Yelapa

I just returned from a journey down to Yelapa, Mexico. Yelapa is a little fishing village with no automobiles - it's a 45 minute Water Taxi ride from Puerto Vallarta to get down there, and we stayed at the most lovely Casa Milagros, which is a mere 182 steps up from the village. But the views!



The place is all very lovely - there is a waterfall at the edge of the village, and a larger one about an hour walk away. The food was wonderful, the people were lovely, the weather was stunning. My biggest concern while there was avoiding burro crap. Easy enough.

Oh, and I got some knitting done:


I had wanted to take along a lace knitting project, but not wanting to get too involved in charts and really PAYING ATTENTION, I opted to cast on for a Pi Shawl. I followed the lead of brooklyntweed, and went for a simple yo, K2tog row every once in awhile. Keeping it simple. The yarn is from Miss Simone - Grignasco ExtraFine, and it sure is extrafine! I'm knitting this on US4s. I plan on completing it sometime in 2037 or thereabouts.

*They say that getting there is half the battle, but this time around it seemed to be a bit more - the getting out of there was a bit of an issue. Heed these words, my friends: If any of you ever think for one minute about going to Houston, Texas - consider our friendship OVER.

Mount Madonna

While Stacie was reverse-engineering the whole of the Anthro catalogue, and making 17 quilts for Christmas, and blocking an amazing piece of lace, and generally Ruling my Universe from Orbit,

I was sitting quietly at Mount Madonna Center, a place of deep quiet and beauty overlooking Monterey Bay.

I've been there every fall for the past three years for a meditation retreat with Geneen Roth, author of many books on emotional eating. Geneen doesn't write about diets. Her point and purpose is not to teach people how to lose weight (although working with her has certainly resulted in my losing weight—about 30 pounds that I've kept off for years), it's to show that working with our impulse to eat when we're not hungry can be, at least if you're the sort of person who eats when you're not hungry, a perfect spiritual path.

I haven't spoken very much about this, here or anywhere, but I'm a great admirer of Geneen, and deeply grateful to her. I know of no one out there taking a similar approach, and I'm so glad our paths crossed.

And while flying back from San Francisco, I finished the Moth. Blocking commences in one hour!

¡Barcelona!

Hi friends! I'm back from Barcelona and able now to think about something other than food. Really, while I was there, I thought of little else. Every day I would wake up and think excitedly, What shall I eat today?! Then after breakfast I would start thinking, What can we eat next?!

We really did have some amazing food, including an indecently big lunch at one place, Passadis del Pep (no sign, off a plaza, down a blind passageway next to an ATM, never find it again), where we had about a nine-course meal which included a mountain of fingernail-sized clams, baby whelks in rock salt, several kinds of shrimp, and an incredible raisin-studded pudding with a crème brulée top. Even the parsley was somehow the best parsley ever. Another night I had a lovely falling-down-drunk cake, and another place we had some really memorable fried chiles in salt. We had patatas bravas, giant fries with chile and aioli, every chance we got. And more... Oh! You must go. Because it is very nice to get up in the morning, have a delicious coffee and a roll, then start planning lunch whilst strolling and people-watching (and ogling the unbelievable mullets, yes, mullets! on the women), then take hours to eat lunch and then walk it off and ogle more (the open-air budgie market, the red-light district one block from the main drag, the Roman fortifications, the extremely Ferdinand-like narrow little passageways) til you find a likely spot for dinner. Very nice indeed.

Another really nice thing to do in Barcelona is meet knitters. Barcelona Knits gets together on Monday nights near the Plaça Catalunya, which is a little like the Times Square of Barcelona - the kind of place where, sooner or later, everyone you’ve ever known will pass by.

