The Independent Stitch

Training to be an election judge

Last night from 6 to 9, I went through training to be an election judge. I'll be a Ballot Judge, responsible for ensuring that voters get the right paper ballots, if they choose to vote on paper—they can vote electronically with a touch screen as well.

Our county was apparently the first in the country to create "vote centers," so any registered voter within the county can go to any polling place. It's extremely convenient for voters, and has been a model that's been picked up elsewhere in Colorado and around the U.S.

The trick is that when people had to go to a precinct-specific location to vote, then reporting results by precinct was no big deal. When they can go to any of the vote centers, the ballots need to be able to be tracked by precinct and precinct tallies need to be collected in another way at the end of the day.

Although the elections office now only needs to find, staff, and supply thirty-three vote centers, each center needs to be prepared to provide a voter with any of 167 ballots.

Learning how this happens was pretty fascinating. The process is well thought out and looks like it will run smoothly. Each vote center starts with an original stock of ballots that, through math and guessing, reflects what history and experience suggest will be needed in that location. A computer program on site updates the inventory as every ballot is issued, and is set to indicate low supplies on any ballots. There's a runner system to resupply, if necessary, from another center (including the main one, at the courthouse).

It takes six judges to handle each center's paper ballot area. That's all I know about right now. The judges work in pairs, each of which has to consist of people with different registration status—you'd never have two Democrats, two Republicans, or two Greens (or whatever) working together. As an unaffiliated voter, I'm a wild card who can be assigned anywhere, as are the student judges—high schoolers, and the only exceptions to the rule that judges have to be registered voters (they're too young), although it was clear last night that the students who have been working on one campaign or another were going to identify themselves as party-affiliated for the purposes of election day.

I do have strong opinions on most of the issues being voted in this election, although they will be left far away when I do this job. I look forward to working in a balanced group with people of other convictions, especially since we will not be talking one word of politics in the vote centers . . . and will even need to ask anyone who turns up to vote in a t-shirt with any election-related information on it to step into the restroom and put the shirt on inside out before coming in to vote.

Next Tuesday will be a long day. We have to show up at our assigned places by 6 a.m. Anyone who is not there by 6:15 will be replaced by a backup. Voting begins at 7 a.m. and closes at 7 p.m., and the original commitment says judges will need to be available until 8 p.m., although the reality apparently is that judges stay until the job is done. The trainer wouldn't predict when that would be, but indicated that even if the day is complicated we should be done by 10 p.m. and we won't be spending the night there. After the voters have finished for the day (and anyone in line at 7 p.m. can still vote), there's a lot of tallying to do, although the votes are counted elsewhere (they're picked up during the day).

We cannot leave the vote center once we are there until we are dismissed at the end of the day, we need to bring all our own food, and we will not have access to fridge or microwave (it's okay to bring a cooler). Cell phones cannot be on or used in the vote center, although we can check messages and make short calls during any breaks.

The trainer was thorough, clear, and had good senses of both responsibility and humor.

Early and mail-in voting is now going on, and people have been strongly encouraged to use those voting methods, but still some of the vote centers here may process as many as 15,000 paper ballots. There are just over 174,000 voters in the county, and with the people who may show up and vote provisional ballots (they are qualified, but the county does not have, say, a confirmed address for them) there might be a final total from here—of all ballot types—of over 200,000 votes. People who have not received a paper ballot have been mailed express voter cards with all the necessary data (including ballot style) printed on it; anyone who forgets the express card can fill out a signature card on site.

While the early and mail-in ballots are already being counted, no one yet knows even starter results because they will not be tallied until starting at 7 p.m. next Tuesday.

By the way, I can go online to make sure my mail-in ballot has been received by the county, and if it hasn't I could vote a provisional ballot at the vote center next Tuesday that would be counted if my mail-in still hadn't shown up.

Rules governing provisional ballots were instituted modified at the federal level for more consistency among the states after the last 2000 presidential election, when people were turned away from the polls in some parts of the country. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 assures that ANYONE who shows up at a vote center can vote, on a regular ballot if their registration is in order and everything checks out, and on a provisional ballot if there are any questions. There are still variations in the way states use provisional ballots. Here, anyone who votes two (or more!) ballots, whether provisional or regular, will be checked out; all but one of the ballots will be disqualified; and if there's any hint of fraud . . . like something beyond normal "I didn't remember whether I mailed it or not" . . . the district attorney's office takes over immediately. [Did some research: Additions are underlined.]

