Last weekend was warm, so it was sweater-washing time.

Those labels in your sweaters that say “dry clean only”? They LIE.  Dry cleaning hurts the Urfs, yo, and it’s terrible for your sweaters.

Cotton and linen sweaters should be washed and dried in the dryer: the dryer’s heat will pull the sweater back into shape.

Silk sweaters will stink to high heaven when they’re wet: wash them in the sink in cold water and a little lingerie wash, then rinse really well.

Wool and cashmere are hair – the best way to wash them is in a sink of cold water with a little gentle shampoo. Cold water will prevent felting. What you want to avoid is agitation: stick them in the sink and squeeze to get them really wet, then leave alone for at least 20 minutes (they won’t be hurt if you forget and leave them). Rinse well.

Take your wool or silk sweater out of the sink, squeeze out some water, then roll it up in a towel. At this point I stand on the towel a little to squeeze out more water.

Stick it on a dry towel and lay flat to dry. On a sunny day, I lay mine outside (inside out, so the sun won’t fade them), and at the end they smell lovely.

The process is more of a pain than flinging a sweater at the dry cleaner, but your sweaters will smell better, last longer, and pill less.

(Please note: this is not a very adventuresome adventure.)

There is a teeny-tiny piece of a plastic bag that has been floating around my kitchen for about 2 years, because it has a recipe printed on it for barley-apple pudding. I thought this sounded like (a) a virtuous breakfast food and (b) a good way to use up some of the 9 metric tons of barley I bought. Even I cannot eat Scotch broth that often.

I finally got around to making the recipe last weekend. My usual rule is to follow the recipe the first time I make it, but this called for raisins, which I dislike, and the whole thing had half a teaspoon of cinnamon in it. For a heap o’ barley cooked in a 2-qt casserole dish, that is just not enough spice.

So I sauteed the apples with plenty of cinnamon, added a bunch more, substituted currants for the raisins, and just to be saucy added chopped crystallized ginger too.

BORING.

It smells divine, but the best thing about eating it is really the apples (of which I used twice the amount called for [the apples were about to go]). It’s virtuous all right – to the point of narcolepsy. It’s as if the barley sucked the flavor right out of everything and won’t give it back.

I’m still deciding whether to keep it for tinkering or finally throw that little scrap of plastic away.

I really do have a LOT of barley.

The more I write, the less I have to talk about, because all the interesting stuff is going on inside.

We’re off to Denver in a couple of weeks, so I keep knitting things to give out as gifts to our friends there. Add to that several skeins of a yarn that I thought would be lovely but turned out to be Troublesome in person, and one gets the following:

Cute, right? I love how the ends came out in the same colors.

Same pattern, the “Virginia is opposed to color” version:

Whew, I tell you. After two scarves in a row, I might need a little break from knitting. They do go on and on.

In other news, I made muhammara last night – Mom, Lissa, and I have been talking about it ever since our Thanksgiving trip. Mine is not as good (the garlic is too sharp), but that hasn’t stopped me from eating it like crazy ever since. I figure – it’s vegetables, right? So it’s nutritious. (But I probably need some protein at some point today.)

Next time I make it, I’ll roast the garlic first. That will double the work of the recipe, but I think it’ll be worth it. Next food assignment: find more uses for pomegranate molasses. You know, besides eating it with a spoon.

I keep seeing seeing commercials for a TV show (a. in my language, that’s TEEvee; b. I think it’s MTV’s The Buried Life) in which a bunch of guys decide what they “want to do before they die” and vow to help other people achieve their “omg mortality!” goals.

My first reaction was to be really, really annoyed – a sadly frequent reaction. But I kept thinking about it, mostly because I kept seeing the commercial over and over.

I came to this: there are plenty of things I want to do with my  life. But if I found out that I had 6 weeks to live, it would not be doing that would be important to me but letting the people I love know that I love them. I would want to make a tour, if I could, to see their faces again and let them know what they mean to me.

If I had only 10 minutes, I would be sad. I would probably be frightened.  But I would know that I have already let those people know  what they mean. They already know, because I tell them. I haven’t done everything I want to do: who does? But I’ve lived awake in this life. I’ve lived. I do not hide my affection. If I only had 10 minutes, I would be sad, but I wouldn’t regret.

I’m grateful to feel that way.

Lookit me, here I am.

I’m super-proud of that story. It was inspired by an exhibit of photographs by artist Miwa Yanagi.