From left, Elena, a really nice girl from the south of Spain, a lovely Argentine girl whose name I forget but who brought some fantastic dulce de leche her mother had sent from Argentina to accompany the announcement of her ¡engagement! (hooray! congratulations!), me, the extremely sweet Paulina, aka Debolsillo (or “pocket-sized”), from Mexico, author of the blog La República de Mi Casa and the podcast En Punto, you know what, these lasses were all very lovely, Trini, Nuria (a beautiful name, don’t you think? and very common in Catalunya), some folks who came in later who you can’t see, and on the right, Danielle, aka laracroft, who also had a wonderful announcement, which is that her crocheted fair-isle socks (yes, crochet fair isle!) will be published in Interweave Crochet in the spring. I struggled along in Spanish; their English was much better. (No progress on Moth. Stitch count horribly off.)

The Sagrada Familia is the thing I have most and longest wanted to see. It did not disappoint. The two main facades outside are staggering; the Nativity side is a very rococo, frothy, excitable sand-castle thing; the Passion side is weighty, blocky, blunt, and very affecting. But they are nothing to the inside. I burst into tears upon entering, which I quickly covered up, because it is so crowded. The scale is unbelievable. The few windows that are done are exquisite; the picture doesn’t convey the subtlety of the colors at all. The columns are of all different kinds of stone and different colors; some come from as far away as Iran. A very powerful experience.

Joe and I also visited the very sweet little knitting shop Persones Llanes (“yarn people” in Catalan) in, appropriately, Plaça de la Llana. Like Paulina, it is pocket-sized and very charming. Their slogan is “all you knit is love.” Barcelona, as I mentioned, is about eating, not buying wool, but I did get some Nepalese cotton for a market bag. (Show you later - it’s plain and simple and very pleasing.)

The wool above is the only Spanish wool they can get to sell at Persones Llanes. It’s used for rug-weaving, so it comes in these long skeins - it’s yarn and a shuttle, all in one.

And here is some absolutely luscious soap from a little hole-in-the-wall soapmaker’s in the Barri Gótic. I didn’t buy enough the first time, and when I went back I couldn’t find the passageway again. (That’s a little Icelandic-honeymoon lava keeping it company. It’s nicer to get your pumice off the beach than at the druggist.)

And this was a really nice fellow who took me to Barcelona with him. Thank you, Joe. I adore you.

Tanned, rested and ready

Wellfleet was profoundly refreshing. We walked so much; I knitted a lot and ate a ton of oysters and socialized more than any other holiday ever (an unexpected advantage of vacationing near home—we knew loads of people there). I’ve come back full of ideas and ready to make some changes, especially in the area of work.

No progress on Moth, but I’ll show you a nice February baby sweater tomorrow. I almost think I might be catching finishitis.

And that makes this another summer during which I do not read Moby Dick

We’re heading off for a week in Wellfleet today, and here’s what I’m bringing to read. It’s the End of the Summer of Self-Improvement (yep, had to drop out of intensive Spanish) and the beginning of Books I’ve Really Been Looking Forward To. (Come to think of it, we’re probably in the middle of that, as my all-day Hallowsthon is what put me irrecoverably behind in Spanish to start with.)

The Armistead Maupin was a birthday gift from Emily and Briana. I was so surprised! They had asked Joe for hints, but for a moment I thought they had seen into the heart of my secret hippie soul. I really loved these books, back in the day, and I will be so happy to take off the chill that Sure of You left me with. (That horrid Mary Ann! Maybe she redeems herself in this book...)

Now I wish to draw your attention to the fourth book down, Sons of Heaven, by Kage Baker. This is the final volume in a series about a race of time-traveling immortal slaves, some of whom might be plotting against their masters. I cannot express how clever and absorbing they are; if you are not completely enchanted by the first one, Garden of Iden, you absolutely will be by the second volume, which made me shriek aloud. Try them.

That’s it then! The knitting is packed, the beach bags are packed, the tea is packed—we’re off. See you in a week.

My Favorite Ugly Sweater

Prior to heading out for a much needed vacation, I had decided that the project that I wanted to work on would be a very simple, mindless, loose-knit comfy sweater. You know, Your-Favorite-Sweater. THAT's what I wanted to knit. No thinking AT ALL. (This, of course, would mean not working on 2 festering projects, the Icarus Shawl from IK, and Hush-Hush from Knitty). Naturally, none of the stash yarn was of use for this (too heavy, tiny gauge, too bright, etc. - y'all know that little game) and I managed to get it into my little pea brain that I wanted something with some variegated colors. So off I went to Ye Olde Yarne Shoppe.

