Enchanting Juno

Casa l'Orange

So as part of snapping my ass out of its recent funk, I decided to make some changes.

When I moved into my house, the walls were painted very dramatic colors:  Decorator white, Navajo white, snow white.

Bold.  I live in a big white box, basically.  I've always meant to do something about it.  Every once in a while, I'll visit someone who has taken the color plunge and I love it.
Then I come home, get out the color fans, sort through everything.......and end up too chicken to pick a real color.  So I back off 50% saturation and end up with a list of things that are too bright, or too pale or too, too, too pastel.

And so the big white box remained.

Recently I had a house guest, a guest who is not a chicken about color.  So I made her pick colors for every room in my house.  (When you stay here, you have to work for a night in the Bed of My Ancestors.)  And before I could revert back to the giant weenie I really am, I ran off to the paint store and came home with five gallons of ......tangelo.

I opened the can and saw...melted orange sherbet.  Oh dear.

I felt fear.  But halfway is bullshit.

I started to cut in.

As I had been instructed to do when I felt the fear urging me to run back to the store and cut the paint with 50% white, I called for reassurance.

Brace yourselves.

It looks fucking amazing.  Amazing.  And the whole room has a flattering golden glow, very important for those of us who are now 37.

(The weird footstool things are in the middle of being recovered, don't worry.  I've been thinking about felting a slipcover for them. Too much?)

Unexpected by product of new color?  Great display surface for new yarn.

8 oz of 80/20 corriedale/tussah.   Maybe a dk weight or a bit bigger.  This was the first thing I tried - and more or less succeeded -  to spin consistently thicker than lace weight.
You can see the textural disadvantage of spinning one ply 3 months after you buy your very first wheel, and the second ply six months later.  Uneven.  But I really, really love it. 

And I have to show you this.  Occasionally people have been kind enough to send me a little gift and usually I treat these things as private expressions.  But I want to say thank you publicly this time, for the gift of spring that charmed me and lifted my spirits and now hangs in the door to my kitchen where it brushes my hair when I walk under it and makes me smile.   (The color was an inspired choice, yes?)

Thank you Lanea.   

Perchance to dream.

The latest quirk in the negotiated settlement I call my relationship with my mother is insomnia.

I'm only an on again/off again sleeper anyway, so this isn't exactly breaking news.  But the fact that I now can only sleep for 30-90 minutes at a time while my mom is in the house may, just may, be an indicator that my belief that I am feeling calmer, more zen and able to cope with her is, in fact, a big fat lie.

She arrived on Thursday and I had an awful broken night, one of those where you open your eyes thinking that it is morning except why is it so dark and the clock says it is 30 minutes later than the last time you looked, which means that this deep, deep sleep you just twitched out of was only 40 seconds long.    These nights take forever.

Then she went off to visit friends for Friday and Saturday and I slept beautifully.  Late, even, on Sunday.

Last night she was back, and the same thing - 12:45, 1:15, 2:30, 4:50...finally falling into a deep, deep sleep, the first restful one...at 6:30.  Which I know, because that's when the alarm went off and I got up and put on my bathrobe and sat down to pet the cat...and that's all she wrote until the loudest thunder I've ever heard rolled at 7:20 and scared me vertical.  The gods threw another hissy while I was in the shower and the walls vibrated under my hand with the volume of sound.

I first noticed this sleep thing last year when I went to visit her, but I thought that was family conflict tension, since she and my brother were at General Quarters the whole time (me, I knit on Clapotis and tried to stay out of it).  Christmas this year it was a little bit of a sort of problem, but again, my brother was there and there's a lot of hostility in that relationship.  But this time it is just the two of us, there's no issue at hand, no ongoing fight, to source of tension specific or ancestral. 

There was no argument, and only the usual sort of minimal levels of criticism (this goes both ways).

We had a pleasant evening. 

This is so not good.

Therapy tomorrow.

