This is long for a status update because it may be the last one for a while...I'll divide it into sections: Knitting, Weekend, and Latest. It's being posted mainly for the benefit of my relatives, but I think it's worth the trouble of those who use the Internet from wherever they're spending the quarantine to read.
1. Knitting, with Photos, which Do Not Work Well with Firefox and Blogger
I read all the blather about avoiding cafes and restaurants, and I thought, "How convenient. I will just take the laptop home and bask in the spring weather in between the rain showers, get a lot of house and yard work done, and write a book of my own." For the last few months I have been earning a relatively livable income writing short e-books for other people to use as market tests for full-length books they hope to write, on Guru, and I've been thinking, "When will I be able to afford to take a break and put up my own e-books as market tests on Amazon?" While Guru's not working for me looked like the ideal time. I spent the weekend, and the last two mornings, writing (and knitting) furiously. I came into town just long enough to touch base with a client and send off some work I'd already done.
I am a slow writer. One of the occupational hazards of being a slow writer is that a lot of us tend to activate nonverbal circuits in our brains, which is part of the thought process, by doing things that aren't helpful. Alexander Pope described it:
"Be mindful, when invention fails,
To scratch your head and bite your nails."
I try to stretch instead of scratching or biting, like a good cat; but when I'm at home and can spread out yarn, patterns, and large projects on a bench instead of having to sit on a chair, I stir up my brain by KNITTING.
As the computer shows youall have noticed, and probably resented to some degree...I'm trying to spare the remaining browser memory on this laptop. It's been a good one for almost twelve years of hard use, first by Grandma Bonnie Peters and then by me. Now the fan belt, mouse, and keyboard are all going down along with the browser memory so it hardly seems worth trying to keep this one going as anything but document storage. I'm looking for another laptop. Meanwhile, no socializing. And I do miss the socializing. I enjoy reading e-friends' blogs, reading your poems, looking at your pictures. I've actually saved some of them for printing and keeping in my files.
This weekend I dug up a file of Naomi Parkhurst's "String Geekery" and other knitting patterns to use in a blanket I've been knitting off and on all winter. For those who don't follow Gannet Designs, this knitter generates original patterns by encoding words--the actual letters in words--as numbers of knitting stitches and turning them into nice symmetrical stitch patterns. They're perfect for the way I design unique blankets, by working bands of stitch patterns across a predetermined number of stitches until a blanket of the right size plops off the knitting needles.
So this weekend I thought wistfully of @naogannet (for those who want to follow her on Twitter, where she posts more than just the knitting patterns), and I finished the Doodles & Typos Blanket.
Cheap cell phone camera exaggerates the slope of the folded-up blanket on the bench beside me...no, it's not a round-yoke sweater. It's a section of a straight, flat blanket showing three approaches to the Doodles mosaic stitch pattern: brown and red with smooth all-purl stitch on the wrong-side rows, brown and blue/white squared up with all-knit stitch on the wrong-side rows, and brown and buff textured with alternate plain and purl stitches on the wrong-side rows. (Stitches will spread out more when it's draped over someone's couch. This is the way the blanket will look when it's folded up in the back of someone's car.)
In real life the colors are richer. The brown is not the plain coffee color that's showing on my computer screen. It's the shade Lion Brand calls "chestnut," which has a strong red overtone and a subtle blue undertone, and suits a lot of people who would not wear other brown sweaters. The buff is showing on my computer in the color to which it will fade if left in the sun all summer (I know because it's left over from a sweater I made in 2010); in real life it's definitely a buff or beige color, not cream, with brown and black flecks. The red, left over from a sweater I made in 2004, is that dark "Victorian Christmas" red with a glittery thread. The blue, left over from a blanket that sold right off the needles last December, is actually paler in real life than it looks on the computer, a baby blue shading to white.
Here's the Typos mosaic stitch panel:
Here's the plain fairisle stitch chart of Doodles:
Most of the blanket is worked in one-color textured stitches like this plain-and-purl version of Doodles, with bands of garter stitch in between.
When this lovely thing reached the size of a full blanket I had some brown yarn left over, so I whipped up a headband using the "Sweet" lace pattern. As mentioned in the original blog post at Gannet Designs, Naomi Parkhurst graphed "sweet" and "heart" as separate lace patterns, and Sweet is the one where the plain, purl, and eyelet stitches form shapes that can be seen as little Valentine hearts, two different styles, stacked in alternating rows.
Well, that's the headband, spread out as flat as it would lie on a flat sheet to show the lace eyelets. The cell phone camera distorts images badly, and posting to Blogspot with Firefox is a chore...I don't know whether any of these pictures will show on your screens.
2. Weekend, with Gross-Outs and a Warning
Anyway it was a productive weekend, although I was sick--just sick enough to notice--especially on Saturday. Chills and fever, that kidney-damage feeling of sleepiness at the computer, that not-normal-cardiovascular-syndrome hypertensive headache to wake me up, sinus drip with traces of blood, celiac sprue. I would doze off on my working bench, then wake up and have to sit up and spend several minutes meditating to get my blood pressure back down...who ever heard of their blood pressure shooting up when they're sleeping? I thought, "What did I eat? Who was I near?" I didn't think it could possibly be coronavirus; wondered if it was yet another round of the flu people have complained about all winter. The only thing I'd eaten that I didn't think was trustworthy was a new batch of a safe food. I brought the wrapper into town to file a complaint to the FDA...and then along the road I saw the band of sprayed horsetail rushes beside the railroad. Glyphosate spraying strikes again. I mentioned that to someone who asked about my health. She said, "Who else was sick?" I hadn't talked to anyone but, on reflection, I had heard people coughing, seen another pile of what was probably an animal's violent diarrhea and a whole box of heavily soiled wet napkins at different points on the road.
