>I know, I know. Rule Number 117: What happens in Portland, stays in Portland. But what the heck. How else would anyone who wasn’t there find out how much fun it was? Really. So I’m going to tell tales of experiences from the 2008 CGOA Regional /TKGA National Conference (Knit and Crochet Show) in Portland, Oregon last week. I am not a photographer so I must once again depend upon the kindness of friends for some images that will eventually find their way here.

Wouldn’t you know it, the week of the event brought record breaking heat to Portland. I’m talking temps in the 90’s. There were half-naked people sunning themselves poolside at the Doubletree Lloyd Center where many of us attendees were staying. Isn’t the Pacific Northwest supposed to be cooler and milder than Sauna Land (Philadelphia)? Yes, I checked the weather for Portland online many times before the trip. Yes, I knew the forecast called for higher than average temperatures. But come on. Nobody foresaw this.

Consequently none of us felt comfortable trotting out the magnificent sweaters, shawls and other outer layers we had stuffed into our checked bags (that BTW now cost $15 to check). Well, none except those who had arrived from climates even warmer and more humid. Come to think of it, one crocheter found a way to put her All Shawl to an alternate use. When it got too warm, Pam Shore wore hers hip wrapped, waist tied. It looked great, too. But, hell, if I had known I wouldn’t need those stupid cardis and wraps I’d have left them in the discard pile on the floor at home and saved the bag poundage for the yarn and books I coulda purchased but didn’t.

Portland is a majorly cool place otherwise. Pun totally intended. Portlanders are friendly and are used to weirdness so they took all our fiberazzi outlandishness in stride. I loved the Max trains, free throughout the downtown areas you might want to tourist. But even with the free, easy and convenient transport, I did not love that the Doubletree, designated conference hotel, was so far from the venue, Oregon Convention Center. The official distance is two-tenths of a mile. HA! The actual distance from my room to the exhibit hall was more like half a mile and seemed to grow longer hourly. Okay, so some of you may not think that’s very far, but factor in the heat, the bags of class supplies, project materials, new purchases, garment samples to show off, water bottles and all the other conference gear that had to be schlepped back and forth two or three times each day and you have a recipe for exhaustion.

There were several other events going on at the hotel and at the convention center while we were there. CGOA/TKGA socials like the Saturday night dinner and fashion show are, dare I say, sedate affairs compared to some of these. One night at the hotel there was a real wing-ding going on in a ballroom across from the bar and a few of us who shall remain nameless were tempted to crash it because there was loud music, freeform dancing and cake.

Milling around in the hallways, waiting for elevators and lined up at the curb, we met conventioneers of all sorts. Soccer teams. Realtors from Idaho. Amway/Quickstar distributors. You could usually scan the various event badges to tell which group was which. Two groups, however, didn’t need no stinking badges. One was us. There was just no mistaking people who flaunted such colorful and creative crochet and knit garments so shamelessly and wantonly and constantly despite the unseasonable warmth.

The second group was even more interesting than us if you can believe that. It was an organization that provides service dogs for the visually impaired. Guide dogs and their owners, handlers, trainers were EVERYWHERE! There were even tiny puppy-guides in training. It was impossible to move through the hotel lobby without getting whacked by the furiously wagging tails of a dozen working dogs. I agree with Drew Emborsky. The goldens were the most adorable. The German Shepherds were scary. Big. Scary. But Golden Retrievers have such soft expressions and happy body language.

I got to observe these remarkable people and their dogs in action, navigating the corridors, elevators and sidewalks. I had no idea of the many and varied requests these dogs are trained to respond to. One evening while I was waiting outside the hotel entrance I witnessed a blind girl ask her yellow lab “find the trash can”. Granted, the poor dog got faked out because there were so many similar containers out there, disguising not only trash but also recycling, smokers receptacles and potted plants. But WOWSERS he found it.

SO well trained were these canines. Any other gathering of so many dogs would resound with boisterous barking and doggy high spirits. I heard not one bark nor whimper, not even a snuffle the whole week. Every dog took the work very seriously and behaved magnificently. Well, all except for that one “pet accident” that I will not mention. After I got home I looked at my own dog in a whole new way. Useless EEEEdiot chihuahua who doesn’t even know his own name and probably couldn’t find his own food dish if I moved it.

