As smoke is in the world

It's Friday, or as I like to think of it, Gentleman's Saturday.* Specifically, it's Friday the 13th, always a lucky day for me, a person who missed being born on Friday the 13th by a mere ~19 hours. 

It's been a month of birds-of-prey sightings: just this morning I saw another Deering Oaks hawk, a smallish brown one drying its wings while perched in a tree, holding them wide and letting the wind blow through the feathers. 

Everything is eerily green for January. It's 50 degrees and raining. There are teeny buds on the lilac.

We started out the week eating Chinese food and playing? solving? a mystery-in-a-box with Adam and Jeannette's wonderful upstairs neighbor, Dani. We were successful, but we required many hints.

Sleuths, sleuthing

*To be perfectly honest, I think of Thursday as Gentleman's Friday. Today is actually just normal Friday.

Missed a day

Blerg, it was November 18 that broke my record! I actually remembered while lying in bed last night, but having pledged to myself not to look at screens after a certain late hour, I accepted defeat and fell asleep instead of blorging.

In my defense, Adam and Jeannette came for dinner (!!!). In other news, a wreath arrived in the mail from Dad so we went ahead and started our annual struggle with holiday porch lights — we seem to go through many stages of them looking weird before getting them to a somewhat normal state. It's early to do these things, yes! But we want to make the most of a Closer to Normal Than Last Year season. 

It's the twenty-ninth birthday of my first baby, my sweet, stubborn, shockingly brilliant girl. She is far away, once again celebrating (or not — I hope she is!) in a distant country. I'll never forget her stories of the first birthday she spent without us, turning sixteen in a German village near the Black Forest, so homesick, but fêted at school with cakes and gifts, held aloft on a chair and paraded around, as her classmates sang! I thought, those Germans really know how to do birthdays right.

Mica mermaid, 1994

a little birdhouse in my soul

don't mind me, i'm just messing around with my blog template a little bit. i want to make my pictures bigger, maybe. especially the following, which should be entitled, "well hello! and welcome to my bathroom."

ugh, don't ask. well, okay, since you ask: we have one of those house issues that i think of as a twisted kind of rube goldberg machine, all impossibly interconnected. there are pipes in the bathroom that are leaking a bit into the kitchen ceiling. they are old, made of lead, and basically dissolving. and in a tricky place to get to, so we need to rip up the bathroom floor to deal with them. meanwhile, the bathroom, which was "redone" in a really sloppy way right before we bought this house, needs to actually be redone. here's where it gets boring, so let me just wind this up by saying we needed to scrape off all the old floral wallpaper, and we did. and beneath that are walls of utter weirdness. story to be continued.*

below, i present exhibit a, me at work in the wintertime. i don't think i've ever actually taken a photo of my beloved hot bag of corn, made for me years ago by my maman. november through may this thing is my security blanket, constant source of warmth, and pretty much the only reason i can't get along without a microwave. i made isaac and mark each their own hot bags of corn this year for christmas, because they were both stealing mine all the time.

  





































ah, the birdhouse in my soul. have you ever seen a more gorgeous thing? this was a christmas gift from my sweet (absent) brother and sister-in-law. i don't know if it will live here permanently--i keep moving it around trying to find the perfect spot. it is way too gorgeous to go outside, by the way.









































*this story might involve paint. or it might involve beadboard. or tile. or all three! it might involve happy hours of working together to make our (only) bathroom lovely, or it may involve the wringing of hands and great cries of despair. i'll keep you updated.

follow me in merry measure

introducing charlie the dog, minnow's san francisco cousin and the newest addition to the family. my mom is visiting him (and his humans) right now, and she sent me a few snapshots.

he is a little guy, about ten pounds, possibly a jack russell terrier/chihuahua mix, with a big dog personality (according to my mom, and that's the ultimate compliment). i can't wait to meet him!

more christmas bounty

i just love this canvas basket that a & j gave us for christmas (and it was chock full of presents, i might add). it's serving as scarf-and-mitten-basket at the moment, but very, very, very soon it will be accompanying us on lovely summer picnics, packed full of delicious food...