Personal Perestróĭka

Hello, Monday morning.  Why are you so very cold and foggy?  That whole frosted over car thing was so not on.  It is nearly April.  No more frost, ice, snow or anything else, please.  I have already had to restructure part of my day because of the cold and fog.  Bleh.

Had a lovely time at the benefit for Cowboy Keith last night.  It was nice to see so many people from the community out and sharing.  You can donate at the website if you have the cash and the inclination and weren’t able to make it out last night.

I wore the purple dress last night.  It is definitely cute, but the next version of it will be longer as it isn’t something one could sit down in right now.  I also made a spring-y skirt this weekend:
(yeah, weird crop, my hair was doing something unmentionable and really, trust me, you didn’t want to see it)

Alas, the weather has not cooperated since I made it.  I finished a few small repair/alteration sewing projects this weekend as well. Still many more to go.  I’m half tempted to go do all my ironing right now, just so I can stand over the heat vent while I do it.  Brrr.  I also ran into my friend Miss K (from Seattle!) at the benefit last night and I promised her thread color updates.  Only mentioning it here so that I will hopefully remember to do it.

Alright, work calls.  Indeeed it’s actually been on hold for a bit waiting for me to pick up, so I better take the call this time.

I am having Bristish cafe style cheese toasties for breakfast (Momma, we will get some wheat-free bread and make these when you visit).

I am listening to Last Train Home’s “Last Good Kiss” over and over this morning, as it seems to suit my current situation.  Perhaps a little more dramatic than my reality, but it works nonetheless.

I am making a list of things to do today.  I recently gave up this practice in favor of a rotating ongoing master list of things that needed doing.  That just gave me much much much anxiety so I have reverted back to the simpler list for the day.

I am trying to ignore my impending birthday.  Yes, it’s a month away, but yesterday I woke up all full of contemplation about it.  The years ending in 0s and 5s are fine for me, it’s the 1s and 6s that get you.  They make me feel compelled to assess where I am in life and that never seems to match up with what I think I should have acheived.

I am going to sew something cheerful today, since the skies are so grey.  I am going to be grateful for the grey because I know it is what brings the green.

I am all errands and work and cleaning today.  And yet, even just drving around is incredibly wonderful.  Because it is spring.  Really really spring.  I can’t really express properly how much I love spring.  It is like a full-body, physical experience for me.

There is the wonder of the cherry blossom snow falling on yards and blowing past windows.  The redbuds that speckle the newly greening landscape with insane, gorgeous purple.  But most of all, here in Tennessee, it is the return of the trees.  A couple days rain and suddenly the hills are chartreuse and full of a fluttery new green. The wrinkly, tissue bursts of new leaves give such a rush of pleasure that it’s nearly sexual. Green green green green.  Delicious.

Now I will go sit in the sun and eat chicken salad and love love love on the spring for a second before I get back to work.

In the last twelve hours I have: driven home from work, checked my email & rss feeds, written a letter that I will never send, listened to a storm roll in, slept, dreamt, read the entirety of Coupland’s Eleanor Rigby (cover to cover), made coffee, had breakfast, texted with Libelle, checked Facebook, listened to hours of NPR, made a list of things to do, ignored said list, checked my email again, contemplated what to wear, worried over what I am not getting done, watched the rain fall and my yard flood, listened carefully to the bird calls outside to see which new ones have arrived for spring.  Perhaps not all exactly in that order.

I did all of this without ever seeing another human being, or hearing the voice of one, even over the phone.  I have texted, chatted, emailed and read FB status updates.  I have, I guess, interacted, though not directly or immediately. This is particularly interesting to me today.  It is not an abnormal twelve hours for me to have had, but Eleanor Rigby really was book almost entirely about loneliness and the nature of it in the modern world.