There was one little downside to having accommodations at the same hotel as a guide dog convention. I noticed the lobby carpet was occasionally decorated. You’d totally expect the odd strands and fluff left from the fiberazzi who would lounge and crochet or knit in those comfy chairs and sofas. But mixed in with the mohair, wool, alpaca and cashmere was a good amount of silky Golden Retriever hair. And that was OK with me.

>If you’d asked me a week ago to describe my hero, the guy I want to sweep me off my feet, solve all my problems and live happily ever after, I’d have chosen a totally unattainable dreamboat. Besides the obligatory tall, dark and handsome I’d have thrown in funny, smart and gainfully employed, with good measures of creative and talented. Dashing. Devil-may-care. Brooding. Handy with a laser pistol, light saber and/or bass guitar. Must like dogs and horses. Sort of a cross between Hugh Jackman (sigh) and Han Solo. That was then.

Today my ideal guy is… The Geek. Let me explain.

One morning last week I got up, made the coffee (although I don’t know why I bother to drink the stuff; I should just set up an IV) and sat down at my PC, resolved to get some work done. I powered up. Whirring and buzzing. Nothing else. Crap! The OS will not boot. I shut it down and tried again multiple times. Still nothing. I am getting knots in my stomach. A horrible realization is sinking in. If I can’t get this fracking machine to work, I am doomed.

This system has not given me a moment of concern from the day I bought it three years ago. Therefore all the documentation that came with was buried… uh, I mean safely stored… in the basement. I tossed the joint searching for some kind of owners manual. I found reams of paperwork from two previous computers, pounds and pounds of manuals and guides. But anything useful for this PC was stored on the drive or available online, none of which I could access because my computer would not start. How Catch-22 is that?

A couple of hours later, gagging from the dust, pulling cobwebs out of my hair, I emerged from the lower depths of the house with only a disc containing diagnostic tools. So I tried running a diagnostic, not that knowing the result would have helped any. I don’t speak techno-babble.

Mercifully I still had my previous PC. It took some aggravation, loading drivers and programs, in order to coax that old thing to life. Eventually I was able to check my e-mail, but barely anything else. By now it was dark and I gave up.

For days my PC was nothing more than a very expensive paperweight and a constant reminder of how stupid I was for not backing up my files more often. I moped around, jonesing for the Internet and this blog and all my buds. I tried to cheer myself up with the thought that I had the perfect excuse for not writing and sizing any patterns. But finally I did it, the one last thing I could do, the one act that truly showed the measure of my desperation. I had to call in a Geek. You see, in my universe, geeks are a different life form from normal people; not as exalted as doctors, nor as slimy as lawyers, nor as greasy as auto mechanics. But like all of the above, geeks know stuff and can do stuff that I cannot. Nobody enjoys being made to feel like an idiot, know what I’m saying?

So I unplugged the tower and handed it over to DH who took it to the IT guys at work. In the meantime I considered shopping for a new computer with all the latest and sexiest toys. I went as far as to configure my dream system and add it to my cart. At least I’d be ready to hit the order button if it came to that.

By the next morning I had the bad news. The hard drive was fried. Kaput. Dead. A late drive. But Mr. Geek said it was worth saving. He had a replacement in stock and gave me a ballpark price for the repair, a tiny fraction of the cost of a new system. So, what the heck. If I wasn’t thrilled with the outcome I could always hit that order button later on. I told him to do it. Two hours later I had the tower home, plugged in and was back to business as usual (minus any files I had neglected to back up, which were considerable). And I am happy to admit that I have undergone a serious attitude adjustment where geeks are concerned.

His name is Alex and he is a god. A god who wears striped polo shirts and baggy cargoes and may or may not wear glasses. A god who, statistically speaking, is likely to live on pizza and Wii. A god who is most assuredly around the age of my youngest son (the actuary) and rather reminds me of him in a goofy way. A god who is neither tall, dark nor particularly handsome, although I’ll grant that he was cute in a sweaty sort of way as he was carrying the tower to my car for me. (Hey, it was unseasonably warm that day and geeks aren’t expected to do heavy lifting.)

I adore my geek. We need to declare this official “National Be Kind to Your Geek” week. Make that “Planetary Be Kind to Your Geek” week. Or something. Thanks, Alex! You ROCK!

