Tag Archives: socks

by

Recovery Fibbing Friday

Pensitivity101’s short edition, just questions to lie your socks off to.

  1. What is an orderly? – No-one in my clan. Google Chaos, and the top result is our family portrait.
  2. What is an auxiliary? – Just like, in the UK, they say ‘arse,’ instead of ASS, In North America, ‘auxiliary’ is a euphemism for ‘axillary,’ which means ‘armpit’, as in Donald Trump’s renewed attempt to become the President of the United States has made Mar-A-Lago the political armpit of America.
  3. What is a clip? – It is both the haircut, and the $58 that Haircuts-R-Us charges mostly-bald guys.
  4. What does ECG mean? – It means that you’ve reached that point in life where you’ll have to learn a bunch of medical initialisms – EKG, CBC, EEG, MRI….WTF, DNR, and every name in your Little Black Book has DR. or MD after it.
  5. 5.  What is The Crash Team? – Three of the wife’s sisters.  They maintain their driving license, just in case hubby has a heart attack, but they learned to park by ear.  Back up till it bangs.  Turn left, right here.  Turn signals are for wimps.  I hear they’ve opened a training school for demolition derby drivers, and are the darlings of the local body shops.6. What is a candy striper? – The cake decorator who puts the special script on the icing.

    7.  What is an IV? – Four PM on a sundial.
    I’ve heard that the Government wants to ban Roman numerals….
    ….Not on my watch!

    8.  What is a call button? – A clickable screen icon for when you are playing online poker.

    9.  Why is everything white? – Because you’re having a near-death experience. Don’t worry!  Both Heaven and Hell have rejected you.  You’re about to get a cold reboot, (Thanx to a handy defibrillator) and things will soon be normal again.

    10. Why don’t they have biscuits on the tea trolley? – It must be a supply-chain problem, and nothing to do with the fact that I got a job in the kitchen.

by

’23 A To Z Challenge – K

KITCHENER

The Word – The Man – The City – The History – The Myth

First, the meaning.  The word, not necessarily the name, means just what it seems to mean.
Noun

  1. A person employed in, or in charge of, a kitchen.
  2. An elaborate kitchen stove.

The family of my city’s namesake must have done some significant social-climbing over several centuries, in Britain’s rigidly stratified society.  What began as a lowly cook or scullery maid, finally gave us minor nobility, Horatio Herbert Kitchener.

He was born a mere 3rd Baronet.  He followed his father into the Army, and soon showed more than average planning, tactics, and leadership ability.  After he won several battles, and invented concentration camps, in southern Africa, he was raised to First Earl of Kitchener.

He was a product of his time.  He had no charity for anything or anybody that wasn’t British.  He barely skated past a court martial for having 9 prisoners and a German missionary summarily shot.  On the other hand….

Mankind invented footwear to protect from rocks and thorns and poisonous snakes.  As ‘boots’ became firm and solid, so did abrasion and foot irritation.  At first, rags were wrapped around feet to help fill the footwear and prevent internal rubbing.  Eventually, knitters, almost entirely women, learned how to knit socks to cushion feet in boots, and keep them warm.

For most people, (men) the seam which closed the toe-end caused no serious problem, but for Infantrymen who had to quick-march 20 or 30 miles, carrying 50 pounds of ruck, it was soon found that those seams caused pain and bleeding.  Your army can’t fight, if it can’t move.

Lord Kitchener knew some knitters, and approached them with a request to develop a method of sealing the ends of socks – American, sox – which did not protrude or irritate.  One of them discovered a smooth method of grafting closure.  It was named the Kitchener Stitch.  That’s like having the Burger King Whopper named after you, because you ordered one.

‘Sand Hills’ became ‘Ebytown,’ and eventually the city founded by people of German ancestry, became Berlin.  In 1916, with much anti-German sentiment generated by the First World War, they voted to change the city name, to honor this war (?) hero who had died at sea.  A newly-settled little unincorporated village of about 300, on the British Columbia/Washington border, claims that they were first, taking the name in 1898.

The three little cities of Hespeler, Preston and Galt, to our south, were forcibly amalgamated into the city of Cambridge, by the Provincial Government in 1973.  Today’s Woke society, and Cancel Culture, are busy eliminating past sins.  If the statue of Queen Victoria is doused with red paint, and it is demanded that it be removed, and her park renamed, then the name of a racist colonialist bully-boy will soon be removed also.  I suspect that Cambridge, Kitchener, and the city of Waterloo will all be folded into the already-existing Region of Waterloo, which, like L.A. encompasses the entire County of Waterloo.  Whatever they call it, I plan to still be here blogging atcha.  😀

 

by

7 Of 9’s 4th Of 30 Challenge

Another Challenge

Star Trek

That title’s a vague, old, Star Trek, Voyager reference, and it’s still not the fourth, it’s merely number four, on a thirty-day list that I’m chaotically crashing through.

  1. What you wear to bed

This list creator is seriously disturbed.  You could be, too.  There is not enough vodka or qualified psychiatrists in the world, to erase the mental picture of me, rolling out of the old fart sack.  For a while, I dated only blind women.

When I first got married, I slept in the nude, because – you know – sex could break out.  My wife informed me that, when it came to sex, I was self-sufficient, so I took the problem in hand.  Sex did occur a couple of times, and soon we had a couple of kids in the house, one of them female.  I couldn’t go looking for my BVDs in the dark when one of them had a bad dream, or go wandering down the hall with my dangly bits….uh, dangling.

I took to going to bed in my undershorts, and continued for decades.  Never know when you’ll have to run outside to escape a fire.  The house is 72/73 F, summer and winter, although we have an electric mattress warmer to keep us cozy in the winter.

