March Madness: CCCC, chess, and crochet

I’m not into basketball (I’m amused by Facebook’s recent “Bracket of Evil” application), but this has been a crazy month. I was pounded by papers, prepared my talk for the 4C’s conference, started setting up jobs for the summer, and tried to make sure that my family was fed! No wonder I'm recovering from a cold right now. All this, and crappy weather at the beginning and end of the month. Rain, rain, and more rain – with a brief break of sunny weather. Who knew 50 degrees could be so welcome?

Let’s start with the 4C’s, which was held in Louisville, KY. A car would have been nice to explore the surrounding countryside, with the bourbon plants and horse farms. Instead, I did my best to explore the city, usually by walking. I was surprised how easily I could cross the downtown streets without looking first, which gives you an idea of how populated the city is. I ate some good food (chipotle grilled cheese sandwich with roasted tomato soup at Toast; fish and chips at the Irish pub, Ri Ra – not on St. Patrick’s Day) and caught “The Cherry Sisters Revisited” at the Humana festival (apparently the Kentucky Derby of theatre). I have to admit, however, that I missed my creature comforts: hot tea, my travel mug, and fruit! After having a Hot Brown (open-faced turkey sandwich with cheese and bacon) at Bistro 301, I asked the bartender if there was a grocery where I could buy some fresh fruit. There was none (people don't live downtown!), so instead he gave me a small plate of grapes and chopped melons - and didn't charge me.

Souvenirs included an Urban Bourbon Trail T-shirt for Igor. All I had to do was visit at least 4 bourbon bars – and I didn’t even have to drink at all of them! I did try my first bourbon, however, at the Jockey Silks Bourbon Bar. The old bartender was really helpful. When I told her I liked scotch, she asked me what type, then brought out a few bourbon bottles for me to sniff. I had the bourbon whose smell I liked the best (Van Winkle 12 year). I also bought much of my Easter candy at Muth’s, the oldest candy store in Louisville. Muth’s Modjeskas (caramel-coated marshmallows) alone made the trip worthwhile: the marshmallow is not sweet, but the buttery caramel really knocks my socks off.

I have mixed feelings about the conference itself. My panel was very successful: we got a good crowd of nearly 30 people, and people thought we did a fantastic job. The reason, however, seemed to be because we didn’t literally read papers – which I honestly think would be odd for a topic called Oral Presentations. Although it is normal for people to read their papers at humanities conference, people at this conference have been complaining about the practice. But the culture still exists. So, with our well-made presentations (using PowerPoint or Spaces), we hit the ball out of the park, but the wall is admittedly rather low. Still, I heard a student might be writing up a review of our panel for an online journal, which is pretty cool.

I enjoyed some of the panels I attended, but in general, I was wondering whether this conference is suitable for me. It was hard to differentiate between the panels, whose titles all had some version of the “The Remix: Revisit, Rethink, Revise, Renew" theme (our panel used the word “Re-envisioned”), and panels that purported to be about technical and scientific writing really weren’t, at least in the way I define those terms. Plus, there was the issue of people reading their papers, but at least I got a lot of knitting done. In the future, I may concentrate on the plenary sessions and panels where the panelists all come from the same institution.

Back at home, I received a number of emails from Nikita’s teacher about altercations that involved Nikita, which lead to a lot of phone calls with parents. Ivan chipped his front tooth by falling down the stairs head-over-heels, and Nikita may have his first loose tooth. And chess seems to have replaced opera as Igor’s latest obsession: Igor bought a computerized chess board so that Nikita could practice playing when Igor isn’t at home, but instead, Igor spends most of his spare time playing against the computer.

That doesn’t mean we no longer listen to music. Indeed, Igor and I took Nikita to his first opera, “The Barber of Seville”. It was a kid-friendly version, with the opera shortened to 1 hour and the lyrics sung in English. Nikita enjoyed the show, but was still fidgety in the seats. It’s a good thing, then, that we didn’t get tickets to see Anna Netrebko at the Met! Ivan also really enjoys opera, and yesterday, watched a fair amount of “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Don Giovanni”, which he calls “Cherubino” and “Don Jue-an”, respectively. One of these days, I’m going to record Nikita and Ivan “singing” together, but they’ll have to stop re-enacting the fight scene at the beginning of “Don Giovanni” first.

As for me, I discovered that I can knit while supervising Nikita’s lessons, but I still haven’t finished Nikita’s Transformer hat. I actually had to rip back all that I knitted during the conference because the hat was still too small – on size 5 needles with sport-weight yarn!

So, I’m trying to learn crochet instead. Not because of Sweden’s Olympic hat (although it is pretty cool), but because of the little toys called amigurumi. I think these toys look better crocheted than knit. Amigurumi are also much smaller than Nikita’s hat, and would definitely help rid my stash of random small bits of yarn. So, I’ve picked up a number of amigurumi books from the library, and my favorite designer is Ana Paula Rimoli. I promised Nikita, however, to make the Grim Reaper from Creepy Cute Crochet. Funny story about this: I think it’s the scythe that attracted Nikita to the Reaper, and he didn’t know who he is. When I told him that the Grim Reaper is the person who picks you up when you die, he replied, “Oh, so he’s a good person!”

Crocheting is supposedly easier than knitting because it only involves a single hook (instead of two needles), but it doesn’t seem so to me. The structure of knitting is intuitive: you have loops upon loops. The structure of crochet is not. Consider the single crochet stitch as an example. How was it invented? Who sat down and thought you could make fabric by inserting a hook through a hole, making a loop to add to the loop already on the hook, and then taking yarn through both hoops? My old knitting standby, Maggie Righetti, only confused me about crochet. YouTube videos helped, but Debbie Stoller’s book seems to have the clearest explanations. Too bad I’m not crazy about most of the patterns in the book, but really, if I keep doing crochet, it will probably be to make things for which crochet seems more suitable than knitting: amigurumi, lace, and cute handbags.