AJAX BELL

Author of the Queen City Boys books

Category Archives: heartsafire


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Forced change and willpower

Last summer I finally hit the wall of being so unhappy with my body that I had to take action.  For years I’d gained weight and become more sedentary.  I thought I ate pretty well and figured that genetics was against me and there was nothing I could do about my round little apple dumpling shape.  And I didn’t care so much.  I’ve never been terrifically concerned with beauty aesthetics and I am genuinely concerned with the way our society raises young women to starve themselves.  I have a couple friends who underwent bariatric surgery to great (over 100lbs) weight loss and each of them told me that at the end of it, they were still who they’d been before and whatever demons they had still needed to be faced, skinnier or not.  I knew none of my demons had to do with my weight so why fight a losing battle with my body?

But as I age my body becomes more my enemy.  Aches, joint pains, longer recovery times, many new problems.  Everywhere you look there’s a new study saying that exercise will cure everything.  I got into physical therapy for my chronic, severe shoulder pain.  I worked on my posture, I diligently did my recovery exercises twice a day and I decided to get fit.  I mean if I was already doing some sort of exercise twice a day, why not add more?  I determined the the optimum, most convenient exercise for me (indoor rowing) and set to it, with long series of staggered goals.  The biggest one being “turn 40 being in the best shape of my life.”  I rowed and rowed for weeks and the weight almost immediately started falling off.  Exercise with a surprise benefit!  I wasn’t just becoming healthier, I was visibly changing.

Fitness minded friends encouraged me to count calories and really look at my diet.  I insisted I didn’t need to do that because I knew I ate pretty well: no gluten, mostly whole, fresh foods, very little packaged or pre-prepared food.  But I caved pretty quickly and started using My Fitness Pal, initially to just track exercise but my use coincided with discovering my recent weight loss.  I was encouraged so I started tracking what I was eating every day for a few weeks and yes, according to the general consensus, I was eating too many calories for my height & age.  Sure they were “good” calories, but they were still too many.

Armed with numbers (weight and calories and energy expenditure) I didn’t quite understand, I read up on nutrition and on nutrition and sports medicine.  There’s a mountain of information out there and lot of it is wrong.  I sorted through message boards and essays of advice and I eventually made a standard for myself.  Maybe some of it is wrong, it’s hard to tell, but for me it’s reasonable, practical and makes sense.  I eat a low carb, high protein, high fat diet, still avoiding most processed foods.  I spent months altering my diet slightly and recognizing what was making me feel better and what was making me feel worse.  And the weight continued to come off, slowly but steadily.

In the last few months I’ve been pretty uneven about exercise.  My consistent routine was upheaved by moving and the demands of the new house and my job, by not immediately creating a new routine when my circumstances changed.  Days shy of turning 40 I’ve nearly met the weight loss goal I set when I started tracking calories and I feel great.  I can’t stress enough how much pain I was in before and how much simple weight loss helped me feel better.  But even when I was heavier I felt much, much better when I was exercising regularly.  I’m small and relatively fine boned and extra weight was literally dragging me down, so yes, I feel better with out it.  Exercise however has a threefold improvement: the satisfaction of accomplished a single task set out to do (row 30 mins, walk an hour), you get the immediate rush of improved blood flow, it’s calming and over time you physically feel stronger and more capable.  It’s like this door to understanding has opened for me.  Yes, of course we’ve all heard “it’s just diet and exercise” for ever.  But I can’t state strongly enough how true that really is for me.  It is hard work, not because it’s hard to do, but because it takes commitment and dedication and sometimes the returns are slow to show. But really unless you have a major medical problem, six weeks of dedication, to diet, exercise, or both should show you what’s possible.

Still I’m not nearly to where I want to be.  Halfway there.  I’ve got diet figured out, as long as I stick to it I should be fine (“it’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle change”). But exercise I’m still learning, it still feels forced some days and I don’t love it. Yet.  I’m going to get there.  That’s my goal for the next year.  I know I need to work harder because just like my friends, here I am at goal weight for my height, age and build and I look in the mirror and I don’t see much that’s different than where I started (in fact I can only see the difference when I compare pictures side by side).  Lumpy, poochy, misshapen belly, weak arms, shoulder pain that flares up when I’m too sedentary, aches that could otherwise be controlled.  I am so much better than I was 11 months ago, but  I’m not great yet and I want to age into greatness, into fitness and most importantly into strength.  So I will keep working, keep striving and never set an end point, because I want to have a good relationship with this body and like all relationships, you have to keep at it, keep listening and keep trying.

And because no make over story is complete without pictures:

Continue reading →


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Hooray say the people, it’s the Solstice!

Today in the Northern Hemisphere we round the corner on darkness.  It is the Hibernal solstice when the sun is near its greatest distance from the equatorial plane, standing still as it were.

Today Marduk tamed the monsters of chaos and for one more year we are safe as we move back into the light.

