Gold medal memories

The first Olympics I clearly recall watching are those from 1984. I imagine I watched some of the Lake Placid Winter Olympics in 1980--somewhere I have some commemorative stickers that came in boxes of Pop-Tarts--but I don't remember taking them in. All I recall of the '80 Summer Games in Moscow is the U.S. boycott. Were they even covered on television here?

The earliest memories I have of Olympics viewing is laying on the floor of a hotel room near Toledo on President's Day weekend and watching ABC's coverage from Sarajevo for the Winter Games. I want to say it was a hockey game, but memories can be tricky. I feel fairly certain, though, that I raptly watched as the TV glowed in a darkened room and unfamiliar sports appeared before me. The '84 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles were promoted like crazy, perhaps best remembered via the McDonald's scratch-off cards that awarded free food if Americans medaled.

As an aspiring sports journalist I wrote a piece for the local weekly newspaper about the 1988 Calgary Winter Games with the hope that it would start me on the road to being a published writer outside of the school paper. (It didn't, probably for a very good reason.)

I've continued to watch the Olympics as obsessively as my schedule permits. Why? Obviously seeing the best athletes competing is a big attraction, but I also like the international flavor and the way that it takes hold of the world's imagination (or so I'd like to think) for the event's duration. In the summer of 2004 it was cool to hang out for a bit in a public lot in downtown Toronto to watch the events being projected on a big screen. Caught up in the Games, I also visited Olympic Spirit Toronto, which opened shortly before I spent a few days in the city.

There's just one day left in the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. I'll be sad to see them end. I find it comforting to be able to come home and watch a curling match or spend the night viewing whatever the day's events are. Chances are I won't see most of these athletic competitions again until 2014 and probably won't miss them. (I'd really like more curling, though.) Nevertheless, for the last couple weeks almost nothing else has held my attention like the Olympics. Hurry back soon.

Passing the time

While I tread water on the blog, here's a mention of yet another Olympic athlete who knits. Also, indie rocker Marnie Stern is also a knitter. Stern's music is probably an acquired taste, especially for what I perceive the readership is accustomed to, but the song I've embedded below made my 2008 Archies list. (It's the best on an album that I'll admit can be a challenge.) Enjoy, hopefully.

Another gold medal knitter

Joining the USA's Hannah Kearney as gold medal winning knitters at the Vancouver Olympics is German biathlete Magdalena Neuner. She also keeps a knitting blog on her website, although clearly she's been a little busy and hasn't repaired the MySQL errors on the knitblog's main page. If ever this site has such problems, please know that it must mean I'm preoccupied with claiming my own Olympic gold.

(Site update: comment moderation returns for an undetermined period of time since massive comment spamming has cropped up again.)

Olympic knitting

I interrupt my extensive Winter Olympics viewing to pass along that United States moguls gold medalist Hannah Kearney is a knitter. Apparently she's even been working on a hat when not preoccupied with training or competing in Vancouver.

Participation ribbon

The Olympics are off and running, and I'm going to try to finish a project during them. A few weeks ago I started a hat at the lone knit night I've been able to attend so far this year, but I dropped some stitches off the dpns and wasn't comfortable using four needles, so the WIP was ripped out.

I attempted to restart it a couple times prior to the Winter Games, but one malady or another--twisting the project, casting on one stitch too few, leaving an excessively long tail--led to me frogging it over and over. So it's going in Ravelympics even though it should have had much more done on it already than essentially starting from scratch again.

I'd like to be more fully engaged with Ravelympics than I will be. I won't be challenging myself. I won't be doing very much. If I can just get one hat done--something I have been able to whip out within 24 hours of starting--I'll be satisfied. Right now that's an achievement in itself.

Olympic knitting

I'm not sure I completely understand this story, but this story about one of Canada's First Nation tribes getting the right to knit products with the Olympic logo caught my eye.

It reads to me that they will be knitting the garments by hand, which sounds like an extraordinary amount of work if they're to end up with much product. Anybody out there able to shed some light on this?

President's Day

I can't remember the last time I got President's Day off. It is not treated as a holiday at work because Martin Luther King Jr. Day grabs that lone honor for winter quarter. I don't believe we got it off when I was a college student either, so unless my employer in my temp days after college (and before my fulltime job) granted it off, the holiday has gone unobserved in my routine since high school.

Believe it or not, President's Day really was a holiday I looked forward to as a kid. We didn't go on vacations very often, but one trip that we usually made was to Toledo every mid-February. I know, Toledo in the winter (or Toledo at any time) doesn't sound terribly exciting, but it was the chance to get out of the house and spend a couple nights in a hotel.

The purpose of the trip was for my dad to get the business and family's taxes done by his accountant in northwest Ohio. Come to think of it, I'm not sure why there wasn't someone in the Dayton area who could do them. Nevertheless, it made for a fun weekend trip.

The big attraction for us kids was the hotel. I can't remember its name, but I can picture it as it's where we stayed pretty much every time. The building on I-75 south of the city didn't stand out in any way on the inside or outside. It was just the thrill of being in a hotel. Plus, it had a large indoor pool. I guess we were easy to please.

If we weren't swimming , we were probably watching TV. I recall being sprawled on the floor watching an Olympic hockey game from Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. (No, I didn't sleep on the floor.) Hotels also meant HBO, which meant being lured by the siren call of the magnificent theme music and open introducing the next movie. If the timing was right, we could seeFraggle Rock and The Beastmaster. Or maybe it was Dragonslayer...or both. I never saw it, but Super Fuzz always seemed to be on in those days.

