>I really love cinnamon.  It annoys the heck out of everyone because I could sprinkle it on everything, even foods that don’t go with cinnamon.  But who wants to eat food that doesn’t go with cinnamon, anyway? I am convinced that, of all the aromatic components in cinnamon, there’s one that is totally addictive. When I first read Frank Herbert’s Dune, I was sure that the novel’s fictitious spice had to be cinnamon-ish.  Cinnamon-y.  Cinnamon-like? Whatever.  I can see myself with blue-in-blue eyes.

Among the four types of cinnamon I’ve had the pleasure to have known, my favorite is China Cassia. The purists and most Europeans might prefer “true” cinnamon, the Ceylon type, but I find it pales in comparison, being wimpy to the point that the flavor disappears.  Gimme that cassia bark, with a bite like a cinnamon red hot.

There are times I’m tempted to dust the dog with cinnamon.  Just about anything would improve the scent of my dog, but I am loathe to waste all that spicy goodness on the little brat.

On the rare days when I am not crocheting or writing about crochet or researching in order to write about crochet, or traveling to places to talk about crochet… you get the picture… I can be found in the kitchen baking stuff.  Yup. Stuff with cinnamon in it.  Don’t you just love the way the aroma of sweet, spicy baked goods coming out of the oven permeates the entire neighborhood?  Almost as good as the smell of fresh baked bread.  OMG.  Cinnamon buns.

Along with millions of other bakers, I am a Christmas cookie freak. The holidays can’t begin until I pull the first fragrant batch from the oven. I used to obsess over elaborately shaped and decorated ones, or multiple layer confections with unusual flavors.  But I noticed that nobody ever ate the ones that took hours to create. It never failed that the sweets that flew off the tray fastest were the easiest to make: 1) chocolate chip cookies, 2) brownies, and 3) my personal favorite, Snickerdoodles, a Pennsylvania Dutch cookie that is crisp on the outside but chewy inside, rolled in (what else?) cinnamon sugar with a touch of nutmeg. So I have stowed away all my fancy cookie cutter shapes, gingerbread molds, sculpting tools and rolling pins and just keep it simple.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I still use my Christmas cookie cutters for the most awesome holiday treat that you can’t eat.  Cinnamon ornaments.  The dough is equal volumes of ground cinnamon and apple sauce.  I am not joking.  Say, two cups of cinnamon and two cups of apple sauce. You squish the mixture around until it balls up and holds shape.  Let it rest for a few minutes.  Some recipes call for the addition of a bit of white school glue (Elmers) but I never go there, in case my dog ever gets a hold of one. Roll out the dough no thinner than 1/4″, cut into shapes, poke a hole near the top with a drinking straw, transfer them carefully to a baking sheet.  The ornaments need to dry out completely, which will happen naturally if left on the counter for a couple of days.  But I prefer the baking method, where you stick the trays in a slow (200 degrees F) oven for a few hours.  WOWSERS! Talk about making the whole house smell festive.

Once they are hard and dry, you can smooth off the odd wonky bits with a little light sanding if you want.  Thread a ribbon through the holes you so thoughtfully provided.  Hang and enjoy.  I have one suspended from the rear-view mirror of my car. And a dozen on my Christmas tree.  The scent is driving me mad and I wish I could bite one just to satisfy the cinnamon craving.  Is it too late tonight to bake some Snickerdoodles?

>My crochet life chugs along nicely. I sweat a gang of design projects and patterns, agonize over new crochet proposals, tinker with yarns and tools, write a few lines here and there, terrorize a few editors just for fun. Any breaks from these activities are for the mundane chores of my life-outside-crochet. Like eating. Sleeping. Treating my hair to the most magical leave-in serum on the planet. Vacuuming dog fur. Eating. Laundry. Nothing exciting here.

Tonight, two extraordinary things happened. I am still reeling over the experiences and am not sure which was worse.

It began as what I planned to be a quiet but busy night at home finishing up a design. I thought I had enough sets of hooks and eyes for a jacket front closure. UH-OH. I tossed the place searching for the ones I’d squirreled away the last time I needed them. I found three sets. Shoot. This jacket must have five, and it has to ship in the morning. The nearest purveyor of such things, the place I am reasonably sure will have in stock what I so desperately require tonight, is a craft store eight miles away. For me, this is a road trip.

