Friday Unrelated Information

1. It's that time again--it's Open Barn Day at Blue Moon Ranch tomorrow. Come see the alpacas, buy some fiber from the herd, talk to Linda and Ed about their animals, and shiver (it's going to be cold, unfortunately). I'll be there in a semi-official capacity, too.

2. Here's something to make up for the Virginia Woolf quotes:

Virginia Woolf Quote Of The Day, Day Two

From A Room of One's Own again (yes, it's a cop out, but at least it's not a cat picture):

What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us…For the reading of these books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an intenser life.

Virginia Woolf Quote Of The Day

From "A Room of One's Own":

The whole structure, it is obvious, thinking back on any famous novel, is one of infinite complexity, because it is thus made up of so many different judgments, of so many different kinds of emotion. The wonder is that any book so composed holds together for more than a year or two, or can possibly mean to the English reader what it means for the Russian or the Chinese. But they do hold together occasionally very remarkably. And what holds them together in these rare instances of survival (I was thinking of War and Peace) is something that one calls integrity, though it has nothing to do with paying one’s bills or behaving honorably in an emergency. What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens.

Tuesday Project Roundup: No Projects Are Finished Yet Edition

I've been jumping between projects this week: A chambray dress with long sleeves and a skirt out of the same free drapery fabric that I made the Bruce Lee girl dress out of (that one's not for me; it's for the lady who gave me the fabric). I've been mulling over a trial pair of pants after Saturday's Pants Summit, too, and working on a knitting project, which will be this:(I will not, however, wear it in a wind tunnel with a skirt made of scarves, as the model seems to be doing.)

Of course, with all these projects to work on and a free evening last night, what did I do? Shopped for more fabric and patterns online.My friend just announced she's getting married over Thanksgiving weekend, so that requires a dress out of this shiny silk plaid. I want to try to make a light wool jacket before it gets too cold. And who could resist the sleeves on this baby?I couldn't. Look how delighted the pattern model is by hers.

Words Used In Recent Conversations That I Never Thought I Would Hear

1. pederast
2. logician
3. solipsistic

There's a scene in The Garden of Eden where the female character uses the word "paramour," and the male lead reacts thusly, which is how I felt hearing these, too:

"You really said it," David told her. "I'd never heard that word pronounced and I had absolutely no hope of ever hearing it in this life. You're really wonderful."
"It's a perfectly common word."
"It is at that," David said. "But to have the sheer, naked courage to use it in conversation."

Friday Unrelated Information

1. I re-read "A Room of One's Own" this week and found so many good Virginia Woolf quotes. Today's resonates because it's fall:
"It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in windowpanes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish…has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."

2. Speaking of fall, the autumnal equinox is Saturday. Druids and other pagan types celebrate with various harvest festivals; Christians celebrate with Michaelmas (well, British Christians, at least).

3. This is a long but fascinating article from the New Yorker about a man with nearly total amnesia--his recall is limited to just seconds--but who can remember his wife and how to play music (he was a musicologist before his brain was injured). It discusses the nature of music and emotion and memory, and makes one feel really, really grateful for one's own brain function.

4. With the weather getting colder, I've decided I need to learn how to sew pants. So that odyssey starts tomorrow. It may not be pretty.

Another Birthday

My father and my brother have birthdays withing a month of each other, so now it's my brother's turn: Happy Birthday! He used to pull me around on the sled when we were little, and now I sometimes get driven around on "the wheeler." He's a good brother.Eddy is in training to go for rides on the wheeler, too.

Do You Know What Day It Is?

Yarr, it be Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Here's a list of piratical celebrations, online and otherwise, and if ye be a crafty pirate, here's some embroidery patterns to do whilst sailing the seas, arrrrrrrr!

Tuesday Project Roundup: Metafashion Edition

Back when I thought I wanted to get an English minor, I took a critical theory class, where I first encountered the prefix "meta" attached to something--in this case metafiction, which the professor defined as fiction about fiction.

Given the print of this skirt, I think I could safely call it metafashion, or fashion about fashion. It's too bad that in the print the ladies aren't wearing skirts with that print, because that would be another mind-bending effect. But instead of thinking that one through, I could just twirl in my puffy new skirt: Also: Boo ya!

Also: Tomorrow is INTERNATIONAL TALK LIKE A PIRATE DAY. Get ready!

Monday's Word

I was given a book titled The Superior Person's Book of Words nearly five years ago, but I haven't opened it much, probably because 1.) I feel silly reading something like that and
2.) I secretly think I already know all the words in it. But I was stuck this morning for something to write about (other than goats and fabric and projects piling up) so I opened it and found this:

aporia. (n) Patently insincere professings, e.g. by a public speaker, of an inability to know how to begin , what to say, etc.