Provisional ballots need to be counted by fourteen days after the election, and representatives of each party are normally on the phone right after election day to ask how many provisionals there are, to see whether any races could change results based on that late count. The trainer estimated that between 80 and 90 percent of the provisional ballots check out as okay and are counted in the final results.

I left the session last night hungry (it's hard to eat dinner when the work day ends at 5:30 and the meeting, across town, starts at 6 . . . half a PB&J had to tide me over) and also reassured that the voting process in this county will be orderly and as fair as is humanly possible. There are paper trails for all ballots, paper and electronic, and there have never been any chads here. The system looks controlled, professional, and balanced.

I'm impressed with the paper-ballot part of the operation, and what I can see from this angle of the rest of it.

On not seeing (or hearing) a major candidate in person, part 2 of 2

This is a continuation of yesterday's post.

After we'd stood in line for a while, my daughter decided to take another walk and see how far the line had extended beyond us, since the end was once again out of sight. I remained in our place, visiting with the people next to me—two of whom, it turned out, had gone to the same small college I'd attended . . . a couple of decades after I was there. This gave us quite a lot to talk about. They also had an extremely cute, active, and pleasantly distracting little kid with them.

Our scout was gone for a very long time. Something like an hour, maybe a bit more.

When she came back, she had located both ends of the line, with the intention of mapping the whole thing's extent and course.

By then it was a little after 3 p.m. The candidate's talk was scheduled to begin at 3:30. We had progressed a few hundred feet along the line. Even if the talk began an hour late, as political talks sometimes do, the amount of time it would take to simply walk the distance between us and the front of the line meant we were kind of unlikely to get into the Oval before the event was over. My daughter had homework to do, and my back and knees were beginning to object to the hours of standing on concrete . . . and if I was home I could always spend the time trying out yet another way to get around the glitch in the layout file for the book.

So we decided to improve the chances that a few of the people behind us in the line might get into the Oval by taking ourselves out of the mix and heading home.

Here are some of those people whose prospects got better because of our departure: part of the line about 3/10 of a mile (.5 km) east of where we'd been standing, photographed as we walked back to our bikes.

Here, out of sequence, is the map we assembled after we got home:

• X: Where we parked our bikes.
• Red: People standing in line; looked like they were averaging about three across.
• Green arrows: Direction of movement toward the Oval (we walked in the opposite direction to find the end).
• Section shaded light orange: The part of the line shown in yesterday's photos.
• 1: Where we joined the line.
• 2: Where we were in line when we decided to call it a day.
• 3: Location of the end of the line at the time when we left.
• Scale: Note the 1/10 mile (161 m) indicator at the lower right. By the highly scientific method of marking the distance on a piece of paper and marking off intervals on a printout of the map, the extent of the red line shown on the map above is about 2.7 miles (4.3 km).

Homeward bound, my daughter and her bike (my bike is almost identical: same scratch-and-dent sale, although we haven't found the scratches and dents yet):

On the bike ride to the political gathering, I had declared that on the way home I intended to get a photograph of a particular piece of public art. I've passed it a number of times, but it's at the base of a long grade on which I am not inclined to stop if I have any momentum at all. It's the sort of slope where I just keep going slower and slower and slower until it seems like I'm going to be going so slowly I'll fall over and have to walk up. I haven't had to walk it yet, but there's always that risk.

Anyway, we did stop for pictures and here's the sign, seen along with the upper half of the hill, which doesn't look so bad when you're not pedaling up it:

Here's a close-up, taken from the other side, with the sun at a more favorable angle:

The person at the top of the triangle is dressed in slightly different colors on the two sides.

The sign's thought seemed appropriate to the day and the gathering, as well as the hill.

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The online version of the local newspaper was doing regular updates of what was happening at the political event, and when we arrived home the website indicated that the political candidate had just started speaking.

Monday's newspaper called it a "partisan crowd," which it mostly was, although I saw at least one person standing in line wearing a jacket with a bumper sticker for the other party's candidate neatly applied to its back. The paper also estimated that there were 45,000 to 50,000 people in the Oval. It also said, "Lines started forming before 5 a.m. . . ., many crowding into the Oval at the last minute, some never getting in at all."