In the meantime, I leave you with the following retail experience.  I've been looking for a stereo cabinet for a long time - I want something that doesn't look like a manly modernist glass sculpture - because I don't think stereo equipment is a design feature - and doesn't look like an industrial cabinet  and isn't cheesy particle board fauk (faux-oak) and doesn't cost 9 million dollars and also is big enough to hold not just the components, but also the CD binders, the tapes from high school that I still have and - brace yourself - the LPs.

(Dudes, I have Japanese import 12" Duran Duran singles circa 1983.  You'll have to pry them from my cold dead hands.)

It's taken me five years but I have a promising lead.

Each of those five doors slides from side to side, so I could hide the uglies when I wanted to, but have them open as needed without leaving the cabinet doors hanging open (which drives me wild with OCD rage.).  It isn't bad looking.  It doesn't look like a stereo cabinet.  It adds more shelf space.   It is, possibly, the thing I have been looking for.

So I went to P***1 to take a look.

It isn't on the floor.   The perfectly charming young women working that night go out of their way to help - calling their main office, calling several stores in California to find one which might have a floor model, looking through every piece of material they can find...but in the end all they can tell me is that it is a special order only, but if the compartments are not big enough, I don't have to take final delivery once it arrives in the store.

This is a logistical problem.  I can order it, wait for it to arrive at the shop, check it out, measure everything relevant....and return it if it isn't suitable.  But if I do take it I have to get it home myself.  If I opt for home delivery, I have to find a way to get it to the store if the size isn't right.

This thing is NOT small.  It will not fit in the Official Fiber Festival Vehicle.

I thank the charming young women and go home.    A standard stereo component is 17.1 inches wide.  The total width of the shelf unit is 54.375 inches wide.  Assuming 3/4 inch wood, allowing, say, and inch an a quarter for the trim overhang...... that leaves 16.5 inches for each of the cubbies. 

Shit.

Someone must have these measurements.  After all, P***1 has some kind of contractual arrangement with the no-doubt exploited 3rd world craftsmen who made it.  So I emailed the company detailing very specifically what measurements I am looking for.

In return - and promptly, I must say - I got a very cheery little email from Cindy B.

Dear ***,

Thank you for contacting us on our website and expressing your interest in our merchandise.

We regret that you were unable to locate the dimensions on our website for the Bookcase with Sliding Doors. This item measures 17.75"deep X 54.375" wide X 62.625" tall.

We hope this information is helpful, and please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.

Sincerely,

Cindy B.

Cindy, Cindy.......that's not what I asked for.

Does anyone know a carpenter on the Mid-Atlantic who'd knock something like this out for me for less than an arm AND a leg?  It's either that or sell my stereo and look for a micro system. 

Or is this one of those things where I get a bug up my ass and Go Too Far?

Satan's sweater.

Well, OK, the chocolate fountain was a cheap shot and a bit of a fake out.  What a big return, right?

But nearly irresistible.

I've gotten one or two calls from friends saying essentially, OK, fine, you're not sad anymore, you're just distracted, do your duty woman.  And they are right, so very right that I've been dawdling over my keyboard.  The problem is that taking this mental health break has shown me how much more time there is in my day without blogs.  And some of that time, I really like.  And maybe need for development in other areas.

We'll see how it plays out.

In the meantime, you may have heard that my best girl Stephanie came to see me.  You might think she's on a book tour, but I know it is just an elaborate ruse to come and stay Chez Juno and play with wool.  TMW came down from New York as well for part of it and we had the Best Sunday Ever sitting on the deck in the sun with knitting and each of our beverages of choice.  They made me start a sock.   Bullies.

There is a whole sock post simmering as a result, but for the short term let me give you something I call Still Life with Wool.

That's a bit like getting a tropical postcard saying Wish You Were Here, isn't it?

Oops.  Did it again.

Sometime around the time this picture was taken, as the sun crept off the edge of the balcony and the air cooled, I went inside to put on a sweater.  Except, I sort of don't have any.

How embarrassing for a knitter to have to admit this.

