Knit 2,
Post-K

Two years ago today, Hurricane Katrina tore through the city of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Today, we take a break from our regularly scheduled knitting for a brief culture report -- the good, the bad and the ugly:

Scads of our people still are living in trailers in our front yards. Our insurance companies screwed us over, we've run out of savings and now it's either "Design on a Dime" for those of us with the money for building materials and the skills to do the job ourselves ... or a painful waiting game for those of us too aged, unskilled or impoverished to hang drywall ourselves. New Orleans is a heavily elderly city, and when old folks run out of money to pay other people to repair their homes ... well, you know. It just doesn't get done, and it's not their fault.

The ray of hope? A program called The Road Home, which offers grant money to help people repair their homes, provided they actually plan to live in them. I am grateful that I had enough savings to remove the tree from Mom's house, fix her roof and get her interior repaired, livable and painted, but we still applied to the Road Home Program for help in finishing the job.

The home below is only a few blocks from my high school. The water was about eight feet deep around here. My old school is back up and running, but this family still has a tree on their house and a blue tarp for a roof. The car, previously a prized vintage vehicle, was smashed by a falling tree which tumbled across it on the way down. The black mass to the right of the car is the overturned root ball of that tree -- the trunk, about five feet in diameter, which was blocking the street, has been sawed off and hauled away. That's a tire snagged on a root on the far right:

And the car? It didn't belong to the white house. It belonged to a neighbor down the street.

Repairs have not even begun in huge parts of the city. The unflooded section has largely come back to life, even though many wind- and tree-damaged homes are stalled in progress, their owners overwhelmed and out of money. But vast stretches of New Orleans remain untouched, ungutted, and un-come-home-to. Their former occupants, about half the city's Pre-K population, remain in Houston and other cities.

This is as far as one of my relatives was able to get on her home. It is now gutted and ready to repair. She has applied for a low-interest loan and grant money so she can begin work. See the water marks? There is a high water mark, and various lower levels as the floodwaters were pumped out of the city over a period of weeks:

Fly-by-night contractors are still ripping people off. We can only pray for instant Karma, and hope they get their balls caught in a nail gun. If they ever actually pick one up, that is.


The city's homeless population has doubled. Many people made homeless by Katrina have joined the ranks of those who were already homeless before the storm hit. A considerable number of homeless people are camping out in other people's abandoned homes.

As a result, the fire department has been busy.


Rats Rule. Where do rats go when the water rises? They go where it's dry. 80% of New Orleans flooded during Katrina, so the surviving rats from that portion of the city swam to the unflooded section. And? They have been reproducing quite well. The part of the city that stayed dry now has a rat population to rival Medieval Europe.

Fortunately, one of my Mom's cats thinks that he is Ted Nugent, and rats are deer.


Katrina is still killing people. Or, welcome to Hospital Rwanda! If you get seriously sick in New Orleans today, you have a 47% greater chance of dying from your ailment than you had before Katrina shattered our health-care system. Why? If you're poor, or working and uninsured, Charity Hospital is gone. And if you have insurance and can otherwise afford a doctor, there simply aren't enough doctors and hospital beds to go around.

New Orleans used to be a great place to live -- now it's a great place to die. I know that seems amazing, as we are arguably in the First World and all that, but consider that only one fourth of the city's major hospitals are back online. The numbers get worse when you consider how many smaller hospitals, dialysis clinics, and other second-tier hospitals are gone. This isn't due to poor care standards. Nurses and doctors are doing the best they can with what they have. It's simply due to a shortage of bed space and a doctor-to-patient ratio to rival any third world nation. It's also due to the fact that one of the finest trauma centers in the world -- Charity Hospital -- is gone.

The remains of about a hundred and thirty storm victims remain unclaimed. A memorial for these unknown victims of Katrina soon will be erected. Update: I made a trancsription error when I first posted this; I accidentally typed only "thirty."

Se Habla Espanol. This isn't a bad thing at all, it's just new, and interesting, and it takes a little getting used to. The flavor of New Orleans is changing from "Creole" to "L.A. South." New Orleans had a fair representation of Latino food and culture pre-Katrina -- and some mighty fine hot tamales, I might add -- but now it's like, "hello, carnitas! And pass the menudo, please."

Menudo is a lot like boudin -- once you acquire the taste, you like it a lot. And, like boudin, you really don't want to know what's in it.

I love the cultural cross-pollination -- it took the Latino drywall and roofing crews about three weeks to figure out how to make crawfish empanadas. And I might add that New Orleans enjoyed an unusually festive Cinco de Mayo this year.

Side note -- I would be soooo grateful if one of y'all would tell me how to make the "~" sit on top of the "n" like it's supposed to. I can't figure out how to make Blogger do it.


Vera's marker has been demolished. This does not bode well for the karma of the empty lot on the corner of Jackson Avenue and Magazine Street, just a block away from Garden District Needlework.

In the first desperate days after Katrina passed through and the city began to flood, a hit-and-run driver ran over a woman named Vera, who later died on the street from her injuries. Neighbors and strangers on the street had no alternative but to construct a makeshift tomb on the sidewalk. Her body was covered with some plastic sheeting and people arranged bricks both to hold the sheeting in place and to provide a modicum of dignity by marking the spot with what they had at hand. Someone painted a makeshift headstone on these bricks: SHRINE -- VERA -- 8-30-05 -- GRAVE -- NEVER MOVE:

Well ... somebody moved it.

After Vera's body was recovered, the marker bricks stayed for over a year and a half. During that time, steady offerings of flowers, cards and Mardi Gras beads appeared at the marker. But the last time I passed by, the bricks were gone, and a real estate agent's sign has appeared in its place.

Vera's spirit, however, is still there. I don't think the real estate agent is aware of that fact.

In the photo below, the sign closer to the camera is planted exactly where Vera's body lay:

President Bush today ventured into the city to mark the anniversary of Katrina, two years after he stalled on taking charge of the situation -- two years after he utterly and completely failed to dislodge himself from his vacation in order to manage one of the worst crises in American history.

Two years too late. In his speech today, he said that he understood what people were going through.

I am absolutely certain that he does not.

I find it hard to believe that two whole years have gone by since I was up to my neck in wet, filthy and frightened animals. My mind holds a dizzying array of images from the past two years: at one of the emergency animal shelters, I recall a veterinarian in blue scrubs, trying to catch a short nap on top of a pallet of donated dog food ... the trash heap in front of the house I grew up in ... an elderly lady planting flowers in front of her still-ruined home this past spring ... the bones of a small child discovered months after the storm, found by one of our SPCA officers in pursuit of a stray dog in the 9th Ward ... a truck resting in the branches of an ancient live oak tree ... dead cows and horses in other trees ... an enormous barge perched atop a levee ... armies of ruined refrigerators lining the streets ... FEMA food tents late at night ... the vast stretch of raw earth, destruction and nothingness where the town of Waveland, Mississippi once stood ... boats on rooftops ... an overturned New Orleans city bus wedged sideways across a narrow street ... heavily armed Guardsmen in camouflage riding around in Humvees ... and vast stretches of my home city rendered completely unrecognizable.

