Gently Down the Stream
Having no clue what to blog about today and no knitting or spinning to show you (I'm making progress on the merino, but how many times can I show you pix of it and say, "Look, it's blue"?), I'm just going to drift along on the stream of consciousness and see where I end up.
We visited Miss B at camp yesterday, took her shopping and out to lunch, and moved her stuff from her old cabin to her new cabin. The cabin-switch thing is new: I never had to do that at camp. But she's now with a few girls she met last year, and she seems happy about that.
This is the pond they swim and boat in. Look, it's blue. It's quite lovely. (I presume it's a pond as it's on the small side.)
Taz started special-ed summer school today; it's a five-week program that aims to keep students from losing ground during the long summer break. Since the school lunch staff doesn't work summers, and eating is a major part of Taz's school program, I sent various foods in with him this morning. (The staff works with him not on eating politely or on eating specific things, just on eating: during his cancer treatment he basically stopped eating, not an uncommon thing, apparently, and ever since he's had tube feedings to make sure he gets enough nutrition, so we've all been working with him hoping eventually to get him to the point of no longer needing the tube.) I had forgotten to put a couple of things on my shopping list, though, so we stopped at the grocery store on the way home to get soy butter and chocolate milk, the kind in the boxes that doesn't need to be refrigerated. The soy butter tastes (to me) a lot like peanut butter, but isn't dangerous to people with nut allergies.
Nut allergies puzzle me. I don't remember anyone's ever having them when I was a kid, especially not the kind where the sufferer will die if one peanut molecule infiltrates the school building. All right, I'm exaggerating a bit here, and I'm sure it's no laughing matter if it's your child, but I would really like to know where all the allergies came from. Now there's a movement afoot, in our town anyway, to confine all food to the cafeteria: no more snacks eaten sitting companionably in a circle in the meeting area, no more birthday celebrations in the classroom. (None with food, anyway. If you ask me there's no such thing as a food-free celebration.) We've all learned to avoid sending in nuts — the invention of soy butter makes it a lot easier — so this just seems like another way of sucking all the fun out of life.
I just saw the new(ish) Verizon commercial again, the one where the spooky-looking woman appears in the couple's yard and tells them she's surprised they moved in after the terrible fate befell the previous occupants: "It's a dead zone. They could never get cell-phone service, and they ended up going completely insane." There's always one commercial shown during baseball games that I can't help liking; last year it was the "Naaah-flac" goat.
I'm thinking seriously of knitting a triangular shawl, a shape I haven't done before, and I have some ideas for lace patterns to use. They have to be easy to use in the standard triangular construction, which is to say tessellating and fairly small. What are your favorites?
We visited Miss B at camp yesterday, took her shopping and out to lunch, and moved her stuff from her old cabin to her new cabin. The cabin-switch thing is new: I never had to do that at camp. But she's now with a few girls she met last year, and she seems happy about that.
This is the pond they swim and boat in. Look, it's blue. It's quite lovely. (I presume it's a pond as it's on the small side.)
Taz started special-ed summer school today; it's a five-week program that aims to keep students from losing ground during the long summer break. Since the school lunch staff doesn't work summers, and eating is a major part of Taz's school program, I sent various foods in with him this morning. (The staff works with him not on eating politely or on eating specific things, just on eating: during his cancer treatment he basically stopped eating, not an uncommon thing, apparently, and ever since he's had tube feedings to make sure he gets enough nutrition, so we've all been working with him hoping eventually to get him to the point of no longer needing the tube.) I had forgotten to put a couple of things on my shopping list, though, so we stopped at the grocery store on the way home to get soy butter and chocolate milk, the kind in the boxes that doesn't need to be refrigerated. The soy butter tastes (to me) a lot like peanut butter, but isn't dangerous to people with nut allergies.
Nut allergies puzzle me. I don't remember anyone's ever having them when I was a kid, especially not the kind where the sufferer will die if one peanut molecule infiltrates the school building. All right, I'm exaggerating a bit here, and I'm sure it's no laughing matter if it's your child, but I would really like to know where all the allergies came from. Now there's a movement afoot, in our town anyway, to confine all food to the cafeteria: no more snacks eaten sitting companionably in a circle in the meeting area, no more birthday celebrations in the classroom. (None with food, anyway. If you ask me there's no such thing as a food-free celebration.) We've all learned to avoid sending in nuts — the invention of soy butter makes it a lot easier — so this just seems like another way of sucking all the fun out of life.
I just saw the new(ish) Verizon commercial again, the one where the spooky-looking woman appears in the couple's yard and tells them she's surprised they moved in after the terrible fate befell the previous occupants: "It's a dead zone. They could never get cell-phone service, and they ended up going completely insane." There's always one commercial shown during baseball games that I can't help liking; last year it was the "Naaah-flac" goat.
I'm thinking seriously of knitting a triangular shawl, a shape I haven't done before, and I have some ideas for lace patterns to use. They have to be easy to use in the standard triangular construction, which is to say tessellating and fairly small. What are your favorites?
posted by Lucia at
7:58 PM
5 Comments:
we have had many debates about peanut allergies here at work. A few people here have kids with food allergies and they are (mostly) adamant that schools/work/church/playgrounds stay food free. One person here, who has the kid with the worst allergies, has taken a different approach: she tells her kid to not eat food that she hasn't packed for him/given him/approved. She says "the world will not change for him"
Tell Miss B hi!!! from me. Give my little devil a hug for me.... i taught special ed summer camp and spent 6 weeks potty training 2 of the boys. camp's hard on everyone.
By
Mini, at 8:15 AM
Three ways to knit a triangle. 1. Cast on a whole heckova lot of stitches and decrease one on each row. Easiest way to incorporate lace. Well suited to vertically-oriented patterns.
2. Cast on 3 stitches and increase one stitch each row until you have gone mad or run out of yarn. Trickier to incorporate yo and decreases. Also well-suited to vertically oriented patterns.
3. Cast on 4. increase in first stitch. k1 Place marker.Increase in next stitch. k1.
Continue increasing first stitch of every row and first stitch after the marker. This produces a classy chevron shawl and is twice as tricky to incorporate lace. You should be able to kick the ass of this one, since you are particularly lace-gifted. Best for horizontally- oriented patterns.
Yay Miss B! And Yay Taz!
By
roxie, at 9:36 AM
Personally, I can never see too much of that beautiful blue fiber you're going to spin into yarn. But maybe that's just me?
I often think about the nut allergy thing, too. I've read a good bit about it, but no-one seems to know for sure why it's so common now. The "experts" make their guesses (which, when i think about it, maybe that's all they ever do about things - guess), but nobody knows for sure.
One of the QP's former classmates had nut allergies (among other allergies such as gluten). His Mom always supplied treats for him to have in school (like at a birthday party) and she taught him how to tell if he can eat a food or not - because in the real world, he needs to know how to do these things.
By
AngeliasKnitting, at 1:34 PM
I don't get the nut allergy thing either. I never even *heard* of it until I was in college. And now, as you say, it's pervasive! Very weird stuff indeed.
I love knitting triangles, and I bet you will too. :-) I know you prefer to roll your own, but there are SO many wonderful triangle patterns out there... Evelyn Clark is the goddess of triangles, but she has stiff competition these days.
By
Anonymous, at 1:52 PM
I wish I had something intelligent to say, but it's hot and I have to get up and stop looking at blogs! (did you hear about the girl in Canada that died a year or two ago because her boyfriend kissed her? He'd had peanut butter at lunch). Miss B at camp in ME or MA?
By
knitnzu, at 5:41 PM
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