Wherein I Mainly Talk About Our Cat and Then Proceed to Apologize for Doing So

I have been a terrible blogger. I can't believe this page has been silent since Thanksgiving. To remedy this, I will update on miscellaneous topics, none really involving knitting since I have to remain mum just a couple more days until gifts are revealed. But they're all done and they make me happy!

The last few weeks have been filled with me being sick (nearly everyone in the office has been passing around a sore throat/nasty cough for the last couple weeks). I took a sick day for the worst of it, wherein my cat and I were nearly identical in our sleeping habits.

A couple weeks back I attended a local art studio that was selling pieces for the holidays, and I grabbed up this bowl. It is happily containing leftover yarn that has no other home and yet is too small for my tastes to be wound up into a center-pull ball.


Early in the month I finished reading Middlemarch, and if I return to blogging, I may very well share my thoughts on it, provided they don't fade too drastically.

And in other news, our cat loves snow. We allowed her to be on our screened-in porch periodically during the spring and summer, and she adored it. She could crouch for hours at the screens, and would hide behind my plants when we tried to get her to come back in (she's like a petulant child).

Knowing this, we dreaded the onset of colder weather. Even though the temperatures have dropped, she still thinks she wants to check out the scenery. So we let her out and stand at the door until she quickly returns to us. Unless there's snow blown in, like there was a week ago. I think she scampered around and did the following in under five minutes. And then wanted back out nearly as soon as we brought her in (we didn't indulge her). Those markings that almost look like human footprints? Not so. She slid around in it, and pounced on the snow clumps when they snuck up on her.


And I'll close with yet another cat anecdote. But first, an apology to you people who despise felines and cannot understand the turn this blog has taken: I'm sorry. Since I'm no longer teaching, I'm stuck when it comes to amusing stories, and this will likely remain the case until we have children. Alas, summon that patience from deep somewhere, for this, too, shall pass. Now, back to my closing story.

When Eric was home this week, he heard Augustine bolt for the front window. Eric figured the mail carrier was at our door, since our cat has sensitive ears and takes pride in serving as our guard. This was the case, so Eric stepped out to retrieve our letters, only to find our mailwoman stopped in our yard, standing in snow and staring at our front window. When she saw she'd been caught, she gushed, "I just love your cat!" I am amused to imagine our cat and mail carrier bonding over the year, watching each other through the glass.

Second Annual Indiana Thanksgiving Extravaganza

This week is coming to a close, somewhat against my wishes. With it, Heather and Chad left for Iowa today and our normal routines will resume tomorrow.

Tuesday night they arrived and we collected our hungry charges to commence the second annual "Visit Eric and Faith for Thanksgiving because they don't have enough days off to drive to Iowa and back in order to have quality time with family" extravaganza!

Wednesday, Heather and I enjoyed a tour of the South Bend Chocolate Company. If you recall, I first traveled there in May with another sister, but as it was on a weekend, we missed seeing it in action. This time, we didn't have to imagine employees; instead, the machines were rolling out chocolates and people were individually setting almond slivers into the tops of the chocolates as they emerged from the conveyor belts. We both posed for the following picture:


Naturally, the requisite campus sightseeing was accomplished, and the Snite Museum duly visited. When we were collecting Eric from the library, Chad and Heather's reaction was comical as the elevator doors opened to reveal the following sight:


I was prepared for the emptiness, as this is an overflow floor, but there were some comments as to whether the university money was spent in all manner of ways so as to preclude books, or whether our pupils are so studious so that all printed materials were in constant circulation.

Thanksgiving was a treat. One downside, however, is that since we partake of a catered meal, we don't get the turkey and ham leftovers for sandwiches and the like. Nevertheless, we still managed to find enough food around to keep us happy. After all, we had to bribe them with shrimp and cheese balls so they'd make the trip.

The remainder of the time was spent creating stitch markers and making cards, watching movies and Heroes, knitting, cheering on Notre Dame, having a date with my sister, and watching our gentlemen play a PS2 college football game with numerous team match-ups -- I'm sorry to report that Notre Dame lost against Iowa State, Stanford (twice), and pretty much everyone except for Wofford College. Even fantasy games left me with the desire to get this season over with so we could move on to the next.

