I missed Friday’s post because Doc’s guts were acting up again and we ended up at the ER (but no hospitalization this time, yay!). This week’s posting may be on and off because I am a potential juror and am also behind on work because I took Friday off.
Damn! Who else could do without problems?
This was uploaded seven years ago but (as far as I can tell) really started making the rounds this year. I saw it at the beginning of February and thought, “No, January is the worst month”…but with long, long weeks and more snow and all the bare trees with “some awful truth hiding in the branches,” suddenly I see this guy’s point. Anyway, Kevin Killeen is my new hero:
“It’s a month that doesn’t hold up life as any better than it is.”
“Something great happened here but it’s over, and that’s the way February is.”
“Carbohydrates are big this time of year. Also lotions.”
“If you can live through February, you’ll live another year.”
One more week, friends. Hang in there.
I’m calling these The Greenhouse Days of winter, when you just crave something warm and green but there’s still so much cold and gray to get through (with another foot of snow expected tonight, sob). We took a trip to the big “orangerie” at the botanical garden here Sunday and it was glorious: the sun was shining through the glass, there were tropical plants everywhere, we could take our coats off.
Even outside, despite all the snow, is looking promising–this is the same magnolia tree I took a picture of a few weeks ago. Hang in there, little buds!
Continuing the, um, visceral theme of the week*, our buddy Mike found this art/sci-fi worldbuilding project and it’s been fascinating me. As the creator, artist Trevor Roberts, explains:
The Mystery Flesh Pit is the name given to a bizarre natural geobiological feature discovered in the Permian Basin region of West Texas in the early 1970s. The pit is characterized as an enormous subterranean organism of indeterminate size and origin embedded deep within the earth, displaying a vast array of highly unusual and often disturbing phenomena within its vast internal anatomy.
Following its initial discovery and subsequent survey exploration missions, the surface orifice of the Mystery Flesh Pit was enlarged and internal sections were slowly reinforced and developed by the Anodyne Deep Earth Mining corporation, who opened the Pit as a tourist attraction in 1976. In the early 1980s, the site was absorbed into the National Park System which operated and maintained the Mystery Flesh Pit until its sudden closure in 2007.
There isn’t a story to read about it, per se, but you can click through the fake ephemera Roberts created and just get lost:
I’ve been thinking about why I find it so compelling–because I don’t usually go for horror–and I think it’s the idea of making a national park out of something that’s clearly alive and giant. Like, the Yellowstone caldera is also huge and mysterious and dangerous, with lots of “orifices” and acidic pools and geysers, yet we’ve created a whole park with hotels and restaurants and dams on top of it. Of course we’d do the same inside a “superorganism.”
Anyway, go explore the Mystery Flesh Pit. And don’t forget to buy a souvenir on your way out!
*My colonoscopy went fine and Doc’s antibiotics seem to be doing the trick! Hopefully we are done with Poop Stuff for a while.
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You gotta be able to laugh about it, right?
We had to get Doc antibiotics yesterday to try to head off more diverticulitis, and today I get to prep for a colonoscopy (it’s early for me to start but I did a genetic test last year and have an elevated risk, so…that’s the point of screening, I guess).
Poop stuff! Again! At least Toby is Team Normal Poop this time around.
I learned about this celebration this very morning from a Japanese pattern maker I follow on Instagram: Hari-Kuyō, the Festival of Broken Needles. As Professor Wikipedia tells me,
Hari-Kuyō began four hundred years ago as a way for housekeepers and professional needle-workers to acknowledge their work over the past years and respect their tools. In the animist traditions, items as well as humans, animals, plants, and objects are considered to have souls. This festival acknowledged the good given to people by their tools. Practitioners went to Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples to thank their broken needles for their help and service.
Bent or dull pins and needles are stuck into a block of tofu or another soft food and then buried; people often pray for improved sewing skills, too.
Searching around, it seems like a lot of Western crafters have this on their radar already (needle maker Schmetz even has a blog post about it). Now that I do, too, maybe I’ll do something with the old pill container of used sewing machine needles I’ve been collecting.
We made it to the mountains yesterday right as it started snowing. We never regret getting out and it was pretty magical–but wow is there a lot of snow. It’s gonna be July before it’s all gone from the highest elevations.
This is a great essay from a parenting site (fair warning, the next essay down the page talks about having a fourth kid, jesus) about the foods our moms fed us in the 80s and 90s. The food described is an instant nostalgia trip but there are great points to be made that just cooking someone something is enough; it doesn’t have to be over-engineered to the point everyone is unhappy. (“What’s wrong with a salad being made of iceberg lettuce and bagged cheese instead of kale massaged in olive oil and pomegranate seeds? Literally nothing!”)
…there was spaghetti with parmesan from a can and baked potatoes with a big dollop of sour cream and shredded cheddar cheese. There were chicken and broccoli casseroles; there was bottled teriyaki sauce poured over frozen meatballs and rice and meatloaf with a side of steamed frozen veggies. There were frozen waffles for breakfast with sliced strawberries and normal peanut butter that didn’t gloop out when you opened the jar because it needed to be mixed together, and there was Daisy cottage cheese topped with canned, syrupy mandarin oranges, and there were bowls of Lucky Charms.
Hell yes!
A mini mood board for making it to the midpoint of winter:
I heartily agree with this in 2023, The Year of the Capybara:
Replace Groundhog Day with Capybara Spa Day pic.twitter.com/EjO72X0Un2
— Clayton Cubitt (@claytoncubitt) February 2, 2019
