The Homebody

Moving Day

2018-06-11T05:46:00.002-04:00

We've moved to wordpress!

My new blog, The Small House in Charlottesville, is now live, although not all my old posts from this blog have made it over there yet and currently the only new content at the new site is a welcome post. There are also a few design details that may need refining, but basically, the site is ready to go. The new URL is www.smallhouseincville.com. I hope to see you there!

Slowly but surely

2018-06-04T06:17:00.000-04:00

I'm sorry for the long delay at launching my new website. I finally resolved a major technical issue, but now am having trouble importing my posts from this blog into the new one. It seems like a simple enough process. You run a back up utility on blogger that gives you an xml file that contains your blog's entire contents. You then run an importer tool in Wordpress. When I did this, all my blogger content landed in the media library and I have no idea how to configure it so it appears as posts. So I've begun the slow and painful process of reviewing all my blogger posts and manually putting each one into Wordpress (backdated). Of course this stupid method of content transfer means all comments will be lost, although they'll live on in the old site. You probably think I am stupid now, but the fact is, I AM stupid. So no worries. I enjoy time-wasting, pointless tasks.

At least now the URL is working properly, which was the big technical problem. My plan is to spend this week transferring as much content as possible and I hope for an official move by early next week. My archives will look weird, as I'm adding the oldest and newest content, hoping to meet in the middle some day, so you'll see a bunch of recent stuff and some things from 2006.

Chance Encounter and the Curse of Mother's Day

2018-05-14T06:32:00.000-04:00

Early yesterday morning, (05:55 to be exact) I went out for a run. A few blocks from my house, I spotted a man standing on a street corner. I had to decide if I would change my route to avoid him, or run past - a routine decision that all women have to make when they're alone and are approaching a strange man. This man appeared to be weaving on his feet and I can easily outrun a drunk so I decided to proceed. When I got close, he approached me, indeed without any respect for boundaries so I had to hold up my hand and tell him not to come any closer. I wasn't afraid, but I was annoyed. I asked him to tell me what he wanted. He was wearing a baseball cap, glasses, and clothes that, although rumpled, had probably seen a washing machine recently. In an educated voice, he asked me if I could help him. I cut him off, saying I didn't have any money and then went quickly on my way. He didn't try to follow me.

At first, I felt guilty that I had rebuffed this man so brusquely, although truly, I had no means to help him. I don't carry money with me when I run and I didn't even have my phone. But then I realized: He's a white man. No harm will come to him. Had he been non-white, someone might have called the police about a "suspicious" person. Had he been a woman, there might have been offers of help along the lines of "Hey baby, want a ride?" But he was a white male, secure as King Henry II's proverbial virgin with a bag of gold, perfectly safe to stand on a residential street corner at 6:00 am, accosting random women.

My feelings turned in a different direction entirely and I found myself angry with the man rather than with myself. Honestly, how feeble to find yourself stranded and to just expect someone to rescue you. The man had two legs that worked, he could have used them and walked downtown and found help.

Anyway, screw him. I changed my route on the homeward run and didn't see him again, but the whole incident made me realize that I don't like men. Sorry men, but a lot of you really suck. And even the relatively decent men who don't sexually harass or condescend are still standing around basking in their male privilege in a very irritating way.

It must have been a rough night in Charlottesville on Saturday. Two blocks from the man who accosted me, I saw someone sleeping in their car and I also encountered a man passed out on someone's front yard - something you might see in a student neighborhood, but unusual for my neighborhood. The man who approached me, I suspect was a tourist, lost, drunk, and bewildered in an unfamiliar neighborhood.

Yesterday was Mother's Day, which I try not to acknowledge because it's the most angst-filled day of the year. This year was my first Mother's Day without a single child in the house and I was free to do what I wanted - EXCEPT - on this day of all days, Phoebe got sick. When I took her out for a walk, she refused to go into the park and insisted on standing in the vacant lot, munching on the tall grass. Inside again, her stomach made such ominous noises, we had to go straight back out and my sacred morning routine of tea and a book was upset because I had to stay out with her, waiting for her to puke. Classic Mother's Day - even when your kids are all taking care of themselves, you still can't escape being responsible for someone who's about to puke. Jon, of course, slept like a baby through all the events just described.

In other news, my new website is coming along but isn't quite ready to be launched. Wordpress.org offers a bewildering array of tools and it's been scolding me because I suck at SEO. Of course I want readers, but maybe it isn't a super high priority for my blog to land near the top of searches. Also, I installed a new theme which undid much of the work I'd already done with one of Wordpress' standard themes. Maybe in another week or two it will be ready. This may be the last post that I write at this site. I intend to migrate all my content here to the new site.

More Dog Drama

2018-04-30T06:31:00.004-04:00

The very best days, in my opinion, are those that are a pleasant mix of work and relaxation. I am happiest when I'm accomplishing something, but my weekend coffee breaks are sacred. These are about an hour and a half each Saturday and Sunday in which I read and knit or embroider and look at decorating or gardening books. Saturday was a glorious mix of work and play, but yesterday morning, our younger dog Phoebe launched an unprovoked attack on our older dog, Sancho. If you've ever seen a real dog fight, you know how distressing they are. To see your sweet and cuddly pet turn into an angry, snarling, wild animal is truly horrifying. Jon pried the two dogs apart, and after we reintroduced them to each other, Phoebe made apologetic gestures to Sancho, nose touching and tail wagging, while Sancho resignedly tolerated her. Sancho wasn't hurt, at least.

More than a year ago, they'd gotten into a fight and I'd read that younger dogs will sometimes try to usurp the older dog's position as pack leader. The book I read said to reinforce the older dog's precedence. So I made a point of always allowing Sancho out the door first, giving him his meals and treats first. That seemed to work for nearly eighteen months until yesterday. And then, several hours later, they got into another fight, again, unprovoked, as far as we can tell, although the fights always start when we aren't looking. Still, there was no food and no toys in the vicinity. This time, Sancho has some superficial bites to his snout.

So now we have them separated until we decide what to do. Phoebe has the dining room and sun room to herself, where there's a comfortable bed and plenty of windows. Sancho has his usual space in the living room. We have always kept distance between them at meal time.

Jon and I both hardly slept all night, and he is going to call the vet today. We are wondering if Phoebe has an illness or something that's making her lash out.

I don't usually crowd source about problems, but let me know if you've had dog fighting issues in your household. I've read some articles online and one suggests that the attacking dog may be stressed, perhaps by an ear infection. We also had traps set for a ground hog on our property on Friday. The traps are baited with some sort of ground hog sexy times scent and we theorized that Sancho had gotten some of this on himself and smelled irresistibly of ground hog. So I bathed him last night, in case that is the issue.

Dog Shaming

2018-04-23T06:05:00.002-04:00

The two pictures below sum up how the washing machine delivery went.

I thought I was so clever, putting a plate of chicken in the sun room with which to lure the dogs so I could lock them in for the delivery. Phoebe fell for it, but Sancho didn't and let me know that if I tried to make him go into the sun room, he would bite me. So I had to build a ridiculous furniture barrier between the living room and the hall. It looked like a child's fort with chairs turned sideways and tables and desks all pushed together to keep Sancho in the living room. And of course when you move furniture, you stir up a lot of dust, so the house became filthy. The delivery men were very nice, but they must have thought I was nuts. Both dogs barked ceaselessly the entire time they were here. It was mortifying.

Hastily constructed furniture barrier

Attempting to console Sancho during the process

When the men were walking to their truck, I followed them out with an envelope for each and asked them to have a beer on me. After I released Phoebe from the sun room, she went upstairs and liberally decorated the floor in front of the washer with poop, to show me just what she thought about being locked up during its introduction to the household.

But it's lovely having a washing machine again - this time a commercial grade one that blasts through a load in twenty minutes. And now that I'm no longer spending hours each week at the laundromat, I'll have more time to work on my home and gardening projects. Plus, tomorrow I'm starting ballet class at the School of Richmond Ballet. Oh! And, and, I finally got to the top of the library hold list for Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser. I'm reading it now, but am only a few pages in.

Happy Friday

2018-04-20T07:11:00.000-04:00

Just popping in for a quick update. It's Friday and I'll be working from home for the day because our new washing machine will be delivered today. Our "old" one (we bought it only seven years ago) has had multiple breakdowns lately. I've been without a washing machine for over three weeks now, so I'm eager for the new one to arrive, but also dreading the delivery itself since I'll be alone and will have to somehow control the dogs and gracefully pass tips to the delivery men. Jon is usually in charge of both of these things, but he can't stay home today.

