summer extremes

 It’s not quite seventy degrees today. And by that, what I really mean is, it’s thirty degrees cooler than it was yesterday. 

it was not this hot - the sun beats on it in the pm

I finished my firefly dress; I was going to wear it tomorrow to work - now I hesitate. Is seventy one degrees too cool for sleeveless? Probably, especially after such a cool, damp day.

it's a maxi

I had such a time getting the armhole binding to flatten out.

Wetting it, then pressing, over and over, to gently stretch the fabric. Patience and persistence were what I needed.

Last night's sunset -

I actually had to close my windows tonight - it's cool, and damp, which makes it feel colder.

Daisy in my window

grave-robbing

 "St. John's narrative of the Resurrection opens on the morning of the first day of the week. It is still dark - just the way it was at the beginning of time before God said, 'Let there be light (Gen. 1:3). But a light is about to shine, and a new creation is about to appear.

The stone had been rolled away. That stone, blocking entrance to the tomb of Jesus, stands for the finality of death. When someone we love dies, it is as though a great stone is rolled across them, permanently blocking our access to them. And this is why we weep at death - not just in grief but in a kind of existential frustration.

But the stone had been rolled away. Undoubtedly, Mary Magdalene thought a grave robber had been at work. The wonderful Johannine irony is that the greatest of grave robbers had indeed been at work. The Lord said to the prophet Ezechiel, 'I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves' (Ezek. 37:12)  What was dreamed about, what endured as a hope against hope, has become a reality. God has opened the grave of his Son."

                                                             -   Bishop Robert Barron: a meditation on John 20:1-9

new life on the plum tree

Every time I see a rabbit outside, I wonder if it's the one we rescued from the cat last summer. Did he even survive? 

rather splotchy markings

the real King

 It's the last Sunday of the liturgical year, the feast of Christ the King. This would be celebrated at the end, because proclaiming someone a king would be a culmination of their life. And next Sunday begins Advent, which is the beginning of the liturgical year. It would have to be the beginning, because it is the quiet, reflective time before Christmas, the birth of Jesus, and we know that life begins, not at birth, but before that, at conception. So, we honor that presence of him in his mother's womb for the three or four weeks before Christmas, waiting and preparing with her for the birth. 

It's nice for the merchants that Advent starts on December first this year, since all Advent calendars I've ever seen seem to think it always begins on that date. But Advent is not something invented by those who sell Christmas decorations. It was observed by the very early Christians and officialized in the fourth century - that's pretty early! They observed it practically from the beginning. 

Christ's reign is a conquest not over political enemies
but over the powers of sin and death.
His rule is redemption.

- from Magnificat, November 2024

Put no trust in princes,
in mortal men in whom there is no help.
Take their breath, they return to clay
and their plans that day come to nothing.

- from Psalm 146

the deep down things

 I finished C.S. Lewis book. Toward the end, there was a section that seemed so dense and I decided that I didn't have to read every word, but then, looking at the last chapter I felt like reading it.

Jason Baxter speaks of nostalgia as a positive thing: "Lewis was nostalgic for the future." he says. "The old model was not wrong, strictly speaking, but a kind of deep, human subconscious desire for a world that, in some sense, we are meant to occupy, but not yet."

He says, "The experience of nostalgia is a feeling of beauty's remoteness, but only because it is so far in the future, rooted 'deep down things'.* It is hope. And the great thing about true hope, this nostalgia for the future, is that it has none of the irritability, fear, anxiety, and discouragement that flavors many of the words of those who describe the demise of Christendom in our day. We were denied the garden, and then we were exiled from the enchanted cosmos. Now we must own our modernity, But by doing so, we engage in an extraordinary ascesis of the senses. We must move forward and look beyond."

                                     - from The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis

*God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is smeared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell; the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs -
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins

it might as well be spring

It is entirely spring-like today; I saw a neighbor pruning his grape vines earlier. Why not? Although I know nothing of grapevines. It's going to snow on Tuesday.

