Friday Unrelated Information

1. Depressed Copywriter is pretty much perfect, especially if you know of or happen to be a depressed copywriter. Some examples: 

2. On a less cynical note, I hope all the moms out there have a Happy Mother's Day. If you need a card for your own badass mother, you can download a printable PDF of this one here. 

What Camping As A Vegetarian Is Often Like

Hippie Poem Wednesday

This hippie poem appeared on The Writer's Almanac today, which gives it far more poetical credibility than coming from, say,  a site with the name of Mystic Mamma. It's by Joy Harjo, whose birthday is today.

Eagle Poem

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear
Can't know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren't always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon, within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Car Knitting

Before the camping trip I realized that 1.) I would probably not be driving and 2.) if so, then I could knit in the car. So I looked around for a small accessory-type project and landed on a knitted tie (using this pattern). 

No, it is not for me. But it's not a sweater, so I'm hoping to avoid any "sweater curses."  And no, I haven't worked on it since the car ride home.

Sunday Night Conversations: The Right Word

Here's some advice about word choice, as given out by my best friend last night: 

I watched The Universe last night and they were describing things like the scale of our solar system and the speed of light. And that's the time to use the word "awesome"--not when someone refills the ice in your water.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. This is making the rounds in advertising circles and it is awesome: This Advertising Life. 

2. Here are some pictures of Skyler enjoying his birthday presents this week, taken from my brother's blog. 

Playing the piano!

And riding on an inflatable rubber burro...

I have no idea where my parents found this, but it's really great. Every kid needs a red rubber donkey, right? 

Thursday Poem

The opera last night reminded me of this poem. It's not really about opera, though. 

After Love

Jack Gilbert

 
He is watching the music with his eyes closed.
Hearing the piano like a man moving
through the woods thinking by feeling.
The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below,
step by step. The music hurrying sometimes,
but always returning to quiet, like the man
remembering and hoping. It is a thing in us,
mostly unnoticed. There is somehow a pleasure
in the loss. In the yearning. The pain
going this way and that. Never again.
Never bodied again. Again the never.
Slowly. No undergrowth. Almost leaving.
A humming beauty in the silence.
The having been. Having had. And the man
knowing all of him will come to the end.

A Night With My Imaginary Boyfriend

Tonight I get to hear my imaginary Russian boyfriend sing in the Met's "Live in HD" broadcast of La Traviata. I'm looking forward to it. I'm sure he is, too. 

It's been non-stop culture around here lately. I'll have to listen to this if I start feeling too fancy.

Tuesday Project Roundup: (Glacial) Progress

I was able to turn last week's fabric and pattern into a cut out pattern and a finished front! That's not a lot to show but it's progress!

The front is hanging oddly on the dress form because it's just a front. But maybe by next week it will have  a back attached.

Look Who's One!

The Smartest Baby in the World* is one years old today! He had a big party Saturday afternoon to celebrate.  There were cupcakes:

 

There were so! many! colors! on the gift bags:

And there was the toy piano to try out: 

It's incredible to think that in 36 weeks you can grow a brand new human, and that in 52 more you can go from this: 

To this (yes, he's walking):

Happy birthday, Skyler!

*Totally un-biased auntie opinion.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. This weekend, I have tickets to the Utah Symphony for the first time in a couple of years. (I used to be there nearly every week back in the days of student tickets.) I hear good things about the orchestra under the new music director.

2. I also have Skyler's first birthday party to attend on Saturday afternoon. I bought him a toy piano, since aunties get to force their interests on their nephews.

 

My brother is going to love hearing "PLINK PLONK PLINKPLINK" all day, every day. 

Just Once

Just once in my life, I'd like to be able to tell off a client and hold out for my idea the way Don Draper does in this clip that isn't allowing me to embed it. 

That is all.

Goose On The Roof

Toby saw something on the roof the other morning, and I assumed it was one of the pigeons that help themselves to the seed in the flat feeder and drive him bonkers. 

No, it was a goose, just hanging out on the roof, driving Toby extra bonkers. He'd never seen such a big bird!

Tuesday Project Roundup: There Are No Sewing Machines In Campgrounds

Way back before the extravaganza that is April (Regular Easter! Greek Easter! Mom's birthday! Camping! And Skyler's birthday coming up!), I decided on my next project. I even got the pattern ready and did a quick test sew of the body to check the fit before I cut into my fancy Liberty fabric. 

