Yeah. Well.

The thing about not having been deployed over the last eight years is that the deployable pool has gotten shallower over each of those years. By this time, we've been aware that this was going to happen at some point. But the last word was "Probably within the next two years" and "Most likely Afghanistan."

Now it's "Probably within the next six months" and still "Most likely Afghanistan." Which, given the news in the last couple of days, makes me sick to my stomach. Not that it's ever been that safe of a place.

So let's talk about something else, like mushrooms.

I grew up with a shelf of field guides and a mom who knew how to use them. Her interest was mainly trees and wildflowers, so by the third grade I knew trees by sight the way most kids learn the words for chair and table.

When I went to college, I considered getting an English degree. But then I had a flash of myself standing in a school trying to teach English, and the instant I got to college, I changed my major to horticulture.

By the end of my degree studies, I could rattle off the scientific names of a couple of hundred cultivated plants, everything from Asparagus esculentus to Zinnia elegans.

When I got married, I married a guy with a family tradition of foraging for edible mushrooms. Not just the easy obvious morels, which you have to work very hard and delude yourself greatly to get wrong, but the tasty stumpers or honey fungus, Armillaria mellea.

We joined a not-so-local mycological society, with a lot of knowledgeable mushroom experts, and learned more of the edible and yes, deadly species that grew in our often damp and rainy state.

For a while we were on the local hospital's list of people they could call if someone brought in a case of suspected mushroom poisoning.

It was a great group, and we enjoyed their forays (and their potlucks!) greatly. Sad to say, the group disbanded about four years ago.

So it's always interesting to come across a species that we don't immediately recognize.

And oh, yeah, knitting.Almost to the end of chart B. Which is boring. (I can say that now that I am almost done with it.)

And I'm up to a dozen needles in this one. I'm using pieces of wide rubber band on the ends, a tip I learned from knitting designer Diane Willett at our last lace group meeting.

I have longer circ.s on order from Knit Picks. Until they get here, I'll just add needles until I run out.

Back on the Maybe-Deployment Treadmill

I took the child up for the fourth and last section of the MEAP (science), stopped for gas, and headed home.

And I promptly got a call from my husband saying that once again there's a good chance his unit will get deployed.

*sigh*

We've faced this possibility so many times in the last several years that I think my panic mode is burned out.

Locked in at the Zoo

Many of the blogs I read had some version of the Remembering 9-11 post.

Mine was quiet in a way because of 9-11.

Because of 9-11, my husband's day job has him in uniform most days of the week and some days of the weekend.

Because of 9-11, instead of being called a "weekend warrior, hur hur hur", complete strangers come up to him in the grocery store and shake his hand or pay for his breakfast when he eats in a restaurant.

Because of 9-11, we spent the evening of 9-11 locked in the zoo!

Operation Military Kids is a program meant to lighten the part of the load that kids bear when they have a mom or dad who is in the military.

Through OMK, my husband, our son, and I went to the zoo with a bunch of other military families, were locked in when the zoo closed, and spent the night in Binder Park Zoo's Wild Africa area.

We had dinner and did some icebreaking activities. We had (microwaved) s'mores (a marshmallow and a square of chocolate bar sandwiched in graham crackers) and a campfire. We slept in sleeping bags in a screened building and woke up to the crowing of red jungle fowl.

This morning, we had breakfast and watched ostriches up close.

We watched as the bontebok, zebra, and giraffes were released into their enclosure for the day. (Can you spot the giraffe? A triangular light spot halfway up the slope?)This is a 19-acre area with two natural ponds. I was amused to see that the giraffes have browsed it up around the edges of the fence just like a giant horse pen. It's a big enough area that the animals don't wear it out. I had to stitch two shots together to get the whole width in:

Here's a zoom shot as they were let out. You can see the two keepers who followed them out and shut the gates that lead back to the barn where they spend the night, and one of the two baby giraffes just born this summer.
In the "I love my camera" department, I cropped out all but the bit with the mother giraffe and her baby.Pretty good for about a quarter of a mile away.

Later in the day the giraffes came to the overlook where you can buy part of their daily food and let them take it through the netting. Baby Giraffe stood patiently . . .
While his mother ate some lettuce.

And tonight we are all completely wiped out and looking forward to sleeping in our beds and not on a concrete floor.

Dancing Bear Falls Off the Ball

A while ago I got a call from a friend asking if I'd gotten an email she'd sent. Asking, because I hadn't answered it.