And the smell.

I also remember the stars shining over the black and vacant city.

Local pianist Phillip Melancon recalls this phenomenon in song:

"Stars coming out in New Orleans ... for the first time see their grace ... what a price we must pay in New Orleans ... to see God's freckled face.."

When I talked to Lisa Louie tonight, she reminded me that you can't come to closure with a tragedy when you are still in the middle of it. Lisa survived Hurricane Iniki in 1992, a devastating storm that hit Hawaii only days after Hurricane Andrew visited his wrath here on the mainland.

It takes a long, long time to come to terms with a disaster of this nature. If you were lucky enough to be able to repair your own home, you can't start emotional healing while half of your neighborhood is still a rubble heap. There is the dreadful combination of joy and guilt that your home was spared the worst of the flood when others were not, and a deeper guilt in the knowledge that your own property is mostly repaired and functional when other people are still crammed into tiny white trailers or even living on the street. There is the fear and anxiety over when you will see some of your friends and relatives again, if they will ever come home, and what will happen in the long run to your home town.

And if you worked in the rescue and recovery efforts, there are still the nagging doubts. Did I try hard enough? Could I have done more?

I am haunted by the voice of a woman on one of the animal-rescue phone lines, begging for help. She was in her attic, with her dog and her cell phone. She had heard the animal rescue number on the radio. The water was rising. "Please," she begged. "Please, somebody come get us. I need to break the attic window so we can get out on the roof."

I had taken down her address, confirmed it, and was in the middle of giving her some instructions when she was cut off.

Silence. I felt like someone had punched me.

I ran to the triage table and handed over her information, making sure that it was dispatched immediately as critical. That was the only thing in my power to do.

I have to believe that the call just dropped. Cell phone service was crashing everywhere.

Or maybe she dropped her phone in the water.

I have to believe that she and her dog got through the attic window and out onto the roof.

I try to envision them on the roof, looking up into the night, waiting for the helicopters.

Sunday is for
Spinning

Hurricane Dean seems to have plans for visiting its wrath on Jamaica and Mexico instead of our general area, which allows me to put local disaster planning on the back burner for just a moment and show you all a picture of the delightful hand-dyed pencil roving sample that Ray of KNITIVITY was nice enough to send me last week:





Ain't it purty? This was dyed using a sampling of Ray's favorite color mixes applied to natural Jacob's sheep grey pencil roving. Because it is pencil roving, the yarn, once spun up, retained the color repeats rather close to the way Ray laid them out. This was Ray's first attempt at dyeing roving and I have to give him a hand; he instinctively knew how to space the roving so that a bit of grey showed in between color repeats without being muted out by the color.

The photo above was taken in natural light on an overcast day and is about 95% true to the actual color of the roving. It can be tricky getting true color on an overcast day. Oh, and ..? Slap me with the stupid stick. I didn't include an object for size reference, so I should add that this very fluffy and squishy ball of roving is about the size of a small adult-sized hat, or a loaf of sourdough bread. Weight: 1.8 US ounces of fiber.

The natural grey adds depth to the dye color so that it has a somewhat tweedy effect even as a single ply. The following photo was taken indoors under an Ott light, with flash, and is spot-on for color reproduction. Notice that the yarn seems just a little darker than in the photo above. This is because the roving color always looks darker (or more saturated) after it is spun up, just as paint always dries a shade darker than it is in the can :

Now if I had wanted, I could have Navajo-plied to retain the color sequence and saturation showed above ... or, I could have retained the color sequence and created a muted color segue by plying it with either a solid grey or a solid white single. But the yarn told me it would rather have a tweedy appearance, so I plied it against itself, making no attempt to match color sequencing. The result is a mix of barber-pole effect and matched-color bits as they happen to fall in the plying.

Here is the resulting yarn on a niddy-noddy:

And here it is, skeined up and put away to ripen until it decides to become a knitted object. The sample yielded 105 yards after plying. Ya know, a whole bunch of this stuff would make a really yummy sweater:

Like I told Ray, something about these colors made me think Victorian thoughts ... thoughts which lingered in shadowed parlors draped with ruby silk and midnight blue velvet ... the surf pounding on the grey cliffs outside ... and into this parlor wanders Edgar Allen Poe. Ray, this is a great colorway for handspinning, and I hereby christen it, "Annabelle Lee."

"It was many and many a year ago,

in a kingdom by the sea,

that a maiden there lived whom you may know

by the name of Annebelle Lee.

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

than to spin and make yarn for me..."

Sorry, Edgar, but I couldn't resist ...

9:00 PM update: Folks, please keep your thoughts on the poor folks in Jamaica -- they are getting the worst quadrant of the storm as I write this. The Yucatan is next, and the storm will have strengthened to Category Five by the time it hits Mexico. Cancun is still in shatters from the 2005 storm season. This is a good time of year to donate to your favorite disaster relief charity.

Why I Knit

by Lisa Louie

Dear-Readers: Hurricane Dean is nosing into the Gulf of Mexico and Mambocat must spend some time in contact with animal rescue folks in the event this storm heads our way. My co-conspirator in yarnly matters, Lisa Louie of Maui, guest-blogs today. This post was written before school let out for the summer....

Several years ago, an on-line survey asked the question “Why do you knit?”

My answer was “Because I HAVE to. I’m not sure why I have to; I just know that I do.”

I knit a lot, and I have been knitting for a relatively long time. Twenty years, which is almost exactly half my life. I’ve never stopped during that time, paused a few times, but never stopped. At this point, my knitting stops only long enough to go to work or buy groceries or other mundane necessities.

Why do I work? I have to have money to buy yarn, and support a few other of my hobbies, like eating regularly and living indoors. I work for a non-profit learning center, and much of my time is spent getting students of various ages through their homework, and teaching them what they need to get through their homework. Many of our students are, ahem, challenging, or as the PC police call them “high risk”. Whatever these students are called, they all seem to be having a “high maintenance” week. Shorter attention spans, slower to understand a concept, wiggly, fidgety, whiny, and so forth. I’m not sure if it’s because school is almost out, and they can smell the freedom of summer, if the planets are out of alignment, or what, but it’s been a week of much effort on my part, and little payoff in their learning. As I told my husband, getting learning into them has been like “pushing Jell-O up a hill. With a stick.”