Phoebe, I will probably be able to lure into a bedroom and shut her in. She is young and headstrong, but I know she won't actually bite me. Sancho is more difficult as he can't climb the stairs anymore and he will threaten to bite if you collar him and try to make him go somewhere he doesn't want to. Our usual method is to entice him into the sunroom and shut the door and then barricade the open entry into the kitchen with chairs. But he is deeply suspicious and even with treats as a motivator, it is extremely difficult to get him to go where he doesn't want to. Who could guess that the two sweet-looking dogs below are the absolute bane of my existence and have made us the outcasts of the neighborhood?

The garden is coming along. The radishes got off to a slow start, but they are growing. It has been a cold spring this year. I sawed many limbs off the trees along our back property line and also pulled up miles and miles of Japanese honeysuckle and English Ivy. I also successfully uprooted many wild grapes. Now the poison ivy is starting to appear and I pulled up all I could find, and even after careful scrubbing, the rash is coming out on my arms. Hopefully it will be confined to the arms only. And honestly, if I achieve a pesticide-free poison ivy eradication, the rash will be well worth it. Our property hasn't seen a drop of chemicals since before 1990 and I don't want to break the record.

I read an excellent book, Farm City by Novella Carpenter. This is the book about the urban farm she created out of her rented upstairs apartment in a bad neighborhood of Oakland, California. She didn't have enough land and squatted on a next-door vacant lot. This wasn't just a big vegetable garden with a few chickens. She kept bees and raised animals for meat - turkeys, ducks, geese, rabbits, and even two pigs right in downtown Oakland. The pigs, she and her boyfriend fed by dumpster diving from the finest restaurants in the bay area. This is a fascinating read, fast-paced and also very funny in parts. Sometimes you encounter an author who feels like a kindred spirit and I sense that with Novella Carpenter. I love her determination and her ability to thumb her nose at convention. I think I shared that my long term goal is to turn my own property into an urban farm of sorts. (Although I have no intention of keeping pigs. They sound exhausting.) And I'll also be squatting, on the city-owned hill on the other side of our driveway. It gets the best sun. But for this year, I'm sticking to one cautious bed in the back with my radishes and chard.

Oh, and finally, I'm starting the process of switching to Wordpress. I've bought a domain name and have a host. Now I'm working on setting up the space and eventually migrating all my content here over to there. I'll let you know as this develops. The new site is nowhere near ready to be launched yet.

Reading Lately

2018-04-09T06:10:00.001-04:00

I've been plowing through books this year. Here's a selection of what I've read lately.

Country Chronicle by Gladys Taber (1975) Taber was well-known for her books about Stillmeadow, her farm and 1600's house in Connecticut. This book consists of musings categorized by the four seasons, with recipes interspersed. One such thought, which I wanted to quickly write down before I forget, concerns the many tourists that come to New England in the summer. Taber observes that you always take yourself with you when you travel. In other words, the way you behave when you travel is a reflection of who you really are, since you are away from the constraints of the community that knows you. This isn't the first of Taber's books that I've read and it won't be the last.

The Headmistress, Growing Up, and Miss Bunting by Angela Thirkell (1940s) There's a comforting sameness to Angela Thirkell's novels and while I can't reconcile myself to her classist and sexist world view, there's still something endearing about these books. She's adept at portraying awkward social situations and difficult people and you can't help laughing at some of her characters. On the other hand, Thirkell makes it clear that women should be content to accept men as their superiors, the serving classes are happiest if they are being subservient, and that social mobility is anathema. But what are these books about? Thirkell herself pokes fun at herself through her Mrs. Morland character who writes novels that are "all the same." All three of these novels are about small communities in the fictional region of Barsetshire, dealing with World War II, and the vagaries of human nature, with bits of romance thrown in as well.

Thank Heaven Fasting by E. M. Delafield. (1932) A deliciously cynical, although somewhat somber, novel about Monica Ingram, a young girl being groomed for the marriage market. Her upbringing is both impossibly sheltered and cynical. All people are gauged according to whether or not they are "useful." A young man who's attracted to Monica isn't a marriage prospect because he doesn't have enough money, but he's deemed useful because his presence helps prove that she is attractive and will thus attract more eligible men. Monica's parents, on the one hand push her into adult society, on the other, treat her as a child and leave her utterly unequipped to deal with men. And so, because of the very innocence her parents try to preserve, Monica does serious harm to her chances.

Goat Song by Brad Kessler. (2009) Another back to the land book; the most satisfying of the ones I've read so far. Kessler and his wife Dona buy a farm in Vermont and raise dairy goats. The book is a pleasing mix of the down and dirty details about animal husbandry and cheese-making, and a poetic celebration of the goat and the special relationship between a herdsman and his animals. I like Kessler's voice; lyrical without being pretentious. I was surprised to learn how many of our words come from goat behavior. Capricious, for example, from capri, comes from the finicky way that goats eat. There's also a frankly shocking description of goat sexual behavior which helps one understand why the image of a goat is associated with sexual depravity. (The description also raised my hopes for what might be revealed in the Steele Dossier. Ahem.)

Happy reading! Feel free to share what books you've enjoyed this winter.

March for our Lives

2018-03-26T06:35:00.001-04:00

Saturday was a perfect day for a protest in Washington: sunny and cool. The whole day was great and I'm really glad I attended this march. I bought a ticket on one of the Rally buses going up from Charlottesville for the event and we departed at 7:00 am. An elderly man was there, just to stand by and see us off, which was such a sweet gesture. I went alone because I like doing things alone and also because it is easier in situations like this to have only yourself to keep track of, although on the bus, as another single lady sat next to me, I had the uncomfortable realization that I am a middle aged woman who goes to protests alone. I'd packed a piece of stiff fabric and some sharpie markers, and attempted to make a sign but before I finished I felt so car sick I had to abandon the effort and breathe deeply and stare fixedly ahead and hope that the stiff fabric might double as a barf container, should such a thing be needed. It wasn't needed, but I didn't feel better until we were nearly there. My slogan was to be: IT'S EASIER TO BUY A GUN THAN TO OPEN A POUCH OF LAUNDRY PODS which it totally true, by the way.

We arrived at Union Station well before the official march start time, so I was able to get a fairly good position. Not very close to the stage, but within good view of the large viewing screens and speakers. They played music until the rally officially started and it was fun to watch the crowd swell and see all the signs. We were on Pennsylvania Avenue, and I was positioned just forward of the Newseum, where my sister used to live.

Here are a few of the signs I liked.

By the rally start time, the crowd was so tight, I was wedged in without even enough room to move my arms or plant my feet more than a few inches apart. I was right in the middle of the street and to move sideways to the edges of the crowd was literally impossible. I'm not particularly claustrophobic, but I did have to take a few deep breaths at times and remember that this was all for an important cause. And the speeches and entertainment were superb. I got to see Lin Manuel live! I was also blown away by Demi Lovato's performance and the student speakers - many from Parkland, but others from around the country who'd lost siblings to gun violence or who had survived school shootings. These kids are impressive and while I'm ashamed that we adults haven't managed to create a safe world for our kids, I am deeply grateful to these students for taking matters into their own hands. It was also really neat to see the crowd shots on the screen and I realize I was in the middle of that mass of people. I heard 800,000 attended the march in DC.

After the march, which ended promptly at 3:00 I had a few hours to kill, so I went to the National Gallery, hoping to see the Cezanne portrait exhibit, but it didn't open until Sunday. :( Then I went to the Museum of American History, my favorite museum in all the world, and revisited the huge dollhouse, Julia Child's kitchen, and the first lady gown exhibit. (Melania Trump's gown, isolated in its own case was being pointedly ignored by almost all the visitors.) I took a break to sit on the grass on the National Mall and eat the snacks I'd packed and then it was time to head to the station.

People threaded their signs through the fences along the Mall after the rally.

I wore sunscreen, but still got quite the burn, from standing motionless in the sun for five hours.

Here's to a future in which weapons of war are outlawed and kids don't have to worry about being shot in school.

What I've been up to lately

2018-03-21T06:32:00.001-04:00

We tend to hibernate in the winter and not socialize very much, but I've been busy with various projects.

Garden

Close up of the wilderness I'm attempting to tame

Work on the brick path stalled, since the ground was frozen, and then wet and I'm stymied by the problem of making it level and how to deal with the slope. Instead, I've been vigorously pulling up vines and cutting down brush along the perimeter of our property, and preparing a garden bed. I have modest plans to plant radishes and Swiss chard and if these are successful, I may plant more things next year. My long term goal is to have most of the backyard converted to vegetables and bee hives. Our lot isn't big enough for a true urban homestead, but I think I could grow all the vegetables we need.