Well. I would describe myself as "not very organized" at the best of times. Sometimes, I have just enough energy to do the things that must be done, and none left over.

"Things that must be done" comprise a much shorter list than commercials would have you believe. On my personal list are things like breathe (so important! hold your breath and watch the second hand to find out how important), eat, drink, and sleep, and personal hygiene.

Blogging and email kinda falls off that list when things get tight.

So let's see, what have I been doing since the 6th of May?

I spent the last two weeks as Parent-in-Chief, while my husband went down to Arkansas for a hazardous material certifier school.

I took some pictures of apple blossom.I've read that my particular camera tends to blow out white highlights, and I have that problem in full sun. These shots were taken under a typical Michigan bright overcast sky. No blown out highlights here - I guess that's something to be grateful for!I took a picture of the deer tracks following the loop path that I mow at the south end of our lot.I caught the baby beech leaves just unfolding.

Over the course of the two weeks my husband was gone, I mowed the dratted grass twice, and then it rained the next day both times, causing the grass to instantly grow some more.

My lace group, whose meetings I have been missing very often and very much (they overlap with work), had a trunk show again. Since Kathy (Kirchner, link here) said she would open the sales room at 4pm, I drove up for the sale. I had a great time talking to my lace-making friends. Boy, have I missed these meetings.

Although I don't often get to attend meetings, not having the time means I do have the money to spend. So I bought two books: first, Knitted Lace Designs of Herbert Niebling, which is the brand-new Lacis translation of Eva Maria Leszner's Gestrickte Spitzendecken, and Sonja Esbensen's Kunststrick II.

I bought a pair of the Sew-Mate tatting shuttles, one green and one purple.

And (did you guess?) more thread, including more of the Valdani pearl cotton I love so much.

Saturday the child and I went to the Binder Park zoo down near Battle Creek, Michigan. This was supposed to be with his Cub Scout troop, but we didn't manage to link up with them.

Besides the great fun of spending his allowance in the gift shop, here was his absolute favorite part of the zoo: feeding the giraffes in the Wild Africa exhibit.Giraffes, ostriches, zebras, and several other species are free to roam in this large open area. Three of the giraffes came to the giraffe-head-height overlook where we could buy giraffe biscuits to feed them. This guy was the tallest of the three, and if you've ever succumbed to pleading puppy eyes, you know the exact feeling when we ran out of biscuits!

For me, my favorite part was after I drove home from the zoo, my husband was finally home. Right now he and our son are at the movies, and I am finally all alone in the house. Writing my first blog post in a week and a half.

Finally! Good News

Whew. After nearly a full week of worrying about possible deployment (I seem to worry with my stomach: I had a continuous stomachache for a week!), my husband finally found out Sunday that they had already found someone else to fill the open slot - on Wednesday!

I'd feel more like grumbling, "Well, they could have told you Wednesday" if I weren't so relieved. It was nice to sleep all night last night and not wake up in the middle of the night thinking of yet more other things I'd have to do if he was gone.

I'm not a person who worries about being alone or coping with stuff like plumbing. I did worry that I'd probably have to quit my job, not having anyone handy to watch our son, and about taking our son to Cub Scouts when my husband couldn't tell me either A) the address or B) the den leader's name! (He knows where the house is and that's apparently enough for him.)

I worry more about having to think up meals. I'd rather mow grass or shovel snow than cook.

But on to happier stuff.

I had a lovely birthday yesterday. It started out sunny, and I woke up thinking, "Cool! I got my Willow!"

The Society for Creative Anachronism has a whole system of awards and hierarchical things that I don't pretend to understand. The AoA (Award of Arms) basically says, "You're hanging out in the SCA." The Willow says, "You've been hanging out in the SCA and we notice you're good at certain stuff."

If you want to read alllll the Midrealm awards, the big long list is here.

Anyway, I was completely taken by surprise (thanks for nominating me, you guys!). Although it's not obvious in the photo, this scroll is illuminated in shiny gold. I've done just a little hand lettering, so I can tell you that a lot of fine work went into this piece. And it just goes to show that your basic obsessive volunteer will work for hours for the occasional emailed thank-you. (Thank you, Lady Hiordis Reginsdottir!)

In the morning, I knitted a little more on the socks I worked on Saturday at Vineyard Raids.

And later in the day, my parents came down to visit, and we went out to lunch. Mmm, pizza!