Coronavirus is not associated with the puddles of vomit and diarrhea we are seeing more and more of on (sprayed) public roads, Gentle Readers. The combination of glyphosate and dicamba vapor drift, where people spray poison because they are too lazy to pull up or cut back "weeds," is causing this. We need a total ban on all open-air spraying of anything at all...including pure water, which has been shown to trigger conditioned psychosomatic reactions when people (or animals) who've survived reactions to sprayed pesticides' vapor drift have seen experimenters spraying water from a helicopter-mounted vaporizer.
Coronavirus is a separate thing from glyphosate, but in real life, in sharp contrast to #BayerScience, living bodies do not react to different things in discrete ways. One source of harm to the body aggravates another. Glyphosate reactions aggravate dicamba reactions. Dicamba reactions aggravate glyphosate reactions. Exposure to either one is likely to aggravate effects of coronavirus or of any other infectious disease anyone happens to have. Spraying "herbicides" in the vicinity of people who are especially vulnerable to coronavirus is pretty likely to guarantee painful and messy deaths.
How can you tell which symptoms are which? Well, coronavirus is not associated with celiac sprue, but many glyphosate reactions aren't either. Here's a clue. If it's a virus, bacterial, or fungal infection, rain is likely to make it worse. If it's a reaction to glyphosate vapor drift (as distinct from glyphosate in food), rain is likely to make it better.
On Wednesday it had rained...and I felt better. I threw out that wrapper and bought the same brand again, just for a test. I had that food product for breakfast this morning. Guess what, no surge of hostile feelings preceded no stomach and liver cramps today. I don't think I'll bother the FDA after all. I think tomorrow I'll go after the railroad company.
If you're concerned about your elders, or the weakened individuals you've been told to have unnecessary vaccines in hope of protecting from things like flu and measles...you need to ban all pesticide spraying in your locality, now.
3. Latest
So I came into town, not "avoiding cafes" to the extent of failing to e-mail documents I'd promised to send someone, but definitely avoiding the lunchtime rush, on Tuesday. Likewise on Wednesday.
As I walked into the cafe on Wednesday a local government person had just left, and as there were no customers in the cafe the workers were wailing aloud.
"Oh, Priscilla, you may have to stop coming in here!" one of them said, or would have said if my real name had been Priscilla. "We can only have ten people in here at a time!"
"I didn't have a hypertensive headache this morning until she came in," wailed another one who looks far too young to be hypertensive. "Ten people! That's just ridiculous!"
The cafe seats 34, with extra seating for groups in a back room. Only once have I ever been asked to haul the laptop into the back room, in all these years, but many's the time I've seen close to the 34 people occupying the 11 tables at lunchtime. Often two people who want to go online together will feel shy about sitting at the big table next to the charger and thus force me to sit there alone.
I sent the cafe owner a message. Obviously I couldn't be online all day either here, or at McDonald's or Taco Bell, if they were having to make people wait to come in and eat. I thought about other places. Well, the Grouch has Internet access. I could rent it from him if I could stand to be around him...definitely not as a full-time job. There are good reasons why his own wife and children don't work from the Grouch's house. Maybe the cafe owner had some suggestions about places I could rent in town, as in storm-damaged store-or-flat spaces above the Jackson Street stores that nobody currently wanted to rent as store space. I'd been wanting to rent one with the money I'd made at Guru, anyway.
"No! Business as usual!" the owner declared. "We're not going to have all that many customers anyway. People are coming in to take food out, so that's what we'll do. You can sit where you always sit and show people that we're still open! If a crowd of people do come in you won't mind walking out to the post office or something will you?"
I will not, Gentle Readers. As the owner came into the cafe and talked with me and the workers, I realized that in order to face the coronavirus I am probably going to require pots of African, not Colombian, glyphosate-free coffee. I may reduce online hours in order to write on the desktop computer, which makes typing so much more comfortable by not having that stupid battery case jutting out in front of the keyboard. I will reduce time online or in town if I have bronchitis. But y'know, when you think about it...avoiding crowds does not have to mean giving up our favorite road food. People who are accustomed to buying breakfast or lunch at the cafe are still ordering their favorite meals as take-out meals.
Occasional visitors to Gate City, like lawyers who come in to represent someone in court, have been steered to the cafe by Terry Kilgore, Mike Carrico, et al., for years. They should be glad to know they can order take-out to eat in their cars, or in conferences with whomever they're here to confer with. It looks as if there are plenty of places to park right on Jackson Street. They do not need to come into the cafe at all but, if they want to look at the baked goods on the shelves, they'll be able to do that at a good healthy distance from other people.
Avoiding crowds does not mean panic shopping and hiding, especially when no one is actually ill. The economic damage panic can do to communities could be worse than the damage of actually having a virus from which, after all, most people don't even get the symptoms of a particularly nasty cold. Pneumonia has thinned the older generation every year for centuries, and will continue to do so. If you are at risk you should avoid crowds in any case, but avoiding crowds does not mean avoiding normal work, shopping, etc. All it means is keeping a good healthy distance from other people, waiting for the five o'clock after-work crowd to thin out before you go into the grocery store, waiting for the eight o'clock crowd to move on before you go into the post office, and so on. For those of us not already frail enough to be in nursing homes or retirement projects, quarantine starts when someone is ill.
I will be avoiding crowds in town when able. I've notified people that I'm available to pick up mail and groceries and leave them on the front porches of people who are already in quarantine.
This may change...meanwhile, the absence of updates at this web site will tell you something about Blogspot's reduced compatibility with Firefox, not about me. Some of you will get updates by mail, some by phone or text message, and the rest of you may share your mailing addresses (I don't want to know where you live) with Boxholders, P.O. Box 322, Gate City, Virginia 24251.
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