deputychairman replied to your video “A sleepy

via http://ift.tt/2pUlOiU:deputychairman replied to your video “A sleepy Farmbaby reading Highlights with Grandma.l, practicing…”

Oh she’s all cuddly and sleepy!

She went to a family friend’s EIGHTH birthday party today, and she is only three, so there were a lot of MUCH bigger kids playing, and she was a little overwhelmed. Her hair is full of cake and her face is caked with dirt and she kept zoning out and staring blankly at walls. She was so tired. And she has only just given up an afternoon nap, and really isn’t totally beyond the need for it. But she was good anyway, all through family dinner with two aunts and grandma and grandpa and the farm manager [he comes to all the family dinners with good desserts in the offing {which is all of them we’re not fools}, since he lives in the attached apartment and Farmsister likes him well enough to unambiguously invite him every time]. 

At one point her mother had to leave the table while Farmbaby was curled up in her lap, and so she was offered her choice of anyone else to snuggle with, and she gave it very serious consideration. What a lucky kid; there were five pairs of arms outstretched ready for her! She was aware enough to notice and be pleased by this, but unsurprisingly, picked her father. (just as well, she’s damn heavy, I had the honor this morning for rather longer than I strictly wanted but sometimes the hug life chooses you.)

She perked up enough during bathtime that when Middle-Little and I came into the room together, she made a joke about the ants going marching. Which sounds like nonsense, unless you take the following into account: We’re upstate New Yorkers. Our native accent is this absolutely hideous abrasive sharp-voweled nasal bray and does not distinguish between the word “ant” and the word “aunt” (seriously, our dialect pronounces them identically and it sounds obnoxious, but if we say “auhhhhhhnt” we sound really pretentious, it doesn’t match the rest of the accent). Aunt should rhyme with haunt and taunt, but it doesn’t. Brother-in-law, a native of Illinois, admitted that it’s pronounced “ant” in his accent too and he doesn’t like it either. He really has his pick, he’s lived so many places [IL, MO, SC, and more I don’t remember], but none of them gave him a real right to a proper pronunciation of aunt so he’s sort of as stuck as the rest of us. [Also he can’t distinguish between pen and pin but that’s really more a handicap than an accent, now isn’t it.]

Farm Manager, a native of New Hampshire, looked thoughtful for a moment and confirmed that, although otherwise his accent’s not really distinct from mine, he does pronounce aunt to rhyme with haunt. Goddamn New Englanders.

Anyway. Someone has explained this in Farmbaby’s presence and she has picked up on the inherent humor that her mother’s sisters have a title indistinguishable from a type of insect, and someone I know has said something about the aunts going marching two by two, and she was on the ball enough to repeat that while sitting in the bathtub covered in bubbles, so you go, kid!

csevet replied to your photo “My mother makes me

via http://ift.tt/2pshrhZ:csevet replied to your photo “My mother makes me beautiful socks sometimes! I am such a knitting…”

god i love handknit socks where the stripes don’t even try to match. it’s such a good look and ppl never appreciate it

bebeocho replied to your photo “My mother makes me beautiful socks sometimes! I am such a knitting…”

those are beautiful!! i’m an amateur knitter who can only do hats and easy things like scarves, so socks are impressive to me

My mother is an extremely accomplished knitter. I randomly encountered a classmate of hers from grad school once– a coworker’s mother had gone to their very unusual graduate program, and by coincidence had attended for the same year– 1969, I think– and she immediately remembered my mother as the one who’d brought her knitting to lectures and pissed off the lecturer, but Mom didn’t need to take notes, she just needed to pay attention, and knitting was the best way to make herself do that.

She has a rule, where she can’t start anything new while she’s still working on something old, but socks don’t count. There’s always a big project that she has to study charts to make, and then a little project she can do from memory. So she pretty much always has a sock going.

FWIW I don’t think she knew how to knit socks when I was little. It’s something she picked up after I left the house. But that was 20 years ago now, so in the last 20 years she’s probably knit every member of our six-person family, plus husbands and boyfriends and things, at least three pairs of socks. She’s just constantly knitting socks. All this same pattern. (My father, I think, at this point nearly-exclusively wears hand-knit socks, she’s made him so many.)

And letting the stripes fall where they will is 100% her aesthetic, in socks and in life. There’s no point trying to make the socks identical; they’re clearly a pair, but they’re sisters, not twins. Socks are her don’t-have-to-look-anymore project, the kind of thing she knocks out on airplanes or trains or in the passenger seat during Dad’s driving stints on their cross-country jaunts, the kind of thing she knits while watching TV or having conversations or sitting by the pool making sure the Georgia grandkids don’t murder each other or their grandfather. (They like to play very rough with Grandpa in the pool, who so far can take it but the two boys together outweigh him now, so those days may come to an end and my mother is Prepared to Save Him.) So she’s not going to bother with anything complicated like trying to match the stripes.

(The other thing she can often knit without looking is baby sweaters. Back when she was working every coworker who had a baby got a sweater, often an exquisite one. I think standard one- or two-color baby sweaters are in the socks continuum as far as her project organization goes.)

The big projects she has rules about knitting sequentially are things like cabled Aran sweaters for my father, and her most recent big accomplishment, which was to knit a replica of an extremely complicated Peter Rabbit-themed sweater her own mother had knit her in 1955, for Farmbaby. Those, she knits in dedicated sessions and does not bring traveling.

