a confession

How does one become a fan of  particular professional sports team?  Well, first of all, one has to love the sport, I think.  I am never going to be the fan of any NBA team because I don't like to watch professional basketball, or any other basketball, on television.  I do love to watch football, though. 

I have very early memories of my dad and I watching football on tv together.  We were probably watching college ball as my dad has always been more interested in that than the pros, but the same rules - for the most part - apply.  I know that my dad was amazingly patient, especially for him, explaining the rules to me over and over again, game after game, season after season. 

I don't remember specifically, but I am sure we watched the Browns during their 1964 championship season.  I know my dad disliked the great Jim Brown, terming him "yellow" because he was so good at running away from his would-be tacklers.  Even as a child I was confused by that.   Wasn't that what he was supposed to do?  So for many seasons I was a Browns-hater because my dad was, but gradually that changed, and I became a member of the long-suffering tribe of Browns fans.  I lived and died - but mostly died - with the Kardiac Kids and their last-minute victories.  I hated John Elway and the Broncos more than any other sports team.  Elway's nickname at our house was "Bucky" due to his protruding teeth, and I loved to hate him. 

I had to break up with the Browns, though, after "The Fumble", as it is known in Cleveland sports lore, left me sobbing in front of my television set.  I just can't care this much any more, I thought, and although I remained a fan, I drew back to protect myself.  I never liked Art Modell, but, along with everyone else in Northeast Ohio, I hated him with a passion after he stole the team away to Baltimore and left Cleveland bereft.

I loved watching Joshua Cribbs play, having spoken to him a couple of times on the Kent State campus.  Once, in particular, Julie and I were walking Bobo and Lucie on campus, when we saw Josh playing with his young daughter near the MAC Center.  His daughter wanted to pet the diminutive (but mean) Lucie, but we steered her towards mellow Bobo instead.  Josh's kickoff returns were electrifying, and when other teams started kicking the ball away from him, it only validated his skill.

So I think I have established that I love watching football.  We faithfully watched the Browns week after week until we moved, mid-season, two years ago to the greater Baltimore area.  And you know what?  They don't show the Browns' games here.  They show the Ravens.  The reviled Ravens.  The team stolen away from us.  I had to watch football, though, so it was the Ravens or nothing. 

Which brings me to the second - and equally important - factor in how one becomes a fan of a specific team:  proximity.  Reading the local newspaper or watching the local news, I learned more than I wanted to know about the Baltimore Ravens and their players.  I had to admit, I liked Joe Flacco, the young quarterback who was at the University of Delaware during the time Julie was there.  And I learned that the party line around here is that Ray Lewis "was young, and running with a bad crowd, and has really turned his life around."  Seriously.  Everyone says that. Even the guy who came out to give me an estimate on a new fence told me those exact words. 

So, yeah, I watch the Ravens' games now, and I do cheer for them.  When the Ravens played the Broncos in Denver several weeks ago, I was filled with delight that my team knocked the Broncos out of the play-offs.  It was deeply satisfying in a way I had not anticipated.  Take that, Bucky, I thought to myself, as John Elway seemed to smile even in defeat up in the owner's box.  With sincere apologies to my friends and family in Northeast Ohio, I will be cheering for the Ravens in the Super Bowl this year.  They're my team, after all.

because I need a new project, part 2

I love to knit socks.  More than scarves or hats or mitts - of which I have knit many - I love to knit socks.  I am hard-pressed to explain why.  Sock yarn is the most beautiful yarn, it's true, but it is what I think of as the architectural nature of socks that appeals to me the most.  I mean, I understand how a scarf progresses from a line of stitches to a very long rectangle.  I understand how the tube shape that is the beginning of a hat gets pinched off at one end to form the hat.  But the sock-in-progess is like a miracle to me. 

I will try to explain.  I am knitting along on this small tube, which is the leg of the sock. When the leg has reached the length I desire, I start the heel.  After following a series of specific instructions, my sock has totally changed direction, and is now heading down the foot towards the toe.  It's magical.  Every single time.  And that is a lot of times because I have knit a lot of socks.

