Plenty of Nothing

2006

Good things:

In March Douglas sent out Shaolin Cricket, saw Queen in Toronto, and had some good beer. And inherited a laptop.

In April, Heather got new specs and a luxurious second set of reading glasses.

In May, Heather finally managed to convince the flyer people to stop dropping an inch's worth of paper on the stoop every week.

In June we both discovered Alison Bechdel's books.

We started the blog in August.  We have readers!  And the porch ceiling finally got painted.

In September Douglas saw Billy Bragg live.  Heather went to Frenchy's.

In October we saw Alison Bechdel live!

In November the Americans turfed the Republicans out of Congress!  Hooray!

Bad things:

War in Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Trailer Park Boys movie was a disappointment.  When exactly does it take place?

Heather spent the December shutdown sick in bed.

Miscellaneous good reads: Bechdel's Fun Home, A Woman of Berlin, Coady's Mean Boy, Waters' Night Watch, Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans, MacAulay's Crew Train, and George Elliott Clarke's George and Rue.

The Mountain Witch's Mittens, Part One

Leave it to a Frenchwoman to make dressing up as a Tolkienesque sorceress look authentic, practical and fashion forward.  Black?  How seventeenth-century.  She and the rest of her fellowship can be found here, tromping around a French mountainside.  You can tell from her expression that somebody stands in imminent danger of a blast of goddess wrath.  And she would seem to offer an answer to that ancient conundrum, Can you cast a spell with mittens on?  From a textile perspective, that pointy cranberry felted witch hat is an enticing project beyond my capability, but the mittens I can manage.  I have the burgundy and apple green wool already.  The checkerboard pattern presents a couple of problems though.  First, when knitting in two colours, you have to carry one colour behind, but with these large squares it means there will be long loops of yarn behind the pattern, long enough to tangle your fingers.  If you catch the second strand behind, say, every third stitch, you run the risk of creating furrows of tension in the pattern.  (See below.)  The second problem is how to close off the top without abandoning the checkerboard design.  My first idea was to make the mitten eight squares around, four green and four burgundy, then at the top to reduce the burgundy squares to triangles, causing the four green squares to come together at the corners, creating a single square space at the top to be knit over in burgundy.  Here's how that looks:

See the pressure ridges?  I'm going to have to start over and this time I'm going to try carrying the yarn behind every stitch, and I'll also use more needles to make the jump from one to the next less angular.  I'm not thrilled about the square at the top either.  It's single instead of double knit, and kind of corner-y.  I'm also going to have to find the manual for this camera and figure out how to photograph with natural light.  All the faults I wanted to highlight tend to smooth out and disappear with the flash.

Douglas

World Whockey Roundup

My planned systematic coverage of women's hockey hasn't been as systematic as I planned, but here's a quick mid-season round-up.

CIS.  Alberta is romping through Canada West as usual.  The top three scorers in the CIS are all Alberta Pandas.  Laurier is on top in Ontario, with Guelph, Queen's and Toronto close behind.  St FX is the Atlantic leader, again, as usual, but with St Mary's and Moncton close behind. 

McGill is eating up the QSSF, with Ottawa second, and Concordia and Carleton trailing far behind.  Concordia is usually better than this year's version.  The McGill team is named the Martlets, after those little heraldic birds on the school's coat of arms.  U of Ottawa's team is the Gee Gees, slang for horses, specifically the horses that used to pull sleighs around pre-automotive Ottawa.  Concordia are the Stingers, and Carleton the Ravens.  Not bad nicknames all told.

On the QSSF and geography.  It's interesting how leagues continually arise and evolve to fill the same geographical area again and again.  The minor pro UHL, for instance, is centred in Michigan and covers an area very much like that of the pre-1990s IHL, and even has some of the same teams, which suggests there just ought to be a minor pro league in that corner of the States at all times for the Kalamazoo Wings to play in.  Canadian hockey history is full of little Montreal/Ottawa leagues like the QSSF, including the original 19th-century CAHA.  In Canadian college sports you always assume the Atlantic conference is the most geographically compact, but in women's hockey the QSSF is the conference with the shortest bus rides.  And each of the four QSSF teams has about six to ten players with French last names.  Which would suggest that if the Quebec City/Windsor corridor is the Two Nations x axis of Central Canada, Ottawa/Montreal is the bilingual y axis.

The Swedish word for women's hockey is damhockey, as in dame hockey, not damn hockey.  The top tier of Swedish women's club hockey is sorted into three geographical divisions.  MoDo is walking away with the northern division, AIK the east/west division, and Jönköping the south.  You'll recall that Sweden upset the US at the last Olympics.  Here is the website for the Swedish women's national team.