Nothing has happened since then, though. But something could happen Saturday morning before Skyler's party. I'll let you know.

Camping!

For the weekend, I went and slept in a tent for the first time in about five years. The trip was to Capitol Reef, where I'd never been, and that is some lovely country.

There were pictures taken from passenger windows: 

There were pictures taken from the back:

There were side canyons:

There were views to admire:

There were trails that turned out much longer than we thought they'd be: 

There were miles to go before we slept: 

There was golden desert light:

Needless to say, it was a good weekend for my inner hippie.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. This Married to the Sea post has inspired a catchphrase between me and my friend: "Don't be the lefterly cow".
(click image to enlarge)

2. And the last line of this entry in the "Shit Certain Social Groups Say" video meme has become my new catchphrase:

NAMASTE!

Today's Thought

I guess this is five thoughts, really:


Via Pinterest.

Grammar Wednesday #5

This one was another request (which makes me so happy): How can you tell when to use drink, drank, or drunk? Or sink, sank, or sunk?

Drink and sink are pretty easy, since they're in the present tense. (I'm pretty sure nobody gets confused about saying "Drink up!") But drank and drunk and sank and sunk are both past tense verbs, so how can you tell which one to use?

Drank and sank are simple past tense verbs: "The ship sank." "I drank too much last night." But drunk and sunk are a past participle, so they need a helping verb--no, don't tune out yet, that just means drunk and sunk always appear with a form of "have": "They have drunk my potion!" "The submarine has been sunk by the spies."

So here's my trick: Drunk and sunk have a U in them. Have has a V in it. U and V come right next to each other in the alphabet. S0 use that trick to remember that drunk and sunk should always appear with have.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Accessories

I made my mom a scarf for her birthday. She's really hard to buy for and making her something requires that she like it (it's a Mom Law), so it seemed like a good idea. Besides, accessories are a pretty flexible gift.

I used two-thirds of the Liberty prints from last week and followed this tutorial, just making the square a little smaller. There was a lot of hand sewing to finish but it went pretty quickly.

Weekend Report

Look who came to my house on Sunday to celebrate his grandma's birthday! This was the first time I'd hosted a family event in the new place.

"Reading" the card he "signed."

Party table!

Other notable weekend events: Going to Brooks Brothers and attending my first Greek Easter celebration. There was drinking. There was dancing. There was an entire lamb on a spit, head and all. (At the Greek Easter celebration, that is; not at Brooks Brothers.)

Friday Unrelated Information

1. My mom will be 64 this Sunday, so pre-emptive happy birthday! I know I posted this same video a few years ago for her, but it's extra-appropriate now that she is 64 and has a "grandchild on her knee":




2. I don't like eels, not one bit. But eel puns are almost OK:

Incredible

Here's a rough trailer for an upcoming documentary Alive Inside, about music and how it helps "awaken" people with memory loss. (Bonus Oliver Sacks!) Like my dog rescue video last week, this one starts off sad, but at least watch from about 3:00 - 4:00.



Incredible. If I ever decide I want to use my powers for good, maybe I should go into music therapy.

Happy Birthday Mark Strand

I still like your poem in the Gallivan Center downtown the best:

Visions of the end may secretly seduce
our thoughts like water sinking
into water, air drifting into air;
clouds may form, when least expected,
darkening the glass of self,
canceling resemblances to what we are.

Even here, while summer sunlight
falling through the golden
folds of afternoon
brightens up the air, we mark
our progress by how much
we leave behind. And yet,
this vanishing is burnished
by a slow, melodious light,
as if our passage here
were beautiful because
no turning back is possible.

It is our knowledge of the end
that speaks for us, that has us weave,
as slowly as we can, an elegy
to all our walks. It is our way
of bending to the world's will
and giving thanks.

Tuesday Project Roundup: "It Never Goes Bad."

My old roommate used to stockpile things like soap and laundry detergent and use the rationale of "it doesn't expire!". Similarly, I use that line to justify stockpiling fabric, even when I'm too busy to really sew.

Yes, this is more Liberty of London. It never goes bad!

Something To Ponder

(Via Pinterest. In my head, I hear this being read by Master Yoda.)