I have knit socks for Tom and Julie and Kristen and Ben's dad and my dad.  I have knit multiple pairs for Ben, who rarely wears them, and Andrew, who always does.  But, mostly, I knit socks for myself.  I have probably knit ten or twelve pairs of socks for myself.  For the most part they sat in my top dresser drawer.  I would get them out and wear them for "special" occasions, but mostly I admired them each time I opened my drawer. 

That changed this year.  "I'm wearing these socks," I thought to myself, and I did.  Almost immediately, my beautiful, hand-knit socks started sprouting holes in the heels.  Huge holes.  In both heels.  I probably have four pairs right now with blown-out heels.  The socks are perfect other than that, and I just can't throw them out for that reason alone.  So I'm going to do the only other thing I can do.  I'm going to learn how to darn socks.  Women have been darning socks for generations, and I can do it, too.  No, I don't know how to do it.  Yes, I hate to sew.  Still, that is what I am going to do. 

I enlisted Ben's help in a very crucial part of my plan.  "Find me a darning egg, will you, please?" I asked him.  If there is one challenge Ben loves, it is searching out just the perfect thing on line.  In no time at all, he had a selection  of darning eggs available as buy it now on ebay for me to chose from.  You might think a darning egg looks like an egg, and some of them do.  But they also can look like mushrooms or maracas, and I knew it was the maraca-shape that I wanted.  Most of those available were wooden, but the one I selected was plastic, half red and half cream-colored.   The red half will show up through light-colored socks, while the cream half will be perfect for dark socks.  Ben agreed with my selection.

The darning egg now sits on my desk, waiting for me to learn how to use it.  And I will.  I'm sure there are dozens of tutorials on YouTube detailing how to darn socks.  So just as soon as I finish this pair of socks I'm working on, I'll get right to it. 

because I need a new project

The yarn I bought finally arrived, and, boy, does it ever reek. I knew it would, though. The woman I bought it from warned me that it had been stored in mothballs. Initially, I thought that was a deal-breaker, but, having used the yarn before, I knew it would be perfect for a new project I have in mind. Internet searches had already informed me that the yarn has been discontinued, so when the seller told me she had turned up another skein of yarn that she would include for the same price, that clinched the sale.

It took forever for the yarn to get here, but that is another story. Now that it has, I have to deal with the smell. Apparently some people actually like the smell of mothballs. I am not one of them. After opening the package, I immediately placed the box and its contents on the glider on the back porch. It was 38° degrees outside and raining, but the yarn spent the rest of the day and that night out on the porch. I couldn't have it in the house, after all. I brought it in the next morning, but it still smelled bad.

Next, I took it to the basement and loosely re-wound all the tightly-wound yarn cakes. It sat on an open shelf in the basement all day yesterday. It still smelled bad. Currently, the yarn is in a lidded plastic container with one of those room freshener cakes. This room freshener has been working for an entire large room in the basement, so I am hoping it will do that trick, but I am not optimistic.

I checked on Ravelry, of course, to see how other knitters have dealt with this problem. There is not a yarn-related issue I could possibly come up with that has not already been addressed on Ravelry. Suggestions ranged from ridiculous to way-more-work-than-I-would-ever-do. So now my plan is to try one thing and then another until a) the smell goes away or b) I get tired of trying and use the yarn anyway. I'll keep you posted. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

can you tell the difference?

My computer died a couple of weeks ago.  I know, I know.  It's sad.  But, mostly, it's pretty friggin' inconvenient.  And really kind of unexpected and sudden.  Here's what happened.  I did my normal late night surfing one night, then went to bed.  The next morning I sat down to see what was new, but what was new was that my computer wouldn't boot up.  It wouldn't do anything, really, except sit and spin.  I shut it down.  I turned it on.  Nothing. 

Fortunately, we have a laptop, so I was able to do pretty much everything I needed to do from there.  But all my bookmarks were gone.  And I couldn't access my é.doc, which I always keep right on my desktop.  The é.doc is where I keep all my frequently-used symbols that I hate to look up all the time.  Here is the entire content of that document, if you are interested:

"¡       ü      é    °  ©   ½  ⅓  ¼   ¾   ë

In knitting, "pm" stands for "place marker" and "sm" stands for "slip marker".  The markers are there to help you remember to do the seed stitch border. 

 Hope that helps!