When my doctor confirmed the diagnosis of an enlarged prostate, she prescribed a medication that will shrink it, and keep it shrunk.  Without any explanation, she asked me if I wanted Cialis.  That’s like offering a dog a driver’s licence.  Erectile dysfunction didn’t seem to be the problem, so I said no.

After doing some research, I discovered that drugs like Viagra and Cialis were originally developed to increase blood flow.  When test subjects were asked if they experienced any side-effects, many of the men replied, ’Uh, yeah.  I don’t roll out of bed anymore.’ and a lucrative secondary market was discovered.

The maintenance dose of Cialis that I was offered is supposed to increase blood flow, to help the medication work, so I quickly said, yes.  As I neared 70, my normal low blood pressure and slow heart rate were no longer enough to keep my feet warm enough to sleep at night, even with the Cialis.  Perhaps at my next doctor’s appointment, I’ll ask for a higher dosage level.

SDC11122

The wife made me a hand-knit, custom-fit pair of socks, which I wear to bed over my regular socks, and sleep comfortably.  They, and my bikini briefs, are enough to allow me out on my back deck, when the new puppies start rowdying in the morning, ‘cause no-one lives behind me, to see what I wear to bed.  😉

by

’18 A To Z Challenge – G

 

Challenge '18Letter G

For the letter G, I want to take you from Sheep to Socks, through

GADGETS

In my Rapunzel post, I told of my daughter, who is a spinster – literally a woman who spins yarns.  While she also does it with cotton, bamboo, milkweed silk, dog fur, angora, llama and other, more exotic fibers, she most often spins wool.  There’s a lot more to it than just spinning, so I thought I’d show you some of the gadgets necessary to get from a naked ewe, to a well-clad me.

20180424_161147

Most sheared fleece the daughter obtains, has already been washed.  If not, she has to soak it clean to remove dust, dirt, and the natural lanolin.  The above picture is of two hand carders.  Like giant, curved brushes, handfuls of the raw wool are placed on one of them, and then ‘combed,’ to align all the fibers.  Hand-carding is a long, tedious operation.  She also has a hand-cranked drum-carder, but needs the moved-away grandson, to run it.  Usually she just purchases ‘roving,’ which is a commercially produced, loose, fluffy rope of fiber, already for spinning.

20180413_175939

This is a drop-spindle.  Hung vertically, and brushed against the leg to rotate it, the yarn grows ‘up’ until it’s wound onto the spindle to hold it, and the process is repeated.  This one is fairly small, for producing delicate yarns.  Depending on the size, these can produce anything from the finest yarn, up to ships’ ropes.

20180424_161406 - Copy

These are slightly larger drop-spindles for heavier yarns, one wound with thread the daughter has already produced.  These are all commercially made, but the daughter has several that she built herself from readily available household items.

20180109_162228 - Copy

This is the smaller one of the daughter’s spinning wheels.  Her larger, better one has two foot treadles, to prevent a sore, tired leg from pumping with just one foot.  Through gear-ratio, the large wheel rotates the small spindle quite quickly, and the thread/yarn flows off as fast as the spinner can keep up.

20180322_183706

This little storage bobbin hangs off the side of the spinning wheel.  As the loose yarn accumulates, it can be temporarily wound on here, until the batch is finished.

20180424_160902

This is called a Knitty-Knotty.  The finished yarn is wound on from the bobbin, up-down, back and forth, then slipped off as a skein.  A loose skein of yarn is not handy to knit from.  The yarn can tangle, or it can fall to the floor.

SDC11124

This gadget is known as a swift.  A skein can be held in the Vee of the center.  The shaft slides up and down to change its spread, and match the circumference of any skein.  You may notice that all these gadgets are made of wood.  Spinners and craftsmen developed and built their ancestors from wood, long before metal crafting became cheap and commonly possible, so there has been little reason to change what works in wood, into metal.  Steel/aluminum swifts are available, but they are not as inexpensive, tend to jam or tear yarn, and fall apart sooner.

SDC11126

At this point, the daughter’s yarn reels off the wife’s swift, and goes onto her winder, to produce a small, firm, easy to find and control ball, that will sit on her lap, or drop into a knitting bag.  This is about the only gadget which has successfully been fabricated from plastic and metal.  Like a little sewing machine, the wire arm shuttles back and forth, to produce that round, even ball.

SDC11122

The daughter knits a variety of things.  Her hand-spun yarns and knitted items can be viewed online at http://www.facebook.com/frogpondcollective .  In the past, the wife has also knitted a wide range of clothing items, but now concentrates on custom-fitted socks.  Non-elastic socks don’t ‘fit all.’  She makes them for the daughter, our son, the grandson and now his fiancée.  The above pair were lovingly crafted for me, when it became apparent that my aging body couldn’t pump enough blood to my feet at night to keep them warm enough so that I could sleep.

***

In last year’s A To Z Challenge – K I included information about Herbert, Lord Kitchener, for whom this city is now named.  While not a very nice man, he did accomplish one nice thing.  Hand-knit socks, the only kind available back then, were basically tubes.  The toes were sewn closed, leaving a protruding, rough ridge on the inside.

Kitchener found that, after marching his men for hundreds of miles, their toes were raw and bloody, and the men would refuse to march further, or be unable to manoeuvre when needed.  He went to some women who knitted socks, explained the problem, and asked if there was a solution.  At least one of them said that there was, and explained it to him (or his aide.)

Without being able to knit a stitch himself, he is given credit for “The Kitchener Stitch,” which is not really a stitch, but rather, a type of grafting, or weaving, which closes the ends of socks smoothly.  Of course, the wife knows all about it, and uses it on every pair she knits.

Th-th-that’s all folks – for this time.  I hope to see your electronic footprints back here soon.  They could even be in a special pair of socks if you play your cards right.  😀