About a week ago, a chunk of our wooden back-door stoop broke off; well, the house is sixty three years old. My brother planned to fix it, but it's winter. But then it got warm! And today, when he gets out of work earlier than on weekdays, he is working on it. The cats are closed in the spare room, where I'm sure Annie feels safe from all the noise, and Daisy feels overwhelmingly curious, and maybe a little scared, but not enough to quell the curiosity.

I finished the RFK Jr. book - it was excellent. I like him. May God keep him alive. I was reading Towers in the Mist, but it's one of Goudge's historical ones, and I can't seem to get in the mood for it, so I've put it aside. I'm still going through Christina Rossetti's poems.

And somebody dropped off the cat stories at the library this week. That's more my cup of tea at the moment.

bright spectacle

 There was a spectacular sunset and I almost missed it. I just happened to go to the front of the house for something, and wow! 

The camera never seems as enthusiastic about sunsets as me. It was more brilliant than this. Believe me!

incremental living

 Advent began a week ago, and with it I started on the Christmas cards. I figured out that if I do five cards each night, I'll have plenty of time to send them all, with only a minor effort and maybe fifteen minutes spent. So far, it's going well.

It finally dawned on me that I cannot clean the kitchen all in one day. Well, of course I could, if I didn't do much else. I'd rather not do it that way. So I made a list of what tasks cleaning the kitchen consists of, and I do as many of these on kitchen day as I can, and then the next day I'll try and do just one more. And the next, etc. If it's after working all day and I'm tired, I won't, but it's always in the plan, and if I can do it, I will. But, I'm going forward.

It's impossible to get a nice photo of the counter, but I put got Daisy's FortiFlora packets in a Christmas cup and I made room for a tree. The bowl where we save pop tops for a friend has silver snowflakes on it. The red package is a gift of wine, and it looks festive, so there it sits! It looks much better in person. You'll just have to come over. :)

For years, at certain sunny times of the morning I'd notice how dusty the cabinet doors were, but wiping them all down thoroughly is a big deal, and then they get dusty again in no time anyway. After years of this futility, I got the notion to count them; there are twenty seven, plus two sections I also need to wipe down. So now, I just wipe down cabinet number one on the first of the month, the tenth cabinet on the 10th, etc. It takes seconds, and there is no more dust to be seen. On Sundays and holidays, I just don't do it and those get wiped the next month. 

Right now, I'm also trying to bake for Christmas and decorate, so there's always too much going on. And in between, I try to keep up with my reading and sewing. I prefer it this way: doing a little of this and a little of that. It all seems to get done, or enough of it does to make a difference. Does this all seem nutty to you, or does it make sense?

a garden saga

 The very rainy weather pattern we were in seems over, and it's actually been September-like at times, in the high seventies and how eighties. Amazing! And very welcome. But all my plans for the backyard garden were foiled and now I just have to learn from this and forge ahead. 

Do you see the long grasses in there? Just one week ago I went in to pull up some weeds after the weather had changed. There was standing water in there along the edges, and the weeds I pulled up were not only in muddy soil, which I expected, but sopping, dripping mud. There was really no point in continuing. I realized that raised beds are what I need to think about. I don't know if today, one week later, it was much drier, but today we're having a very rainy day, rain on and off all day, so there is really no point. The rain today is normal for summer, falling straight down, cooler breezes coming in the windows - it's nice. But that area down there doesn't need any more water, unless I want to grow rice. 

My brother had told me in the spring that he wanted to focus on the side garden - he works long hours and doesn't have so much time - so I said I'd work in the back garden. 

His MO for the garden was always to rototill, and then plant everything close together, so the plants could help prop each other up to a certain degree. He would incorporate some compost with each plant he put in, and then use MiracleGro for fertilizer. He told me that the point of growing your own veg is to spend as little money as possible, to make it worthwhile. And, to be fair to him, he had to make good use of what little time he had to spend on it. But I have different ideas (and probably less realistic than his).

