Of ski masks and balaclavas

(August 28: Google Analytics tells me that a handful of web surfers are arriving to this post looking for a ski mask pattern. If I may, this post (scroll down) might be more useful.)

One of my current knitting projects is a ski mask and being without a pattern for one, I turned to Google.

And came up with this:


This is the first of four ski masks designed for an entire family. The rest of the photos (a definite must-see) can be found here. Click on that link. Seriously. Click on it.

According to the knitting blogosphere, the masks appear in a book of McCall's Vintage knits circa 1965. One reader liked it so much she made one for her son and took a photo of him wearing it and sent it in to the magazine, which ran the photo (scroll down the post to see the poor boy).

I actually found the PDFs of the patterns, but trashed them once I realized that they would not be useful for me (too many colour changes, poor-quality scan). I now wish I had kept them, because I can't find them online anymore. Not that I would actually knit these for anyone. Ever. You couldn't pay me enough.*

* "enough" negotiable

Torrington to Gopher: Get Stuffed!

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: To show the gopher that it could be done.


Today Anna and I went to Torrington to see the World Famous Torrington Gopher Hole Museum. About an hour's drive north from Calgary city limits, the tiny town of Torrington boasts a little museum filled with little exhibits: taxidermied gophers, dressed and posed in dioramas depicting different aspects of town life.


It sounds a little creepy, but nothing cutes up stuffed Richardson's ground squirrels quite like costumes and well-painted dioramas. And it was busy—at least five different groups went through the museum in the 30-40 minutes that we were there. At $2 per adult and $0.50 per child that doesn't seem like much, but it must add up. A map in the gift shop showed where visitors had come from, including all over Europe, China, and even Iceland.


When the museum was first conceived, an animal rights lobby group found out and started a letter writing protest campaign (clearly PETA doesn't understand that gophers are the opposite of endangered). The museum has a binder full of hate mail from as far away as the UK and Japan, including a drawing of a hand with the middle finger raised and a missive asking the mayor how he'd feel if he were to be stuffed for a "Mayor Museum." I think the funniest ones were people asking why the town couldn't just use readily available fake models in the dioramas. While using fake gophers would certainly diminish the impact of the museum, it made me wonder what countries/states/provinces sold stuffed toy gophers to begin with. The most boring letter was actually the one from PETA, which asked why the museum couldn't feature live gophers and educational displays for children. The obvious answer: where's the fun in that? The binder also contained encouraging letters, many of which were from rural areas in Canada and the US.

After Torrington, we drove to Olds and found the botanical gardens on the Olds College campus, where we saw pretty flowers.


More gopher photos here, many of which are worth seeing, though that's certainly not all of the roughly 40 displays. A few more photos from Olds here.

Visits

As a result of several factors (stress/burnout, free ride back, extended family visiting, sister having time off work), I am in Calgary for a spur-of-the-moment visit/vacation. I arrived unexpectedly on Sunday in time for a late dinner, bringing no work back except some non-dissertation books and lots of knitting.

After dinner, while I was in a food coma and still getting out of a dissertation headspace, my mom asked me if I was available the next morning to go along with my parents and my aunt (who is visiting) to see my grandfather. I said of course. The plan was to see him and then go for dim sum.

It wasn't until later that night, when my dad confirmed the plan to see my grandfather and my grandmother, that I remembered—my grandfather is dead. He died last October. When my mom said "see grandpa" she meant visit his grave, which happens to be next to the grave where my grandmother is buried.

For my part, I thought mom meant visit my grandfather in his apartment in Chinatown and then go for dim sum. I think it was the dim sum that threw me, because I immediately thought "Chinatown" and then placed my grandpa there. It's not like I could have forgotten the funeral—I had to fly back early from a conference in Tucson to attend it.

I guess that's confirmation that taking this vacation was a good idea.

Stupid ants

Working at night during a heat wave leads to every window in my apartment being open. This is not a problem except for the bugs that inevitably make their way in and go straight for my desk lamp. Before I switched to compact fluorescent bulbs, this meant a lot of zapped bugs (incandescent bulbs get hot). They would fly, they would hit the light bulb, and they would drop like so many mosquitoes on a desk.