Today we light candles and keep them lit.  Though darkness is already on the run, we must continue to chase it away so spring can come faster.

Today the Oak King is apparently dead, his branches bare and cold.  We thought the Holly King had won, as he remained green,  but long live the Oak King as he returns to rule us into Midsummer!  Go, hang the holly, let it catch bad spirits on it’s tiny horns, protecting us in the months of darkness when the border with the shadowlands is permeable.

Today is the Saturnalia where we eat and dance and decorate the evergreens with red berries.  We will reverse all our roles, switch with our opposites and see the world from the other side, through other eyes.

Today and for the days to come, find joy in each other, celebrate, kiss beneath the mistletoe, feast in the light of candles.  Celebrate the darkness and the joy we have as  it washes away.  Tonight we breathe and meditate on our lives.  We breathe out the things we want gone, we breathe in our wishes for the coming year.  Tomorrow life begins again.


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What Spain Was Like

“She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.”

– William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (full quote here)

Yesterday morning (relatively speaking, to my current sense of time), I got on a plane in Barcelona.  It flew out over the Mediterranean, which was spectacularly blue, and then turned sharply and went directly over Sitges, a town I had visited just days before.  I wept copiously with a great sense of loss as the plane went over the entire length of the Pyrenees, until reached the Bay of Biscay and turned over the Atlantic, towards Philadephia.

I am presently too tired, too soul-lagged to tell you about it.  Indeed I may never getting around to writing a narrative of it, but I promise lots and lots of pictures as soon as I get all 500+ of them sorted and tagged and all that modern day nonsense that allows me to foist my living room vacation slide show on you.  For now my soul is still somewhere over the Pyrenees, perhaps, still dreaming of the Mediterranean.


What Spain Was Like

Spain was a taut, dry drum-head
Daily beating a dull thud
Flatlands and eagle’s nest
Silence lashed by the storm.
How much, to the point of weeping, in my soul
I love your hard soil, your poor bread,
Your poor people, how much in the deep place
Of my being there is still the lost flower
Of your wrinkled villages, motionless in time
And your metallic meadows
Stretched out in the moonlight through the ages,
Now devoured by a false god.

All your confinement, your animal isolation
While you are still conscious
Surrounded by the abstract stones of silence,
Your rough wine, your smooth wine
Your violent and dangerous vineyards.

Solar stone, pure among the regions
Of the world, Spain streaked
With blood and metal, blue and victorious
Proletarian Spain, made of petals and bullets
Unique, alive, asleep – resounding.

– Pablo Neruda


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Two down and what makes three?

Some days you just need to change everything.  And sometimes you remember to document it.  I’m pretty sure my hair was holding me back. Heh.

and

 

And of course if you’ve decided to have a week long mid-life crisis, then haircutting isn’t enough, you need to get a giant new tattoo as well:


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An open letter to Sherman Alexie

Just read a line in a Sherman Alexie story about standing in line at Bartell’s and suddenly I’m so homesick I’m not sure I can live through the heartbreak of it. In my head I ask Sherman Alexie if he imagines how many of his throw away lines profoundly affect people?  I think of every word I’ve put out there, every bit of fiction I’ve written, and no one has ever come back to me with the important words, with the phrases that I labored over, they only come to tell me about the how they were moved by my fast lines, the ones that drop out, that I don’t consider at all before I put them to paper.

Perhaps the lines I don’t labor over mean the most, come more truly from me?  Perhaps there is no meaning in any of it and will just keeping spilling out words, looking for the turn of phrase that will free my soul and find it someday.  Perhaps Sherman Alexie labored over that line and still will never know will never know how his two sentences made me break my own heart.  I could write him a letter and tell him, but I would labor too hard over the words, I would lose the importance of sharing what he gave me.  I have always been writing this letter to him in my head, through out the years, every time I read his stories and poems.  A letter that never makes it to paper, to computer screen, never achieves more than some small form of therapy for me.

I am talking to Sherman in my head (can I call you, Sherman, I feel we are close enough now) about my homesickness, about how I cannot ever really understand where he is from and he cannot understand how I am from where he is now.  I tell him it is a continuum that no one but me can see, a story that can’t quite be told, but is important all the same.  And the The Butchies pop up on shuffle on the old mp3 player and I start to cry because this is more homesickness than a soul can bear.  But this makes me get up and start to cook dinner: fettuccine alfredo with smoked salmon (real, PNW smoked salmon), peas and caramelized onions.  Because I am homesick and if I lived close enough that I could call my mom and ask if I could come over she would walk to me to a restaurant near her house (one Sherman Alexie has surely been too) and I would order some variation of this dish because you don’t really find it anywhere else in the world, not the way we make it in Seattle.

