Friday Links

By in Friday Unrelated Information

1. I just discovered the Cheese by Numbers Instagram and site and I am obsessed. When I want to mindlessly scroll, I scroll through the archives and just…look at cheese plates. Rules to follow + food that you arrange instead of cook? I’m in. Check it out.

2. It’s dark, there’s a pandemic, it’s nearly Christmas, then it’s my birthday, and after that it’s the second anniversary of my mom dying. Things are rough. I appreciated this thread about grief, written by a mom 14 years after she lost her son, but… I’m not to the point of really believing it yet. You can read it on Twitter or read a compiled version.

3. From Doc, and this is the Christmas spirit I want all year:

 

Happy Birthday to Matt

By in birthdays, love

It’s my love’s 50th birthday today. Whenever I talk about him, it’s easy to make it all about me. He did, after all change my life–not just for being such a good partner, but for giving me the push I needed to get into therapy and onto medication. If he did nothing else ever, I’d be forever grateful.

But he does so much else, every day. He’s constantly checking in with his friends, our friends, work friends, family (including mine). He loves to learn things–anything, from history to how things are made to what actor made a cameo in that series. For him, I think it’s a way to connect even more with other people and appreciate how smart humans can be.

He is the fairest person I know, but he won’t tolerate cruelty. He holds himself to the highest standards of all, which can be tricky (I speak from experience) but he gives the people he cares about so much benefit of the doubt.

He’s the wokest bae, classically handsome, the literal strong and tall man of my dreams. Happy birthday, honey. I love you.

Ornament Exchange

By in Christmas, sewing

My work is doing an ornament exchange-by-mail and, in a moment of being a team player, I signed up for it. The company is small enough at this point that I thought I’d get someone I knew pretty well, but no, I got the one person I almost never work with.

So, I broke out the felt and made a generic tree. Everyone likes trees, right?

I forget how fun it is to play with felt–I just found an image I liked on the internet and then layered the felt as I went. I was able to use the embroidery stitches on my machine for the first time, too.

The felt was all leftover from the stockings I made my brother’s family back in 2014 and I just threw this in an envelope with a couple stamps for mailing, so it was a zero-cost project. Not bad for some (grudging) team player holiday spirit.

Monday Poem

By in Christmas, poems

This seems appropriate to the season and today’s weather:

Christmas
by Bernard O’Donoghue

Despite the forecast’s promise,
It didn’t snow that night;
But in the morning, flakes began
To glide all right.
Not enough to cover roads
Or even hide the grass;
But enough to change the light.

Happy Birthday, Altair

By in birthdays

It’s my sister-in-law’s birthday today! Altair has been married to my brother for 18 years now (!). She brings such an antidote to the anxiety-fueled cynicism my family can have: She cares deeply. She loves openly. She knows feelings aren’t facts. And she’s an inherent optimist.

She’s passionate about her work and she values being a mentor to other women, which is something I don’t think she had in her early career. She recently got promoted and I had a chance to see the deck she used for her interview. It was classic Altair: funny, capable, and totally sincere.

She’s raising her boy to share her values and, while I don’t think he missed out on all of the genetic anxiety, it makes me so proud and happy to hear him say, “I love you” so much and to generally see the best in all things–just like his mom.

Happy birthday, Altair, and thank you.

 

 

Friday Links

By in Friday Unrelated Information

1. If you read anything today, read this: How to Be an Active Bystander When You See Casual Racism. “God, I hope someone says something, you think with increasing desperation. And so does everyone else.”

2. Swole Woman wrote a long piece about finding motivation to work out, and I copied many quotes into my Quotes email draft. This one, though, got put in bold: “Sometimes not feeling like working out is actually feeling overwhelmed by our expectations.”

As a perfectionist, as someone with anxiety, as someone who’s still a beginner-level lifter: THIS. I’m still learning to manage just…taking it one day at a time.

3. As the tweet where I saw this says, “This should hang in every classroom.”

 

 

 

Time For Space Advent

By in Christmas, space

I remember the Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar a little late every year, but I do remember it. Head over to The Atlantic to see a photo from Hubble every day and get some good perspective.

“This galaxy, known as NGC 1032, is located about a hundred million light years away in the constellation Cetus. This view is looking right at the edge of what is actually a spectacular spiral galaxy, with a broad disc of gas and dust dimming some of the light of its many stars along the middle.”

How To Hang Removable Wallpaper

By in decorating

Step 1: Figure out how you want the pattern to be split up on the wall. (We decided to center a full repeat in the middle of the wall.)

Step 2: Drop a plumb line on both sides of where your first roll will go. Tell your partner that “plumbus” is Latin for “lead” because that’s what the weight at the end of the line was back in the day. Realize that’s where “plumbing” comes from, too.

Step 3: Hang your first roll following your guide lines, then keep hanging rolls, following your first one that’s perfectly aligned. Say goodbye to the weird coral accent color that never really worked.

Step 4: Make sure you have lots of helpers. One of your helpers may bring their helper (Pink Mousie) over to see what’s going on.

Step 5: Removable wallpaper is pretty forgiving, so if you find your ceiling isn’t perfectly level, thus making your vertical lines get off slightly by the end of the wall (something you didn’t consider as you were pondering “plumbus”), you can peel it up and smooth it back down repeatedly to fudge the pattern match.

Step 6: Trim off the extra paper at the corners and bottom using a sharp blade and a ruler, put everything back, and ask your partner, “Do we live in a magazine now??? We DO.”

Hanging removable wallpaper is VERY doable. I would say it’s easier than painting–it’s definitely less mess and cleanup and far easier (for me) to get a nice sharp edge. We got our wallpaper from this Etsy store but you can find it lots of places, including Target.

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