State of the brick path at the moment

Here's how it looked before I started

House

I recently read The New Bohemian Handbook by Justina Blakeney and it inspired me to take some steps to make my house more pleasant and comfortable. First step was a deep clean, in which I washed all the walls (so many cobwebs) and generally dusted and tidied. I focused on the living room, which we don't use to its potential because it is dark and cold and there's just something uncomfortable about it. I can't go crazy redecorating because we are going to have to rewire this room (indeed the entire front of the house) but I am looking at lamps, and after stalking large gilt mirrors online, I found a piece I really love to put over the mantle. It instantly brightened the room. There's a lot more to do, but this is a start. I wouldn't say that my style is truly Bohemian, but this book has some interesting exercises in it and is a useful resource if you're trying to figure out how to make your house a place you truly feel good in.

Space over the mantle

The mantle needs a vignette now. I'm working on it.

Knitting
Inspired by a sign I saw at the Women's March, 2017, I designed a knitting pattern that depicts Trump as a simple set of triangles.

I didn't get a chance to take a picture at the march,

but then I saw a photo of it in a book!

I used excel to design the pattern

Crude, but I think it's recognizably Trump and his KKK friends

I knit a second one, similar to the first only missing the KKK figures and hung it on a tree in Washington last weekend, when I was up there with a group of friends.

I know it's crooked, but it was unbelievably uncomfortable, hanging this, even with two friends. A man who was walking past yelled at me to take it down and then called me a traitor. Also, the tree was too big, but I'd already really upset a squirrel and there were no other remotely suitable trees nearby.

Protests

I haven't been to nearly as many protests this year, but I'm going back to DC for the March for Our Lives protest on Saturday. Also, I participated in a spur of the moment chance to heckle my congressman as he arrived at an unpublicized event downtown. He actively hides from constituents. He was willing to meet with local white supremacists, but won't talk to constituents about issues related to healthcare or the republican tax cut. Therefore, the strategy is to find him at events like this and ask him the questions he won't answer. There are some good videos out there of him furiously telling a woman that her family's healthcare doesn't matter because she's "just one family" and angrily saying that he won't answer yes or no questions.

Any of you guys planning to march this weekend, either in DC or at your local marches? The NRA must be destroyed.

Where the Sidewalk Ends: Negotiating Charlottesville as a Pedestrian

2018-03-12T06:18:00.001-04:00

I grabbed a screenshot of this headline because it exactly mirrors my thoughts about being a pedestrian in Charlottesville. The article pictured above is about Dublin (which has issues where pedestrians are concerned) but it translates to Charlottesville.

To be a pedestrian in Charlottesville is to know rage. Inconsiderate drivers are one thing, but in this post, I'm focusing on how local government is responsible for terrible pedestrian conditions.

There are a lot of construction projects going on around town, particularly along West Main Street and absolutely no accommodations have been made for pedestrians, who are shunted from one side of the street to the other and back again because the sidewalks are closed. West Main is a busy, dangerous street to cross, particularly after 4:00 pm, when it has the highest volume of pedestrians and drivers.

Yesterday morning, I walked down West Main to the library at UVA. Here's some of what I saw. For those of you unfamiliar with the area, West Main is one of the busiest streets in the city of Charlottesville. It is the connector from downtown to the University of Virginia. It sees heavy pedestrian, car, bus, and bike traffic. It is absolutely unacceptable to allow developers to take over the sidewalks and bike lanes here.

^Little traffic because it was early Sunday morning.

Rumor has it that my office is moving back to this area so I'm going to have to walk through this mess every freaking day. And sure, these projects will end, but there's always a new one. I've already seen a few other projects from beginning to end, when different sections of sidewalk were blocked off, again with no pedestrian or bike accommodations. I have spoken at town hall meetings with city council, I have emailed city council, I have had numerous emails with Charlottesville's bike/ped coordinator. I've attended city forums about bike/ped issues. I have specifically asked that developers be required to provide temporary sidewalk access and I'm certain I'm not the only person addressing the city about this, and yet nothing changes.

Essentially, if you are an ordinary Charlottesville resident, you are a serf. Following that analogy, city government represents the ruling class, real estate developers are the nobility and the rest of us don't matter except for our payment of tribute (taxes) with which city government rewards the real estate developers. We serfs are supposed to passively accept that construction projects may shove us into the street.

At its heart, the pedestrian issue is a class issue. Is it a coincidence that the best conditions for pedestrians are found in the richest neighborhoods in the city? The people building all the hotels and apartment buildings around town are the ones with the money. City council gives them what they want and lets the rest of us go to hell. Since pedestrians aren't a well-funded lobby group, we are at the mercy of local governments. They may choose to make things nice for us, or they may not. It's mostly not.

It makes me wonder what our streets would look like if pedestrians and cyclists had a lobby group as powerful as the NRA. What do you think bike/ped conditions would be like if that happened?

The Wild World of Sewing your own Lingerie

2018-02-26T06:16:00.001-05:00

I've discovered that sewing your own bras is a fun and extremely gratifying activity. It never occurred to me that it's possible to make a bra yourself until Ladybird, one of the sewing bloggers I read, wrote a few posts about the Watson Bra pattern. This bra meets all my requirements: pretty, but with no padding or underwire. The Watson Bra pattern can be bought online as a PDF download. Ordinarily, I shy away from PDF patterns because scaling the pieces to print correctly is intimidating to me. Bra pattern pieces, however, are small enough to fit on a single page and the pattern comes with instructions on how to scale, so I had no difficulty.

For my first attempt, I bought a bra making kit from the Tailor Made etsy shop. Bra sewing is tricky in that it involves narrow seam allowances, curved seams, and lots of raw edges to be finished. On the other hand, if your finished bra isn't perfect, you can still wear it because no one can see it. My first and second attempts are far from perfect, but I wear these bras all the time because they're pretty and comfortable. They can also be laundered with no fuss because there are no molded cups or underwire. Below is a little picture essay on the process. Apologies to those of you who follow me on instagram, since this may be a rerun for you.

First, I traced the pattern pieces onto stiff cardstock

I made a practice version out of an old tee-shirt

Tracing the pattern onto the back of the fabric

All the pieces cut out. The fabric is a scuba knit - medium thick with a firm stretch.

The bra cradle is lined with powernet mesh. All of this came in my kit along with all straps and elastic, hooks, and a piece of stretch lace that I used as an overlay for the inner half of each cup.

Finishing the inside edge with tricot elastic

Cups sewn into the cradle - this is the hardest part

Fail!

Sewing the top of a cup through the loop that holds the strap.

The finished bra - this was view B, with a narrow band.

I couldn't wait to make another bra, but for my second attempt, I ordered a different scuba knit fabric and a "findings" kit, which is a set of lingerie elastic and hooks. This time I made view A, with the longer band. I'm happy with the second bra too. Both of them fit perfectly. (Watson Bra sizes range from 30B to 40D.) These bras are more comfortable than my store-bought bras. Now I'd like to branch out into different types of fabric. Unfortunately, the fine dressmaking shop in Charlottesville went out of business. There's a quilters' shop, but I doubt they have lingerie fabric. Joann's has lots of stretch fabric, but all of it is unspeakably ugly and they don't carry a full range of lingerie elastic, so I guess I'll be shopping online.

Second attempt at the Watson Bra - the topstitching is tragic, I know, but I hope to get better at it. By the way, I realized this post sounds a bit sponsored, but it's not. I'm not promoting the products I linked to, just sharing in case anyone is interested in attempting this project. I really had a lot of fun sewing these bras.

I Was a Baby Borgia

2018-02-19T06:22:00.001-05:00

Here's the story of how I poisoned the neighborhood kids when I was two. How do I know I was two? I'm able to date this memory pretty accurately, based on the house we were living in at the time, which we moved away from shortly after my third birthday, and the time of year. I was probably close to turning three or possibly just turned. Also, although it's the conventional belief that people have amnesia prior to age three, I have numerous memories from my babyhood, even one or two from infancy. It's a family trait to have a very long and accurate memory. As my uncle, who married into the family, said to Jon, "When did a Bermingham ever remember anything wrong?" (Narrator: Never.)

We lived in a little Cape Cod house on Pilgrim Road in Tonawanda, New York. It had a fenced back yard with a row of bushes along the back fence line. That summer, I must have shown a lot of curiosity about the berries on those bushes because my parents made a special point of telling me never to eat them. So of course I became obsessed. I have no idea what kind of berries they were, but after doing a little research, I think they may have been snowberries, which are toxic, but not fatally so. According to Wikepedia, they cause vomiting, dizziness, and mild sedation when ingested by children.