Now, with the house to myself, I am getting caught up on laundry and dishes and am trying to decide if I'm catching a bug. As such, I'm indulging in the following scene: I am wrapped in a quilt as I sit in an armchair with a classic book, sipping from a large mug of black tea, listening to various music, and turning my head to see snow floating down outside my window.


Yup, it's going to be hard to leave this and exchange it for work tomorrow morning.

Book Recommendation: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

A couple months back, while discussing favorite books with a friend, she urged me to begin blogging about them since there wasn't paper readily accessible to jot the titles down and this would serve as a reminder. So I begin with The Catcher in the Rye (affiliate link).

I have read this book twice, with five years in between. I experienced a decided dislike with the first read-through, although I did enjoy a couple nostalgic passages. Willing to give it a second chance, my second experience was nearly opposite the first. While I feel there are some things that could have been altered, and the protagonist is not someone I readily relate to, I understood him. Perhaps it took losing my brother to be able to identify the barricades he was using to distance himself from others: his crass mouth, his fighting defense, his outrageous lies. But I began to see his hurt, his inability to communicate and how he struggled in his isolation and fought against phoniness. I see this as a study of grief, how he has not yet come to terms with mourning his brother and the downward spiral that commenced.

One of my favorite passages from the book is when he's relating to his sister what he'd like to do in the future:

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around -- nobody big, I mean -- except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff -- I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going. I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.

In spite of his abrasive personality, Holden Caulfield is sensitive and wants to care for those around him. He's just stuck and no longer knows how to be himself. Early on, when writing an essay for a classmate, he turns nostalgic and gets mocked and debased for what he writes. So he shuts down and reverts to his fists.

I read too much into these things, but I imagine some of my former students as Holdens, lost without someone to side with them. They found it was easier to be labeled the troubled child and let it define them and their future actions. I valued the moments I had with those students (sometimes while monitoring detention) when I caught a glimmer of the true person inside, when they let their defenses down. But it was hard to continue that when they returned to my class and their peers, because their peers didn't know of the small steps taken to change.

In one case, a student switched sections, to one where he didn't have close friends. Then he started to learn to be himself and stop belittling his every failure for the amusement of those around him. Of course, I don't know what ended up happening to this modern-day Holden, as he was removed to live with an aunt in Texas.

Humble Pie

Warning: Football Post Ahead. (Also, please watch your step for the overused parenthetical.)

If ever there was one, this was a week to get your hands on often-elusive Notre Dame tickets.

I heard of someone who bought two legitimate tickets for $20. One university employee who receives from their dean two tickets to some game in the season received five. Instead of the familiar scene of fans with hands raised, fingers showing the number they wanted, there were countless individuals with their tickets waving to anyone interested. One fan, looking for a singular ticket, had his hand up for all of one minute before he found one.

In our department, countless faculty were trying to find takers, and the ticket office had at least thirty alumni return their tickets through express mail on Friday. After the ticket office refused to accept any more tickets due to the number they already had on hand (seriously, that never happens), a coworker offered me both of hers for free. She was going on vacation and didn't want them to go to waste.

The weather outlook was beautiful, so Eric and I walked to campus. It was eerily quiet on our way and I felt as if I were in a Twilight Zone episode. The streets weren't all blocked off like normal, and the crowds were missing from their regular haunts. Once inside the stadium, the eeriness wore off, as it was still a full house as far as I could tell.

It was a good game. There were frustrating times (Sharpley's fumble that was returned for the touchdown that finally put Navy in the lead), but we made Navy earn the end to their losing streak.


In triple overtime, Navy finally bested us. If it wasn't for the pass interference, I think we would have headed to quadruple overtime. As it was, we couldn't perform the two-point conversion from 1.5 yards, and above you see our final play. (You can also tell our vantage point. Pretty good seats for the first and third overtime, especially.)

We're nursing our wounds, trying not to dwell on the sorry losing streak we find ourselves in, and I'm trying to keep Eric from focusing on when we could have earned points in the game that would have kept us from being tied at the end of regulation (namely, at 4th and 15, faking a field-goal attempt to try and run for the first down; no surprise, we turned it over on downs).

