Unraveled Wednesday: 8/30/23

I'm joining Kat and fellow Unravelers today for the last Unraveled Wednesday in August. Time flies when you're working on the Captain Ahab Hitchhiker and want to see the colors changing.

I'd like to be able to finish this by next week sometime and get started on my next Wollmeise roll, but we'll see. 

I finished a bunch of books last week. Some were three-star fill-in books that I read between holds (The Anomaly, The Firm, LT's Theory of Pets, and Open Throat). They were perfectly fine reads, but there were also a couple of five-star standouts. The first was Above Ground, a stellar book of poetry by Clint Smith that Kat recommended. I was not familiar with Clint Smith, but I'm grateful to have read this book. It's a remarkable collection of exceptional poems about birth, parenthood, dancing in the cereal aisle, odes to the electric baby swing, double stroller, and those first fifteen minutes after the kids are finally asleep. There are also poignant poems about civilians being killed by US military air strikes, New Orleans after the storm has passed, George Floyd, and Willie Francis, the first known person to survive an execution by electric chair, 1946. Clint Smith knows exactly what to say and how to say it.

"What is the difference between science
and a miracle other than discovering new
language for something we don't understand?"

The second standout was the current Read With Us book, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. I'll be honest, it was such a difficult book for me to read initially. We had chosen it for Read With Us so I felt I had to read it, but the overwhelming violence and carnage brought my reading to a halt at least three or four times. It wasn't gratuitous violence but rather necessary in a book about the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka in the 1980s. And along with the violence, this book also requires you to think and gain some sort of grasp of what was going on in Sri Lanka. Shehan Karunatilaka cleverly gives the reader an abbreviated shortcut to the factions and abbreviations in the form of a cheat sheet that Maali provided to clueless Western journalists, and I appreciate all the editing he and Sort of Books did over two years to make the book more accessible to Western readers.

Once I got past the initial blood, butchering, and bodies everywhere, I came to appreciate the world of the Afterlife that the author built. Narrated by a dead man in the second person, there are waiting rooms with endless queues, ghouls, ghosts, spirits, and worse in the In Between, and Maali Almeida has seven moons to finish any unfinished business so he can move on to The Light. It's a murder mystery, ghost story, political, and historical novel about evil and violence. It's also full of dark comedy and well worth reading.

"Evil is not what we should fear. Creatures with power acting in their own interest: that is what should make us shudder."

What are you making and reading this week?

Places

Places I knit this weekend:

In the car while I waited in the long, long line for our county's hazardous waste disposal. (My hazardous waste was 14 burned-out fluorescent four-foot-long bulbs.)

At Ryan's house while waiting for him to finish mowing and John to finish picking more beans. 

In my knitting chair in my living room after I was done blanching and freezing beans. 

In the gazebo in the park across from my house. In the interest of truthfulness, I didn't actually knit in the gazebo. Years ago there used to be chairs up there, but someone seems to have removed them. I did knit while seated on that bench you can see below next to the love crape myrtle, but left when the park became crowded with teenagers looking for Pokemon and a group of people singing hymns. 

It wasn't an especially exciting weekend, but Captain Ahab did get out to see a few sights. I hope your weekend was a good one!

Something New and Different

Long ago, Ryan advised me to try one new thing every once in a while. I did this for a while but gradually let it drop by the wayside. In checking back on the blog, I was surprised to find that this conversation with Ryan happened six years ago, and it was definitely time to try something new once again. John gave me the opportunity to get way out of my comfort zone last week and try something very new to me. 

Welcome to shooting sporting clays. We went to Lehigh Valley Sporting Clays in Coplay, PA. John has been here five or six times before with guys that he used to work with. He was anxious for Justin and I to go with him for his birthday. Justin was happy to go; I went along grudgingly, and Ryan wanted no part of it. But much to my surprise, it was interesting and I did have some fun. 

The object is to take your shotgun and shoot at clay targets at 17 different stations (these are called "houses"). It's all electronically controlled with a card that you put in at each station and then someone in your group pushes a button to release two clay targets. You have three chances to try this at each station. 

The clay targets are thrown (electronically with the push of a button) in lots of different ways. 

Some come from close by but fly high overhead away from you; others are nearby but end up rolling along the ground. (These are called "rabbits".) 

Some stations are wide open, like the one above, but others are more contained, as pictured below. 

