Something New from Something Old

About a year ago, I read one of Deborah Newton's older books on designing sweaters and then bought used copies of many of the reference books from her bibliography. Most of these books were available on Amazon, Abes's books or Halfprice for a fraction of their original price, plus shipping. Some of the books I was not able to get so cheaply was a series called 'Bauerliches Stricken,' which is a set of three books, written in German, and published in 1983, by Lisl Fanderl.

I currently only have books 2 and 3 of the series, and haven't been able to find book 1 for sale on its own. The books are stitch dictionaries and the patterns are complex and appear to have been designed for knitting in the round, because cables are worked on consecutive rows, which would not be a problem if you are always working on the right side. And most of the example garments shown in the book are socks.

It is always my pleasure to enable the relaxation of the children

We are on vacation in Oxnard, renting the beach house we usually rent for our 'escape the heat of the Los Angeles' and lucky for me, my daughter Natalie's friend Jen, who spent part of her high school years in Germany, is visiting for the weekend and has helped me translate some of the key passages in the books. My husband had already translated the title and said that it means, "Craftsmenlike Stitches." Some helpful previous owner of book 2 had figured out the chart symbols, which are not the standard ones, and taped in a translation in English, for which I am grateful.

With all this help, I have been able to use these books to develop some chunky headbands for a yarn company that kindly sent me samples of some of their new yarns. We took photos of Natalie and Jen wearing four of the designs this morning. Below is the book's chart for a pattern from Innsbruck, Austria, and my slightly simplified version of the inset of that pattern on the right. Since my pattern is being worked back and forth, I modified it so that none of the tree branches start on a wrong side row, because that would just be too difficult.

I am just hoping that there are some knitters out there who will not mind cabling on the wrong side of their work. It's fun and easy, really it is...

From cast off cardigan to cherished creation

Do you know that there are very few yarn stores left? Those places where you can walk in and browse with your eyes and feel the softness or prickliness of the wools? I was highly critical of our local Joann's poor selection of yarn, until they went and closed that store and my nearest nearest Joann's is now 12 miles away. A knitting store just blocks from my house lost their lease when the property was sold and a Walgreen's was built in its place. There is a lot of yarn for sale online. I have bought from Knitpicks, Jimmy Bean's and Webs. They all have nice yarns and some of it is affordable, but the really good stuff; such as cashmere, and very fine merino, is super expensive.
Also, it is very easy to make mistakes color matching and the softness and pliability of the yarn can't be judged from an online photo. Online yarn stores don't offer samples (very foolish of them in my opinion), so you can't see before you buy. Also, I have to pay for shipping. So if I don't like the wool, I have to pay to return it.

What's a knitter to do? What I am doing now, which is an experiment, the success of which has not been entirely established, is creating my own yarn library, or "stash" as knitters like to call it, by recycling used sweaters. Luckily I live near a Goodwill, Salvation Army, and two other thrift stores. These carry cashmere sweaters, merino, and silk mixes. Salvation Army has 50% off days, and Goodwill sells almost every sweater for $4.99. Such a deal!

Selecting sweaters:

Every month I visit these stores and buy sweaters. So far this has been a summer hobby so I don't know if there will be as many sweaters to buy, or at such cheap prices, come winter. Lots of people clean out their closets of winter clothes in the summer and I have bought about 100 sweaters. I pass over the felted ones produced by someone's laundering mistake, and also the ones with moth holes, and buy only the most pristine of the sweaters.

Washing and Unwinding: 

This tutorial on unwinding sweaters got me started and I then tweaked the process a little as described below.

After machine washing the sweaters on a wool setting and hang drying them, I unravel the seams in this order: neckband, side seams - wrist to hemline, shoulder seams. This order is the reverse of how the sweater is assembled. I use the Royal ball winder to creating center-pull balls of yarn. I clamp the sweater fabric to something, load the loose end onto the Royal ball winder, wrap the end around the slot about ten times to anchor it firmly, and then unravel directly. When I encounter a break in the yarn, I hand felt it together rather than tie it. Hand felting is done by overlapping (in parallel) the two broken yarn ends by 1.5 to 2 inches, wetting the yarn ends a little, then rubbing between the palms of your hands. The moisture and heat produced from the rubbing cause the fibers of the two pieces to lock together. This is working very well. The wool that is unwound will have a lot of kink that will stay until the wool is soaked, which I do only after I have plied the wool into a thicker yarn (more on that later).