Every so often a shirt would come out of the manglers with a dangling, sometimes missing or, very rarely, a crushed or melted button. My keen-eyed parents could spot a button issue from across the room and would always jump to remedy the situation before it became… well, an issue. By the time I hit junior high and my father expanded the laundry to include dry cleaning, many other kinds of buttons and categories of repairs/alterations to garments were required as well. I grew up learning to pay particular attention to buttons. Were they washable, dry cleanable, securely sewn, in good condition? Or was there going to be trouble?

I was never technically supposed to sew buttons, but I did my share. Shirt buttons back then were pretty much standard and nearly indistinguishable from one to the next, because shirts (at least the ones that came into the laundry) were indistinguishable. The overwhelming bulk, no surprise, was white with the occasional blue oxford. Very rarely a pale yellow or a conservative stripe or little silly checks would show up. It was possible to match the buttons on most of these shirts from a limited variety of replacements. Not so today. If you lose a button and didn’t think to save the spare that came with, then you are majorly screwed.

Now that I’m examining my button history, I realize why I shy away from buttoned-down collars. Those fracking tiny collar buttons are a source of misery. Unlike the rest of the buttons on a shirt, which are generally attached to fabric that is double-layered, interfaced or otherwise thicker, those collar buttons live on a single layer of cloth. Good shirtmakers put a small disc of interfacing behind collar buttons for insurance. But sometimes that’s not enough in a place fraught with peril. Most guys have extreme difficulty buttoning them, particularly if a tie is involved. The frustration and discomfiture is reflected in the staggering number of raggedy torn holes where collar buttons are supposed to be.

So I learned to hoard all spare buttons. Since I was always careful to take care of any loose buttons on my own clothes right away I never had to go to those back-ups. So began The Collection.

Over the years I worked my way up from simply saving buttons to seeking out and buying cool and unusual ones. Buttons were my souvenirs of choice, small tokens I hunted down in the course of my limited travels, easier to pack in your return luggage than, say, a lamp. I even coached my friends to bring me back one great button from every trip. This was before I had any awareness of yarn. Today I hear the siren song of the LYS in whatever city I’m visiting. If I can browse buttons there, so much the better.

My absolute favorites are the ones I scouted at an open air market in a quaint square in The Hague, Netherlands. You might think me a total goof, traveling so far to bring back Disney. But that’s me.

I collect crummy old… uh, I mean, vintage specimens, too. My prize is a wonderful 50’s era carded set that includes a matching belt buckle. $1.50. WOWSERS. You can’t get one lousy new button for that much. Flea markets, antique fairs, thrift shops are horrible, dismal places to seek yarn but treasure troves for buttons. That’s also where I search and seize vintage crochet and lace patterns and books. But that’s another post.

The strangest new button I own is one I call “Mystic Pizza” after one of my favorite films. It was hand made in Australia by someone who musta had some great pharmaceuticals.

So, you ask, what do I do with my buttons since I obviously never sew them on my crochet. And that’s a valid observation. Once you create a button hole and sew on the button, then you are stuck with the closure. I like to design open fronts that you can wear anywhichway the mood strikes using alternative closures, links, pins and ties. Besides, my collection is so eclectic and consists of so many orphans that the whole lot is totally useless for anything but display purposes. Not that I display them. I keep them safely stored in my collection of cigar boxes.

Have I mentioned that I’ve amassed a sizable but eclectic stash of buttons? The button thing started ages ago, pre-dating all my other obsessions. It started when I was a kid and lived in the back of my family’s Chinese laundry.

Today we are largely a wash-and-wear society. You take non-washable stuff to the cleaners and perhaps let them do your dress shirts. But who would even think to send out sheets and towels, underwear and socks? I know for a fact that people did. How odd. The term “Chinese laundry” has little meaning today. But before political correctness was even a thought, many towns and neighborhoods boasted such establishments where Chinese people sweated to keep America clean and freshly ironed.

My grasp of history is tenuous and hazy. Let me paint a picture for you in broad strokes. I think the stereotype was born during mid 19th century, the era of the California Gold Rush and the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese, mostly men, fleeing war and poverty, left their farming villages and families behind, hoping for a better life in California, the “Golden Mountain”.

