I'm back!

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Apple Basket!

Would you believe it, it is still hot here; this weekend is less sweltering, as we have some rain, wind, and cloud cover – the runner’s friend – but still, it is unmistakably high summer. The butterfly bush is blooming and brimming with butterflies, bees buzz in the clover field that is supposed to be a lawn (ahem), and the cat practises his Dali clock impression.

Very appropriate, as noted last week, for writing Hot Day-stories: the LinkedIn Fiction Writers’ Guild July Heat short story competition ended this Thursday, and I managed to finish a story for it. I took my laptop outside to enjoy the warm air and the shade under the lilac tree and got a story together, coming in just under the word limit (980 words out of 500 to 1000); I could expand, clarify, and continue. Funny how story elements crop up and have you wondering where that came from or how this will impact the situation or ... Maybe later.

Now is the week for choosing three of the about thirty stories to vote for; several are very good, while others ... need a bit more work. I got a few positive comments on my story – that do not necessarily translate into votes, of course, and may only have been prompted by kindness and my own ‘I am new to this’ presentation.

As I have mentioned before, summer is the time for me to sort and tidy – and so, in the process of cancelling a couple of superfluous subscriptions, I have come across different approaches to customer service.

I decided several months ago not to renew my Rowan membership, since I have not knitted anything from the latest issues, and £32 seemed a bit steep for two pretty picture books and the annual ‘gift’ of yarn. So when the first emailed prompts came, I ignored them, only noting that this was a first: the previous years I have had to be aware of the dates myself. Oh, well. More and more prompts showed up in my inbox, and even though I know it’s a robot sending them, I was a bit annoyed at getting two in the same day. So, I went to the Rowan site looking for the Unsubscribe button. No such thing. Even logged in, under my account settings, there is no option to unsubscribe or cancel. Lots of ‘let’s remind you of the benefits’ and ‘buy now’ and ‘this is how easy it is to renew’ – but no easy way to not renew.

I left the page and continued to ignore the prompts, which stopped arriving on the date of my subscription ending. End of story.

Or so I thought, because a couple of weeks later, I had a postcard from Rowan, reminding me how easy it is to renew and get all the benefits from a membership.

I also cancelled my Netflix, because I never get round to watching anything, and it seemed silly to keep it running. So, I went to the Netflix site looking for the Unsubscribe button. And clicked it. And got a ‘we’re sorry to see you leave, please come back any time, and you’re welcome to watch whatever you want until [date of subscription ending].’

Guess where I am mostly likely to return to.

The Knitting

Yes, I am knitting! Not 10 hours a day – which I didn’t before, either – but knitting. I feel whole again; hence the title of this week’s post.

Back in May, when I started the V neck jumper for Victor, I promised to finish it before his birthday, which all of a sudden is not some-time-several-months-away, but this coming Tuesday. Who would have known? I managed to not panic, but did the whole I have so-and-so many separate bits to do, rib, setup, decreases, rib again, ends; and so-and-so many days to do them, and then dividing.

Anyway, concentrating on one project quickly makes a difference, and being entertained by films in the evenings, I have finished the first sleeve and worked the second. All I have left are the ends to weave in; and not even as many of those as I could have, as I have joined skeins using Jane Richmond’s double knot technique, found on YouTube.

So voila, one jumper done. I am all set to get as many wips out of the way as I can before starting work in September, so there will be no (more) frivolous casting on. Only the necessary: Laura’s fourth birthday is coming up in August, and as my niblings are reared on designer handknits (heh), she will of course be getting something. More on that later – after the birthday.

And I am writing patterns, translating (from English into Danish) and editing, several at once which is a bit of a mess and again caused by my wanting to make all the things, preferably at the same time. But I am getting through them, bit by bit. The interesting thing is, even though you cannot proofread your own text properly, because the brain interprets what it knows should be there instead of what the eyes see – when you translate your own text, you do find the errors and inconsistencies. So there is actually a way to tech edit your own stuff.

Of course, another pair of eyes is invaluable: I am working on a lace shawl, for which I made the prototype for my mum’s birthday in June; my sister wanted one, too, so I got her to test knit (clever, eh?) and thus find not only typos, but also explanations that made perfect sense to me, but no-one else – and now I am translating the pattern and knitting from it. When this is all done, it will be a thoroughly worked-through pattern. So watch this space!

