An Assortment

The Swallowtail Shawl
Yes, I’m still shamelessly promoting the Blogiversary Raffle, trying to make sure that feral kitties and lemurs and other creatures are safe and well-fed.

As a temptation for potential donors who haven’t yet made the leap, check out the Swallowtail Shawl that I’m giving away as the grand prize.

Because I worked it in worsted weight yarn, it’s nice and big. And the cotton content gives it wonderful drape.

Here’s a detail of the lace patterns.

If you haven’t yet entered and would like a chance to win this shawl (and other great prizes) check out the raffle guidelines here. A $2 donation (or more) to an animal protection/welfare group is all that’s required to enter.

Foodborne Pathogens

The day-long conference last Friday was great! The talks were set up so that we moved systematically through a huge body of materials: development of federal tracking of food-borne diseases, descriptions of the different types of illnesses, an explanation of epidemiological methods ranging from interviews with those infected to collection of agricultural samples, the role of veterinary medicine in responding to outbreaks, laboratory methods for processing samples, and forensic investigation of outbreaks. I finished most of a pair of silk wrist-warmers and learned to fear raw milk (actually, I think raw milk sounded pretty scary even before these presentations). My only regret is that I’m at the point of needing reading glasses to knit, but don’t yet have bifocals, so the power-point slides were a bit of a blur.

Non-Pathenogenic Food
Recently, Melissa and I had a wonderful dinner at F & D Yummy in San Jose (1688 Alum Rock Ave.). We had tickets to School of the Americas, a new play about the death of Che Guevara being produced by Teatro Vision at Mexican Heritage Plaza, and figured we’d just head over early and try our luck eating somewhere new. The neighborhood had lots of small eateries, but the bright lights of F & D Yummy called the loudest. It’s nothing fancy to look at—but it is very clean and very well-lit. The food was absolutely delicious!: simple, straight-forward Chinese/Vietnamese dishes, cooked up with fresh ingredients. If you’re in the Bay Area, you really should check it out. For less than $20 two people can have a satisfying, generous meal.

The Anniversary Surprise
Apparently year four on the even-hipper-than-modern anniversary gift traditions list calls for Experimental Theater.

Melissa’s Saturday anniversary surprise was tickets to Monster in the Dark, the current production by foolsFURY. I was delighted with her selection.

This distopian play does have a credited author (Doug Dorst), but it was developed in collaboration with the company over three years and is every bit as rich as one might hope, given the number of brains and length of time involved in its birthing. It follows a half dozen characters (one of whom is played at one time or another by every actor in the cast) during the collapse (?) of a totalitarian government. During the first half of the play (which Melissa and I found most engaging, though we enjoyed the whole thing) the “monster” takes the shape of societal institutions; during the second half the “monster” is revealed within individuals.

The production incorporates dance, song, and movement in ways that really enrich the central narrative. I was particularly fascinated by the use of language in the play, which reminded me a bit of A Clockwork Orange (the novel) or 1984. Orwellian would be just the word for it. Those in business are referred to as stuffthrusters; the religious are makersellers; corpses are skinhulls.

Because this is experimental theatre, it does involve the whole people-onstage-and-mingling-in-the-gallery-as-the-audience-comes-in thing. Usually this drives me nuts. I want clear boundaries between me and the performers and don’t want to have to fret about the potential embarrassment that a blurring of those lines may lead to, but these interactions were oddly comfortable and challenging at the same time.

One actor strolled up with a guitar, started chatting with the folks in the row in front of us, then turned to me and said “That’s quite a sweater you have on. You look like you could be a rule-breaker,” in an approvingly warm voice. [I was wearing my purple malabrigo shrug.] Melissa and I laughed, and she told him that was exactly what I was, after which he asked “What’s the rule you’ve broken most recently?”

That question stumped me. I’d been feeling delightfully iconoclastic, but… what rules had I broken lately? His question wasn’t hostile; there was no “gotcha!” zing to it. Yet, it’s so easy to think of one’s self as not bound by convention and simultaneously so very difficult not to bound by it.

When I did think of my reply, it was a knitter’s one, of course. “When I knit this sweater,” I said, “I didn’t really follow the pattern.” I didn’t go into any long explanation about knitting without a net or the risks of ignoring gauge or the pleasure of taking chances with a project requiring dozens of hours of work—but they were all there in my mind, for what it was worth.

This production continues in berkeley through the weekend and will move to San Francisco in March. If you can attend, I highly recommend it.