drinks diary february 16 2014

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Breakfast room coffee in a Best Western in Richmond, KY. My approximation of the cover of a book about guns that a guy next to us was reading. It’s obvious I don’t know anything about guns by how I can barely draw a representation of them. I’m totally okay with that.

All the colours of Zebra F-301 ballpoint pen. Yee-haw!

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Later the same day, lunch at La Fiesta in Lake City, TN, a favourite place for us to stop on this highway. And lunch the next day at The Grit (RIP) in Athens, GA, with Jenny (High Energy Knits if you remember the old knit blog days) and her son.

Green and blue ballpoint pen and a bit of marker.

books i read in 2025

Last winter I decided to make a change to my morning routine, taking my after breakfast coffee up to the bedroom couch (the preferred couch of our elderly cat) and reading a book instead of looking at social media or working on textile projects like I used to do. It gives both me and the cat a calmer start to the day, and means that this year I read a good deal more books than any other year since I started keeping track.

This morning I permanently deleted my one remaining social media account. Yes, the calendar is arbitrary, but still it’s nice to start off a new calendar year with a feeling of freedom.

Okay, here are the books:

1. Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
2. Richard Wagamese, Keeper ‘n Me
3. Todd Strasser, Fallout
4. Thea Lim, An Ocean of Minutes
5. Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know
6. Jasmin Gyuh, Gokudols
7. Octavia E. Butler, The Parable of the Sower
8. Drew Hayden Taylor, Motorcycles & Sweetgrass
9. Jamil Jan Kochai, 99 Nights in Logar
10. Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country
11. Alice Walker, The Color Purple
12. Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth
13. Jonas Jonasson, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
14. Chuang Hua, Crossings
15. Heather Young, The Distant Dead
16. M. G. Vassanji, The Magic of Saida
17. Emma Donoghue, Room
18. Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories
19. Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
20. Ayşegül Savaş, Walking on the Ceiling
21. Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence
22. Elizabeth Hay, A Student of Weather
23. Cathy Marie Buchanan, The Painted Girls
24. Okey Ndibe, Foreign Gods, Inc.
25. Mona Awad, All’s Well
26. Edward Dorn, Slinger [Gunslinger]
27. Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion (re-read, first read 25 years ago)
28. Timothy Findley, The Wars
29. Anne Rice, Violin
30. Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Turning Leaves
31. Eduardo Mendoza, The City of Marvels
32. Yu Miri, Tokyo Ueno Station
33. Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red
34. Neel Mukherjee, Choice
35. Lori Lansens, The Mountain Story
36. Vendela Vida, And Now You Can Go
37. Vincent Lam, The Headmaster’s Wager
38. Jonas Jonasson, Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All
39. James McBride, Deacon King Kong
40. Kate Beaton, DUCKS
41. Thomas Hertog, On The Origin of Time
42. James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
43. Edwidge Danticat, Everything Inside
44. Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
45. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
46. Carol Shields, Small Ceremonies
47. Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses
48. Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
49. Anne Rice, Interview With The Vampire
50. Heather O’Neill, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night
51. Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War
52. Heather Abel, The Optimistic Decade
53. Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
54. David A. Robertson, The Theory of Crows
55. Yasutaka Tsutsui, Paprika
56. Richard Wagamese, Indian Horse
57. Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
58. Satoru Noda, Golden Kamuy
59. Joshua Barkman, Life After Life
60. Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker
61. Chido Muchemwa, Who Will Bury You?
62. Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
63. Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
64. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos

drinks diary 13 & 15 february 2014

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Tea at Milk Coffee Bar (RIP) with Carly, which we ended up throwing into a to-go cup when the stand up comedy show we didn’t know was happening (stand up comedy being a thing I would never subject myself to by choice) got super racist.

Then Waffle House coffee in Florence, KY as we drove down to visit Athens, GA, where I went to grad school.

Ballpoint pen and marker.

shorty

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Five weeks ago today my sweet friend Shorty died.

These are the last photos I took of her, back in September when we were still enjoying our mornings together on the front porch.

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Towards the end of the summer she had started climbing into my lap if I wasn’t quick enough to dole out the nuts, and trying to crawl into my pocket to get them herself. We’d reached a level of trust that even allowed me, just a few weeks before she died, to reach out and flick a bit of dried leaf off her hear without so much as a flinch from her.