The whole place has been built in an abandoned quarry, and they've kept some of the remains of buildings. There are also several stations over water. Both John and Justin liked those because you can get a better idea of where you've shot and adjust your aim on subsequent attempts.

John thought I needed to give this a try also, so I did pick up his shotgun on one of the first easy stations. It felt way too heavy and I couldn't even use the sight pin because the stock of his gun is made for a man and too long for a woman who is a good six inches shorter than he is. It didn't feel safe to me, so I ended up not shooting, but did enjoy keeping score. John asked and they do rent guns made with smaller stocks made for women, so maybe someday he'll talk me into going again and actually shooting with the right gun for me.

It does seem like a testosterone-fueled sport, and in the three hours we were there, I only saw one other woman. She was actually shooting and seemed to be enjoying herself. So maybe I will go with John again someday. Hopefully, this would be on a nice crisp fall day and not a sweltering, sweaty one, and with a gun that was made for a woman. Sporting clays could use a little more estrogen. 

Unraveled Wednesday: 8/23/23

I'm joining Kat and fellow Unravelers today, with two new projects. I cast on my second Hitch on the Move and knit just a couple of triangles to make sure that I still liked the yarn pairing. I do, and I have plenty of yarn so I'll be able to make this one large enough to make me happy.

I've been knitting a lot more on my Captain Ahab Hitchhiker and I think I can see a very slight shift in the shade of blue.

The yarn goes through blue while transitioning to shades of brown, so I keep on knitting to see what's coming next. 

I haven't finished any books this week other than Invisible Women which I wrote about on Monday. I blame all the beans, zucchini, cucumbers, chard, and tomatoes that have needed to be blanched, frozen, cooked, and processed into yet more tomato juice and pickles. I may be giving dill pickles to everyone on my list for Christmas this year. 

I am rereading The Firm in anticipation of a sequel (The Exchange) from John Grisham that will be released in mid-October. I used to enjoy John Grisham novels decades ago, and while this will probably be the only one I re-read, it's a good book to listen to while I happily knit with Captain Ahab. 

What are you making and reading this week?

A Book Post

I'm not sure I read enough to make Monday book posts a semi-regular thing, but I've written about books that have been important to me in the past couple of weeks and I've got another one today. I don't remember how I stumbled across this book, but the title caught my eye, and I think the author writes about an important idea that we should all be aware of. But beware, this book might make you angry!

It's Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez. 

The author's basic premise is that data is important in our world today, for everything from economic development to healthcare, education, safety, and public policy. We rely on numbers to make important decisions and distribute resources. But there is a big problem with this. Much of the data we have collected and pay attention to does not take gender into account. It treats men as the default and women as atypical, so bias and discrimination are built into our systems. Women can pay tremendous costs for this bias, in time, money, and often with their lives. It sounds slightly dramatic, and I can picture some of the males that I know rolling their eyes at this, but while I was reading the examples that the author presented, I found myself in complete agreement. 

Some things are simple, but I've often thought that my phone was too large to feel really comfortable in my hand, and I can't recall that I've ridden in any car where the seat belts fit correctly or comfortably. They were most likely built around male dimensions, just like crash-test dummies. The fact that the safety equipment in cars does not take into account that women are shorter and lighter contributes to the horrendous statistic that when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47 percent more likely to be seriously injured than a man and 17 percent more likely to die. I'm willing to bet that almost every woman has felt discounted by a male physician at some point in their lives, and possibly even had their symptoms diminished as just part of "being a woman." An important example is the real life-or-death consequences of a lack of medical research when it comes to the different symptoms of a heart attack in men and women. There are so many examples in the book that at times it can become overwhelming. 

Because there are so many instances in our daily lives of this gender bias, it can start to feel like some sort of conspiracy against women. I don't think that the author was intent on blaming males, but rather that many of the people that design products and do research have assumed that being human is the same as being male. She points out that most of us can not even imagine a problem until we or someone we care about experiences it. When she was pregnant, Sheryl Sandberg felt frustrated with how long she had to walk to and from the car park of the Google building. She brought her concerns to the Google co-founders and they were surprised that they had not seen this problem themselves, but neither had Sheryl before she was pregnant herself. 

It can also feel a bit depressing because there are no easy fixes for these problems. The author states that “The solution to the sex and gender data gap is clear: we have to close the female representation gap. When women are involved in decision-making, in research, in knowledge production, women do not get forgotten”.