My poem “Frau Drosselmeyer Loves the Summer” is up in the newest edition of Goblin Fruit.

One of the best things I ever did was go with Dad to cut wood.

It was a church thing. If I remember correctly, someone had “donated” the trees on a back corner of their property. Dad and I met up with a bunch of men from church: gloves, chainsaws. I was … 19? 17? Something like that. Home from school, I’m pretty sure.

I was not allowed to mess with chainsaws. In those days, I could hardly walk from here to there without grievous injury, so I was in charge of hauling and stacking.

When the trees were cut, we stacked them onto the back of a pallet truck and drove into a shabby little neighborhood, full of tiny houses set up on cinderblocks, and we passed out the wood to the people living there. They were mostly old, with a few young women surrounded by very small children.

One old man made a long speech about how we were true Christians, doing God’s work by making sure they could stay warm in the cold winter. We were a bunch of Episcopalians and mostly white dudes, not given to effusiveness. We shuffled our feet and stared at the ground. Dad shook the man’s hand.

“That’s why we do this,” Dad said to me as he climbed back up into the back of the truck with me. “Things you think are small can make a big difference in someone’s life.”

One of the doctors said to  us, “You know he doesn’t have the best heart.”

Except he did. He had the very best heart.

We went with my family to Scotland in September 2007. (Is it really so long already? Time to go again.)

I could go on and on about that trip. But mostly I remember how settled into myself I felt from the minute we stepped off the plane. I knew how to find my way around Edinburgh immediately, which was weird because I still regularly get lost in Houston though I’ve been here for 8 years. But I felt solid there, as if I had a firm spot on the planet in the middle of all that grey sky and deep green grass.

And our photos are full of doorways. This is less a testament to Scotland than to Dingo’s eye, I know.

I have these photos all over the place.

I think about going through those doors.

Climbing to the other side. Into green.

How I love 3-day weekends! They feel so luxurious.

I have read in various places around the internet, many times and again recently, about how it’s so hard to be a knitter because “people make fun” of knitters.

1. What people? Why would you hang around with jerks who mock your hobbies?

2. Why would you care? I sincerely do not give a damn if people at the airport think  knitting is dumb. Maybe they LARP, which I think is dumb. But you know what? That”s why I don’t LARP. I’m not going to waste valuable knitting/writing/reading/cat-petting time trying to convince LARPers that I’m somehow “right.”

Being “right” is vastly overrated.

So. I’ve been making this hat over and over again, because it is as cute as a widdle baby bee and it’s so easy that I don’t even have to hardly look at the pattern anymore.

Some iterations:

Yummy, yummy stripes.

This looks so good on my sister.

This one went to my stepdaughter, GirlKit, who loves all things pink.

I asked her whether she wanted me to teach her to knit. She said she’d rather I just knit things for her. Greedy old girl.

It started out so well: the Panthers played the Saints in New Orleans just after Christmas. Mom and Dad drove down for the game and then across to Houston to spend New Year’s with us and the Wickeds.

They arrived on Mom’s birthday. I cooked a pork tenderloin on top of leeks and made the crash hot potatoes from Pioneer Woman. Then Mom and I sat together on the floor in the guest room and she picked out  pearls and beads for a necklace that I still haven’t made. And that doesn’t fill me with guilt at all!

For New Year’s Eve we had a party. Dad loved parties so much: throwing them, going to them. Any excuse for a party, really. He just really liked people, and he loved to be surrounded by a crowd. He wanted to know all about everyone. In the card she sent after he died, my mother-in-law called him “joyous.”

I just re-read that card today, and I was so glad to see that word. Bit by bit, I’m getting to remember that joy. How proud he was of all of us. How warmly and completely we were loved.

But I digress. I invited Dingo’s whole family, but only three of them came, so there was an enormous pile o’ food. That’s pretty normal for me. I like to pretend that I’m cooking for, as Mama puts it, “Cox’s army.” I had bought a ham WAY on sale, and we had scalloped potatoes. Dad requested cooked carrots – a food I had avoided for decades, but I used a recipe from Martha Stewart so easy and good that I have cooked it all year long and eat them like a snack.

Late late, all the menfolk piled in the car to buy fireworks, which Dad talked about afterward as a treat, because they’re illegal in NC. We had a little fireworks show at the bottom of the driveway along with half our street.

It was a great visit, such a happy and relaxed few days.

Last night I went to bed at 9:15. I was ready to be done with 2009.