Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
I had no idea Pizza Hut is remodeling some older stores to look like the 80s and 90s “Pizza Hut Classics.” The New York Times had a feature on it, which linked to a comprehensive list of locations from The Retrologist newsletter. Who wants to go to Lander, Wyoming and order a pan pizza with me?!
We were in the desert for a couple days at the beginning of the week (which you would never know, thanks to the magic of scheduled posts). It was SEVENTY DEGREES and everything I wanted it to be.
We did the Grandstaff Canyon hike the first day, one of my favorites.
And then the next day before we left we tried a new trail to the Mill Creek Waterfall. The trailhead was really close to town, everything was well marked, and it even had bonus petroglyphs!
I think it the summer that waterfall would be party central, but it was still too cold for people to swim in. (Yes, I waded in.)
I jumped right into another sweater after I finished my non-itchy rainbow sweater. I was high on the success of the making something wearable, so I did some more shopping for cotton blend yarns, and now I’m already done with the yoke: 
This will end up being a rollneck sweater, like the classic J. Crew cotton sweater. I’m using a PetiteKnit pattern again and added stripes for an even MORE J. Crew vibe. It’s going fast–bigger needles and more meetings at work in which to knit–so maybe I can wear it once or twice before summer.
(Shoutout to my new project bag, too. I’ve sewn three different knitting bags over the last three years and didn’t enjoy using any of them, so I finally gave up and bought something. It’s perfect.)
The opening three lines of this delighted me but this line is the clear winner of them all: “Not even moths in the spell of the flame/ Can want it to be warmer so much as I do!” Amen, Kenneth.
Desire For Spring
by Kenneth Koch
Calcium days, days when we feed our bones!
Iron days, which enrich our blood!
Saltwater days, which give us valuable iodine!
When will there be a perfectly ordinary spring day?
For my heart needs to be fed, not my urine
Or my brain, and I wish to leap to Pittsburgh
From Tuskegee, Indiana, if necessary, spreading like a flower
In the spring light, and growing like a silver stair.
Nothing else will satisfy me, not even death!
Not even broken life insurance policies, cancer, loss of health,
Ruined furniture, prostate disease, headaches, melancholia,
No, not even a ravaging wolf eating up my flesh!
I want spring, I want to turn like a mobile
In a new fresh air! I don’t want to hibernate
Between walls, between halls! I want to bear
My share of the anguish of being succinctly here!
Not even moths in the spell of the flame
Can want it to be warmer so much as I do!
Not even the pilot slipping into the great green sea
In flames can want less to be turned to an icicle!
Though admiring the icicle’s cunning, how shall I be satisfied
With artificial daisies and roses, and wax pears?
O breeze, my lovely, come in, that I mayn’t be stultified!
Dear coolness of heaven, come swiftly and sit in my chairs!
1. Let’s plan a trip to Japan and go to Jeans Street in Kurashiki. “The road is dyed indigo, the color of Kojima’s iconic denim. The red and white lines at the road’s edge resemble the denim’s selvage— the reinforced end of a bolt of fabric that forms the outside seam of high-end jeans.”
2. These hand-drawn data visualizations from mid-1920s Turkey are beautiful:
3. I posted about reading to dissociate from the horrors yesterday but seriously, what would we do without books?
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
Carl Sagan, Cosmos
It’s only March, y’all…
In the spirit of focusing on amaryllis buds instead of WW3, here’s a Philip Larkin poem, first posted back in 2016. Clearly it still speaks to me–I think it’s that first line, figuring out the syntax and then saying, “Oh yeah, that is what the light is doing these days.”
Coming
by Philip Larkin
On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon —
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.
Right after I finished the rainbow stripe hot water bottle cover in 2024, I ordered another skein of that magic colorful yarn. I said in the bottle post that “I was leaving it out like another throw pillow” so I thought, “Why not just make a real throw pillow?” I did math for the cast on to get a 19-inch wide piece and then just kept knitting until it was 19 inches tall.
That knitting took, uh, two years…but that slowness worked out because those stripes look great in my new office! 
I blocked the knit square, lined it in scrap cotton, then treated that like one piece and sewed in a zipper. The backing of the pillow is an Anna Maria Horner reprint (I used the original in my first quilt back in 2009).
This whole room is just a color circus and I love it. The giant pinboard on the other wall has a few postcards I put up in my locker in high school (!) on it and MOAR color from prints and posters. 
It’s kind of fun to have a room that’s just for me and not visitors or guests or Doc. You might be thinking, “Karen, you’ve decorated the entire HOUSE for you,” and you wouldn’t be technically wrong when I did the other rooms, I tried to keep visitors or guests or Doc in mind and think of what they’d like. This office is just what I like and that’s rainbows and Legos and the lamp from my childhood bedroom and postcards like this: 
I might have posted that Kafka quote too early last week, because I was really feeling it this weekend:
“Every day I watch the terror grow and every day I have to work, run errands, do chores—how to describe that contradiction, and how to survive it.
Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon.”
Except the modern version of his postscript would be, “We started a war in the Middle East. Hanging art and sewing on Sunday.”
It’s hard to know what to even say. It’s hard to not worry about, well, everything. It’s hard to take a few pictures because you’re really happy with your new space and then think about missiles hitting cities and destroying someone else’s space.
But I got my amaryllis bulb to send up a bud for the second year in a row? I guess that’s something. 
1. The most nostalgic combination of words possible: 1991 California Raisins commercial for the library (via Austin Kleon).
2. I need to print this out so I can remember what’s actually helpful for people going through something (don’t put the burden on them! I speak from experience but I still forget!): 
3. I’m probably painting the hallway this weekend but what if I took a boat ride in a laundry basket instead? And I were a goose?
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