After a week of “Jell-O pushing”, I got home last night and was completely brain dead, but my body was still wired. We had dinner, and went for a walk, but after that, I just had to knit. I only managed a few rounds on a sock, because my brain and my hands couldn’t seem to connect to get the stitches in the right order (it’s been a reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllly bad week) but I needed it very, very badly just to try and restore some sort of balance to my brain. Soothe it, connect it with something it needs and try and untangle its connections so I can function again today. I think the knitting helped some, and I am going to take it with me to work today. I hope I don’t need it while I’m there, but at least if I have to go push some more Jell-O up a hill, at least I’ll have a good stick. A short, pointy stick. But it’s a good stick, and I’d much prefer to use it on yarn.

104

Y'all, it is hot. It was a hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit yesterday afternoon. It was 84 degrees at two in the a.m. when I woke up and had myself a good dose of insomnia, and it's 101 right now.

It's the kind of hot that makes you seriously contemplate whatever posessed your ancestors to settle here. Me? I'm convinced that my own ancestors arrived in October and made their decision based on that, and by the time summer came back around they were too busy eking out a living to get the hell out, and by then, the babies caused by happy October weather were born ... and then well, you know. You're stuck.

My own personal, direct ancestors didn't arrive till the late 1880s. By that time, clothing was slightly less voluminous than in days gone by, but not by much. Women still drowned when any sort of boat sank, weighed down both by their clothing and the social norms of the time which forbade them to shed it, even to save their own lives.

I can't stand wearing anything but the thinnest garments in this weather. I can't imagine facing it in pantaloons, petticoats and corsets. Gah. Once the thermometer hits about 95, it's even too hot for shorts. A loose, thin, cotton or linen skirt is much more comfortable. Today I'm wearing a Hawaiian-print wraparound and a tank top, which makes me think of Lisa Louie -- hi, Lisa!

I have a hard time imagining the first European explorers deciding on this as a swell place to live. "Hey, guys! There's a little rise over here next to the river! Let's build here, just as soon as we get all those water moccasins and poison ivy vines out of the way."

Before the advent of air conditioning, running water, mosquito control and modern sewage, people down here died all the time from yellow fever, malaria, and related ailments -- right up until the early 1900s. We still have to maintain diligent mosquito control to keep encephalitis and West Nile Virus in check.

Anyway, yesterday, it was too hot even to spin properly. Even indoors with the air conditioning on, the humidity was such that I was having trouble drafting the fiber.

So I fooled around with experimental yarn labels instead. The labels shown below are draft-quality mock-ups -- having a bit of Sunday afternoon computer fun:

I waited until late afternoon to catch the low, slanting light outdoors, but the oak canopy above our house still prevailed -- it's so much easier to take outdoor pictures in winter here. You can't even see our house on Google Earth, but you sure can see the trees.


Yarn colors, top to bottom, are: Candy Striper (gradient-dyed Romney singles plied together), Blood Orange (space-dyed roving, spun into 2-ply sport weight), and Blue Hawaii (dyed 2-ply Romney). I was going to dye some more last night but it was too hot, even with the air conditioning on. It occurs to me that I should put a tiny dash of yellow here and there in the Blue Hawaii, to represent the twist of lemon in that drink.


I suppose the name "Candy Striper" belies my age -- how many of the rest of you were hospital
Candy Stripers in high school? I am thumbing through my dye notes, and nearly all of my other color names are either food-related or adult-beverage related. I can't imagine why ...


I don't think I like the idea of a twisted skein with a wrap-around label as much as I like the idea of loose skein hanging with a tag. I'll play around with tag designs tonight, and post photos to solicit opinions.


Thanks to everyone for your kind and supportive commentts about my upcoming venture into the weekend arts market. I am still waiting for my application to be approved but I will let you all know as soon as I have an opening day for my weekend stall.


I'm getting up super-early tomorrow to dye some singles before breakfast, before the heat gets serious. I also need to be up super-early because I'll be edgy -- my brother-in-law is having bypass surgery tomorrow morning, and I worry better if I'm up early.

To Market, To Market

I've been keeping a secret.

I have long yearned to have a yarn shop. And I have also long struggled against any notion to abandon or diminish my career in animal welfare.

I do hope to be able to retire someday, and to feel satisfied that I have done my part in the world of animal welfare. And I often entertain the idea of opening a yarn shop at that point in time, if I can ever bring myself to retire from my line of work.

A random selection of my handspun and hand-dyed yarns.

But I am no candy-eyed fool. I suffer no delusions about a leisurely life of shopkeeping. I grew up in retail -- my Mom managed a card and gift shop -- and I knew from an early age that your life is not your own if you manage a store.

Some people are absentee shop owners. They see their shop only as an investment. And with a stellar manager like my Mom on your payroll, you can be an absentee owner. You can say, "Here are the keys, O Competent One. Manage my shop and make money for me while I go to the Bahamas." The owners of Mom's shop did that sort of thing all the time. They went to Europe, and Mom went to work.

But I don't have enough "play money" to set up a store and pay a good manager the salary they deserve to run the show on my behalf while I do my fulltime work (much less go to Europe).

I've been employed in the animal sheltering business for quite some time. It's not the sort of work you want to pursue if you deeply need to impress others with your monetary prowess, but it's what I do, and it's why I am here on this planet. I also knit, and spin, and write, and do other things to express my creative self, but caring for those creatures who cannot care for themselves is my real calling in this world. And that's where I need to spend most of my time.

However, my urge to create, to make things with my own two hands, and to put words down for others to read, is quite large.

I knit. I spin. I design garments. This helps me deal with the endless frustration of keeping a candle lit in a hurricane, which is the nature of work in a municipal animal shelter. You save a life one day and you are called, sadly too late, to help another life tomorrow. You beat your head against the wall a lot, trying to convince abysmally stupid people to do the right thing -- to spay and neuter their pets, to vaccinate their pets, to keep their pets from running at large.

Some days, you take a cruelty case to court, and you prevail, and the bad guy has to pay for his horrid actions. Most days, you don't have enough solid evidence to make a good case.

Some days, you get a dozen downtrodden dogs off to rescue groups, four adult cats are adopted, and a batch of healthy puppies go off to loving homes.

Other days, you find yourself investigating an animal poisoner, prosecuting a dog-fighter, and euthanizing a litter of desperately sick puppies whose lives could have been saved if the owner had considered that spaying --- or even just vaccinating -- the mother was more important than buying a carton of cigarettes.