By our observation, while there were "some" people there before 5 a.m.—and even at 11 a.m., when the paper estimated the line was a mile (1.6 km) long, going in a direction where we couldn't have seen it from the main road as we drove by after our breakfast—I'd have said that "many" never got in at all, based on the length of the line past the point where we were standing.

I heard by e-mail from the folks who'd been next to us: when the speech ended, they had moved to about 200 yards (180 m) outside the entrance (which we actually thought was darn good progress). There's no telling how many people abandoned their positions in all parts of the line, as we did ours, or if the line kept growing after we departed.

On most Monday mornings, I have a meeting at a coffee shop across the street from position 3 in the map above. This morning the staff said that their shop and all of the other restaurants in the area had been crowded all afternoon with people who'd taken a look at the line and decided to bag it and go sit in comfort instead of standing around.

It's hard to guess how many more people would have attended if the space had allowed. Another quarter? Half again as many?

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In sum: my daughter and I had a great bike ride on a pleasant afternoon; met some new people we're glad to know; and got a photo of a sign we'd been wanting to document. We also got to do some great people-watching.

But I still haven't seen or heard a major political candidate in person.

On not seeing (or hearing) a major candidate in person, part 1 of 2

I've never seen a major political candidate in person. Yesterday one was scheduled to speak in our city at 3:30 p.m., and because the location was within biking distance of our house my daughter and I rode down to the location.

We knew there was a chance we wouldn't get in, because we had breakfast with a friend first instead of going to get in line multiple hours in advance of the event. We decided before we left that it would be okay if we just went to the area, spent some time looking at what was going on, and then went home.

The campus is normally sparsely populated on weekends. We started noticing higher-than-usual traffic when we were about a mile away.

We arrived about 1 p.m. and parked our bikes. The gates to the Oval, where the gathering would take place, were scheduled to open at 1:30. At about 11, when we'd driven by after our breakfast, we estimated the line at around 500 feet (150 m), although we were just eyeballing it from the main road. In any case, it looked like the lining-up had gotten well started but wasn't outrageous.

One thing that was cool about the event was the fullness of the bike racks and the emptiness of the parking lots. People had been asked to use alternative transportation, and they did. A whole lot of people biked and walked. The city, which normally has no Sunday bus service, also scheduled one special route that operated from 10 to 6 to bring people into the area. (Post-event buses that we saw later in the afternoon were packed, even near the end of the run.)

This is just one set of racks by the library that I snapped a picture of while we were looking for the end of the line.

The line was growing very quickly—faster than we could walk, so it kept growing away from us, although we didn't realize that until we did finally locate the end, close to where we'd started.

Here are a few photos of the line when we started our search for where to join it. They are sequential, taken as a pseudo-panorama from where I was standing on the west side of the student center. They show the portion of the line that extended from the library along University Avenue west to Meridian, then north to Plum Street/North Drive. I estimate the distance covered in these pictures as about 1/2 mile (.8 km). Then the line turned west again and went out of sight.

 

When we got to the corner of Meridian and Plum/North, at about the location of the near-leafless tree in the photo just above, we looked west:

The people with their backs to the camera are all, like us, walking along in search of the end of the line.

We walked quite a distance, enjoying the people watching. By Moby Gym (technicallly Moby Arena) and the McGraw Athletic Center, some kids were entertaining themselves in a characteristically Colorado fashion. 

We took a shortcut through some of the football practice fields (and got our feet soaked because of overwatering of sod) and, 35 minutes after we started walking—shortly after the official opening of the gates to the Oval—we did join the end of the line.

To be continued, with a map and some additional commentary on the news reports on the size of the crowd as contrasted with our in-person observations.

Caps for babies; and boxes instead of dingbats

Knitting small caps out of scraps

While I was traveling last week, I encountered a copy of the brand-new Luxury Yarn One-Skein Wonders, edited by Judith Durant (with whom I used to work at Interweave Press: good person). It's got 101 projects for small amounts of yarn. Obviously, they're designed for luxury yarns, but they work for leftovers of less fancy yarns, too.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm making a few caps for babies-at-risk again this year (Knit One, Save One; or Caps to the Capital . . . the last collection of caps occurred in 2006). Before heading for New Mexico a couple of weeks ago, I grabbed a couple of free crochet patterns off the web and didn't use them directly but interpreted the concepts using my yarns, hook sizes, and finished sizes. During the trip, I completed two caps (on the right above) and read half of one book for pleasure. (The dark cap is alpaca and very, very soft. I finished the book after I got home.)

