, Alice, and Margaret and their families, along with other women in George Smith’s past. You might think they were gullible and desperate women, which naturally is why Smith preyed on them, but they had far fewer options then than women have now, so in the end, I sympathize with them. Smith’s defense lawyer is a master of oratory who could easily sway a jury, and yet, his final opinion of his client isn’t what you expect. The letters Smith wrote, and the ones he made his wives write to their families about how gloriously happy they were with him, reveal an arrogant, bullying, and greedy man (although it's interesting to note that he wasn't getting millions of pounds as a result of their deaths, only a thousand pounds or so from each, but perhaps he thought that would make their deaths seem less remarkable than if he was inheriting gobs of riches, and if he could have gotten away with it on several more occasions, he could have had a very tidy sum eventually). Conversely, on reading Spilsbury’s case cards (which is where things get a bit graphic, just so you know), it’s easy to see why the public thought of him as a real-life Sherlock Holmes.

I admit I don't read much true-crime thriller reading. However, there are two reasons why this book appealed to me when I read a blurb about it in New Scientist.

The first is that, courtesy of my mom, I’ve been watching a series on DVD called Murdoch Mysteries, which takes place in Canada close to the turn of the century. The series is based on books by Maureen Jennings. The main character, Detective Murdoch, is considered an eccentric by his colleagues, not only because as a Catholic, he makes the sign of the cross to himself whenever he encounters a dead body, but also because of his use of the new science of forensics in solving crimes. Since his methods get such good results, the mouthy, temperamental, likes-a-wee-drop Chief Inspector Brackenridge lets Murdoch carry on with his weird experiments, helped along by the good lady doctor working in the morgue and who cracks corny death jokes a lot, and an up-and-coming Watson-like constable who provides a lot of the comic relief. The whole thing is a fascinating look at forensics in its infancy (and Yannick Bisson is some nice eye candy, but they really need to lighten his make-up – he looks overly fake-tanned). The Magnificent Spilsbury is a real-life example of these techniques in use.

The second reason is that the scenario described in the book reminded me of a novel by Gladys Mitchell called Speedy Death, in which one of the characters dies in a similar way with no signs of violence or poisoning. Mrs. Bradley (the detective character) notes the water that splashed on both sides of the bathtub, which helps her figure out how the victim was murdered. The novel was published in 1929, so it’s possible that Mitchell may have heard of the Brides in the Bath case or read about it while doing research. (I make weird connections like this all the time; you get used to it.)

This was absorbing reading – I often extended my lunch breaks at work so I could “read just one more page.”

I got a copy from Waterstone's when I was in London in May. For some reason, Amazon isn't carrying this book, although it was published in April. But bookdepository.com has it.

That reminds me, Mom wants to read it now, so I’m sending my copy to her.