I asked her if she could teach me to knit, a few years back. She laughed, and said, “Youtube.” 

kelseyuum: … he claimed to be genuinely surpri

via http://ift.tt/2pVSLeP:
kelseyuum:

… he claimed to be genuinely surprised when, in March 1956, he received a letter from one Sam Gamgee, who had heard that his name was in The Lord of the Rings but had not read the book. Tolkien replied on March 18:

“Dear Mr. Gamgee,

It was very kind of you to write. You can imagine my astonishment when I saw your signature! I can only say, for your comfort, I hope, that the ‘Sam Gamgee’ of my story is a most heroic character, now widely beloved by many readers, even though his origins are rustic. So that perhaps you will not be displeased at the coincidence of the name of this imaginary character of supposedly many centuries ago being the same as yours.”

― The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: Letter 184

He proceeded to send Mr Gamgee a signed copy of all three volumes of the book. However, the incident sparked a nagging worry in Tolkien’s mind, as he recorded in his journal:

“For some time I lived in fear of receiving a letter signed ’S. Gollum’. That would have been more difficult to deal with.“― J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

csevet replied to your post “csevet replied to

via http://ift.tt/2p9OF2D:csevet replied to your post “csevet replied to your photo “My mother makes me beautiful socks…”

your mom reminds me of my grandma. she also has her Showpieces (crocheted afghans, usually for whoever’s newly-wed or -born) and little mindless projects. as far back as i can remember she’s had one mitten pattern, one keyhole scarf pattern, one hat pattern. also one pullover sweater, which she knit in every size for my family one christmas. rumor has it she knit grandpa a pair of argyle socks early in their marriage and was scarred by the whole experience.

There’s something to be said for doing one thing and doing it well. Mom likes to pick a complicated pattern and then make it several times for different people. She often makes four of a thing, one each for me and my sisters. She made my dude and my nephew each copies of the same sweater once. It’s a thing she does.

At the end of her life, my grandmother’s physical condition was poor enough that she had to go into a nursing home, but she was mentally still pretty with-it, and so was often bored by her companions, who were usually not very with-it, so Mom set her up with yarn and she just knit dozens of pairs of mittens. She was on too many pain meds to concentrate enough to turn a heel, so socks were out, but man she could still do mittens. I have like, three or four pairs of mittens from that time period. Because she was mostly but always with-it, but by God she could knit a mitten. 

She would knit mittens and watch the front door and keep an informal log of everyone who came and went, because it passed the time. 

I’m sort of descended from the human equivalent of border collies, is the takeaway: we don’t idle well, we’ll Find Something To Do if there’s no tasks set. 

heartofoshun reblogged your post and added:I always wanted to learn to knit. I can crochet, but crocheting is to knitting like  coloring with crayons is to painting with oil.

Oh, I don’t know that that’s necessarily true– I know there’s usually a divide, and people usually do One Or The Other. Mom doesn’t crochet, really doesn’t know how. Middle-Little decided to be a crocheter instead of a knitter; she can do both, but prefers crochet, and she does some beautiful fiddly little complex things. She has done some really cool amigurumi stuff, which is a Japanese tiny-stuffed-animal crochet technique. 

awisekraken replied to your post “csevet replied

via http://ift.tt/2q7Juzv:awisekraken replied to your post “csevet replied to your photo “My mother makes me beautiful socks…”

I aspire to this level of craftswomanship. I’ve done hats and scarves, and I’ll be moving on to afghans and socks next.

buttons-beads-lace replied to your post “csevet replied to your post “csevet replied to your photo “My mother…”

maybe this is a the-grass-is-always-greener thing, but as an only-knitter I am often jealous of cool crochet patterns. there are so many awesome things you can do with crochet in the realm of stuffed toys. I feel like crochet is way more versatile because it’s easier to make irregular shapes, and join pieces together.

And here’s the thing, man, guys, I don’t knit or crochet or do any kind of yarncrafting at all, because I have told myself no more hobbies. I sew, I embroider, that’s it. So– it’s all a magical mystery to me. 

My mother cross-stitches too, but with less gusto than she knits I think. She did crewel embroidery at some point in the distant past but I think she did, like, two pillowcases and then decided she was over it.

I have this idea I’m hankering to do, I want to make a… I guess it’s a quilt. I want to combine painted and appliqued and embroidered elements, and make a map of the farm, and I have all these ideas for textural details I want to do, but I just– I have no real notion of where to start, so I just daydream about it. 

Meanwhile I couldn’t tell you the last time I actually picked up a needle. *eyeroll*

nasa peepo?

via http://ift.tt/2ptncvR:
… I Googled this and it seems to have something to do maybe with some YouTube type person or maybe a podcast. I don’t know. It’s not something I’m familiar with. At least it doesn’t seem to be obscene? I really don’t consume much media, and that includes podcasts and YouTube things, so I’m pretty scant on the context, here. 

This does remind me, though, that I have a small pile of asks and replies I was going to put together into a thing about learning Spanish, so I should work on that when I next have time. 

Idk if u noticed but Riz is a serial man-spreader... discuss?

via http://ift.tt/2pZ8Pz5:
I have totally noticed that too, in like every pic lol. Why does he do this???

Farmbaby is telling jokes. Q: What did the beer say to the wine? A: screw, screw, screw! When her...

via http://ift.tt/2oFFsxN:
Farmbaby is telling jokes.

Q: What did the beer say to the wine?
A: screw, screw, screw!

When her mother said no more jokes until you eat more, she came over and reached for her mother’s face to pull her mouth into a smile and shrieked “SHE MADE HER LAUGH ” in maybe the most sinister and disturbing displays I’ve seen in a while.