Monthly Archives: February 2020

Watching Professionals Have Fun

playing, technical skills, thinking out loud,

I have enjoyed watching two sports throughout my life: tennis and figure skating. The end of January was a bonanza month with the Australian Open and the US National Figure Skating Championships. Thanks to the wonder of the contemporary world, I was able to watch a lot of both of them despite not having cable.

As always, I was inspired by their skills, strength and determination. And, when it was all over, I enjoyed watching them have some fun, too. The tennis fun happened at a Roger Federer Foundation fundraiser in South Africa where he played Rafael Nadal in an exhibition match. While they were clearly competing, they were smiling as they did so and even making jokes and a little trash talk. Clearly having fun playing the game to which they have devoted their whole lives:

For the ice skaters, the fun comes after the competition in the skating spectacular where they can dial down the pressure (no required elements, no worries about under rotations), put on some cool costumes and have fun with no thought to competition at all. Certainly, the best example of this was the ice dancing pair of Kaitlin Hawayek and Jean-Luc Baker who skated to Swan Lake:

I wonder sometimes how top competitors keep up the motivation and commitment, and these moments of fun give us a clue: they really love their sport. We see a passion, sheer joy, that goes beyond any superficial desire to win.

The Heart of the Sea

playing

Minecraft Inventory If you haven’t played Minecraft, you may want to move on. If you do play, then you’ll know how excited I was to discover a shipwreck that included a buried treasure map that led to finding The Heart of the Sea. For an hour this afternoon, I was completely absorbed in the process, including getting some advice from online Minecraft sites about finding the buried treasure.

Minecraft doesn’t always feel like a game. I use a few cheats that allow me to “mostly” play in the survival mode but mitigate the effects of dying. My play is open-ended: building, mining, and trading depending on my mood. Today, I felt like I was playing a game with a goal that led to a journey, some challenges, and a final reward: the rare Heart of the Sea. I feel successful even if I am not completely sure how to use it. That will come later.

And, once again, I am reminded of the freedom of having a flexible schedule. I have evening meetings for the next two night so take that into account when planning my days. So, after having to travel in the rain this morning, I came home and took a break to discover the Heart of the Sea.

Backyard Birds

Photography

We are birders. It is a hobby that has taken us to wonderful natural places and, I am confident, will do so again. For now, we mostly doing our birding in our backyard, encouraging the birds with suet and sunflower seeds. We get a nice variety of locals like cardinals and finches and wrens with the occasional unusual sitings of yellow-rumped warblers and red-bellied woodpeckers.

I didn’t get any decent pictures to share today but here are a few from the past for your Sunday viewing: a male cardinal and a downy woodpecker enjoying the suet.

Cardinal Red

Downy Woodpecker Feeding

Hacking Hobbies

creativity, learning, ,

I wrote about the continuum of practice in crocheting, creating a dichotomy between easy and challenging. But, I missed a dimension, I think, that I was reminded of last night as I contemplated the end of a stale loaf of home made chocolate babka and the proverbial light bulb went on.

Bread pudding. It was just enough for two and that was all I needed. I skipped the Internet on this one: milk, eggs, some cinnamon poured over the bread and life was good. I baked it until the custard was set and then, thinking it needed a little more sweetness, put together a quick glaze with confectioner’s sugar and milk.

In this case, I knew enough about bread pudding and baking Babka Bread Puddingthat I could just make it up and be decently confident that it would turn out alright. The real unknown was how long to bake it and that was just a matter of checking and having a good idea of what done should look like. Where did I learn all this? I did learn some basics in home ec and from my mother and grandmothers, but most of it just came from awareness and experience. Would it have tasted better if I had found a real recipe?

Crochet BlockI am doing a little hacking with my crochet as well. I did a twist on a granny square that begins in the corner and uses three colors to create some drama. From there, I put them together to form a larger block with the corners now forming the center of the square, giving it a quilt like quality. I have two blocks now and am wondering where to go from here: a bag? or more squares for an afghan? I can do either of those without a pattern or even a YouTube video!

Once we get the foundation, then build our skills with support, we can often move away from the directions or the recipes or the patterns. We move beyond skills to imagination and application. I often see the final preparation–whether it is made of food or yarn–and then work backwards to figure out how to do it.

A Continuum of Practice in Reading and Crocheting

books, reading

I have been reading and crocheting so naturally at some point my reading connects to my crocheting.

As I mentioned in this post, I had started working on my first “real” piece of crocheted clothing: a sweater vest for my dad. It was classified as an Intermediate, level 3 on a five level scale.

Crocheted Sweater VestI have made lots of hats and scarves but they are forgiving, mostly one size fits all. The vest had different directions for different sizes and included ribbing and arm and neck openings. It also had a special pattern in front that was a little tricky. All in all, a challenging pattern for me. I am happy to say, I completed it, and it fits! (It wasn’t quite done when I saw my dad but he was able to try it on. I finished up the borders and put it in the mail yesterday.)

Once I finished the vest, I wanted something easy, almost mindless as one friend suggested. It is hard to be completely mindless with crochet as there is usually some counting involved but there are certainly plenty of patterns that are much more mindless than the sweater vest. I chose to make a corner to corner shawl using beautiful self-striping yarn. Once you get the simple pattern going, it is easy to continue and the yarn does all the work. And, in the end, you get a lovely shawl in much less time than the sweater vest.Easy Shawl

Is one bit of crocheting better than another because it is harder? I certainly learned more about my craft from making the vest. But there was a bit more stress for something I am doing to relax.

I was reminded of this question as I read David Denby’s Lit Up, his study of high school English students, their teachers, and the texts they shared. He focused on several innovative, committed teachers who challenged their students with classics but also found ways to connect them to contemporary lives and concerns. The students of one teacher read assigned texts as well as their own choices and, at the end of the year, made a hierarchy of the books from hardest to easiest and then thought about why they were hard and how difficulty impacted quality. It was, for the teacher, a way of helping them understand the difference between an easy beach read and something else.

Their end of the year project required them to combine Shakespearean soliloquy with their own reading. Denby identifies something more about the relationship of the classics and the contemporary: “Some books, they knew, were better than others, but there were strengths in merely good books as well as in a masterpiece, and those qualities could be made to play upon each other. Part of the connection of the classic texts and contemporary books was that they intermingled in the reader’s mind, working on each other–usually in mysterious ways, this time in explicit ways” (p. 182).

The obvious similarity here between my crocheting and the students’ reading is the laddering, starting with easier projects that built foundational skills for the more challenging project.  And that project has built my confidence for even more difficult projects. But what about the other direction? How has my successful challenge changed my attitude or approach to the simpler stuff?  Just like I refuse to label some reading as a guilty pleasure, so I don’t think the easy things are a waste of time. They are a chance to just enjoy crocheting but perhaps, as a more experienced crafter, these simpler projects are better, made with more precision, a higher quality than before.