And while I am chopping onions the mp3 player turns again and gives me Kevin Gordon singing Watching the Sun Go Down, and I remember how I stopped at 6:42 am, on my way to work, to photograph the sunrise over an electrical power station, and got distracted by some horses too.  I think of how the redbuds are surely more beautiful this year than they have ever been before, blooming riotously, everywhere, making the edges of every roadway glow purple.  I think of how  the heat in Tennessee makes me feel warm all the way through to my bones, like I’ve never been warm before.

So I tell Sherman that he is lucky indeed, to be able wait in line at Bartell’s, but he has to go through cold rain to get there and I am saved by the sun  and the green in spring and the sounds, all the sounds, here in the dirty South.  Perhaps I am homesick for a place that no longer exists.  A place I visited, moved through in childhood, that is just a fairytale now, I can not go back.  My adult self does not have the magic to cross back over the boundaries of the places I’ve been before, I can only go to new places or create them myself. And I’m still crying when I sit down to eat my dinner, but not because I miss anything.  I am so lucky to have been so many places, both real and imagined. Lucky to be me and to be still so full of emotions good and bad (love) about all of those places I have been and the people in them.  Even the rude lady in the Bartell’s line that you have to tell to fuck all the way off.  So thanks, Sherman, for reminding of my home, the past one, the new one, the one that is always me and goes everywhere inside my heart.  I’m certain that you never knew that namedropping Bartell’s in a story would make some girl in Tennessee break out the fancy smoked salmon from way back home and cook herself a good dinner on a night when she would otherwise have been too tired, too worn down by work, to do more than make a quesadilla.  Thanks for dinner, Sherman, I really feel like we are close now.

 

(Pictures taken early this morning in Tennessee, when I stopped, before I even had coffee, to remember that there is beauty in the world.  Even when you feel like you break to pieces because of the stress that swirls around you and puts the anxiety inside you, there is still the color purple and leaves that were not that green yesterday and sunrises.  The redbuds really are spectacular this year.)


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Resolve

I was trying to think of a fitting send off for 2011, but really I wish it would sneak quietly out the back door and be done with.  I can’t really even be bothered to tell it not to let the door hit its ass on the way out.

In 2011 I got better.  I recovered, almost completely, from 2010 and 2009.  I reconnected with some amazing, beautiful old friends who I am so very glad to have back in my life.  I reconnected with my old online community which is no different than sitting down with old friends.  I learned, I changed, I stayed the same, I became more me, I remembered who I was, and who I want to be.  I think I managed to find myself again, or at least the creative center of myself, even if the rest of me seems much changed than who I was even a year ago.  I am glad to be moving forward, looking forward, and carrying on with the people I have around me.

In 2012 I plan to take myself less seriously.  I want to worry less about external pressures and ask less of myself.  I want to write more and laugh more and sing loudly even when I’m out of tune.

I have an extensive list of new projects I want to work on in 2012.  I’m not sure yet which will make the cut and which will fall by the wayside but I am going to strongly commit to one or a few and be dedicated and vigilant in my work on what I do choose.

I will be smarter and more me by the end of the 2012.  I don’t think that’s too much to ask of myself.

I am so grateful for my huge, wonderful family, for my mother and my sisters.  I am so very thankful for my friends and my community.  I wish I had the words and time to tell each of you just how much I love you and how much you mean to me.  I will carry that love in my heart every single day, I will use it to bolster myself against the hard times.  I will do my best to love you all even more, every single day.  I will trust you all and work to to learn to trust myself and my instincts more.  I will try harder to be worthy of the love given back to me.

Here we go!


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Adventures in substitutions

It’s a cold, cold winter night here, so I did the only thing one can do, cooked and baked until the house was warm and smelled good.

Quinoa Red Lentil Soup


I used this recipe (the stove top version which only took about 35 minutes) which came highly recommended from a trusted friend.  I saw it and thought, oh I have all those things, I’ll make that.  HAHAHAH!  Well, I had quinoa and red lentils.  Of the spices I only had fresh ginger, paprika, cumin and thyme.   So I used those and substituted 2 tbl of green curry paste for everything else.  Also I didn’t have any of those vegetables, so I used a yellow onion, diced, a yellow squash (the zucchini like kind), also diced and a can of diced tomatoes and a couple cloves of garlic, finely chopped.  I did follow the directions pretty closely, despite all the substitutions.   At the end of cooking I also put half of it through the blender until it was smooth and added it back in with the rest (a secret that improves 85% of soups).

I think it turned out great.  Would be excellent with a dollop of sour cream but there’s few things that isn’t true about.

Apple cake


2 eggs
1/4 cup canola oil
1/2 cup applesauce
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp pumpkin spice
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
3 apples, peeled & chopped

Directions:  In large bowl, beat eggs, applesauce and oil until smooth.  Add sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, pumpkin spice, baking soda, salt and mix well.  Add flour, beat until smooth. Fold in apples. Pour into greased and floured 9 by 13 pan. Bake at 350F degrees for 50-55 minutes.