Often, you come home and you just want to curl up in a ball in the darkest recess of your closet, with a blanket over your head. On days like that, it's not hard to think that everybody's old friend, Jack Daniels, might have some good advice. You think about giving him a call, climbing into his pickup truck, and having a good, long, bumpy drive through the woods and swamps and backroads of your mind, while you retrace your steps and carry on about how you could have done things better. Mr. Jack and his friend Ms. Merlot are good listeners, and you have a lot to get off your chest, and maybe you should give them a ring.

But then you remember that you have to work tomorrow, and you acknowledge that it might not be such a good idea to give old Jack a call tonight.

Ah, well then. Maybe on the weekend.

Unlike Mr. Daniels, knitting and spinning do not drag you deeper into Dismal Swamp. Knitting and spinning provide repetitive kinetic release, soothing the eyes with color and beauty, and soothing the hands with texture and softness.

So I knit, and I spin. When I really want to let go of some tension, I scour fleeces and make felt.

And I write compulsively. It makes me happy to have a small audience for my blog, but I'm just as pleased to do technical writing for my job. On a good writing day, I can inspire others. On my bleakest and most barren writing day, I can at least crank out presentable employee training materials.

But no matter how lousy my day has been, I can almost always knit or spin.

We've had our share of frustration, aggravation and waiting for miracles in my line of work since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit south Louisiana and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. We have worked insane hours in burdensome conditions. We have built new shelters and clinics. But there is still so much more to do. My job situation has changed twice since Katrina hit.

Not good for the ol' morale.

But last week I learned there is some available space at the arts market downtown, which is affiliated with the farmer's market.

And I thought about yarn.

So I have applied for a weekend booth at the arts market downtown. Into this booth I shall bring my handspun yarn, and offer it for sale. In addition, I plan to offer some "recycled" yarns -- mill ends combined with other yarn into new skeins of one-of-a-kind novelty art yarns. And I will offer some small knit goods for sale -- scarves, amulet bags, that sort of thing. The sort of things that will be seen as good gift items as the holidays approach.

And of course I will spin. The arts market likes to welcome people into their fold who do what they call "heritage crafts" -- knitters, weavers, potters, dyers, basketmakers and now a spinner. As far as I know I am the first spinner to give it a go.

This could potentially lead to a fulltime or part-time indoor stall later in the year. We shall see.

So let's see what happens.

More later.

Canned Sheep



Some people don't believe in Kismet (or serendipity, if you prefer a more elegant word).



But I do.



How else do I account for another spinning wheel coming into my life in almost the exact same way that my first wheel found me and made me buy it? And only a matter of weeks after I told the story of my original wheel in my May 29 post?



Once again, I was not shopping for a wheel. I was flipping through the newspaper and my glance fell on "SPINNING WHEEL" in the classified ads. And folks, it's not like Baton Rouge is throbbing with disillusioned handspinners looking to unload their gear. Stumbling across that classified ad was pure luck. When I phoned, I learned that it was the last day of the ad run, and the seller hadn't received any calls but mine.



The seller was an extremely pleasant woman who was selling her house and, after much consideration, had decided to part with her spinning wheel. She'd done a lot of handspinning back in the '70s, and a good bit of dyeing as well, but her interest in spinning waned over the past 20-odd years, so she parked the wheel by the fireplace as a conversation piece, and packed the other supplies in her attic, where they've remained since the mid-1980s.



There were two Romney fleeces, each packed into an airtight five-gallon flour tin. One was in fairly good condition, as you can see from the portion remaining in the can. It had been purchased clean and scoured, and had been packed away untouched. It does need a warm bath to loosen up a good bit of caked lanolin, but it's definitely salvagable:











The wheel itself is an Ashford Traditional, and, as a testament to Ashford's reputation, it operated smoothly for a test-drive after sitting in a corner, unoiled for over two decades:

The keenly observant among you may ask, "what's that hanging off the wheel there, near the knob for the Scoth tension? The orifice hook had gone missing, so the seller had replaced it with a loop of stout nylon fishing line attached to a bit of cotton cord. The wheel is in excellent condition, missing only the spring for the Scotch tension (although I rigged a temporary substitute with a piece of cotton twine so I could give it a test drive).

It also came with carders, a noddy, a lazy Kate, two drop spindles and a lump of brown fleece of indeterminate sheepy origin, the lot being inspected by Blue, the feline in charge of incoming inventory here at the Asylum. He was particularly interested in smelling the brown fleece:

Inside the box containing the accessories was a smaller box contaning some samples of natural sheep-colored and vegetable-dyed handspun yarn, each neatly tagged with the dyeing information:

Also included was the dyebook documenting the owner's numerous experiements with natural dyes, ranging from the brightly colored onionskin and marigold samples shown below, to subtle hues of pink and lavender from local roots and flowers. She was a busy dyer back in the day -- there were over 200 samples in the ring binder:

And last, here's the second fleece, which had apparently been sold fresh-shorn and then stored away unscoured, firmly packed into a five-gallon tin much too small for its volume. See how it broke apart into two heavy lumps there on the right? I doubt that this fleece is salvagable, but I'll give it a try anyway. I definitely won't have garment-quality wool, but if I scour it well and card it mercilessly, I just might have passable rug yarn.

The worst that can happen is that I'll have clean wool for stuffing pillows.

And check out the groovy vintage paper bag from Wildfower Fibres in Oregon. Now I'm itching to find out if they are still in business. Anybody out there remember them? To add to the '70s appeal, the wheel came with its original paperwork, and the fleeces came with their own vintage invoices as well: a grand total of fourteen dollars and twenty cents, including postage and handling!

The decent-looking wool from the first photo went into a mesh bag and was soaked the bathtub overnight with 1/4 cup of Dawn dishwashing liquid, in hopes of loosening up that caked lanolin. That fleece was reasonably clean -- after an all-night soak, the lanolin de-caked and the fleece opened up ... the water was just a little bit on the murky side:

This was drained, rinsed, and given a second wash with Mane-n-Tail horse shampoo. Tomorrow it will be placed under the carport, on a raised rack, in hopes of drying. When it's still slightly damp; it will be spritzed with a 1/32 mixture of hair conditioner and water, wrapped in brown paper, placed inside the car, and parked in the sun, to steam. This is not a scientific proportion, I just find that an ounce of conditioner dissolved in a quart of water sprays nicely and doesn't make the fleece sticky.This is the best way I know to loosen up old lanolin in a fleece that's been sitting around for awhile.

My hopes are not nearly as high for the other fleece, but I'll give it a soak and a fair chance.

The best part? The owner was mainly looking for a good home for this wheel. She didn't want to simply sell it to the highest bidder on Ebay. I couldn't even have bought a new noddy, lazy Kate and hand carders for her asking price, which included the wheel and everything else. I call that a bargain. She just wanted to re-home her wheel and make a spinner happy.