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I don’t know what happened to her. One minute she was fine, running up and down the fence, wiggling her silly little stump of a tail, and taking walnuts from my hand like always. Four hours later my partner found her dead in the alley with no signs of trauma.

She’s buried in the backyard at the base of this little log feature I made in July out of some cut off pieces of utility pole the workers left in the alley when our poles were replaced.

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the housening: backyard edition

It took me all summer to complete this job I had expected to have finished by the end of May. It’s the only big job I managed to finish all summer. But just look at how pretty my shed is.

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When we went to look at rust paint colours, we assumed we’d be choosing from the traditional range: red, cyan, Tonka toy yellow, John Deere green. But we found out something very exciting: when you buy the Home Hardware store brand rust paint, you can have it tinted any colour. As in, any colour from the wall of paint chips for the regular paint. We were like kids in a candy shop.

Here’s how it looked in late June, with just the front and sides finished. That pasty non-colour on the door, with fake wood grain, is what the whole thing used to look like.

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The painting seemed to take forever, because due to all the bending and crouching involved (and my ageing body and bad back) I painted the shed one side at a time. Having to plan for, and wait for, adequate stretches of dry weather dragged the project well into fall. I started with the hard part, the narrow space between the shed and the fence, and nearly passed out in there from breathing the paint fumes in that hot, tight space. Fun!

I stand at this window every single day feeling pleased with myself, and enamoured with these colours. Please don’t look at my unhemmed curtains; that’s a winter job.

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Here it is in the first snowfall of the year:

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And the next day, with more snow. I grew up in a much snowier place than I live in now, and my family made fun of me when I sent them this picture.

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And here’s what it looks like now, a bright flash of colour in an otherwise bleak urban winter landscape, under what is, most years, about as much snow as we normally get here.

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We left a gap in the fence at the back of the shed, which faces onto our alleyside parking, so that the alley cats would still have their familiar back door into the yard. Right behind the rose of Sharon is a kitty-sized gap. There’s now a row of four baby roses of Sharon here to make the kitty door more private.

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a new dress (sort of)

For a few years now I’ve kept a practice of making myself a new dress for my birthday. This week as I was finishing up Cobbled Bodice Attempt #5 on a dress by a careless and sloppy designer I both love and hate (Tina Givens, IYKYK), it occurred to me that I should be making myself a new dress to celebrate my Gramma’s birthday instead (or in addition to). My Gramma was a professional sewist, making and altering things for people right up to the day she died. She gave me the skills and the confidence to make my own clothes. She taught me how to read and use a sewing pattern while guiding me through making the most fiddly and ridiculous shirt I’ve ever sewn, with cuffs and buttonholes and an asymetrical closure and an incredible ruffle that ran all the way up the front opening and around the collar. She bought me my first sewing machine, and bequeathed me her last one, which I still use. She would have turned 99 today.

As I should have expected, the bodice fix I was attempting didn’t work out (um hi, it took me five tries to realise it’s not the bodice that’s the problem). That dress is back on the sewing room floor, destined to become a skirt or rags, and I’ll make a whole post about my struggles with Tina Givens and her beautiful yet deeply crappy patterns another day. Fortunately, I had another dress nearly finished so I had something far better and more beautiful to wear today than that utter failure.

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Pattern details: like most of what I make, this dress is a pastiche. The mullety two-layer skirt is from the Metamorphic Dress by Sew Liberated (pattern link: Metamorphic Dress). I had at first made this using the same bodice pattern I used for my thesis dresses, an apron-ish style I still love but the shoulder straps of which tend to fall down constantly from my narrow shoulders. I’m working my way slowly through my closet and remaking everything that’s not perfectly comfortable, the majority of which have that irritating strap problem. I adapted this new bodice from the Orchard Dress by Helen’s Closet (pattern link: Orchard Dress). I wore it to the public library knitting club today and the straps didn’t fall off once!

The top layer fabric is pieced together from large flour sack towels that I dyed with tea and screenprinted with all of my favourite motifs: cartoony flowers, clusters of floating arches, twisting segments of warped spacetime, and layers of gritty monoprinting blocked out with paper cutouts. The bottom layer is my old standby, the SCA’s favourite chemise cotton from the Bleachery in Aurora, Illinois, dyed a softly mottled pale olive tan with goldenrod flowers and iron water.

The Captain, whose pose I’m trying to copy here, is wearing my Gramma’s ribbon full of pins won in the Senior Games, along with my Granddad’s steam show hat full of badges.