Better Living Through Literature – Words + Projects + Stuff I Like

Tuesday House Project

June 30, 2026 KarenLeave a comment

All of my house projects follow the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie model: If the second storage shelf doesn’t fit back in the new basement closet and barely fits in the garage, you think about wall shelving. If you’re going to put wall shelving in the garage, you think you should probably paint the walls first. If you want to paint the walls, you’re going to need to mud and sand and prime them. And before you can do any of that, you have to take everything OFF the shelves so you can get to the walls.

So here we are:

I roped my dad into coming up and giving me a lesson in applying mud over the weekend. Turns out there are a lot of similar skills between finishing drywall and getting a smooth layer of frosting on a cake, and I’m not great at either !

But I’m done watering my friend’s garden after today so I can get in the garage and spend some time very gradually improving for the rest of the week. Because as we all know, “Sucking at something is the first step to being sorta good at something.”

Garden Times

June 29, 2026 KarenLeave a comment

I’ve been yard sitting for my friend (Mr. Sunday Night Conversations) for the past week while he’s out of town, which involves dragging hundreds of feet of hoses around his yard for a couple hours every day.

At least it’s a lovely yard–he and his brother have put so much into it over the last couple decades.

Friday Links

June 26, 2026 KarenLeave a comment

1. I love this: 2000-Year-Old Roman Theater Hosts World Cup Watch Party.

2. Caity Weaver writes about garage sales, thrift stores, and estate sales in The Atlantic. You get history and pathos and sentences like this:

“For every delightful discovery of a charmingly wacky neighborhood where one resident’s garage-door mural features an alien camouflaged among the paddles of a prickly pear cactus, and another homeowner has installed a rooftop statue of an orange pig with blue angel wings, there will be a haunting encounter with a nearly silent man hoping to sell a single button-down shirt for 50 cents. If you don’t have the stomach to witness people’s lives up close, do not ever stop at a yard sale.”

3. Thinking about my orange cat. 🙁

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Thursday Poem

June 25, 2026 KarenLeave a comment

Here’s one from Poetry Instagram by Lyndsay Rush, aka Mary Oliver’s Drunk Cousin. I also swear it was just April and now it’s 98 degrees and everything is going, going, going.

Soaking it Up
by Lyndsay Rush

Is it June already?
Honey, I swear it was just April
I swear the sun just came out and we remembered
why our ancestors worshiped it
I swear my peonies and iris and wisteria
just opened their eyes
I swear it was only yesterday that I wasn’t swearing
every time I stepped outside
But now we’re in the thick heat of it
The bare feet of it
The thudding heartbeat of it
They love to remind me that I only get 18 summers
with you
But if time is such a petty thief,
why are my arms so full?

Not Yet

June 24, 2026 KarenLeave a comment

Two weeks ago I impulsively filled out an adoption application for a dog, after following different rescues and thinking and pondering and deciding that yes, the house IS too lonely and I actually WAS ready.

Then we met some foster dogs a couple days after that (including Teddy Murphy, a SWEETHEART) and we went home to sleep on it…and I just missed Toby and realized that I was not, in fact, ready and perhaps I was using the dog idea to distract myself from actually processing the crushing grief of losing my best friend of 17 years.

At least the dog meet and greet confirmed that they’re delightful and that Doc is indeed the Dog Whisperer. Maybe someday…

Tuesday Project Roundup: Fashion Pajamas

June 23, 2026 KarenLeave a comment

It took me a couple years to jump on the “matching set” trend but I finally sewed up some block print fabric I bought pre-tariffs into the Florence Pant (lengthened 3 inches with a 1.25 inch hem) and the Genra Shirt for a look that screams… pajamas?

I promise, these sets are all over the fashion world. There’s even a sewing pattern for both that I was inspired by, but I decided to use patterns I already had and that I knew fit (I have never been a “make a lot of muslins and tweak the fit” sewer).

Looking at these FASHUN examples, I think I need to try the top tucked in and add some jewelry if I wear it out of the house?

I do like the final pieces, though–as you might expect from almost-pajamas, the whole set is ridiculously comfy. I love an Indian block print for summer; the cotton is so nice and light.

Midsummer

June 22, 2026 KarenLeave a comment

It was a long weekend and the solstice so I spent as much of it under the sun as I could: A hike in Big Cottonwood, visits to gardens (my dad’s and my friend’s), and watching the sunset from the city’s north foothills instead of the lake this year.

Friday Links

June 19, 2026June 19, 2026 Karen

1. I’m a little late today because we have another summer Friday for Juneteenth. Now I’m plotting how to get 4-day weeks until Labor Day and might be doing this later:

2. No one was more surprised than me to learn that Provo has a (kinda) jazz kissa? They listen to more than jazz and I’m not sure there are coffee drinks but otherwise it’s the same. The Kids These Days are discovering listening to an entire album and I am trying to be supportive of them and not roll my eyes! (Review from their Instagram.)

3. Anthropeum is a game that has you guess “where in the world, and when, does this human artifact belong?” It’s incredibly difficult!

How To Read More

June 18, 2026 Karen

I saw this essay by John Paul Brammer, “How I Learned to Read Way, Way, More” making the rounds in my different newsletters. When I read it last week, I realized he was the same author who wrote the piece about applying for Global Entry and the urge to conform I posted last summer. This one is wonderful–talking about attention and curiosity and developing a reading habit.

I had a long dry spell of reading in my late 20s/early 30s when I was still reading what was on my shelves but I just didn’t seek out anything new. Then I started walking to the library from my office job, and then I finally got a Kindle and discovered library e-books. Now I’m reading about a book a week. And no, they’re not all capital-L Literature, but as Brammer says in his essay:

I don’t need to go on about the benefits of reading, but here’s a brief paean: it has dramatically improved my quality of life. I’m less anxious. My thoughts feel cleaner. Thinking itself is more pleasurable. Pain is less mysterious. My brain is just better. Books are a privileged medium. We’re grammatical beings. We talk to ourselves in sentences.

RIP, David Hockney

June 17, 2026 Karen

The painter died at 88 last week. I don’t talk about art a lot here but a postcard of his “Mount Fuji and Flowers” from the fancy mall stationery store lived in my high school locker and then on the walls of my first office cube. I’m forever on the lookout for an exhibition poster of his “A Bigger Grand Canyon,” and I lived for any story of him in his old age, still out there making art, like this one (from LACMA’s tribute):

During the pandemic, sequestered in his home in rural Normandy, he greeted every day by walking around his gardens, noticing the changes in nature, iPad and stylus in hand. Each day, he created something new, quickly crafting a tree about to bloom or a branch or a flower, observing how his subjects changed each day with the passage of the seasons. And he would share these images with his friends; each morning I would awake in L.A. and be greeted by an emailed iPad drawing from David, reminding me of all the beauty in the world. “Don’t worry,” he’d say with his characteristic sly wit, “they can’t cancel the spring.”