om shanti

Wow... I hope this doesn't come out sounding corny. It wasn't corny.

I had what I guess was a religious experience at yoga class tonight. (Get your scoffs out now, folks - I'm about to get deep on you now). It happens sometimes during deep relaxation at the end of class, when I'm in that semi-conscious state that is definitely not sleep, feeling wonderfully relaxed. It hasn't happened in a long time, but occasionally during deep relaxation I will get some kind of Overwhelming Sensation. Sometimes it's just pulsating energy, or pure joy, and once it was the very real smell and color of tall grass, cool against my face. It's a neat thing - you leave class all blissed out and goofy afterwards.

So tonight, I had a relatively lackluster yoga class, partly because there was a new teacher who had never actually taught a public class before, and you know, it could have been better. But she was quite nice. Anyhow, towards the end of class we did a sitting twist where you look over your shoulder at the wall behind you, and at this particular yoga studio there are a lot of excellent psychedelic pictures of saints on the walls to look at. I looked at Buddha, who was meditating and radiating colorfully from the picture. I like Buddha a lot. I was thinking about how Buddha is the embodiment of compassion, and of love. Not love in the romantic or the filial sense, though those are included, but LOVE, the force that guides us towards goodness and compassion. I don't exactly believe in "God," per se, but this pretty much sums up my particular cosmology - love.

So then we flopped on the floor for deep meditation. We got the eye pillows. Megan put on the music with the lovely voice singing breathy, melodic Om's over and over. That picture of the Buddha stuck in my mind. "God is love!" I was thinking happily, as if it was some kind of revelation. The image of Buddha from the wall was still bright in my mind's eye. Then the Buddha picture in my mind suddenly started radiating bright red, warm glowing LOVE from the middle of the chest, I mean really really sending out bright red love rays, 100 times more vibrant than the psychedelic picture on the wall. My whole body was vibrating. My teeth were buzzing with the om sounds. (Try it, if you've never done this before: say "om," drawing out the M. Ommmmmmmmmmmmmm. Isn't it cool how your teeth vibrate?).

Tears were streaming down my face and I was smiling like a lunatic. I really hope I didn't scare Megan, the nice new yoga teacher. I was having a religious experience in the middle of her very first class, my body humming along with the Universal Love Vibration. It felt great! I wish I had a picture of it... but it's not like a crying Mary statue or something. It's all inside the mind's eye. Yet so real!

I wish I could have remained in that place a lot longer, vibrating and contemplating love like that. But my analytical brain quickly takes over and the tears dry up (though the smile remains, hours later). I started thinking about how would I explain this to someone else, like HWWLLB's father, who is super-duper-analytical and always wanting to talk religion with anyone who will bite? And how would I draw the Buddha picture? And could I knit a sweater that showed the Universal Love Vibration radiating out of the wearer's chest? And how weird would that be? (Answer: It would be pretty weird). So the Overwhelming Sensation didn't last very long before the Analysis Impulse took over, but hey, it was great while it lasted.

Now the sweater... I was thinking Manos del Uruguay, purplish-bluish, with this big bright red sunburst blasting out of the chest area. And yellow or maybe orange edges, trim I guess. Does this sound totally hideous? Maybe it would be so ugly that it was spiritually ugly. A religious experience for the wearer. But I guess it also means color knitting. Argh! Well, it's not good religious art without suffering, right?

work ADD

Oh man, I have a mean case of ADD at work today. Do you hate days like this? I wish I could learn to embrace my unfocused-ness and do something useful like improve the feng shui of my office or tidy up the 4,378 duplicate work-related bookmarks on my browser or SOMETHING. But instead I start a new project, work on it for 3.4 seconds, get distracted, work on something else, visit my friend Gwen's cool new blog, order some sock yarn from KnitPicks, start another new project, decide I need caffeine, make tea, start another new project, forget I boiled water, and so on.

This wouldn't be so frustrating if I didn't have so much actual work to get done this week. At the end of the year I am generally crushed in grant reports due, piles of paperwork, number-crunching and budget forecasting, program evaluation, planning, and so on, which really isn't bad because I like to be busy and buckle down to a good day's work. But for reals... it's the holidays! I just want to knit socks for my family and bake cookies and write loving letters to my dear far-away friends.

So... speaking of dear friends in faraway places, this is April, who is in Berlin. Today she sent a really sweet email all about what the future holds (including a visit at Xmas - yay!), and this adorable picture:


April is so cute. She has bought a mug at the Xmas Market. Who knit your hat, April?

