Almost Christmas

Somehow there are those usually come when least expected moments. . . when a pause of knowing arrives and in those moments all is light. "Remember this - this is it." It's tangingly ineffiably wordless. Yet, everyone knows of what I write.

Yes. Thats it! And for everyone it's different.
It's those things that make you say Yes to life.

For this holiday season I wish for everyone to find their Yes.
To discover what brings you happy, light, and full of good cheer.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Laugh with me it eases the pain

Laugh with me. . . . it eases the pain. This morning I joined a new skein (on my latest project a loop d loop pattern -a ponchoette. It's superfast knitted bulky on dp 39 needles) using awesome hand to knee friction skills. I went to start knitting and TA DA or should I say TA DOH! I'd joined the yarn at the wrong end of the project. It's a beaut of a join and now I must go hack it off and resplice.

My Knitting Lap Monkey

Wow

The most amazing thing just happened. I just came across "the picture" on ebay for a sweater my grandmother made many, many years ago. (Which I just found out is from a circa 1960’s pattern book) I have the un-blocked and un-seamed pieces.

My grandmother started making it for my Mom and was just unable to finish it due to ill health. It sat as a UFO for at least 8 years if not more. When I inherited it I didn’t have the pattern book nor did I have any idea of what the finished sweater should look like. The neckline kept tripping me up as was a bit unusual. I messed around with it a few times but no matter what, it didn’t look right. My grandmother passed away at the grand age of 95 this past summer. I wanted to finish the sweater and give it to my Mother as a very special present from both my Grandmother and her daughter this Christmas. We've been feeling the loss of my Grandmother quite a bit. This is our first Christmas without her.

When I came across the pic on ebay it gave me pause for a moment as I realized this was the pattern book for the sweater. O My Gosh! So that’s what it is suppose to look like. Just in time for me to finish it! Oh HAPPY DAY!!!

HAPPY, HAPPY DAY!!!

Only in Sedona

I assure you the stagecoach would win.

They're on a 28 mile twisty two lane narrow mountain road. Having driven it many times (stuck behind behemoth motor homes) the stagecoach is much faster.

“As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.”

An excerpt from Orhan Pamuk Nobel Prize lecture
“My Fathers Suitcase”
(Winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature)

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2006/pamuk-lecture_en.html

© THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 2006

Give every human being a fair chance

"This years' Nobel Peace prize gives highest honour and dignity to the hundreds of millions of women all around the world who struggle every day to make a living and bring hope for a better life for their children. This is a historic moment for them.

World's income distribution gives a very telling story. Ninety four percent of the world income goes to 40 percent of the population while sixty percent of people live on only 6 per cent of world income. Half of the world population lives on two dollars a day. Over one billion people live on less than a dollar a day. This is no formula for peace.

The new millennium began with a great global dream. World leaders gathered at the United Nations in 2000 and adopted, among others, a historic goal to reduce poverty by half by 2015. Never in human history had such a bold goal been adopted by the entire world in one voice, one that specified time and size. But then came September 11 and the Iraq war, and suddenly the world became derailed from the pursuit of this dream, with the attention of world leaders shifting from the war on poverty to the war on terrorism. Till now over $530 billion has been spent on the war in Iraq by the USA alone.

I believe terrorism cannot be won over by military action. Terrorism must be condemned in the strongest language. We must stand solidly against it, and find all the means to end it. We must address the root causes of terrorism to end it for all time to come. I believe that putting resources into improving the lives of the poor people is a better strategy than spending it on guns.

I became involved in the poverty issue not as a policymaker or a researcher. I became involved because poverty was all around me, and I could not turn away from it. In 1974, I found it difficult to teach elegant theories of economics in the university classroom, in the backdrop of a terrible famine in Bangladesh. Suddenly, I felt the emptiness of those theories in the face of crushing hunger and poverty. I wanted to do something immediate to help people around me, even if it was just one human being, to get through another day with a little more ease. That brought me face to face with poor people's struggle to find the tiniest amounts of money to support their efforts to eke out a living. I was shocked to discover a woman in the village, borrowing less than a dollar from the money-lender, on the condition that he would have the exclusive right to buy all she produces at the price he decides. This, to me, was a way of recruiting slave labor.

I decided to make a list of the victims of this money-lending "business" in the village next door to our campus. When my list was done, it had the names of 42 victims who borrowed a total amount of US $27. I offered US $27 from my own pocket to get these victims out of the clutches of those money-lenders. The excitement that was created among the people by this small action got me further involved in it. If I could make so many people so happy with such a tiny amount of money, why not do more of it?

That is what I have been trying to do ever since. The first thing I did was to try to persuade the bank located in the campus to lend money to the poor. But that did not work. The bank said that the poor were not creditworthy. After all my efforts, over several months, failed I offered to become a guarantor for the loans to the poor. I was stunned by the result. The poor paid back their loans, on time, every time! But still I kept confronting difficulties in expanding the program through the existing banks. That was when I decided to create a separate bank for the poor, and in 1983, I finally succeeded in doing that. I named it Grameen Bank or Village bank.

Today, Grameen Bank gives loans to nearly 7.0 million poor people, 97 per cent of whom are women, in 73,000 villages in Bangladesh. Grameen Bank gives collateral-free income generating, housing, student and micro-enterprise loans to the poor families and offers a host of attractive savings, pension funds and insurance products for its members. Since it introduced them in 1984, housing loans have been used to construct 640,000 houses. The legal ownership of these houses belongs to the women themselves. We focused on women because we found giving loans to women always brought more benefits to the family.

To read the rest of Muhammad Yunus Nobel Lecture, Oslo, December 10, 2006 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2006/yunus-lecture-en.html

It's her fault

It all my secret pals fault and she doesn't even know it ** (She's working on her Masters/PhD in Comparative Lit at a Midwestern college) In wondering how best to spoil her I did a couple of searches about the authors she'd mentioned reading. It started with Mahfouz who won the Nobel Prize in lit which led me to the Man Brooker Prize which led me to more of Mahfouz, which led me to other Nobel winners which brought me back to my secret pals reading endeavors which brought me to "The Master and the Margarita" and whew here it is a couple of months later and I've got her to blame for my renewed sense of interest and curiosity in literature. Hmmm. . . now how to figure out how to knit and read at the same time***

My SP is Psychic

I've been looking at the Mac and Me head wraps and wondering if any of them would look good on me. Cute change from a hat. I've been contemplating making something like this twisty headband thingy. In similar colors.


I was thinking of a neutral color for the center and a soft green or blue around the edges. . . and. . . . Whoa! Here comes a package. . . . . . . inside I find the most awesome of combos. (pics & further boasting to soon follow)

Two skeins in Cotton Patine from Elsebeth Lavold and a cushy Anny Blatt mohair in blue. To relegate the mohair to edging perhaps may be a bit too cruel for such a pretty yarn. It's begging to be a lace fru of some sort. Decisions,decisions.

** Sigh**

My SP Rocks!!!

I YYou Secret Pal - - - Thank you!

HAVETOKNITITIS

I've got the worst case of havetoknititis. The mac and me Opera Gloves in Koigu. I'm sure any other hand dyed sock yarn would work. My notsolocal YS got in a huge supply of Koigu recently and I've been jones-ing for stash enrichment. On my last visit to my LYS I found a yummy wool/silk hand dyed yarn for my SP in green, turquoises and blues. I couldn't resist stopping by the LBS for some matching findings and beads. Pics of yarn and necklace to soon follow.