And so began the World's Ugliest Sweater.


I'm using Mountain Colors Bearfoot yarn in the Tamarack colorway. The yarn is a joy to work with - smooth, soft, knits up beautifully. I'm knitting this on US3s, all in the round, going to join at the pits and work raglan decreases (though it *may* become a V-neck - not sure about that part yet). To spice things up a wee bit, I've worked the cuff ribbings in a mini twisted cable.

(that's atop a near-finished quilt, btw - if anyone is up for a few hours of handstitching, let me know!)

Anyway. Up until I connected the body and the first sleeve, I was still considering ripping the whole thing out. "This looks like clown vomit!" said I, and "I don't know if I could be seen with myself in this!" But now that things are coming together, I'm actually kind of liking it. I'm not minding the way the color is pooling and striping.


And here I am with half of sleeve number 2 done.

What do you think? Too.......clown vomit-y?

It's hard to come back from New Mexico

New Mexico is pretty depressed, and probably has been since 1927. We lived in Albuquerque when I was about ten, and that's perked up some, and of course Santa Fe and Taos have, but apart from that, it's a slow, remote kind of place. Little attention to matters of fashion. Lots of attention to beauty.



This virgin was carved inside a tree out back of Albuquerque's San Felipe de Neri Church in Old Town. Like a lot of beautiful things in New Mexico, it's not announced - just there for you to stumble on and be transfixed by.



She has an arresting, rather simian face.



I just about fainted when I saw this sign in Truth or Consequences. I do believe that this is a representation of what folks used to call a "Chinaman." Nothing rusts, and nothing's wasted in New Mexico - this sign had to have been in place for decades. I think the last time they took it down to touch up the paint, they reckoned the pigtail was a little offensive and busted it off. They left his buttons on, though.




Everywhere we went we saw fantastic preserved commercial art. This is Socorro or Belen, I think.



Outside Las Cruces, once a makeshift burial ground for victims of Apaches, now the second-biggest city in New Mexico.



Not sure this store in T or C was ever open.



Mineral hot springs are good for you!



The Very Large Array, outside Socorro. We were lucky enough to tag along with a school group, so we got to go everywhere - even inside the control room.



Tell you what: for making do, New Mexicans put New Englanders to shame. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is using this equipment today. (They've got some newer stuff, too.)



Is the sky ever like this in New England? I think not. Hubbo (apologies to Ann and Kay) was nearly blinded.



Near McCartys, on the Acoma reservation, the start of a very long trail over the lava from Acoma to Zuni Pueblo. This is one of the youngest lava flows in the continental U.S. (The very youngest, at 1000 years old, is the Valley of Fires, near Tularosa, where the eruption flowed at a rate that would fill 13 bathtubs a second, and went on that way for 43 years. That was a pretty good one, too.)

I don't have to tell you I used this occasion to say the word "pahoehoe" about a hundred times.



No lighting at the Lightning Field. Devastating hail in Alamogordo, mild hail in Gallup, crazy snow in Santa Fe, but no lightning at the Lightning Field.



Inside the Lightning Field accommodations, where we spent our paper anniversary. It was made out of three abandoned homesteads pushed together. Quite rustic; a great place to commune with my Chevron scarf.



The beautiful slot canyon at Kasha-Katuwe, or Tent Rocks, outside Santa Fe.



Some of the many tent rocks.



Just outside Taos, the Greater World Community of Earthships. They're all completely self-sustaining, getting their power from wind and sun. In the high desert, they get eight inches of rain a year (which is legal to collect in New Mexico, unlike Colorado). The water is re-used four times before being returned to the outside. It totally reminded me of Tatooine, and I half expected to turn around and find Aunt Beru handing me a tall glass of something blue there.



We were there for two weeks, and put 2000 miles on the car. I shall never tire of New Mexico. Can't wait to go back.