Year: 2011

Friday Unrelated Information

Karen

1b. I’m happy to report that the “Yoga for the Winter Blues” video was really helpful. I got farther into a backbend than I ever have before (which is still not very far) and realized that if I can do that, I can easily survive onerous meetings or a weather inversion.

1b. I’ve turned into one of those sports people. I think I get why they run marathons now.

2. Happy birthday to Jane Austen and Arthur C. Clarke today.

3. Here’s another MST3K Christmas song, because it’s absurd and because Christmas is next weekend:

“Hey, you keep Christmas in your way and let me keep it in mine.”

The Darkness

Karen

I think the lack of sunlight is getting to me early this year. I’m seriously considering light therapy, but my inner hippie also wants to try some yoga and re-read this essay I found a couple years ago. From Jeanette Winterson, it talks about embracing the winter darkness–and she does make some good points:

It is a mistake to fight the cold and the dark. We’re not freezing or starving in a cave, so we can enjoy what autumn and winter bring, instead of trying to live in a perpetual climate-controlled fluorescent world with the same day-in, day-out processed, packaged, flown-in food.

And she ends on a strong hippie note about the darkness:

Food, fire, walks, dreams, cold, sleep, love, slowness, time, quiet, books, seasons – all these things, which are not really things, but moments of life – take on a different quality at night-time, where the moon reflects the light of the sun, and we have time to reflect what life is to us, knowing that it passes, and that every bit of it, in its change and its difference, is the here and now of what we have.

Homebodies

Karen1 Comment

I was reading the Christmas chapter of The Wind in the Willows this week, where Moley finds his old home and the caroling field mice show up, and thought, “Forget Dagny or Franny; I identify most with Moley.” Consider this:

He saw clearly how plain and simple…[his home] was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one’s existence…It was good to think he had this place to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.

Tuesday Project Roundup: This Counts

Karen

Putting up the tree counts as a project, right? I did make a ten-minute tree skirt out of felt.

Then, of course, someone was upset that the tree got fabric and he couldn’t fit underneath it to sit on said fabric, so I brought down the remnants for him:

Mood lighting!

Hooray For Winter Birthdays

Karen


Happy birthday to my sister-in-law today! Not only does she win the bread for the family, she finds time to make homemade baby food–and she’s put up with her crazy in-laws for nearly a decade. I hope she has a fantastic birthday!

Big Day

Karen

Some big historical events happening today, courtesy of The Writer’s Almanac:

1. The 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
2. Willa Cather’s birthday.
3. The anniversary of the first fully clear photograph of the Earth from space, taken by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972, and known as “The Blue Marble.”

Fruitcake!

Karen4 Comments


Yesterday I made fruitcake, the kind where you raid the Whole Foods bulk aisle for fancy dried things and then soak the cake in booze and age it for a month. The Anne of Green Gables-reading part of me likes doing something so “old fashioned” (if not downright medieval); the drinker in me likes the booze part; and the adult reader in me thinks of Laurie Colwin:

Lately I have begun to think less of holiday and have turned my attention to the idea of winter, of trying to fill the house with good things… I want to make a gesture toward that longed-for simpler time by producing something that is made only once a years.

(from the essay “How to Face the Holidays,” in More Home Cooking.)

Also: BOOZE!