Mossy Cottage Knits

More Than You Ever Wanted To Know About Monitor, Washington

Follow-up to the questions about El Speck-o on El Map-o, Monitor:

Don’t be too impressed by the post office under the Grand Old Flag since, post office, yes; mail delivery, no. When it comes to mail, Monitor is all about the self-serve. Here, curiously, and Lord knows why, someone has posted photos of the inside of the Monitor post office. (What’s weirder, the fact that someone took these photos and posted them, or the fact that I Googled for, and was thrilled to find, exactly this sort of thing? As TMK is fond of saying, “there’s 30 seconds I’ll never get back.”)

Which’all reminds me of the post office in the “town” in Borneo where my parents used to live. Somewhere I have a photo of my 6’2” father standing in the post office…and he fills up the entire thing, floor to ceiling, corner to corner. It wasn’t so much a post office as…you know how in some small towns, the bus stops have tiny, wooden, one-person shelters to stand in? Post office, bus shelters—twins separated at birth.

Which further reminds me that employee paychecks were delivered by helicopter to my parent’s front lawn. Good God, but our lives were bizarre. I had moved Stateside long before my parents moved to Borneo, but what’s telling is that when my mother told me about the helicopter-paycheck-front-lawn thing, I didn’t bat an eye. But I suppose when you live a life where the only way to communicate with your father is through bush radio (complete with “roger” and “over and out"), your brother hatches gecko eggs in his sock drawer, you have to check under the dinner table every night for the poisonous snakes your cat liked to bring in, and your pet turtle disappears while you’re on vacation because your servants ate it, your idea of what's normal becomes slightly skewed.

But back to Washington state… Thanks to TMK and this site, we now know Monitor is named after “the Union warship Monitor and its victory in 1862 over the Confederate Merrimac.” The site further informs us that the name of the town used to be “Brown’s Flat.” Boy, there's a real pick-me-up of a name, eh? Elsewhere, I was able to find this postcard graphic of Brown’s Flat before it became the, um, bustling metropolis it is now.

The funniest thing about the town is, smack in the middle (pretty much where I stood to take the photos), where two piffling, trifling, no-count roads cross, there’s a stop sign. You cannot drive straight through the two blocks that constitute downtown Monitor. TMK tells me that that’s because, during apple-packing season, when the huge apple warehouses are operating full bore, things can get dangerously hectic. Dangerous. Hectic. In Monitor. I’m sorry, but that just makes me laugh every time.

The other thing that always amuses us when we go to Monitor and, more specifically, to (for Gillian) mater and step-pater’s house, is the noise. You think country, you think birds, breezes soughing through the trees, nickering horses, mooing cows, and perhaps, on an over-the-top-rowdy Saturday night, crickets. If only... First, heavily trafficked train tracks run smack-dab through the property, and hugely long locomotives barrel through day and night, blasting deafening air horns, complete with Doppler Effect. Then there’s the river. They live right on the Wenatchee, maybe 50 feet from the bank (used to be 70 but Mother Nature had a spectacular hissy fit a few years ago). In spring the river runs full and high with snow melt, and makes a deep and loud whooshing, rumbling sound that carries through the land, through the foundation of the house, and up through your pillow as you try to sleep. Saturday night, TMK and I were reduced to hysteria-tinged giggles as we lay in bed listening to (a) the thunderous rumble of a train, (b) the seemingly endless blast of the train horn, (c) the dull roar of the river and, as if that weren’t enough, (d) emergency sirens on the highway on the other side of the river. Ah, country life.

Knitting

Have I been knitting? Meh, half-heartedly. My latest project is a Steam Scarf in strawberry-pink Cascade 220. I had no intention of starting a new project while I was working on the 4-Acre and the Yo-Yo sweaters but I needed something portable and simple for our weekend trip, something I could pick up and put down at a moment’s notice. Thoughts so far: Great, fun, easy but attractive pattern based on 2 x 2 rib and the occasional 16-stitch cable. If I were to do it again, I’d use larger needles (I’m already using 9s; 10s would’ve been better) for greater drape. And I would definitely have used any other color than pink. The slightly macho look of the big cables and the sissy look of the pink do not jive. It looks like a scarf in drag.

Dulaan

I’ve had a reminder from F.I.R.E. to please, please, please remember to tape to the outside of your box an envelope containing the inventory by item and by size of what’s inside. If you don’t, instead of just storing the box until the volunteers are ready, they have to open it and see what’s inside, and this is costing them real dollars and cents. We even provide you with a handy-dandy fill-in form, so no excuses, Brigadiers! (If you don’t want to take the time to list every item in the box, organize everything by item and size into bags and then just list the bags, for example, “red bag: children’s hats, size 2-3 years.” This is what I do.)

F.I.R.E. also tells me that last year at this time, they had about 3,500 items. As we speak, they have 7,000. Way to go, Brigadiers!

P.S. A shout out to new reader Knitting Granny! “Granny,” I think the rose you show in your May 18th entry is a George Burns. We have one and it's one of my fave flowers! I mean, a rose that is striped pink and yellow? How cool is that?

Posted by Ryan at May 23, 2007 11:29 AM