It is important to be able to find the center-pull end of the ball later. Unfortunately when you remove the ball from the ball winder this end till tend to retract into the center of the ball. To avoid this, remove the 10 winds that you made around the slot of the ball winders shaft, hold them in your hand, then remove the ball.

Creating a library for my stash of yarn:

To make identification and coordination of colors easy, I made color charts out of large index cards, one per each of these color families: blue, yellow, red/orange/coral, aqua/teal, green, tan/brown, gray, pink/burgandy, and purple. I staple a sample of each sweater's yarn to the appropriate index card, uniquely label the sample, then put the actual balls of yarn in a ziplock bag with the label on the bottom seam. This way I can match colors easily, then find the balls of yarn in my storage closet. Each color family has a shelf in the closet. Here is the "Blue" card and an example ziplocked, labeled bag of yarn:

The huge amount of kink in some of the yarns is shown in the samples. This kink can only be removed by soaking and hanging the yarn to dry with weights -- more on that later.

First attempt at knitting this yarn (Lesson in what not to do):
From reading about commercially produced sweaters, I know that yarns used in them, if they are multiple ply (more than one thread of yarn), the yarns are not twisted together. From this I deduced that I could combine four strand of the unraveled cashmere yarn together without twisting it. I designed a little headband for my daughter Tessa and started knitting with four separate strands. This was not so easy because the yarn tended to split. It was also hard to fix mistakes or tear out because I had to account for each of the four threads and not lose any of them. The kink in the yarns also made things just a little more difficult.

I finished the headband, soaked it in warm water and soap, rinsed, blocked it, and this is the result:

The slight unevenness in the stitches, especially apparent in the purl background, is because the yarn was not soaked and weighted before knitting to release the kink. And after knitting the piece from kinked wool it is not possible to weight the yarn to assist in straightening it. Some of the kink came out by soaking it after knitting, but not enough in my opinion.

The pattern for this headband is available at Margaret Holzmann's pattern shop on Ravelry.

Unexpected Outlay of $ on Equipment:

It is ironic that part of why I got into recycling yarn was to save money on yarn. In this phase, I spent about $400 on equipment. Not to mention the additional closet space required to store all this stuff...

Twisting: I wanted the yarn I was knitting to be like yarn I could buy commercially. That is: twisted, not prone to splitting, and straight -- not kinked. I had already determined that I did not want to soak single strands of cashmere to get the kink out because the yarn was so fine that it would become a tangled mess. So I decided that the right order was to twist the kinked yarn together into a multiple ply, worsted weight, then soak to remove kink, and dry the hanks. I learned that a spinning wheel could twist the yarn quickly.  Spinning wheels are expensive but I found a good deal on a used one on the Ravelry spinning equipment group. The seller lived 20 miles from my house and asked me to pick up the wheel. She teaches spinning and when I picked up the wheel she gave me a demonstration of spinning and plying. I found a plying tutorial to get me going. My spinning wheel is a Schacht Ladybug, which is a danish modern style, smallish beginner's wheel.

Yarn has to be plied in the opposite direction of the twist of the individual strands. My cashmere strands, which are 2-ply, are twisted counter-clockwise, so the individual strands must be plied (combined together into a yarn composed of several individual strands) in the clockwise direction. I didn't want to waste good yarn, so at first I practiced plying with some old acrylic yarn.

After practicing for an evening, I moved on to plying my first ball of cashmere. To ply, I placed four center pull balls on the floor around my feet. I felted together the four separate strands and tied that to the leader on the bobbin. At first the yarn I plied was under-twisted, which I discovered only after I had soaked and dried it. An easy fix was just to run the yarn  through the plying process on the spinning wheel again to give it more twist, re-soak and hang-dry.

Once I had plied together the four strands, I unwound the yarn on the bobbin onto a niddy noddy to produce a hank. Following a tutorial on setting the twist in plied yarn, I tied the hank in 4 places then soaked it in warm lightly soapy water, "fulled" it (wacked it again and again onto a towel spread out on my counter), and hung it up to dry with some weights at the bottom to help straighten out any remaining kinks. After the hank was dried, I put it on my Swift (I found this very modestly priced Swift at Overstock), and rolled it into a ball off the Swift. This was amazingly easy.

