the pleasures of jet lag: my Italian journey

I was up at 7 this morning. For those of you with children and jobs, this may not be cause for surprise. But for me, this means my body clock is seriously whacked. A, my beautiful son, is a sleeper. He goes to bed late and gets up late, the little genius. I don't think it harms him in any way, and it certainly keeps me from snapping at him when he's in a feisty morning mood.

The past few days, I have taken afternoon naps nearly every day and got up at very odd hours in the morning--11:30, 8, 10, and now 7. Who knows where the fun will stop? Hopefully around 8, since that gives me 4 hours to get my act together before lunch, instead of the 2 I normally squander. I could have blamed the sleeping on depression before, but now I am feeling so much better that it's no longer an excuse. Praise God! The best reason is jet lag, of course, and travelling a tremendous amount in a very short period of time.

We left for Italy on a friday afternoon, got to the house in Tuscany the next evening after a nearly feverish ride through 5 little towns that weren't on my map, thorough as it was. We got lost a few times, went down a dirt road that led to a very untidy house, and then finally down the gravel road to a staggeringly beautiful villa on a hill. I couldn't believe it. It wasn't fair, really.

The place I have already written about, but there are pictures here again for you to see, and they don't even do justice to the place. It was built in the 18th century, fully restored recently, and sleeps about 12-14 comfortably. Reeeeeallly comfortably. Lots of adverbs.

When we arrived, there was a basket of complimentary snacks, and wine and olive oil that were made on the premises. A round of fresh pecorino, some wild boar sausage (so good, and SO bad), and very hard toast squares that Italians like to get instead of white bread loaves I think.

Our room upstairs was huge, had a beautiful armoire and dresser, our own bathroom, and views over the valley to a neighboring town. Directly below were the vineyards and olive groves, the caretaker's cottage, and the pool. I didn't swim at all, since I think hypothermia would have been the result, but it was great to soak one's feet in. The weather was so nice that I didn't need to cool off. I could wear light sweaters at night, unlike the sweltering inferno of Italy in August.

Looking out from the kitchen, you could see the cypress trees lining the driveway and Montepulciano rising in the distance, a little jewel of a city that sparkled at night. The first night, I heard sheep and cows, and vowed to find out where they lived and take some photos. More on that later. Also, to the side of the kitchen was an outdoor dining room, sheltered from the wind on 3 sides. There was a pool table, a huge sitting room with fireplaces, another outdoor table and a gazebo next to the pool. There was a TV with about 300 channels, many of them Arabic. D watched a little bit and was deeply disturbed. A cell phone commercial, for instance: a man sitting on a park bench gets a call, and walks away. Seconds later the park bench explodes. WTF???!!! I know, American ads are messed up. But this is way beyond the pale.

We shared the place with 7 other people: one was D's roommate right after college, then his girlfriend who found the villa, and then the rest were all her girlfriends from school and college etc. Nearly all were pale, brown-haired ladies, so that someone might think from a distance we were all some strange Mormon family or something. It was great getting to know them all, and several times during our trip D and I would go off somewhere and then run into everyone else randomly. It was kindof creepy but cool at the same time. Asking for a table for 9 was always an adventure.

Nearly every meal I was awake for was excellent: a restaurant where all you choose is the wine, and they take care of the rest, a little trattoria in Florence that served local comfort food (lots of fava beans, stews and risotto), a very hot place in San Gimignano with some stronger wine than I bargained for, and our final outing to Castiglione del Lago where I got the Umbrian menu, a four-course extravaganza of lamb, bruschette, bean soup (yum!!) and vin santo with biscotti. Vin santo is like port, I think, very strong and sweet, and you dip the biscotti in and thank God that you're not driving anywhere afterwards. I haven't even mentioned the fruit, how fresh everything is, the pecorino and prosciutto that I wolfed down like it was going out of style...also the two huge meals our friend Leslie coordinated and cooked like a champ. whew. Amazingly, I only gained 2 pounds. A sacrifice I can handle.