President's Day was for going into downtown Toledo. In those days the city had a brand new shopping center called, I think, Lakeside. The first year it was open may have coincided with when we made these trips, but by the time we stopped going, I recall that it was nearly empty save for seniors getting their walking exercising.

It's funny the things that one remembers, but one other memory that sticks out in my mind was hearing a street corner preacher on a downtown corner near the accountant's office building. We didn't spend much time in the accountant's office. Usually we were just there while we waited for my dad to finish up the time he spent with them. I recall being intimidated by the guy yelling hellfire and brimstone in the big city, so you can imagine how shocking it was to go up high in this office and still hear him inside. That guy had a set of lungs on him.

Now President's Day is simply a day without mail delivery, but for those years when it meant a weekend family vacation of sorts, it was something greatly anticipated that I remember fondly.

Bag of tricks

Having been on the go in recent weeks, it's been nice to take it easy yesterday and today. My Sunday schedule so far: church, knit, nap, knit, exercise, blog. More knitting is to come, I'm sure.

Depending how I measure, I've finished around seven inches of the bag's body. Unless I do some major slacking, I'll be ready to knit a handle (or handles) tomorrow or Tuesday. Suggestions?

I continue to search my mind for why this color combination seems so familiar. Maybe it resembles an old lawn chair. For some reason I also think of tackle boxes. The bag's body reminds me of a planter holder, perhaps due to the ropey color and pattern. Is this some kind of Proustian madeleine? Do I need to develop an auteur theory for knitting?

Of course I've been soaking up Olympics coverage all day. I'm already sick of the McCain attack ad and the payday lending industry's deceptive spot trying to get enough petition signatures in an effort to overturn the state's recent legislation to rein in their usury. And what's with the creepy public service announcement (WMV file) the state is running repeatedly to warn us about pandemic flu? "It will happen again." Talk about killing the Olympic spirit.

In the bag

With some much appreciated help in the comments and the light over my head turning on, the Everlasting Bagstopper is coming along quite nicely. For awhile I was befuddled how to pick up stitches. I was trying to pick them up clockwise. I could only do one, and even that took quite a bit of maneuvering to pull it through the edge. Eventually I realized that I needed to go counterclockwise. That made my efforts significantly easier, although picking up stitches can still be a challenge.

Thanks to Karen--who I originally thought was this Karen--I had a set number of rounds of stockinette to knit. Of course, if I weren't blind or something, I would have seen that this information is, in fact, in the pattern. I guess I stopped reading the sentence after it talks about the marker for the start of the round.

The next ordeal was getting the stitches to move on the needles when I swapped out the US 5s for the US 10 1/2s. I pushed and pushed and pushed, practically to the point of piercing my hand, but couldn't get them to budge. And then a revelation! If I replace just the needle doing the knitting until the first round is done, then I can actually do something with the stitches. Sometimes it takes me awhile...

As I've knitted the body of the bag I've learned to do the yarn overs and k2togs with less tension. If I knit them as tightly as I ordinarily would, I'll go mad before I'm done with the project.

I have some time until I have to figure out how to put handles on this thing. For now I'll enjoy the knitting and not worry about it. The color combination seems like it's something for tennis or golf equipment in the 1970s. It has an odd pull on me, as though it reminds me of something from my past that I can't quite recall.

I can see myself making several of these bags. I could certainly use a couple to take care of my small grocery store purchases, and I imagine they could come in handy for just about anyone. We'll see how long it takes me to finish one, though.

I've been knitting the bag off and on all day--there's more done than what you see in the photo--while watching the Olympics. I have three HD channels providing coverage and stayed up until nearly 3 a.m. to see the first events. Having taken a couple of fencing classes in high school, it was fun to watch women's sabre, although the action is so fast that it's almost impossible to tell for myself who earned the touches.

Also, good for NBC Universal showing events and match-ups that ordinarily don't get the TV time: France vs. Angola in women's handball, singles badminton matches without US athletes. Sure, I'm interested in watching Michael Phelps and gymnastics, but I like getting a broad view of the Summer Games. There's more available than I could ever watch, but I like having the choice.

On the sidelines

Due to an oversight on my part, I did not qualify at the Ravelympic Trials and thus am not participating in Ravelympics. (In other words, I thought I could sign up today. Nope.) I'll have to pretend I'm playing alongside the big kids while I knit during these Games.

I've decided to go ahead and try my hand at the Everlasting Bagstopper, although I'm not sure what I'll do when it comes to making handles or knitting the stockinette portion on the base. (The pattern doesn't specify how much of that to knit, thus my confusion and potential stopping point.)

I'm doing the base, top border, and handles in Sugar'n Cream's dark pine and will do the body in jute. Hopefully I have enough yarn. I cleaned out Hobby Lobby's stash of the latter color, so anything else I get will likely have a different dye lot.

I've knit about two inches of the base while watching the Olympics' stunning opening ceremonies. I'm a fan of director Zhang Yimou's Hero and House of Flying Daggers--Curse of the Golden Flower looked great but left me a little cold--so I'm not surprised that he's been able to put together a visually dynamic program. Zhang knows how to do things on a big scale, and boy does this ceremony have that.