Summer in SoCal

Even though I left a comment on Camille’s blog saying my favorite season was fall in Chicago, there are things about summer in Southern California I definitely like. As in getting produce from my garden. What could be nicer than making a salad with tomatoes I just picked. And even if the cucumbers look strange (they’re lemon cucumbers) and I thought the plant was supposed to give me cantaloupes, they taste great and are 100 percent organic pesticide free.

Walking Goldy is particularly nice now. We go out as the day is fading. There is no glaring sun, but it’s still light enough to see everything in color. The north mountains are purple brushed with gold. The burning heat has lifted and it is kind of gentle warm. I love to look at everybody’s yard. They are big around here, almost like a personal park. The silk trees have their fragrant pink fans, and the honeysuckle plant one neighbor smells so sweet, I often snatch a blossom and keep smelling it as we walk.

There’s some mystery, too. Something has changed at the remodeled house down the street. I watched the couple move in and redo the house. Months later, I saw them walking with a baby carriage and realized there was an addition to their family. Then there was another addition. I started seeing an older woman walking with them. It was easy to figure out she was the woman’s mother since she looked like an older version of her.

There was always a SUV in the driveway and the house was invitingly lit up at night. Lately the driveway has been empty. Just the other day, the woman was watering with a hose. Even though I don’t know her, I turned to smile as I passed. The look I got back was anything but friendly. Her eyes looked hollow and her face sagged with sadness. When Goldy and I passed the house on our way home, it was dark out. There was only a dim lonely looking light coming from somewhere in the back of the house. It occurred to me that I haven’t seen the man for a long time. Hmm.

I found the perfect sort of thing to crochet in the summer. The expensive, nightmare, silk yarn I wrote about awhile back turns out to be lovely to work with when it’s warm. And it’s not a nightmare anymore. Once I ripped my attempts at knitting with it for the zillionth time and started to crochet with it, everything changed. With the knitting, I kept getting extra stitches and the edges looked wobbly and awful, and it took a thousand hours or maybe it only seemed that way to knit one row. There have been no extra stitches since I started to crochet and no lost ones either. It still takes awhile to do a row because of all the little bumps in the yarn, but it’s definitely faster than knitting.

The one skein is supposed to make shawl, but that was with the knit pattern. Crochet tends to take more yarn, so the shawl might end up a scarf. Since it’s light as air, either way it will work for warm weather.

I like the pattern I made up so much I’m already planning to use it with the apricot colored cotton yarn I bought in Old Town Alexandria.

How do you feel about wearing a scarf in the summer?

Smooth as Silk?

I’m changing churches. Not religion, not even denomination, just churches. I’ve been a member of my current church for at least twenty-five years, so this will be a wrench. The problem is politics, and this might serve as a warning to anyone who does public speaking (including me): unless you are a politician or speaking at a political event, don’t let your political beliefs show. I don’t want to get into details, but I want to go on record as saying this has been a painful couple of years, and an excruciating couple of months. I was going to stand and fight (I know I’m not alone in my complaint), but last Sunday I went to a church in my own neighborhood and the relief was so enormous that I knew what I had to do.

Is somebody out there – somebody computer-savvy – looking for an interesting idea for a mystery series? Have I got a lead for you in this news story: http://www.philly.com/philly/hp/news_update/20080401_Ronnie_Polaneczky__Cyber_vigilante_brings_worldwide_heat_on_thieves_who_had_stolen_his_stuff.html

There are all kinds of ways this could have gone. Fortunately, it went the best way. But what if it hadn’t? Or what if this, the first one, went well, but a later one didn’t? That would be the first novel. Vigilantes always start off with the very best intentions, and they begin operations in a venue where police are, or are seen as, lax. It’s a very dangerous perception if allowed to fester, that the police are no longer able (or worse, willing) to act when honest citizens are victimized. This could be a very cool series, but it needs to be written by a young person, or someone who knows how to make computers do as they are told – in a way a reader perhaps not nearly as skilled (me, for example) could understand.

One of the marketing ideas we came up with for Thai Die is Thai silk. Getting some was a long and far more complicated job than I would ever have believed. Thailand does not make silk embroidery floss. Okay, I said, then we can use some of the silk they use in weaving. All we’ll need is a couple of balls of silk thread. I don’t know if it was the language barrier or if the silk manufacturers in Thailand didn’t believe why we wanted it, but it took months. I now have a cardboard box about fourteen inches square and six inches deep containing a large wad of gold-colored Thai silk thread. It doesn’t have the smooth texture of silk floss and I have discovered that’s because it’s wound, not spun. I’m not sure how it makes a difference, but in wound silk the cocoons are heated in water, then the end of the wrapping is found somehow and attached to a wooden bar. Then another cocoon, and another, and another are attached to bars arranged in a circle. The circle turns as it backs away and the thin strands are twisted together. That’s winding. Spinning is done on a wheel – though the wheel doesn’t look like what we think of as a spinning wheel. I’m not sure why that makes a difference, but wound silk feels rougher and is inclined, when brushed up against more wound silk, to become firmly attached.

Anyway, what my designer, the sainted Denise Williams, has done, is come up with a design that calls, in part, for gold floss. And what we are going to do is offer people who come to my signings a free length of Thai gold silk to use in stitching the pattern. This is a unique product, not for sale anywhere. It’s also a little difficult to use, as its rough surface catches on everything, including tiny flaws in the stitcher’s fingers. But its sheen is unsurpassed.

Oh, and I am speaking of this now because I have been persuaded to bring some samples of it to the quilt show in Rosemont and the lecture in Palos Heights this weekend to give away to people who will then have to buy the book when it comes out in December in order to work the pattern.