Love in the Age of Covid

To be perfectly frank I’ve been a piss poor prepper since we moved into this apartment.

I have never been the SHTF prepper to begin with. I’ve never been the stereotypical guns and liberty bunker down and bug out type. I don’t even own a bug out bag (we have plans, I don’t have the actual bags). It would even be a lie to say that I haven’t side eyed the SHIT out of the SHTF crowd.

And here we are in the fucking end of the world.

Ok. It’s not the end of the world. It’s just the reality spinning, close the grocery store at the top of the hill down outright (I should have gotten photos, everyone else was taking them) and mass frenzy end of the fucking world.

It’s the let myself swear on my own damn blog like the terrified and yet fully trained prepper that I am.

I know that one does not tell the world that one preps, but I also live in a working class sector of a city; shit hits the fan that heavily and it won’t matter if people know or not. I’ll get hit regardless. I came across a man yesterday that was already threatening to shoot anyone who comes for his toilet paper.

I’m not expecting a -literal- war for toilet paper and I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone who reads (or used to read, when it was actually active) this blog that I have no qualms with shifting to higher levels of personal cloth than we already use.

Yesterday or Friday I would have said that the whole thing was overblown but that was before I went shopping for groceries and saw what that store was like. And before Starbucks was taking the chairs away as I was sitting there. And before the store at the top of the hill was closed outright. The thing is, we are most definitely the ones throwing much more shit on that fan (you do know that’s what the acronym means right?) than truly necessary but that doesn’t mean there is in fact no shit. An artificially created shitshow is still a shitshow we all have to wrangle.

We are a trucking household and therefore I am in the gossip chain for things other people aren’t. There are literally thousands of loads out for bids right now on necessities and groceries. The stuff is there. It has to get here (and wherever you are). I can’t guarantee that we’re not heading into rationing because this shit is going to linger like a bad smell.

My academic background is in conflict sociology and my religious emphasis is in shadow work. I would love to tell you that I am surprised or saddened even by any of this but that would be a bald faced lie, if anything, we’re lucky it’s been this long since we faced down mass illness and rationing (admittedly I never really fully expected them to come in tandem).

I cannot leave you in good faith with just another round of the same fear noise that everyone is dealing with right now.

Go outside, with a watch or your phone and set a 10 minute timer. And just look at the world. Because the wind is still blowing and the plants are still growing, and the birds still remember how to sing.

It’s the Great Puffer Fish, Michael Myers

Life and Homesteading

My great homesteading successes so far have been closing the storm windows and practicing with a pour over coffee maker.

The thing is life has been interesting since my last update.

There was a train crash involved. An actual literal train crash that included reversing for two hours into Rochester and school buses into Syracuse to finish the trip.

So while there hasn’t been a lot of homesteading work, there’s been plenty of energy everywhere else.

Halloween

I’m putting this on its own tab…

This is the lead in holiday to my favorite quarter of the year and I started out posting a literal ad on my Facebook asking for someone to do ANYTHING for Halloween. I was looking at a drought year.

Then we got to today where I’m so overloaded with the holiday that I’m ready for a Christmas party.

Somehow our work decorating contest turned into a full on haunted house. Multiple rooms, jump scares, coherent story line, the whole set up. I suppose I can cross haunted house experience off my bucket list.

And somehow I set this whole thing up (I mean that literally I generated most of the theme) to center on zombies and zombie making. Our team mascot is now Puffy the Puffer Fish.

The kicker is that I hate zombies.

Horror

The rest of Halloween rolls into horror. So much horror…Including Halloween.

Listen my feelings on slasher flicks hasn’t changed much in my review hiatus but I. Love. This. Movie. It’s a hell of a ride. See the first film, maybe the second, but definitely this one. I should sit down and completely review it. My major take away is that it feels more like a Western than a horror film but that’s actually a strength of the film. More on that later.

In other heavily hyped horror that I need to review: Haunting of Hill House. One line review? This is grief fiction pretending to be horror because it uses horror tropes. It’s heavy handed and takes itself too seriously and there is true horror that does this better. I suppose if you need a bridge into horror or really love symbolic horror it would work for you but it honestly failed on all major fronts for me.

