I believe this is from a children’s book but it feels appropriate anyway.
November comes
And November goes,
With the last red berries
And the first white snows.
With night coming early,
And dawn coming late,
And ice in the bucket
And frost by the gate.
The fires burn
And the kettles sing,
And earth sinks to rest
Until next spring.
When you want to try insulated pants, do you BUY them from Backcountry for $200?
Or do you MAKE them? 
You know the answer if you’re reading this. I had bought Polartec Windpro Stretch and ripstop last year from The Rain Shed to try the Controlled Exposure pants again in a stretchier fabric. But when I saw the quilted Backcountry pants, I pivoted and used my tried and true Brassie joggers pattern and scraps of Thinsulate leftover from my parka.
I quilted the ripstop to the Thinsulate for the fronts and used the stretch Polartec for the backs. I also used scraps from my magic fleece (Polartec Alpha Direct) to line them–the fronts totally and the backs from gaiter height to parka height:
I went up a size from normal and they fit over my hips no problem–and they are DELIGHTFULLY WARM. I should only need a base layer in the coldest hikes–this test run was about 35 degrees in the sun and 25 in the shade and they were perfect.
The face you make when you spend $0 and get exactly what you want!
I wasn’t joking about focusing on the pie for Thanksgiving:
We kept about 1.5 of these and drove the rest around to family on the day–a delightful new way to celebrate!
Then it was just pie-fueled nature hikes and couch times and sewing for the rest of the weekend:
1. It’s a short week (FINALLY) and it’s Thanksgiving. This is the fourth one without Mom and my family has all decided to adapt how we want at this point, rather than continuing to try to preserve How Things Were–which I think is ok. This is how Doc and I are doing it: 
(by Liz Climo)
2. I have never seen a more accurate graph for Thanksgiving with extended family:
3. Finally, this:
Happy Thanksgiving indeed. If you’re missing someone around the table, I’m thinking of you. If the table you used to gather around isn’t there for you for whatever reason, I’m thinking of you. And if you’re making your own new table, I’m thinking of you.
I got my vest done and it’s a layer I needed AND it’s reversible. So I’m trying to focus on those two facts and less on the fact that I look like I’m wearing a big quilted cube when I have it on.
In hindsight, I think adding length would have shifted this from “square” to “rectangle” a little more, but the cropped retro length is growing on me. I also could have gone down a size but I wanted room to layer/room for my back to get even more swole in a few years.
Construction-wise, the Green Pepper instructions were great, as usual. I added the step of quilting my outer to my insulation but other than that followed everything to the letter. Materials were leftover Thinsulate from my winter parka project and DWR supplex and Polartec Thermal Pro shearling from The Rain Shed, plus my trusty KAM Snaps (that are reversible too!).
There’s just one more month to go until the Winter Solstice and then the days start getting longer again. We can do it. (Right?)
(Picture from Red Butte Garden yesterday–there’s a Sunday morning yoga class there we tried out!)
1. Remember when I talked about Dracula Daily, the project of sending Dracula chapters by email? It was kind of fun to read a novel over six months. Now that it’s over, you can sign up to get Moby Dick in your inbox with Whale Weekly. As they put it:
Wish you could take 2 years to finish Moby Dick without feeling bad about it? You’ve come to the right place.Whale Weekly will begin in November, 2022 and installments will continue for approximately two years in accordance with the passage of time in the novel.
2. I’ve been interviewing at a few places, because why not, and this is just so incredibly tempting:
3. Mayhem on the train set!
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If you’ve been around here for a bit, you know that I subscribe to the Culture Study newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen. I think I started for her commentary on toxic jobs (heh) but the stuff she writes about communities of care is what I can’t get enough of lately.
I could pull quote just about the entire newsletter from last week, about why it’s hard to accept help:
You haven’t been around examples of healthy community or dependence — particularly within your family — and don’t have models of what it means to safely ask for help. This is particularly true for people whose independence is, in some way, a trauma response, but I also think it’s true of people who grew up in homes where the adults were solitary or isolated, or where everyone in the family talked shit about other members of the family who asked for help.
But the meat of the article is a document template for outlining what help you would need and want most (food, errands, a walk, etc.). Then you can send your answers to your friends and family and they can fill theirs out and suddenly you’re not in the loop of “What can I do?” “Oh nothing, it’s ok.”
In summation, THIS:
It’s wrong to think of community as tit-for-tat, I-give-so-I-get, but offering care invites engagement….and accepting care models vulnerability. We cannot assume that others don’t have space to care for us, just as we cannot convince ourselves that we do not have space for others. You are not a burden; you are beloved.
Doc and I both had a clear Tuesday so we went to a different canyon that’s usually just too busy to be nice on the weekends. It was like a storybook illustration of “winter” and we discovered a new-ish feeder trail that was extra magical.
For locals, this is the Donut Falls hike in Big Cottonwood. Usually you have to walk up the access road to the trailhead, but at some point a new path through the forest to the east got put in. There’s also construction going on for a boardwalk through the meadow there and it looks like everything will connect:
It was cold–the car said 25 degrees in the parking lot, and we gained elevation/lost the sun–but my Polartec base layers and my parka did great. (This did solidify my planning for some heavy quilted pants that will use up the last of the Thinsulate and Polartec Alpha, though.)
And! The one spot of the trail that’s a scramble down in the summer had a ROPE for the winter and I got to pretend I was rappelling on the Alps. Thrilling!
I’m working on a vest layer for hiking or around town and it’s gonna be WARM:
I quilted Thinsulate to nylon supplex and am layering it with Polartec Thermal Pro “shearling” (all from The Rain Shed). The pattern is a Green Pepper one, the “Women’s Santiam Reversible Vest”
I basted the two layers together and I look a little like the Michelin Man… I guess that’s how you know it’s a warm layer.