I plied four strands of cashmere together, created hanks, soaked, and hang dried with weights, and then knitted them into sample gauges with U.S Size 5 needles. After blocking, this is what they look like:

The blue hank is composed of four different cashmere strands from the blue and purple families. The red hank is composed of two strands of an orange/pink color, a red strand, and a forth strand that was made from felting together some waste strands in the pink/burgandy family. It is this strand that creates the striped look. This strand started out (top to bottom) as burgandy, the hot pink, then light pink, then red. I really like the way this technique turned out although the colors are a little strong.

Based on the standard gauge for yarns, the weight of this 4-strand cashmere is light worsted. My swatch is 24 inches stitches wide, and so has 20 stitches per 4 inches of width. See the chart snippet below from the Craft Yarn Council's standard yarn weight page.

My next step will be to experiment to see what weight I can get from plying 5- or 6-strands of 2-ply cashmere. Stay tuned...

What Not to Wear (times 5)

My daughter Hannah is a perfectionist. I am not saying that she is a perfectionist in every aspect of her life. A quick look at state of her bedroom floor will confirm that she is less than perfect when it comes to keeping her clothing in her drawers. But she is a perfectionist in anything relating to taste, art and appearances (that is, outside the home). This year she is a senior in high school and she decided she would like to attend a dance. She had many invitations to dances last year, and disappointed many would-be suitors. After receiving two invitations to prom last year, she made a general announcement to all who would hear that she would not be going to prom, period. And she received two more invitations after that.

But this year is different. It is her senior year, and she doesn't want to miss out on what remains of the high school experience. The first step was to get a boy to ask her. It couldn't just be any random boy; it had to be a boy of Hannah's choosing. Hannah chose a boy who has a very large group of guy friends and does not really have any girl-friends. Getting this boy to ask her to homecoming was going to be a little challenging, but Hannah gave herself a few weeks lead time during which time she talked him up daily between classes (they have several together), and generally wore him down with smiles and attention. After confirming no less than three times via his friends that she would say 'yes' if asked, the boy finally asked her in a most creative way. Driving home from school two weeks before the dance, a car pulled out in front of Hannah, cutting her off. A sign was taped to the back of the car saying, "FOLLOW US HANNAH" Out of the sunroof popped a boy holding a sign saying, "Homecoming?" Hannah followed the car to a RiteAid parking lot where, surrounded by a group of seven of the boy's friends, she was presented with a bouquet of flowers (this is more typical) and asked to the dance by the special boy. She replied "yes" enthusiastically.


Hannah was so sure she was going to get asked to the dance by the boy of her choosing, that she started shopping for her homecoming dress a week before she received the invitation. Wearing the perfect dress was as important as being on the arm of the perfect boy.


Dress # 1: On a Saturday afternoon, three weeks before the dance I dutifully accompanied Hannah to the mall and tromped through Macy's, Nordstroms, and several boutiques. We found the dress of her dreams at Cache. It was purple with some bling at the waistline. The problem was that this particular dress was also the dress of her sister Natalie's dreams. Natalie had purchased the same dress a few weeks earlier to wear to a wedding. But Hannah was sure that this was the only dress that would work for her and she would just make sure that she untagged herself in any photos of her wearing the dress that turned up on facebook. Natalie would never know.

Dress # 2: After receiving the invitation to the dance Hannah's ideas about what to wear were really starting to solidify. Upon arriving home from work one day, Hannah told me that she had returned Dress #1 and purchased a much better dress, and not only that, she had saved me $60. She modeled the dress for us and Gerard commented that she looked like an artichoke. I'm not sure if it was a rare case of a child listening to a parent's opinion, but it appears that his comment may have been the catalyst for her disenchantment with Dress # 2.


Dress # 3: We were now 1.5 weeks from the dance and the search for the dress accelerated. Hannah ordered a cream-colored dress online from Nordstrom using a gift card that she managed to talk Rachel into surrendering. Dress # 2 was returned to the local Nordstrom store.


Dress # 4: Under the guise of shopping for shoes, Hannah returned to the mall and purchased another cream-colored dress from a new store named Sasan. She used the remainder of her summer earnings as a camp counselor to pay for the dress. This dress was very fancy and also was was too big for Hannah and would require three major alterations. She left it at the store to be altered and planned to pick it up on the Wednesday before homecoming. She cancelled shipping on Dress # 3 with Nordstrom online.


(there were a few days of inactivity in the dress procuring department while she waited for Dress # 4 to be altered)


Dress # 5: Not unexpectedly at this point, the results of the alterations on Dress # 4 did not please Hannah. They had forgotten to take in the waist. She asked me to perform that alteration but was disappointed that I couldn't get to it before Friday. Hannah was starting to have doubts about Dress # 4 working out after all. On the day after she picked up the Dress # 4 from alterations, she brought home a dress from school lent to her by a friend. This was a dress the friend had purchased the previous Spring to wear to prom, but had not ended up wearing (hmmm ... sounds familiar). It was red and very striking but just a tad too tight on Hannah.

