Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
I stayed up to see the eclipse of the full moon yesterday. It made for a late night but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a lunar eclipse, so Toby and I sat and watched it for a while. And took a camera phone picture.
Science explaining the eclipse is here, hippie thoughts about it are here, and The Mighty Boosh’s moon routine (which is what was in my head the whole time) is right here.
It’s my mom’s birthday today! I’ve said it in years past, but it’s still true: She’s not only my mom, she’s my friend. We talk on the phone every day, we email each other, we go to yoga together, and we compare style notes. Because as you can see from the photo above, I got all my sense of style from her!
A hike was taken on a cloudy evening and the foothills were really green:
Flowers were noted (are these a forget-me-not? I thought they liked to be by a stream but these were not):
The deck was stained in sun like this and then got rained, snowed, and hailed on by the end of the day (the deck will get re-stained next weekend, sigh):
And beers were had:
It was a good weekend.
1. Not only is it Friday, it is going to be 75 degrees. Papa Hemingway says it best: “When spring came…there were no problems except where to be happiest.”
2. Happy birthday to Mark Strand, whose poems appear here fairly often.
3. The MST3K tumblr I follow pointed out this clever person doing a series of MST3K-themed cocktails. Below is the Gamera:
Posted about this time last year, I present (again) Kung Fu Grandpa in the Food Lion Parking Lot:
Shake it off. Shake it off.
This is from Walt Whitman’s I Sing The Body Electric. Even introverts get this feeling sometimes–at least with the (few) people they really like:
As you may recall, last summer my dad built me an awesome deck and pergola on the back of the house, and I enjoyed the hell out of it all summer long: 
However, I’m in a new “twin home” development where I’m pretty close to the neighbors (on all sides). A fence isn’t in the cards this year, but I think putting outdoor curtains on the pergola might do the trick. Like so:
I can pretend I’m in a cabana in the afternoon! I can wear a caftan, put on some Turkish music, and rock the casbah at night! I could even close them and take a nap out there. I think it’s going to be great.
And it turns out that Pinterest has some really great ideas about using canvas drop cloths for curtains (cheap, sturdy, and already hemmed) and electrical pipe for curtain rods (cheap and weather resistant). My dad has already engineered everything for me, so I’m just waiting on steady weather to re-stain things and get going.
Is it summer yet?
And for good measure:
Smiling Lambie and Buddha hope your week is off to a good start.
1. This print has been on my mind lately, especially when I’m feeling like Tire Lion. It makes a great point:
2. Happy birthday to blues great Muddy Waters. This is my theme song about 4:00 pm most workdays, and especially on Fridays:
So let’s celebrate it! Or, you know, post a poem because it’s nearing the end of the week. This is by e.e. cummings, who tells us you don’t have to worry about syntax or capitalization to make a poem:
into the strenuous briefness
Life:
handorgans and April
darkness,friends
i charge laughing.
Into the hair-thin tins
of yellow dawn,
into the women-coloured twilight
i smilingly
glide. I
into the big vermilion departure
swim,sayingly;
(Do you think?)the
i do,world
is probably made
of roses & hello:
(of solongs and, ashes)