Snowberry - these look like the berries I remember

One day, the other neighborhood children - we were probably all age four and under - were gathered in our backyard. I was suddenly struck with an idea of how to eat the berries and not be detected by the adults who were in the yard with us. We would play a game in which everyone skipped laps of the yard and every time you passed the bushes, you had to grab a berry and eat it. This is the part that seems the most unbelievable to me because I doubt I had the language skills to organize a game. Then again, we certainly played this game and as you will see, I got the blame for it. Round and round we skipped. On the first lap, I grabbed a berry. It was hard and tasted awful and I spit it out. We kept skipping, but I only pretended to eat a berry each time. The other children actually continued to eat them.

The next day, my mother stood over me and told me that the children I'd been playing with the day before had all gotten sick. One of them, the youngest, had been so sick he'd been taken to the emergency room. I understood the concept of "emergency room" because my great aunt was the chief administrator of a hospital and we would sometimes visit her in the convent on the top floor. The nuns' quarters were spartan, with no real space for visiting, so we'd walk around the hospital. I distinctly remember being allowed to play in an empty operating room around this time. So I was accustomed to making myself at home in a hospital and knew what an emergency room was, though I'd never actually seen one.

Easter Sunday, so a few months before the incident.
That's Sister Ellen, my great-aunt who ran the hospital.Also, my father and my brother, John.

Don't worry, no one died but the incident was considered serious enough that child protective services got involved. My mother told me that what I'd done was so terrible that someone from the county was coming specifically to yell at me. On the appointed day, my baby brother was whisked out of sight so he couldn't disrupt the meeting, I was sat firmly on the couch, and a woman - a social worker or visiting nurse, (police officer?) I suppose - arrived. I don't remember much about her. My memory may be faulty at this point, but I feel like she was somewhat nonplussed, like she'd been expecting me to be a teen age sociopath and had to quickly reshape her speech for a toddler. Not that I remember a word of what she said, but I do know she didn't yell at me because I remember feeling relieved that she hadn't.

My third birthday (and my brother's second) in late August, so right around the time of the incident.

That was the end of it. Really the end because my parents never spoke of it again. Not once ever in my whole life, and we're a great family for telling "Do you remember" stories. My poor mother must have been mortified and relieved that my father's job transferred us to Boston soon after. I thought of this as a funny story - I told it to great comic effect at the dinner table one night - but written down, it seems kind of awful. I'm certain I had no intention of hurting anyone and yet I did. It's one of the worst things I've ever done.

I didn't write about this to show off my precocity as a criminal mastermind (OK, that might have been part of it) but because I've been thinking a lot lately about early memories. I think it's harmful to say that no one can remember anything from prior to age three. Many people may be traumatized by things that happened before they were old enough to understand what was happening, or little snippets of disjointed memory that they can't be sure are real or were dreamt. They might be unwilling to seek help, or worse, be told that what they remember can't be real. I've read that for babies and toddlers, what might cement a memory are strong emotions, because at that age we are creatures of feeling rather than intellect. This is not my earliest memory, but it's the first memory I have that took place over multiple days and involved several people.

What do you think? Do you have memories from before the age of three?

The Palliser Novels

2018-02-05T06:53:00.003-05:00

Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels are a series that grew out of his beloved Barsetshire Chronicles. The Duke of Omnium, wicked and politically liberal, is a minor character in the Barsetshire books. He serves as a symbol of moral looseness and he's the head of the family that forms the central core of the Palliser novels. While the Barsetshire books focus on the dealings of the Church of England, the Palliser novels focus on the British parliament. British government is not my strong suit, but each Palliser novel has its human interest angle in the form of a love story, so don't be intimidated. I enjoyed the whole series, but I did skim over some of the dense passages about politics. And now onto the summaries.

Can You Forgive Her? (1864) If you're wondering who it is you're supposed to forgive, it's the protagonist, Alice Vavasor, for behaving like an idiot. Alice is a young woman, who, owing to her mother's death and her father's negligence, is rather more independent than most Victorian young ladies. She is engaged to the eminently respectable but boring John Grey. She also has a dashing cousin, George Vavasor, who has ambitions of getting into parliament and who seems more romantic and exciting than plain John Grey. George's sister Kate lobbies hard for Alice to dump John and marry George. Meanwhile, Alice's cousin Lady Glencora has recently married Plantagenet Palliser and things are not going well. Lady Glencora, immensely rich in her own right, had been in love with the dashing, romantic, but also profligate Burgo Fitzgerald. Her family conspired to force her away from Fitzgerald and into marriage with Palliser, who is the heir to the Duke of Omnium. Lady Glencora teeters on the edge of infidelity, while Alice Vavasor makes one stupid decision after another. There's a third, comic relief plot line involving George and Kate's aunt, the wealthy widow Mrs. Greenow and the competition for her hand between two bumblers. This book sets the stage for the other books in the series. The marriage of Lady Glencora and Plantagenet Palliser is the core of the whole series. George Vavasor's foray into politics introduces us to the parliamentary angle of the books. Overall, this was an absorbing story, with a few scenes of shocking violence.

Phineas Finn (1869) The title character is a young Irishman, charming and extraordinarily good looking, who gets a chance for a seat in parliament. And so begins his political career. I've heard people say they didn't like this book. There are some long, skimmable passages about politics, but there's plenty going on in Phineas' personal life to keep you interested. He has a girl who loves him back in Ireland and manages to fall in love with two different women in England and a fourth falls in love with him and he fights a duel, and in general behaves pretty badly while also being mostly likable. Also, the story of Lady Glencora and Plantagenet Palliser continues in this book.

The Eustace Diamonds (1873) One of my favorite Trollope books overall, and hands down favorite of the Palliser series. There's not much about politics in this one and the story shifts away from the Pallisers, who are mere observers of this drama. Lizzie Greystock, no better than she should be, marries and is soon widowed by Sir Florian Eustace. A valuable diamond necklace, belonging to the Eustace estate was given to Lizzie by her husband. She refuses to give it up and obstinately won't understand the difference between something you own outright and a family heirloom that is really only on loan to you. In the meantime, she looks around for a new husband and is attracted to her cousin Frank Greystock, who is already engaged to a lovely but impoverished girl but that doesn't stop him from dallying with Lizzie a bit. (Trollope's novels often feature young men who are basically good, but behave like jerks where women are concerned. See also Johnny Eames, Phineas Finn, and Silverbridge Palliser.) If the BBC made a movie of this, I'd watch the hell out of it.

Phineas Redux (1873) Takes up the story of Phineas Finn again, a year or two after the end of the previous book about him. This time, there's been a murder and our friend Phineas has been accused! Also continues the adventures of Lizzie Eustace.

The Prime Minister (1876) Our old friend Plantagenet Palliser (now Duke of Omnium) is the Prime Minister of England. His wife, the irrepressible Lady Glencora bestirs herself to help him in his career by inviting all and sundry to visit them and plans numerous parties, much to the PM's annoyance. Even worse, she uses her influence as the PM's wife to help the career of a blackguard with whom she has a passing interest, which leads to scandal and humiliation for the Duke. This novel is also the story of Emily Foster, who marries a man her father doesn't approve of and has to face dire consequences as a result.

The Duke's Children (1879) Not even being the Duke of Omnium is protection against young adult children doing stupid and infuriating things. Plantagenet Palliser's three children, Lord Silverbridge (the eldest and heir), Gerald, and Mary, collect gambling debts, get expelled from Oxford, and fall in love with people the Duke doesn't approve of.

The Chronicles of Barsetshire

2018-01-29T10:50:00.001-05:00

I've finally finished reading all of Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire and Palliser novels. Trollope is enjoying a resurgence of popularity and I know lots of others are reading these books. This post is a little summary of the Barsetshire novels, to be followed with a second post about the Palliser series.

The Chronicles of Barsetshire are all set in and around the fictional cathedral town of Barchester, located somewhere in the southwest part of England. As far as series are concerned, this one is loosely constructed. Some key characters appear in each novel, but each one has an independent story line and works more or less as a stand alone.

The Warden (1855) Many Trollope readers express affection for this short (for Trollope) novel. It introduces us to the characters who will feature in all the following Barsetshire books and who can help but love the kindly Mr. Harding, the novel's main character. This book is about a manufactured church scandal. Mr. Harding presides over a "hospital" (really just a charitable home) for indigent old men. He receives a handsome salary and free house in exchange. The papers get ahold of the story and present it as a scandal of monstrous proportions - blood sucking clergyman getting rich on backs of old men, etc. Mr. Harding's daughter Susan is married to archdeacon Grantley, and the Grantleys are the family around which all the Barsetshire novels revolve. There's also a love story concerning Mr. Harding's younger daughter Eleanor, and the church reformer John Bold.