There now. Maybe I have this out of my system. I might even be able to make it to the end of the season without another blog reference. (As an aside, I really enjoy how I can find myself in a nitty-gritty football conversation at work with half a dozen other women -- only in South Bend.)

Changes

For those that have followed the blog since its infancy, you have noticed its subtle shift from teaching anecdotes to pictures of finished creations and talk of yarn. While teaching, I had little time or energy to knit or sew during the year unless under duress (as in the case of a sister's graduation), but I had no shortage of student typos.

When we moved to South Bend and I began working, I had to adjust to the excess of free time, including an hour lunch each day. I naturally returned to my yarn, picking it up during a movie at home or while enjoying a leisurely lunch outdoors. And these habits have been maintained this year plus.

It became natural to document these successes online, but one hindrance stands in my path. At a minimum, my sisters and I have instituted a 'homemade Christmas' for each other, and it looks like a couple others may join us in this challenge. Therefore, I have been furiously knitting and sewing, but if I revealed stories and photos of what I have kept busy with as of late, I ruin the surprise, for most of my sisters check this on a regular basis.

As a teaser, though, I reveal what I have made for my nephew, since he's yet too young to be reading this and I trust his mother to remain mum on the subject. Let me introduce you to 'snake' and 'mouse.' I have struggled with names for these creatures, so suggestions are welcome. I've debated Nagini and Neville, but it has little merit for non-Harry Potter fans. The analogy falls apart with examination, since Nagini is creepy and Neville is not a rodent, but I digress.


Initially I passed this pattern by, until I realized that snake could eat mouse, revealing to all evidence of his recent meal. Then I couldn't resist. But really, who could?

So admittedly, my actual knitting creation still needs embroidered eyes, but you can see that the first image (from the pattern creator) has the project finished, and she shows the snake satiating his appetite.

Bathroom Humor

A colleague relayed the following story about her elementary-aged granddaughter.

Little "Susie" accompanied her mother to her older brother's middle school. While there, she used the restroom. When she emerged, she said, "Mom, I need a quarter."

"Why do you need a quarter?"

"I was washing my hands, but they're all out of paper towels. And can you believe they charge 25 cents for napkins!"

Her mother spit out, between laughs, "Honey, go use the hand dryer."

My Own Obsessive-Compulsive Tendencies, or Welcome to the Freak Show

My brain does funny things. In fact, it has been doing one particular funny thing going on nineteen years now, which is hard to own up to when I think of the triviality it represents.

Let's first go back to when little Faithy was in third grade, for this is when it began. Imagine a thoughtful girl in pigtails learning to spell (and apparently beginning to work with the multiplication tables). She liked to discover patterns in words. Let's take the word "teacher," as it is one I, um, she recalls manipulating. She would take a word, spell it out in her head, determining how many letters it contained. "Teacher" contains seven. However, she was not content with the sum. Instead, she wanted to see how many times she would have to repeat it in order to reach a proper total (determined to be any double digit ending in 6). "Teacher" would need to be repeated eight times to make 56, so she would dutifully do so. Why -6? One must not too deeply examine the roots of something begun when she was but nine. One theory as likely as another is that there were 16 stairs in her home, and she always counted them (although the total never varied, she couldn't resist).

As Faithy grew older and her savviness increased tenfold, she would graduate to analyzing phrases, sentences, song lyrics, and beyond. Before long, she could recognize when acceptable phrases were spoken without consciously counting them out ("no parking any time" is a stock example, or "closed on weekends").

Here we must enter another rule. She learned that if a phrase ended in a three or in an eight (take "no passing zone" or "Saturday," respectively), one could reach success by doubling the entirety (13 becomes 26, 8 becomes 16). At first she would double just to reach satisfaction, but it came to pass that she was content with reaching any double-digit ending in a three, six, or eight. So her odds were pretty good, now, since 30% of examined phrases would be acceptable.

But what to do with those ornery ones that didn't muster up? This is where her shady ethics come into question. She would make the necessary changes to find satisfaction, even if that required an alteration of meaning, or even if it ended up as nonsense. Just now someone spoke, "He's out of town." Yikes, only 12. She might transform the phrase to "She's out of town" to work, or perhaps "He is out of town."