Dress # 6: On the day before homecoming, Hannah brought another potential dress home, lent to her by the owner of Dress # 5. This dress was blue, and matched Hannah's eye color. It was too big in the waist so Hannah took it in by hand. With one day to go, Hannah decided that this was The Dress.

Now that homecoming is over, all the dresses have been returned except for Dress # 4 (not pictured) which Hannah had to keep because she had it altered. She says she will wear that dress to prom. Right...

Foiled

It's been a long time since I posted because I have an incident to report that I am not terribly proud of. It turns out that I am not the only adult in our family who suffers from an occasional lapse in judgement that puts that family's health and safety at risk.

My Girl Scout troop of 4th graders is beginning to camp. As the leader in charge of the camping I had to take 3 classes on camping skills. One of the classes was instruction on outdoor cooking and in that class I was introduced to the concept of a dutch oven. A dutch oven is so named because the Dutch brought them to the New World and traded them with American Indians. These cast iron pots were actually in common use in Europe at the time white people began to colonize North America and were not just the providence of the Dutch. Dutch ovens have three feet on the bottom that raise the bottom of the pot about 1 inch off the ground making a nice space for hot coals underneath. The lid has a raised flange around the edge to hold coals on the top as well. The walls are thick, and with coals on the top and bottom, the dutch oven will heat evenly and can be used to cook anything you would normally cook in a conventional oven. I was very excited about the concept of being able to cook delicious meals, and not just weaners and beans, while camping with the troop. And it sounded so easy too! This picture, from a boy scout camping trip, shows how simple the concept is.

I went right out and bought two 20 lb dutch ovens for our troop to experiment with this new form of cooking. I seasoned one of the dutch ovens with oil and filled it with my favorite baked casserole dish, lasagna. Then came the dilemma. I didn't know where to put the dutch oven during the cooking. My outdoor fireplace had a fireproof surface that was raised off the ground, but it was way out in the hinterlands of my backyard, and too far from the kitchen. My backyard's cement porch was another alternative, and right outside the kitchen, but I would have to put the dutch oven on the ground and then bend over to tend the coals. I compromised on using my redwood picnic table benches, the very same benches that I had sat on as a child while enjoying family barbecues. My parents had given me their redwood picnic table and benches in 1989. I lined up the benches side-by-side under the overhang of the pool house (I didn't want to have to stand in the sun while slaving over the food). All I needed now was a fireproof barrier to put between the dutch ovens and the wood surface of the picnic table benches.

I considered a cookie sheet but didn't want to ruin one by putting coals on it. I remembered that I had heavy duty foil. I ripped off 10 pieces of heavy duty foil and covered the left side of the bench. I put the dutch oven on top of the foil. On the other end of the bench I put a propane stove with a coal starter chimney on one of the burners. I used the propane stove to light and heat the coals. When the coals were hot, I put some coals under the dutch oven and some coals on top.

After about 50 minutes of cooking the lasagna was bubbling and hot and ready to eat. I brought the dutch oven inside the house and removed the coals that were sitting on the foil and put them back in the coal chimney on top of the propane grill. The coals looked spent and they would burn themselves out. I unscrewed the propane tank and set it on the bench. Umm -- the lasagna smelled good and I was eager to try it and revel in my family's compliments.

The lasagna was delicious. Just as I was about to start dinner cleanup, the doorbell rang. It was my friend and co-leader Narma who had come to try the lasagna and hear how the whole process had worked out. I had seen Narma earlier in the day when she had, to my surprise, brought me a fire extinguisher. I had had a good laugh at that. What was she thinking bringing a fire extinguisher?

Narma really liked the lasagna and stayed for 45 minutes or so to chat. After she left I went right outside to clean up while there was still some daylight left. The setting sun was not the only source of light in my backyard! The entire left side of the picnic benches were on fire with flames leaping as high as the overhang of the pool house. Flames were creeping toward the right side of the bench where the propane can was sitting. I ran back inside the house and yelled for my husband, then grabbed a stock pot off the stove, filled it with water and ran back outside. One pot of water was enough to put out the flames, but I continued fetching more water and dousing the until smoke stopped billowing from the benches. The benches were nearly burned through and ruined.