I really like Coupland.  I haven’t read his last 3 or 4 books, but I read all the previous ones and have nothing negative to say.  They are fast and engaging reads.  I always leave them feeling very thoughtful and slightly changed.  I admire his minor use of magical realism.  I appreciate his characters and generally find them likable.  I love reading about Vancouver and other parts of the northwest.  I love the way his characters always have mirrors to my own life.  Growing up in the 70s, in the northwest is entirely it’s own thing.  I’m sure his characters are relatable to many people of all ages and from all places, but I find a small, special sort of connection. Which is, perhaps, the root of what makes me like Coupland’s work.

I can’t say whether you would like the book or not.  Probably, if you like Coupland already.  I can’t say much about it at all.  My response to it was very personal.  As would be, I hope, anyone’s, since I guess that’s what loneliness is: something very internal and intensely personal.  I can’t decide right now if I think loneliness is something we should cast out of ourselves entirely, or if it is something to be reduced, shrunk, and then treasured.

In the last twelve hours, I have lived my life, alone, exactly the way I would want too.  In the last twelve hours, I have lived entirely outside my life, away from it.  It was my life and yet a nice escape, restorative.  I am glad to have done it, and yet, though I know I know I will do it again, it is not necessarily what I would choose for myself.

So I’m sure most of you know about Mercury Retrograde, and the havoc it can cause.  Well right now Venus is in retrograde.  Which is about relationships (of all kinds) and right now it is particularly about dealing with your past in a way that enables you to move forward.  Resolution of conflict, dealing with buried feelings etc.  There’s a bunch of other stuff too.  My ruling planet is Venus and so, as I understand it, this means that potential events of this retrograde are particularly applicable to me (as they are also particularly applicable to Libelle, but in a slightly different was as she is an Aries and the this is Venus Retrograde in Aries). So anyway, given that, to some extent I believe in all of this, you would think that maybe I would brace mayself before I opened my inbox each day.  But no, I sit down, half-caffeinated and blithely click until I am suddenly faced with something that I probably can’t deal with first thing in the morning.

Really Facebook is probably to blame more than anything.  It’s like a bizarre continual online reunion.  Sometimes very welcome, sometimes very awkward, sometimes both at once.

And I suspect that it doesn’t help that my headspace is all wonky today from a series of really conplicated strange, stressful dreams.  In one I was traveling back and forth between my mother’s house and my father’s house.  At each I was trying to plant flowers and maintain gardens and gather things that were mine to take with me, but at every turn something would come up and I’d have to jump in the car, drive through the desert for hours, and go to the other parent’s house to solve a problem or fix something or water something, or search again for some lost object that I was sure belonged only to me.  I also had a dream about ebing with a bunch of friends and being chased through the woods by robot policemen.  Sadly I remember less of that dream, but really each were equally stressful.

Now I need to focus on my external life.  Clearly this will take much more coffee. And maybe so exterior motivation.  Does anyone want to come over today and just around and tell me what to do next until I get everything done?  Because that would be great.

It’s is a gorgeous, exactly perfect first day of Spring!  Today I went and held Chef Daddy’s new baby, who will henceforth be known as Queen Mab, as she is a tiny fairy.  Is there anything better in the world than spring flowers and tiny, sweet babies?

Last night I dreamt about my friends’ new baby.  She was sitting her little seat, still too small to hold her head up, but she was very alert.  I kept trying to tell her she could go to sleep, that everything would still be there in the morning, but she wanted to see what everyone was doing. Clearly I have some special insight proving she will be one of the smartest girls ever!!

I am so tired today.  I am fantasizing about an afternoon nap.  I am disappointed that the hammock isn’t set up already.  Not enough to bother setting it up though.

I am going to draft out a test pattern for a baby clothes idea I had.  I am maybe going to finish the dress I’ve been altering for Libelle.  I am maybe going to sweep and mop the house.  I am maybe going for a walk in the sun.  I am maybe just going to sit here and work on the stupid RSS feed coding problem that I am still having.  I am maybe going to shower.  I am maybe going to walk to the cafe next door for lunch.  Why am I not in downtown Portland with 600 taco trucks to choose from?  I want good tacos.  Mmmm, tacos.  I am maybe going to be easily distracted today.