Now how can you write reports when you have emails to answer from someone as adorable as that? I tell you, it's just not right. While walking to work this morning HWWLLB and I were talking about how nice it would be to really jam on all our end-of-the-year work and then take some short days and extra days off for the holiday time. Ha! At this rate I'll be hanging our Xmas stockings on my office door and writing 2005 grant reports in my retirement.

So... any of you have suggestions for battling the deadly work ADD? Several cups of tea and a slice of pumkin cheesecake didn't do it.

sugar high

Hey there friends. This is a Monday morning quickie post to wake you up from the post-Thanksgiving food stupor with some sugary holiday cheer.

To those of you who live in western NC this is probably old hat, but I was delighted this weekend to see the National Gingerbread House competition at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville! Naturally I forgot a camera, so I can only describe the amazing feats of baking on display at this place. The Grove Park Inn hasn't posted their winners photos yet, but the Asheville Citizen-Times has some shots on their website.

A Miss Bobbie Jinright of Troy Alabama won the grand prize with a Santa's Workshop gingerbread house. It's about the size of my desk at work, and what I really want to know is HOW in the heck do they glue all those little candies on straight??? They claim to only use edible substances, but I bet she took a hot glue gun to that sucker. Bobbie's house was awfully nice, but I actually think it was blown away by the 1st place "adult" category winner (that isn't naughty like it sounds), Nancy Kyzer of Indianapolis, who did the ENTIRE St. Basil's cathedral (you know, the onion dome thing in Moscow), out of gingerbread and candy. That sucker was amazing - I think it was probably even to scale. It made me want to eat it, and also to go to Moscow.

many colors

Okay, you color nuts, I'm doing it. I'm knitting little beer cozies with more than one color. I hope you're happy. They're wild little suckers - all blue and pink and black and stripey. I do like the his & hers set, though I'm knitting them on straight needles and sewing them up - that colors in the round stuff is crazy.

This experience has me fixing to design a big sweater inspired by the many colors of Niagara Falls at night. Kaffe Fasset, watch out!


This is a real live picture of N.F. taken by my new friend Hilton. Can't you just see it in a sweater? You can't? Maybe you're not trying hard enough.

While I'm working away on insanely-colored little projects, our cats are busy avoiding each other at all costs. Jackie is all through with her antibiotics, and the bandages are off, so it's time for her and Simon to meet and become best friends. Here she is in the kitchen after raiding his food dish.

And here is Simon staying in bed all day to avoid bumping into her. I'm sure they'll be thick as thieves in no time...
It really is amazing how Jackie is basically good as new after her gut-wrenching injuries. You can see the hind foot in this picture - the one that was all mangled. Other than the hair still growing in, it looks fine! She doesn't drag it anymore or hardly limp at all, except when she's running (because it's time to eat) or going up the stairs (in search of food). She never even needed to wear the little sock I knitted for her with Cascade Fixation. I guess I'll be forced to use the leftovers to knit myself some little socklets. Oh dear.

vegas falls

Not too long ago HWWLLB and I took a wonderful trip to Maine, and at the Portland Museum of Art saw an exhibit of paintings by the early 20th century American Artist Rockwell Kent, including a stunning view of a wild and majestic Niagara Falls. So I was very very excited to visit the falls during my trip to Buffalo - and the conference organizers were nice enough to arrange a bus trip to the falls Saturday night. I couldn't wait to be awed and humbled by a massive natural wonder.

But, um... it wasn't quite like that. In fact, it was less majestic than tacky, not unlike a very cold Dollywood, but, you know, with a big waterfall. I'm sure the falls are actually prety amazing, but the overall feeling I got was dissapointment. The falls were tarted up with multicolored lights (look - it's green! now it's blue! now it's red!) and dwarfed by the twenty-story casinos and hotels rising above it on the Canadian side.


This picture I swiped off the web makes Niagara Falls at night look kind of classy. It wasn't.

And then there was the town of Niagara Falls, Ontario's annual Festival of Lights. Hoo boy! What a showstopper. As we drove the traffic-clogged road along the Niagara River, falls to the left, all along the right were 8-foot high displays such as this Beauty and the Beast tribute in the "Enchantment of Disney" section. Our bus driver/tour guide (who knew in detail the story of everyone who has ever gone over the falls, whether daredevil or suicide, including exactly what kind of cocktails they'd had before jumping in, and their shoe sizes, bless her heart) accidentally turned into the Dufferin Nature Park, a U-shaped traffic jam disguised as a light show.

