small change

black - photo friday challenge

Last Friday’s photo challenge was “black.” Well, it proved to be quite a challenge for my nascent participation in this weekly ritual. For days I drew a blank on it. I also took dozens of photographs, but none had anything to say about the theme of “black,” even if they featured plenty of black within their frames in varying degrees of obviousness.

It wasn’t until I took a friend and fellow knitter to my neighborhood yarn store that it hit me.  Just about every serious knitting project I undertook so far has been with thread that was either black or some slight variation on it, like this hooded parka I am knitting for the younger son (who happens to be a challenge of another sort).  After having gone through some 20 balls of yarn (and I am still not done with this piece), I am so ready to knit with color!

And I am also ready to abandon the idea that patterns in knitting books are written in plain black and white, for all to follow to get the finished product featured in the picture. As it turns out, this pattern omitted a couple stitches in the raglan decrease, so what I got is not what is in the picture!

post feast

And so another Thanksgiving came and went. We celebrated quietly, thankful for all we have and for each other's company, but with only one son home for the holiday. We worried about relatives (my in-laws) in India, where they went to celebarte a wedding and find themselves in chaos.

We cooked up a feast, as if we had expected lots of guests. But no one else came. Still, we didn't spare the butter or cream, staples that went into the stuffing with chestnuts and apples, the mashed and whipped parsnip puree, and, with some truffle oil, under the skin of the turkey the spouse prepped and cooked, since yours truly is more or less (well, more and more) a vegetarian. There was going to be souffles for dessert, but the stuffing was good enough as a second helping to pass for dessert, so now it's time for that postprandial glass of wine (hoping that it will work its magic on all that butter and cream). So here is our menu in pictures:

Maybe this photo explains why I was not looking forward to diving into the turkey, cripsy skin and all that notwithstanding...

Sweet potatoes with fried sage leaves, mashed and whipped parsnip puree, roasted Brussels sprouts, all recipes (including for the turkey and stuffing) adapted from Gourmet's November issue....

Cranberry sauce made from fresh organic cranberries cooked with persimmons from my friend's tree...

All done now....

spudlings

All across the US in countless kitchens, from the modest missionary to the grand mansionary, the carcasses of turkeys wait to be stuffed and trussed, roughed and shoved into ovens, then slapped and sliced on platters, only to meet their fate as belly-stuffing for the Olympic eating event for their human keepers. But who knew that there were other creatures, perhaps not as large or feathered as turkeys, or hairy and cutely snouted as pigs, about to be sliced and diced and meet the same fate as their meat counterparts? The fresh veggie and fruit delivery guys left these sorry little spud creatures at our doorstep to slaughter for our feast tomorrow:

Another helping of huilt,  guilt anyone?Nah, go ahead, dig in and don't look into those eyes....

apples and oranges (2)

My previous post was in response to last Friday’s photo challenge, but in a way, this post is a continuing thread to what I wrote. We continue to enjoy balmy weather here in Northern California, and with Thanksgiving around the bend, this means that if it is Sunday, half of Marin’s population is browsing at the farmer’ market at the Civic Center. 

The spouse, my friend C, and I headed out as well, to brave the crowds close to noon when most of the stuff goes on sale, just before the market closes. Lots of yummy (and organic) greens can be had for 3 to 4 dollars a pound, and since I have been relishing greens almost as much as chocolate these days, you can say that I was a happy camper with my bagful of chard, frisee, kale, and arugula.

Squashes are my other favorite food, and there was plenty of that stuff too, enough to please both palate and eyes. One of the other main reasons I went to the market today is that the goat cheese from Bodega Bay is about to disappear for a few months, while the goats get a holiday. I am not kidding, but this goat cheese is so creamy and its taste so subtle, that it is almost out of this world -- well, in as much as Bodega Bay itself, too, is out of this world....

This being Marin, the market is a place not just for stocking up on delicacies, but also, letting go of a few stresses. If you are in the mood for a massage, why, just step over into the Ahhh Massage booth, park your goodies and then yourself and enjoy the kneading.

As for those who prefer t do a bit of people watching in between fondling veggies and fruits, as you can see, there is plenty of variety for that too. Wearing fur-lined boots and summer tops at the same time and carrying yoga bags from the fancy yoga clothing line store is pretty common place around here.

apples and oranges

The subject of food is can be quite visceral. It so happens that the last Friday photo challenge had food as its theme. I happen to have a zillion photos of food, since I both love to eat and to cook. But, it also so happens that Thanksgiving is nearly upon us and as such, a whole other dish of memories and issues gets served up for me. Ever since I moved to North America and had my first Thanksgiving, it became my favorite holiday. Stripped of religious overlays and cored of the pit of commercialism that compels gift giving, Thanksgiving has always been a wonderful way to be with family and simply eat, drink and be merry.