I went into this trip with the resolution to not care if I didn't see anything at all but the back of my eyelids. I had maybe 3 or 4 places I wanted to go, but even then I wasn't going to be upset if they were too far away or if I was out of energy or whatever. Just being in a foreign place is exhausting, since so many things you take for granted just aren't so there. Like lines: people don't stand in line in Italy, they scrum. Everyone knows who's before them and after them, but it's all one big pile till it's your turn. Stores close for siesta, mostly, and you can't get everybloodything you want at one store. Fridges are small, because it is assumed you get your food every day from the market or the COOP. Oh yeah, and everyone speaks Italian.

My Italian is passable: I can get through a conversation about most basic things, and maybe a few things about my specialties (art, teaching, diapers--pannolini--, and I learned the words for crochet and yarn before I left). I am by no means proficient, but I try to speak Italian solely and then ask if they speak English, if it's really important (a rental car agency, for example). Otherwise I speak Italian until I am completely lost, then resort to pantomime. The whole process is exhausting, though, and I had to study a little bit before I asked for some things, or before we went someplace new. Looking up words for "farm," "goat," "cow," all those rural things they didn't think to teach us in Roma. We learned words like "Vespa," "va via," and "ho un fidanzato" in Roma (Vespa the scooter, go away, and I have a boyfriend, respectively)
These challenges were things I knew ahead of time, but it was hard for D to take when it looked like some old ladies were cutting in our line and all. He looks very tense in a new place, and pissed off. Eventually he relaxed a bit, but it was still hard for him because he did all the driving.

We did go to some pretty far-away places, too. Not far away as the crow flies, but far away because they built little highways on medieval pilgrimage roads. So Siena, the closest "big" city, was a 2 hour drive on the scenic ways (we took the bigger road back, but it was still a long drive). We weren't even going to stop in Siena: we went on to Monteriggione and San Gimignano, both beautifully-preserved medieval towns that I hadn't been able to visit before. Monteriggione looks like a stone crown on a hilltop, perfectly-spaced towers forming the high parts of the crown. Inside, it looks like you'd expect a completely preserved medieval town to look, except it smells good and the people have all their teeth. S.G. has about 14 intact towers rising all over the town, built by competing families. They're so close together, I don't see why they didn't just reach out and strangle each other. Then the walls are fortified as well, and there's an intricately frescoed church with some of the scariest pictures of hell I have ever seen. More graphic than Michelangelo and Giotto and almost Bosch. Ew. Can't even mention what was happening to the old usurers and fornicators. All I know is I want to be in heaven, even if it looks like a boring harp recital in comparison.

Every other day, we decided to stay local, which usually meant sleeping in till 2:30 in the afternoon (it's a 6 hour difference, so very unsettling to the body), or getting up a little earlier and trying to get to the market before siesta. Otherwise, we would decide the night before where we were headed the next day. So besides the aforementioned towns, we also went to Florence and Cortona, and visited the farm down the road as well.

Now I better post some pictures and continue my saga later! Ciao.
the view of Montepulciano from the villa. Vineyards in the middle distance and to the sides of the road.
san gimignano, from the piazza. little high-pitched swallowtails were everywhere, and nested in the little square holes made to support scaffolding.

quick update?

we're back from italia. I am mega tired, but also exhilirated. I consumed perhaps half my body weight in wine and pork products (prosciutto, wild boar, ham, salami, and a big friggin english breakfast in London), and loved every artery-clogging minute of it. It was fan-bloody-tastic!
here's a photo. Will write more later when I wake up.

what a tangled skein we pull

I am stubborn and often dumb. I know that. Lo conosco, as my Italian tapes have told me. Sono stupida, si. I have spent literally hours and hours with a skein of rayon ribbon yarn, which I loved so much at the sheep and wool festival that I doubled back to get it. I had said, "I will hate myself and forever regret not buying this stuff, because I have left a skein before and dreamt often about what might have been." (insert the song, "of all the skeins I've loved befoooore...") I bought two of these ribbon hanks, and haven't touched the other one because I am Cursed.