My husband never did hear my calls for help so I had to go get him and show him what I had done. He didn't say much. I think he was mute with astonishment that I had done something so stupid and dangerous. He mumbled and went back in the house and I stood there alone pondering what I had done. The foil wasn't burnt all the way through so the fire must have spontaneously started in the wood when the wood had been heated by the coals to a very high temperature. What had I been thinking when I put burning coals on top of wood? Where had I gotten this misplaced confidence in tin foil as an insulator? What would have happened if I had waited a few more minutes before going outside? Would the fire have reached the propane tank and would it have exploded? Would our house have burned down? Very likely. I didn't like to think about it.

Although this happened months ago, I am still ashamed to think of it. The next time I am feeling smart and superior, I will come back and read this blog entry to bring myself down a notch or two.

Now I have this off my chest and can go back to writing about my husband's foibles.

The Budgeting approach to Christmas

Another Christmas has come and almost gone. Dinner is over and we are cleaned up. The turkey was a bit salty from the brine but the green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, stuffing and homemade bread were pretty tasty. My husband is from The Netherlands and after marrying me he received an education in Christmas consumerism. He stood by and watched me over-buying and over-spending for the kids' Christmas and had told me again and again to establish a budget per child and track against it. But until this year I did not follow his advice. The kids would supply a wish list (referred to by Gerard as the demands) and I would buy all the stuff on that list. That would be the the first phase of my shopping. In the second phase of the shopping, without any real dollar figure to support it (because I wasn't tracking what I was spending), I would develop a sense that one of the kids was getting less than the others, so I would buy more for that kid to balance things. Then I developed the same feeling about one of the other kids and so I bought more for that kid. The cycle continued until several days before Christmas when I stopped buying only because anything ordered would not arrive in time for Christmas.

This year I tried budgeting by setting a per-child budget of 25% less than what I usually spend. I recorded everything on an Excel spreadsheet and kept a running total for each kid. Santa probably uses spreadsheets, don't you think? Here's how I ended up:

• Kid A: was 60% below budget. She has been away at college and I'm out of touch with what she likes, she doesn't like surprises, is picky, she didn't have much on her Xmas list to begin with and finally, and dumb me, I actually forgot to order a few things she did ask for. We are going to go out after Christmas and get her a few items she needs before going back to school.
• Kid B: right on budget.
• Kid C: 15% over budget but one of the items she got was a desk chair which I would not have normally bought her as a gift.
• Kid D: 40% under budget. But this is our littlest kid and a dollar goes a long way when buying plastic horses and littlest pet shop stuff.
• Dog: Not officially in my budget, but she got a purple latex monkey toy, new collar and a huge rawhide bone.

Factoring in what I spent on a few family board games and puzzles, unplanned gifts for the dog, and what I additionally spent on sundries for the kids' stockings, what I still need to spend on Kid A to get her in family with the others, I came out just about on budget, everything considered. And the heap of gifts under the tree from me did not look quite so embarrassingly monstrous this year. It was a nice change to not get looks of disgust from my husband on Christmas morning. So, I conclude that setting a budget and tracking expenditures works pretty well to contain my runaway gift spending.

So how my husband do this year? Does he budget and track? I asked him and it turns out he spent 3 times what I did and he won't really know exactly how much until his credit card bill arrives.

Photo: our ceramic Christmas tree next to some roses taken from our garden yesterday.

To the Movies

If you had not been to see a movie at the theater in the last 70 years, what movie would you see? What movie best exemplifies the difference between a movie made in 2009 and one made in 1939? My mother-in-law Anna is visiting from the Netherlands for the Christmas holidays and we gave her the choice of going out to see a new movie called Avatar from 20th Century Fox or staying home and watching a kids Christmas video. She said that either was fine with her, so we went to the movie. On the way there she told us this was the first time she had been to a movie theater in 70 years. We asked her "are you sure?" and she told us the last movie she saw in a theater was "The Seventh Son."

Before we realized that Anna had missed two generations of revolution in the movie-going experience we had thought Avatar might be a little much for Anna. Our concerns were due to the scantily clad blue aliens, and the animated fighting action. While this movie has those things it turns out to be a really amazing movie -- it has an engrossing plot, amazingly realistic animation combined with film footage and real actors, and it is in 3D, very beautiful and surreal. All during the movie I kept sneaking a glance at Anna to see what her reaction was. Was she sleeping, was she horrified? No, she was staring at the screen intently for the full 2 and a half hours. She came out of the theater looking dazed and she kept repeating "unbelievable" and "I loved it" when we asked her what she thought.

