Yikes, it’s been four months since Caroline and I left the Phoenix area and that’s just far too long. We were originally supposed to meet someone today we’ve not seen in a while, but he had to excuse himself from our date late on Thursday. I’d like to have pushed us out of town for a short road trip after learning this, but a talk about Josef Albers by Claire Campbell Park at the Heard Museum caught Caroline’s eye and so that is keeping us here this weekend. Until that begins at mid-day I’m cleaning up where photos belong that have ended up on my blog and were scattered across my Notebook while Caroline is busy with her newly acquired Appalachian dulcimer in her lap.

It was gifted to her with the person calling it a mountain dulcimer, but that’s a variant name along with Kentucky dulcimer and some others. My favorites are nicknames such as mountain zither and hog fiddle. From now on this is Caroline’s hog fiddle. Tuning it was hard on the ears, but as she strums it afterward the drone that is resonating out of it is quite appealing. Her new old instrument came from Hill Country Dulcimers out of Fredericksburg, Texas, a store that is now defunct. From the dulcimer, she went on to her ukulele to serenade me with “All My Loving” by the Beatles. Then just before we are about to leave for the museum, I see that Nils Frahm is playing in Phoenix tomorrow night and I snag two tickets up front.

Upon arrival at the Heard Museum, we filed into the Steele Auditorium and took two seats in the front row close to today’s speaker: Claire Campbell Park of Tucson. Caroline had taken a workshop with her a couple of years ago or so regarding blending colors on the loom which also included color theory. Today’s talk is about one of the more influential artists regarding teaching art in the 20th century Mr. Josef Albers. While Josef’s wife Anni Albers was highly influential in weaving, Caroline hadn’t learned of her or her husband’s work until the workshop with Claire. The couple got their start at the Bauhaus in Weimar working next to the likes of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. As the Nazis took to power and forced the Bauhaus to cease operations the Albers moved to Black Mountain, North Carolina, where they joined the faculty of the Black Mountain College. Now long gone the college once played host to the founder of Bauhaus Walter Gropius along with John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Allen Ginsberg, Willem and Elaine de Kooning amongst a number of other notable artists.

Back home Caroline with the same love that she has made all of these socks with, will hand wash them. I’m very well aware of how fortunate I am that not only do I wear custom-fitted unique handmade socks every day, but my best friend cares enough to ensure these socks last as long as possible by hand washing them. As these socks are hung up to dry I will not be going barefoot as I have 11 others pairs that I get to choose from. Not only that but we probably have about half a dozen other skeins of sock yarn that are destined to wrap my feet in love. My socks are priceless when you consider the following: take the minimum hourly wage you’d charge someone for your line of work and multiply that by the roughly 40 hours it will take you to fit and knit a pair of these socks. Now add to that cost an almost negligible price of the yarn of between $20 and $35. With all of that in mind, I value each pair of these at something near $2,000 for a total of approximately $34,000. Even the heels of my socks have gone through various iterations until Caroline found the design that felt best to my sensitive feet. Some other details about these socks: I chose my own fingering weight yarns when we are out traveling in places such as Portland, Newport, and Cannon Beach, Oregon; Haines, Alaska; Asheville, North Carolina; Española, New Mexico; Frankfurt, Germany; Budapest, Hungary; and Vienna, Austria.