Barchester Towers (1857) In this novel, the Grantleys grapple with the appointment of a new bishop of Barchester. Archdeacon Grantley is the son of the late bishop and has some expectation of filling the role himself. Instead, Bishop Proudie is appointed and he comes with an odious wife, Mrs. Proudie, who will provide entertainment in all the following Barchester novels. In addition, there's their sanctimonious assistant, Obadiah Slope, who pursues the widowed Eleanor Bold. (Alan Rickman played Obadiah Slope in the BBC series based on the Barsetshire Chronicles.)

Dr. Thorne (1858) This novel takes us outside of Barchester itself and away from the Grantleys. Dr. Thorne, respectable, but without an excess of money, lives with his niece Mary, who is illegitimate. Her mother is dead, her father unknown. Mary and Frank Gresham, the son of the local squire are in love. Frank's mother is one of the aristocratic de Courcy family and she is not going to accept a marriage with a penniless girl of dubious birth. This book has a plot twist that I don't want to spoil, but ultimately it's a satisfying love story and I've seen it mentioned several times as the favorite of the Barchester books.

Framley Parsonage (1860) I've seen people mention this as their least favorite Barchester novel, but I enjoyed it. It concerns the young clergyman Mark Robarts, who, although not born into any great wealth, enjoys a happy marriage and a position as the rector of Framley, which comes with a comfortable income. It's painful to watch him make a series of stupid financial mistakes and bring his family to the brink of ruin. Perhaps this is why some people have difficulty with this book. There's also a love story, involving Mark's sister Lucy and his friend, Lord Ludovic Lufton. This book has a secondary plot involving the marriage of Archdeacon Grantley's daughter Griselda, to Lord Dumbello, which allows for some brilliantly catty scenes between Mrs. Grantley and Mrs. Proudie. Finally, this novels ties up the story of Dr. Thorne in a most satisfying way.

The Small House at Allington (1864) A love triangle between Lily Dale, Johnny Eames, and the caddish Adolphus Crosbie. We also return to the family fortunes of the de Courcys from Dr. Thorne. I loved this book at the outset, but later grew frustrated with Lily Dale, who is absolutely bent on self-destruction. We are also introduced to Plantagenet Palliser, the young man who will be the focal character of the Palliser series. He considers (shocking!) a dalliance with the married Lady Dumbello, or Griselda Grantley of Framley Parsonage.

The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) This novel concerns Reverend Josiah Crawley, the curate of Hogglestock, a less-affluent region of Barsetshire. We first meet Mr. Crawley in Framley Parsonage, when his wife becomes ill and Lucy Robarts moves in to take care of her. The Crawleys are desperately poor, and Mr. Crawley is of a stern and upright nature and firmly resists any efforts to help him. In this book, Mr. Crawley is accused of stealing a check for fifty pounds. Now, it's obvious to everyone that Mr. Crawley is the last person to steal anything, but the stolen check is in his possession, he can't say how he got it, and he refuses to bestir himself to fight for his innocence. To add to Mr. Crawley's troubles are Mrs. Proudie and a sycophant clergyman who has an eye for stealing Crawley's curacy, once he's in jail. The love story (because there's always a love story) concern's Mr. Crawley's daughter Grace and Henry Grantley. The Grantleys all agree that Grace is a lovely girl, but they don't want to be connected with the daughter of an accused thief. We're also treated to the conclusion of the Lily Dale/Johnny Eames love story and some glorious angry scenes between Mrs. Proudie and Reverend Crawley.

I can't name a favorite Barsetshire novel. I loved them all. These books are the comforting sort that you long to get back to at the end of a long day, but not so comfortable that you're bored. You'll rage at the injustice that some characters face at the hands of Mrs. Proudie and others of her ilk, and you'll laugh as Trollope mocks annoying human traits that are easily recognizable among your own acquaintance.

New Orleans Part II

2018-01-18T06:29:00.001-05:00

Brigid's porch on Sunday morning

Bright and early on Sunday, Brigid and I walked from her house to the Wakin' Bakin' Cafe for breakfast. I had a delicious bowl of yogurt topped with hemp granola, berries, and Louisiana honey. Then we headed for the famous St. Charles Avenue streetcar and rode into the Garden District. This is the oldest continuously running streetcar line in the world. We hopped off at Washington Street and walked to Lafayette Cemetery.

During an earlier visit to the cemetery, Brigid had found a tomb with a bit of the top broken off, a view of the bones within, and a mysterious mason jar containing a mysterious thing that, viewed through the clouded glass, could easily have been an eyeball, or was perhaps something innocuous like a tulip bulb. At any rate, we searched for it at some length and finally stumbled on it, just as Brigid had remembered it, only now, offerings of coins and a string of Mardi Gras beads were piled by the hole in the tomb. It's funny about Mardi Gras beads - here at home I see them as clutter and toss any beads that make their way into my house, but they look so right in New Orleans. They're everywhere, draped on fences and houses - we even saw a huge pothole in the street that was filled with them. They're like an integral part of the city itself.

Mystery mason jar

We left the cemetery and walked over to the Irish Channel, on the other side of Magazine Street. This is where the Irish settled when they first came to New Orleans and I was curious to see it. My own Irish ancestors went to Pennsylvania, but there's a long and interesting history of the Irish in New Orleans. And we shopped a bit on Magazine street and I bought Jon a leather card holder made by a local artisan.

In the Irish Channel

My house in Cville has a similar stained glass window

(Side note: most of my pictures are awful. I forgot to pack my camera and had only a phone. Plus, I was mostly focused on absorbing the surroundings and talking to Brigid, so I left my phone in my pocket and missed several good photo ops.) Anyway, we headed to lunch at the house of one of Brigid's friends, who, with a group of friends, transforms her backyard into a restaurant or theater. It's called The Pepper Lantern and is in the Faubourg Marigny.

You squeeze yourself through this tiny alley and emerge into a backyard where there was a fire, a bar, tables and chairs arrayed on the grass. We ordered a sampler plate to share - one of each dish on the menu, which was a hot African groundnut stew, sweet potato hummus with flatbread, a delicious salad with chard, beets and oranges, and a latke topped with pickled red cabbage. We also ordered a yummy cinnamon oatmeal baked apple for dessert and ordered mimosas from the bar.

Our sampler platter

New Orleans is THE place to see vintage typewriters in the wild

There was live music, so we hung around for a while, drowsing in the sun. It was a cold day, but we were in the sun and sheltered from the wind. (It was so cold and windy in New Orleans that my face is as chapped as if I'd spent the weekend skiing.) We left after a while and stopped at a market to buy a bottle of Gingeroo (a bottled rum/ginger cocktail) and headed to City Park to drink it and watch the sunset under the Singing Tree, a live oak, hung with wind chimes. There's no open container law, so it's totally acceptable to do this. Brigid says you can pop into a cafe on Sunday mornings and order a bloody Mary to go. It's not like I want to run amok in the streets but honestly, some alcohol laws are ridiculous. Why shouldn't you be able to stroll about with a beer - an eminently civilized activity, in my opinion - if you feel like it? .

The Singing Tree

Live oak in City Park

But now it was late afternoon and I was acutely conscious that my flight left the next day at 5:30 am. We ate a simple dinner in a French restaurant and then said our goodbyes. The whole trip had been magical and it was just so wonderful to see my daughter in her own surroundings, meet her friends and see her life. I think what struck my the most was when Brigid said that in New Orleans, people don't ask what you do, they ask what you make. I love that.

The trip home was uneventful except for one incident I'd like to relate because it was so silly on my part. First of all, the rental car area of the New Orleans airport has a very robust anti-theft system. In my experience, you stop at the kiosk, are given keys, and you drive away. In New Orleans, once you're in possession of the car, you must stop at a second kiosk, where, while you show your contract to an agent, a security bar comes down and a plate of vicious spikes elevates from the floor, ensuring serious damage to the car should you decide to make a run for it. That's right. At the New Orleans airport, they would rather wreck the car than let you steal it.

So anyway, I was anxious about several things that morning, including missing my flight and not being able to find the rental car return. And then I was delayed leaving my hotel because my windshield was frozen and the car didn't have an ice scraper and THEN, despite my maps app, I got onto the highway going in the wrong direction and had to loop back and wasted several precious minutes. I finally got to the rental car return, a multi-level parking garage, and I missed the Alamo sign on the second level and drove up to the third level which was for cars from different companies. I realized my mistake immediately, but now I was stuck because of the above-mentioned theft precautions, it was literally impossible to exit the garage and drive down to the second level, and of course no one was manning the kiosk at 4:00 am. So I left the car with the "Thrifty" company and went off to catch my flight.