The Books

I am moving through the Dickens biography by Claire Tomalin; now I’m even past the time when he wrote Bleak House. The name for Esther, the main first-person narrator, Dickens got from the eldest sister in a batch of orphans whom he helped and corresponded with for years: a sweet and caring girl, apparently much like the Esther in the book.

The picture that emerges from the biography is not altogether appealing; Dickens was brilliant, of course, and prolific and caring and doing a lot of good – but also selfish and uncaring. I really do not envy his wife, Catherine, always pregnant – they had 10 children – and having to put up with his travelling and moving house and working and corresponding intimately with various men and young women, including the love of his youth.

Oh, and the woman who ran the Dickens household, as much as anyone could run anything with Dickens around, was not Catherine, but her younger sister, employed as a governess and almost a second wife. It is said that Dickens admired the setup of his friend, Wilkie Collins, who lived with two women for most of his life; maybe he tried to emulate this.

Staying with the audio books: DR, Danmarks Radio, gave out a handful of free audio books at the beginning of the summer, one of which is Den Store Omstilling / The Big Transition by Jørgen Steen Nielsen. Quite an interesting book on the need for a global transition away from the hunt for economic growth, consumerism, &c, and the detrimental effects they have on the environment, on the planet. Instead, we need to focus on ‘ecological economy’, to realise that continued growth inside a closed system is not possible. We must find out how to live without spending more, without consuming and destroying the basis for our own existence.

Several theories and experiments on this are presented, among them a plan for a 21-hour work week, instead of the 37.4 that is the Danish norm now, or the 40+ hours in many other countries. The idea is that this would make room for more people in the workplaces and at the same time give everybody more space in their lives, to bicycle to work, to grow vegetables, to take care of children and relatives, in short, to live more organically.

For just over 3 weeks, I have every day been reading a chunk of Caesar from a collection for schools, just to get myself back in the habit. This way, I got through (some of) the Gallic Wars, (some of) the Civil War, a handful of letters, saved in Cicero’s collection, and a bite of Suetonius’ Caesar biography; and both my Latin reading and my historical knowledge are refreshed. Oh, and I found out how it can be that a single Gaulish Village was not conquered by the Romans: the village of Asterix and his comrades lies in the land of the Venelli, a tribe that was conquered not by Caesar himself, but by his legate Sabinus. So, if you want something done properly, you have to do it yourself.

(You don’t know Asterix? Go find out, they’re fun!)

While I’m at it, I am now reading Caesar by Peter Ørsted, an account of Roman morals and politics in the shape of a biography of the most famous of Roman leaders.

By the by, if you want to know something of Roman history in an easily accessible way, go to Colleen McCullough’s series Masters of Rome. In six fat books, she gives us, in great detail, the history of the Italian Wars, Caesar’s life, the final century of the Republic, including the Spartacus rebellion – and a seventh book tells of Antony and Cleopatra.

And more historical fiction: The Gallows Curse by Karen Maitland is yet another of her Mediaeval English supernatural thrillers, rich and gory and suspenseful. I have previously read Company of Liars and The Owl Killers, and I can recommend all three of them – though not to the squeamish. They tend to be quite explicit in dealing with sickness, maiming and death.

But if you don’t mind all that – on the page, that is – and have a few nights’ sleep to spare, this is a great book.

One of the very first books Victor got for his Kindle was Stephen King’s UR, in which a college English teacher acquires a Kindle, and strange things start to happen. It is a small book, a 61-page novella, featuring King’s well-known blend of the quotidian and the fantastic, and keeping you reading until the last word. And it won’t even cost you any sleep.

That’s all, folks!

I hope you have a great week – I am off to weave in ends, but I will be back next week with pictures and more. Keep happy, keep healthy, keep crafting!

Hot Days

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Apple Basket! We are sweltering hot here, at least by Danish standards; summer has really come at last with daily temperatures above 25° C and unremitting sunshine.

So it’s time for sunbathing – and seeking out the shade, as I am doing right now – for the short, strappy dresses that spend most of their lives packed away, and for getting out of bed early enough to run before it is too hot.

