J's World View

It arrived yesterday. The sizeable manila envelope addressed in large six-year-old handwriting containing J's map colored in a most interesting way. It appears something has happened in Asia. Have I missed something on the news? It is delightful and will make for an interesting ghan of the world. Using his color scheme, I will proceed in knitting my way through The Pacific Ocean toward the compass rose and my first landfall in South America! Here is Vogue Knitting Chart One that I will use with J's colors.

In other knitting, I completed the Ruffle Scarf AKA the Potato Chip scarf(because you can't make just one) to be given as a Christmas gift. The pattern is available at http://www.knitpicks.com/projects/Projects_Display_Yarn.aspx?itemid=50355220 where you can download the pattern for free! I used Cascade yarns "Pearls" and size nines which yielded a slightly heavier weight as seen modeled here by Mighty Max my
Wonder Dog! The next one I make will be with an airy fiber for a wispy ruffle for K2's birthday in February.

A Puzzle in a Maze in the Dark of Night

Joan Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted challenged me to concentrate and strive to stay with her. Challenging style! This is not a book to lay down for a day or two and return later! I had to review to understand where I was, what was happening, and to answer "Who ARE these people?!" After seeing Charlie Rose interview the author on PBS, I wanted to read some of her work preceding her current best seller The Year of Magical Thinking. Her elliptical writing is thought-provoking. I do enjoy her technique of restating phrases in full as often as three times in a given short paragraph. Another charming device is using phrases such as he "may or may not have..." stating oppositions that appealed to my own imprecise memory although the intent was to write in the need-to-know basis of a CIA covert operative. The whole thing finally makes sense and comes together in the final few pages. The author succeeds in
placing the reader in the helpless abyss of a covert agent who must wait for an unknown contact to provide a glimmer of the next action.

Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.
---from http://www.xanga.com/spinner_mom