Here's how I know my husband loves me: he doesn't enjoy bagpipes, but he got me a bagpipe CD (Spirit of the Glen) because I love bagpipes.

But I think the nicest present was hearing "They got someone else to fill that slot."

No News / Not Sinking

No news on the maybe-deployment front. Argh. My husband has a drill this weekend and might find out more then. Meanwhile we're both as nervous as two cats in a rocking-chair store.

So how about this headline?

McCain pulling out of Michigan

I can't wrap my head around that one. What exactly does that mean?

I knew it was bad here, what with hundreds of thousands of jobs leaving the state, 8.9% unemployment, and a rank of either 3rd, 5th, or 7th highest mortgage foreclosures in the US, depending on who you consult.

Is Michigan sinking? How bad are things when politicians start leaving the state?

Last time around, I got really tired of hearing about red states and blue states, so it was kind of a relief to see this Patchwork Nation map. I live on the border of "Tractor Country" and "Emptying Nests", in a big patch of smallish family farms.

I wasn't really aware, until I started poking around, that having all these little farms around was unusual. We have some farmers who plant acres of corn and soybeans, but we also have apples of all varieties, peaches, sweet and sour cherries, blueberries (lots of blueberries!) and small fruits that don't ship very well like fresh red raspberries. It makes for really good eating, and excellent cider.

And that's only the fruit. I also drive by fields of pickling cucumbers, probably headed for Freestone Pickle. I drive by the pickling vats on my way to work.

I pass a pasture with either bison or beefalo grazing in it, and I keep trying to remember to bring my camera and get a picture.

It's sort of like living in the French countryside, as far as the variety of fresh local foods goes. A couple of representative links:

Lakeshore Harvest Country
Southwestern Michigan Farms & Markets
Michigan Lakeshore Wine Trail

We have chocolatiers, dairy bars, brewpubs, and sheep farms.

Among the reasons I'll never be a politician - I'm not leaving!

Oof.

New England asters, Aster novae-angliae (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae), that I rescued from the bulldozers a couple of years ago. Pink-y ones, purple-y ones.

They are starting to self-seed and come up in random spots around the yard. The place I got them from is now solid asphalt parking lot.

I was uploading a couple of pictures and feeling good that I had already taken away the old furnace parts to the scrap yard this morning, when my husband called and said, "Are you scared yet?"

He got a call asking if he wanted to go on the list to be deployed with a unit that is basically ready to go. They had a platoon sergeant, but something happened, and they need someone to fill the slot. If he went, he would have his drill this weekend, one week at home, and then leave.

Argh.

These last seven or so years have been very long, with roller-coaster emotions. I can't think about the possiblity of deployment all the time or I'd go nuts.

But it's always in the back of my mind. Just now it got dragged back to the front of my mind. It's hard to write about wildflowers and knitting when my mind is churning with what-ifs.

The title of this post was going to be "Dragon Skin Bag Gets Teeth".

After sitting for over a year, I was finally moved to pick it up and start knitting again. Teeth, ribbing, and then possibly a knitted-on edging.

But I'm distracted now. I forget what I was going to say about it.

My Busy Week

Not just this week, but last week, too.

I guess I didn't post about last week's washer breakdown. Yes, the same Kenmore front-loading washing machine that I replaced the speed control board and timer on last August.

Last Tuesday I opened the door after a white load to find that the bearings had finally given out on this washer. Which meant my formerly-white laundry got covered with tiny speckles and great big smears of blackish-brown bearing grease.

I knew the bearings were going, and last year when I was searching for parts and information to fix the washer, I read a lot about how bearing failure was a known problem in my particular washer. Now I guess I am going to learn more than I really wanted to know. If I can still find a replacement rear tub/bearing shell.

The repairs I did last year were relatively easy. They involved stuff like unscrewing screws and unplugging the connectors from the bad part, then plugging in the new good part.

This repair involves removing heavy parts not designed with female upper body strength in mind. For example, the concrete counterweights on the drum. Or the tub shell bolts that were tightened by gorillas with pneumatic tools. [glower]

Another thing that was going on last week, besides getting ready for the demo and calling the washer bad names was that my husband was away at one of the various National Guard things he has to go to. Drill weekends, annual training, schools, and other miscellaneous training things. Single-parent duty is not my favorite thing, and people whose spouses are deployed have my utmost respect.