The nature park was a horseshoe drive about 1/2 mile long, circling a small pond. On the banks of the pond, and all across the water, stood more or less "nature" themed animated light displays, including a beaver chewing down a tree, Bambi and Thumper scampering around each other, two rams bashing heads between pine trees, complete with "ouch" marks radiating from their heads on impact, and this sacred show of Noah releasing the dove from his ark:


This photo shows the path of the animated dove from Noah's hand to where it disappears off-stage.

The half-mile drive should have taken all of two minutes, but instead we spent about 30 minutes in a line of cars who must have driven miles from all across southern Canada to gawk at the light show. Look kids! It's a deer!

Back at the conference, I was making excellent progress on the secret xmas project, despite frogging large sections twice (I didn't gauge swatch. why? WHY???!), upside-down cables and one or two backwards cable twists. All in all, it's coming along nicely. I love the staghorn cable - knitting it makes me feel so traditional and celtic. This is a quick peek at a tiny piece of the project, because, you know, it's top secret and all. But I can't resist showing off my natural-born celtic cabling skills, not to mention the pretty pretty super natural Peace Fleece yarn:

greetings from the dystemperate zone!

I have to tell you the truth: I was afraid. I was afraid of the cold in Buffalo. Dreading the wind and snow like the thin-skinned southern peach I've become. It didn't help that as we flew in on the plane from Charlotte, when we began our descent and broke through the cloud cover, you could suddenly see that the ground below was covered in snow. Half the people on the plane yelled out, "NO!" A man behind me yelled "Disgusting!"

When I was ten, I would have been yelling, "YES!" Even when I was twenty. But it's true what they say about being thirty... I am a grown-up boring flabby slob who can't even tolerate a little snowstorm. That's what they say, right?

Anyhow, it was dang cold in Buffalo, and for the first two days I bundled myself pathetically in a parka and sprinted the block from the hotel to the conference center every time I had to go outside. But Friday it snowed, a beautiful heavy snow that didn't seem to slow the city down at all. They plowed, they sanded, they went about their business like nothing had happened. The last time we had snow in Raleigh, we got a quarter-inch dusting, and in a mass panic that actually made national news, the city SHUT DOWN. School buses were stuck on the road for upwards of four hours. Several hundred children and teachers actually spent the night at school. People who commute twenty minutes home spent three or four hours and many ran out of gas on the highway, sitting in gridlock. All because of 1/4 inch of snow in the middle of the day! Relatives from New Jersey called to jeer us for several days afterwards, and they had every right to. It was embarrassing. So this ease with beautiful, snowy weather made me envious. I wanted to be like that.

By Friday night, the cold didn't seem so cutting. Saturday during breaks from the conference, I discovered how refreshing it was to go outside and take a brisk walk with a light fleece jacket on. The cold could feel GOOD! (Of course, after sitting for three days in 8-hour-a-day-straight meetings, almost anything else felt pretty good).

Sadly, I had no free time to find yarn stores or SnB's, but I got plenty of secret Xmas knitting done during the many hours of sitting still in a conference room. I also got to take a toxic tour of the neighborhood surrounded by Buffalo's many chemical plants (more on that another time), and I got to see Niagara Falls. Which will be the subject of another post, because there is just oh! so! much! to say. It's nice to be home, where my 62 degree house feels a little chilly.

he was injured... injured bad.

Yesterday while visiting over at Flems' office, she showed me this hi-larious internet movie thing which made me fall down on the floor laughing (it's G-rated, I promise, but it does have audio, cube dwellers).

Not having the teevee at our house, I often miss out on this kind of stuff. Thank g*d for random email forwards!

In other matters, I am about to take a trip to Buffalo, NY to go to a meeting. I'm not terribly excited about the predicted snow showers and 40 degreees high temps, being as how it's still 70 and sunny here in the Cackalack, but I am VERY excited about seeing Niagara Falls for the first time! And also, the local knitting scene... anyone have any tips on yarn shops or Stitch & Bitch'es I should drop in on while in Buffalo? I imagine knitting would be big in a place where you can wear wool all year round, am I right?

Note also that, according to the vintage postcard at left, Niagara Falls is the home of Shredded Wheat. Now I'm really excited - I can get some early Xmas shopping done! High-fiber gifts for everyone on my list!