In Atlanta, where it was now a more reasonable hour, I called the "customer care" phone number from the email about my reservation and explained the whole situation. The person I spoke to was very kind but when she tried to call the Alamo office in New Orleans, no one was answering the phone. She told me not to worry and I hung up and then realized I'd called Orbitz' customer service number and not Alamo's itself. But here is the thing, I'm one of those people with a phone call phobia. It had taken much resolve to make even the call to Orbitz. (I had considered just not calling anyone and hoping it would sort itself out.) The thought of making another phone call and having to go through the whole rigamarole again was unbearable. So I left myself in the fate of Orbitz customer service and consoled myself with the thought that surely I wasn't the first person to make this mistake and that the Thrifty people would probably soon notice that a car that didn't belong to them was in their lot and it would all be sorted. Which it was, apparently. I can see from my credit card statement that I was charged $10 more than the contract, but if $10 is the fine for being a dumbass, I am OK with that.

Otherwise, I got home with no problem to find that Jon, in my absence, had painted a surprise mural on one of our walls. It's growing on me. I mean, why not?

A Weekend in New Orleans

2018-01-17T06:17:00.001-05:00

I just got back from a little visit with Brigid down in New Orleans! I had never been there before, but it's a place I've always wanted to see, so it's super exciting that one of my children actually lives there. Brigid works full time, teaching, so when I arrived last Thursday morning, I was on my own for a bit. (Jon stayed home. With our work schedules, his speaking engagements, and the needs of the dogs, it is increasingly difficult to travel together.)

As much as I love solo travel, I really hate driving in an unfamiliar city, and since I arrived before the check-in time at my hotel, I drove straight from the airport to a museum, partly to view the exhibits, but also to get my feet on the ground and have a chance to get oriented. There are many museums in New Orleans and I chose the National World War II museum, at Brigid's recommendation. (Bonus, but unbeknownst to me at the time, it turned out to be within walking distance of my hotel.) I'd say this museum is a must for anyone who is interested in the American experience in WWII. Exhibits cover everything from domestic life during wartime, to military uniforms, weapons, and many artifacts of all kinds. Particularly well done were the short informational films that played on loop, in various places throughout the museum. Of course I remember learning about the major events of the war in school, but these films, made up of actual footage from the time, really expanded my knowledge of and brought to life the raid on Pearl Harbor, D-Day, and the development of the first nuclear bomb. (Indeed, the short film about the Trinity Test - when we blew up a plutonium bomb in the New Mexico desert - was so compelling I sat through it twice and would have watched it a third time, but I felt like I'd hogged the bench for too long.) It was also a shock to see the displays of nazi symbols and regalia, as these are no longer just exhibits in a museum, but had been worn openly by the terrorists who invaded my city.

A typical WWII-era kitchen exhibit

I spent a lot of time in the domestic exhibit. :)
Please forgive the terrible quality of these pictures.

I drove to Brigid's house in mid-city and we walked along the bayou and then had dinner at a delightful mid-eastern restaurant, 1,000 Figs. We shared the spectacular felafel platter and a dish of spiced lamb hummus.

Empty plinth in mid-city where there used to be a confederate monument.

Friday was very bad, as I was sick the whole day. I'd had a bad headache after landing the day before and even cut short my visit to the WWII museum because I wasn't feeling well. I rallied in the evening after Brigid gave me some ibuprofen, but Friday I felt awful. I did manage to walk to a nearby pharmacy on St. Charles Avenue and buy ibuprofen and ginger ale. Back in the hotel, I spent the day throwing up and sleeping, just like when I went to Buffalo in August. I'm starting to think that flying must be triggering migraines because I'm never sick so it's weird that I would become so very sick whenever I fly and there are all sorts of articles on google about protracted air sickness and flying-induced migraines.

Saturday morning, still somewhat shaky, I ventured into my hotel's cheerful, sunny dining room and had a piece of toast and some coffee and felt amazingly better almost at once. My hotel (actually a bed & breakfast) was the Creole Gardens, set in an 1840's house and outbuildings around a courtyard. Based on the conversations I overheard in the dining room, many of the guests were French. It's a beautiful building, located on the edge of the Garden district and very close to the famous St. Charles Avenue streetcar line. (Hint: I discovered when buying the ibuprofen that you can buy passes for the streetcar at Walgreens, which is handy because the ticket machines on the streetcar itself don't give change. A single ticket is $1.50 and a 24 hour pass is $3.00.)

Brigid and I strolled around the French Quarter, looking in art galleries and shops and we visited St. Louis Cathedral, where I lit a candle in thanks for my returned health.

One fun feature of the French Quarter is the street poets!

This poet must have gone off to get a hot drink. It was freezing!

Brigid's friend Zaq wrote me a poem about "resistance."

We had filled crepes for lunch at Cafe Conti in the French Quarter. After lunch we went to the Bywater neighborhood and walked to the "end of the world," a levy along the Mississippi, busy with industrial shipping. Brigid tells me that it's slated to become the launch point of a future Disney cruise, so the End of the World is at the end of its world. :(

We walked to The Sneaky Pickle, a vegan restaurant on St. Claude Street for hot tea and a snack. (New Orleans has so many great restaurants! I wouldn't have known what to choose but Brigid is familiar with lots of great places.) We poked around in a used book store, The Rubber Library, and I bought a vintage Duncan Hines cookbook and an old copy of Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé.

The Rusty Rainbow

After that, we stopped in a bar for a glass of wine and a chance to look at our books and then walked over the "rusty rainbow" a humpbacked bridge over the railroad tracks and viewed the New Orleans skyline.

Brigid sews costumes from assorted old garments and some of them were to be exhibited at the "Sustainaball" an event sponsored by Grow On, a community urban farming and sustainability organization.

The back of a cloak Brigid made

Since it was Second Saturday and there were gallery shows going on everywhere, we went to a show at a ceramics gallery, where I couldn't resist buying this:

We finished the night with a late dinner of po'boys at the Parkway in mid-city. Goodness this post is getting long. I think I'll save the rest of the trip for a second installment.

Books of 2017 Part 3

2018-01-10T06:18:00.002-05:00

The Innocent Traveler by Ethel Wilson (1980) Saga of several generations of a Victorian family who eventually emigrate to Canada. Mostly focuses on the free spirited Topaz, the old-maid, eccentric aunt.

The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault (1944) A young girl runs away from home in search of her disgraced older sister.

The Golden Door by A. A. Gill (2011) Essays about America by a brit. One essay, depicting a cruel experiment performed by Thomas Edison (who was a monster, by the way) really put me off the whole book. Don't read this if you love elephants. Or skip that essay. Much thoughtful material though.

In Spite of all Terror by Hester Burton (1968) A children's book about the rescue from Dunkirk in early WW II.

The Proper Place by O. Douglas (1929) An aristocratic family faces reduced financial circumstances, sells the family estate and settle in a small fishing village in Scotland.

The Brandons by Angela Thirkell (1939) I've read so many Thirkell novels that their plots are starting to run together. This is one of her typical comedy of manners.

The Country Life Cookery Book by Ambrose Heath (1937) Vintage British cookbook. I haven't tried any of the recipes yet, but I intend to.

The Sun in Scorpio by Margery Sharp (1965) This was one of my favorites of the year. A family living on Malta must return to England because of WW I. This book follows the misadventures of the family's younger daughter who can't thrive in the dreary northern climate.

Frost in May by Antonia White (1933) Young Nanda Gray, whose family recently converted to Catholicism, is sent to a select Catholic boarding school for girls. I believe this novel is autobiographical and there is much in it that will resonate with those of us who had a Catholic education.

The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell (1857) Brilliant and readable biography. Gaskell knew Bronte personally.

Before Lunch by Angela Thirkell (1940) One of Thirkell's recurring themes is people falling in love with the wrong person. But everything's always sorted out in the end.

The Duke's Children by Anthony Trollope (1880) The last of the Palliser novels. Not even being the Duke of Omnium will protect you from young adult children who behave like dumbasses.

The Day of Small Things by O. Douglas (1930) Continuation of the story from The Proper Place, mentioned above.

Britannia Mews by Margery Sharp (1946) Satisfying novel that repudiates social conventions and also explores the consequences (not all bad, eventually) of a terrible decision, made in one's youth. Was made into a move, called The Forbidden Street. Anyone seen it?

Cheerfulness Breaks In by Angela Thirkell (1941) Oh dear, the War has come to Barsetshire. I thought this one was better than her average.

My Sister Eileen by Ruth McKenney (1938) The funny adventures and misadventures of two American girls.

Too Close to the Falls by Catherine Gildiner (1999) Memoir of a young girl growing up in Lewiston, NY, a small village just north of Niagara Falls. I loved this because Catherine herself is a precocious and amazing character, but also because I recognized so many local landmarks and names and also the overpowering sense of danger and attraction that comes from being close to Niagara Falls. I will be reading the second book soon, about Gildiner's teenage years in Amherst, NY which is the actual town where I grew up.