I love it, more so because I know it won’t last. Very soon, the temperatures will drop, the sky will be overcast, and we can once again complain about the wind and rain. So the present languor brought on by unwonted heat causes only a temporary disruption of life and work ethics, and soon there will be no excuse for laziness.

Not that I am completely idle, and some of my perceived idleness is enforced: I am having a hard time watching films – only in the evenings, mind you – without knitting. I feel lazy sitting there with empty hands, and now that my arm is so much better, it is even harder. But I don’t want to jeopardise my recovery, so I am toughing it out for a few more days, and then I will pick up my needles and see how it goes.

This weather makes the perfect backdrop for writing a summer short story; the Fiction Writers’ Guild on LinkedIn, of which I am a newbie member, has, as it turns out, a monthly short story competition, with a few set parameters and of course a limited word count. The July story has to be set on a very hot day, include a superstition and the word ‘liberty’. Well, it is American, after all. So, I have been doodling a bit and may come up with a submittable story.

The Knitting

Well, there has of course been no knitting at all this week; I had the second and hopefully last round of acupuncture on Wednesday, and things are really looking up. I am even able to contemplate the possibility that I might actually be able to knit again, that this part of my life is not necessarily over.

My ever helpful mum let me know that it is Perfectly Possible to live without knitting.  I did restrain myself from any comments of the ‘easy for you to say’ kind. She does knit, though – at least, she made a doll’s dress for Laura last year.

Earlier this week, I had a newsletter from Garn Garagen (the Yarn Garage) informing me that the Samarkand yarn – light fingering / laceweight lambswool & silk – is going to be DISCONTINUED and therefore, it was (is?) on SALE.

As you know, those are two dangerous words, and when they are in conjunction, as in this case, the danger is not merely added, it is multiplied and squared. Any yarn addict will understand that now is the time to quote Oscar Wilde:

‘I can resist anything but temptation.’

Let me hasten to say, before you become too nervous, that I did not sell any of my children or even endanger the food budget for the remainder of this month. I did buy some yarn, and almost all of it has planned / intended projects attached to it. This is what I got:

A cone of colour 57, Azure, 962 grams including the cardboard thing in the middle. With this I can make the Queen Street Cardigan by Andi Smith, for my Lady Violet look, and the Laminaria shawl by Elizabeth Freeman. Have I mentioned that I love lace knitting?

4 50-gram skeins of colour 16, Ecru. This is for one or maybe two lace shawls that I want to design.

1 50-gram skein of colour 40, Gentian Violet. Ok, this one was just for fun and because it was the last one in that colour. But hey, it was DKK 16.20, so the damage done is limited.

Because you are clever and quick, you will have spotted the inconsistency in the above: first, I whine about not being able to knit and falling into the pit of despair, or at least teetering on the edge of it – and then, I go and buy yarn.

What can I say? Except to put the mood swings down to withdrawal symptoms: when you are prevented from doing something you love and are used to doing, it is all too easy to feel deprived and estranged, to see that world gliding away from you and leaving you stranded on a desert island. It is the same feeling I get when I am (have been!) unable to run because of injuries, and I cannot bear to even look at my running shoes or books, and the list of unheard episodes of Marathon Training Academy just grows and grows.

But once in a while, a ray of hope bursts through the cloud cover, and I am convinced that all will be well soon enough, that the future me is running and knitting to her heart’s delight – while of course being rich and beautiful and happy and successful and all that. And in the spirit of those moments, I can buy yarn and plan more projects.

At the University of Surrey in the UK, Dr. Julia Percival of the Chemistry Department is right now running a project to create a huge, knitted and crocheted model of the molecular structure of a group of mineral called Perovskite; these ubiquitous minerals have great properties such as superconductivity, magnetoresistance, and ionic conductivity, making them hugely important in microelectronics and telecommunication (according to Wikipedia).

The project invites knitters and crocheters from around the world to either knit a blue octahedron or crochet a yellow ball, which will then be all assembled into the crystalline structure. Submissions will be welcomed until the end of August 2013.

I am thinking of knitting an octahedron; I have some more of the blue Kauni wool that I used for the TARDIS last summer during the Ravellenics, and I think the colour falls into the given spectrum. Just for fun.