When I took the photo of the apple and the orange, I was thinking literally of the old adage: apples and oranges. Holiday feast (and so the holidays themselves), the way I see it, are apples to some people, and oranges to others. For those in the oranges category, the holiday meal is an occasion to break with tradition and go all out when it comes to serving up food. For the apples among us, the holiday meal is the ritual that’s all about re-experiencing the comforting taste of what is well-known and so cherished.

All my life I wanted to be an apple, anchored viscerally in a tradition. But I am an orange – that strange fruit of my Eastern European childhood that was a rare treat around Christmas, sweet and exotic, leaving a taste for the sun of faraway lands. Even as I settled in a land where oranges are more common place these days than apples, I am still an orange when it comes to holiday food. Every feast I cook has a different menu from last year’s. And I wonder why my connection to place is co cerebral…

not weathered

While other bloggers in my cyberhood are coping with plunging temperatures, rising winds, and oppressive darkness shortly after noon, I am stepping out, still wearing sandals, into the California sunshine and off to see what locally grown fresh veggies and fruits are on sale at our neighborhood health food store.

Lest it seem that I am boasting, I want to make it clear that while I am grateful for the heat and light, there is something strangely numbing about the mostly balmy weather, the always-available feast of fresh foods, and that light that glitters the air. All this makes it impossible to complain or feel any sort of privation, for one. For another, it makes it impossible to appreciate the power of gratitude. But the worst of it is that it makes the accident of geography and climate into a sense of entitlement.

Then again, in a month or two, there cold be torrential rains with floods and hills sliding away, followed by a dry spring and a summer of fires consuming homes by the hundreds. And, there is always the Big One, that next earthquake, building up the pressure underground, while we go about our business in the sun-sparkled landscapes of California.

at the edges

The last few days, in fact, this whole week since last Friday, has been a blur, with work, “to do” lists, projects, my yoga practice, all moving in and out of focus. There has been some real chaffing at the edges, too, not just in through reflection, but in the “objects” of reflection, too. For one, I made the stupidest mistake at work, one that I took much harder than my boss did.

We moved offices, on a fairly short notice, and I was in charge of arranging the new phone and Internet hookup. I spent hours on the phone with the appropriate people to set it all up for our convenience and for what I was priding myself on as being a smooth move – across the hall from our old office. I even made sure that I changed our billing address and such from the old suite to the new suite. What I didn’t realize that in the almost two years that I have passed the door of the suite of our new office, I never noticed that the letter attached to the number was not the same letter as the letter on our old office. So, I ended up sending the poor phone guy on a wild goose chase for a place and wiring that did not exist. Needless to say, we had to reschedule to hook-up, but since we moved only across the hall, I was able to keep the connection alive for my boss through the router and wireless. All was not lost, just my pride – which is a good thing.

On the other hand, being discombobulated has helped in unexpected ways: I managed to fall deeper into my forward bends in my yoga practice, as if those hyper vigilant hamstrings released their grip and decided to follow the directive of the deeper bend from the hips. I have always been a backbender, reveling as I do in upward bow pose (urdhva-dhanurasana) and its variations. To have been able to finally rest my head in paschimottanasana (and its variations) and lose my focus over wondering when the pose will end is even more refreshing than the exuberance that comes in the wake of backbends.

The wise will always know what to leave in a blur and what to bring into focus. And so, this week, though I may not be wiser, a little honing at the edges has helped bring me further into letting go of both the muscles of the legs on which I stand and also of those proverbial ones that keep my ego upright and uptight….

autumn - photo friday challenge

Here is my first foray into the weekly Photo Friday challenge, for which the theme, this last Friday, was “Autumn”:

Oddly enough, the first association I have with autumn here in California is the sudden greening of the landscape that has been parched for months by a relentless sun. Everywhere you look closely enough, there are new shoots of grass and wild weeds, even as the ornamental flowers and foliage wither, and as the fields of crops go slowly bare. It is also in autumn that the air clears, giving way to brilliant blue skies and that piercing angle of light that casts long shadows into the hearts of people prone to sadness.