I substituted Bob’s Red Mill all-purpose gluten-free baking flour.  Also I normally would do 3/4 cup applesauce and no oil, but I was unsure about this flour mixture, because I’ve never used it and I figured a little oil might help.

I’ve used previous versions of this recipe (I seem to reinvent it every year, whole wheat flour, less sugar, no oil, now gluten-free) to make muffins for which it is excellent.   The original recipe called for 2c sugar and a cinnamon and sugar glaze, but I really prefer things less sweet.  You should experiment until it tastes how you like.


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Remember (the) Maine

This is the mosaic of the pics to I took in Maine (click it to see them all on Flickr).  I sort of love it.  This is basically in chronological order, a few Boston pics at the beginning and end and a lovely depiction what I saw: buildings, sky, ocean, sky, ocean, beaches, forests, oceans, sunsets and sunrises. I love how the colors in the mosaic look like a whole day, bright in the middle and dimming at the end.

I had a great trip.  I feel like I should say something philosophical about traveling alone but I don’t know what.  It was great the freedom, but it was bittersweet enjoying restaurants alone.  I’m utterly i love with Maine.  I’m sure this is like when people visit Seattle and the weather is gorgeous and they gush about how amazing it is and I’m like, yeah, grey 9 months a year.  Like, clearly Maine must be awful in winter but still it presented itself to me as something wonderful.  Like a place I’d only read about in books, a place of my imaginings made real.  Which I guess it is.  I’ve filled my Amazon Wishlist of Maine things to get through out the next few months so I can keep in my head how I felt while I was there.  Especially while I was out on the water.  I miss the ocean so much.

I hope you enjoy the pictures.


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Book, book, book, movie!

I have been fortunate enough to have time to read actual books lately.  Granted this has interfered with time I might have to sew or socialize, but I think it’s definitely been time well spent.  In the last, oh, month or so I’ve read all of the Southern Vampire Mysteries.  I won’t review them for you, as I assume you’ll either read them or you won’t (or you already have) and you’ll judge me or you won’t for having very much enjoyed them.  It’s possible that having Alexander Skarsgård in my head as Eric Northman went a long way towards my enjoyment of them, but perhaps not.  Perhaps they are just good, light summer reading.  Now that I’ve finished them, I might go back and read Book 4 again.  Or maybe I’ll start watching True Blood season 4 (don’t spoil me I haven’t seen any yet) and then read Book 4 again.  Book 4 is my favorite.

gratuitous ASkars. I can't help myself.

After all the vampires I read Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things, only to discover, about 80 pages in, that I’d read it before.  SIGH. Yes, I don’t know if that’s commentary on where my head is right now, where it was when I first read this collection, or if says something about the quality of the stories.  The stories, I felt, were uneven, as is so often the case with short story collections.  Some were excellent, others I flipped through reading only every fourth word or so.  I’m never sure with Gaiman, he’s written some things I love and some I clearly forget.  He’s an author I try to not engage with, that is to say that my enjoyment of his writing is equal to how much I am able to entirely ignore him as a media figure or a person of any consequence.

I’ve spent the last 6-ish days pushing through Connie Willis’ Blackout/All Clear.

This is certainly one book split into two volumes and should be read as such.  This is in her Oxford Time-Travelling Historians universe, though reading the other books in that universe is not a prerequisite of reading this one.  Several reviews I read and a couple trusted reader friends suggested that B/AC would have benefited greatly by having an excellent editor and being a few hundred pages shorter.  Something I have said often about the last 3 Harry Potter books, about everything Diana Gabaldon has written since Outlander,  about Cronin’s hideous Passage, and many more.  And yes, I imagine that B/AC could have been more concise, more dense, more tightly crafted but for me Willis is one of the few authors I simply can’t get enough of.  Her worlds immerse me utterly, her language keeps me in instead of pushing me out of the story, letting me see only the story and not the writer and she clearly loves her characters so much that I can’t help but love them too.  I would gladly sit down right now with 1400 more pages of her characters.

I knew this would have a happy ending, I knew it would all work out, but it twists and turns enough that one can never guess quite how.  I found myself anxious to the point of wishing she would just get on with it already in a few scenes.  Mostly because some of the secondary characters were so beloved and seemed so likely to die that I just couldn’t stand it.

I know only the basic framework of history for WWII Britain. Still I have been to most all of the places in London that the action happens in, and I have been to museums and memorials all over Britain about the war and the Blitz specifically and I believe that engaged me all the more with this tale.  London is a character in the story being just as battered and ill-treated as her people were through out the war.  I felt many times like I was walking through the locations of the story and thought deeply about how it must have been to see the city both before and after the war.

Time travel is very tricky and I think Willis handles it well.  Generally making it simply a framework for an understandable historical bit of fiction.  This time though the time travelling paradox itself plays into the mystery of the plot to good effect.