I did manage to get around to making some bias tape the other day:

I used this tutorial for the continuous tape (less sewing!).

I have many many many other things to do today, but first more coffee!!  HURRAH!

I am home form work and freaking exhausted but I just got the baby news.  BABY!!  Chef Daddy and his beautiful wife had their first child tonight.  And beautful girl, with a brilliantly Irish name, born on Paddy’s Day!  Hooray!!  Everyone raise your pint of Guinness to celebrate!  EEEEEEEEEEEE!

I just spent two hours running errands.  I’m half tempted to write an insane, long rant about people’s inability to drive on the freeway in Nashville.  I will instead, try to remain smiling and forget the whole episode.

While I was out I got a bias tape maker in a wider size.  I will now work very hard to get everything else I need to do done before I spend the rest of the day making bias tape.  I don’t even need bias tape immediately for anything, I just suddenly want to make lots of it in patterns and bright colors.

This weekend I did a little refashioning.  Turning an oddly sized long-sleeved blouse into a much cuter, better fitted short-sleeved blouse.  I forgot to take a before picture, but this gives you the general idea of what I removed:

I also made a sewing set on my Flickr, which has a few more details on this and some past projects as well.

I’m pretty sure I make this post every year:
The Ides of March

The term Ides comes from the earliest Roman calendar, which is said to have been devised by Romulus, the mythical founder of Rome. Whether it was Romulus or not, the inventor of this calendar had a penchant for complexity. The Roman calendar organized its months around three days, each of which served as a reference point for counting the other days:

Kalends (1st day of the month)
Nones (the 7th day in March, May, July, and October; the 5th in the other months)
Ides (the 15th day in March, May, July, and October; the 13th in the other months)
The remaining, unnamed days of the month were identified by counting backwards from the Kalends, Nones, or the Ides. For example, March 3 would be Five Nones—5 days before the Nones (the Roman method of counting days was inclusive; in other words, the Nones would be counted as one of the 5 days).

Used in the first Roman calendar as well as in the Julian calendar (established by Julius Caesar in 45 B.C.E.) the confusing system of Kalends, Nones, and Ides continued to be used to varying degrees throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.

So, the Ides of March is just one of a dozen Ides that occur every month of the year. Kalends, the word from which calendar is derived, is another exotic-sounding term with a mundane meaning. Kalendrium means account book in Latin: Kalend, the first of the month, was in Roman times as it is now, the date on which bills are due.

I woke up this morning feeling vile.  Nauseous, overheated and a little dizzy.  I feel a little better now.  I finally ate some very bland breakfast and am now back in bed.  It’s cold.  Cold outside, cold in my house.  I feel yucky.  And most the work I need to do today is from the laptop anyway.  I wish working from bed felt decadent and wonderful, but mostly it feels lazy and pathetic.

From the new Lynda Barry book, What It Is?

I have a whole list of things to do.  A few of them I could be doing while surfing the net.  Instead I am on Etsy obsessing about buttons.  Look at these!!    Also my birthday is a mere 6 weeks away, and I know many of you have been sitting around worrying that you haven’t given me in gifts so long, I figure the least I can do is update my favorites list. *ahem*

Also, how freaking hilarious is this?

Link found via pretty Pettywhack:  I want to buy this just so I can set it on fire and make sure it does not exist in the universe anymore.

In my defense, I am way behind on everything.  The plague really kicked my ass last week.  So maybe I am catching up on fucking off before I am catching up on work?  The iPod today is giving me a continuous back and forth between Wild Sweet Orange and Against Me! It’s making me happy but possibly a little more erratically insane.

Okay, going to work now.  Really.  And hey, it’s stil early.  I only fucked away the part of the day where I probably would have been asleep anyway.

I know that between today’s high and tomorrow’s low the temp will drop by nearly 50°F.  I know that spring is here, and yet still fluttery and new and not ready to keep me warm.  I know that tornado season is dawning.  And yet walking outside at 7:20 this morning to a pleasently damp 62°F? Felt like I’d won the lottery.

