Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
1. It’s not that I’m not sleeping well, it’s that I’m staying up way too late for no particular reason. So a cloudy weekend without morning appointments is sounding really nice.
2. I think more yoga will help with the sleeping, too. I still need to work on getting into a headstand:
This summer I want to read all the books on my shelf that I’ve either never finished or never really even started. It’s rare for me to buy books (why, if there’s a library and you re-read everything you have anyway?) so I’m not sure how so many ended up in this stack,* but I plan to spend some quality time with them under the pergola or at the pool.
*OK, I do know how I got Songs of Distant Earth and A Passage To India: They’re on long-term loan from my father. I’ll read those first, Dad.
There was a Google Doodle last week in honor of designer Saul Bass‘ 93rd birthday and it’s pretty good:
Slate tells me “The following film title sequences are referenced: Psycho, The Man with the Golden Arm, Spartacus, West Side Story, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Anatomy of a Murder, Ocean’s 11, and Around the World in Eighty Days.” (All I recognized was Vertigo.)
You can make friendship bracelets:
and you can make legwarmers (I guess technically the string here is yarn, but close enough):
(Someone wanted to get his feet photographed, too.)
There was laundry (which Toby approved of):
Some freelance:
Breakfast under the pergola (it’s all finished, hooray! Now on to the deck):
And some nature:
1. Did you hear that Martha Stewart has joined Match.com? I love Martha and hope she finds lots of dates. Her reactions in the interview are pretty priceless:
2. Actually, I wonder if Martha’s thought process was something like this before she decided to sign up for Match.com:
The old Buddhist-hippie-poet-translator-environmentalist is 83 today and still doing his thing. Here’s an early one about summer in the mountains:
Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
I finally got the sleeves on that tunic. I took a break from it to work on Skyler’s aloha shirt and now it seems like it’s been going on forever. But I only have to hem it and add trim to the cuffs and bottom now, so hopefully I can finish soon and move on to the quilt:
The friend I’m making it for is in town so we picked out fabric for the backing and border and binding (oh my) recently. Now that I have everything I need to sew it, I’d probably better start.
I spent a large part of it outside admiring most of my new pergola (!):
It still needs rafters across the beams and some stain, but LOOK AT IT. I should have added one years ago! (Using the term “I” loosely, of course; my dad gets all the credit here.)