Yet another thing we did last week, to redeem the day after the washer went spoing, was to make cakewaffles!

I read about these on Ravelry, but this was the first time I ever tried them. You take a cake mix (yes, you can make a scratch cake, go ahead!), mix it up, heat up and grease your waffle iron well, then you use the cake batter to make waffles!

So far we've tried a yellow cake mix and a devil's-food one. Our son was absolutely charmed with them, and they really did help make a breaking-things day better. (Hey, you could make a chocolate cakewaffle, top it with whipped cream and cherry pie filling, and call it a Black Forest cakewaffle.)

Yesterday I spent most of the day at the Trash Dash, where local schools race cars made out of trash: plastic bottles, bottle caps, foam trays.

Most of the schools send middle-school age kids, but our little school is so small that they let the 3rd through 6th graders compete. We heard, "What grade are you in?" more than once. But the kids did okay, and one of their made-on-the-spot cars came in second in the Engineering Design Challenge.

After driving three under-10-year-old boys there and back again and spending nearly an hour and a half total in the car, I was very ready for some all by myself time.

More Fun at the Unit Party

Another thing they do at National Guard parties is introduce and promote the FRG, the Family Readiness Group. (A military spouse's life is full of acronyms.)

The FRG is basically a group of spouses, mostly wives, who do stuff like organize kids' activities at parties, put out newsletters, and draft somebody to wear the Santa costume.

That's the stuff they really do, but their stated purpose is to provide support and services to the spouses of deployed soldiers.

And every time a commander talks about them, I hear a speech like this:

"What are you going to do if your soldier is deployed and the furnace quits or the plumbing needs repairs?"

The fluffy, high-pitched answer I guess I'm supposed to be giving is, "Goodness, panic, because as a woman plainly I have no idea what I'm supposed to do!"

But the answer in our house is a little different.

Actual conversation this fall:

Husband: "My watch is broke."
[When he says "broke" and not "broken," there is a whole subtext that reads, "Irritating inanimate object has deliberately stopped working to thwart me."]

Me [taking watch and looking it over]: "What's wrong with it?" (Band looks fine, crystal is not broken -- watch isn't ticking.)

Husband, flatly: "It's broke."

Me: [understanding dawns] "Oh, you mean it needs a battery?"

Husband, giving me a look that says "Clearly those powdered-sugar donuts you eat have made you simple": "It's broke."

The FRG speech that would apply to me is, "What are you going to do if your soldier is deployed and your son says, 'Mom, I just can't eat any more canned soup, frozen pizza or fish sticks!' ?"

But I've never heard a commander give that one.

It's Not How Most Parties Start . . .

Saturday was my husband's National Guard unit Christmas party. The party activities were supposed to start at 10 am, but they had opening formation at 8 am. Since he is now based at an armory a good hour's drive away, we all went in one car and left at 7 am.

This meant my son and I were there (along with many of the other spouses and children) in time for . . . the sexual assault video. Including a narrator reading off a whole explicit list of what counted as sexual harrassment or assault and a rather lame dramatization of a sexual assault.

Quote from video: "I can't believe you had a relationship with the Major!"

Quote from me: "Do real people actually say 'I can't believe you had a relationship'?"

Quote from husband: "No, they say something like, 'Oh my god, I can't believe you were blanking the blank! He's such a blank!'"

(And pffft, there goes my nice award.)

Eventually we figured out that if we moved to one end of the room we were far enough away from the speakers to avoid the rest of the sound from the video. Whew.

Later quote from me: "That's not how most parties start, with a sexual assault video."

Husband: "Some parties, that might not be a bad idea."

Short Essays. Or Paragraphs.

On Ground Hogs

The ground hog or woodchuck, Marmota monax, is a marmot, but I'm sure if you told someone in Michigan, "I saw a marmot," they would probably think you said "varmint".

The woodchuck is mostly regarded as a varmint (vermin, pest) in Michigan. The Department of Natural Resources website says "Woodchuck may be taken year-round with a valid hunting license."

They dig deep holes and lots of them, and are not the farmers' friend. I often see them in fields, standing up like a little man in a very baggy fur suit. Given the evidence of the small one in my yard, at least some of them must be little women in baggy fur suits.

I've never seen one fling itself at a shovel blade like that before. The combination of a baby animal, an animal I had always thought of as relatively inoffensive, and its ferocity was what got my heart going.