Anne"

 

 

Yeah, that last part is what I mail to the dozens of people who email me about a section of a knitting pattern I wrote that they don't understand.  It is confusing, I guess, but hundreds of other people have successfully navigated the pattern.  But I digress.

 

As soon as Ben got home from work, he was on my computer problem.  He tried all the things I had already tried.  I know he has to do this, but it is maddening, all the same.  After doing many other things that I didn't do, he reported that my hard drive was dying.  Now, I know virtually nothing about computers, but I know that my hard drive is essentially my computer.  So that sounded bad. 

 

Ben went right to work, backing up everything on the dying hard drive as best he could.  He went online (on another computer, of course) and ordered me a new hard drive, which arrived in good time.  Then came the real work.  And I know it was a shit-ton of work even though I don't have the slightest idea what it all was.  If you are computer savvy, you understand all about re-formatting and installing and recovering.  If, like me, you aren't, you still probably know It takes a lot of time and effort.  Not to exaggerate, but hours of time and effort.

Day  by day, I got more and more of my computer back.  And I was delighted to have it back, as I was learning to hate the laptop, with its very touchy and surprising touch pad.  Instead of moving the cursor, it would suddenly enlarge the image I was looking at ten or twelve times.  It would abruptly shut down what I was reading and offer me something else.  I don't like that.

So here I am today, with my brand new computer.  Oh, it looks all the same from here.  Ben even found the image I have always used for my desktop - a photo of Julie reading on the glider on our patio in Kent, with Bobo and Lucie on either side of her.  I tell you, it brought tears to my eyes the day I logged on and noticed them all sitting there as they always have. 

So, yes, it looks the same, but it works so much better.  For example, I am using my normal browser to write this blog post, where I used to have to switch to Chrome to access it.  I lost all the photos that were on my desktop, it's true, but I chose to use that as an opportunity to clean off my desk, as it were.  All the documents I had scattered there were placed in folders named "recipes" or "patterns".  It just makes sense. 

I am very, very happy to have my computer back, needless to say.  But what does need to be said is THANK YOU, BEN.  I appreciate it more than you can know.  And now I have the opportunity to tell you so. 

a temporary antidote for what ails me

One thing that's always sure to give me a brief respite from the Christmas blues is to watch the movie White Christmas. Now that is an odd thing because I really detest Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye, and to think of either one of them as a romantic lead is beyond ludicrous.  And yet, I love that movie.  I have loved it since I was a kid.  I can remember singing the songs from it with my brother Thomas as we did the dishes.  He must have liked it, too, because he would even sing Sisters with me.

As much as I dislike the male leads, I love Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen.  I think Rosemary Clooney is lovely in a fresh, natural way, and her voice has always been one of my favorites.  When she sings Love, You Didn't Do Right By Me,  she is stunning.  But this year, I have been noticing Vera Ellen especially.  What a spectacular dancer she was!  She had such a tiny waist, and her legs went on forever.  I just can't take my eyes off her in the production numbers.  This was the first year I noticed George Chakiris as one of the dancers in Mandy because I have always been so busy watching Vera Ellen dance.  And the clothes she wore!  I just loved her outfits when I was a kid.  She seemed like a Barbie doll without the gross, over-inflated boobs.

The music is just fantastic, but I love the story, too, and I always tear up when General Waverly walks into the darkened dining room, the lights come up, and he sees his troops assembled there.  Then they all begin to softly sing We'll Follow the Old Man.  What a finale!  Unfortunately, no one in my family shares my passion for this movie so I generally watch it for a bit on my own while I am knitting.  AMC has been showing it this year, but I generally have to click away during their ridiculously long commercial breaks.  Hm-m-m.  Wonder if it's too late to add it to my Christmas list?

not everyone has a Merry Christmas

Last night at dinner I asked Ben what might be considered an odd question, but one that I had definitely been wondering about.  I asked him why he liked to decorate for Christmas so much.  I just don't understand it.  He told me that he likes to commemorate holidays; that it breaks up the year for him.  And he does like to put out gourds in the fall and Easter eggs in the spring, as well. I still don't get it.  Now, I understand that when you have small children in the house, it is fun to decorate for their sake.  I liked doing that very much.  We are long past that stage, however.

