"Why," asked my husband, "do you have a reducer on your desk?"
29 January 2021
On saints and plumbing parts
02 January 2021
Book Log 2020
It is a perennial conundrum that I used to rail about the child's "required" book logs, back when she was in elementary school, and yet I delight in recording the books I've read via my Goodreads account. I *think* I read 68 books in 2020.
Last year, I started tagging books as male/female authors, and fiction/non-fiction.
It took a little data manipulation to figure out what I'd read, but I can report that I made a conscious effort to read books by women and in fact, did so: I read 46 books by women, and 21 by male authors. (One book was an anthology, hence 46 + 21 does not equal 68.)
Other stats: I read 19 library books, 7 mysteries, 2 books of poetry, and 2 cookbooks. 11 books were non-fiction, 6 were re-reads, and I abandoned 6.
I rarely give star ratings to the books I log on Goodreads, and my "reviews" are really just notes to self - they aren't intended to be comprehensive reviews. That said, I did give four stars to these good books:
- The Corner That Held Them (Sylvia Townsend Warner)
- An Unnecessary Woman (Rabih Alameddine)
- A Wall of Light (Edeet Ravel)
And five stars to these:
- Becoming Duchess Goldblatt: A Memoir (Anonymous)
- The Dutch House (Ann Patchett)
- Here (Richard McGuire)
- An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (Daniel Mendelsohn)
- The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Robert Macfarlane)
- Olive, Again (Elizabeth Strout)
The Mendelsohn reminds me - I read Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, as well as Maria Dahvana Headley's translation of Beowulf. And I was amused to find myself shelving the Headley RIGHT NEXT TO the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf. How convenient to have the translator's names so similar, so as to make the filing of Beowulf so satisfying. (It is entirely possible that we have at least another Beowulf, but I did not check.) Reading An Odyssey shortly after The Odyssey was good - it gave me a lot of insight into the book. Similarly, I read Headley's The Mere Wife before I read her Beowulf; The Mere Wife is a modern day novel riffing on the Beowulf tale, and helped me figure out some of the bones of the poem. [It occurs to me that I tagged neither Beowulf nor The Odyssey as poetry...perhaps I should have!]
Possibly the oddest book I read was one on fungi. Funguses. Merlin Sheldrake's book is called Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures - and it is FASCINATING, so much so that I gave two copies away to friends. If you don't want to read a book about fungi, check out Sheldrake's Instagram post, where he eats his book. There's a fungus among us.
The last book I finished in 2020 was one I got for Christmas: The Year of Knots. It's kind of a "how to" book - but it's both how to tie (some knots) and how to be more creative in your life. I've now learned to tie three new decorative flat knots, and I've even memorized one of them. I'm not sure that I'll be taking up macrame in 2021, but stranger things have happened.
Labels: books
30 December 2020
Technical Challenge
Has 2020 been anything but a technical challenge? It's certainly not been a signature bake, and if it's a showstopper, it's the kind that falls down and uses salt in place of sugar.
Our Christmas was a technical challenge. My husband woke up in the middle of the night and discovered that our power was out, due to a crazy tropical storm. Con Ed promised restoration by 3pm, so we sent the kid to Starbucks for coffee and breakfast snacks, opened our presents 'round the unlit tree, read books and played Gin Rummy, and ate shelf-stable soup for lunch. In mid-afternoon, Con Ed revised the restoration estimate to 11am the next day, so we pulled out the portable generator, started her up (yay!), and began running extension cords. And ... POWER. But by then it was about 4:30, so we ordered Chinese food for dinner.
On Boxing Day, we made popovers for breakfast, and roasted the (insanely large for three people) roast for dinner - all the Christmas day meals, delayed a day.
(Yes, we are still eating leftover pork.)
So, it was somewhat fitting that my birthday present from my daughter - yes, my birthday is four days after Christmas - was a technical challenge.
She measured out most of the ingredients, and gave me an untitled recipe (the full recipe, not a GBBS sketch).
