… please come here.

It’s just us four this year. Which is fine.

One year, I would really like to have a Thanksgiving meal with historically accurate items. Another year I would like to spend most of the day delivering meals to the homebound. I know the Consort enjoys trying different dishes. But the girls are adamant about ritual and routine, and they like to call it “tradition”, but I think they are imbuing too much rigidity to the menu. In any event, we are going to have way too much food:

• Lentil Nut Loaf in turkey shape, with onion gravy
• creamed onions (traditional)
• pineapple bread pudding (a midwestern concoction introduced to my parents long ago)
• gingered and mapled mashed yams (this really ought to be a dessert)
• candied yams with marshmallows (for Trixie)
• mashed potatoes (Impera is making these, because the Consort and I wanted to do a potato and turnip mash, and she didn’t like that idea)
• cranberry sauce (home cooked)
• can of cranberry jelly (for the Consort and Trixie)
• sauteed corn with chipotle and thyme (new this year!)
• green beans with shallots (traditional)
• stuffing (traditional)
• rolls (I thought the menu was doing OK for carbs; Impera disagreed. She’ll be making this, too)

And for dessert:

• Hubbard squash pie (Impera wanted two pies — since it’s only us four, I suggested we only make one right now, and we can make a second after all the leftovers are eaten)
• pecan pie
• coconut coconut coconut pie

The day started with a loud thunderstorm, and the rain has continued all day. I took a short walk outside, determined to find some beauty in the grayness. I think I found some.

It was an unexpected sunny morning, which was the perfect time to introduce you to my latest knitting project.

There was a bit of a delay, as I first had to get the remote working correctly.

I ordered the pattern and yarns early in October, but the Socktober mystery socks took up most of that month.

Now, chevron is a lovely basic pattern, easy to memorize. Which means that knitting it can get boring, even with color changes every three rows. Luckily, I discovered Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcasts just as I was starting these, and that was the perfect accompaniment to the process of knitting these mittens.

While knitting these beauties, I listened to 5.5 hours on the battles of WWII’s Eastern Front and 4 hours on the Punic Wars. If you ever find yourself with time to kill, I highly recommend these podcasts. Entertaining as well as educational. Edutainment for the masses.

I adore these mittens. And they are just as beautiful on the inside as they are on the outside.

(Yes, I realize I’m bragging, but I don’t care. It’s not my skill as much as much as designer and yarn dyer Julia Vesper’s skill we’re talking about here, anyway.)

They make me smile — I can’t wait to wear them once the weather gets cold.

Chevron Love Mittens, in the Vintage Appliance colorway.
Pattern and yarn kit available from Knitterly Things.

The best way to end a weekend? With a potluck. Good food, good friends — good times.

• Did some picking up
• Did some hawk shoo-ing
• Did some knitting
• Did some cooking
• About to do some DVD watching
• Hoping to do some reading
• Expecting to do some sleeping

The autumn rains have begun — stretches of days that are gray and rainy. Soon they’ll turn into gray and cold (sometimes snowy) days. We don’t get much crisp blue sky in the winter out here — and when it is crisp blue, it’s bitterly cold.

So when a bright ray of sunshine makes it into the house, we are grateful for it.

Yes. So, who wasn’t surprised earlier this week, when we here in the US first heard about the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force’s reversal on yearly mammograms and monthly self-exams?

Since then I have read one article (and many of the reader comments) and listened to part of one radio show on the topic, and here are my first thoughts.

Things I believe:
• This report did not have appropriate PR in place when it was released (especially because it reversed long-held recommendations).
• The usefulness of self-exams has been overplayed by the medical community.
• I believe in the ability of science to review information with an unemotional eye.
• I have not heard that breast cancer deaths are significantly higher in Europe and Canada; and I know that British guidelines are for less frequent mammograms, starting later.
• New, similar, recommendations have recently been made for prostate cancer, so it is not surprising that a fresh look resulted in such changes to mammogram guidelines.
• The idea of cancer terrifies most, if not all, of us, and our first instinct is to attack it with the most aggressive measures possible.
• We take the effects of accumulated radiation much too lightly in our society (and I think back to how much radiation I was dosed with last year, and I think: how naive my post was!).

I do not believe:
• …that this is a ploy to disenfranchise women during an economic downturn (this is when I stopped listening to the radio show, when they let a caller say this — these reports take a long time to put together, so for liberal and fair NPR to allow such fear-mongering was irresponsible).
• …that because currently doctors do not take the time to sit and discuss personalized risk factors with patients, we should just continue to dose millions of women with extraneous radiation (a reason for continuing yearly mammograms that Dr. Weiss used in the radio conversation).
• …that the reasoning behind stopping self exams has convinced me yet (sure, they may not make a big difference if you are going in for mammograms every year, but if we push those back to every two years, they may play a more useful role).

Sadly, the chair of the Task Force, Dr. Calonge, is not a great speaker (clearly a researcher with little bedside manner) and the statistician who supervised the data crunching, Dr. Miglioretti, sounded terrified to be speaking on air. And sadly, Dr. Weiss was much too invested in this personally to come across as anything but a fearmongering reactionary.

What most people seem to overlook is that these are recommendations, not dicta in a one-size-fits-all command. If a woman has family history of breast cancer, if she works in a high-risk field or has had high exposure to unhealthy levels of radiation, or if she has had questionable scans in the past, then of course she may choose to continue with yearly mammograms (remember the x-ray issue though — a lump may be the devil you see, but radiation is certainly a devil we don’t see).

I had my first mammogram last fall, and had just last week received a letter reminding me to schedule my yearly mammogram. But if you recall, they had me redo one side — five times. I felt lots of anxiety about the whole situation, and even after I was given the “all clear” it still made me feel like I had dodged a bullet.

Because I have no other risk factors, and because I am young, I have chosen to sit back and wait for the time being, see how all this falls out — but make a concerted effort to remember my self-exams.

What have you or the women in your life elected to do at this time?

I want to write something about the new mammography recommendations, but several experiences have distracted me to a point where residual frustration is affecting my ability to string my thoughts together.

• My favorite baristo gave me a REALLY STRONG latte. I didn’t ask for this special treatment, and I’m still dealing with the jitters, four hours later.
• Second day in a row that I received returned mail for “sender not at this address”. But in both cases, the sender DOES live at that address.
• I spent too much time at the post office trying to get the local one taken care of. I had to visit two different branches, and no one addressed the root problem of TWO completely separate pieces of mail getting returned on back-to-back days, implying a bigger problem than simply a “lazy” mail carrier.
• A woman in a minivan, backing into a parking space at post office #2, was too close to my car and scratched the side. When I shouted at her to stop, she leaned her head out and said, “Oh, did I hit your car?” Yes, you damn well hit my car!
• I was standing RIGHT IN the spot she was backing up into. If I hadn’t looked up (and she hadn’t been scratching my car), would she have even seen me, or would a tiny scratch have turned into a squished Imperatrix? (And why did I even think that getting right up to the back of her minivan would do any good — do I not have my self-preservation reactions cranked up to full power?)
• I am trying to corral internal rants about minivan drivers in general, people with handicapped tags on their windshield not knowing how to drive (and who don’t seem particularly handicapped to ME), and people who don’t take responsibility for their actions.

See you tomorrow.

A cover band.

A cover band, whose members are 30somethings and 40somethings, called “The Mothers and The Fathers” (get it?)

A cover band called “The Mothers and The Fathers”, who come out on stage in regular clothes, but as the set progresses, play more and more intense songs, and their outfits/hair change, song by song.

So that at the end of the set, they have transformed into a punk band from the 1980s.

GENIUS! (am I right?)