Then, on the next trip, I picked up this new one-skein book. It contains a whole lot of great patterns—some by designers I recognize and admire, and some by designers I don't recognize and also admire. I wish the designers' names were on the table of contents, because I follow specific designers and am always interested in what new folks are doing, but given the number of patterns it's understandable why they aren't. The table of contents is full. The patterns themselves are clearly identified as to source, and it's fun to leaf through and discover whose brain was behind which concept.

A very useful attribute of the book: the information is organized by size of yarn, which is how I look for it.

For the hats I'm making now, I'm using a pattern created by Kathy Elkins (of Webs), although I've changed the yarn weight, gauge, size, and starting stitch count (thus, also, shaping intervals). The multicolored version at top left was a winging-it adaptation of my version. For the brown one on the lower left, I tweaked the pattern again for a different yarn weight and I'm liking my results better. I have a third cap in progress now in worsted-weight yarn (like top left) and I think I've got all of my alterations the way I want them. All the caps are usable, though; they're just getting more refined for use with different yarns and in smaller sizes.

My previous post contains all the necessary information to participate in this project; I added some of the details in the comments after folks inquired.

And there's a nifty and appropriate crochet pattern I just located on a blog called A Chelsea Morning.

There are lots more patterns worth exploring for other purposes in Luxury Yarn One-Skein Wonders. I'm grateful for the chance to explore it with needles in hand so quickly. That doesn't happen often. I usually have to wait until space clears in my life to try out ideas in a new book.

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Computer notes

There haven't been many computer comments lately in part because I've mostly been on the road and in part because not all that much has changed. I'm still paddling upstream on this project, with the file and the machine misbehaving for reasons no one can figure out well enough to fix.

Here's the good news: the book (Ethnic Knitting Exploration: Lithuania, Iceland, and Ireland, by Donna Druchunas) has an index! And the index is in the book file.

Only once did the layout program give me a random paragraph of dingbats (one of its bizarre symptoms of glitchiness). The new twist was that these dingbats were green. The rest of the dingbats it's given me have been blue. The quirks are getting more creative? (Computers are NOT creative. They follow specific rules of behavior, which are sometimes scrambled. But still specific.)

On the bad news side, and I'm ignoring this for the moment, some of the REAL dingbats that are supposed to be in the file have been replaced by blue boxes with Xs through them:

Those two pages (one example of several affected spreads) are supposed to look like the next photo, which I am only able to show you because I generated a PDF of the working file a while ago when that font was working as it should:

It takes a lot of time to design, size, and position those symbols that are aids to the reader in using the diagrams, charts, and worksheets throughout the book. Having them get messed up is worse than having some other things mess up.

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Turning away from computers and toward civic responsibility

This afternoon I signed up to be an election judge on November 4.

I've already voted with a mail-in ballot.

Yes, I have a gazillion other things I "ought" to get done that day. However, I am not good on phones or at canvassing to encourage people to vote. What I can do is show up at the county courthouse before 6 a.m. on election day and work steadily as needed until 8 p.m. or later to facilitate the orderly progress of the election for those who are voting then. (The vote centers are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.)

I'll be what's called a backup judge. That means I'll start my day at the courthouse and can be sent out to work at any of the thirty-three polling places in the county, as needed. The county consists of 2601 square miles (6737 km²) and about 277,000 people.

I'll be training next week as a ballot judge. It's a three-hour training session, because any resident of our county can vote at any of the centers (this is a very cool thing) and there are 130 different ballots that people may need to have access to, depending on where they live. It will be my job to help people vote the right ballot.

If you're in the U.S., remember to vote before the election closes on November 4.

Sculpture: Don Gummer's big rock in North Adams, Mass.

The rock in the air

Last week when I was walking toward a crosswalk in North Adams, Massachusetts, on my way to work for the day, I thought of my friend Richard Cabe.¹ Richard does nifty things with very large rocks. Exactly eight days earlier, he'd given me a tour of his workshop, in an old industrial building in Salida, Colorado.