There doesn't seem to be any merit to this exhibition, but at times it comes in handy with Wheel-of-Fortune or crosswords. She kept it to herself until college because of its banality, but then disclosed it to her older sister and a couple friends in a memorable breakfast ("memorable breakfast" is 18, just for your edification).

So why continue, you might ask? ("So why continue" is 13.) Ay, there's the rub. For this is why it is termed her obsessive-compulsive tendency, as it cannot be turned off. It is exacerbated when her mind is disengaged and seems to decrease with added engagement ("added engagement" is only 15, so it could be changed to "adding engagement" to keep the peace).

Her husband and friends can tell stories of how eery it can be to have her calculate the final digit of any given phrase with seemingly instantaneous results, but honestly, when she's been doing it for nineteen years, it would be a shame if it took much time. Perhaps most frightening of all, she periodically refers to herself in the third person.

Searching, Searching

Primarily the audience for this blog tends to be family and three-dimensional friends. Once in a while I will have a stranger comment how they found my blog through my use of a Flickr photo, and other times people are directed to it by a search engine.

I'm curious what the reaction must be for the people who searched for the following things and ended up at my page:

-appropriate birthday gift for ex-wife
-my car needs a nickname
-banking, text messaging
-not wanting to do work in school
-penmanship, "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy fox"
-poetry inspired by my niece
-Positive Affirmation worksheets for middle school students
-poetry poker
-Buick Century side impact death
-teaching english privet drive
-landlord responsibility above-ground pool
-molar extraction videos
-weddings on fathers day
-lingering cough nose bleed

I'm afraid there were some disappointed individuals.

The trend seems to be that I happened to use the words in unrelated posts, but Google leads them to me nonetheless. For instance, I discussed Hassler's novel in one post, and my teaching job in another ("staggerford and tenure" found me).

Or I mention how I have succumbed to Notre Dame football's siren song and "brady quinn hot" is led to my confession.

Sometimes an entry title is quite misleading, when you consider my tongue-in-cheek entries on temptations in college and lil smokies brought people looking for answers. And let's not forget "difference between men and women," which is also a repeat offender. Or those searching for the "recipe of Panera cinnamon crunch bagel," and instead are faced with my observations.

One of my favorite search terms, that shows up time and again, is "poems about potatoes." I am amused that my blog shows up first in a series of 2,240,000 million results. Apparently there's a great demand for such poetry, and I am proud to say that my entry on "Poetry and Potatoes"speaks to the masses. Yes, spuds do bring us all together.

Names

At work, one of my responsibilities is grading bubble sheets. There's even this great computer program that runs an analysis of the results, which, if examined, provides fruitful information. I won't go into the depth of what all it can do since it's not the basis for this story, but this provides some background.

One professor gives a quiz every Friday during his fall-semester class. He also began the tradition, soon after I arrived, of presenting me with cookies along with the exams to be graded. He is quite welcome in the office every week, as he arrives right when we are interested in a mid-morning snack.

This generous professor will be called 'Frederick' here while I relate a story. During a conversation during which he asked me why I go by my middle name, he mentioned that to this day, no one in his extended family calls him Frederick. At this point, you might assume that Frederick and I both go my our middle names. Not so.

When he first began school, he was sent home with a note pinned to his shirt. His mother read the following: "Frederick is a very nice, well-behaved child, but he doesn't seem to know his name and did not respond to it all day long."

The next day, his mother pinned a note to Frederick's shirt. It was two words: "Try Bobby."

When 'Frederick' was born, a very opinionated aunt neither liked his first nor his middle name. In her fashion, she began calling him Bobby, and as his aunt held much sway, the rest of the family followed suit. To this day, he can classify his friendships by those who call him Bobby still and those who call him Frederick.

When he feels so inclined, he will refer to me by my first name and I then respond by calling him Bobby, after which he beams.

Welcome to Notre Dame football season, folks

One of our new graduate students entered the office at the end of the day Friday with this to say:

"Faith, since you seem to know the answer to everything, why is there a man ... painted black ... wearing a skirt ... holding a torch ... standing in the reflection pool?"

Yes, football fever has again descended on South Bend.