The Books

While not knitting, I can at least read; so this week, I have finished The Sign of the Four by sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the second of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

Also, I have read about writing: my lovely cousin Lasse gave me Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, an American bestselling writer (whom I must confess I had not heard of before), in which she with great warmth and humour recounts tales of her life and writing, and gives tips & tricks as to how to tackle both. Your own life, of course, not hers, and your own writing, too.

When you have read a handful of books on writing, and of course the ’10 tips’ lists found here & there on the Internet, you begin to notice how several pieces of advice recur, often in slightly different wordings, but essentially the same. This is somehow comforting: it seems there is a plan, be it divine or not, writers do have certain traits in common, and some of the method is communicable.

And of course, listening is always an option: I finished Bleak House by Charles Dickens this week, with some relief over certain developments in the narrative – I can’t say which without spoiling hugely, so I will be silent on those points.

Bleak House is not bleak, though populated with persons in troubled circumstances; Dickens’ well-known social indignation shines through, but so does his knack for satirical and funny descriptions of characters large and small.

The Dickens biography by Claire Tomalin that I am also listening to is proving to be rather long-lasting; of course, with everybody home I have less listening time than when they are not – but the book does seem to want to include every detail of Dickens’ life and be rather verbose about them, too. I am sticking with it, though; at the point I am at (1842, I think), Dickens is being criticised for not being able to write female characters, so I have to consider what I think of the women in Bleak House.

Certainly Esther, the first person narrator – there are two voices in the book, Esther and an impersonal, omniscient third person narrator – is an example of the ever good, ever patient and humble and self-deprecating and generous and  [fill in the blank] little woman, to the point of being nauseating or at least annoyingly naïve. Still, I was relieved when her future was settled, so she must have evoked some sympathy in me, if not any desire to emulate.

Each morning, I read a chunk of Caesar; by now, I know the words and phrases for sending ambassadors, receiving hostages, engaging in combat, burning farms and villages, and other cheery pastimes, by heart.

In Book 6, he breaks off the narrative to play ethnographer, recounting the habits and institutions of the Gauls and the Germans; including the no doubt intended-to-be-chilling description of the huge tracts of forest covering most of Germania. In these forests live reindeer, elks, and aurochs, three otherwise unknown species. The description of elk hunting had me laughing out loud, much to the surprise of my surroundings.

You see, according to Caesar, elks resemble goats, but are larger, and have no joints in their legs, so they are unable to lie down, and if they fall over, they cannot get up again. Thus, they sleep standing up, leaning against certain trees; and when the hunters find those trees, they undermine or cut them so that they stay standing, but break and topple when next the elks lean on them, and the elks topple over as well and can be killed.

Bet you didn’t know that!

Of course, Caesar makes quite a point of the vastness and wildness of the woods, the ferocity of the aurochs, and thus of the people, repeating how they are big and strong and live on and for hunting and warfare – all in order to explain why Rome is not colonising the far side of the Rhine.

Well, this is it for this week – I have been typing two-handed this time, and now it is time to not overdo things.

I hope you have a lovely week; keep happy, keep healthy, keep crafting!

Giving My Right Arm

-         . . .  a rest, that is.

Keeping it brief this week; had acupuncture on tennis elbow, so no knitting since Wednesday. Left-handed typing is a bit of a bother.

Thomas & Victor returned from Bavaria Thursday evening, so everything back to normal – holiday normal, at least.

Victor and I are watching Downton Abbey in the evenings, currently season 3. Comments later.

The Knitting

Did get some knitting done before being reminded to leave it be for a while (and being sore after having 4 needles stuck in my arm ...):

One (nearly) whole sleeve on the V for Victor jumper;

the yoke on the Rondeur tee nicknamed Charm;

baby cardigan & hat, called Elanor after the eldest daughter of Master Samwise Gamgee, for my cousin’s little girl who was born on Thursday (pattern on the way);

and a bit more of the ‘denim’ Atalante skirt.

The Books

Caesar: marching through various regions of Gaul, fighting & ‘pacifying’ & demanding hostages from innumerable tribes.

DarkMatter by Michelle Paver: ghost story, spooky, highly recommended.

Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Knitter’s Almanac: nice, chatty, hugely practical, want to try out all of the recipes.

Still listening to Bleak House & the Dickens biography.

Finally got started on The Sign of the Four, the second Sherlock Holmes story; in which we meet Miss Mary Morstan whom Watson finds very attractive and charming.