I have cursed as well. I have listened to an entire book on tape and about 4 hours worth of sermons from Tim Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian in NYC (that should help with the cursing, right?). I have gone to bed at 2 or 3 in the morning for 2 nights in a row, when I should be getting my beauty sleep and packing for Italy and spending time with my son, who will not be coming with us.

But here I am, blogging while he naps and knowing I still have about an hour left of unraveling this bloody thing. I have spent all this time with my yarn, not stitching away and creating something that drapes like cool water on a sunburned back--NO!--I am unraveling the 7-inch-diameter Knot from HADES. And I have to unravel it. I have to! Do you hear?

It is all my fault. I was seduced by how slippery it was. Snaky slidey ribbon, a plague on you! I took the wrapper off the hank, and it was already kindof messy before I took the little strings off that hold the hank in place. I was possessed or something, thinking this stuff will just slide around and have no trouble, so I won't bother putting the hank over my feet or a chair or whatever I use to wind it up. I knew this would happen. I have spent less time on another skein, when I first started knitting, and was bewildered at how tangly things can really get if you don't do them correctly.

Well I am now a cautionary tale. I have cut the yarn about 7 times, maybe 8, when it can no longer be pulled through the dense black hole of knottige. Each time I cut, I think "how am I going to weave the ends of this crap? I'm going to have 20 ugly knots on anything I make out of this! You EEEdiot!

This has been a week of "I'm sick of this *$#@!* material!" I was working on a white cotton thread cloche, which started out looking like a yarmulke, then like Moussaoui's hat he wore during his trial, and then like a baby's hat on a too-big head. It fit like a baby's hat, smushing my hair down and nearly giving me a headache from the pressure. So I unraveled it for the 4th time, which is not terribly unusual. I rarely work from patterns, and make things up as I go along. Mistakes I just rip out, even if the whole thing is a mistake. I know I won't wear something if it doesn't fit right, so I have disciplined myself to take care of those mistakes ahead of time. Then I don't have an excuse. All the same, I got tired of seeing just white, white shells over and over, and the top of my index finger was raw from all that thread traveling across it. Boo hoo, right? So what better than to put it aside and unravel a hank of luxurious rayon ribbon? Now I know. Anything is better.

I could have just trashed the whole thing, but I spent about 20 bucks on this sucker (now multiply 20 bucks times 10 hours and think a bit...) so I felt compelled to get it under control. The final insult is that it smells mildly smoky when I put my face in it. We are not amused. Will it ever be turned into a garment I will love (or someone else will love?)? Maybe I will think better of it when I return from a restful time in bell'Italia.

I'm a posting fool

maybe my luck with photos will hold. here are some of my son in the gorgeous weather we had last week, and also a few the I took of some beautiful colored plastic boxes in the sunlight. I had a delicious afternoon of listening to Bella Tuscany on CD, by Francis Mayes, imagining myself at the villa, feeling the warm breeze through my window and just playing with the way light passed through my boxes. The neighborhood was unnaturally quiet for that time of the day; usually there are the Louds out playing espionage in their front yard with a piercing-shriek-dog tied to the porch, but mercifully they went elsewhere.

crochet photos

we'll see if Blogger will cooperate, and here are a few things I've worked on in the past couple of months. Below are: the tomato baby hat, a raspberry cloche adapted from this pattern, and connie's bag. I have other photos but blogger is being tempermental. grr!
The bag is in afghan stitch, or also called Tunisian crochet. It's worked like knitting in that each stitch you keep on your needle, and then you work all of the stitches off the needle. I made the strap extra-long, and doubled it up inside the bag to create pockets for the cell phone/sunglasses. Tunisian curls like a bugger, so I lined the purse with plastic canvas covered in a slick yellow material.