So this morning I made the gingerbread pancakes.  They were kind of underwhelming.  I had lemon curd though, so that made them spectacular.  If I made them again, from that recipe, I would double the coffee, double the cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger.  (Ahem, or even use nutmeg, as I couldn’t find any, so I used allspice instead.)  They were kind of too cakey too, I might also add more buttermilk. I’m full, and yet still kind of craving gingerbread.

This is where I live.

Photo by edwin.donnelly via nashvillest.

Romance Sonambulo

Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.
With the shade around her waist
she dreams on her balcony,
green flesh, her hair green,
with eyes of cold silver.
Green, how I want you green.
Under the gypsy moon,
all things are watching her
and she cannot see them.

Green, how I want you green.
Big hoarfrost stars
come with the fish of shadow
that opens the road of dawn.
The fig tree rubs its wind
with the sandpaper of its branches,
and the forest, cunning cat,
bristles its brittle fibers.
But who will come? And from where?
She is still on her balcony
green flesh, her hair green,
dreaming in the bitter sea.

–My friend, I want to trade
my horse for her house,
my saddle for her mirror,
my knife for her blanket.
My friend, I come bleeding
from the gates of Cabra.
–If it were possible, my boy,
I’d help you fix that trade.
But now I am not I,
nor is my house now my house.
–My friend, I want to die
decently in my bed.
Of iron, if that’s possible,
with blankets of fine chambray.
Don’t you see the wound I have
from my chest up to my throat?
–Your white shirt has grown
thirsy dark brown roses.
Your blood oozes and flees a
round the corners of your sash.
But now I am not I,
nor is my house now my house.
–Let me climb up, at least,
up to the high balconies;
Let me climb up! Let me,
up to the green balconies.
Railings of the moon
through which the water rumbles.

Now the two friends climb up,
up to the high balconies.
Leaving a trail of blood.
Leaving a trail of teardrops.
Tin bell vines
were trembling on the roofs.
A thousand crystal tambourines
struck at the dawn light.

Green, how I want you green,
green wind, green branches.
The two friends climbed up.
The stiff wind left
in their mouths, a strange taste
of bile, of mint, and of basil
My friend, where is she–tell me–
where is your bitter girl?
How many times she waited for you!
How many times would she wait for you,
cool face, black hair,
on this green balcony!
Over the mouth of the cistern
the gypsy girl was swinging,
green flesh, her hair green,
with eyes of cold silver.
An icicle of moon
holds her up above the water.
The night became intimate
like a little plaza.
Drunken “Guardias Civiles”
were pounding on the door.
Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea.
And the horse on the mountain.

–  Federico García Lorca
(Translated by William Logan)

Am definitely still sick.  Getting better.  Please send hot young guys to bring me hot Thai soup and I will be fully repaired post haste. Yes.

I tried to make my own bias tape yesterday, but either I’m an idiot or I was still just too sick to concentrate.  Maybe will try again today.  I did finish a dress this week:

I have no idea why the colors in the picture came out so weird, except I was sick when I took this and it took me forever to figure out how to set the timer.  The dress isn’t perfect, but it is definitely wearable.  The side seam pockets came out nicely.  The collar puckers a little oddly, but you’d probably only know if I told you.

Here’s the collar detail (unironed), lined in a lovely pattern that actually matches the whole thing pretty well.  The pleats on the collar came out really well (except that one pucker, which isn’t shown here).  The color is great, though I might go with a slightly lighter weight fabric on the next version of this one.  The next one might also need darts in the back.  Heck, this one needs darts in the back, I’m just too lazy to add them right now.

It’s warming up here, so hopefully I can war this tonight or tomorrow and get a better picture of it.

