Another cold, but not freezing, grey, and rainy day out there today. March was a cloudy wet month, and April has begun in the same way.
My pap smear yesterday was easier than the time I spent dreading it, thank goodness. It is behind me now.
Attila and I do not feel inspired to outdoor activity today, the weather just isn’t nice enough. Soon that will change, very soon, as April warms towards May’s blooms.
I am about to begin making a series of colour matched washcloths. I have completed three using the single crochet stitch, and now I will create one each with the half double crochet, the double crochet, and the triple crochet stitch. While I am doing this I am going to be learning to assess with more accuracy, the end of one row and the beginning of the next, and the front and back of a stitch so that I can insert the hood under the correct part of the stitch as I go along.
One of the things already learned concerns closing a crochet circle, and preventing the chain from twisting. I discovered that I cannot prevent twisting of the chain visually, the correct edge of the last stitch before moving to the next row is indiscernible. Inexpensive yarn markers, purchased for $1, bobby pins, were used to mark the bottom of the foundation chain, and in particular the last chain was carefully marked. This worked well, except that the bobby pins were long and cumbersome, making them difficult to work around. I am looking forward to using my new yarn markers!
We decided that now that is April, and it is cold and raining out here, that we would celebrate our Saturday off with another great homemade pizza with a movie. I found some pizza sauce with half the amount of sodium found in the regular sauce at the store, which means twice as much for me! Flavour, that is what one craves a low sodium, low sugar, low cholesterol diet.
Last night we watched a most depressing film, Tom and Viv. Not knowing anything about the film, we were a good way into it before it was revealed that Tom was T. S. Eliot the poet. Quite frankly I could not get a feel for him, or his wife Viv from the film, the characters, as written in script, were flat. The acting was good, the writing left a lot to be desired. Regardless of that, Viv Eliot’s story is disturbing, and not a happy one. I entertain doubts about the integrity and human decency of T. S. Eliot.
“When Vivienne’s brother Maurice Haigh-Wood, who had colluded in her committal, visited her, he burst into tears. “It was only when I saw Vivie in the asylum for the last time I realised I had done something very wrong,” he told Michael Hastings, author of Tom and Viv, in 1980. “She was as sane as I was. What Tom and I did was wrong. I did everything Tom told me to.”
Source: Not crazy after all these years
October 26, 2001
This was a film we will not watch again. Someday I will read Painted Shadow.
“Carole Seymour-Jones was awarded the Paul Mellon visiting fellowship by the University of Texas at Austin in 1999-2000 to research Vivienne Eliot’s life at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. She is author of Painted Shadow, published this week [October 16, 2001] by Constable & Robinson, £20.00.”
It strikes me, in watching films meant to depict the lives of people who are no longer alive to provide input, that the best that can be hoped for is a skeleton of factual information, dressed in grand style for the theatre, and not necessarily representing the reality lived.
Worldly Distractions
Weather
1°C
Date: 8:00 AM EDT Saturday 1 April 2017
Condition: Mostly Cloudy
Pressure: 101.4 kPa
Tendency: Rising
Temperature: 0.8°C
Dew point: 0.1°C
Humidity: 95%
Wind: N 16 km/h
Visibility: 19 km
Quote
“If grass can grow through cement, love can find you at every time in your life.”
Cher
1946-
I notice a lot of people use small safety pins for markers in crochet. I got a little box with all sorts of oddments and in it were quite a few different colored stitch markers of two types, which I love. I use them all the time.
Example of my favorite ones: https://flic.kr/p/SN4DJw
We saw that movie a couple of years ago I think it was, and it was disturbing, to put it mildly. We also did not enjoy it that much.
We are coming to the end of a series that I’ve had here for ages, maybe a year or two now, called “The Tudors” – oh my! It’s been so good… but very realistic and not for the faint of heart (or is is “feint of heart”?) Two more episodes to go but we are saving them for tomorrow. Four seasons and if you ever want to know all about Henry VIII, this is the show for you.
here is the little kit with goodies in it:
https://flic.kr/p/Qdqik1
last one — I wanted to mark where the corners were in this new pattern I started as I’d never done it before so I put the little colored plastic “safety pin” markers at each corner and kept moving them up each row… because the corner was slightly different from the pattern along the row.
https://flic.kr/p/SXmcHa
Sorry your movie was depressing. Sadly, I think quite a few women were placed in asylums in years past, with only a few of them having real reason to be there.
We have bright sunshine, today. Hope you do too and that it’ll help lighten your mood. *hug*
Bex! Thanks for all the pictures! Your favourite markers are the one’s I bought, I love them too, so easy to use and they are small enough that I can crochet right over them.
I did want to ask you about the yarn ball winder, when and how you use it. I have been looking at them, but haven’t decided if I would need one.