Richard is very fond of granite. He loves rocks and likes to change our views and experiences of them.

Now here in an old mill town in Massachusetts, about two thousand miles east, a massive granite boulder was suspended from cables.

I could even see sky through the rock.

Many of Richard's rocks interact with water. Washing up at one of the sinks he has installed in the home he shares with writer Susan Tweit is like dipping water out of a clear-running stream. One of the neatest things about the basins Richard shapes is the surprisingly familiar but initially out-of-place smell of the rock when it gets wet. Another is the contrast between the rough and polished surfaces.

There's a similar element of surprise in the rock in North Adams. It interacts with air. It's actually not immediately evident that you can see the sky through it, because you have to be at the right angle to discover that aspect of the installation.

It's a little easier to discover the correlation between this piece and what's across the street:

More big suspended things.

The story

I learned later that the sculpture in North Adams is by Don Gummer. Called "Primary Separation," it has been installed at Mass MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art).

A press release from the Marlborough Gallery in New York has this to say about the piece:

"Gummer's most recent large project, Primary Separation, was installed at MASS MoCA in 2005. Based on a model developed by the artist in 1969, the sculpture consists of a 24-ton granite boulder, sliced in half and suspended ten feet above the ground by steel cables and columns over a verdant rectangle. As remarked in a recent profile in Art in America (January 2005), this sculpture 'anticipated Gummer's recurring concern with the integration of the manmade and the natural, the geometric and the organic—and more generally, the fusion of opposites, most notably in his constructions of the last two decades.' "

Indiana Parley, a blog listed as "a place for public policy, politics, the history, and the future of Indiana," posted a notice about an exhibition of Gummer's work at MASS MoCA in 2007 (he was born in Indiana) and noted, "Mr. Gummer's wife is also someone of some note in the performing arts. He is married to Meryl Streep."

During the two days that I walked along the street by the sculpture while going about my business, an abandoned credit-union building nearby was being razed to make room for an associated park, apparently part of the long-term vision for the area. I didn't see the building, but was told what it had been. On the first day, the space it had occupied contained a pile of rubble and a hole. When I walked by on the second day, there was cleared dirt and unobstructed sightlines.

Another curious note

MASS MoCA is located in a 19th-century factory building formerly occupied by the Sprague Electric Works, and also formerly a superfund clean-up site.

Richard and Susan live on an industrial site that they have reclaimed (and turned back into a garden-plus-park) in Salida.

So many nice correlations.

Such wonderful visions for rocks.

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¹ Richard's web site talks mostly about his functional sculptures; he also does wonderfully expressive work that doesn't have a functional component.

The Rook-y vest on a day it was made for

So this morning it's gray and overcast and there's a light mist of rain coming down. Yesterday's temperatures were in the high 70s, nearly 80 degrees Fahrenheit (about 25 degrees C). Today's in the mid-40s (about 7 degrees C).

This is exactly the kind of weather I envisioned when I started the Rook-y vest, which I've shown in progress and then finished but flat.

Rook-y is a Socks That Rock yarn, used by most folks for making, as the name implies, socks. It's Merino, and well twisted and plied, which would make it work well for most people's footwear. However, I'm very hard on my socks and need to use wools that are soft enough for next-to-the-skin wear but more durable than Merino. So when two skeins of this Raven Clan colorway came into my life, I knew they were destined to be made into a frequent-wear item that was not socks. Thus the vest experiment.

When I arrived at the coffee house this morning for one of my three weekly sessions of "get out of the office and work on a project without interruption," my companions Kit and Judy declared the vest a success. I handed Judy my camera.

So here, at the request of Leslie over at Nake-id Knits, is a picture of the vest "on the hoof":

(I look like I need another post-travel nap. . . . )

Because the yarn is so tightly twisted (to maximize durability in the Merino), the legs of the stockinette stitches are slightly unbalanced and my two lace cable panels (mirrored) look slightly different. I don't find this a problem at all, and would happily use this yarn again for non-sock knitting projects. The yarn was very pleasant on the needles, and I loved the color variations within the dominant black field.

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I've got lots of photos from my two recent trips, first to New Mexico and then to western Massachusetts by way of a brief touchdown in upstate New York. My accounts of these travels will, of course, be idiosyncratic and far from comprehensive. But I saw some cool stuff.