I might be more sensitive to the light, as my spouse and I came back from a funeral – that of one of his fraternity brothers. For the first time in ages, it seems we are starting to go to more funerals than any other kinds of social gatherings – and it’s no longer the funerals of our parents’ generation. Suddenly, we are our parents’ generation. Sitting through the service in the sanctuary I had this feeling, as the light filtered through the window, that we were the tender new grass on Death’s lawn, growing towards winter, our last season.

And all this, on yet-another glorious warm California day that belies the calendar!

even threaded

So, I have embarked on my first huge knitting project, a hooded parka, for my younger son. The body of the oeuvre was easy enough to execute, thanks to an almost mindless process of following a simple pattern. The sleeves however have bedeviled me, and I have wasted enough cheap yarn already making prototypes that didn’t work. Then, in a moment of inspiration, and what I thought was clarity, I believed I had the problem licked and went ahead with the pricey yarn I am using for the parka. I even made a chart to follow the increases and the rounds, thinking myself extremely smart for it.

and so, these last couple of days, I settled back with the knitting, making rounds through TV shows and breakfast coffee … and the sleeve was growing, albeit a bit slowly, it seemed to me. How was I going to get from 56 cast on stitches to the 93 stitches in the round and not go beyond the 20 inches in length the pattern called for? In fact, I reached the 20-inch mark and I was still on round 7 or so, of the 17 I should have knitted shortly before reaching 20 inches.

Surely, there must be a mistake in the pattern, I thought. I googled the book in combination with errors. But all I found was praise for the author and his work. Yes, his work.

So, that is when I decided to do what I should have done in the first place: the math! Duh! After measuring my gauge, multiplying and dividing a few times, it became very obvious to me that I misread the very first instruction. Rather, I think, I took an assumption I had for granted – and all the subsequent Zen-like practice of paying attention or minding my stitches was for naught.

You see, the pattern called for knitting one round in a pattern, then another round in simple knitting. The pattern for the sleeve increase started with working even for 6 rounds. Well, yours truly must have had a thing for that “even,” because she assumed that she was to knit 2 rounds for each one in those 6 rounds: 1 round in pattern, and 1 in plain knitting. No wonder her 20-inch sleeve, the way she read the pattern, was going to be 40 inches…. OK, no need to go into the third person just because I am so embarrassed. Still, when I went for help at my local knitting store, I bet the women kept laughing long after I drove off with the yarn between my proverbial legs – or should I say knitting needles.

The painful lesson from this Penelope-like endeavor?  Apart from the actual pain in my hands from the hours of knitting? It is a simple one: though you may lavish all your attention on that first assumption that you take to be your launching pad, be it in thought, writing, work, what have you, do not take it for granted, however happy it makes you and do everything you can to question it thoroughly.

In other words, I learned today that it in a practice (be it meditation or knitting), it is not enough to focus the attention. It is also necessary to train the mind to do what the mind does best: discriminate between what is and what we think there is.

 

trading in doubt

This mid-morning, while I went looking for a couple of books on political economy to help me better understand the current crisis, the stock market went loony, turning a dismal day into an opportunity for optimists in the wake of its sudden 10 percent gain. Broken in as we have been by the speed of technological innovation in the ways in which we communicate, I suppose, we are now primed for the wild ride of an aftermath of financial innovations, such as the securitization of debt, when it comes to our relations to economic value. I am desperately trying to reach deep into the recesses of my memory to dredge up the remnants of old informed takes I used to have on the economy when I was in graduate school.

Unfortunately, the only derivates I knew about back in those days were theoretical, literally (ha!), as I studied the relationship between natural resources and land use policies. So now here I am, along with millions, losing not just money, but also a certain sense of security in my ability to make informed economic choices. Paulson’s déjà vu certainty in saying that changing the terms of the bailout is the right thing to do, only weeks before he was certain of those other terms of the bailout, frays the tethers that hold us however tenuously in a belief that that, though rough times are ahead, there is some semblance of order and calm on the horizon, if only we follow the course. But the only thing that appears to be certain in this parade is uncertainty itself.

I tend to think that this weird spike in the market today is actually a sign of greater trouble to come.  Talking with people as I have been, I think that it’s not the bull that is unpent today. On the contrary, what I see happening is that people, afraid and depressed in general, are seizing an opportunity to sell.

I already noted that the recent quick shifts in the market rendered the notion of “value” one without a referent. The majority of us, tourists that we are, are left holding a map to a place that is not only out of this world, but also, doesn’t exist.