I tried to enter into the holiday decorating spirit this year.  Ben and I bought some new things together, and I went out and got some things on my own.  The house looks very pretty.  It looks like a stage set where no play will be performed.  It looks ready for a party that no guests will attend.  I would much prefer that it look the same way it does every other day, because that is what Christmas will be - like any other day.  And that's just not that merry.

William H. H. Krear 1839-1864

I tend to become obsessed with things.  I won't even begin to list all the different enthusiasms I have picked up and discarded over the years.  But I will say that there have been some very successful ones, as well. Our Elyria postcard collection is a fine example of that.  Ben and I spent several years hunting down every single postcard from Elyria that we could find.  We both derived a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction from our somewhat single-minded pursuit of all the Elyria postcards; and we ended up unexpectedly writing a book about them, of which we are very proud.

I took up knitting five years ago, and got into it big time.  I think it would be fair to call it an obsession.  I still pretty much knit every day of my life, and have completed dozens of hats, scarves, afghans, sweaters, etc.  I have a yarn collection (my stash) that I can knit from for a very long, but that doesn't stop me from adding to it on a regular basis.  Julie has also become a knitter, and there's nothing we enjoy more than traveling from yarn shop to yarn shop, comparing - and buying - yarn.

Which brings us to my current obsession:  Ancestry.com.  I saw a commercial last week while I was watching TV (and knitting) about their free 14-day trial offer.  Oh sure, I had seen the commercial many times before, but that day, for some reason, I got up, went to my computer and signed on.  I started with myself, of course, and before I knew it, I was adding family members in widening circles all around me.  I was still at it when Ben got home from work that night.  I was totally hooked.  I practically hopped on Ben along with the dogs as I told him all about it.

Ben had gone through a geneology phase several years ago, which I hadn't really shared at the time, and he couldn't quite understand at first what had gotten me so excited about it now.  But I kept talking, and eventually, he was digging out old photos and family records from plastic tubs he brought up from the basement.  Soon, we were each seated at a computer, logging in information and photos, and yelling back and forth between our rooms with the nuggets of information we had uncovered.

When Ben asked me what got me started, I said, oh, you know, that commercial on TV made me curious about what I could find, and I truly thought that was it. It wasn't until I uploaded one of the photographs that Ben took for me that I realized what I most urgently wanted to accomplish. The photograph is of a framed document that has hung on the wall of every house where Ben and I have lived.  The document is entitled "THE SOLDIERS INDIVIDUAL MEMORIAL" across the bottom, and, I believe, was sent to grieving families back home when a soldier died.  Ben and I matted and framed the document, actually, before we were married.  While I was growing up, the document was rolled in a tube and stored on the top shelf of the bathroom linen closet.

At my urging, my dad would sometimes get the document down, unroll it, and talk to me about his Grandma George, and her father, who was killed in the Civil War.  He was called "Colonel Krear" in our family, although he was never a colonel.    On the document, there is a small oval photograph of my great-great-grandfather in his uniform, and a hand-written list that includes when he was mustered in, the promotions he received, and the battles in which he fought, up to, and including, the battle at Jonesboro, Georgia where he was mortally wounded in August of 1864.  He was twenty-five years old.  Two months after his death, his widow gave birth to his only child, Carrie Krear, my father's Grandma George.

Today I transcribed all the information from the document and uploaded that to Ancestry.com, as well.  Ben had suggested that I just toggle back and forth between the two electronic documents, but I really wanted to read from the original.  I put on my reading glasses, got a strong magnifying glass, and began.  I listed the names of the battles:  Shiloh, April 7, 1862,   Siege of Vicksburg Miss. May 19 to July 4 ‘62, Kenesaw Mt. June and July /’64.  I realized I was crying as I typed in the words.  I thought about this man, this boy, really, from Massillon, Ohio, who had probably never left Ohio before, who was fighting and bleeding and dying in conditions we can't even imagine.  And he kept fighting.  A dozen battles in cities across the South until his final battle in Jonesboro, Georgia.

Ben and I have been talking about how gratifying it has been to work on this project.  Aunts and uncles we loved, grandparents long-dead come alive for us as we think and write about them.  Most gratifying of all for me has been memorializing William H. H. Krear, whom no person living today ever knew.  Now he will not be forgotten.