Friday Unrelated Information

1. Here's a fiesty (and profane) piece about the benefits of working in advertising if you're creative. The writer makes some good points:
You can try to make it with your band or be a novelist in your free time. But during the day, you may as well learn about how to work creatively with other people, and how to accept rejection and outright failure, even if you still think that Verizon catalog copy you wrote was a masterpiece.

2. Being Easter weekend, it's time for my annual religious experience: listening to Bach's St Matthew Passion.

3. It's also this guy's first Easter (and nearly his first birthday)! I had to resist buying him the bunny ears costume I saw at Target.

Because obviously he doesn't need ANY clothes to be cute!

Mary Frances On Going To Restaurants

From "D is for Dining Out," in An Alphabet for Gourmets, by my BFF Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher:

I had a happy beginning in [the] neglected art and much abused privilege [of dining out], one that has sheathed it in unfading pleasure for me when it is done well. When I was no more than five or so my father and mother would begin to prepare my spirits for Easter, or Christmas, or a birthday, and when the festival rolled around, there I would be, waiting to greet it...on the pink velvet seat of the region's best restaurant.

I admit I am prejudiced about it. I seldom dine out, and because of my early conditioning to the sweet illusion of permanent celebration, of "party" and festivity on every such occasion, I feel automatically that any invitation means sure excitement, that it will be an event, whether it brings me a rained-on hamburger in a drive-in or Chicken Jerusalem at Perino's. The trouble is, I'm afraid, that I expect people I dine with to feel the same muted but omnipresent delight that I feel.

Worthy Of Dr. Sagan

You guys. Phil Plait at the Bad Astronomy blog has outdone himself. He's describing a massive, massive infrared survey of the sky--over 150 billion pixels, showing a billion stars--and he does it really, really well (click through to see how he gives an idea of scale). But it's at the end of the post that he gets really Sagan-esque:

Think on this: there are a billion stars in that image alone, but that’s less than 1% of the total number of stars in our galaxy! As deep and broad as this amazing picture is, it’s a tiny slice of our local Universe.

And once again, we’ve reached the point where I’m out of words. Our puny brains, evolved to count the number of our fingers and toes, to grasp only what’s within reach, to picture only what we can immediately see — balk at these images.

But… we took them. Human beings looked up and wondered, looked around and observed, looked out and discovered. In our quest to seek ever more knowledge, we built the tools needed to make these pictures: the telescopes, the detectors, the computers. And all along, the power behind that magnificent work was our squishy pink brains.

A billion stars in one shot, thanks to a fleshy mass of collected neurons weighing a kilogram or so. The Universe is amazing, but so are we.

Tuesday Project Roundup: What I'm Knitting

Um, not this:

This was going to be a pair of striped legwarmers that used two different variegated yarns to created the effect of many colored stripes, something like this:
(Image from Google; knitters, you recognize this, right?)

But the colors were just not working. I pride myself on my sense of color and I'm usually really confident in it--but when I get it wrong, it is pretty spectacularly wrong.

Ah well, by the time I finished it wouldn't be legwarmer season anyway.

A Belated Toby-versary

I knew I was coming up on 4 years with the love of my life, but I'm ashamed to say that last night I realized I had missed the actual date (March 23rd). I can't feel too bad, though, because the love of my life also missed it (unless one of his highly varied and operatic "MEOW!!"s was meant to be a reminder).

Dates aside, happy anniversary to my friend, my "something to love," my entertainment. He meows, he chirps, he sings, he knows many, many words and phrases, he knows our routines, he lets me know when those routines are different ("MEOOOOOW!!"), and he pulls an endless variety of faces:

Wise.


Crazy.


Unconvinced, with a side of disapproval.


Wondering.


Helpful.


Approving, yet tired.


Darling.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. As a work field trip, the creative team went to The Leonardo museum yesterday afternoon. Did you know they have a huge collection of photos from the civil rights era? It was really moving to read about something that changed so monumentally less than 50 years ago.

2. Another thing that moved me (to tears) yesterday was this video, the title of which sums it up: "Blind Dog Rescued from Trash, Regains Sight."



You may also be moved to donate to the rescue organization.

Trying Times

I have felt off for the last few weeks, and I can't tell if it's because of the unsettled weather, having less time to myself, professional issues, or just not going to enough yoga classes with my awesome teacher.