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Speaking of cool stuff, I learned from this morning's issue of Shelf Awareness (an electronic publication about the book trade) about a New York Times article on Luis Soriano, who operates a bookmobile—called Biblioburro—out of his home in a conflict-beset part of Colombia with the help of two donkeys, the appropriately named Alfa and Beto.

Computer repair resource in Taos, New Mexico

This will be a fragmented post. I've got lots to catch up on.

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If you ever need computer repair help in Taos, New Mexico, I had an excellent experience with Taos Mountain Electronics. It's located off the beaten path but worth seeking out.

Clear explanations, thorough testing, fair pricing. They talk PC, Mac, and Linux.

By the way, you're somewhat more likely to need computer diagnostics and/or repair in Taos than in many other locations because the whole city's electrical system is old and inconsistent, prone to brown-outs. We weren't able to recharge our computers' batteries while the computers were turned on, and my battery drained down so far . . . while the system was plugged into the wall on AC and without triggering the usual automatic shut-off . . . that the machine couldn't even boot.

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Because of the power inconsistencies, I didn't have much opportunity to keep up with e-mails or blog-reading while I was in Taos. However, just before we left to come home, I used some of my battery power to check a few posts, including one by Donna Druchunas on her trip to the area a week earlier for the Taos Wool Festival.

When I saw the final photo in Donna's post, I laughed because I knew exactly where she'd taken her picture. And I couldn't resist walking out the door and down the block to shoot my own view of the same location.

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More on the trip to Taos in another post, but I need to remark here on the drive back to Denver. Within Colorado, and over the course of about four hours, we passed through temperature zones that ranged from 38 degrees F (3 degrees C) to 79 degrees F (26 degrees C). And the cold weather wasn't in the high country, nor was the hot in the low country (which are where we'd expect to find the extremes). Colorado teaches the wisdom (and necessity) of dressing in layers.

Here's La Veta Pass, one of the high points on the route we took. The bright yellow is aspen, Populus tremuloides. Aspens grow in colonies, many trunks rising from a common rootstock.

Here's another, also taken from inside the car through the glass:

Although the photos don't capture the brilliance of the colors, I think this was an exceptionally fine year for fall drama in the high country.

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My project from Socks That Rock Rook-y got finished before I left, but wasn't completely dry so it didn't go on the trip. I wanted to get someone to take a picture of me wearing it, but that hasn't happened yet. Here are some flat views that I took at the coffeeshop tonight:

 

 

It's a U-neckline camisole-type vest. I'm very pleased. The inspiration was a pattern by Elsebeth Lavold, although I radically changed the gauge, used different locations and types of lace patterning, and worked a different kind of crocheted picot edging.

This was a pretty lazy knit: I didn't have time or patience to plot out the details the way I usually would. So when I got to the neck shaping, its width was dictated by where my lace panels lay.

The finished item is lightweight, soft, and sturdy, and will provide one extra layer of warmth for the coming cold months. I had approximately 8 yards (7 m) of yarn left over.

Reading: We Bought a Zoo, and knitting Rook-y

Well, Typepad has just changed its interface and I just published a blank post. So I'm going back to fill in some information. Apologies for any weirdness in the appearance of the blog.

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I've spent the past few evenings reading We Bought a Zoo, by Benjamin Mee. It's a memoir about a family that acquired, against many odds, a decrepit private zoo in rural England and brought it back. Events are all relatively recent—the purchase occurred in fall 2006 and the zoo opened to the public again just last summer. Mee's a professional writer, which is why he could get the story told so quickly and so well.

Here are a couple of quotes:

• "Throwing yourself into worthwhile, fruitful hard work that you believe in, as much as you can handle and more, is a kind of luxury not everyone gets to experience. It is also exhausting." (p. 179)
• " . . . [I]t was a one-way journey we were on, and most of the problems we faced, for once, really could be solved by throwing money at them. I was just acutely aware that once the money was spent, there wasn't going to be any more. And if we failed to get the park open with it, the level of disaster would be unthinkable. Probably many animals would die, and many people (including those who had left good jobs to work for us) would be unemployed. And the family assets, which my parents had worked so hard all their lives to build up, with be in tatters. 'But at least no one's shooting at us,' my mum would say. Brought up in Sheffield during the war, [she] . . . knew from direct personal experience that things could be considerably worse." (p. 205)

Buying a falling-down zoo is an even wilder idea than taking on a small, independent publishing company. I don't have to worry about the animals dying, which would be the worst, and I have no employees depending on me, just a family.