I was feverish and sick and slept a lot this past weekend.  I dreamt long involved fever dreams of this book and the characters and myself in with them.  I have, in this way, completely internalized this story.  I feel exhausted and thoroughly satisfied having been through the ringer with this story.  It’s always hard to recommend things.  Do I want you to to read it because I liked it?  Yes.  Do I want you to read it because I think you’ll like it?  I don’t know.  If you liked her other books you’ll probably like this one, even if you think it is too long.  If you’re interested in WWII history from an every day standpoint of how citizens dealt with it, you’ll probably like it.  Amazon hopefully has enough of a preview up that you can decide if you want to read more or not.  If you decide not to read this you should read To Say Nothing of the Dog anyway.  Yes, you, all of you, everyone should read it.  Because I said so.

I also went and saw Captain America which I enjoyed very much.  It was a very, very different WWII than B/AC. I think they used a lot of the same location shots from Band of Brothers which really tickled me.  I’m totally digging the universe connections in the Marvel comic movies and all the cameos etc. It’s like each movie makes the previous ones even better. Thor and Iron Man are both somehow that much better for having seen Captain America.  I can’t wait for The Avengers!

(A note on formatting: I had been writing my posts so they were easily read when imported in to Facebook but the importing feature only works intermittently and really I’d prefer if you clicked out and read them here anyway, so I’m not formatting for FB anymore, if you don’t get pictures you’ll have to click out to the original post.  If FB can’t be bothered to make itself work right, I can’t be bothered to cater to it.)


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New horizons, new directions

I spent a good portion of this past holiday weekend trying to prove to myself that I could still sew with some success! My last few projects have been frustrating wadders that I’d like set on fire, rather than wad up and throw on the floor.  But this weekend I produced three neatly made, wearable pieces, which maybe didn’t end up being to my taste or my style, but are definitely proof that I at least sort of know what I am doing.  Pictures hopefully taken tonight, if I can be bothered to stop catching up on Doctor Who long enough to snap myself.

♦♦♦

I bought a new leather belt.  It smells like Europe.  It was made in Canada and not China (like surely my last half dozen belts were) and I wonder if that isn’t the difference.  I mean, it smells like leather, but it smells like leather I only associate with Europe.  It’s wonderful and merely opening the box it came in filled me with fantastical memories of the streets of Florence and the amazing foothills of the Pyrenees, of shopping in Amsterdam and riding night trains through Germany.  Even if I was to never wear the belt (which I surely will) the price was 100% worth the evening of those memories.  To that end I leave you with a tiny slice of vistas I have seen.

in Barcelona Angels watch over you from Montjuic


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Everything that came before now

I might have way over committed myself in the past couple weeks.  If I owe you something, I promise it’s coming quickly.

Between my new position at work and a a few days out to the PNW to see Crackerjack Sister graduate, I’m wiped out. My capacity for critical thinking is surely at an all time a low, and even that is devoted to work.

I did have a great time in Seattle.  I put the pics up here, though most of them are probably only interesting to you if you’re related to me in some way.  I tagged along on many shopping trips from which I benefited greatly (new Converse, fancy new shirt, excellent new dress).  I got an awesome new laptop which is so light and fast that I feel like I can go everywhere with it, though I probably won’t, since one doesn’t need to be computing all the time.

Back in TN now, where it looks like we got a very brief reprieve from the oppressive heat.  I’m already planning to stay inside all weekend and finish projects of my own and other people’s.  At least the cicadas seem to have all passed while I was out of town!  Plus I missed Bonnaroo and CMAfest crowds, both of which are cicada like in their noisy and mass.

Obviously no sewing going on lately.  I did buy new handbags yesterday as I can’t resist a good deal.  I love Fossil handbags.  All of the ones I’ve owned except the one I’m currently using, which I got used, quite cheap and I just sort of hate it.  So I got this one and this one (in a brownish grey not depicted there) for $101 total for both!  I spent forever standing in the store trying to decide which and then made a last minute choice to get both.  Hurrah!  I should be set for a good long time now.  Both came with an extra detachable strap and I can’t figure out what it’s for.  The extra, removable strap is that same length as the strap on the bag already.  If it was much longer or something, it would make sense to me, but at the same length, it just seems weird.

So, uh, yes, there’s all the news that’s fit to print. I better get to doing something, so I’ll have something good to show off, eh?

I took these pictures with my phone to remind myself of the color of the sky after 9pm, in June in the Pacific Northwest.  One of the things I really miss is the summer light.


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My Mother

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve met my mother.  And probably that impacted your life in some positive and major way.

She is the best person imaginable to be my mother, we are in some ways perfectly suited to each other in temperment and good company, and in the ways we are not, she is perfectly suited to be my sister’s companion, as my sister is also mine. We are an even triangle of companionability, love, understanding and the little ripple of conflict that always arises when people are too like each other.  The three of us, I think are so bound together that I couldn’t explain it to you, nor would I want to let you inside the place that’s ours.

But this is about my mother.  You don’t really need to know about her being a good mother to me, because that only matters, really, to her children.