I think that there are not many 86-year-olds who share Anna's interest and appreciation for things that are new and novel. Since she enjoyed the action/alien 3-D movie so much maybe a Monster Truck event is in store for her next.

We have done some more staid activities while Anna has been here. Below are three photos of Anna at Tessa's class holiday party. In one, Anna is standing below Tessa's doll that Tessa (or actually Mom) dressed up in a Hollander costume. Anna is watching Tessa decorate a cookie in the second photo. Anna, Mrs. Britt (Tessa's teacher) and Tessa are shown in the third photo. The bottom photo is of Tessa and Anna at Stats, a seasonal store in Pasadena that carries some outrageous and corny Christmas decorations

The Case of the Missing Passenger Side Mirror

Natalie arrived home after taking her first quarter finals a UCLA in a sleep-deprived, zombie-like state on Friday evening. Because Gerard and I were planning to attend a memorial service for a co-worker the next morning we asked Natalie to drive Rachel to an appointment in Pasadena on Saturday morning. Natalie warned that she was out of practice driving and did not want to drive any unfamiliar routes until she was used to driving again. I felt that in typical fashion she was just trying to get out of waking up early.

Around 9:30 a.m. Gerard, me and Hannah left for the memorial service, and Natalie and Rachel left for Pasadena (Tessa had already been dropped off at Layla's house for a playdate). Shortly after we got seated at the memorial service, Natalie called and told us tearfully, "I lost the passenger-side mirror." I asked, "What do you mean, you LOST the passenger-side mirror?" "I got confused and thought I was lost and I was yelling at Rachel and when we arrived, we noticed the mirror was missing." I told her we couldn't talk right now and that she could explain it to me fully when we got home. When we got home I got the same story from both Rachel and Natalie, except that Rachel remembers she might have heard a teensy noise at some point.

After lunch, Gerard and I decided to retrace their route and see if we could find the broken off side mirror in order to reconstruct what had happened. We drove along slowly and finally saw it two blocks before their last turn. We found three pieces of the assembly but some other pieces were missing. The plastic housing had clearly taken the impact because it had a huge piece missing. Two parts were in the street and one part was on the grass near the curb. It was very obvious that they had gotten too close to a parked car and the mirror had been sheared off by impacting something on the parked car. There was a parked car near where we found our mirror, but that car was unscathed so probably whomever they hit had driven off, probably after collecting their broken mirror parts.

Our girls were clearly oblivious to what they did, but maybe we will be hearing from someone who witnessed the severing of the mirror.

Adventures in Car Maintenance

I suppose I am a backseat driver because Gerard turns a deaf ear to my well-meant advice to avoid certain of LA's highly congested roads or "turn here." He also does not heed my advice learned at my father's knee about car maintenance. We have recurring disagreements about the importance doing regular maintenance and in particular the necessity of keeping tires properly inflated. He owns a Jaguar and has to replace his tires every 1 to 2 years which he views as perfectly natural, although expensive, because the tires are butter-soft and made for performance not endurance. I point out that if he would just keep them inflated they might last longer.

But now I realize it is not just me he doesn't like to take advice from. He is impervious to the advice of everyone. About month ago a fellow commuter motioned to us to roll down our car window and told us that the left-rear tire was low on air. When we got to work we took a look. The tire did look low to me, but not to Gerard. This past Monday we were leaving the parking lot at work and Gerard's boss pointed out that all the tires were low but especially that left-rear one and that we had better get to a service station right away. Gerard looked and again wasn't convinced and replied to his boss "my tires always look low."

About a mile into the drive home Gerard was having trouble controlling the car as we were stopping at lights. He said "It's just an intermittent problem." Another mile later I could clearly hear a funny thumping noise coming from the direction of that left-rear tire, and he said "I hear a noise in the dashboard so that cancels out the noise you are hearing." We were passing the last service station on the route for the next 5 miles and I suggested that would be a good place to stop to check out the tire again. He drove right on by.