I guess I’ll end with one last hyped horror, the new Sabrina. It was enjoyable. It’s a little Mary Sue and it does that remind you it’s horror via no bright colors thing but it was an easy watch.

Knitting

At some point I need a page update but I’ll get there.

Mitten season is here in a big, big way. It’s going to be a lot of mittens for the next few months.

Samhain Sale, Rieshaw Knits

It flows better than Halloween Sale.

All orange and black commissions, and size or fiber, placed before November 1st will be an automatic 25% off.

Place an order via Rieshaw Knits

Trade and cash free maker; PayPal accepted

Update, End of September

In fairness I did say posting would be spotty.

The weather people haven’t quite come out and said the S word yet but this feels a lot like the year we got hit with Knife so this might be an early snow year. The first half of the month was brutally hot. The last week or so has been much more traditionally fall though, so the lake may stay calm.

I have to keep reminding myself that 40s and 50s heading into October at night is where we really are supposed to be, this isn’t the fluke, the past few years have been the fluke.

Life/Work and Other Normal Stuff

I have fallen completely off my budget and I’m feeling it. I have a new mantra (self control is empathy for the future self) and it actually seems to be helping this time-along with mitten season and Swagbu.cks (does WordPress still hate that word? Don’t worry I’m not dropping a referral link).

I’ve done things like refuse to carry no more money than my bus fare at least a few days a week and try to find work arounds for my comfort products. I do actually own an entry level espresso maker with a steam rod. It’s no coffee bar. It gets the job done.

My job transfer hit in late May and I did most of my training through the slow months. I was told on Friday that we go into heavy overtime starting Monday, and most people are talking Christmas money.

Me? I’m talking about throwing money into Rieshaw and buying cranberry beans.

Horror

I sat down today and watched The Ritual again.

This is a movie that I should enjoy. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be a fan of this film.

I’ve never been able to successfully get through this movie. Today was no different. It never holds my interest.

Knitting

I haven’t put my link on the side bar yet so this is the Rieshaw Knits Page on Facebook. I’m not going to push that link every entry but I also can’t promise it’ll go up on the side bar quickly.

There is an interesting project in the works over there and if you’re a fan of those subscription boxes you should follow the page through October for more information.

It was interesting going back into production knitting after well over a decade. I’m not interested in going back into full production knitting as opposed to direct commissions but it is a structure I have experience with and enjoy.

That was the only project I worked this week. Tomorrow I’ll do the finishing work and start something new. I want to do Christmas work but I also have stale/relatively old commissions I need to work. It’s a balancing act.

The Return

A lot of time has passed, hasn’t it?

Honestly I was thinking I was pretty much done with blogging. But I’ve gotten more than one email asking when I was coming back, if I was coming back.

There’s been a lot of changes since the last time I wrote. I actually look back on the period of my life when I last wrote with a certain level of nostalgia.

It was so stable.

There’s a lot to go through. I mean, I’m a trucker wife running a homestead by myself st this point. I’ll get to that eventually.

And that name on that knitting photo? I did actually start a micro knitting business.

(You can follow that page at Rieshaw Knits)

I even got a new job myself!

I’m thinking at least in the short term this blog will be knitting heavy. Expect a post a week, if that, at least I get my blogging senses back.

Powdered Coffee Creamer

It’s been one of those years where I look up and it’s early May. It’s not inherently a problem. However it is reminding me of that folk statement about time moving faster as you age.

I’m 32. I don’t want to think I’m at that point where I’m losing months.

I’ve been fighting this monster and am too stubborn to give up.

Dyngus Day has come and gone.

It’s iced coffee season again and I keep throwing money away on liquid creamer I forget to put back in the fridge. Powdered doesn’t need to be cold.

This is basically flavored powdered milk. I do use S.wagbucks to food prep via Amazon and order full fat powder. I don’t know where I grabbed this from, I did drop the added fat.

