Here are the 2 current knitting projects – the lower one was my travel knitting and the bigger one is the blanket I have been working on since I’ve been here.
What have I been reading?
Two books – Henning Mankell’s Before the Frost – an Inspector Wallander detective story set in Sweden
Elmer Kelton – The Big Brand, a collection of Western stories previously published elsewhere.
What have I been buying?
More yarn, of course, at Weaving Works and the Yarn Circle
I am enjoying exploring my home-to-be. In 1958 I applied to the University of Washington in Seattle to do graduate studies in geography. I did not receive a favorable reply. In fact I did not receive any reply at all. The 2 other universities I applied to both offered me teaching fellowships but as I recall, the terms for the post at Northwestern were more attractive – so Evanston Illinois is where I spent the academic year, 1959-60, including a summer school in Platteville Wisconsin to learn fieldwork.
The following September I travelled to Evanston to attend the wedding of one of my Middlebury College roommates. I met up with some of my Northwestern friends and the upshot of that was that I joined these friends, Helene and Bob and (mad) Mohammed Mohammed, for a road trip to the West Coast – all the way on Route 66, as it then was. 
Upon arrival in Palm Springs near Los Angeles, Mohammed delivered the car to its owner, and Helene and Bob and I flew north to San Francisco to visit friends and go camping in the Sierra Nevada. Still footloose, I decided to take the bus North to visit another college roommate who was teaching in Seattle – my first arrival in Seattle, September 1959.
I thought Seattle was a wonderful place then – (and I still do now.)
Photo credit – 1994 view, heading west out of Chicago
Yes, I made it to Seattle – I had a window of opportunity to depart Dublin and had an easy trip. Dublin, Chicago, Seattle – 20 or so hours – and it was still the same day. No objections were made to the fact that I had my knitting so that helped to pass the time. And I read a wonderful book – Snow on the Equator, An African Memoir by Sean Rothery. The author lives near me in Dublin although I don’t think I have met him or his wife. He is now in his 80’s and has written this memoir about his 3 years in Uganda back in the 1950’s. Sean was an architect and he and his wife Nuala were keen mountain climbers. In a spirit of adventure they made the decision to leave Ireland to go out to East Africa. Sean was employed by an architectural firm in Kampala Uganda and Nuala found work with the Government Dept. of Education.
Every page of this book brought back memories for me. I too went out to Africa in a spirit of adventure 10 years after Sean and Nuala. I left California to go to Nairobi to take up a post with the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Nairobi. And almost simultaneously, my husband to be left Belfast Northern Ireland to go out to Kenya to take up a position with the Town Planning Department of the Kenya Government. We met – and the rest is history.
Ian and I did not climb any of the mountains in East Africa but we travelled a great deal and so many of our trips (safaris) and daily experiences were similar to those of Nuala and Sean 10 years previously. We left Kenya in 1968 and then returned to live in Nairobi again in 1989. Just fascinating to see the changes. I want to write so much more about this – Sean’s book is an inspiration to me to put pen to more of these reflections. So, watch this space.
In the meantime, here I am in Seattle at the home of our eldest son, whose life began in Kenya 40+ years ago.
Snow and ice have us housebound here in suburban Dublin. In fact, virtually the whole city ground to a halt yesterday and the airport was closed for a few hours. This weather has me a bit uneasy – I’m due to fly tomorrow. A few days ago when there was a slight break in the bad weather I booked a flight to Seattle – the plan being to greet our container and welcome the contents in to our new home. 
Yesterday’s cartoon in the Irish Times says it all – this is for you Bettina in County Mayo.
The snow is beautiful but when it’s life-threatening, then it loses its glamour.
To change the subject – here’s what we have been doing since we’ve been snowed in. I’m not a reader of Mills & Boon but doing this jigsaw of their covers was great. Good bold colours, definite pictures, historic context, and very easy. Very satisfying.
Mills & Boon Jigsaw Puzzle
And I have finished another blanket. 