A Woman's Walks by Lady Colin Campbell (1903) Travel essays. I have to be honest and say, these were ho-hum to me.

Mama Makes up her Mind by Bailey White (1993) Essays about an eccentric southern family. Funny at first, but a bit tiresome by the end.

The Silver Thorn by Hugh Walpole (1928) I really enjoyed this collection of short stories. This was my first Walpole, but I think I'll be reading more of him.

Forever Chic by Tish Jett (2013) A book about fashion and beauty for the over-40 crowd.

Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp (1944) Cluny has been raised by her plumber uncle, since the death of her mother. The fact that she "looks like she's somebody" leads her into some unusual escapades. Was also a movie! Margery Sharp really raked in the movie deals, didn't she?

Northbridge Rectory by Angela Thirkell (1942) A small English village continues to grapple with life during wartime. This might be my favorite Thirkell to date.

& Sons by David Gilbert (2013) A group of sons is summoned by their father, after his closest friend dies. I had a hard time liking this one, partly because the narrator isn't very likable.

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey (1930) Takes place on a single blustery day in March, in which the bride is somewhat ambivalent. Was made into a movie, but I haven't seen it yet.

Johannesburg by Fiona Melrose (2017) Inspired by Mrs. Dalloway; chronicles a single day in Johannesburg, in which Nelson Mandela dies and a woman plans a birthday party for her mother. Uncomfortable reading for an American in the Trump era. We're bad enough, but see what happens to unarmed POC here. (I'm not sure if this one is available in the US yet. I got mine from Amazon UK)

The Nutmeg Tree by Margery Sharp (1937) How amusing that the final book of the year turned out to be the best! Julia Packett is perhaps no better than she should be, but she shows true moral courage in trying to prevent her daughter from marrying a bounder. (I haven't yet seen the film version - Julia Misbehaves. If you've seen it, let me know if it's good!)

Books of 2017 - Part Two

2018-01-08T06:20:00.002-05:00

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James Cain (1934) I thought this would be about a housewife having an affair with the postman, and it wasn't. It is about an extramarital affair, though.

Mariana by Monica Dickens (1940) Funny and beautifully written novel about a young girl growing up in London.

The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope (1876) Fifth of the Palliser novels.

One Pair of Hands by Monica Dickens (1937) Hilarious memoir about Dickens' experiences working as a cook-general in various households in England.

The Fortunes of Harriette by Angela Thirkell (1936) I was surprised that this turned out to be a biography of Harriette Wilson, a regency era courtesan. (I was expecting another Barsetshire novel.) Honestly, don't kill yourself trying to track this one down.

Hostages to Fortune by Elizabeth Cambridge (1933) Lovely novel about a young family in England, mostly in the WWI era.

Summer Half by Angela Thirkell (1947) Tedious novel about a young law student who takes a temporary job teaching the summer term at a boys' boarding school. Important to read for Thirkell fans, though, because it introduces you to characters who will figure prominently in her later novels.

Scenes from Provincial Life by William Cooper (1950) I had the odd impression that this book wasn't what I'd intended to read at all and that there's a different book by the same title that was what I really meant to read. Anyway, it's a sort of autobiography of a young teacher and his romantic misadventures.

Portrait of Elmbury, Brensham Village, The Blue Field by John Moore (1945 - 1948) These make up the Brensham Trilogy, a series about a town and nearby villages in England, before, during, and just after WW II.

Pink Sugar by O. Douglas (1924) Cozy novel about a fortunate young woman settling into a small village in Scotland.

The Innocents by Margery Sharp (1972) A mother who refuses to accept that there might be something wrong with her daughter, leaves her in the care of an elderly woman for the duration of WWII. This woman, though undoubtedly the best caregiver for the little girl, seems to be an unreliable narrator, which adds a slight edge of creepiness to the story.

The Little Bookroom by Eleanor Farjeon (1955) A children's book of very imaginative short stories.

Pomfret Towers by Angela Thirkell (1938) British comedy of manners and romance. Rather better than other Thirkell novels I'd read to this point.

The Little Book of Hygge by Meik Wiking (2017) One of those bullshit books trying to capitalize on a trend. Don't waste your money.

How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran (2011) Essays on all aspects of womanhood. Very funny and I also learned that if a shoe comes in yellow, you should buy it in that color.

Olivia in India by O. Douglas (1912) Charming and funny epistolary novella about a young woman's trip to India.

I'm going to finish up the list in a third post.

Books of 2017 - Part 1

2018-01-04T06:29:00.002-05:00

One of my favorite posts to write each year, a list of everything I read over the past year. As with 2016, I read a lot of undemanding cozy lit books. Very little non-fiction books in this list, and most of those are cookbooks.

How to Create the Perfect Wife by Wendy Moore (2013) - Disturbing account of Thomas Day, who set about adopting a couple of young orphans and training them up so he could choose one to be his perfect wife.

Below Stairs by Margaret Powell (1968) - Frank and salty account of the life of a servant in Edwardian England.

The Father Hunt by Rex Stout (1968) - Nero Wolfe mystery

I read the Alexandria Quartet over the last of 2016 and into 2017

Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell (1958) - The second book in his Alexandria Quartet, which is a series of novels focused on the marriage and love affairs of an Egyptian family and assorted British ex-pats in Egypt.

Eugene Onegin by Pushkin (1830) - I read this because I enjoyed the movie, which starred Ralph Fiennes and Liv Tyler. This is actually a long poem, telling the story of a Russian nobleman.

Breakfast, Lunch, Tea by Rose Carrarini (2006) - recipes from the Rose Bakery in Paris.

Death of a Dude by Rex Stout (1969) - Nero Wolfe mystery

Phineas Redux by Anthony Trollope (1859) The third of Trollope's Palliser novels.

Please Pass the Guilt by Rex Stout (1973)

A Family Affair by Rex Stout (1975)

Ripe for the Picking by Annie Hawes (2003) - Continuation of the very popular Extra Virgin, Hawe's account of settling on an olive farm in northern Italy.

O These Men These Men These Men by Angela Thirkell (1935) - The story of a failed marriage rife with sexism, classism, and bigotry that I couldn't overlook, even considering the year it was written.

Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell (1959) Third of the Alexandria Quartet

Schoolhouse in the Wind by Anne Treneer (1944) Charming memoir about growing up in the schoolmaster's family in a small village in Cornwall in the early 1900s.

Clea by Lawrence Durrell (1960) Final novel of the Alexandria Quartet

Dear Dr. Lily by Monica Dickens (1988) Spans the friendship of two very different women, who both emigrate from the UK to the US.

A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul (1961) Novel about the Indian community living in Trinidad, particularly Mohun Biswas, his marriage and relationship with his overbearing in-laws, and his quest for a house of his own.

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939) Old school Hollywood.

Journey to the South by Annie Hawes (2005) Hawes' account of her visit to her fiance's hometown in Calabria.

The Cornish Years by Anne Treneer (1944) Second part of Treneer's memoir, this time covering her time at a teaching college and her teaching career. There is a third book, Stranger in the Midlands, that I haven't read yet.

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt (2011) Two outlaw brothers in the western US. Philosophical and sad.

Farmhouse Revival by Steve Gross and Susan Daley (2013) Gorgeous book of farmhouse interiors.

Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty (2013) A sexy and smart suspense novel.

A Handful of Honey by Annie Hawes (2008) Hawes recounts an adventure from her teens, in the seventies - getting kicked out of Portugal for being politically dangerous and her rescue by a Moroccan family in Paris and her later attempt to find this family in North Africa.

The Landlord's Daughter by Monica Dickens (1968) Somewhat creepy novel about an awkward gym teacher and her secret life.

A History of Food in 100 Recipes by William Sitwell (2013) This book turned out to be less interesting to me than the title suggested it would. Lots of lecture, few real recipes, or at least not ones I wanted to try.

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1937) A series of mistakes sends the wrong man to a fictional east African country to cover a revolution there for The Daily Beast.

The Joyous Season by Patrick Dennis (1965) Very funny novel about the breakup of a marriage, told from the child's perspective.

Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen (1939) Portia Quayne is a 16 year old orphan who must move in with her brother and his wife, and the subtle cruelty of their treatment of her.

OK, I'm realizing that I read a LOT of books in 2017. I'm going to break this up into two or three posts, or you'll be scrolling forever. Tell me about your reading experiences in 2017.

2017 - Terrorism and Yarnbombs

2018-01-01T09:55:00.000-05:00

I think we can all agree that 2017 was a big dumpster fire of a year. The absolutely breathtaking cruelty and hypocrisy of the republican party has left me feeling sick, lost, and despairing. I pray to God earnestly that Trump, Pence, and all their cronies will soon be viewing the world from behind bars.

