Longtime readers here will remember Mr. and Mrs. Stompy, my upstairs neighbors in my apartment before I bought the house. This video makes it all clear: They weren’t loud, they were performance artists.
So good.
Longtime readers here will remember Mr. and Mrs. Stompy, my upstairs neighbors in my apartment before I bought the house. This video makes it all clear: They weren’t loud, they were performance artists.
So good.
It’s my mom’s 67th birthday today. She’s a yogi, a cyclist, a gardener, a mom who let me read books and study music, and a grandma who spoils her grandson rotten.
She’s never once told me I couldn’t do something and she’s the person I would choose to be my friend now even if she weren’t my mom .Happy birthday!
I spent most of Saturday Kon Mari cleaning the sewing and knitting supplies. There isn’t as much of a dramatic reveal with this room as there was with the closet because the majority of the craft detritus was stuffed in boxes–notions I’d inherited from friends, fabric scraps from projects ten years ago, patterns that aren’t my measurements anymore, yarn that only had a few yards left in the ball, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So I went through all the boxes and bins and got those sorted. And I folded all the fabric to sit on the shelf vertically (except for the knits on the top shelf), which is one of my favorite Magic Tidying ideas.
I even got all the thread out of a box and onto a thread rack, which of course has to go in rainbow order.
(That’s not really a Kon Mari rule, though; that’s just me.)
It was a beautiful spring weekend here: some trees are leafing out, some others are blooming, the foothills are getting green, and the robins have started singing in the mornings and evening (they do “so rinse and wring the ear”). I thought of the first line of this poem yesterday evening so here it is for your Monday.
(I’m only leaving the second stanza in for the line “all this juice and all this joy”–I can live without original sin in my sonnets, but Hopkins was a priest so there you go.)
Spring
1. I know this isn’t going to look like a big deal to other people, but to put it in perspective, I have maybe six meetings a week usually. But not this week! No wonder I want to either eat cake or visit J. Crew. (I’m resisting both. So far.)
2. I am also pinning a lot of imaginary patios to my Pinterest board lately. I have plans for a new chair and rug for my own patio, so in my head it’s going to look about like this:
Plus, it will be nearly 70 degrees here tomorrow. Patio time, here I come.
Mary Oliver, media-shy and often quoted around here, gave an interview and short reading to the radio show On Being recently, which you can find right here. She talks a little more about her early life (“I got saved by the beauty of the world”) and her recent move to Florida, but the most exciting things for me were her talking about her new work. She quotes from the beginning of a new poem:
“Things take the time they take. don’t worry. How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?”
Perfect.
My second favorite part? Her reading of “Wild Geese.”
It was the 100th anniversary of Billie Holiday’s birthday yesterday, in 1915. Here is my favorite of hers, performance wise:
(This wins for favorite jazz standard, no matter who performs it.)
Doc and I had our first anniversary over the Easter weekend (Easterversary?) and so I decided it was a good time to make him another shirt. Since the chambray I found was fairly plain, I decided to add a few cowboy-ish details like front yokes and pearl snaps. I wasn’t going for “Western,” really, but more “vintage and heroic”–a Steinbeck shirt for a man whose nickname comes from Cannery Row.
The details close up (I used the same construction mods/tips as the shirt for Christmas):
And the man himself in it (my nephew had told him to “be a tiger” at Easter.)
Happy anniversary, honey!
1. I may have a Polish last name, but my cultural heritage is all German Lutheran (from my mom’s side of the family). Which is why I have never heard of a butter lamb before, a Polish Catholic Easter tradition. It’s a butter sculpture of a lamb! People take them to be blessed! Even nuns make them! Clearly I have been missing out.
2. Speaking of Easter traditions, Wagner’s “Good Friday Spell” from Parsifal is also appropriate listening for the weekend. As you carve your butter lamb…