I made my mom a scarf for her birthday. She’s really hard to buy for and making her something requires that she like it (it’s a Mom Law), so it seemed like a good idea. Besides, accessories are a pretty flexible gift.
I used two-thirds of the Liberty prints from last week and followed this tutorial, just making the square a little smaller. There was a lot of hand sewing to finish but it went pretty quickly.
Weekend Report
Look who came to my house on Sunday to celebrate his grandma’s birthday! This was the first time I’d hosted a family event in the new place.
“Reading” the card he “signed.”
Other notable weekend events: Going to Brooks Brothers and attending my first Greek Easter celebration. There was drinking. There was dancing. There was an entire lamb on a spit, head and all. (At the Greek Easter celebration, that is; not at Brooks Brothers.)
Friday Unrelated Information
Incredible
Here’s a rough trailer for an upcoming documentary Alive Inside, about music and how it helps “awaken” people with memory loss. (Bonus Oliver Sacks!) Like my dog rescue video last week, this one starts off sad, but at least watch from about 3:00 – 4:00.
Incredible. If I ever decide I want to use my powers for good, maybe I should go into music therapy.
Happy Birthday Mark Strand
I still like your poem in the Gallivan Center downtown the best:
Visions of the end may secretly seduce
our thoughts like water sinking
into water, air drifting into air;
clouds may form, when least expected,
darkening the glass of self,
canceling resemblances to what we are.
Even here, while summer sunlight
falling through the golden
folds of afternoon
brightens up the air, we mark
our progress by how much
we leave behind. And yet,
this vanishing is burnished
by a slow, melodious light,
as if our passage here
were beautiful because
no turning back is possible.
It is our knowledge of the end
that speaks for us, that has us weave,
as slowly as we can, an elegy
to all our walks. It is our way
of bending to the world’s will
and giving thanks.
Tuesday Project Roundup: "It Never Goes Bad."
My old roommate used to stockpile things like soap and laundry detergent and use the rationale of “it doesn’t expire!”. Similarly, I use that line to justify stockpiling fabric, even when I’m too busy to really sew.
Yes, this is more Liberty of London. It never goes bad!
Something To Ponder
(Via Pinterest. In my head, I hear this being read by Master Yoda.)
Friday Unrelated Information
1. Here’s a fiesty (and profane) piece about the benefits of working in advertising if you’re creative. The writer makes some good points:
You can try to make it with your band or be a novelist in your free time. But during the day, you may as well learn about how to work creatively with other people, and how to accept rejection and outright failure, even if you still think that Verizon catalog copy you wrote was a masterpiece.
2. Being Easter weekend, it’s time for my annual religious experience: listening to Bach’s St Matthew Passion.
3. It’s also this guy’s first Easter (and nearly his first birthday)! I had to resist buying him the bunny ears costume I saw at Target.
Because obviously he doesn’t need ANY clothes to be cute!
Mary Frances On Going To Restaurants
From “D is for Dining Out,” in An Alphabet for Gourmets, by my BFF Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher:
I had a happy beginning in [the] neglected art and much abused privilege [of dining out], one that has sheathed it in unfading pleasure for me when it is done well. When I was no more than five or so my father and mother would begin to prepare my spirits for Easter, or Christmas, or a birthday, and when the festival rolled around, there I would be, waiting to greet it…on the pink velvet seat of the region’s best restaurant.
I admit I am prejudiced about it. I seldom dine out, and because of my early conditioning to the sweet illusion of permanent celebration, of “party” and festivity on every such occasion, I feel automatically that any invitation means sure excitement, that it will be an event, whether it brings me a rained-on hamburger in a drive-in or Chicken Jerusalem at Perino’s. The trouble is, I’m afraid, that I expect people I dine with to feel the same muted but omnipresent delight that I feel.
Worthy Of Dr. Sagan
You guys. Phil Plait at the Bad Astronomy blog has outdone himself. He’s describing a massive, massive infrared survey of the sky–over 150 billion pixels, showing a billion stars–and he does it really, really well (click through to see how he gives an idea of scale). But it’s at the end of the post that he gets really Sagan-esque:
Think on this: there are a billion stars in that image alone, but that’s less than 1% of the total number of stars in our galaxy! As deep and broad as this amazing picture is, it’s a tiny slice of our local Universe.
And once again, we’ve reached the point where I’m out of words. Our puny brains, evolved to count the number of our fingers and toes, to grasp only what’s within reach, to picture only what we can immediately see — balk at these images.
But… we took them. Human beings looked up and wondered, looked around and observed, looked out and discovered. In our quest to seek ever more knowledge, we built the tools needed to make these pictures: the telescopes, the detectors, the computers. And all along, the power behind that magnificent work was our squishy pink brains.
A billion stars in one shot, thanks to a fleshy mass of collected neurons weighing a kilogram or so. The Universe is amazing, but so are we.