Last night I had series of complicated dreams.  Each dream began with me thinking I was awake, dreaming that I had insomnia.  In the first dream I got up and went outside. I found MOPMD standing on his porch and he asked me to walk with him.  We went around to his neighbor’s houses, but I persuaded him not to knock, as it was 4 am.  We returned to his house, only to find a few of his friends had arrived. They started playing music and making drinks and soon, even some of my friends arrived and there was no privacy left anywhere, nor enough quiet to sleep, though I wanted nothing more than to sleep.  I woke up, tossed, turned, drifted off again.  I dreamt that Libelle came to MOPMD’s house to pick me up and we went straight to the airport.  We spent the day wandering in some small town on the Italian coast, trying to meet up with the rest of our school group.  We left the town to go see the nearby lagoon and got caught out by the tide in a little stone building wondering if we could make it to the roof and if that would be high enough to get us out of the water.  An attractive Italian policeman arrived and rescued us with a little pink Zodiac.  He chided us for not paying enough attention to the tide tables and the time of day (it was getting dark).  Back in town we ran into some guys we knew and one of them asked me out, he eventually morphed into MOPMD, and I spent the rest of the night worrying about whether he really wanted to ask me out or if he was just humouring me.  I woke up again, got up for a second, and came back to bed cold. I couldn’t shake the chill. I dreamt of snakes on cold dark rocks, shuddering, before they tightened into denser coils to try and keep warm.  I dreamt that my body extended in light, down an amorphous highway of history, but never found a goal, as it shivered and shuddered for the cold. I looked and looked for a soft, warm place to rest, but was met only with the hard, dark road, and increasing weariness and cold.

Suffice to say that I don’t feel at all rested this morning.  I do still feel cold.  It is, however, hopefully the last cold cold cold day for a while.

I had hoped to sleep more, but it doesn’t seem to be on the table today, so I will make breakfast and drink coffee while I read the news.  I will make my to-do list while I watch the movie I didn’t finish last night.  I will clean the house, do the laundry, and get some real work done.  Today I will make a day of it.  Or maybe I will just stay under this fleecy blanket if it doesn’t get warmer in here.

How would one go about making gingerbread pancakes?  It can’t be that hard right?  And ha, I’ve only had two sips of coffee and it took me the entire typing of those first two sentences for me to realize I could just Google it.  To complete this experiment I would also need to procure lemon curd.  So I guess it isn’t happening today, although Publix will probably come through for me on the ingredients.

Last night I dreamt that Libelle and I moved into a new house.  It was strangely laid out and needed a lot of work (just like our current house!!).  In the dream, as we were moving, and all our friends were helping us lay new floors through the place, I went outside and saw hoards of traffic.  Apparently it was game day, UT (Tenn) vs. UT (Texas) (and no, I have no idea if these teams would really play each other in football) and we’d moved in right across from the stadium (which I guess means we either moved to Kville or Texas?).  Oh No! My dream self thought, the Nashvillest girls warned me about this!  I have to decide before game day if I am going to leave the house at all, and time it around the traffic.  And I started shaking, grabbed a friend and kind of collapsed against him and started sobbing.  When he asked what was wrong, I choked out that I’d only just realized that I’d left East Nashville, and if I’d realized before then I never would have moved.

So clearly, the mental message here is: don’t leave East Nashville.  Heh.  The weird thing is though, that actually the stadium’s location traps us in east Nashville when the Titans play.  The traffic management is so bad that we are left with only a couple options for getting into the city and those are generally the long, very very long way ’round. It’s hard to say, really, if my psyche is warning me against moving out of E. Nash, or if it is just anxious about football season.  Which, uh, preseason isn’t even until like August or something, right?  Also, damn it, Tennessee, what have you done to me that I am dreaming about football.

Anyway, somehow I woke up from all of this fantasizing about gingerbread pancakes with lemon curd.  Which I think I read about soemwhere recently, as this isn’t something I would generally make up myself.  Alas, I have no lemon curd (which is a shame, I should perhaps always have some in the house, of course I’d just eat it and have to get more), nor buttermilk to make the pancakes with.  I could instead make waffles with apple butter.  It seems almost as good, but only almost.  Hmm, maybe I will have bacon instead.  Why is Sunday breakfast always so late and such a production?  What I am really asking here is: why does someone not just bring me exactly what I want for breakfast on Sundays?