Winter, that was another thing

It me.

• I really love Max Richter's music. I enjoy falling asleep to Sleep, and I'm crazy about the soundtrack to The Leftovers. This Tiny Desk Concert is so good, especially seeing On the Nature of Daylight played live. This is one of the few pieces of music that makes me cry without the use of sad lyrics (or any lyrics). Ugh, I just love it.

• Here is an important news story I'd like to bring to my mom's attention: FURRIES STOP DOMESTIC VIOLENCE ASSAULT.

• And here's more on the luckiest lady in the world, the Scottish woman who can't feel pain or anxiety. And did I mention she lives in Scotland?


"Whenever I pressed Cameron for details about a seemingly devastating occurrence, she wasn’t evasive; she was mystifying—always ending up on a lovely memory, via a route so unforeseeable it was as if it, too, were determined by a child with a map."

And if you're worried about one bathroom

Hello from the summertime! Flowers are blooming, sun is shining, greens are green and blues are blue over here. The house* is full, with Zoë and her copain imminent (as in, just a couple of hours!). 

Just posting this non-informational post so that I won't have only one single solitary rabbit-related post for the month of July. 



*the other night I couldn't sleep and one of the things my brain was gnawing on was the fact that we didn't have some sort of guest log book for keeping track of everyone who's ever stayed with us in our house over the past 20 years. I was seized with an impulse to attempt a list, right then in the middle of the night. Summer log thus far = Mom, Holly, Maia, Isaac, Edna, Leander, Jonah. Upcoming = Zoë, Eric, Joya, Oona, Grandma Nancy, Tracey, Bill.

The circumambient air was redolent with doughnuts

Since the romance of my working life is no doubt of great interest to my reader(s), I will let you in on this secret: it is more challenging to define "waterfall" (for an audience that may include both middle schoolers and adult English learners and without using the words "water" or "fall") when you are experiencing brain fog than when you are not.

And now it's later and I've been laboring on "doughnut," which has made me hungry for circles of fried dough and also brought me to this extraordinary historical information about how the Civil War, doughnuts, and the state of Maine converged:


The ladies of Augusta, Me [Maine], distributed over fifty bushels of doughnuts to the Third Volunteer regiment of Maine, previous to their departure for the seat of war in 1861. A procession of ladies, headed by music, passed between double lines of troops, who presented arms, and were afterwards drawn up in hollow square to receive the welcome dough-nation. 

Never before was seen such an aggregate of doughnuts since the war began. The circumambient air was redolent with doughnuts. Every breeze sighed doughnuts – everybody talked doughnuts. The display of doughnuts beggared description. There was the molasses doughnut and the sugar doughnut – the long doughnut and the square doughnut – the rectangle doughnut and the triangular doughnut – the single twisted doughnut and the double twisted doughnut – the “light riz” doughnut and third kneaded doughnut – the straight solid doughnut and the circular doughnut, with a hole in the center. There were doughnuts of all imaginary kinds, qualities, shapes, and dimensions. It was emphatically a feast of doughnuts, if not a flow of the soul.

All I want in this world is a doughnut banjo picnic.

Seventeen

Cold rain, damp dogs, birds in the blue-gray sky. It's the kind of Monday that keeps tempting you, all day long, to take a nap.

And then there's work, and tea, and laundry to fold and rough spots on the kitchen wall that need to be sanded, just one more time, before we can finally paint. Because paint comes first, and then the ceiling, and then the tile... Don't you worry, one of these days there will be some visible change in there and I will take a picture of it!

Missing my babies. It's only a week and a half until Thanksgiving break, though.

Twenty-sixth

Phew, made it. Goodnight, all. xo

Fifteenth

Losing steam here, mid-way through. I've been patting myself on the back, metaphorically, for my perseverance, both here and over here, but there's something about the ides of November that slows a person down. That and the utter darkness at 4:30, that's just hard to adjust to. It is 6:30 as I write this, and I am ready for pajamas and a book. Actually, I am enforcing the reading of all the New Yorkers I've got piled up before I allow myself to go back to the library. Which is nice because it's also bath season, and it's easier to read magazines in the bath than library books. Uhhhhh, I am an 80 year old lady now!!!!

Sleepytime.

Tenth

I kind of want to do this while listening to Bon Iver. I did take a lil' nap earlier, lying on the little couch beside the pellet stove, reading The Year of the Goat and daydreaming about my goat herd (not my goatherd, although I'm positive that Mark would be just as good at that and cheesemaking, or whatever, as he is at tiling and plumbing and computering and electrical repairs, etc).

Today the Dancer came over for tea and also there was coffee and bagels from Union Bagel Co and dogwalks and cozy cats. Upstairs, Mark is finishing the installation of beadboard in the bathroom. Just you wait, blog friends, I will post an After photo of that bathroom one of these fine days that will amaze and charm you. Yesterday I was equally productive, painting all the trim in the dining room and kitchen. Today's been dark and sleepy, despite all the coffee and tea.

Tuesday

Cat parts on my bed. It would be tempting to take a nap on a rainy Tuesday morning, but there's a puppy in the house and work to be done.

things i've never said

"it is what it is."

"would i lie to you?"

"because i'm the mom and i say so."

"my bad."

(edited to add) "it's a no-brainer."

rest in peace, april. and thank you, global warming/mother nature, for the soft, unfrozen dirt in our back yard. our pet cemetery includes: two gerbils (murdered*), one poisson (gold colored, long lived), two hermit crabs (with romantic associations, not necessarily to each other), and one sweetheart of a guinea pig.

i work here, and look out this window, and the sunlight is changing, changing. the passing traffic can sound like the ocean if you squint your eyes just right.

this is what happens in my bed after i get up in the morning.



*involuntary manslaughter?

jammies

observe, my poll on the right side of this blog. by a good, healthy margin, your partners sleep in their pajamas. which seems correct to me, because so does mine. but i see that there's a significant minority of naked sleepers, which just sounds cold, to tell you the truth.