One mile later an unmistakable grinding noise was coming from the left-rear and the smell of burning rubber had filled the car and so Gerard finally pulled over to the curb. The location could not have been worse. We were on a commuter route, a two-lane road called Altadena Drive, on a curve, and it was pitch black with no nearby streetlight. He put on the hazard lights. Altadena runs through the foothills and the location where we stopped has spotty cell-phone coverage. I did manage to put a call through to AAA roadside service but their phone system cut us off after a couple rings. I called home and asked Hannah to make the call and the same thing happened to her. Next, I went to the neighboring house and rang the bell. I man came to the door and I asked if I could borrow a flashlight because we were going to try to change a flat. He replied, "What, are you crazy?, you'll be run over!" He gathered up several flashlights, and he helped us signal cars coming around the curve while I illuminated Gerard and the rear tire.

Gerard is pretty adept at changing flats since he has been required to do this so frequently. He quickly put on the spare and did not get run over. The left-rear tire was completely shredded but he had not done damage to the rim, amazingly. The next day he had all four tires replaced to the tune of $1K. I really restrained myself and told him "I told you so" not more the 3-5 times. Has he learned anything from this latest experience? Yes, he says he will not buy another Jaguar.

A night at the Los Angeles Zoo

I recently signed up to be a co-leader of Tessa's 3rd grade brownie troop. This is a group of 15 very sweet little girls. The troop is in its third year and my role is to get us ready to go camping in tents. Getting to know the great outdoors is a core value of scouting so we're going to be doing that whether the girls like it or not.

We have a plan in place to gradually reach the tent camping goal. Last spring we made a two-night trip to LazyJ Ranch in Santa Monica (sadly we just learned that place is closing). Our brownies were just 2nd graders so all the moms except two came along to make sure the girls behaved and that no one would be homesick. This past weekend we stayed over one night at the LA Zoo. We had fourteen girls and just three moms. And the girls were just great. Not a one complained about her mom not being there, and they independently packed up their sleeping bags and duffles in the morning without even being told. And they schlepped their stuff without a complaint (well maybe Tessa complained a little). There was only one teeny bit of drama because one group of girls didn't leave space for another girl's sleeping bag on the floor, but we were able to resolve that very easily with our "let's include everyone speech." Below is a picture of our troop leader Cathy surveying the sleeping arrangements with satisfaction.

As mentioned, I have set myself up as the camping expert who is going to lead the troop on the outdoor voyage of discovery. So the first thing I did to establish the respect of everyone was leave my sleeping bag and pillow at home. It was all packed and ready by the door, and I simply didn't put it in the trunk. Brilliant! I did however, pack an extra blanket for Tessa so I swiped that from her when we arrived and made a makeshift pillow out of some clothes. I had brought my Aerobed and I figured with the blanket, the makeshift pillow and the Aerobed, I was still going to be getting a pretty good night's sleep. But I wasn't counting on the itty-bitty leak that had developed in the Aerobed. As I was drifting off to sleep at around 11 p.m. (yes, our delightful girls actually all quieted down and went to sleep as soon as lights were out) I did notice that the mattress was not quite as firm as when I first inflated it, but I figured I was just imagining things. I awoke at 2:30 a.m. to the realization that my mattress was half-deflated. But I calculated at the rate it was deflating I would still be somewhat aloft by morning. After that I woke up about every 45 minutes and by 5:00 a.m. I was lying flat on the cold cement floor and that was the end of any further sleep. After this, I'm not sure whether I should trusted to supervise the setting up of tents and attaching of propane tanks.

The zoo sleepover itself was somewhat lame. I chaperoned Rachel and Hannah's NJ troop when they went to a similar sleepover at the Philadelphia Zoo and it was much more educational because it was a backstage tour where we went into the nighttime quarters of the animals and the keepers demonstrated how they are cared for. At the LA Zoo we just walked around to the same exhibits you would see in the daytime, except that they were in darkness and many of the animals had been put inside. Tessa's comment was, "you can see the animals better in the daytime" and I had to agree. But the girls gave the event a 10 out of 10 because they love being together for sleepovers no matter where it is. Hopefully they will feel the same when they are in a cold tent and it is raining outside!

This next photo is of Tessa's friends, Eden and Catrina:


and here Tessa with Layla and Mallika.


This is my best animal shot -- the problem with taking photos in the dark with a LED screen is that you can't see a thing! This might have been a decent picture if the camera had been pointed just a bit lower.

I made my first blog entry and came back today to see how many followers I had attracted. It was a big fat zero. On the news today I heard that men who are using internet dating services are most attracted to women whose profiles say they are interested in yoga and cooking. Being married I am not interested in dating but still, since 50 percent of potential readers are men it might make sense do a little update to the profile. It's not a terrible stretch (excuse the pun). I do cook sometimes and I did try yoga once.

