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You gotta be able to laugh about it, right?
Welcome To Poop Week
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.
Almost-Spring Cleaning
I decided to organize and re-do all the fabric storage in the house, which involved opening up bins and boxes in three different places, consolidating/throwing away, and moving the boxes up and down two flights of stairs. (It also involved wondering why I kept tiny scraps of garment fabrics…what was I thinking?)
It’s mostly done now (I have to re-fold the fabric in open storage) and it’s always satisfying to go from looking like the room threw up…
…to being able to see the closet floor (!).
Friday Links
1. Was this made in a lab specifically to appeal to me, reader of 20th century novels and lifting bro? Excerpts From The House of Girth, Edith Wharton’s 1905 Novel About Powerlifting
Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart.
Lily Bart’s arms were bursting out of her satin sleeves like two great slabs of uncooked brisket. “Mr. Selden!” she cried. “What luck. Have you heard? I can deadlift one hundred forty pounds.”
2. Speaking of lifting, here is a short video about seniors competing in powerlifting (via She’s a Beast). Edith was 97 when this was filmed. Edith is our new queen.
3. A Stonehenge theory I can get behind:
Today’s Essay
It’s by Patricia Lockwood in the London Review of Books and despite that august publisher it is both hilarious and horrifying: She describes her husband getting sick with a mystery gut illness in a London hospital, and wow does it capture a lot of what I felt last year during Doc’s own gut illness (“the body simply goes away when you are trying so intensely to project yourself into someone else, blinking in and out, in pain and on morphine, on the verge of being wheeled back”).
Also, I mentioned hilarity, and oh my god I couldn’t stop laughing at parts of this:
“‘Something is very wrong inside me,’ Jason said on his way back from the bathroom, bending over my row with his face white and his arm held rigid over his lower abdomen. Secretly I thought it might be the world’s hardest fart.”
“Emergency surgery was the only option. (‘Oh my God,’ I thought when I heard, ‘but he’s completely full of Lebanese food.’)”
“All of the people who had been told, in the direst terms, that my husband’s asshole was going to be directly connected to his mouth, and that we would live in England for ever, now had to be told something else.”
Today’s Holiday: Hari-Kuyō
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.
Tuesday Project Roundup: Still Sewing
I’m still working on the quilted chore coat but we’re entering the home stretch: I finished all the interior binding and started on the actual construction…maybe 7 weeks after I started cutting out pieces? But I think I want to try to focus a little more on slower/bigger projects this year, since I truly don’t need more clothes.
Interestingly enough, the relatively small amount of piecing and cutting I’ve done has truly improved my accuracy: Making bias binding used to be a struggle and a mystery for me, but this time around I made a perfect square and cut a perfect bias and sewed the most even .25″ seams and generally breezed through something I used to struggle with. Yay for skills!
So Much Snow
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.
Friday Links
1. This Austin Kleon post about a “noticing walk” reminded me of this David Sedaris classic about getting 60,000 steps day, “Stepping Out.”
At the end of my first sixty-thousand-step day, I staggered home with my flashlight knowing that I’d advance to sixty-five thousand, and that there will be no end to it until my feet snap off at the ankles. Then it’ll just be my jagged bones stabbing into the soft ground.
2. The mystery of Worcestershire sauce!
But Worcestershire’s closest condiment cousin is probably garum, a fish sauce that was integral to the kitchens of antiquity. […]The 4th-century Roman cookery book Apicius describes oxygarum, a mixture of garum and vinegar, which was used as a poaching liquid and seasoning, and which sounds an awful lot like a primeval Worcestershire sauce.
3. All of us, at this point in the winter (from Katie Benn):
4. I cannot stop laughing at this:
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In Praise Of Mom Food
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!