Compact fluorescent bulbs do not have a similar effect on many insects, including mosquitoes and some weird little green bugs. Tonight, though, I found out that flying ants are a little more sensitive to hot surfaces than their insect bretheren. They're not killed by the CF bulb, but stunned and unable to survive the rather significant fall from my lamp to my desk.

Which is all a long-winded way of explaining why I've been cleaning bugs off my desk all night.

Harry Potter and the loss of innocence

This post is not really about Harry Potter. Sorry. This post is about the experience of reading Harry Potter for the first time and falling in love with it, before the hype, before everyone fell in love with it (or while everyone else was falling in love with it simultaneously only you didn't know). This post is about virginity.

There is something special about a virgin encounter with a special piece of art. By "virgin encounter" I do not solely mean "first" encounter, though that is a prerequisite. What I'm referring to is the experience of hearing, reading, or seeing a song, book, TV show, or movie without knowing anything about the author, band, concept, set-up. In such a media-rich world, this would seem almost impossible (and the Harry Potter 7 book spoilers online would attest to that), but there are times when people do encounter a piece of art "cold". The result can be anticlimactic (a shrug, a "meh") or it can be earthshaking.

Two such examples of the latter: The first time I watched the video for Coldplay's "Yellow", which also happened to be the first time I heard the song. I immediately fell in love with it, having no preconceived notions about the arist(s) at all. I experienced the joy of discovering something for myself, an enjoyment unalloyed by any future knowledge of self-made comparisons to U2, a mediocre third album, and daughters named after fruit. The name "Coldplay" brings with it all sorts of cultural baggage now, it can't be helped. But way back in 2000, all I had was a song, and it was all "Yellow."

Second example: It's easier to have a "virgin encounter" with a book because authors receive less publicity than movie stars. And so it was in 2001 that I read Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God for a class. The last third of the novel is breathtaking. I'm a devouring type of novel reader and got immersed in the book, partly because the plot takes a somewhat melodramatic turn, but mostly because I had become caught up in the characters and their plight (there's a scandalous relationship, a hurricane, a shooting, a trial). I remember finishing the book, closing it, and regretting that I would never read it again for the first time.

Other works that have inspired this emotion in me: Chagall's The Eiffel Tower, Norah Jones's "Don't Know Why", Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express.

This is not to say that context is unncessary for the enjoyment of a piece of art. I analyze and teach literature within various contexts—historical, cultural, literary. But I hold a special place in my heart for the times that a work of art caught me off guard, where I had nothing to go on but what was before me.

What makes the final Harry Potter book unique is that it combines both the eager excitement over discovering something anew with the apprehensive knowledge that the 'something' also marks an end. It would be an odd experience, reading with what might be described as a dreadful joy. I wish all Potter fans a good read this weekend. Don't rush it; after all, you'll have years to re-read, but only one opportunity to read it for the first time. May the last page be bittersweet and perfect.

----

Edited at 3:14 a.m. to add:
Running page count: 30.5
Pages excised in revision: 1
Pages added in revision: 2
Momentous file name change: Chapter 1b.rtf instead of Chapter 1a.rtf

Calling it an early night

Pages so far: 29.5 (yes, I am counting half pages)

Words added to spellcheck: heterotopically

Current temperature outside, including humidex: 30C

Clarissa is going to kill me

I spent a good part of the day (and night) trawling through an e-text of Clarissa looking first of all at all mentions of "worth" or "worthiness" or "unworthy", and then later looking for a specific reference to producing an heir for Mr. Solmes that I learned the hard way didn't actually exist. The problem with working on the longest novel written in English is that finding reference really does feel like looking for a needle in a haystack.

I also wrote a page-long paragraph about how the Sinclair House works to expose the prostitution of Clarissa that happens at Harlowe Place. It's unclear where I'm going with all this. I need to rethink this section.

Pages so far: 25 (I've taken quite a few days to catch up on secondary material)

Words I've added to spellcheck: hooped (as in petticoat), heterotopia (as in Foucault)

Coming up: A Harry Potter post to make up for this one.