Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
I packed a lot in to this past weekend. There was a hike into the mountains:
I saw a tiny fern on a mossy rock:
I got the patio set up and lots of things planted (more on those curtains later but yes, I just to have blog about something and my dreams come true!)
I had some friends over Sunday night and got these incredible peonies from two of them:
And I discovered an app that makes your pictures look like watercolors. Hours of fun!
Pre-roll for brand awareness, encouraging insurance members to make healthy choices.
Marketing collateral for a campaign promoting the client’s mobile banking.
1. Here’s a facsimile of a long, typewritten letter from Rose Wilder Lane to her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, about the early draft of By The Shores of Silver Lake. As I learned only recently, Rose was the editor–probably even the ghostwriter–of the Little House series, and an editor and author in her own right. She and her mother had a difficult relationship, so there’s a little of that, but mostly blunt (good) editing advice about finding a theme and leaving out what you can’t explain easily.
2. And here’s a quote from a memoir/cookbook I just finished (A Homemade Life) which follows a recipe about a cake named “The Winning Hearts and Minds Chocolate Cake”:
What it all comes down to is winning hearts and minds. Underneath everything else, all the plans and goals and hopes, that’s why we get up in the morning, why we believe, why we try, why we bake chocolate cakes. That’s the best we can ever hope to do: to win hearts and minds, to love and be loved.
Much to the delight of my inner hippie, I’m going through a series of yoga classes about the chakras. After a class about the third chakra (root of our power, determination, drive, etc.), my boyfriend had us watch this TED Talk about the science behind body language and how “standing in a posture of confidence, even when we don’t feel confident, can affect testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain, and might even have an impact on our chances for success.”
You may have to go take a class about the third chakra yourself to really get the connection, but learning about the hippie ways of having power and then getting tips for feeling powerful that are backed by science was (wait for it)….pretty powerful.
The Writer’s Almanac tells me that Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway was published today in 1925. It’s my second-favorite of hers (To The Lighthouse is the first) but, like all her work, it’s a little hard to get a pithy, blog-length quote out of it. But here’s this:
She would not say of any one in the world that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, far out to the sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary…She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the year, the company I work for launched a new product, the Cricut Explore electronic cutting machine (it’s kinda like a printer, but instead of printing, it cuts stuff out and writes on it with a pen). Well, I just won one from a work contest! And it’s one thing to use it at work and write FAQs about it and send emails trying to sell it, but (unsurprisingly) it’s a lot more fun to just take it home and play with it.
Here it is in action:
Here’s a sticker I cut from vinyl:
And here’s where I think I”ll really use it–party stuff!
Everything I made last night was already designed (there’s a gallery to pick from in the software) and it took maybe an hour to make it all. I can definitely see more drink labels, banners, invitations, and general papercrafting in my future.
Thanks to KRCL, I discovered this song in a live version, and it’s a damn fine way to start the morning. Those pipes! That piano playing! That sequined gown!
1. How about some pictures of the sardine run, which is the mass migration of billions of sardines and dinner time to the bigger predators like sharks, dolphins, and whales? Nature is pretty fantastic.
(found here)
2. Public service announcement: Did you know that Overstock.com sells tiles? THOUSANDS of tiles. (As many tiles as sardines!) I don’t know why this tickles me, but it does.
(via Pinterest, of course)
The idea of “softening” has been on my mind since my last yoga class. I like this addition of “lovely”–it reminds me a little of the “Saint Francis And The Sow” poem, where “everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing.”
(Yoga! Deep thoughts! Self-blessing! It is Hippie Thought Thursday, after all.)