Friday Unrelated Information

1. This weekend I will see Star Trek and go to the Neko Case concert at Red Butte and get a haircut AND buy some bark mulch for the yard. Big weekend!

2. Here is an article about "Caring for Your Introvert" from the Atlantic quite some time ago. I think everyone I know needs to read this.

3. Something silly from Married to the Sea (click for big):

I Got Nothing

Between not knowing what day of the week it is, and being busy, and obsessing over finding a good travel dress to wear on a business trip (my first business trip!), I am just drinking coffee and looking at pictures on the internet in the mornings, not composing anything good.

I'll have a list tomorrow.

Schubert Weather

This partly cloudy end of May with the honey locusts in bloom reminds of when I first discovered the Schubert Cello Quintet eight or nine years ago (and blackberries in cream-top yogurt, and the difficulties of sad people, but that's not what we're talking about today). I had to listen to it twice this weekend while sewing, and you should listen to it, too. The second movement, the loveliest, is below, but the whole thing is worth an hour of your time.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Long Weekend

Even with Mr. Isbell being gone all week and me having Monday off, I really didn't accomplish much this weekend. When I try to think of what I did, all I can come up with is "Make blueberry muffins."

I did sew a little, because for the first time in about 15 years I've decided I want a pair of pajamas again--with a matching robe. This probably ties in with wanting to have long hair, although watching all that Mad Men again doesn't hurt, either. And I decided it was time to improve on what's described at 1:40 below:



"Team Building Exercise 99, yeah!"

Memorial Day Now Memorialized With Furniture Sales; Sorry, Veterans

You can read about the holdiay's history as Decoration Day here if you'd like, or you can read this Carl Sandberg poem that I always think of:

Grass

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work -

I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. Why is Dick Cheney still talking? Why are there news articles about how he's still talking? Please stop talking now, Dick.

2. The Writer's Almanac tells me it's the birthday of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who hated writing Sherlock Holmes stories:
"To get out of writing Holmes tales, he asked Strandfor higher and higher prices for his stories, ridiculously high, hoping they would turn him down. But they went ahead and paid him anything he asked."

3. Finally, Lego sets that adults can leave out without feeling silly: Frank Lloyd Wright models! Read more here.

May Is National Bike Month

I've finally started riding my bike to work! I know I wanted to be less wimpy about riding in cooler weather (Thing #9), but I started my new job in April and was just too shy to wheel my bike through the office right away. (It didn't help my shyness to learn that one coworker is a fancy bike racer and one boss rode/ran/swam the Hawaii Ironman last year.)

But now I've started riding and it's significantly easier to pedal every time, which is good, and all the roadies at work are friendly, and I'm getting waves from passersby again. Velo bon!

The Attack Of The Cute

I had to be on an East-coast client call early this morning, and Toby did not like that one bit. In his cat mind, if I'm up earlier than usual it should be to lavish him with even more attention and monologues in the kitty voice. So he did his best to distract me with races, squeaks, surprise attacks, and most distracting of all, the Cute Roll:

Tuesday Project Roundup: Christmas Stockings Are Not Holding My Interest

To be fair, I haven't been working on them very much because of the yard and graduation parties and eating outside on the new patio. But these caught my eye, despite my knowing I haven't worn any summer knits I've made in the past:

I really like the navy one, but the directions appear to be in Finnish and would have to be mail ordered and Christmas stockings are easy and I'm not knitting that much anyway. (I'm not sewing much, either. Because have you noticed? It's WARM outside!)

If I do decide to knit either of these, I guess I could get enough yarn to make them long-sleeved. Because I probably wouldn't finish until fall anyway.

Ninety Degress!

I think the whole office will be restless today.

There is some treasure hidden in the heart of summer
everyone remembers now, and they can't be sure
the lives they live in will discover it.

(From "Santa Barbara Road," Robert Hass.)

Friday Unrelated Information

1. Things I have done at work this week (unrelated projects): Researched the difference between a multi-level marketing scheme and a pyramid scheme; used more exclamation points writing one web site than I have in my entire professional career; and learned about the growing mainstream market for total-body cleanses. My job is awesome!

2. Speaking of advertising, let's watch some Precious Roy Home Shopping Network (from the most brilliant show ever to appear on MTV, Sifl & Olly):


3. And to end the week on a more highbrow note, I came across an Elizabeth Bishop quote that, for me, defines the reason literature exists: "Since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way carefully; who knows what might depend on it."

Science Fiction Plants!

Last night I discovered that ivy has pushed through the outside bricks, into the walls, and is trying to sprout through the baseboard in the bedroom. And that is thoroughly creepy. Not because I think that ivy will suddenly come shooting in to attack us in our beds, but because the ivy has been slowly, slowly working its way in and is probably not going to stop now. (I am so glad I rent, by the way.)

Something that inexorable and vegetative reminded me of a couple of science fiction stories--there's one by Bradbury in S is For Space about mushroom kits that kids order and start growing; the mushrooms then turn out to be a weird alien life that takes over the world and smothers all the kids' parents. And Ursula LeGuin wrote "Vaster Than Empires, and More Slow" which I don't recall as well, but is about a planet whose plant life slowly strangles the explorers, I think. (I mostly remember that the title comes from Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress": My vegetable love should grow/ Vaster than empires, and more slow.)