On the National Guard

Although I try not to make this a "military spouse" blog, my husband has been in the Michigan National Guard since 1983. His day job is at a National Guard armory, and he wears the pixilated camo ACU every day. Sometimes his job involves moving vehicles around the state. More than a few times he's come home and said, "Someone bought us breakfast this morning."

They see guys in uniform and they go to the cash register and pay their tab.

This has a strange feeling for my husband. Well, for me. So far, he has not been deployed overseas. We know that could still happen. But sometimes I think he feels a little guilty that people are paying for his breakfast when he's not deployed.

On the other hand, it is the National Guard. Although it's always at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to equipment upgrades and funding, the National Guard is supposed to be there when stuff happens like Katrina or tornados in Kansas. "There" meaning "here," as in, in the country, available with fuel blivets and water tankers, mess tents and construction machinery.

Somebody has to be here, and I guess it's the ones who are here who people are going to see and buy breakfast or lunch for. It's certainly better than being screamed at or called a baby killer.

Which is a roundabout way of saying thanks to that guy who ended up paying for the piece of turtle cheesecake my husband brought home the other day.

On Fixing Washing Machines

I've tried to fix a washing machine (both top and front loader) four times now, three times successfully. All three of the successful times involved clearing a clogged impeller. (I do know enough to follow obvious safety precautions, like unplugging the machine first.)

The impeller is just a fan-like device that spins and pumps out the water. If you throw a sweat sock into a fan (don't try this at home) and jam the blades, that's pretty much what has happened when you get "washer fills but won't drain". (N.B. you can even jam and stop a lawnmower if you run it over a knee high sweat sock. One day I will share how I know this.)

My big beef about modern washing machines is that they usually don't filter the water during the cycle, before the water is pumped out. So any lint or floaty stuff in the water has to go through the impeller and possibly jam it. When I was a kid, my mom had a top loading washing machine that pumped the water through a lint screen that she could clear at any time during the load.

These days, if a washer even has a lint "filter", it's hardly worthy of the name -- instead of a screen, it's a goofy-looking plastic device with big stick-y up-y teeth. My front loader just has a series of holes in the rubber door seal that the water can randomly slosh through, but nothing systematic to get the lint out of the water before it is pumped out.

The take-away lesson on this is if a 27-year-old rug disintegrates in your washer [ahem!], it's a good idea to fish out the bits by hand before you let the washer hit the drain cycle.

(But it probably should be that there's a time when even a rug you wove yourself should be thrown out instead of washed.)

Now I Remember . . .

Now I remember why I avoid the news. So many days the only things that make any sense to me are the ones that are on my knitting needles, or on someone else's.

I stopped listening to the news on the radio regularly back when our son was getting old enough to listen and respond to what he heard there. At that time, guys from my husband's National Guard unit were deploying to Iraq.

(I quit watching TV, news and all, a long time before that. I can't even remember . . . might have been back in the '80's. Strangely, I miss fewer cultural references than you'd think. They must dye the ether. Or something.)

It was just too depressing, too nerve-wracking, to answer questions about things the newscasters would say. They would say something like, "Eleven soldiers were killed in Iraq today," and the child would say, "But they weren't really dead, right, Mom?"

I already felt nervous enough about whether my husband would end up deployed, without having to figure out how to answer questions like that. So I stick to reading the news in the newspaper.

If I need more news than that, or want a different perspective, I pick up a lot of news from the international email groups I'm on, and there is always "Watching America" and Newseum.

I don't view it as hiding from reality, although what's so great about reality these days? It's all about what I choose to concentrate on.

The word "concentrate" is directly related to "concentric", like the concentric circles that make up a bull's-eye target. What am I ringing myself around? Positive, creative stuff that makes me happy, that spreads a little joy in the world, or horrible, crappy stuff that makes me want to scream, grab someone by the ears, and head-butt them like one of the Nac Mac Feegle?

"Ach, here's a headful o' dandruff for ye, ye bogle!"

(Not that I don't think that many people in higher office wouldn't benefit from a good headbutting, mind you.) (Extra points if you can untangle a triple negative.)

I Love Project Gutenberg

And other free sources of old out-of-print patterns.

Even if the patterns are a bear to figure out. You, too, can learn knitting instructions like "narrow", "fagot", and "increase as shown".