For times like this, there are hippie platitudes--I mean, quotes from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:

Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature.

Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation.

Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing.

And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature.

(From here, via said awesome yoga teacher. Yes, I visit that site nearly every day.)

Grammar Wednesday #4

(Today's tip was a request from a friend, which made me feel absurdly gratified. Grammar matters to more than just me!)

Probably because of their visual similarity to "chose" and "choose," people tend to confuse "lose" and "loose" as different tenses of the same word (the way "chose" is the past tense of "choose").

My friends, they are NOT the same word. They are not related in any way. Lose is, of course, "to cease to have" something--a verb; something that is loose (an adjective) "is not firmly fixed in place."

So how do you keep it straight? You can think of the adjective/verb difference, or you can use this tip: If you mean "to cease to have something," use lose with one O. You can remember it by thinking that it has ceased to have the second O.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Almost

So yet again, a leopard-print knit dress has not turned out the way I pictured it. But on the bright side, I think I can fix it.

Here it is with the skirt attached. See how the top part blouses out above the waistband and the skirt a little?

Yeah, that effect is being accomplished with pins right now.

Since my fabric is a knit, I didn't take into consideration the fact that a knit waistband would stretch. Without pins, the waistband slides down and pulls the top down with it, giving the whole thing a much straighter, drop-waisted effect:

But as I said, I think I have a fix for this: I'll add some elastic in a channel behind the waistband to keep things where they should be...just not this week. You can only struggle so much with something, right?

"The wind. The wind."

It's a dramatically stormy Monday morning here (but at least it's rain, not snow) and it made me think of parts of a Neruda poem:

Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.

The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I can contend only against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.

(The whole thing is worth a read, because it's Neruda, obviously, and because of that famous last line.)

Friday Unrelated Information

1. I took the day off today. So far I have slept in and received a gift of cognac-fig ice cream made from goat milk (thanks, Amber!). If these things have happened before 10:00, what greatness will the rest of the day hold?

2. Actually, I think the "greatness" will be working on house projects and professional projects and maybe even sewing. I will think of this Isak Dineson quote:
When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.

Space News

Another new supernova has been found as of March 16. This one in barred spiral galaxy M95, which is roughly the size of our own Milky Way galaxy and about 37 million light years away. Supernova SN 2012aw is the really bright point at the end of the spiral arm that goes down and to the right--see it?
Oh, space. You provide such good perspective.

(Picture from APOD; you can read more about the supernova on Bad Astronomy.)

Happy Birthday, Johann Sebastian

It's Bach's birthday today, in 1685. Here's a happy little piece from the sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin: the Prelude from the E Major Partita.



I love the ending, starting about 2:40.

The E Major Partita has always sounded like spring to me, which is appropriate since yesterday was the equinox.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Half A Roar

Well, all my hopes for more time to work on this leopard knit kind of got blown out of the water last week and into the weekend, but I did manage to make some progress before then:

The pattern I'm using is for a woven, not a knit, but I the only modification I'm making for the knit is I'm leaving off the side zipper, as a knit should stretch enough to pull it over my head. I'm happy to report "so far, so good" on the fit.

Now it just needs the skirt. Surely I can find time to attach two rectangles to this top, right?*

(*This is where you say, "I don't know. And don't call me Shirley!")

Reassurance From The Beatles

Oh yes, I'm still getting my hippie on with late Beatles tunes. I never cared much for this one until I listened to the lyrics (past the "love, love, love" part); now, I like hearing that there's "Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time" and there's "Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be."



Bonus Ringo at the end. Mr. Conductor!

Friday Unrelated Information

1. Adding cat heads to something makes it funny. (It's a law, I'm sure of it.) That's why Cat Scientists of the 1960s is so great:

There's even a Cat Carl Sagan!!


2. I don't really have anything else this week. But come on--there are cat heads AND Carl Sagan. I think that's enough, don't you?

Hippie Quote Thursday

“Quietly go to work on your own self-awareness. If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.”

- Lao Tzu

3.14

Happy Pi Day and happy birthday to Albert Einstein. (How perfect is that?)

Tuesday Poem

I've been able to get some sewing in this week but not very much, so I don't have anything to show today. Instead, how about this poem? It's a good one for spring, for being sad, for navigating tricky times.

Horses At Midnight Without A Moon

by Jack Gilbert

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there's music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.