Powdered Creamer

1 cup dry milk

Spices- favored, I used pumpkin spice and turmeric

2 or 3 packets stevia
I put everything  [a tablespoon or so or spice and maybe half a teaspoon of turmeric] in a jar and shake hard. I reshape before use. I don’t miss the mouth feel of the extra fat, but I also use the full fat powder.

Paramilitary S******** Knitter Army- A Conspiracy Theory

If you go to Google and type in ‘knitters are’ and let it autofill there are probably some things that would come to mind, based on stereotype.

Old, boring, naive, cute, etc.

Something to that effect.

But if you go and type in ‘knitters are’ and let it autofill now, you get something a little bit weird.

A couple of things leading into this post: this conspiracy theory (referred to as CT from here on out) is new. It’s about 5 days old as far as I can tell. It heavily involves fiber culture, so if you’re the type to be into CT only you may have missed a lot of the back story so I’m going to be including part of that background for clarity’s sake, not as a political statement. And that leads into the third point, this is a heavily political CT so there’s really no escaping at least an overview of the politics and is not necessarily an endorsement by the blogger.

The basic theory goes something like this: there is effectively what could be referred to as a paramilitary syle socialist leaning knitting (and crocheting) army made up of primarily liberal leaning women spurring on a great deal of the protest movements including the women’s marches, especially the march in Washington DC, surrounding the current political administration.

The CT seems to center around an actually heavily gender biased assumption about the nature of crafting: it’s about those pink hats that are exploding everywhere. Pull up a photo of the already mentioned march and you’ll see a sea of pink hats.

I found the theory via this tweet thread:

 

The rest of the thread, needed for context, is here.

Basically through the discussion this original poster (op) doesn’t understand a few pivotal things about the nature of crafting-that crafters use social media, that women can actually get together to craft when they care to, that knitting doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, and that pink yarn is a pretty common thing in the world. [No one tell this kid about truck days at the grocery store or how stuff is shipped en masse around the world either.]

The thing is, if you dig through the thread it’s heavily implied that this tweet isn’t an isolated thing. There was actually some sort of weird thought process surrounding how the hats showed up and why, and there was apparently some sort of theory around that all these women knew to show up with the hats all at once with no prior knowledge. It’s…also sort of implied that we can’t, like as women or knitters or both we just don’t have these thought patterns. It’s very odd.

Some of this I can get. If you were on the fiber culture related parts of Instagram or Facebook the hats were impossible to avoid. They were everywhere. I won’t use the word bullied, but there was definitely this sort of social pressure to make hats (I actually didn’t make any, for reasons that aren’t political in nature). But it does need a certain level of exposure to this subculture-I mean, I don’t follow NASCAR media and therefore have no idea what’s going on over there. It’s understandable.

This CT, or mini-CT sort of became a joke, especially some of the stuff quoted in the tweet thread, around my FB. I think as a group we sort of figured it was an isolated oddity and it would die out.

Then came the Joy of Knitting Facebook fiasco. A yarn shop came out and said that the owner would rather have feminists not purchase at her store because they’re vile, nasty people (that’s a paraphrase but not by much). I won’t link to that page but the statement and the surrounding firestorm of attention has gone national so googling it will bring you up to date. In other words, the US suddenly was introduced to what used to be called radical crafting.

So now we’re coming up on the Google thing: the search recommendations are based on part on how many people have searched for those terms. In other words, people honestly think we’re ruining the country. People honestly seem to think that we’re some sort of major political leftist leaning network (trust me, that’s deeply untrue). Just in the name of science, I actually let Google take me to the suggested results for that tag, and they’re weirdly all over the place. One of the results is about the Koch brothers so I think that’s just similar letters, and there’s a couple of things on the everlasting fight between crocheters and knitters (who’s more rude, who’s more snobby, etc). Oddly, there’s nothing in there about us ruining anything, really. Which makes me think that people are Googling and Google’s not finding anything. However…and this is important because CT doesn’t necessarily take care of tying up loose ends in terms of factuality (don’t look at me, they don’t) it’s hard to tell how long that this has been the ‘normal’ response from Google. It could have been like that forever and we’re just looking for stuff like this now because of our sudden paramilitary status.

This is easily the strangest thing to come out of an already bizarre month.