Project Gutenberg file 16605 is The Ladies' Work-Book Containing Instructions In Knitting, Crochet, Point-Lace, etc. If you were looking for old instructions for crocheting a miser's purse, look no further than the "Handsome Purse" found here. (Bearing in mind the part about "a bear to figure out".)

How about the On-Line Digital Archive of Documents on Weaving and Related Topics?

Lady Katharin L. Hoare's The Art of Tatting and ten monographs on tatting by MML. Riego de la Branchardiere, can be found under "topics", then "Tatting".

The knitting documents were not as yummy, but they do include Natura Exenterata: or Nature Unbowelled, circa 1655. (This is not the whole document, but includes the pages on fingerloop braiding, knitting, and dyeing.)

We had a "family day" Friday. The kid had no school. (Thursday was the end of the marking period.) The husband had the day off for Veterans' Day. We did a lot of driving in lovely November sunshine, did a lot of errands, had a couple of hours at home, and went to a canton meeting in driving, pouring, blowing rain.

I meant to post about Veterans' Day today, but we had some more difficulties with our phone line. (See "driving, pouring, blowing rain".)

My husband has been in the National Guard since 1983. Things have certainly changed in the last twenty-three years. For a lot of those years, if I mentioned that he was in the Guard, I was about 75% likely to hear, "Oh, a weekend warrior, hur hur."

I don't hear that much any more. In parades, when the military units walk by, people clap instead of standing on the sidewalk and talking. On the occasions when we go out as a family when he's in uniform, complete strangers will come up to him in the grocery store and ask to shake his hand. Part of his job involves moving vehicles around the state, and when they stop for breakfast, people have paid for their breakfasts. Once a woman tried to hand him money!

What I hear these days is, "Thank you for what you're doing." They might have no idea exactly what he is doing, but in their minds, he stands in for all the deployed troops. It's touching, and somewhat embarrassing. He says, "I don't know what to say when people come up to me like that."

So I'll say it: You're welcome.

9/11 (and 9/12) Reminiscences

Now that it's September, I've been thinking about 9/11.

On 9/11, our son was two. My husband was a full-time stay-at-home dad. I was working full-time in corporate America, in an office furniture industry suffering from the popping of the dot-com bubble.

That particular day, my husband was working a man-day at one of the National Guard posts in Michigan. My mother was watching our son, her only grandchild. I was sitting at a computer all day, maintaining a database.

My cube neighbor's mother called her at work to tell her a plane had hit one of the World Trade towers. Radios went on, internet news websites were called up. Somebody even turned on a television in one cubicle.

I went out at noon to eat my lunch in the beautiful fall weather. All the air traffic was grounded. There was not a jet contrail in the sky anywhere. (We live under the Detroit to Chicago flyway. There are always jet contrails up there.)

I think I had brought some tatting with me, and after I ate my sandwich, I worked on it. It was sane, normal.

I went home and found condolences from internet acquaintances in Sweden, Australia, Germany, all over the world, over what had happened.

The next morning, I walked across the parking lot with my cubicle neighbor & friend, J., and we talked about the news on the way in. I put down my coffee and changed into dress shoes. (It was a big parking lot.) I was leaning down to turn on my PC, when the manager, the guy who rarely spoke to the likes of me, came in and said, "Would you come with me, please?"

Uh-oh. I knew this couldn't be good. People had been downsized all around me all summer. I brought my coffee along, and made small talk about the previous day as we walked to Human Resources, and a little conference room with an HR rep. The box of tissues on the table did not give me confidence, so I was not too surprised to hear that the industry had not been doing well, and unfortunately, mine was one of the positions that was being downsized.

However, 9/11 had just happened yesterday. I was alive, and I knew where all of my immediate relatives were and their states of health. The big boss excused himself as quickly as he could, and the HR rep went over severance, COBRA, unemployment.

I learned that I would have the day off with pay, and about two hours to clear my personal belongings out of the cube and say my good-byes. For a brief instant, I felt worried and responsible about the conversion project I had been working on, as a company that had just been bought was switched to our system. Then I said something to myself that I would repeat over and over: "They downsized me. That is no longer my problem."

I went back to my cube. J. said, "Oh, I'm so sorry!" One of the supervisor-level bosses came in and tried to be sympathetic. I began deleting personal emails and files off my computer, and I sent emails telling a few people that my job was no more. I peeled baby pictures off my cube walls, loaded a box or two onto my office chair, and wheeled it into the lobby. I walked out and got my car from the far reaches of the parking lot, and parked right up front, in the visitor's spot, that would normally have gotten me a reprimand from Security, to transfer the boxes.