Tomorrow is my choir's perfomance of Beethoven's Mass in C (that right, one of my real interests is choral music). This is a very beautiful work, but not much fun to sing for a 2nd soprano like me. Every phrase seems to lead to a high G which has to be sustained over several measures. After a while I feel like I'm shrieking and I probably am! Gerard is taking a group photo of the choir before the concert and completing the headshots of chior members tomorrow. He has been so generous to do this for me and the choir.

Tessa and I have been canvasing our block to sell nuts for Tessa's Brownie troop and have now met most of the neighbors. The odd thing about this is that we have lived in this house for almost seven years -- and we still didn't know any neighbors! It turns out that we have a number of widows living on this street and they don't come to the door if they don't recognize who is there. There are a few well known cases of elderly women who have been overcome by force after opening the door and had their houses robbed. Well, you can't blame them for being careful. We must look harmless because we were cordially invited in to their living rooms and we have now made several new friends.

Well, in addition to selling the nuts, I am also running the sale for the troop. I have put in about 80 hours of effort for $400 profit for the troop so that is about $5 per hour of my time. I'm glad my regular job pays better than that! And our troop gets 25% of the sale price, the girl scout organization gets about 50% and the remaining 25% goes to the nut packaging company. It's a very good deal for the girl scouts organization but not so good for any of the other parties. This is about the same deal as with the girl scout cookies. But I'm not complaining because after all I volunteered to run this sale.

I'm waiting for a phone call from Rachel who is attending an English group meeting and should have called 30 minutes ago to be picked up. I am still in the business of picking up Rachel and Hannah from all their activities even though they are almost 17. I'm starting to regret not pushing them to get driver's licenses earlier because they could be driving by now. But if they were I would be staying up late worrying instead of staying up late picking them up. Hannah is at a marching band competition and will be getting back at 12:15 a.m.

As in most things, Rachel and Hannah are polar opposites when it comes to driving. Rachel is conscientious and remembers to follow the safety rules. She always looks left-right-left before making a right turn. But Rachel doesn't handle the car well so we are frequently in the oncoming lane at some point during her turns. She also has trouble telling right from left when under stress so I learned to point when when giving her turn directions. One day early in our practice driving it took two miles for her to finally make a left turn I was requesting. We were actually in the next town by the time she finally understood what I wanted. Hannah knows her directions and handles the car like a pro but she drives off before buckling her seatbelt, enters intersections without looking either way, and she speeds. She has a serious case of overconfidence. So with her I have to give a stream of safety reminders about the most basic things -- break now, slow down to keep the car under control during turns, etc. In California teens have to have 6 hours of professional instructions and I'm thinking about buying an extra 6, or maybe 60 would be better. Ok, I am cautious with my teen drivers. Natalie has had her license for over 2 years and has only been allowed to drive on the freeway twice.

Time to go figure out what is up with Rachel and why she is not calling. Not that she will answer her cell phone...

A blog of my own - inaugural address

Inspired by my friend Mia's blog, I am going to start my own in the hope that if some interesting experiences come my way I will have the presence of mind to write them here. Of course Mia's life is much more interesting than mine because she just moved to Japan and has much to report.

I will start with the trip we took to Orlando last week. Gerard (husband) had to give a keynote address at OOPSLA (sounds like LA had an accident, doesn't it?) which is a conference for Object Oriented programmers. Tessa (youngest daughter) and I went with him. We stayed at the Disney Contemporary Resort and visited the four Disney theme parts in four days. Gerard had to skip Wednesday's entertainments in order to give his talk at the conference. My favorite was Animal Kingdom, Gerard liked Epcot best, and Tessa liked whichever one she visited most recently. The highlight for Tessa was the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror ride at Disney Hollywood Studios, and the low point was when Orlando airport security confiscated her Epcot mini-snowglobe on the basis that the one ounce of fluid in the globe might potentially be flammable. The security guy was untouched by the sight of an eight-year-old girl standing silently with tears cascading down her cheeks. Mom was not untouched and is trying to get a replacement snowglobe.

I last visited Orlando in 1996 so that Natalie (eldest daughter), who was then Minnie's most devoted fan, could meet the object of her admiration in person. I had three little kids in tow and so we visited Magic Kingdom one day and spent the rest of the time around the hotel. So, I didn't see as much of the theme parks as I did on this trip. The biggest difference I see is the number of mobility scooters in use.

The picture is of Tessa in Tomorrowland at Magic Kingdom with our hotel in the far background.