She did.

Meanwhile, I'm so delighted to have such a nice wheel at such a bargain that I'm trying to think of something nice to do for her, with all her handspun samples. They, too, are a bit stiff and gummy, having been dyed in the grease and stored in her attic all these years. I think there's enough to make a nice, felted pillow. Maybe I'll do that, and leave it on her doorstep one night, so she will have a souvenir from her spinning and dyeing days.

Now to see if that other fleece is salvagable.

Cats, Tornadoes
and Time Management


Some random things from this week:







Tessie, our eldest cat, she of the achy joints and great fondness for all things soft and warm, loves her new, felted pad. You can make one for your cat, too -- my Critter Cozy pattern is just a few posts back, on July 4, 2007.


On Thursday, I took a weekday off to visit my Mom in New Orleans, and while I was there, a storm front came through the city, and this is what appeared over Lake Pontchartrain. It's a waterspout -- a tornado over water -- a couple of miles offshore and about 5 miles north of downtown New Orleans. The weather goddess was merciful, and the horrid thing both touched down and spent itself out over the vast lake. If you look closely, can you see the huge white wake of high waves and white foam it created in the water as it moved from right to left? Pity the folks fishing, and the leisure boaters out there. That is actually a column of water -- many tons of water being sucked up into the sky. It was HUGE -- consider that the shoreline is several miles away from the photographer, who was high up in a downtown building -- a close call, and terrifying to behold:

And no, I didn't take the picture. The credit belongs to New Orleans' key newspaper, the Times-Picayune, copyright 2007. For more on the waterspout story, you can click on

www.nola.com and search for "waterspout." The city has already suffered a couple of devastating tornadoes since Katrina. They didn't need another one.

And ...

Look, cats on laundry!

Why don't you admire these lovely cats for a moment before I go off on a rant?

Jigsaw (the muted tortoiseshell) and Guinness (the tuxedo) are shown here, making themselves useful. Somebody has to keep the laundry from escaping.

I've had another uninspiring workweek, so my creative streak is sorely strained. The downside of grant-writing for humane non-profits is that so much time is spent waiting for answers,waiting for requests for more information, waiting for feedback. And as I am not working actively in a shelter or clinic at the moment, I get dispirited during long spells with little feedback from the prospective funding agencies. If you like swimming through peanut butter, consider a career in the non-profit sector!

In addition, our little spell of Seattle-like weather passed as quickly as it came. So I've been indoors most of the weekend, working on a shawl and spinning, and reading the knit lists as well as other people's blogs. Which brings me to my ....

Yarn Diet Spoiler

Those of you who know me personally know that I'm the sort of person who's the first to point out that you're probably not going to lose weight and keep it off on that new celebrity diet, and you won't end up looking like a celebrity or hanging out with one on the weekends, either. Call me a spoilsport, but it's my nature.

I'm also likely to point this out while chomping on a mouthful of chips.

So I need to know ... what's going on with this "no buying yarn for a year" fad? On the KnitList, KnitU and on many, many blogs, knitters are fretting out loud over their stashes, determined to buy no more yarn. Those who have a moment of weakness berate themselves publicly after indulging in a paltry skein of sock yarn. Many people are also de-stashing.

This wouldn't bother me if a few individuals in posession of seriously out-of-control stashes were providing the knitting Internet with amusing descriptions of their space-saving woes.

But it's not just a few people with comically unmanageable stashes who are going public with this. One knitter after another seems to be jumping on the de-stash wagon, for what seems to be no good reason. Why?

Everyone else is doing it.

Many people with stashes of a perfectly modest and humble size (say, a closet full or less) have suddenly found themselves wracked with guilt and have jumped on the idea of self-flagellation with acrylic I-cord: "Bad knitter! Self-indulgent! Too much yarn!"

What's going on with this? Why the guilt? Is it another excercise in womanly self-denial?

If I look around real hard under my own saddle, I think that's the burr I'll find. So many of the women I see de-stashing just happen to discreetly mention that a husband or boyfriend has decreed that they have "too much yarn."

Some of these self-appointed yarn managers have found the knitter "disorganized," insisting that she chose only one project at a time and buy only the yarn needed for the desired garment. Others declare that too much money is being spent, and demand that spending cease immediately.

One young knitter, who I know from the LYS, confided that her husband decided that she was spending too much time knitting, and that he was uncomfortable with her knitting in front of his friends because he feels that knitting is "dorky and behind the times," and (here's the kicker) "why don't you find a sexier hobby?"

Which begs the question, what is she supposed to do with all the "free time" she'd have without her knitting? Scrub flooors on her hands and knees? And how is she supposed to demonstrate a state of sexy and au courant non-dorkiness? Should she pole dance instead of knitting?

Sadly, none of these knitters write about what the complaining husband or boyfriend is doing to contribute his share of self-sacrifice to the family budget, household storage space, or self-improvement through austere hobby management. There is no mention of sadly foregone titanium golf clubs, no discussion of the sale of surplus computerized gadgets, no sportscars going up on Ebay, and no talk of cancelling any subsciptions to Playboy or Sports Illustrated.

And that bugs me. I do not intend to be sexist in this little rant, but so far I have not found one male knitter who's jumped on the de-stashing wagon because his wife, partner or significant other has drawn a line in the sand and laid out the ultimatum of No More Yarn.

So... hey cowgirls, are y'all listening?

If your kids and pets are not in danger of starvation ...

If you are not accumulating massive credit card debt...

why jump on this particular bandwagon?

Think about it:

Your local yarn shop counts on your business.

Employees count on the LYS for jobs.

When yarn shops close, employees lose jobs and yarn companies don't get orders.

When yarn manufacturers don't get orders, they cut back on production.

When they cut back on production, employees lose jobs and wool producers lose orders.

When wool producers lose orders...

Do you see where I am going with this? If everyone joins in on a fad of self-deprivation at once, the whole yarn and wool industry will suffer.

Rant over.

Me, I am counting on my yarn and fleece stash for retirement entertainment. Dave and I live in a cluttered house full of yarn and books and records and cats, as well as Dave's Museum of Obsolete Technology. He has manual typewriters, and I have spinning wheels.

And, speaking of which:

That lovely Oussant fleece sample from Jo is ready to be spun. The drudge of the past week was pleasantly interrupted by a spinning windfall. More on that later.

--Mambocat

Hello ... Seattle?
We have your weather,
and we're not giving it back.


Some Sunday mornings start out with a good, long, lazy sleep-in, to the tune of rain hammering on the roof:









And when the rain stopped, I went to the door, bracing myself for a blast of superheated, humid air.
But it wasn't there.