I didn't know what we were going to do, now that the full-time wage-earner of our household was unemployed. Fortunately what did happen was that two weeks later my husband got hired for one of the many jobs he had applied for in the previous nine months.

But since the country was in an uproar, he worked gate duty and whatever else was needed at Fort Custer for those two weeks.

It was a turbulent time in our lives. On the one hand, it was hard to be really upset about losing a job when the day before so many people had lost their lives. On the other hand, decidedly non-domestic me had been thrown overnight into the role of stay-at-home mom. Meanwhile, my much more domestic husband had been catapulted into the wage-earner role.

Five years later, I don't miss corporate America a bit. (Well, except for the dental plan.) But it's probably time to venture back out into part-time work now that our son is in school all day.

Prose Works

This is my "neighbor" to the north across the road from the driveway.

In the foreground, soybeans, then dwarf fruit trees (apples, if I remember correctly), and in the background, a woodlot.

Oops, I seem not to have taken the west and south pictures off the camera's memory card.

Early this morning my husband left for his third two-week annual training session of the summer. He's been in the National Guard since 1983. His unit is being reconfigured, or whatever the official term is, from an armor unit into some kind of reconnaissance unit, so this will be the last time they are together as Company A.

Last night he said, "I've packed up the camera to take it with me, since this is our last AT together, so that's where it will be when you go looking for it."

I said, "Two weeks with no pictures?!?"

We do have a scanner, but this new one is not as good at scanning anything thick. And I find the scanner software irritating to use: full of ads for the manufacturer's other products, plus it makes assumptions about dpi and the save directory that can't be permanently changed. Every time I use it, I have to go in and change them to the size and directory I want.

So. Two weeks with no pictures!

I am nearly done with the purple socks I started back in June. The summer has been going fast. I'll have to hurry if I want to finish them in July. I only have a few more rows of the cuff to knit, and then I'll do the Kitchener or tubular or grafted bind-off (whatever it's called) and they'll be done.

Yesterday I went out in the evening, when it was only 82 degrees F. (and 66% humidity) and picked some more blackberries. After the blackberry "drought" of last year, so far I have a dozen pints and four quarts canned, and lots more berries ripening. I am going to keep canning by littles until I'm tired of it. Then I think I'll bake a pie.

One of the things that is fascinating to me (many things are fascinating to me) as a horticulturist is the variety in the blackberry plants. I see some that are usually three-leaved. Some are usually five-leaved. Some are fairly weak-stemmed creeping or trailing plants, with flowers in the leaf axils all along the cane. Some of them only bloom towards the center of the plant.

Some are strong, thick (thorny!) canes that stand up straight and don't even droop at the tip. (Last night I picked berries off some of these, and some of the berries were up over my head!) I even have some that are thornless, which you might think would be desirable: but those plants also blossom very scantily, and what is the good of a thornless blackberry less the berries?

Being a person who likes to know what she is looking at, I opened my Peterson Wildflower Guide and read:

Brambles (Blackberries, etc.) Rubus

Most of the plants of the genus Rubus are woody, prickly, or bristly shrubs, outside the scope of this book; most are problems for the specialist. Gray recognizes 205 species in our area. See A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs for a small selection.

"Gray" is Gray's Manual of Botany. "Our area" is "northeastern/north central North America".

Although I have a whole shelf of various field guides, I don't have the Peterson tree & shrub guide, just the Audubon and the Golden tree guides. From what I understand of the blackberry species, they are just as happy to cross with each other as the various squash species. So I probably have all kinds of happy hybrids growing out there.

Today is Saturday, so I can look forward to the fifth pattern from the Sampler M KnitAlong group (see button in sidebar). And I better hurry and finish knitting pattern 4!

Knitting for peace

I read about it too late to post about it until now, but I spent some time yesterday knitting for peace. Both for personal peace, as I was working on tax forms and needed all the peace I could get, and world peace.

I don't post about it much here, but my husband is in the National Guard. He hasn't been deployed so far, but guys in his unit have been. The possibility is always there, in the back of my head, and sometimes in the front. I think about and hope for peace all the time.

The whatever-it-is cloth is getting longer. Garter stitch pulls up more than the moss stitch borders. I can see I need to put some more short rows in the center. Only another inch or so, plus some rows across the middle, until I work the top border.