Jenny Brine of Bible Hill, Nova Scotia, is the leading scorer for the Harvard Crimson.

How to Draw

I've just finished Locas by Jaime Hernandez and am still in the shadow of that giant book.  If they teach cartooning somewhere, surely this is the textbook.  The amount of invention on every page is breathtaking.  This guy has absolutely no shyness about showing you his sources (Archie hits you almost immediately, as well as all kinds of genres from romance to superhero) and his influence on other cartoonists jumps right off the page (early Tank Girl for one).  Who can draw faces like this guy?  He can make you recognize a character from any angle, or at any age.  I'm in awe.  Douglas.

I'm Sitting Here Coughing Up a Lung

and diffidently changing the channels every 10 seconds in a circular search for something amusing. OMG. Serious colour commentary on Jack Russell terrier races. And the dogs--they are demented. Small packages of craziness chasing a plastic bag. Must watch these freaky dogs. No, no, don't put lumberjacks on instead. Lumberjacks are no fun. Must see more crazy little dogs.

These YouTube dogs are calm in comparison to the hurdling terriers.

Must learn more.

Heather

All's Quiet

We now specialize in the lazy winter holiday. I count as the laziest since I get a week or so off between solstice and New Year's; Douglas is less lazy since he gets only three days.

Yesterday was extra lazy. No one felt like cooking so we ate the figgy bread pudding for breakfast, snacked on good cheese all afternoon, and treated ourselves to cold chicken sandwiches in the evening. And since no one felt like going outdoors, we stayed in reading graphic novels and chattering all day long.

Today was less lazy since showers were taken and some shoveling took place. I've also been informed that hockey cards were purchased during a constitutional stroll. And since I felt less lazy today, a roast is cooking away with lots of root vegetables. Still too lazy to make a pie.

Not exactly a traditional holiday but it suits us. Now, if only I could do something about all this hockey.

Your Guide to the Spengler Cup

Each Christmas HC Davos of Switzerland hosts the Spengler Cup hockey tournament.  They invite four other hockey clubs over to play in their rink.  This year the visitors are Khimik of Russia, Mora IK of Sweden, EHC Eisbären Berlin, and Team Canada, a pick-up team made up of Canadians playing for European clubs.  The tournament has been going on since 1923.  Pat Quinn is coaching the Canadians.  In the NHL lockout year Davos won with Joe Thornton and Martin St-Louis on its roster.  Sportsnet is broadcasting the games, beginning with Canada vs Mora on Boxing day.

[Davos beat Canada in the final.]

Christmas in April

I don't know whether you've noticed, but the weather is warming up.  It probably has something to do with the two cars in every driveway on our street, but also with the amount of oil and coal being burnt in Alberta to power the extraction of more petrocarbons from the Oilsands, to drive the two cars in every driveway.  In the 1950s people carried on as if it would be a great thing to change the weather.  But no, it sucks.  Weather is the manifestation of time in the world and a source of its meaning.  There should  be variations from year to year, with the extreme years ten or twenty years apart, to give them time to become storied, not one record warm year on top of another.  Winter here used to be snowy.  Now it's icy, because the temperature keeps slipping above and below the freezing mark.  I'm adaptable, I bought Yak Trax for my boots.  But it pisses me off.  I'm pissed off at Ontarians who equate personhood with a driver's license, and I'm pissed off at Albertans whose idea of conservatism has so little to do with conservation.

Douglas

Rouge et Or

These got favorable notice from the wool shop lady in Kingston, who turned one of them inside out like I hoped.  They were knit on four needles from Alafoss lopi with an improvised Norwegian/Nova Scotian design.  They're a men's large.

Douglas

Perfectly Inefficient

Here we have one of the hundreds of garbage receptacles owed and operated by the city of Ottawa.  These things were designed, probably in the '60s, as a two part system: an outer shell of wooden slats, and a removable inner metal mesh cage.  People put their trash in, a city employee came along, removed the inner cage, dumped the contents into a truck and drove away.  Then came the present era of the green garbage bag, when all garbage must be packaged in plastic.  Now the city employee's nephew stretches the bag over the mouth of the outer wooden shell, people drop in their garbage, a wind blows through the slats, turns the green garbage bag inside out and scatters the garbage across the street.  So whereas before we had to put up with the thoughtlessness of litterbugs, we now have city employees to ensure that everybody's garbage ends up on the sidewalk.  100% inefficiency.  Hard to achieve!