And for fun: ‘philogagging’ – philosophical jokes or humorous explanations of philosophy. Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar ... by Thomas Cathcart & Daniel Klein; the jokes are (mostly) funny, the explanations not terribly satisfying. But what can you expect in 200 pages?

So, no more text for now – I will be back, maybe not much text next week either, but we’ll see.

Have a great week!

Sunshiny Summer Sunday

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Apple Basket! I am sitting outside, on the terrace, in the lovely dappled shade cast by a lilac tree – the blooms are long gone, sadly, but there is still merit to the tree itself. The weather has finally decided to be summer, now that the schools have been out for a week, and I am making the most of it, getting the washing done and dried outside, and getting myself out, too.

This morning, I managed to get a run in before it got too hot – it was about 16 degrees, so nothing near Badwater temperatures, of course, but for these latitudes, the 22 degrees right now is just fine.

July seems to be my time for tidying the house; this is, of course, the month that is entirely school-free, and as I have spent most of my life inside the school system at varying levels, this habit is old and well-established. So, it is a time for contemplation and renewal, for travelling and relaxing and finding new inspiration for the coming year of work & study. The weather is accommodating – not trying to kill you like in the wintertime – you can leave doors and windows open while bustling around with stuff that has accumulated since last year’s purge.

And this summer, in particular, having teaching to look forward to in September, I find that I want to, not exactly get my affairs in order, but gain the upper hand over the house and any unfinished business, including, of course, my wips.

The Apple of the Week

Remember the story from last week? The one about the original, spherical humans who were cut up to become two-legged beings in search of true love? Well, if you didn’t read it, you can still go back and do that.

The other day, our local museum held a beer tasting with story telling, a sort of not-quite-pub evening. About 40 guests attended, as it turned out, and there were four of us from the story tellers’ club. I told this story, beginning the evening’s proceedings, and it did get some laughs even though the beer tasting had only just begun.

Anyway, I shared the story with a friend of mine who then came back and asked about the third gender, the mixed one – are the persons descended from this mix supposed to be transsexual, or what? So, I decided I had better clarify the matter.

The point that Aristophanes makes – or rather, the point that Plato uses Aristophanes to express – rests on the common view of the time, namely A: the masculine is better than the feminine (I know, they were deluded, but there it is) and B: the pure is better than the mixed.  

So, the spheres who were single-gendered were better than the mash-up, and between those two, the masculine ones were better than the feminine.

From these suppositions follows the ranking of each individual’s search for love: the highest form of love is the one between two men – or rather, the love of a man for a boy – next, we have the ‘girlfriend’ type of women. And lowest in this highly speculative pecking order are all those who run around chasing someone of the opposite sex, the ‘adulterers, seducers and harlots’.

This is not to say that the men who had such a homoerotic educational relationship with a teenage boy did not have wives, or that they didn’t fall in love with women – maybe even their wife, if you can believe that.

In ancient times, as in the democratic Athens of the 5^th century BCE, sexuality was not categorised by choice of object, like it is now, but by the role one played in a relationship. A grown, free man, a citizen, would have an active, dominant role, be it in relation to his wife, a slave of his household (of either gender), a prostitute (again, of either gender), or his young friend. The young friend, importantly, would stop playing the submissive role, when he grew up, served in the army, and acquired his rights as a citizen: to speak in the assemblies, to vote and be elected into office, to fight for his polis in times of war.

A grown citizen who was found to have submitted himself to another man (for love or money), lost his rights: such a person was not to be trusted.

The central observation in all this is not about love, or sex, but about power and the individual’s claim to his own body (and here, the gender-specific pronoun is not accidental).

So, there you have it: different times and different societies have varying views on sexuality and on what is and isn’t appropriate behaviour; the only constant is that there are rules, official and moral. One huge difference between the system of ancient Greece and modern Europe (and its sphere of cultural influence) is, of course, the influx of Judaeo-Christian morality and its taboos against homosexuality, nudity, &c; we now have 2000 years of conditioning to that way of seeing things, so the pagan views seem quite foreign.

Well, that isn’t really the only constant – all of the above pertains to the sexual behaviour of men. For women, the constant has nearly always and nearly everywhere been that men strove to control and curtail their sexuality, to be certain of who the father of a child was, in order to maintain the patriarchal rights and privileges.