The movie was indeed disturbing, and I don’t think it gave a clear or fair picture of the situation. I read a bit about T. S. Eliot and his wife Vivienne after seeing the film, and I can see some real class snobbishness with the Bloomsbury group, who claimed Eliot as one of their own, but not her. I was also disapppointed in the spiteful things that Virginia Woolf said about Vivienne, even though they might have been true, but there is no way to know since anyone who had a voice to describe the situation was biased in favour of Tom and the Bloomsbury group. So who really knows. Virginia was not a kind person, that much is evident. Tragic though for Vivienne.
Teri, the movie was depressing! But at least it came to an end, we could eject it from the machine and go back to our own lovely life. Vivienne Eliot had no such luxury, and Tom seems to have been a dark soul who carried his cloud like a halo. Not a group of people I would have enjoyed being around.
The sun is shining bright here today as well! I think we will begin our spring yard cleanup today!
Viv Elliot would not be the first wife of a novelist to undergo mental problems—remember Zelda? She was F.Scott Fitzgerald’s unfortunate and quite mad wife, who actually gained a great deal of fame throughout her life. And I’m sure there are more…not easy living with an artist who is obsessed!
Yes Diane! I do remember Zelda, I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels when in my 20s and also a few biographical pieces about Zelda. I agree, it couldn’t be easy trying to maintain a personal relationship with an artist who is obsessed, particularly a well-known artist. Wealth and noteriety are a heady mixture for an artist, as they already lives in a world of their own creativity.
This is an interesting article about the point you are making: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/heather-laine-talley/zelda-wasnt-crazy_b_3268211.html
And wouldn’t you think that Woolf, who was institutionalized herself at least once, would have been more empathetic to anyone suffering from mental illness?
-Kate
Kate, I would have thought so, but such was not the case. When I was young and naive I thought there was a bond of understanding between people who had suffered tragedies and challenges, that encountering difficulties in life made people more sympathetic to others. Although that does happen, it is not the usual case, at least in the people I have come to know during my life time. That realization was another disappointment for me, in the nature of the “outside world”.
Maggie, I have to disagree with you – with a very strong reason. When I was in university I was in the Honors group, with a CUM of 3.9/4.0. My study was in Psychology. In order to be awarded my degree Magna Cum Laude, I had to do a research paper and defend it to 3 professors. I chose the subject of “The Effect of Experiencing a Loved One’s Death on the Perception of Passive Euthanasia.”
I gave questionnaires to several hundred people, some university members and some not. What I found was that those who had experienced the death of a loved one, no matter how quick or slow, were almost universally more likely to accept hastening the death of someone who was dying, even disregarding suffering or lack of suffering.
Having experienced the death of a loved one had almost universally moved respondents toward empathy, with their not wanting to prolong uncertainty or suffering for another person.
Death is a unique event, it is something that each and every one of us is going to experience, with no exceptions. Once you have lost someone, usually your own mortality comes into focus. For instance, I was philosophical and indifferent about death until my Granny died, then I wasn’t. Empathy in relation to an experience we will have is understandable, and for me, would not represent the usual case, but a very valid one, as reality is nuanced.
My observations are anecdotal, general, and are not in conflict with your research findings. An example of what I am referring to is a common reaction to the peanut butter and anaphylaxis issue in schools. Because children will literally die if exposed to peanut butter, schools have banned the lethal to some substance in schools. There is considerable lack of empathy shown by many, many other parents, whose children are not in a life threatening situation. This is evident in public forums, and I have witnessed it myself first hand. There are many parents who feel the “right” to use peanut butter in their children’s lunches is far more important than the “right” of the afflicted children to attend school in safety. Since anaphylaxis has not touched the lives of the parents whose children are allergy free, they have no empathy at all in regards to keeping peanut butter out of the schools. The parents of children without allergies may have faced other frightening situations with their children, and they would probably extend empathy towards others in those situations, but they do not extrapolate their experiences towards empathy in situations that are unlikely to affect them in any significant way.
All this to say I am heartened by your research findings, and sad that my observations are not alleviated by a universal human trait of empathy towards others.
We can agree to disagree 🙂
My stepdaughter’s school banned peanut butter, as one of her friends came up with a lethal allergy to it. Then we added in a teacher who was lethally allergic to oranges. It’s true, some parents would not (I use “would not” on purpose) be understanding about their child not being able to bring peanut butter or oranges to school. They were angry, in the most selfish terms, over something so small. Fortunately, they were in the minority.
I will admit, though, that even I found the limitations a bit of an irritant at times – but someone’s potential death is much more important than my having to make sure my child’s hands and mouth are cleaned of all traces of peanut butter and orange before she leaves home. And I’m sure other parents actually know that too. It’s just their selfish impulses at being inconvenienced that make the minority vocal.