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And as you can see, the Rook-y project (Socks That Rock) is coming along very nicely. It's going to work. Here's more of a close-up, for the wonderful, subtle colors:

I'm going to have to get used to this new composing/editorial interface.

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Computer and book progress: Although the software is still throwing in odd character shifts, I have been able to override them. The author's and proofreader's changes are in the file, and I've requested print bids. I am babying this along, with the goal of getting it into PDFs that the printer can use, despite the corruption in the file. I still don't have the index or the back cover (both are in the hands of freelancers right now).

And so I can take a short break: I'm leaving town this morning for an unprecedented interlude. Four cousins (all in our 50s) are taking our mothers (ages 84 and 86) on a road trip to a place where they lived during the Depression. Some of us have not seen each other in forty years, and we have never done a trip even remotely like this before.

And now I need to go get ready to pick up the next-in-line cousin, so we can drive to Denver and rendezvous with the youngest cousin in the group (we consist of all the women on that side of the family) and my aunt (who both live there) as well as my sister and mother, who flew in last night.

It should be interesting.

International Bluegrass Music Association award

Andy May, my daughter's father, has won a significant music-industry award: The International Bluegrass Music Association's 2008 Recorded Event of the Year award for the album Everett Lilly and Everybody and Their Brother.

(In addition to being my daughter's dad, Andy was also my husband for a number of years; because he will always be her father, that's how we refer to him around here.)

Reading about what this album went through to get made is quite the story: several of the musicians are no longer around, and the rest just kept trucking until it was done. Several generations of the bluegrass community participated, evidence of the Lilly brothers' profound influence on the genre.

Musicians include: Everett Lilly, Bea Lilly, Charles Lilly, Daniel Lilly, Mark Lilly, Marty Stuart, Rhonda Vincent, Darrin Vincent, Billy Walker, Ronnie McCoury, Rob McCoury, David Ball, Charlie Cushman, Larry Stephenson, Joe Spivey, Eddie Stubbs, Jason Carter, Dickey Lee, Freddy Weller, Mike Bub, Rad Lewis, Andy May, Marcia Campbell, Clay Rigdon, Eric Blankenship & Bill Wolfenbarger (artists), Charles Lilly & Bill Wolfenbarger (producers).

Andy's also a producer, although for this album he was one of the musicians (mandolin on one track) and then released the album on his label, Swift River Music. It's interesting to look at the artists' page and see some friends from those days are still making good music.

It's great to see some of Andy's work receiving high-level recognition. We live in different parts of the world, and it's nice to be able to appreciate—from over here—the acknowledgment he's getting for part of his talent and dedication. His own music is also outstanding and I hope it, too, is recognized at this level some day.

Music (and other entertainment) improves life for the computer-weary

This is a quick post with a couple of notes from outside.

Thanks to Clara Parkes at Knitter's Review for directing me this morning to Kay Gardiner and Ann Shayne's knitterly country-western video, "Pardon Me (I Didn't Knit That for You)."   I think running out to buy a copy of their new book counts as well-earned applause.

And Janel Laidman has Spindlicity back in the spin! Janel has not been lying on a chaise longue eating bonbons while the magazine was temporarily sleeping. She was writing a book. I see she's added Beth Smith of The Spinning Loft and Abby Franquemont of Franquemont Fibers to her Spindlicity team. Looking forward to seeing what they come up with. . . .

This first returning-to-action issue of Spindlicity does have a review of Donna Druchunas' Ethnic Knitting Discovery, the book that laid the ground for Ethnic Knitting Exploration, a project that I am determined will be past the computer woes and into print soon, very soon. Donna is off to the Taos Wool Festival this weekend, where she'll be teaching. I'll be here, making the computer files behave (one way or another).

Although I may take a break for a field trip to see Karen Conduff's paintings as part of the annual Boulder Open Studios event, with a stop at Shuttles, Spindles & Skeins to take a look at some new-to-me books. Depending. Knowing I can get out of here for something fun makes surviving the electronic insanity possible.