So many arrived that white landowners felt threatened by this “yellow peril” and unbelievably restrictive laws were enacted. For those Chinese who survived the intolerably cruel conditions in the mining camps and railroad crews (where masses were worked to death, or froze in the harsh winters or got blown up in the process of nitro–glycerin tunnel blasting) the only opportunities available for people who by law could not own land, obtain citizenship or bring their loved ones over were positions of neo-slavery and servitude. That meant work as household domestics or in service industries, including restaurants and laundries. I suspect that the once ubiquitous Chinese businesses have been recently supplanted by Korean cleaners and corner grocers, Vietnamese and Thai restaurants. But I digress.

Things got better, but even a century later my immigrant parents found themselves running a Chinese laundry. They didn’t actually wash anything. The stuff, mainly bed linens and shirts, were sent to a commercial wet laundry and came back ready to be sorted, folded and wrapped in brown paper parcels, all but the shirts. Those came back still damp and were hand or machine finished on site using an array of irons, presses and manglers.

Each pressing station was designed to do a specific task. There was one with three curved sections for collar and cuffs, one with two arms that did sleeves. The body presser was amazing and scary. It was an upright rectangle around which you wrapped the shirt. Then you hit the green button and the body moved into the machine where two enormous flat irons hissed into place. It makes me think of those cartoons where the toon falls under a steamroller and comes out flat as a piece of paper.

Each station had a hand water sprayer so you could dampen anything that needed it. The metal nozzles, like small garden sprayers that sent out a fine mist, were connected to the water supply through narrow bore hoses that were suspended from the ceiling over each press area. The effect was eerily snake-like. In fact, the laundry floor had this whole jungle thing going on, with the steamy air, the dense forest of machine trees with spitting serpents dangling overhead.

If you look closely in the shop window behind those two laundry midgets (me and my brother in our “Sunday best”) you can just make out the display sign that shows an oriental kind of guy pointing to the words “wear CLEAN HEALTHY CLOTHES”. The assumption and the clear message was that patrons here were cleaner, healthier and better than the poor slobs who did laundry at home. Aren’t we Chinese clever? 😀

I helped out wherever I could. My brown-paper packaging skills were not nearly neat enough or fast enough to be useful. (I still can’t wrap presents. Thank goodness for gift bags and shrink wrap baskets). I wasn’t allowed to go near the shirt pressers or the dry-cleaning machines which came later, although my brothers and I couldn’t resist jumping up and grabbing the sprayers when my folks weren’t watching. Which was hardly ever. But it was better than squirt guns, trust me, and almost worth the hell that ensued if we ever got caught. I mostly did intake and outgo at the counter. But I also sewed buttons.

More soon.

>Only when absolutely inescapably necessary, like for State Occasions or crochet conferences, will you ever see me totally dressed up. I mean in a dress, with the obligatory high-heels, jewelry, accessories and make-up. Heck, most days it is rare to find me in anything but pjs. Shoes? What are shoes? Reading a few of the comments made here by my alleged friends, I feel I must defend my right to choose not to wear dresses. I can explain.

You assume I’m about to blame my mom, right? Isn’t she The Mother Who Longed for a Girly-girl and got me, the kid who ripped the bows out of her hair? Nah. I survived my childhood. The true dress-up trauma came later, much later.

For a few years during the late 80’s/early 90’s I sang in a semi-professional oldies band. No, silly, that doesn’t mean WE were oldies (although I suppose we were all more mature than your typical garage band), but that we performed oldies music. We specialized in the sounds of 50’s doo-wop and 60’s girl groups, rendering nearly note for note recreations of some of the greatest hit recordings of the era. It was bizarre fun; it was horrible torture.

Not only did we four ladies, the Dialtones, have to sing (and dance) like the Ronettes, Chiffons, Supremes, Shangri-las, Vandellas, Marvelettes, Crystals, Angels and Shirelles (to name a few) but we had to wear costumes in a style typical of girl groups of the 60’s. To our costume designer that meant over-the-top matching outfits, with different looks for every set which meant three or four costume changes a performance.

Here’s a little gallery of what I endured for my “art”, including a pink satin baby-doll number with beaded and sequined appliques, a tiny black sequined dress that I had to be sewn into, a leather skirt and chain belt (our “bad girl” look). Mercifully not shown was a tight leopard-print outfit with layers of fringe. Every gig meant five or six hours in extreme stage make-up, stuffed in an array of silly dresses, teetering on different pairs of stiletto-heeled pumps while shimmying as though I were being held captive in a go-go cage.

So, yes, I know what it’s like to be a Barbie doll. Been there, suffered wrecked ankles, won’t go again.