You should know that she is an incredible sister, an amazing aunt, a brilliant manager, a trusted friend and a devoted partner.  If you have a daughter or a son, probably my mother is someone you would want to help them if they were in need in any way.  She has been an unbelievable pillar of support to our extended family, sometimes openly, sometimes secretly, sometimes thanked, somtimes ignored.  She is thoughtful, generous to a fault, and always willing to help if you ask.

She deserves more than just a phone call or some flowers from her daughters, who would both rather show their love in other way anyhow, she deserves the acknowledgement and respect of every person whose life she has touched or helped in some way.

She is so smart and so together and so organized and I think everyone who knows her recognizes that.  But maybe sometimes we forget to think about how kind she is and how unflagging she is in her support of what any one of us is trying to do to improve our lives.

She is, in my mind, the perfect embodiment of everything that was good and beautiful in her own parents.  She has done an amazing job of raising children, not just me and my sister, but others around us too, even my cousins in secondhand sort of way.

If everone who knows her would take just 30 seconds and think of how she’s positively impacted their lives, that would make me so happy.

I also want to send love to all of my aunts, cousins and friends who are mothers.  Each of you is doing an amazing job in your own way and I am proud to know you and see your lives change and see the wonderful people your children are becoming.

And finally, I know it’s Mother’s Day, but sisters don’t get one and I’d like to point out that my little sister is perhaps the best and brightest of us all and even though I’m sure she’s only 3 and still clutching at my leg when she’s nervous, she’s actually become and amazing, beautiful, poised, intelligent woman and in some ways, I’m grateful to my mother most of all for giving me me my sister.

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone!  I hope you all have someone to thank or remember, someone who you love and admire as much as I love and admire my mom.


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Things and books and other things

I’m in the market for a used dresser or side board or cabinet of sorts to replace the cheap, small emergency shelves set up in my sewing nook.  I’m simply hoping to stumble across the right thing in a thrift store or whatever and paint it (or I figured I’d be happy with something like this).  However I stumbled across this re-do the other day and now suddenly I need something I can refinish with a squid.  Like I will waste away, pining for a squid dresser if I don’t get one.

click for pictures from the books locations, in case you werent already wishing you were in Provence right now

I just finished reading Guy Gavriel Kay’s Ysabel.  The Lions of al-Rassan is one of my favorite books and I really enjoyed The Last Light of the Sun.  If I find I like an author I generally seek out more of their books, but I rarely read anything about those books or the author.  I’ve been burned too many times by finding out the creator is a jerk and I find it’s easier to just read a story in the void and only bring to it my current preconceptions of the world and not any negativity about the author or to be pre-influenced by reviews I’ve read.  So based on my two previous reads it seemed safe to assume that Kay wrote character stories in fictionalized versions of historical events (al-Rassan is essentially El Cid and Moorish Spain and Sun is Alfred the Great defeating the Vikings). Which he does write, right? He just also writes other things, apparently.

Ysabel reads like a YA urban fantasy, you know the ones where you’re just a teenager in the city and suddenly you get caught up in the drama of the fairy world? (See Charles de Lint‘s Newford saga stories or Holly Black‘s Modern Faerie tales.) Kay’s story relied more on the strange possibility of magic and history colliding and less actual fairy tales and the setting, Provence, was as much of a character as person in the book.  It was enjoyable and neatly written, it made me dream and think and still left something lacking.  I just didn’t engage enough with any of the characters.  I was compelled to keep reading by the mystery and strange magic and French Celtic history.  And while the main characters were likeable enough, they were real enough, still they just didn’t make me care enough.  I’d recommend this, but save it for the airplane or the beach.

After reading I tried to sleep, somewhat unsuccessfully, because of a string of late, late night thunderstorms that seemed so threatening that I got up from my bed under the windows and went and curled up on the couch (not under windows and further from big, bad thunder).  But as I drove in to work this morning, the storms had left behind a jumbled mess of crazy clouds rushing out and everything is so very, vibrantly, overwhelmingly green, especially against the grey sky.  And I remember, as I do every year, that I (and surely everyone else) continues to live in Tennessee because spring is so sensational.  It’s really astounding how the trees fill in and the colors.  It’s like God is talking directly to you, just for a little bit, daring you notice every leaf and every change and be grateful for it.  And it will be hot soon enough, spring so fleeting like the first flush of being in love and overwhelmed by it, but it comes back every year.  It’s worth the storms and the heat waves and the grim winter.  The Steve Earle line, “Tennessee is green in spring” is like the understatement of the century but at the same time anyone who lives here understands the depth and meaning of that little statement.


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Link round-up

Every year about this time I start searching again for something similar to a perfume I loved that was discontinued years ago.  I often start with an internet search for the scent notes in it, this year my search produced this. Really? We want to smother little boys in lavender and bergamot and tell them that’s how the Hulk smells? I’m, uh, actually I’m not at all sure how I feel about this.

