A Bluestocking Knits

Good heavens, I’d almost forgotten how to log in to TypePad!

So what have I been doing, you ask, these long months?  Very little knitting, I’m afraid — two pairs of socks finished, one of which was actually started in January.  Now I am plugging away at half-finished projects, a row at a time, apparently — Vintage Velvet (wh. for some reason leaves me quite indifferent lately), a Muriwai Bathmat, a Harry Potter scarf in the Ravenclaw colors, not counting the projects that I found under the sofa cushions and stuffed back with a shudder.  I am, however, chain-reading fiction, racing through Joanna Trollope (loved The Men and the Girls), Anita Brookner (until I froze from the chilliness), Kristin Lavransdatter in the Tiina Nunnally translation (miles better than the old one, remind me to expound on this some time), and so many others that suited my fervid fancy at the time that my mind begins to boggle.  I suppose I don’t need to explain that I now have two children in school all day.

The Father-in-Law socks, finished at last, during the Summer Olympics.  I was so excited by Michael Phelps‘ races that despite working exactly the same number of rows on the second sock, it came out noticeably smaller than the first. 

This is Jitterbug in "Blue Parrot" — a quite apt name, I think.  Vivid isn’t in it.  The socks are presently residing in Laura’s sock drawer until cooler weather.  And still unmodelled.

We went camping at Lake Tahoe at the end of August with a passle of cousins.  They had just taken the kids down to the beach when we had our first visitor.  This was the baby bear — mama came back in the middle of the night to rattle the Dumpster.  I actually did not know that a Dumpster could be so very loud.

Am also deep into choir rehearsals, what with our first concert of the season at the end of October.  We are doing, among other things, Benjamin Britten’s "Hymn to St. Cecilia" with the small choir, and Monteverdi’s "Beatus Vir" and Charles Ives’ "Psalm 90" with the big group.  The Britten is lovely and strange, set to a poem by W.H. Auden, and the Monteverdi is just as wonderful as the first time I sang it years ago, and doubtless as wonderful as it was in 1630.  The Ives is seriously weird — if you don’t believe me, look at this —

Why the sopranos got off so easily, I don’t know.  Man, that’s a lot of notes.  And no help from the orchestra, either.

Tone clusters, Blue Parrots — I’m seeing an unexpected connection, here, all of a sudden ….