I looked everywhere: in the garden, under my car, in the mailbox. But July in Baton Rouge was nowhere to be found.

Due to a complete freak of Nature, we're having a cool front in July -- a precious few days of daytime temps in the high 70s F. (Okay, it might hit 80F tomorrow, but still). And, if you can sneak outside between the torrential downpours (that's the catch), you can do what I did this morning -- stroll outdoors with your cup of coffee, and have the following conversation with a neighborhood cat:

Me: "This is unbelievable. It's ten o'clock on a Sunday morning in the middle of July, and it's 72 degrees."

Cat: "Meow."

Me: "What gives? Not that I'm complaining. Not at all. I'm just stunned. In shock, actually. I need to find out how this happened."

Cat: "Meow."

I spot a neighbor jogging -- yes, jogging -- towards me and I wave at her, calling out "Morning!"

(Yes, I am the kind of helpful person to point out the fact that it is, indeed, not dark.)

Jogger, slowing down: "Good morning!"

Me, sweeping out my arms all-inclusively: "What happened?"

Jogger, not needing any further explanation for the nature of my question: "Beats me, but I'm not asking any questions. This is too nice."

Me: "I think UPS got our weather delivery mixed up with Seattle."

Jogger: "No doubt ... Isn't it great!"

Me: "Sure is! Later!"

Jogger: "Later!"

Cat: "Meow."

I spread my arms and take in the coolness (77 is cool, my friends ... it was 96 two days ago). The cat licks his left front paw and then sniffs the nearby border grass, no doubt contemplating a hunt for field mice on this fine day.

Frogs and toads are chorusing a hallelujah choir of pure amphibian joy. I take my coffee to the porch and sit there, watching the neighbors walk by (people are outside!). The lack of heat is so remarkable that entire families are outdoors, walking the kids and the dogs, marveling at the wonder of it.

Y'all have to understand that even a few summer days like this are absolutely and completely freakish in our part of the world. But freakish in a good and very welcome way. The summer norm is for the Louisiana thermostat to have an ugly breakup with the 80s sometime in early June, and then get real friendly with the 90s part of the thermometer, and stay there quite obsessively unti mid-September (with the occasional dalliance into the 100s in July and August).

But here it is, the middle of July, so I take my only opportunity for the whole summer to sit on the porch, drink coffee, and knit.

The amazing weather has done wonders for my mood, so as I work away at my sock, I consider what I might do later in the day, and remember that I've been so dispirited by last week's suffocating weather and bogged-down grant work, that I have fallen over a week behind on my blog.

I have been meaning to post a few things about spinning:

A few weeks, back, you may recall, I went through a bag of natural off-white and natural grey singles and did a little Kool-Aid dyeing.

There was gradient dyeing, with tropical punch Kool-Aid and two four-ounce skeins of Romney singles:

Then, a one-ounce sample skein of Romney singles got tie-dyed with black cherry Kool-Aid. This one will be plied against itself for a speckled effect:

And next, there was a two-ounce skein of natural grey singles -- somebody please hit me with the stupid stick, I forgot to write the breed on the bag label -- that I space-dyed with Kool-Aid Mountain Berry Punch. It will be overdyed with lime green Kool-Aid so that part of the grey remains grey, part becomes green, and part of the green overlaps the blue:

And here's the whole whack of samples hanging out in the bathroom with a fan blowing on them to help with the drying process:

Next time I post, you'll see all of these yarns plied in their final state, and skeined up for future use.

Most of my spinning is fine worsted singles, which I 2-ply for sock yarn or lightweight knits. For worsted weight yarn,I spin fine woolen singles, and the end product is a 3-ply worsted. All of the above yarn is worsted singles (except for the solid blue, which was already plied).

Late this afternoon, we treated ourselves to dinner at the neighborhood sushi bar, and then I took a 2.5 mile walk (about 4K) around the neighborhood just before sunset.

Ordinarily, the 10-meter sprint from the air-conditioned house to the air-conditioned car is the most outdoor excercise a person can handle in Louisiana in July. Anything more strenuous and you'd have to hire an ambulance to follow you around.

But this evening, I walked all the way to the end of the neighborhood, where the creek empties into a small lake, and back again, to the accompaniment of deliriously happy frogs and toads. Birds bathed in the fresh puddles, and shy green anole lizards licked raindrops from the undersides of leaves.

While I was walking, I also remembered that the pesky Mercury retrograde is over. So I came home, paid a pile of bills, pulled out my hand carders and that Ouessant fleece from Jo, and oiled my wheel. I'm plannning to spin this yarn woolen for loft and softness, but two-ply for light weight so it goes further. Once it's spun up, I'm sure it will tell me what it wants to be:






I'm happy as a frog in a puddle, for a few days, at least.

--Mambocat

Tuffet for Tessie


Tessie is our eldest cat, nineteen years old that we know of. She was a young adult cat when she came into our lives.

Lately she spends most of her time in the position you see here, as she poses with the materials for her half-done nap cozy -- curled up, usually sound asleep. Prodigious napping is appropriate for a girl her age; in human years, she's somewhere between eighty-five and a hundred and ten, depending on which cat-age calculator you prefer. I prefer the method which distinguishes between ageing rates in indoor and outdoor felines. Tessie is a full-time indoor cat, which puts her well into her nineties:





But she's a bit creaky and achy these days, and she spends most of her time searching for a warm spot to snuggle in. Even though we keep the house at about 76-78 degress F in the summer, she still gets chilly, and spends a lot of time in her plush bed.

So when I checked out the yarn sale at Hobby Lobby last weekend, I had in mind a simple felted square for Tessie to curl up on, for her favorite spot on the futon.

I liked the results and thought you might want to make one for your own feline or small dog. This is a simple garter stitch square knit on the diagonal on large needles. It's a quick weekend project and the perfect size item for summer knitting -- mindless and fast. It would also be a good first felting project.




FELTED CRITTER COZY



Note: due to the fact that this cozy is felted, it is not suitable for charity knitting, because pet cozies for animal shelters must be machine washable and dryable. After this cozy has shrunk to the desired size, it must be laid flat to dry after subsequent washings, otherwise it will continue to shrink. Animal shelters don't have time for special laundry handling, so be sure to knit charity pet cozies out of densely-knitted acrylic or superwash wool, which can be laundered mercilessly.


Materials:

Yarn: two skeins Lion Brand "Lion Wool" for felting (I used dark teal), and two skeins Yarn Bee "Dream Girl" (colorway "Lydia"). This provided a color scheme of blues, greens and a hint of yellow. If you want a different color combination, choose two skeins of Yarn Bee "Dream Girl" that you like, and then choose a "Lion Wool" or other felting wool to coordinate with one of the colors contained in the "Dream Girl." The Lion Wool is the background, unifying color.