I told him not to till, that I didn't want to weed seeds to be turned up by the tiller. I was just going to try and keep up with them as time went on. When I began in mid-May, it was kind of muddy in there, but I bought a few savoy cabbage plants and onion sets and put them in, along with some mushroom compost from the garden store down the road. I had no idea of filling up the space, as it is a good size and I didn't want to overwhelm myself; I thought I'd buy plants a little at a time, and compost as needed, clearing weeds as I went along. I developed a vague memory of a weeding implement, dug around in the basement and found my cape cod weeder - a fantastic tool for weeding! When the ground is dry, there's nothing like it for cutting those weeds out entirely; when the ground is moist, you can usually just pull them up by hand. 

So, time went on and I bought the rosemary plant, a garlic chive, and some oregano, just whatever caught my fancy when I was at the garden place, and I got some chicken manure fertilizer, the dried sort. I took care of my plantings, the cabbage was growing nicely and I also got an heirloom tomato called Black Russian - I do love the heirloom tomatoes. My plan was to see how things went, and maybe cover parts of the garden with cardboard if I thought I wasn't going to plant there, to keep down the weeds. I was going out in the cool mornings, watering and spreading grass clippings around the plants.  I had a plan. Then it started to rain. 

At first, I just waited, but it would shower every day, it seemed, and more like a downpour. And at times when I couldn't go out. Then, it was all so wet, there wasn't much point, and I thought it would pass. But it lasted three or four weeks, along with steady excessive humidity, the whole time. The cabbages were ruined. The tomato was, too. I didn't think to put them in pots - I didn't know it would last so long. 

I read somewhere once that Leonardo had many failures; he kept going. There isn't much point in my being mopey - I just want to learn from this episode. I was telling my brother at dinner that I'm going to get raised beds. He can't see putting out any expense for them, considering how they need to be filled, etc. But there are a lot of helpful gardening channels on youtube - like Huw Richards, an amazing young man who's had a channel since he was a child, really, and he has frugal and sensible ideas for gardening. I don't mind the expense in order to establish things.

We'll see how it goes.

the earth is full of the goodness of the Lord

I am already finished with the reading challenge I was following! I didn't expect it. It's the third year they've issued one, and I didn't finish the first. The second, I barely made it, but it felt like work. And then when they offered this year's, Angelina said that the books she wanted to read just seemed to fit into the reading challenge. This seemed incredible to me, but I thought I'd try it. And that's just how it was! So, it's October and I'm done. Not done reading, though. 

 

I heard a loud thud coming from the living room, and was almost afraid to look. But Daisy had knocked over the scratching post, and was wrestling with it. She's done this more than once - I guess she wants to teach it a thing or two. So cute. 

I feel inclined to re-read Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft. He is a motorcycle mechanic, among other things and he sees a problem in our distance from understanding how things work, things which are among us as everyday objects. He says: "A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our relationship to our own stuff: more passive and more dependent." I think of sewing; I need to make time for my projects, rather than hope I can fit them in. It's been a real problem lately. 

My brother just called to me - Daisy ate a piece of tomato. I tried to tell him she'd done this before - hadn't she? But no, it was Annie. (Having a blog can be very useful at times.) So, it seems we have tomato-eating cats. Not sure it's a good thing.

We have marigolds still thriving outside, and I know calendula is in lots of homemade salves, good for soothing the skin. But I think ours are tagetes, not calendula, so I will not be making anything with them. 

end of April musings, including creeping authoritarianism

 I finally saw a rabbit today; I've been looking. The little chickadee still flutters over my brother's car when he's home, and I've seen a sparrow hang around the nest and even go in twice, but coming out right away. I don't like it.

I've been continuing the plan of cooking the same meals every week for the whole month. It's a good way to hone a promising recipe, perhaps finding ways to make it more cheaply, or improving it in some way. I like it - less menu planning, anyway. 

Poor Dolly's allergies are terrible right now. She's always had them, some years worse than others. Her eyes stream and she ends up looking like Alice Cooper. No photos! I will not photograph Dolly unless she's looking her beautiful self. She's eighteen now, by the way.