Architectural Legos. Whee!  On the one hand, I wish we still lived in a world where you just got Legos and had to make your own things you imagined out of them.  On the other hand this is sooooo cool.

I think this link has made the rounds a bunch already, but these carved books are so spectacularly sculpturally beautiful that they must bee seen again and again.

Look at this fat little junco!  So sweet!

I almost never go to Threadless because I end up falling into some kind of time void where I lose hours looking at the awesome shirts.

This Mexican papel picado skirt is so incredible.  She says it didn’t take her that long, but I can’t imagine I could produce something handmade this spectacular in a year.  Still I want one very badly.  Hmm, maybe almost badly enough to try it myself.

Click boxes for notes.  Make tiny songs.  Refresh and start over.

Gravity marimba in a forest.  I don’t think I need to say more than that. Oh, it plays Bach.

 


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Why isn’t the weekend longer?

This weekend I finished the second skirt from last week’s pattern.  I cut the pattern down two sizes and used a lighter, slightly stretchier fabric.  The results are certainly improved, though I think I need to use an even lighter fabric, or just something more drapey with a softer hand.  Still, this version is in dark brown and will definitely get summer wear.  I had to go to the fabric store to get elastic, so I got some lighter weight black fabric to revisit that with, and some grey fabric, to cover all my needs for neutral skirts (of which I currently only have denim ones so this will be great).  No skirt pictures today, I’ll save them for when I have some top finished to show it with.

I did take some pictures of the new digs this weekend though.  Not the living room yet, I’m saving that for when it’s fully furnished and not filled with stacks of unpacked boxes (though I am down to mostly books on that front and just need to get a bookshelf and rug or two to finish the room).  But for those who are interested or who asked, here’s shots of the kitchen and bedroom:

click for the full set at Flickr

Yeah, I want to paint that table and chairs.  Yeah, I want to cover those cabinet faces in wall paper or something, but it’s definitely coming along.  Need for rugs and a bookshelf aside, I am mostly comfortable hanging out art home now.  I could maybe use an ottoman and few more baking supplies, but over all it’s great.  Just don’t look in my closets which are jammed with stuff and probably should be actually organized at some point.

This weekend I put away the heavy winter bedding and did get some organizing done as well as few small, nitpicky tasks that needed doing (like hand sewing the corners on the bed skirt so the edges of the box spring would stop peeking out).  Last weekend I packed away my winter clothes and pulled out the summer dresses and lighter weight work slacks.  Bring it on, season change, I am ready!


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The sewing year begins…now! Go!

Because I firmly believe the year starts on April 1 (everything is subjective, right?) I’ve made some resolutions.  Including blogging here once a week about sewing and sewing related things. Yes, really, I’m gonna do it.  I’m settled in enough at the new house that I have good sewing space and I need to get going on it!  (No new house pictures yet, still waiting until there isn’t a stack of boxes in the living room.)

Today I bought these boots, in my size for $9 at the Goodwill on Berry Rd.  But what does one wear with such boots (besides the obvious skinny jeans or leggings)?  Conveniently I’ve started cutting out these patterns:

I think the Lisette will be view B (in grey canvas and hopefully a cool print fabric that I just haven’t discovered yet) and I’m already starting on 2258, view C (but without the waist tie in black canvas, brown stretch twill and some dark stretch denim).  Which means boots are now practical for summer if we have enough cute skirts, right?

I also have two dress refashions in the works.  Hopefully one will work for a wedding I’m attending in a couple weeks and the other will just be a cute summer dress.  I remembered to take before pictures, so surely I can remember to blog about them when I’m done.  I plan on making the view E Lisette top in a couple prints too, hopefully including one in this fabric.  It’s my goal not to buy any new clothes this summer and make or refashion everything I wear, preferably using my fairly substantial stash of fabric.  Is everyone else excited about spring sewing?


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April is surely not the cruelest month, everyone knows that’s February

April begins BIRTHDAY MONTH.  I would love to say it’s all a celebration of me, from beginning to end, but indeed many of my most loved friends share this month for their own celebrations.  I’d say a good dozen or so of you are already, or gearing up to celebrate your own births.  Let’s all do it together!  HOORAY!

The April birthstone is diamond and the flower is Sweet Pea. Which seem some how at odds with each other.  Like at what point is someone going to be like, ‘say, baby, I got you some diamonds and this Sweet Pea bouquet’? It seems simultaneously weird and actually just like something I’d want, so maybe it does make sense for April after all.  Though I prefer amethysts to diamonds, partly over the whole blood diamond and hideous over hype of them and mostly because everyone knows anything purple is superior to anything else!

March has wound down being grim and grey, despite some thrilling spring sun there in the middle and I have high hopes for April. A little more sun and fewer days I have to put on gloves in the morning to keep my hands from stiffening up on the drive to work.

