I got a day off Friday to do volunteer work (with this place). My company gives you the whole day, even if the volunteering isn’t eight hours, so we had the afternoon free and we went up a different canyon to see the aspens. They didn’t disappoint!
I think it’s a physical impossibility to escape quoting Robert Frost in the fall in an aspen grove: “Nothing gold can stay.”
1. Victorian collage art and a catchy title? Of course I clicked on “The Blood Collages of John Bingley Garland (ca. 1850–60).” (The blood drops are ink, not actual blood, and it was a wedding gift for his daughter?) How cool that this weird object has survived 170 years.
2. This was enlightening: racist or otherwise hurtful phrases you should stop using. (The etymology of “picnic” isn’t actually racist like the article claims but its use was plenty horrifying.)
3. Accurate:
Here’s Wendell Berry–“American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer”– not pulling any punches.
Questionnaire
by Wendell Berry
How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.
For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.
What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.
In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.
State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.
I finished my first casebound book on my own last week! The raw materials were just a $12 kit from the art store but it made a really nice finished object. Look at how book-like it is! 
After I finished the kit, I immediately ordered a bunch of bookboard and a better glue brush and various printed text blocks from Hollanders. That makes this an Official Hobby, so I’d better start using a lot more notebooks. (I also got that book about making covered boxes, so I guess I can always turn the bookboard into desk sets.)
I finally finished half of the socks I’ve had on the needles for six months. Honestly, that’s not a bad pace for me, plus my elbow tendonitis didn’t flare up during knitting at all. And now I have socks to wear!
The top socks are a Lana Grossa “Cashmere Brick” yarn on regular sock needles and the neon pair is 2 yarns held together (Lang Jawoll and The Wandering Flock) on size 4s. That cashmere blend is nice; I wish I could find more colorways… because there’s always another pair of socks to knit.
The trees in the canyon are starting to change and those mountain ash berries were astonishing in their orange-ness. I guess I can’t pretend it’s still summer, even though it’s still sunny.
1. Danny Lavery tells us The Problem With Being Edited (it’s my problem, too):
I react with the same baffled fury and impotent rage of Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden: The idea of revisiting something I have already written puts me in the most confounding of moods, and I become sulky, contradictory, and capricious, unwilling to say what I actually think (“I don’t want to look at what I’ve written and think about it a second time, I’m unprepared to defend any arguments I might have made or furnish sources for any claims; please just do whatever you like for the second draft and let’s forget I ever had a hand in writing this”)
2. Bookbinding stuff: a collection of end papers from 1890 – 1930.
3. More digital archives: a collection of motifs used in tatreez, or traditional Palestinian cross stitch. (Gorgeous!)
4. Niche Manifestations on TikTok are my new favorite thing:
@nichemanifestations 🧿🪬Manifestation for cats to only throw up on hard surfaces, not carpet🐈⬛‼️ #manifestation #manifesting #pets #cats ♬ 777 Hz Angelic Healing Frequency – Emiliano Bruguera
Well, here we are, rolling into the dark season. Over the last 17 years (my god) of blogging here, I’ve gone from truly dreading it to being mostly OK with it. Medication helps a lot, of course, but so does realizing that the seasons passing are “not such an awful linear progress but instead a looping and a return.”
So here are some vibes for Fall (and don’t forget the classic vibes of September 21).
It’s my big brother’s birthday today and he is 47?! How does this happen? How is it thirty years ago that we were watching MTV and MASH together?
Ever since I read that Heather Havriliesky essay about showing up for your loved ones, I’ve been thinking about how that translates to my family, how my brother and I used to hang out so much and how now our goals from any interaction can be so different (spoiler: my goals almost always are to talk feelings).
But what matters is showing up, and when I show up I see the human I was raised with, who knows 40 years of in jokes and exactly how I think. I see a good guy, utterly convinced about right and wrong, fascinated by the world, unflinching about the pain that’s part of the world, and able to do a really good impression of Beavis.
I see my brother, and I love him. Happy birthday, Alan!
When I’m able to sit, I’m sewing another pack: the Trail Running Pack from a one-guy company, LearnMYOG. Except every time I work on it, I end up feeling like picking a fight with that guy, because the instructions are so bad.
There aren’t actual instructions, just a video sew along… but I’m not sure this guy had ever watched a sewing video before he filmed his, because why is he sewing black on black for his example? Why is it lit with a single 40-watt bulb?!
My other issue is that this was a THIRTY DOLLAR pattern. (For reference, the lumbar pack pattern I used was $9.) Not having real instructions or decent videos at this price point is bad enough, but not having anything marked clearly on the pattern is inexcusable. There are several points where you’re instructed to “pleat to fit” but… no pleat lines. Notches are hit and miss. And where should we place the straps? Is anything marked on the pattern piece? No, apparently we’re just going off vibes:
Anyway, I’ve been sewing long enough that I can figure out what to do, but I can’t imagine being able to finish this if I were a beginner. It’s also not the most restful sewing experience to be mentally composing scathing reviews while you’re working on it (although that might be a me problem). But lord grant me the confidence of a white guy who’s never seen a sewing pattern… releasing a $30 sewing pattern.