Love-Hate Relationships

When I was in college, my advisor suggested I take a graduate-level course. His only hesitation was that the professor who taught the course had a strong personality, and [my advisor said] I did, too, and he wasn't sure if the two of us would get along.*

I had a strong personality? Me? I wasn't sure if I liked that description or not. Later I decided I did like it -- not everyone likes or appreciates strong flavors. That's okay. Accepting that description of myself enabled me to get along with people who weren't thrilled with me at all, as if I were ginger or anise.

And I think the most interesting blogs I read are written by people with strong personalities. Those definite flavors, whether they are garlic or ginger, Brussels sprouts or fresh black pepper, come through in their writing.

Elizabeth Zimmermann, who wrote The Knitter's Almanac, The Opinionated Knitter, Knitting Around, and so on, was definitely a strong personality. And some parts of her writing I love, while other parts make me bristle.

Same thing with Flylady. I joined FlyLady's Yahoo group when it had 12,000 members. While I really appreciate the power of routines and cleaning up for 15 minutes by the timer, I have my mail filters set up to automatically delete reminders about wearing shoes.

My feet are bare except when I'm driving or walking in snow. Shutting them up in shoes would feel like walking around with my hands in those thumbless baby mittens. Plus my floors are usually up to "barefoot standard": I can't stand feeling sand or stickiness on the floor, so the floor is mostly clean. (NB: Legos are not counted as dirt.)

Enough ranting, now to today's pictures.
This is supposed to be the end of my vegetable garden. Several years ago I moved a couple of columbine plants here to recover when they were damaged. I tried to collect the seeds so they wouldn't do this, but then my son at age four discovered the fun of sprinkling the seeds out of their capsules, and I was too tender-hearted to weed them out when they started to sprout. So we have this. Where I am going to plant my tomato seedlings, I'm sure I don't know.


Apparently this is an Iris Year. I don't know what combination of summer baking and winter chilling brought this on, but it's beautiful. I love the faint, slightly lemon-y smell of irises. One of my earliest memories is of being spanked for pulling a fan of iris leaves off the rhizome and tearing it apart. (I think I was trying to find out where those inside leaves came from.) I guess I have forgiven the irises the spanking.

And here is the knitting. The camera really picks up the difference in the two cream/white colors, where I ran out of the thread I started with (two more balls from the stash used up, yaaaaay!), and worked in two new balls.

Unstretched, this Pi doily is now just over 8 inches in diameter. There are supposed to be 48 rows in this round before another doubling round. That's plenty of room for two repeats of the fern pattern that doesn't really show in this picture.

I discovered I had four more needles in this size, the bright purple ones in the picture. So I worked them in every fourth needle, to give myself a better sense of where the rounds start and end, and how far I have to go. This also enabled me to take out of the work two of the silver needles with thicker points than the others, which were really getting on my nerves.

If you've been counting, that means that, yes, I could have 16 needles in this thing, plus one in the bookmark and one to act as "flying pin".

*We got along famously, and I still remember Dr. R. with great fondness.

PS: Remember the brown thrashers? I was wrong. They are nesting in my rose bush. I hope the dogs don't figure that out!