IMPORTANT! Fuzz can be a choking hazard! Please note: Ordinarily, I do not use eyelash or other fringey, novelty yarns for pet cozies, because in most cases the eyelashes can be chewed off and swallowed. However, I found that the "Dream Girl" is firmly secured to the binder thread. No small bits came off, even with vigourous tugging on my part. I was looking for silky softness for an elderly cat who is not a chewer. Even though the "fuzz" is firmly secured on the "Dream Girl" yarn, I would not use it for puppies or kittens, or adult animals with vigorous chewing habits (think "Siamese" here). Novelty yarn is NEVER suitable for puppies, kittens, or animal shelter cozies.

Needles: US size eleven


Cast on two st., holding together one strand of Lion Wool and one strand of Dream Girl.


Row 1: knit into front and back of first stitch, knit to end of row. Repeat until you end a row with only about two yards of both yarns remaining.


Next row: Knit first st., SSK, knit across until you are almost out of both strands. Join in both strands of remaining two skeins, and continue knitting.


Subsequent rows: Knit first st., SSK, knit to end of row. Repeat until only 3 st. remain, Knit one, SSK, pass knit st. over. Cut remaining yarn.

Weave in loose ends and snip off excess yarn. Be sure not to weave ends in tightly. My finished results are about 30" square:

This results in a very soft, appealing fabric with a nice drape. Without felting, you could make a larger square, using "Dream Girl" along with a coordinating solid-color worsted acrylic for a colorful, fun and fuzzy couch throw or kid's throw. The amount of yarn used here, with acrylic substituted for felting wool, would also make a nice, WARM lap blanket for someone in a wheelchair. I chose this colorway because most things in our house, including most walls, are ocean colors, but many other colors are available in "Dream Girl."


Toss into washer on heavy-duty setting with a bunch of T-shirts or dead tennis balls. Use hot wash and cold rinse.

Dry in the dryer on "high." If the fabric doesn't feel dense enough for your liking, repeat process.




You now have a soft, warm cozy for your pet. My finished measurements in the above picture are about 20" by 20." The cozy came out square, but the surface I used for a backdrop isn't quite flat.

Your results may vary -- felting is not an exact science, and both the water hardness in your area and your choice of soap may affect the results. It also takes longer to felt an item in a front-loader than in a top-loader, because the agitator in a top-loader helps with the felting process. I have found that, instead of jeans, the best felting aids are a bunch of old T-shirts, a pair of plain old-fashioned canvas sneakers, or half a dozen dead tennis balls. If you don't play tennis, beg some off a friend who does.

For good results with your washer, be sure to use the "Beat Your Clothes to Death" setting. If you choose to wash the felted item with a couple of pair of jeans, be sure the jeans are buttoned and the zippers are fully closed, or the zipper teeth may snag on your yarn, and knitterly catastrophe may ensue. Ask me how I know.

Happy Fourth of July to my American readers. We're going to see the fireworks tonight if the rain holds off. Go see some fireworks tonight if you can, and remember that no matter how grim things seem right now in this country, there is always hope for a better future.

--Mambocat

Happy Canada Day!

Today, I want to wish a happy Canada Day to my Canadian readers, eh?

Thank you, Canada, for Koigu, Neil Young, Patons, maple syrup, real beer, and many other Canadian exports, including Cajuns.

Thank you for setting an example for human dignity.

And thank you, Canada, for Canadians. Great folks, all.

--Mambocat

Meanwhile ...

3,978 Miles Southeast

of Dutch Harbor...

Captain Dave, Deck Boss Dez and the crew of the Brown Plaid Couch are tuning up all available weather channels and practicing our foul-weather skills by eating microwave popcorn and sitting anxiously in front of the TV, watching "Deadliest Catch" and flipping to the Weather Channel on commercial breaks to see if a giant, pulsating, red blob has appeared in the Gulf of Mexico in the last 17 minutes.

Greetings, tourists, and welcome to the opening of hurricane season.

"Deadliest Catch" is serious business at our house. Even the cats watch it. Crazy Aunt Purl is much, much better at taking pictures of her TV than I am, but here's a shot of Jigsaw, our tortoiseshell who is the Deckhand in Charge of Cats, watching Captain Phil, who is her favorite crab captain. Jigsaw really digs Captain Phil and the whole crew of the Cornelia Marie.

I mean, sure, we are Southerners, so not only can we fish -- we can sit and watch other people fish on TV. Especially if they are fishing in 50-foot seas.

If you are a Southerner, watching "Deadliest Catch" is like pre-season training for dangerous weather. We watch it faithfully, breathlessly waiting to see who will be in peril, and if they will survive. And we are not taking this lightly -- we know it's for real.

"Deadliest Catch" isn't a contrived "reality" show where you plonk a bunch of accountants and supermodels on an island full of tiki torches, and watch them have childish ego altercations. It's a real-reality reality show. People sometimes die. But most of the time they do not, and disaster is narrowly averted, and we get to watch all this from the safety and comfort of the deck of the Brown Plaid Couch, where we have fortified ourselves against the weather with cats, diet soda, yarn and Fritos.

As the summer approaches, and hurricane season starts leering at us, we start to get bragadocious and competitive about the weather on the show, which is another Southern proclivity:

"I bet the weather can't really be that bad up there on the Bering Sea. I mean, it's damn cold, sure, and high seas ... but it's not like Captain Sig pulls up one day in the Northwestern and Dutch Harbor is gone."

"Yeah, if they had a real storm surge, Dutch Harbor would be toast. It's right there, smack on the ocean. It's only a little bump of an island. The weather just looks worse because it's cold, and the boats are on open water. Maybe they have 40-foot seas today, but it's not Katrina."

Even if you aren't a local, you can easily distinguish between Cajuns and other Southerners who are debating whether or not the weather in the Bering Sea is worse than a hurricane.

The Cajuns are the ones taking bets.

I'd be upset if opilio crab season overlapped too much with the critical part of hurricane season, because then I'd have to move the little-bitty bedroom TV into the living room, so I could put it next to the big TV, and watch the Weather Channel obsessively and track every rainstorm in the Northern Hemisphere from now till Thanksgiving, without missing out on any action in the Bering Sea. I wouldn't be able to leave the house for fear of missing something.

It's a Southern thing. Folks in Hawaii and Bermuda share this OCD thing about weather, too.

We are helplessly obsessed with bad weather. Our weather, other people's weather in North America, the weather in Ireland .... it doesn't matter. We will watch any bad weather. Especially bad weather involving boats. We can sit there and watch a 47-foot wave smack down on the Time Bandit and holler, "DAMN DID YOU SEE THAT!" without even getting wet or having to pump anything out.

