dual personalities

I’m taking the day off today, and I plan to concentrate on the good things that happened this week. First, my stressed out Christmas cactus is thriving in its new location in my son’s room. It is blooming like crazy!

It has never produced so many flowers. I can’t tell you how happy this makes me. I thought I had all but killed it, so its recovery fills me with joy.

Second, I had a great last day of class. The students in my ancient warfare class wanted to end our strategy simulation with a battle, so I spent most of Thursday inventing a board game. Quelle challenge! There was math involved and I’m not good at math (understatement of the year). Consider: If there are 4 legions and each legion has 9 regular cohorts plus one first cohort, and each regular cohort is subdivided into six centuries and the first cohort into five centuries, and each regular century gets a ballista and a scorpion (artillery) but the centuries in the first cohort get double that, then how many ballistae and scorpions do I need? No wonder I get migraines. In the end I got the game ready, and my six groups paired off to determine the outcome of our fictional Civil War. Here’s a photo of two of the warring groups hard at work (the blotted out faces comply with FERPA regulations).

It looks tame, but the battles were intense and there was much hooting and hollering. They really got into it. They were a great group of students – I always left the classroom happier than when I went in, and during a semester that was otherwise extremely stressful (university politics – ugh) that made all the difference.

Finally, our tax return arrived! I’m planning a trip to the dollar store — if I can scrounge up the change to pay the taxes on my purchase.

I also love the fact that the check is void after one year. It could take me that long to decide how to spend all that dosh!

Have a blessed weekend and don’t forget, ““It is a good idea sometimes to think of the importance and dignity of our every-day duties. It keeps them from being so tiresome; besides, others are apt take us at our own valuation” (Laura Ingalls Wilder).

“Beyond what goes on in the world that makes the headlines, there is also what goes on in the small, private worlds you and I move around in and the news of our own individual days in those worlds. Some of the things that happen in them are so small that we hardly notice them, and some of them shake the very ground beneath our feet, but, whether they are great or small, they make up the day-to-day story of who we are and of what we are doing with our lives and what our lives are doing to us. Their news is the news of what we are becoming or failing to become.

Maybe the best time to look at that news is at night when we first turn out the light and are lying in the dark waiting for sleep to come. It is a time to look back at the wars that you and I have been engaged in for the last twenty-four hours, or twenty-four years for that matter, because there are none of us who do not one way or another wage war every day, if only with ourselves. It is a time to look back at our own searches for peace because deep beneath the level of all the other things we spend our time searching for, peace, real peace, is the treasure for which maybe we would all of us be willing to trade every other treasure we have. As we lie there in the dark, we might ask ourselves, what battles, if any, are we winning? What battles are we losing? Which battles might we do better not to be fighting at all, and which, in place of surrender, should we be fighting more effectively and bravely? We are churchgoers. We are nice people. We fight well camouflaged. We are snipers rather than bombardiers. Our weapons are more apt to be chilly silences than hot words. But our wars are no less real for all of that, and the stakes are no less high.

Perhaps the stakes are nowhere higher than in the war we all wage within ourselves–the battles we fight against loneliness, boredom, despair, self-doubt, the battles against fear, against the great dark. In the whole Bible there are perhaps no words that everybody, everywhere can identify with more fully than the ones St. Paul wrote to the Roman church: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (7:19). This is as rich a summation as any I know of the inner battle that we are all involved in, which is the battle to break free from all the camouflaged and not so camouflaged hostilities that we half deplore even as we engage in them, the battle to become what we have it in us at our best to be, which is wise and loving friends both to our own selves and to each other as we reach out not only for what we need to have but also for what we need to give.”

Frederick Buechner, The News of the Day

Last week at this time I was preparing for our son to arrive for Easter weekend. Alas, this week we are on our own, and stacks of grading await. How much difference a few days can make. We had a wonderful Easter, albeit the men had to suffer through one of my culinary mishaps. I tried to make blueberry sour cream pancakes for our Easter brunch but because I was talking while putting the batter together, I didn’t put enough flour in and the result was soupy. Then I added too much flour and it was lumpy, gloopy and, due to the extra stirring required, lavender/grey from the frozen blueberries. The pancakes don’t look too bad in this photo, but don’t be fooled — they were. James is putting on a brave face; each of us managed to eat only one.

We were reminded of the scene from About a Boy when Nicholas Houle threw “a bloody great baguette at a duck’s head and killed it”.

Good times 😊

Switching gears, I’ll share a couple of etchings that I acquired at a recent local auction. They are quite small – not much over 5 x 7 inches – but for some reason the previous owner put them in large frames.

They seem dwarfed by the burlap texture matting, don’t you think?

Here are close-ups:

My plan is to cut the mats down a bit – not too much! – and reframe. I haven’t done it yet, so if you think that’s a terrible idea, please let me know in the comments. I’m not sure where I’m going to put them, but I’ll take photos in situ when I get them up.

We’re still waiting for real spring here. It snowed earlier this week, but that is to be expected. These are the weeks we set aside each year for inside work, spring cleaning and painting. I haven’t gotten my act together to plan anything yet but hope to get to it soon. What spring projects are you planning?

Have a wonderful weekend!

Well, I’ve had quite the day and I’m starting my blog post later than usual, with a glass of wine in my hand. Buckle up. Just kidding.

Today’s blog post title comes from the inimitable Michael Kors during Season 7 of Project Runway. Yes, I am late to the party in discovering that certain older seasons of PR are streaming on Hulu. No commercials! It was the early aughts so minimal politics. Just sewing and seriously anorexic looking models.

I watched PR almost from the beginning. Back in the day when people still used DVDs to manually find movie clips, I was an intern at the Today Show. The show was on Bravo back then, an NBC subsidiary, so each week when someone got kicked off, they’d be on TODAY. It was a very big deal. And then, I think Season 3 is the season where my whole family watched either together or remotely but together (because everyone watched TV at the same time) and we just loved it. We had our favorites and our least favorites. And back then, even though you rooted for the designer, the fashion determined winners and losers.

In 2008 when I still lived in Washington, D.C., I visited my New York friends and we staked out Bryant Park to see the PR designers arrive for their runway show. We saw them all–and Nina Garcia! I have a whole Facebook photo album devoted to this. These photos were taken with my rather large digital camera and uploaded to my computer via a USB cord.

After this exciting moment, we actually high tailed it over to Parson’s and saw Tim Gunn enter the building. I look back on it and I really can’t believe we did this. Also, did we skip work for this? Justified.

Remember the Bluefly.com accessory wall?

Anyway, it’s really interesting to watch now, as more of a sewist. I could always appreciate the handiwork that went into each garment, but now, even more so. It is a highly entertaining, not terribly stressful, pleasant show to watch nowadays (well, I can vouch for Season 6 which is where Hulu starts). I’d love to see Seasons 3-5.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention my dear Mother’s birthday today. I am leaving work early so I can head back to Kirkwood to celebrate. For the second year in three years, the date has escaped my father’s memory and he is out of town (perhaps you’ll recall how in the midst of COVID in 2020, he just completely forgot). We’re going to an event featuring our favorite instagram influencer interior designers at our favorite neighborhood store and then we’ll hit up happy hour. Here is my favorite picture from our trip to Oklahoma/Texas:

I’m grateful for my mother everyday and wish her a happy, happy day, and year ahead! xo.