So besides making me angry, overwhelmed, and slightly depressed, I'm still glad I read this book. It made me much more aware of the male-default world we are living in and how we all need a new perspective and more women involved in how we design the world.

Because I couldn't choose just one quote from the book, I'll leave you with three of them:

“One of the most important things to say about the gender data gap is that it is not generally malicious, or even deliberate. Quite the opposite. It is simply the product of a way of thinking that has been around for millennia and is therefore a kind of not thinking. A double not thinking, even: men go without saying, and women don't get said at all. Because when we say human, on the whole, we mean man.”

“Whiteness and maleness are silent precisely because they do not need to be vocalized. Whiteness and maleness are implicit. They are unquestioned. They are the default. And this reality is inescapable for anyone whose identity does not go without saying, for anyone whose needs and perspective are routinely forgotten. For anyone who is used to jarring up against a world that has not been designed around them.”

“We need a revolution in the research and the practice of medicine, and we need it yesterday. We need to train doctors to listen to women, and to recognise that their inability to diagnose a woman may not be because she is lying or being hysterical: the problem may be the gender data gaps in their knowledge. It’s time to stop dismissing women, and start saving them.”

A Gathering of Poetry: August 2023

Chris Judge, @adailycloud

It's the third Thursday of the month so I'd like to welcome you to A Gathering of Poetry. Today's poem is short and sweet and written for children. I came upon this while reading with my great-nephew and really liked it. He said this poem made him feel good and I agree. 

Every Day
by Nikita Gill

Everyday is not an opportunity
to improve yourself.

Some days are just there
for you to accept yourself
and look at the clouds.

This too is growth.

This too is rising.

Just existing is enough

on some days.

The flowers do it everyday

and make the world more beautiful

just by being here.

So do you. 

Rest today.

There is tomorrow. 

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Gill, Nikita, "Every Day". These Are the Words. Macmillan Children's Books. 2022. 

You can read more about the poet here.

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Thanks for reading and joining us for our monthly Gathering of Poetry. Be sure to visit Kym and Kat so you can gather more poetry and you can add your link below if you would like to share one of your favorite poems. The more the merrier!

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Click here to enter

Unraveled Wednesday: 8/16/23

I'm joining Kat and fellow Unravelers today, with a happier tale than I had last week.

The Sparkly Hitch on the Move is done. I like it, but there are some things I will do differently when I knit my next one. I'm going to increase the size, a lot. This one is only 46" across the top, and I like shawls to be large enough that they don't slip off while I'm wearing them. Martina Behm provides instructions on how to increase the size by explaining what percentage of your yarn you can safely use and still have enough left to finish. I increased the size of this one by two "zigs and zags" and I'm glad I did. It would have been far too small for me if I hadn't done that. I think I successfully corrected my mistake after a bit of frustration because I can no longer tell where I made it. I'm also wondering about slipping the edge stitch to provide a nicer edge. All in all, it's not bad for my practice Hitch on the Move and I think I can improve my next one so I like it a bit more.

This week I read Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. Ann Patchett is a terrific storyteller who is at her best with Tom Lake. It's the story of Lara Nelson recounting her younger days as an actress to her three daughters who have returned home to the family's northern Michigan cherry farm due to the pandemic. To pass the long hours of harvesting sweet cherries, Emily, Maisie, and Nell have demanded that their mother recount her relationship with the celebrity movie star Peter Duke. A chance remark by their father Joe has led to this storytelling. "You know your mother used to date him," Joe told the girls after walking in at the end of a movie-viewing session. Patchett tells this story in dual timelines of past and present while leaving out a few private parts in the story that Lara tells her daughters. Details are revealed (or not) and the girls find out things about their mother that they did not know.

I very much enjoyed how distinctly the three daughters were drawn, each with her own personality and characteristics. My favorite character was father and husband Joe Nelson. He is woven into the storylines of Lara's past and the play Our Town and is also a quietly important figure in the present.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Meryl Streep, and when I started I wondered if her voice would overwhelm the story. I needn't have feared as I soon forgot about Meryl Streep the actress and listened to her as the voice of Lara.

The pain of the past is just one of many things that has to happen to make way for the beauty that follows and Tom Lake reminds us of that.

“There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.”

What are you making and reading this week?