The Knitting

This week, I have mainly been plodding along on a handful of wips, endeavouring to finish something in the near foreseeable future, and so, there is not much exciting news in it.

But, all of the secret stuff is finished now – the knitting, anyway, I am still writing patterns; on Tuesday, when Thomas and Victor had gone off camping with my parents, I put on an audio book and spent half the day knitting. Bliss. Everything is now washed, photographed and waiting for the recipients.

My striped socks have been sitting around feeling neglected for weeks and finally got some love: I brought them to the museum and sat knitting while listening to stories. The first sock is done, and the second started.

As for the V for Victor jumper – well, I am working on a sleeve. That’s it.

Much the same can be said about the denim-ish skirt – not the sleeve part, of course, but the steadily-moving-along part.

Gosh, this is boring. Sorry about that, I must really do something interesting about some of it before next time.

Not even the Rondeur tee has much to say for itself yet; I am using the numbers for the L size to get an S, as my yarn and needles are thinner than the called-for. I’ve done the ribbing at the neck and three rounds of the yoke. Yes, three. Pathetic, isn’t it?

It has raglan sleeves, with an eyelet-and-cable pattern running down between the front & back and the sleeves and eyelet increases along the sides of the cable. I’m looking forward to wearing it, and the summer won’t last forever, so actually, I’d better get a move on with it.

The Books

With two boys away and just me, Andreas and the cat around, the house is unusually quiet. Which suits me just fine: I can listen to audio books on the speakers while knitting, without annoying anyone and without too many interruptions.

I started out, when the boys were packed off, with The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers, one of an audible book swap with my sister. I had no idea what it was all about, but it turned out to be quite interesting; a present-day sci-fi story in which a virus, maybe engineered by terrorists, causes pregnant women to develop rapidly working spongiform encephalitis and die. End of the human race? Or can teenage girls be used as test subjects, carrying babies while in a drug-induced coma? Maybe sheep can be genetically engineered to carry human embryos – if the Animal Liberation Front doesn’t firebomb the laboratories. Scores of motherless children fight for their rights, for overall emancipation from adults. And 16-year old Jessie has to find her place in all this, while her childless aunt pines for a baby.

The human condition is also the main theme of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales which I mentioned last week; the first stories are all about love and sex, jealousy, adultery, requited and unrequited emotion. Gradually, though, the focus shifts to tales of virtuous men and women, and the final tale of the extant collection is the Parson’s Tale, nearly an hour long in the audio, cataloguing various forms of sin and penitence.

One may wonder how this series of tales had progressed, had Chaucer been able to continue writing.

I am currently listening to Bleak House by Charles Dickens; a huge book (nearly 40 hours of audio; to compare, a regular, modern novel is usually about 10 hours long, Ulysses is 29 hours, and the longest book I ever listened to is The Vampire Archives, a 60-hour collection of stories) containing a vast array of major and minor characters, all brought to life in the well-known deadpan Dickensian style.

The arch villain of the book is not a person, but an institution: the Chancery Court, also bitterly mocked by Jonathan Swift more than a hundred years earlier, in which suits could drag on for decades, ruining the lives and devouring the fortunes of all involved – except for the lawyers and court scribes, who were the only ones to gain anything from them.

I haven’t got that far into the bulk of the book, so I won’t try to explain the plot; watch out for the Wikipedia entry, though, as it lays out the facts that presumably are to be discovered gradually through the story.

As the CraftLit app and my phone still aren’t on speaking terms and I thus am missing out on Heather’s comments, I am relying on other sources for information. Luckily, the latest audible swap with my sister provided me with Dickens – A Life, a biography by Claire Tomalin. So, I listen in parallel, having the novel on my phone and the biography on the laptop.

I am reading on paper, as well – right now it’s Caesar, the Gallic Wars, to get myself re-familiarised with reading Latin. I haven’t really done that for quite a while, not having taught Latin for several years, and I am finding it surprisingly easy.

Amazing how much knowledge can be stored in your brain, just waiting to be used.

On that happy note, I will leave you for this week, to knit, read, and tidy my house.

Have a great week, keep happy, keep healthy, keep crafting!