Here’s a book to match the weather we’ve been having. A wonderful book by Tove Jansson, an author I read many years ago. Sometime in the 1970’s I read The Summer Book by this author and I thought it was absolutely magical. It was about an artist and her grandaughter living on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. I saw The Summer Book more recently in a new edition – thought it looked familiar but had to buy it and reread it. Now I have read The True Deceiver, first published in Finland in 1982. Now it has been translated into English and published by Sort of Books 2009.
Again, Tove Jansson’s writing is very atmospheric. Somewhat austere. Richly rewarding. The story is set in a small village in Sweden, in the dead of winter. There are 2 main characters, both very mysterious, one woman cunning and devious, the other woman very naive and trusting.
Maybe some of you remember Tove Jansson better for her very popular children’s books.
This photo was taken from Wikipedia. The date for this book is 1948. 
This morning one of my sketches came up on the screen saver. So that sketch appears somewhere in my photo albums – and it is also in the container rapidly making its way to Seattle. In my search for the sketch I have now found the photographs I used. The photographs were taken in February 2008 and were of the so-called Fashion Parade leading to the Dundrum Town Centre. This never materialized as a Fashion Parade, instead on the right are a number of eating establishments, the trees are no longer there, and Poppies is gone although the cottages are still there. Beyond the cottages, a big hole was filled in and it was to be an ice skating rink. No sign of ice or skaters yet.
I’ve searched and searched but I can’t find my sketch – so I procrastinate a bit longer about getting down to painting.
That’s the trouble with having your photographs appear on the screen saver – you see the photo but it’s soon gone and then you can’t find it.
Now for some knitting to show you.
The photo to the right is of a tank top I knit a couple of years ago and am now wearing, along with a few more layers in this cold weather. And here is the tank top I finished this morning. 
I love reading a good book about the American pioneers who gradually settled the western part of the United States. If I have another life sometime in history I think I would choose to be part of that great westward movement. My latest literary find about this subject was a novel by Nancy Turner, These is my Words, The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901, Arizona Territories. I found it in Epilogue Books, just before they closed their wonderful store in Ballard, Seattle, in late summer 2009. (The demise of Epilogue in Ballard was a sad tale indeed.) When I saw this book in the shop it looked a bit daunting for its size and fine print but the title was intriguing and I do love a good diary. The book reminded me a bit of the Mildred Walker books I also found in Seattle. Good historical novels, soundly researched. And about a part of the West that I haven’t read very much about, apart from Larry McMurtry’s books. Arizona was the last of the original 48 states to be admitted to statehood – in the year 1912, the year my mother was born. It does not seem all that long ago, not even 100 years.
On the subject of books here are a couple of others I have purchased recently. 
Yet another book to help me learn Irish. And then in the sale bin at Hughes and Hughes I spotted another book by the same author, Mícheál O Siadhail, this one a book of poetry – none of the poems in Irish, to my disappointment.
Now here’s what I intended to do this morning rather than writing this blog. I want to try painting with acrylics. The watercolour painting I did of my stash didn’t really show the colours to their true advantage. So I want to see what I can do with acrylics. 
Looking at my stash and thinking about those various wonderful colours that I’m using to make the blankets
Stash remaining
As an approximation, there are 9 balls of wool at 100 grams, and 26 balls of wool at 50 grams. The 100 gram balls are approximately 420 metres each, and the 50 gram balls are 210 metres each. This makes a total of 9240 metres. One mile = 609.34 metres. So if you stretched out the yarns in my stash they would measure approximately 13 1/3 miles. That’s a lot of knitting. Imagine stretching out the yarn to have it showing a path from my house to the centre of Dublin and back again – that would be about the distance. I would start knitting at my front door and walk along knitting, knitting, knitting until I got to Grafton Street, then I would turn around and knit my way back home.
While I’ve been knitting the blankets shown above, I read this book, The End of Sleep by Rowan Somerville. A new author for me – and a very good one. The author is Irish and the book is mostly about Arab culture and Cairo Egypt. I also enjoyed a couple of other novels about Arab culture. These books by an Egyptian author, Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building and Chicago, both recent best sellers.
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