Someone is coming Thursday to look at the tree stumps and remove them. And we're still thinking about what kind of trees we want to replace them. Another cherry, for sure, and something else. Nothing slow-growing, or too tall.

I picked up a book about education in our state during the Revolutionary War, from 1763 to 1800.
"Parents and relatives, school and church, town and state shared the responsibility for guaranteeing the piety and morality of the next generation...The colonists themselves recognized that the Revolution occurred only because the commonality could read and write. The Patriots, believing education determined the character of a people, recognized the crucial but indirect importance of morality in creating and sustaining the Revolution....Americans were thankful that they could perceive the difference between creeping authoritarianism and necessary order. Eighteenth century man believed that anarchy in the state would lead to chaos in church and family. Parents, ministers, and magistrates should cooperate in instilling the right mixture of assertion and deference in each citizen. Education was the method by which a society could preserve what was most essential School, church, and family worked together to inculcate correct attitudes towards God and country."

                                                 -  by J. William Frost

decoration alteration

My brother's little rustic tree which I always put in the kitchen is really a tangle of raffia or long straw. I decided to trim it while still keeping its character.

It's hard to tell, but believe me - it looks much better. And I saved the excess for the Baby.

I had to put this nativity out of the reach of certain furry persons who shan't be named, but I like the new set-up. I also moved the woodland Madonna painting to the kitchen corner cabinet.

It looks very pretty there, but I've twice found the above right-hand tree on the floor.

the responsible party, caught red-handed but too fast to be photographed

As for the tree, I found more paper and cloth ornaments that I expected to, and it didn't look bad until the orphan started taking things down. When I hang them up again they seem to end up higher than before and today I noticed that it's all bare on the lower third, which makes it look very odd. 

an end in sight

They paved our road today; with many large trucks and other vehicles, rolling and flattening; men tamping down the asphalt around the edges of the storm drains by hand, all glimpsed out the window in between ironing and cleaning and cooking, all very fascinating. My brother says they'll have to make another layer, but it is almost done.

shake, rattle and roll

We thought, last Thursday, the road would soon be paved, because they were putting down more dirt and rolling over it to flatten it out. But, no.

Monday, after my brother went out, I looked outside to see a large mound of dirt at the end of our driveway and the big claw was parked on our front lawn.

it got bigger than this

There were deep trenches again with workers in them up to the neck. Phase three, I guess: They were doing the storm drains. So, first they had replaced pipes that brought sewage out, the the pipes which bring clean water in, and now the storm drains. Phase four, presumably, is the paving. (I am surmising).  Everyone's yard has either mounds of dirt on it, or stacks of pipe.

Day after day they dig these pits, and have to fill them in at day's end. Amazing. 

This is all a prelude to yesterday morning. My brother had just gone out on an errand and I was getting ready for work. The house began to shake, like an earthquake. I knew it wasn't that - those fellows were outside. I think this contraption compacts the soil to ready it for paving.

These fellows always show up around 7 every day, but this morning all was strangely quiet and deserted. Until now - I can hear their vehicles beeping as I write this. We'll see what transpires today. If anyone on the street has a large party planned for Thanksgiving next week, that could be interesting.

harvesting the basil

I had almost entirely forgot about the basil, and last night's temperatures in the twenties almost did it in.

all buttoned up

I guess I'm a bit behindhand with the photos lately.....but I didn't take a picture. My brother asked me to look at his summer sport coat, the buttons. They were getting too loose, so I said I'd re-do them.

When I noticed the absence of a knot on the wrong side, I thought I'd better inquire into the right way - a.k.a. the neat way - to do it, and I found this video.

The original thread was similar to embroidery floss, so that's what I used. The instructions were thorough and very clear. All done!

This is a cute channel with two guys trying to show how to behave like a gentleman - good luck to them!

totally unrelated to the subject at hand

a contrasting hem

I'm finally finishing up a summer dress I started way back when; I'm ready to hem it.

