dual personalities

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.

Here it is Friday again. It was a fine, rainy week but spring is definitely in the air, the birdies are tweeting like crazy, and shoots are beginning to poke through the winter detritus. Our son James is coming home for the weekend (yay!). Other than going to church on Easter and then having brunch we have no plans. All of this got me thinking about past Easters, egg hunts, ham dinners and Easter dresses (I only remember one Easter bonnet). Our Easters were always pretty basic. 

The older I get, the more I appreciate simplicity. I’ve never been one for elaborate rituals — there’s the whiff of the pagan about them. Those doughty Puritans were onto something in their 1645 “Westminster Directory for the Public Worship of God” where they wrote, “There is no day commanded in Scripture to be kept holy under the gospel but the Lord’s Day, which is the Christian Sabbath. Festival days, vulgarly called Holy-days, having no warrant in the Word of God, are not to be continued.” Okay, maybe it’s a little extreme, but the instinct is right. We need to focus on what’s important.

Let’s take art as an example. So much religious art is full of chubby cherubim and half-naked people being overly dramatic — kind of like a modern superhero movie (see almost any Italian Renaissance religious painting). The paintings that capture the mystery are more subtle and luminous like this one by Mikhail Nesterov of the Angel sitting outside Christ’s tomb.

Here’s another good one: the Raising of Lazarus by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1896).

His Daniel in the Lion’s Den (1914) is also great. I love the blue light and lions prowling around oblivious to Daniel.

Whenever the brouhaha of modern life gets me down, I go back to the basics – good art, good music and the Bible (and other wonderful writing).

Have a lovely Easter!

Well, Daughter #1 here, to talk about our recent road trip. Upon returning from our wonderful sojourn to Oklahoma and Texas, my mother and I watched “True Stories” the Talking Heads rock n’ roll musical. Here’s a Washington Post article from 1986 about the movie that I think kind of misses the point.

Anyway, David Byrne spends a lot of time driving in the movie. And his driving is nothing like the driving now. Enjoy this 1987 scene from “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles,” where Michael McKean chastises John Candy for driving 78 miles per hour.

And then feast your eyes on this sign in Oklahoma.

Sidenote, as the driver, driving very fast, I was unable to take pictures of signs etc on the roadside that I would traditionally take and thus relied on my mother’s not-so-quick-draw-camera skills. It took almost five days of practice and repeated drills, but she did eventually capture this sign just before our arrival in Tulsa.

Okay back to the narrative. Please notice that the speed limit is 75. The minimum speed is 60! 60! And note that Oklahoma has a strict no tolerance policy for slow drivers on their interstates. Also keep in mind that Oklahoma is where the wind comes sweeping down the plains. It’s windy! We’re talking real white knuckle driving. About 50 miles after crossing the state line, the speed limit INCREASED to a mere 80 miles per hour. At that point we joked that I’d get pulled over and the officer would say, “Do you have any idea how SLOWLY you were going?”

And Texas. Whoee. They have express lanes for people who can afford to pay more to drive on the highway. They have rich person lanes! Naturally, Google directed us to those. I can’t wait for the bill to arrive in the mail. And all of it is under construction. If I had a dollar for all of the “shoulder closed” signs we passed. Well, I could afford those express lanes!

If this doesn’t give you heart palpitations, I don’t know what will.

I will say that the other drivers in Texas traffic seemed nice and were agreeable about letting a car with out of state plates in when they were clearly in the wrong lane and needed to get over IMMEDIATELY. Having driven in Denver traffic last Fall when we accidentally timed our arrival to the start of the Denver Broncos game, I can say that that is not true for drivers in all states.

In Oklahoma, one Mercedes driver clearly thought I was driving too slowly in the left lane and flashed his lights at me to move the hell over (my interpretation). Joke was on him though, once he got passed me, there wasn’t really any place to go. And shortly thereafter, an unmarked (they’re all unmarked in OK) highway patrol car sped by and pulled over the Mercedes. I’ll admit, I felt a smidge of joy.

All of this is to say, that having handled the navigation system directing me through Fort Worth’s morning rush hour over to Dallas to head up to Tulsa, I truly feel that I am woman, hear me roar.

But I’ll admit I was real glad to get back to this scenic and slow Missouri driving this weekend. I listened to Talking Heads all the way back to Jefferson City.