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You gotta be able to laugh about it, right?
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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.
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
Doc got me a Lego set for Christmas and it might have been the most inspired gift ever: It gives you the mental break of a puzzle, but it’s structured, which means nothing is open-ended and you never have to search for a solution. If you have my brain (anxious, needs order) then this is the best possible thing you can imagine.
I built the pirate ship from my Christmas set and will disassemble it soon to turn it into a pirate tavern (it’s a 3-in-1!) but in the meantime I found the Legos marketed specifically for adults and bought one for myself:
I remember doing a few sets back in the 90s but I was still young enough that the process wasn’t important, the main thing was getting to the finished product as soon as possible so you could play Lego Pirates. But building sets an an adult? Yes, give me more instructions to follow precisely. I can’t get enough.
Today’s the fourth anniversary of Mom’s death. I don’t have much to say today; the longer it is, the more grief and memory are just a daily thing versus a “before this date, everything was okay” comparison. I wish she was still here. I wish I could show her my quilts and my cakes. I’m glad she’s not sick anymore.
1. This onion definitely made me cry:
2. That’s okay, though, because this kid knows what to say to someone who’s crying:
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3. This was my dad’s theme song for the first few months after mom’s death. It’s just what you have to do: keep on keepin’ on.
PS–First Aid Kit is coming to town in May! Maybe Dad and I should go.
I decided I’d do little fun things every week or so this month, to counteract the winter blues and that final slog of “always winter and never Christmas.” I’m trying very hard to keep the “fun” from just turning into buying stuff online; I’m aiming for experiences or trying new things (even just working in a new place for a morning counts).
So far I’ve gone to a flower arranging class and played with more marzipan–not too bad for nine days into the month.