So maybe if I hadn't read so much science fiction I wouldn't be nervous about walking by the spot where I saw the ivy pushing in. I think the landlord can deal with this...

It's Almost Time To Read Dandelion Wine Again

This poem was on the Writer's Almanac this morning and it reminded me of the first long chapter of Dandelion Wine where Douglas realizes he's alive (well, mortal; he's 11 in the book so obviously he's been alive and known about it for some time).

Anyway. Good old Mark Strand gives us another lovely poem:

My Name

Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.

Tuesday Project Roundup: What I've Been Doing Instead Of Sewing

The short answer: Buying things for the yard. (And working in it, too, but mostly buying things.)

Mr. Isbell expanded the front stoop into a patio and I bought some chairs:
(And a new hose! and hose storage!)

And I bought a lot of marigolds and potting soil:

I did finally get the yellow dot fabric from two weeks ago cut out last night, but someone decided to impede progress as much as he could:
Look at that stubborn face. He wasn't about to move.

Let's Talk About The Twilight Movie

This movie made it onto the Netflix queue because I was considering the books for trashy summer reading (along with Anne McCaffery and some Ian Fleming) and I thought the movie might give me an idea of how bad the books might be.

And let me tell you, it was bad. Not so much bad dialogue, or a bad plot (well...), but bad for teen girls all over America: How did a book that teaches you that it's ok to throw all your love at someone who will hurt you--who might even kill you--become a worldwide bestselling romance? Because in real life the person you're throwing your love at isn't a sparkly vampire; he's just going to give you a broken arm. Or worse.

So I don't think I need to read the books--I'll spare myself that frustration (and spare Mr. Isbell the rants about women perpetuating these behavior patterns). (Seriously, Woman Author and Women Director and Producers? You think that because a secondary character asks a boy to prom that this makes your book/movie modern and empowering? Wow.)

The movie ended with a Radiohead song, though. I didn't see that coming.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. How cool are these Blue Note album covers from the 60's? Even the names of the albums are cool:


You can see a lot more here on what looks to be a Japanese site.

2. Seriously, I can't take the coolness. If anyone browsing in a thrift store finds any old jazz albums, I plan to buy a turntable someday. Hint.

3. I stumbled across an essay on perfume that does as good a job as anything can describing a smell, in the purplest prose imaginable. Which is a good thing, because it gives us paragraphs like this:
"The best way to describe Bigarade is to say, first, that it is a vast smell. And second, that it smells like a human being in the summer in a complex weather system; whoever this person is, we can smell them, they're showered but they have a smell all the same, and the lovely, intricate smells of summer are all around and clinging to their skin, and also it seems to have just rained because there's the scent of rainwater on pavement and perhaps a bit of ozone, plus some flower petals and grass that got washed into the puddle they're stepping in. "

Happy Brithday, Famous Composers

Today is the birthday of Johannes Brahms AND of Piotr Tchaikovsky. Poor Brahms was in love with Clara Schumann his whole life, which was tricky because Robert Schumann was his good friend and mentor, and poor Tchaikovsky was gay at a time when that was illegal in Russia. (Hell, it still might be.)

I recommend listening to the Brahms string sextet #1, which I found online here (pretty good, but find the Berlin Octet recording). And for Tchaikovsky, you can watch The Music Lovers, but then you'll be depressed, so you'd better just put on the 1812 Overture.

Entertaining, Yet Morbid

I found this in my online reading yesterday: A site with the premise, "If we started a movie on the day you were born, and stretched it over your lifespan, this is where you'd be in that movie."

You enter your birthday, how long you expect to live, and pick a movie (Ghostbusters, 2001, Star Wars, etc.), then the results tell you where you are in that movie, if that movie were your life.

Apparently, I'm in that long fantastic scene in 2001 where Dave is jogging in the round part of the spaceship. I don't know how that helps me with my Wednesday at all, but such is the internet.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Working On Thing #7

Thing #7 from the 29 Things is "Knit Christmas stockings, starting with Toby's." I got the yarn a few weeks ago and finally started last week. I'm to the heel now but, since it looks like a stripey tube, I'll wait on a picture.

Mr. Isbell saw my yarn colors (orange*, turquoise, and a weird green) and said, "Those aren't Christmas colors!" But they are:
*Toby gets the orange one, of course.

The Map Of Library Cats

The internet has produced yet another neat thing to look at--thank you, internet! This is an interactive map of all the known library cats in the world. The main page gives you the summary, and then you can click on the state of the country for more particulars. For example, a library in Huntsville up north had a cat named Dewey ten years ago.

Now the internet needs to come up with a map of all the bookstore cats in the world.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. Happy May Day to everyone enjoying an eight-hour work day today. International Workers Day "is the commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886, when Chicago police fired on workers during a general strike for the eight hour day" (although someone did throw a bomb at the police first, apparently. But still.).

2. If I were ever going to knit anything for my brother, this would be it:
I actually think these are machine-knit anyway, but check them out on the collector's Flickr page of "promotional knit beer sweaters from the 70s and 80s."

3. And more music to finish the week--this is a blast from my past that I suddenly wanted to listen to, and then I was 15 again and riding around with my friend in the summer, going to malls.