I elected to make it as a "regular" Victoria sandwich, without the layer of buttercream. And it was delicious - even if it meant that I had to make my own birthday cake.
Technical challenge, WON.
25 November 2020
The Punch-fueled Post-pandemic Pot-luck Party that I am Planning
27 October 2020
Lewis
I am heartbroken today. My priest died early this morning.
If you know me, you know that I’m a dyed in the wool atheist. But once upon a time, I worked at a non-profit organization that was housed in an Episcopal church. Lewis arrived one day as the assistant rector, and we’ve been friends ever since.
Lewis’s sister asked that we send our “favorite Lewis memories out into the universe to do good and to ease his passage as he becomes one with cosmos”. Lewis, this one’s for you.
Lewis was smart as hell, and foul-mouthed in a way you don’t expect from a priest. He’s the person I called when I needed to figure out if I was a heathen-atheist, or a pagan-atheist. I think we settled on heathen, but I do like the prosody of heathenpaganatheist. Lewis had a huge appetite for life, and was full of stories. Did you know that Saabs once came with two engines? I learned that from Lewis, who had one once.
When my husband and I were planning our wedding, we scratched our heads about who was going to perform the ceremony. I had the whimsical idea that we could call in three of the wise men from the neighborhood: the Methodist minister from across the street, the rabbi from next door, and the Joyce scholar from down the hill – but instead I asked Lewis, with a smidgeon of trepidation because of the whole atheist business. He agreed in a heartbeat– and married us, using a secular edit of the ceremony out of the Book of Common Prayer. I had a moment of horror when he wrapped his stole around our hands, but whatever prayer he sent up, he kept to himself.
Years later, after my daughter was born, Lewis came to visit. She was tiny – a month or so old – and he brought her a huge-looking toddler-sized pair of red glitter-encrusted Mary Janes, merrily decreeing that “every little girl needs a pair of ruby slippers from an old queen!”
A few weeks after my mother died, we had a memorial celebration at her house. Lewis came, carrying a shovel because I told him to, and dug up bits of her plants to take to his new garden. I love knowing that my mother’s garden extends to a churchyard on Staten Island
Lewis, my friend, my life is richer for having known you.
05 July 2020
Cherry Cherry Cherry
Labels: recipes
29 March 2020
In Which We Join The Army
The other day, my kid said to me "can you help me change my bed? There's a hole in my sheet." So I duly climbed the stairs to help her find the clean sheets and take apart the bed - whereupon I discovered that the hole was, um, big enough for a large grown-up to climb through. This was not some tiny little tear.
But, because I am my mother's daughter, and because there's been this surge of folks sewing up face masks for themselves and local hospitals, I took that dead bottom sheet and threw it in the wash. When it was out, I cut off the elastic edge, harvested the elastic, repurposed the edge into (un)bias tape, and cut up the good parts of the sheet into 6"x9" rectangles.
I then scrounged through the box of t-shirts for projects (remember, I am my mother's daughter), and cut a few of them up into more 6"x9" rectangles.
And I pulled out my sewing machine, which, providentially, I had had overhauled in January because the bobbin winder wasn't winding bobbins.
Some hours and some experimentation later, I'd produced 16 masks - using a simple pattern that's been all over the internet.
I am keeping a couple, sending two to my father and his girlfriend, and sending another two to my sister and her wife. And the rest are going to a local hospital.
Random observations:
- My sewing machine is a weird prima donna wannabe: it demands fancy thread in the bobbin, but it doesn't care about the top thread. Happily, I have a stash of silk thread from who knows where - it's old but perfect.
- [Old cotton thread rots; if you can break it easily, throw it out.]
- No one cares that the lime green polyester top thread doesn't match the pale celadon silk bobbin thread. We're talking life safety here.
- Making the pleats is a pain in the ass if the t-shirt fabric is too butch.
- The cut off neck of a turtleneck makes an admirable and oddly comfortable mask - with NO sewing.
- Proper bias tape is cut on the bias.
I'll make more masks soon.