But the only sweater I've completed for myself is Truffle and it is not exactly spring weight.  I've got no fewer than three...no FOUR!... cardigans underway, but nothing done.  And I have very few commercially made sweaters because they are all usually boxy and definitely short in the waist for me.  Once you make room for the ladies, generally there's a lot of material flapping around the middle.  I've discussed this before.  Ad nauseum.

I do have something I am loathe to call a sweater.  What it is is a schmata.  A weird, shapeless, Bluefly cotton cardigan I have never understood what possessed me to buy and which I wear pretty much only to put over my jammies and take out the trash at midnight.  Yet I cannot seem to throw it away.  I have tried, but it always comes out of the Goodwill basket more or less on its own.  It basically exerts some strange compulsion over me.   Maybe it is a demon and I am possessed.  Which is as good an explanation as any.

Since I was cold and among friends I put it on and returned to the deck, making some passing remark about how much my mother hates the sweater.

S. and TMW look at me and say nothing with the words, only with the face. 

Clearly they think my mother is right. 

S says that she's never seen a garment so unflattering that  it puts 70 pounds on its wearer.  A pair of  Sunday morning sweats can put on an acceptable 15 pounds of visual bag, but that's the outside limit.  But this, this.... THING I am wearing is an abomination.  Remarks are made about my need to work on my self esteem.  And maybe my visual skills and spacial perception as well.

Things continued in this vein until I was curled in a fetal ball laughing on the bed, laughing the way that kind of hurts because the ab muscles are tender and spasmed and you've got no air left for your brain.  Then, the friends used my weakened condition to wrest the garment - and I use this world loosely and only for reference - from my hands. 

Stephanie started to look for the side seams so she could measure the bust circumference.    When she found them them her arms were almost spread to her full wing span.  She made Cassie hold one side seam at the level of the top of her head and then marked where the other side seam hit on its way to the floor.

It turned out that where it hit IS the floor.

Let us do some arithmetic.

Cassie = a little over five feet tall

Back measurement of sweater = Cassie

multiply Cassie by 2 = 10 feet.

Juno's bust = 48 inches

10 feet = 120 inches

120 inches - 48 inches = 72 inches

I've been taking out the garbage in a sweater with 72 inches of ease.

I tried to put it in the Goodwill bag but Stephanie wouldn't let me be so cruel to the person who might encounter the schmata's dastardly pull in the goodwill shop.    We put it in the trash.

How can it be wrong

to want something this much?

Something so... decadent, and charming and useless and space hogging and ridiculous?

Linensnthings.com

To go from ignorance of the existence of a thing to total, all-consuming desire for it in 11 seconds is something of a revelation.  Usually only wool makes me feel this way, or perhaps a first kiss.

And now a chocolate fountain.

But I am troubled.  I think of the champagne rivers down banquet tables, and toppling empires and let them eat cake.  It is the end of days, all for 49.99.

I was just looking for a new coffee maker.

My dearest blog,

I've been neglecting you, I know.  I am ashamed, you who have given me so much and asked so little for the past 18 months, you have enriched my life and brought me friends, and new passions and knowledge and hours of amusement.

I've been in a mood, a mood full of the echoing windswept emptiness of a moor in winter (and I've lived in Yorkshire in January, I know about these things), a bleak mood, a sour-tempered Heathcliff of a mood, tho' hopefully less abusive.

I cannot tell you the reason, dear Blog, because you will, through no fault of discretion, but through your very nature, share it with the Internet, and I am not ready for the Internet to be privy to such personal things.   I realize that you may have trouble believing this, given some of the things I have freely told you of, freely and vulgarly in some cases.  But there is is.  This is my limit.

And because of this constraint, this bleakness, I have slighted you for content, fallen into the most shameful cheap cat blogging and some really shocking fleece displays as a distraction from my dessicated words, my uninspired spirit, my shallow insights.  While it is possible that the world presently has no gifts of watermelon, no post office harmony, no joyful street fairs, no poetry, it is far more likely that I just cannot see them.

Please know, dear Blog, that I am aware of my deficiencies and am striving mightily to overcome them.  I will do better by you as soon as I am able.  In the meantime, I remain, as always,

Your devoted,

Juno