Author: Karen

How’s The Basement Coming Along?

Karen

I’m slowly getting things moved downstairs. Mid-move I had a real moment of regret about my plans for the space (“I already HAD a sewing room, what am I even doing??”) but now that it’s a little more set up, I’m extremely pleased. This will be the fancy sewing lair I dreamed about when I bought the house, uh, fifteen years ago!

A large room with a long table with 3 sewing mahchines on it against one wall. A long green cabinet is against the other wall and there is a fluffy white rug.

A desk drawer is pulled out. It's filled with thread in rainbow order.

A cabinet with green doors stands open. It is filled with folded fabric.

I still need to: move more things, make a new ironing board cover, make a new fabric-covered pinboard, get more drawer organizers, hang art, and figure out the lamps I want to use, but the fabric fits in the cabinet (whew) and the sewing machines are all down there. We’re getting close!

Seven Years

Karen

 

A woman in shorts stands in front of a giant tropical plant

 

We said goodbye to Mom seven years ago today. Sometimes it seems like it happened decades ago; sometimes I still think, “I need to call her and tell her this!”

Grief does change, though. It doesn’t get “better,” but you get more used to it. Your loved one’s loss is (usually) less of a surprise, and you get more used to thinking about them without your heart breaking all over again.

It doesn’t go away, though, and I’m realizing that I don’t want it to. Because:

Screenshot of a post that says, Grief is perhaps the last and final translation of love. This is the last act of loving someone. And you realize that it will never end. You get to do this to translate this last act of love for the rest of your life.

 

American Onsen

Karen

After five years of day trips, we spent our first night at Maple Grove Hot Springs. There was a learning curve with the wood stove and I realized I’ve completely forgotten how to travel, but it was a kindly place to start to re-learn.


A steaming stream runs down to the river in the afternoon sun

Morning on the river, with mountains on both sides and frost on all the river grasses

A stone pool with a waterfall, steaming in the winter afternoon

Wood stove in a yurt with the door open to see the fire

Plus, they had wild swans on the river AND a resident cat! (He was so friendly, I got a lot of bonks.)
A woman in a spa robe squats down to pet a gray cat

Thrift Store Poem

Karen

As the tides of STUFF move from floor to floor over here, I’m finding boxes and drawers I didn’t go through during the Great Organization of 2025. So the pile of things to donate is growing, which reminded me of this poem I saw in the Ordinary Plots newsletter. As I learned, “Samuel Cheney is an ex-Mormon poet from Centerville, Utah, who now lives in Baltimore. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, and his debut manuscript, BELIEVERS, was a finalist for the 2024 National Poetry Series.”

 

Deseret Industries Thrift
by Samuel Cheney

Promise yourself
you’re looking
for nothing.
Praise the abandoned

Diet Coke can,
the squealing
quivering carts’ wheels,
the aproned associates

who estimate costs
where tags have been
ripped off
out of hope.

The glass case of valuables:

Stockton All-Star card
framed in black mat.

From an ’80s Okinawa mission,
a Pentax.

Talmage’s Jesus the Christ, bound
in napped leather.

This country
affords so little.
These automatic doors
open and condone you.

Who here isn’t untested,
one touch before
broken, selling for
something fair.

I don’t want to live
my life
like a pair
of skis. Make me

of wool. Bring me out
every year—
pass me on—
bury me with someone.

Another Costco Appreciation Piece

Karen

Maybe the most surprising thing about my middle age is the fact that I’m such a Costco fan now. No, corporations are not our friends, but as Jake Lunbderg writes in The Atlantic,

Costco is a marvel not just historically but also in this moment. In an age of broken institutions, insufferable politics, and billionaire businessmen auditioning to be Bond villains, most things feel like they’re getting worse. Costco seems to stay the same. The employees are generally satisfied. The customers are thrilled by the simple act of getting a good deal. All of it makes a unique space in contemporary American life, a space of cooperation, courtesy, and grown-ups mostly acting like grown-ups.

 

Of course, Costco is also very media-shy and last year The New Yorker asked “Can the golden age of Costco last?” but for now… I’ll take a business that isn’t blatantly trying to rip off its customers.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Yeehaw!

Karen

I’m moving all the sewing stuff this week so I had to finish a shirt I started after Christmas. This is a flannel bandanna print from Suppose, the fabric store on the way to the hot springs in Idaho, that I bought in November.

A cropped button up shirt in a white-on-black bandanna print hanging against a white closet door.

I made the cropped version of the Closet Core Jenna Shirt because I bought the end of the bolt and didn’t have enough yardage for the regular view. The cropped view looks kind of weird on the hanger but it works pretty well with high-waisted pants… perhaps even my Yosemite Sam pants for a full cowboy fit?

The Tides Of STUFF

Karen

I started getting things put back into the basement over the weekend and … the second storage shelf we’d moved up to the garage doesn’t fit back in the closet. (Well, it physically fits but it would block access to either the door or the first shelf, so it functionally doesn’t. I’m not sure what I was thinking when I measured.) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So half the things I’d already moved downstairs got brought back upstairs and that second shelf will continue to live in the garage. Meanwhile, we hauled the two IKEA cabinets down there and I put the new legs and doors on, and I got a little excited again. A long low cabinet with green-gray doors against a white wall. Two turquoise lamps are on it and a fluffy white rug is in the foreground.

I’m going to fill that cabinet with vinyl records FABRIC! As soon as I carry it all down two flights of stairs. (•́ ᴖ •̀)

It’s Done!

Karen

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: An unfinished basement from the corner of the room. The insulation and furnace are exposed.

An unfinished stairwell leading into the basement. Various pantry items are stacked on the stair ledge.

And here are the afters:
The same angle of the same basement, but now there are clean white walls, a bathroom, doors over the furnace, and wood-look flooring

The same shot of the stairwell but with finished white walls, lighting, and wood-look stairs

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!)

The basement room with a shaggy white and black rug in it

A bathroom with a green vanity, a leopard rug, and white walls

 

 

 

*I saw this post this morning and couldn’t agree more. Screenshot of a post that says, Thanks for the free 7-day trial of 2026 I'd like to unsubscribe from whatever the hell this