How I cherish autumn evenings. There’s a luscious quality to the air and the light at dusk that I simply can’t get enough of. So I am tooling along at well past 7 pm, headlights slicing into the dimness of the wooded, winding road I must travel to get to the Valhalla, the shining place where sewing notion dreams are made real.

O-M-G, I clipped a deer. I swear I was watching for wildlife. This season I’ve already seen so much roadkill that I could cry. By my ghoulish count I have mourned for dozens of possum, raccoons, skunks (“…stinkin’ to high heaven!”). But tonight I was focused on my own side of the road, not the side with oncoming traffic. The deer leaped across the road from the left and mercifully kept on leaping, for had she frozen and gone tharn in the glare of my headlights, she would have been a goner and my automobile a sad wreck.

She (for in that flash of brown hide, white belly and huge gleaming eyes, I noticed no antlers) was the size of a big dog and stunningly agile. I barely had time to glance into the rearview mirror to make sure no one was on my tail before I braked hard. YIKES! I heard a soft clunk as she bounded past and out of the headlight beam. A sickening sort of soft clunk. Maybe she kicked out with her hoof as she ran. Please tell me what I heard was the sound of hoof meets bumper. By the time I whipped my head around to follow her flight, she had disappeared into the tangle of trees.

I wanted to stop and see if she was OK. There were cars behind me, no shoulder in the road, and no option for me but to keep driving and try to stop worrying. It wasn’t until I pulled into a well-lit space of the parking lot at the craft store that I could breathe again and examine my car. In my mind I tried to reconstruct the incident. I could find no evidence that it had ever happened. I began to wonder, had it really happened?

How I love shopping at night when the stores are empty save for the other night-persons who also like to shop at night when the stores are empty. By the time I had thrown the hooks and eyes and some matching sewing thread into the hand-basket I wasn’t feeling the need to rush home. So I did a recreational fly-by in the yarn aisles.

Hey! A new hairpin loom was in stock, calling to me. It’s from Boye, features clip-on spacer bars, is adjustable up to 4 inches and includes an I-9 crochet hook. $5.99. WTF. I threw one into the basket. I will offer a review here eventually.

The checkout line was empty. The checkout person, a twenty-something girl with goth-black braids and only half-heartedly concealed tats and piercings, was friendly and chatty. Probably bored. So when she picked up the hairpin loom to scan it, she asked me if it was hard to do. I hemmed and waffled. Heck, I really did not want to get into a dissertation about hairpin at that hour. But I finally admitted that hairpin could be annoying if you have to make long strips.

During the bit of conversation that followed, she revealed that she had volunteered to demonstrate this tool for a Saturday store event in a couple of weeks. There were instructions on the back and inside of the packaging and she felt confident that she could master this stuff by then. I tried to explain how the task of making hairpin strips was only the very beginning, and that she would need to choose among the million thousand ways of joining strips in order to create fabric. I pointed out the crochet hook in the package. She shot me a surprised look. Crochet? She doesn’t know how to crochet.

I had to restrain myself to keep from climbing over the counter and grabbing her by the braids. What were you thinking, girl? Obviously, nobody at this store, at least not the manager who was coordinating and staffing this Saturday event, knows that hairpin is a crochet technique. My cashier thinks that maybe there is someone here who crochets, but she’s not sure. So she’s going to be the designated demonstrator.

I paid up and hurried out of the store. On another day, in another life, I might have stopped at customer service and asked to speak to the manager. How can you hope to show customers the delirious beauty of hairpin crochet if you don’t have a crocheter there, I would rail. How can you be so ignorant (oops, that’s too harsh, even for a rant… I mean uninformed), I would rant. You are not doing hairpin or crochet the service they are due, I would scream. In another reality, I might have volunteered to do the demonstration myself, just to ease the knots in my stomach.

So, which event strikes me as the most horrifying? The deer… or the hairpin. Deer or hairpin. Deer or hairpin.