April also brings an awesome surprise visit from my cousins at the beginning, a long anticipated visited from good friends at the middle and my birthday at the end, so I surely couldn’t ask for more goodness from this month!  It should be calm, wonderful, joyous friends and family love all the way through!  Everyone should have a month like this occasionally.

April is also National Poetry Month for which I shall share some of the poems I carry around in my handbag at all times:

Three Crepuscular Poems
Federico García Lorca

[1]
The evening is
penitent,
still dreaming about
noon.
(Red trees & clouds
over the hills.)
The evening, loosening green
lyric hair,
is gently trembling
… vexed
to be the evening having once been
noon.

[2]
Now the evening starts!
Why? Why?
… just now
I watched the day droop down
just like a morning flower.
A day lily
bending its stems
… just now …
the roots of evening
rising through the gloom.

[3]
Adiós, sun!

I know for sure that you’re the moon,
but I
won’t tell nobody,
sun.

You sneak
behind the curtain
& cover your face
with rice powder.

By day, the farmhand’s
guitar,
by night, Pierrot’s
mandolin.

I should care!

Your illusion,
sun, is to make
the garden
turn Technicolor.

Adiós, sun!

And don’t you forget who loves you:
the snail,
the little old lady
on her balcony,
& me …
spinning my heart like a …
top.


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If wishes were horses I’d be, uh, shoveling a lot

I have been thinking about it, and given the frequency and astounding brilliant content of my posts, I assume my readership to be made up entirely of incredibly wealthy, bored, would-be patrons who just haven’t found the right person to send gifts too.  In light of that, I would like to point out that today it is 94 days or 3 months, 4 days until my birthday (of course you don’t have to wait until my birthday for gifts, silly, even though it’s très gauche, I accept them at any time).  Here are some ideas of what you can get for me:

The purchase of this pillow would give me something soft upon which to rest my head and save me from having to to do hours of pains-taking, meticulous embroidery myself to recreate such a homespun masterpiece.

Any sized print of any of these three photographs (the larger the better!).  This would save me the time and expense of having to go 2500 miles across the country and waiting around in the damp woods for the perfect lighting conditions.  Plus, I am generally an abysmal photographer and mine certainly wouldn’t look this good.

The Frye Carson Lace-up.  This fulfills my need to romanticize early last century laborers, while looking cool, hip and stylish.  A purchase of these (dark brown, size 8.5 please) would save me from having to spend hours on pouring over Ebay to find some that were a tenth of the cost of these lovely originals.

If none of those suits your fancy, I am also accepting plane tickets to Spain (no return needed, assuming you are also purchasing a small coastal villa to reside in as well) or one (or both) of the following:

 

wombatMatt Damon

Thank you for your consideration to this very, very important matter.  If not gifts, you can direct flowers or checks directly to me in my office and I will use them to buy my own villa in Spain (assuming the flowers are filled with diamonds as well).


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Annual ‘The Solstice is JOY’ post

Today the solstice coincides with a full lunar eclipse, the first total lunar eclipse to occur on the winter solstice since 1638.

Today in the Northern Hemisphere we round the corner on darkness.  It is the Hibernal solstice when the sun is near its greatest distance from the equatorial plane, standing still as it were.

Today Marduk tamed the monsters of chaos and for one more year we are safe as we move back into the light.

Today we light candles and keep them lit.  Though darkness is already on the run, we must continue to chase it away so spring can come faster.

Today the Oak King is apparently dead, his branches bare and cold.  We thought the Holly King had won, as he remained green,  but long live the Oak King as he returns to rule us into Midsummer!  Go, hang the holly, let it catch bad spirits on it’s tiny horns, protecting us in the months of darkness when the border with the shadowlands is permeable.

Today is the Saturnalia where we eat and dance and decorate the evergreens with red berries.  We will reverse all our roles, switch with our opposites and see the world from the other side, through other eyes.

Today and for the days to come, find joy in each other, celebrate, kiss beneath the mistletoe, feast in the light of candles.  Celebrate the darkness and the joy we have as  it washes away.  Tonight we breathe and meditate on our lives.  We breathe out the things we want gone, we breathe in our wishes for the coming year.  Tomorrow life begins again.


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My house, in the middle of my street

I know I’ve been promising pictures of the new house for months.  Well I have them, although I wonder why I took them when the house was so messy (don’t you go saying that it’s always messy).   If you want to see the whole house, endless hallways and all, I’ve put a set up at Flickr. I some how skipped the bed room all together, and the porches, and the laundry room and the bathroom (the tile is cool), but you’ll get some idea from the pics, I guess.

The house has many good points, but for the first time ever I have my own dedicated sewing room!  Look:

Ha!  These pictures didn’t seem so dark originally.  But there it is, in all it’s messy, lavender glory. It has fabric and notions and machines and books and shoes and a little TV for DVD movies to keep me company.  I want to get another table, for cutting, to put where the red tupperware bins are currently.  So yeah, I should get on some sewing projects, huh?