I had pinned this image from Anna's website, Pleasant View Schoolhouse, because it seems I'm often drawn to hems with borders: it's the third photo down, with her daughter wearing a dress that looks like the hem is bound with bias binding. I love this look!

I decided to try it with my blue floral, and use a contrasting color.

The ruby red looks nice with it, I think.

I was trying to figure out the best way to go about it; using double fold is the ideal, but I wanted to use what I had on hand and I liked this color. I stitched it on to right side, intending to fold it under and secure it in back, but that would make a very thin band at the bottom, and I like this particular width.

I'm just going to trim and zigzag the seam allowance underneath there, and then leave it be; it's bias - it shouldn't fray, right? I like that width - we'll see what happens! I'll only have to press out the fold line.

Epiphany prayer

O God, whose only begotten Son

 has appeared in our very flesh, 

grant, we pray,

that we may be inwardly transformed

through him whom we recognize as outwardly like ourselves.

-   Magnificat, January 2019

a very small harvest

I quickly cut back the rose bushes today - just two. There were so many red ones! They're now in a pitcher in the kitchen.

And the other bush gave me a few rose hips. The branches were arching and I should have cut them before this, but better late than never - the weight from the winter snow would cause damage, otherwise. So I pulled off all the hips, but only two or three are red. I suppose only the red ones are ripe - what can I do with just a rosehip or two?

two in one

When I sew, I tend to take my time; I am prone to hastiness, which often leads to error, which I then have to fix. But I do think it takes me too long to make a project.

I finished the apron the other day. It's plain, but I didn't have any appealing ideas for decoration, so that's what it will be, but it is reversible.

One side is this soft green all-over print and the other is

this, which if you're a lover of the Old Country Roses china pattern, will be familiar to you.

I was copying the apron Margaret sent me a few years ago  -

a very simple shape which I used for a pattern. Hers is not reversible; she used three fabrics for this: the large floral, the solid light blue and a bold stripe on the inside

as a channel for the ties.

I had three fabrics, the two above and a solid green. But I couldn't decide which of the two prints would look better for the main apron piece. I'm not good at imagining how a finished thing will look and I couldn't "see" if the green floral with a pocket from the larger floral would look better, or the other way around. I was going to use the solid green for the tie and other areas of trim. While my mind was dithering, I saw this on pinterest:

basically the same shape, but reversible! So that decided me. But this one has sewn-on ties, and I wanted to use Margaret's method.

I don't if she made this up or used a pattern, but the way the ties work is a pretty good idea. There is one long (88 inches) tie which runs through a channel of bias binding on the wrong side of the apron; it goes around your neck and when you tie it in the back, it adjusts to your size by scrunching up along the channel. Do you get what I'm saying?

See the scrunching?

Because I was using two layers, I didn't need to make any binding, I just sewed a certain distance away from the curved side edges and made the channel that way, leaving openings at either end. For the tie, I used a length of double fold bias and stitched the edges together. 

It's so plain because I was afraid a pocket on one side would make it bulky and less attractive when wearing the other side. This is a gift for a young woman friend of Debra's who just got married - I barely know her, but I know she has one apron. I knew she needed another. Now she will have three options!

in the interest of warm ankles

I had two small skeins of this very vibrant yarn.

When I was preparing for work last Wednesday - the day it reached 77 degrees - I knew I wanted to wear my sandals, but it was cool in the morning; also, for all I knew the AC might go on there and I'd freeze. I found myself thinking a pair of ankle warmers would be ideal for both situations. After looking at several patterns I realized anything but the most simple stitch would be competing with these wonderful colors, so I just knitted and purled each skein until it was used up. Now these need to be joined into little tubes, but they could also stand to be just a bit wider, so I've fished around for some solid colors to add a bit of a stripey width.

I think I'm going to knit a narrow piece and then attach it to each side edge. Each leg may have a different color, as I've got very little of my "leftovers", but I think that will be okay. Stash-busting.