I drool for wool

Wow. Yesterday I spent an afternoon at the Maryland Sheep and Wool festival in Howard County with my best friend J. Thanks go to my friend Kiki, who told me about it all, and that she still hasn't worked up all the yarn she bought at the last festival. I thought, I need to see this place then (perhaps when D sees our Visa bill, he may think twice about that need!). Click here for pictures someone else took, which are excellent. For a textiles freak, this is a break-the-bank occasion, and a veritable nirvana of yummy yarns and amazing craftsmanship.

After parking in the very crowded lot, J and I walked towards the fairgrounds. I expected to see maybe one pavilion with yarn merchants, and twenty pavilions with sheep and all the smells associated with them, like a more specific State Fair. This was more like Artscape for wool-lovers: booth after booth of yarn, penned-up rabbits and kid goats interspersed with cascading yarn bins, a few pavilions of sheep bleating and huddled under shearing blankets, amazing sweaters and shawls and capes, book stalls of every knitting pattern you ever wanted, everyone from babies to granola grannies, hipster knitters and grow-your-own farmers. I touched everything I could get my hands on. Pavilions that looked like they should house sheep or llamas had--surprise!--even more yarn.

Craftsmanship really sums up the whole focus of the festival: an appreciation for every stage of the hand-made process. One could buy hand-turned knitting needles (and crochet hooks), hand-made buttons and clasps for your finished products, hand-woven workbaskets to store everything. Many vendors sold hand-dyed wool roving that one could then spin into yarn with a hand-made spinning wheel, or one could get a sheep or an angora rabbit, or a doe-eyed alpaca, and do the whole process from scratch. In fact, there was a woman there (one of the photos shows her at work) who had an angora rabbit on her lap and a pile of its fur in her hand, and was spinning the fur on a spinning wheel into an angora yarn. The rabbit just sat there, calm as can be, like a pure white dustmop with eyes.

(I've always had trouble with angora. Every sweater I owned with it was very very hot--great--but every time I would pull it over my head some fibers get caught on my eyelashes somehow. Then I feel like something's pulling my eyelids down and stuck in my eye, like wearing too much mascara. Also, those sweaters shed something fierce.)

The roving fascinated me the most, as I don't remember ever seeing it before. It looks a lot like the consistency of cotton candy without the stickiness, and some of the roving's bright colors looked exactly like something you'd see getting devoured at a fair. You could buy large bags of it by the pound, swirls like a fluffy merengue, or my favorite, huge balls that looked like how yarn must look to a housecat--all out of proportion to the slim hanks of sock yarn that it would become after spinning.

As a city girl, my comforts have been plastic, slick 1960's design, cubes and sparse rectangles that I could then fill with my books. Or I would spend time with my favorite plastic incarnation, Smurf figurines. I savor the smell of vinyl like a sommelier and his favorite wine (if you didn't know before, I am a freak). Naturally, I am not a snob about acrylic yarns, as long as they are cool-looking and fit the project. Most wool I shied away from until a couple of years ago, when I realized there are many other types than Scratchy. You pay for the non-Scratchy type, just like you pay for paint colors that are unadulterated pigments--Old Holland in particular, which a 200 mL Cobalt Violet tube can go for upwards of 200 bucks. Ah, but it is SO worth it. It's like butter, and you don't have to use half the tube to mix a strong color. The cashmere of paint.

So am I a wool convert? I don't feel like I have to choose between natural and man-made, really, just like I don't feel like I have to be a knitter OR a crocheter, or feel like Episcopalians are any closer to the true worship of Jesus than Presbyterians, or any other Christian denomination under the sun. I am happy celebrating the true nature of each, enjoying the benefits of their vast differences, and remembering the underlying foundation that--dare I say it--knits so many disparate elements together.