Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
1. I don’t want to make jokes about a murder but this did make me grimly smile. 
2. What a first week of 2026. I’m feeling this for sure (from Austin Kleon):
3. “The more division you have between people, the easier they are to control.”
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Terrible things are happening in America* but the basement is officially FINISHED, professionally cleaned, and inspected. It took just 12 weeks including holidays (!!) and I love it. If I were rich I’d hire EVERY home improvement project out to the pros.
Here are the befores: 
And here are the afters:
I need to get everything we put in the garage moved back into the new closet before I move in furniture, but I did put some rugs down already. (Gotta protect the new floor!)
*I saw this post this morning and couldn’t agree more. 
After how hard 2025 was, I don’t want to come out and say, “Let’s have more friction in 2026!” But I’ve read two different essays in the last two days about purposely adding friction back in to everyday life via turning your phone off, quitting delivery services, getting out of the car and back on foot, etc.
Dan Sheehan puts it like this, defining what he calls “The Smooth World” (emphasis mine):
The Smooth World, as it is currently and continually designed, is meant to avoid friction at all cost. In it, food can be delivered to your doorstep by unseen butlers, cars turn every excursion out of the house into an isolating door-to-door commute, and in whatever small ways you’re forced to interact with others, you now all have the option of doing so while simultaneously anesthetizing yourself with an unending stream of short form video content.
But hey, those things are chores! Surely optimizing them out of our lives has left more room for leisure! But the optimization hasn’t stopped at chores. Where once games, entertainment, and hobbies were a way of blowing off steam, now many opt instead to remain submerged in that unending stream of content. Our attention is no longer ours to give, having become a new frontier for those who wish to sell targeted advertising.
And Kathryn Jezer-Morton writes,
Tech companies are succeeding in making us think of life itself as inconvenient and something to be continuously escaping from, into digital padded rooms of predictive algorithms and single-tap commands: Reading is boring; talking is awkward; moving is tiring; leaving the house is daunting. Thinking is hard. Interacting with strangers is scary. Risking an unexpected reaction from someone isn’t worth it. Speaking at all — overrated. These are all frictions that we can now eliminate, easily, and we do.
Maybe it’s more about remembering where our attention is going than wanting more friction (because even though I see their points, I am not about to say out loud, “Let’s have a difficult year!”). 
After Christmas I sewed up a couple zip cases for coworkers who’d sent me little presents in the fall. I used stash fabrics and bias but ended up ordering the zippers with a Wawak shipment (because I wanted metal teeth and only had plastic/nylon ones). I thought the pattern might be fiddly but with 1/8″ basting tape, it wasn’t that bad.
These are little–just four inches across and about an inch high–so I’m not sure what they’ll actually be used FOR, but they were easy to stick in a mailer and ship. (Also, do we all know about Pirate Ship? Cheapest shipping possible and a better interface than USPS.)
The holidays are over, the birthdays are over, and now it’s back to work in the gloomy winter. What can be done? Find those “joys far more ordinary” (and turn on your SAD Lamps).
Midwinter Poem
by Victoria Adukwei Bulley
Oh intervals of light in untold sunless days
hardbacked by dusk, there is no guidebook
for the years within a year called winter.
Season of the see-it-through, the out-of-office,
the batten-down. Monied guarantor of the sad
and SAD Lamps alike — hemispheric accidents, all,
of our axial tilt. If not by flying south, what else to do
but stay and bear it? How else to survive, if not by light,
then by joys far more ordinary, unremarkable perhaps,
but good as any that warm the dark days of our lives.
I’m turning 46 tomorrow (!) and still processing the last year and what I want this one to look like, so I’m not sure I have a clear birthday “word for the year” yet. But I think it might be the ideas found in these two unrelated articles.
The first is a dense essay about how the idea of entropy should change our philosophy–“what would our metaphysics and ethics look like if we learned that reality was against us?” The author spends a lot of time getting there, but his idea of “goodness” in a decaying universe was really striking:
“Goodness could consist in any act that seeks, however briefly, to bend the entropic thrust of existence back upon itself – holding it at bay, even if only momentarily. We glimpse this resistance in acts of compassionate care for the suffering, and in efforts to minimise the harm we inflict on the world around us.”
Echoing that idea, the second essay is actually a short post from author Max Gladstone, an allegory about a cast-iron pan he had to restore. He ends it thusly:
One thing we can do against that moment when “all that is solid melts into air,” is to not let it. Fix the thing that seems broken. Form and build the bonds that seem so fragile and so easily torn away. Maybe you can’t walk forever into the wind of change—but each step does matter, and if you can’t imagine even taking a step, at least you can try. […] The Buddha’s right, I think, that all things are transient and empty of inherent fixed being and that the root of suffering can be found in clinging to impermanent things as if they were permanent, but when he says all he really means it, he’s talking about us. You, me, the cast iron pan, the world, we’re all in this together. If the perfect state is impermanent, unfixed—that must apply to the broken state as well. The mess is a gateway to the work, the practice, and at the end of the day, the practice is what we have.
“The mess is a gateway to the work” hit me as hard as “luxurious complications.” Maybe that’s my phrase for 46.
My HEARTFELT wish for all of us:
But if that’s not the case, then here are my hopes for the year: 
(You can buy this from Old Made Good! I might have to.)
2025 was ROUGH, friends. Emergency vets, bedbugs, uncertainty with work, uncertainty with a new house, no upper Millcreek Canyon, saying goodbye to Toby, plus the larger shitshow that is America now… as Doc says, “Don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya,” and that’s what I say to this old year.
I didn’t have too much gift sewing this year, although one thing didn’t get started until December: I got Doc’s brother in their family gift exchange that they do in January and he said he wanted a custom shirt. I promptly forgot about that until I asked Doc’s sister at the end of November what Brother might want and she said, “I really think he’s expecting a shirt.” Shit!
Brother is a car guy with a vintage Cougar, so much searching later, I found the last yardage in existence of the old Alexander Henry muscle car print (from a shop in Wyoming that still hasn’t checked their email, but shipped promptly). Brother was a size 4X, according to Sister, so after googling to see what chest measurement that corresponded to, I bought the Helen’s Closet Tofino Top pattern because that went up to 60 inches.
That’s the size I made and it was a delightful pattern to put together. But does it fit? READER, HE HASN’T EVEN TRIED IT ON YET. 😑 At least it was an easy sew?
Moving on, Doc got another stretch woven print shirt, this time in a Hawaii volcanoes print (from Sew Dynamic Fabrics, same place as his desert print). This fits and he wore it the day of Christmas, because he is a wise man. 
He also got new underwear, because it was time and he’s hard to shop for. But he’s always grateful (again, A WISE MAN) and these are quick to make (the Greenstyle Walbrook Boxer Briefs).
I fully intended to post some seasonal links on Christmas Eve but I started cooking and didn’t even remember the blog until the afternoon. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Here, have some proof that I was cooking:
The traditional sugar cookies, a three-day affair (dough, baking, decorating).
Baby’s first coq au vin, a dish I’ve always wondered about.
Blanched green beans as a side dish (they died tragically in the oven upon reheating).
Cranberry orange rolls for Christmas breakfast because I thought eating cookies for breakfast would be anarchy.
And! We finally got snow on Saturday–last weekend was 60 degrees, yikes–so that was fun to hike in yesterday. 