Who knew there was a word for what celebrities do at awards shows?

Friday Unrelated Information

1. I went to the fair on Wednesday but only had the camera on my cell phone, which did not accurately capture the excellence of a goat I met in the goat barn. She was such a good, smart goat that I asked Mr. Isbell if he thought his parents would let her live in their backyard. He pointed out that she would eat the vegetable garden.

2. Something I just learned: A group of penguins is usually referred to as a colony of penguins. When they are breeding, their colony turns into a rookery or a peguinery . When they are floating out at sea, they are then a raft of penguins. When they are on land they are a waddle of penguins.

3. The Great Basin Fiber Arts Fair is going on this weekend. It's at Wheeler Farm, so not only will there be the regular farm animals, there will be fiber animals and spinning wheels and yarn (oh my). PLUS, the Society for Creative Anachronism ("from the Medieval Times") will be there! Don't miss it!

4. Here's a quote from the country home site I posted last Friday, about what happens when you plant sugar maples ("be not discouraged"): We have seen the maple tree no taller than a walking-staff, become, in fifteen years, so large as to afford sap and sugar. Be not discouraged by looking forward, and say it will be a long time before you can have any benefit by sugar. You must remember the timber is growing every year, and wait with patience, and be assured the other part will not fail.

Actually, that's good advice for most things: "Wait with patience, and be assured the other part will not fail" (even if the other part is goat ownership).

Plant Picture ("It's Working!")

(Morning glory. I wish I could find fabric that color.)

Covey

I think I posted earlier in the year about quail, and how they live all around my house, and how there was a bachelor quail I had named Buster Brown. (I think. I really need to get a search bar on the blog, and remove the link to J. Crew since we broke up, and un-install Google Analytics because I don't think anyone at my old job where the account was based cares about how much blog traffic I get.) Anyway, there are quail around my house, but I don't think Buster Brown is much of a bachelor:
In fact, he may be a polygamist quail, because this picture only got about half of them. We scared each other when I came around the corner (I think the "sportsman" term is flushing the covey?) but they came back around the door after I went in and I got a picture. I like quail. And quail plural marriage.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Quick And Simple Edition

(I was going to call it "Fast And Easy Edition" but decided that wasn't the best connotation for a dress that could be worn by a girl in a Bruce Lee movie.)
Anyway. Not only was this project fast and easy, it was really, really, cheap (ha!)--the pattern was a vintage one my mother had and the fabric was a gift. I even had a zipper on hand, so total project cost was a spool of thread. I sewed it up in about four hours, too, which is making good time.
Here's a better shot of the print. The fabric is vintage, too, and I think in its past life it was drapery. But that just means it has a good weight and, well, drape to it.

R.I.P., Madeleine L'Engle

You've probably heard this, but Ms. L'Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, died Friday at the age of 88. There's a New York Times obituary that's very good, which contains this quote:

"Why does anybody tell a story?" Ms. L'Engle once asked, even though she knew the answer.

"It does indeed have something to do with faith," she said, "faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically."

Friday Unrelated Information

1. Go to the State Fair, where you'll see many blue-ribbon-winning dresses, hint hint hint.

2. I have all sorts of crafty deadlines coming up (an event-specific dress and two gifts)in the next two weeks. Good thing I have a period-costume BBC miniseries to watch.

3. Five great reasons to buy a Hummer

4. Here's a site that tells you all about planning, building, and maintaining a home in the country (aka RANCH HOUSE), often through period writing. There's even home plans. www.backroadhome.com

5. Have some pie this weekend! Think of how disappointed the kitty will be if there is no pie!

There's Pie?

Not At All Like The Blitz, But Still Appropriate

The power went out at my house at 8:30 last night, which meant I couldn't continue to sew or watch Camelot. Before I accepted my forced bedtime I ate some cheese and crackers by candlelight and squinted out some M.F.K. Fisher, which I thought was appropriate. This is from How To Cook a Wolf, her book about trying to eat and live well in emergencies (written for World War II, of course):

"...in a time of peril and unspoken fear [cheese] is an anesthetic and can make your guests, your own self, feel slightly stimulated by its unmistakable flavor and more than a little reassured to know that it still exists. "

Indeed. Cheese in times of peril or power outage is very nice.

We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Tuesday Project Roundup...

...for some physical activity. My traveling companion and I hiked up to the tram at Snowbird, like I had done last year with my father. I remember last year being easier, but this was still excellent.

Someone marveled at the age of the canteen:
Someone else was too tired to look into the camera at the top:
And someone at Snowbird really should have put this sign at the BOTTOM of the trail:
And alphorns make anything better: