Month: April 2019

Happy Birthday, Skyler!

Karen

My nephew is EIGHT today! He’s very much a kid now, not a little boy, but he is such a delight.

As I’ve said before, you can’t put anything over on him. If you show him the why behind something and let him see it, then he’s just fine with it–but he’s not about to accept “because I said so” as a reason for anything.

He already has a very specific sense of style, just like his grandma. I’m standing by in case he ever needs help with his curly hair (I didn’t know what to do with mine until I was in my 20s) but he is very clear that he likes his “Einstein hair” just as it is. He also loves color; when he was at my house recently, he picked up some yarn in turquoise and royal blue. I had to stop and admire the pairing and think, “Huh, I never would have put those together, but they really work.”

You can see the love of color in his art, too, where he takes after his dad and grandpa. He also loves to engineer things (like his mom) and he’s always reading.

Happy birthday, Skyler! We all love you so much.

The Hills Are Alive (And Free Of Snow)

Karen

It was our first time in a canyon since the end of February (!) and thankfully it’s finally spring up there.

All of that snow is making some pretty impressive runoff! I was happy to see doggos on leashes around the water.

Friday Links

Karen

1. This week I learned about “mummy portraits” and they’re fascinating–understudied and a mix of styles: “As far as scholars can tell, the mummy portraits are the first paintings that depict lifelike, highly individualized subjects and demonstrate a fusion of funerary and artistic traditions between the Greco-Roman and Classical worlds.”

2. On the other end of the cultural spectrum, Bon Appetit has a history of Buca di Beppo, or “How a Lutheran from central Illinois created a genre-defining Italian-American restaurant.”

Thursday Essay

Karen

I signed up for journalist Ann Helen Peterson’s newsletter a while ago; each week has a “just trust me” link with no explanation. This week’s link was an essay by Victoria Gannon about working as a contract UX writer in San Francisco. It is wonderful and awful and captures exactly what being an outsider at a mostly male company feels like (see also: Pixar’s “Purl“).

From “The Metrics of Backpacks“:

I am in a foreign country; these are my hosts. I study their dialects and graph their inflections, seeking fluency. I listen as they discuss fishing trips and ways to get their wives to watch science-fiction movies and how annoyed they get when she eats their leftover burrito from the fridge. I offer up pieces of my own life that I think they will like: stories of my boyfriend’s obsessive CD collection, memories of the science-fiction movies my brother made me watch as a child. I too cringed at the green of the Emperor’s blood in Flash Gordon; I also sat in awe when the owl in Clash of the Titans moved its brass wings. But this is belonging by proxy, a male escort at my side; it is never inherent.

Wednesday Poem

Karen

This is a good one. Maybe because I want a dog, maybe because I’m realizing grief is just…going to stay with me. And that will be OK. (We will be OK…eventually.)

 

Talking To Grief
by Denise Levertov

Ah, Grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.

I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.

You think I don’t know you’ve been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider
my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.

Friday Links

Karen

1. It’s Easter weekend, which will be a hard end to a hard week (Mom was the one in our family with faith; she loved Easter and spring and brunch and getting her adult children something for their “basket”). We’re not celebrating–we decided as a family to take a year off from celebrating anything–but I am making a quiche and listening to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.

2. There is a new collection of Oliver Sacks essays out, including this one on “The Healing Power of Gardens.” If the weather holds, maybe I’ll get some yard work in, too.

Spring, Trees

Karen
Not to be too Anne Shirley, but part of what made this house the winner in the year-long house hunt is that there are so many big trees in the neighborhood. I was looking out the window at them yesterday–the first sunny day after days of rain–and thought of this quote from A Moveable Feast:

 

“With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life…But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.”

Make Nine 2019: The Other Sweatshirt

Karen

Here’s the third thing on the Make Nine list for this year: a sweatshirt in fabric that I indigo dyed back in 2017. (No post about the dyeing but you can see Oliver sitting on it here).

 

After the last sweatshirt, I switched patterns to the Sloane by Named Patterns and it was everything I wanted: high neck, great fit through the shoulders, and those long French darts to add a little something. (Thanks to @threadsnips on Instagram for the suggestion!)

I’ve heard the drafting on Named Patterns praised before; I’d say it’s justified because I’m happy with the fit straight from the envelope. It’s also a really fast sew–this was done in a weekend.

I know the indigo will fade but right now it’s the perfect Bob Ross phthalo blue, so of course I had to pair it with some yellow ochre pants (from Everlane).