"Deadliest Catch" gives you the refreshing option of watching other people deal with weather that can kill you and, most of the time, they come out of it alive. It's encouraging for those of us in Hurricane Alley. If Captain Sig can get through it without losing any of his brothers, if the crew of the Time Bandit can pluck a guy out of the surging, freezing ocean with his hat and glasses still on ... well, maybe some of that good, lucky mojo will rub off on us, as long as we stay tuned.

I was somewhat disquieted last week when a reporter on some news channel announced that a recent survey of Florida residents revealed that a majority of them didn't feel that they would be in serious danger of experiencing a hurricane this year and that they also hadn't made any preparations for hurricane season. This alarming news inspired the governor of Florida to give retailers the chance to have a no-tax sale this month on hurricane supplies, hoping that the prospect of big savings would inspire common sense in Floridians.

Frankly? I was speechless. How short is your memory, Florida? The 2004 season, remember?

Possible explanations for la-de-da Florida attitude:

1. Surveyors failed to interview actual Floridians, and questioned contestants for Girls Gone Wild and frat boys on spring break from New Jersey instead.

2. Demographics: high percentage of extremely elderly Floridians, many of whom pass away each year and are promptly replaced by brand-new retirees from Minnesota and Idaho who have yet to experience a hurricane. Minnesota retirees think they can handle anything after 65 years of blizzards. Idaho retirees think they are sufficiently well-armed to scare off storms.

3. Televisions blown away in 2004 Florida hurricane season hadn't been replaced in time for residents to follow coverage of Katrina and Rita destroying Mississippi and Louisiana in 2005 season.

4. Crack is cheap in Florida.

5. Surveyors interviewed people in line at Disneyworld, who will be long gone before the first hurricane hits.

Now knitters are generally sensible people, and no doubt have already made plans for their families, pets and yarn stashes should the need to evacuate occur.

But for the rest of Florida? Hello? Reality calling. Get your head out of the sand. You know what you need. Go get it. Get stuff for your pets, too, and get 'em outta there of you need to.

Hurricane Season Checklist for Southern Knitters:

If you live in the South, on the Atlantic coast or in Hawaii, you need something to keep you from chewing your nails down to the bone during hurricane season, so I highly recommend sorting your knitting out in advance so you know what to knit and when to knit it.

I took advantage of the past few weekends to do some housecleaning and to sort out some yarn and needles for the upcoming season of weather-watching.

I find it convenient to break my hurricane-season knitting down into categories, just like the storms themselves:

Tropical Depression Knitting: No big deal -- while you are knitting on your current project, just click onto the Weather Channel once in awhile to see if it has intensified.

Named-Storm Knitting: This is what we used to call a "tropical storm." But in recent years, weathercasters have started to use the term, "named storm," probably because they are hoping people will take it more seriously than "Tropical Storm," which sounds like a big pink drink with an umbrella in it.

Actually, it is a big pink drink with an umbrella in it. But I digress.

A named storm out on open water means that it's definitely time to start watching the damned thing at least once an hour -- it's starting to get its act together, and it's clearly up to no good. You can still follow knitting charts or patterns if you like, because tropical storm monitoring doesn't require diligent attention. You can check on the thing once in a while, see how far it's moved, and ponder its potential to grow and thrive in the sizzling waters of the Gulf of Mexico. At this point it's probably a good idea to have all your scissors and other notions in the same room with the TV so you don't have to get up and run after them, but you can still refer to the pattern, measure swatches, or follow a lace chart without losing track of any important meteorological developments.

Category One Knitting: Okay, now the damn thing is actually a hurricane, so "keeping an eye on it" needs to be replaced with "concern," provided the thing is 72 hours or more away from landfall. As this point you can work on most basic Aran, lace or Fair Isle patterns, but it's not a good time to cast on for a Kaffe Fassett chart.

Category Two Knitting: "Concern" becomes "serious worry." You will now be spending a great deal of time in front of the TV, so you will need a large project in a familiar pattern. While you can still manage a pattern with a few cables or a little openwork, you do need something you can knit more or less on autopilot. If you're on your fifteenth Wonderful Wallaby, or you've knitted the Charlotte's Web shawl six times already, this is a good time to cast on another one.

Category Three Knitting: Socks. Specifically, the sock pattern you can knit in your sleep. Stocking caps are okay, too. You need something which allows you to watch TV without looking at your knitting very often, and also you need a small enough project to carry to and from the kitchen, where you are cooking and eating every fresh or frozen thing in the refrigerator so it doesn't spoil when the power goes off. You also need to be able to stick your knitting in your pocket so you can keep an eye on the guys, who are hanging around the barbeque grill, making sure all the frozen meat gets cooked and eaten before the power goes out. They need the protien for strength, and beer for motivation, so they can put the patio furniture in the swimming pool, and fill up the garage with bicycles, garbage cans, bird feeders and other small things which might become airborne.

Category Four Knitting: By this time you are watching TV in exactly the same way that you would watch a live king cobra cruising around on your living room floor. You can't move, and you can't take your eyes off it. Garter stitch only, or stockinette in the round. At this point you are not sleeping. Garter stitch is good for keeping your fingers awake, which improves blood flow to the eyes, so you can watch the weathercaster point urgently at the giant, throbbing, howling red amoeba which is about to engulf Houston, Oahu, Savannah, New Orleans or Miami. At this point your car should be packed with your family's supplies, your pets and their supplies, and a month's worth of knitting.

Category Five Knitting: If you live in a state within 300 miles of the projected landfall area, you can relax a little, because at this point you are in your car and on your way to Idaho, to replace the foolhardy retirees who moved to Mississippi last year. In fact, you can even knit if you are the driver, because northbound traffic is at a dead standstill due to the seven million other people also fleeing the general Gulf Coast area. Knitting while waiting for traffic to move helps squash the nagging concern that you will die in your car because you have only managed to get 3.7 miles outside of the New Orleans city limits in the past three hours.

So.

If you're feeling kinda smug because you live in Tennessee or Iowa, think again.

Even if you aren't directly in the strike zone, the same knitting categories apply if you have friends and relatives who may be evacuating to your house for the duration of the storm. If your relatives hail from New Orleans or the Mississippi Gulf Coast, you may want to peruse your stash for spare yarn and needles.

They will need something to do for the next six months.

So It's that time of year. Relocate the spinning wheel to the living room, move a big plastic tub full of knitting supplies next to the couch.

Me? I've learned one thing from Deadliest Catch. If I am ever in peril in the wake of a storm, and my life is depending on somebody? I don't want FEMA coming to rescue me.

I want the crew of the Time Bandit.

--Mambocat