My daughter Brigid at the Women's March in January, 2017

The #metoo campaign and the revelations about sexual misconduct have really led me to view men in an entirely different light. I have my own metoo stories. I'd forgotten about one of mine until Thanksgiving, when we admired a portrait of our friend's mother. The artist's name was mentioned - we had commissioned a drawing of our house from him years ago and when he'd come to deliver it, I was home with just the two youngest children who were babies at the time, and he made an advance on me, which I fended off, but which left me feeling deeply disturbed and frightened. This man lived in our neighborhood and used to frequently run past our house so I had to work to avoid him. He eventually died and I was glad. I never told Jon because I would have been told I'd overreacted, that "X" was really a good guy. I am tired of hearing the parade of misogynistic jerks I've been exposed to over the years defended as "good guys." 2017 was the year that women revealed what we've gone through. 2018 will be the year we shut men down.

I knit this sign and tied it to the Trump winery sign.

And of course there were the multiple white terrorist raids on Charlottesville, starting in May when Richard Spencer and his crowd staged a racist tiki-torch event in a downtown park. This led to a counter demonstration, candlelit vigil, which I attended. In July was the KKK rally in Charlottesville, which I attended as a counter protester and was harassed by Charlottesville police for hanging knitted signs that said, "Black Lives Matter" and "KKK Go Away." And then came the terrible Unite the Right rally on August 11-12, in which my town was invaded by hundreds of white supremacist terrorists, who marched in our streets with shields and weapons, chanting, "Jews will not replace us," who attempted to light counter protesters on fire with their torches, who brutally beat Charlottesville citizens while Charlottesville and UVA police stood by and did nothing, who drove a car at top speed across a pedestrianized zone, deliberately crashing into a crowd of people and murdering Heather Heyer and seriously injuring dozens of others, followed by the tragic helicopter crash of the two state troopers who'd been monitoring the day from the sky. It is impossible to understate the trauma that our community is feeling. The evening of August 12, I stood alone in my house and screamed and screamed until my voice broke. And the raids and abuses continue.* We were invaded by nazis again in October. There were no injuries, but I read several eye-witness accounts of drivers not yielding at crosswalks and stop signs and nearly hitting pedestrians and menacing people with their cars. On August 14th, three men on scooters deliberately swerved to hit me with their vehicles as I walked in the shoulder of the road on my street. I crushed myself into a hedge to escape, while the men beeped, looked directly at me, and laughed. Several weeks later, the same men drove past me again, and beeped in the same way they'd beeped when they tried to run me over. It was clear they remembered me, my house, and the fact that they'd tried to kill me. I'm wondering if I was specifically targeted because I painted RESIST on my roof before the A12 rally, and because I'd been featured in the local paper for my yarn bombs.

This one is my favorite. Of course it was ripped down.

This is the spot where Heather Heyer died.

Politics and terrorism aside, on a personal level, 2017 was OK. The highlight of the year was the Woman's March in Washington, DC. It might even be one of the highlights of my entire life. I also attended seven more protests in three cities, and knitted approximately 30 anti-Trump yarnbombs, which I hung in different places, most notably Capitol Hill and at the Trump Winery. I didn't do much traveling, other than to protests. We sent Seamus, our youngest child, off to school in Richmond at Virginia Commonwealth University. With the empty nest, I've started on the long process of turning our dilapidated old farmhouse into what I hope will be a blissful and beautiful home - a true retreat from the world. Jon experienced a series of health emergencies, from which he has now mostly recovered. Brigid moved to New Orleans and is crafting a beautiful life for herself there.

In 2018, I intend to work to help defeat Tom Garrett, our racist and cruel Republican congressman. I also would like to continue my work on my house and also settle many troubling questions about my career and my future. I'd like to expand my yarnbombing into more pictorial representations, rather than just words.

*White terrorists returned to Charlottesville last night, putting an American flag, chains and other things on the shrouded Robert E. Lee statue.

Holiday Recap

2017-12-31T08:11:00.001-05:00

I hope you all had a peaceful and happy holiday. Ours was quite nice, with all four kids at home and my sister and her husband to visit. The tree didn't catch on fire (always good) and it didn't plague us with allergens like it did last year. I had numerous difficulties with the cookie baking this year - even threw an entire batch of macarons into the trash because they were inedible. Still, when all was said and done, we had a few decent cookies.

Our neighbor gave us this enormous turnip and Brigid carved a face into it.

Me and my sister on Christmas Eve

There was much hilarity on Christmas Eve and after a dinner of gnocchi, homemade sauce, and cookies, we carried on our tradition of the Christmas Pyramid. This activity started years ago when "camera phones" were the new and exciting thing and we engaged in a game of photographic one-upmanship with relatives in Buffalo. Our last stunt with the camera - to form a human pyramid - was such a success, we continued to do it every year.

From top to bottom, above: me, Grace, my sister Margaret, Brigid, Ian, Seamus. Margaret's husband off to the left and Jon took the picture.

Two sets of sisters

The Christmas tamales came off well with only one tiny meltdown on my part. Tamales are a LOT of work. I knew that, but I didn't take into account how much more work they are when you are also making appetizers and desserts. The thing that saved us is that I made the fillings and mole sauces ahead of time. We had two types of tamales: chicken with a pumpkin mole and mushroom/goat cheese with mole verde. Of the two, we all preferred the mushroom. I made meatballs and a bean dip with tortilla chips for everyone to snack on while I did the tamales. In the end, it wasn't "I" I got quite a bit of help from the kids. Grace took care of serving the appetizers and getting wine for everyone and Seamus and Brigid figured out how to efficiently assemble the tamales on the island, while I worked at the counter. The cookbooks always insist that tamale making is a many-person project and they are right.

I was supposed to make a jicama/red cabbage salad, but I was so tired of cooking that I just threw the shredded cabbage into a bowl with a little lime juice and mayo. For dessert we had Smitten Kitchen's German chocolate cake, as well as a gluten free stained glass cake made from gelled fruit juice and whipped cream.

And now the tree is down and Christmas is over for another year.

Phoebe is wondering why we had to take the tree down.

Tamale rehearsal and a new house project

2017-12-11T06:43:00.001-05:00

I realized that despite the insanity of Christmas, December would be unbearable without it. Imagine how unspeakably dreary it would be, with all this darkness and no frantic busyness or holiday lights to mitigate it. You could argue that it only delays the dreariness until January, but by then, the light is perceptibly creeping back.

Anyway, I made a strong start with my Christmas shopping, validated by my shocking credit card balance. Also, I'm sick to death of the traditional Christmas dinner of roast meat and sides. This year, I'm making tamales for Christmas dinner. I have never made them before, but I made a practice attempt last weekend. It was a disaster, but I think I learned enough from the dry run to achieve decent tamales for Christmas. And anyway, the disaster tamales were delicious. They just looked terrible. Tip: if the recipe calls for stone ground masa, don't substitute instant. (In my defense, instant was the only form available in our local stores.) I'm going to invest in a tamale steamer. They cost $18 at our local Mexican market, and it will double as a canning pot. The dry run involved a Bon Appetit magazine hack that had you prop the tamales on a giant wad of tin foil, which worked, but is too precarious for an undertaking as important as Christmas dinner.

In other news, I've started a new house project. I'm going to take the weedy mess pictured below and turn it into a brick path. This is the side of our house. It's really supposed to be a dirt path to the back yard, bordered on either side by flowers, but it is an endless task to keep the path weeded. Also, we have a huge pile of leftover bricks from when we built the front patio. I haven't made much progress, what with rain and cold weather and a broken wheelbarrow. I hope I'll be able to amuse you with my foray into DIY masonry and ditch digging.

It's back-breaking work. The soil itself is dense, red clay. If I had a kiln, I could just make my own bricks. Not even being facetious. So stay tuned, but don't hold your breath.

O. Douglas

2017-12-05T06:41:00.001-05:00

I had the good fortune to obtain and read several books by the Scottish author O. Douglas, so I thought I'd do a little profile of her novels. She writes in the vein of the great female British writers of comfort lit. Douglas' novels are less farcical than, say Angela Thirkell's, have less substance than Barbara Pym, and are not as edgy as Margery Sharp's, but are enjoyable in their own right.

O. Douglas is the pen name of Scottish writer Anna Buchan (1877 - 1948). Her brother was John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps and also governor of Canada. (I had no idea.) I recently read four of her novels and each one was delightful. One thing common to all her novels is attention to the houses of her characters and how they are decorated. And they all have such lovely houses. She must have had an interest in interior design.

This is the edition I bought on Amazon. The original dust jacket pictured below.

First up, Olivia in India, which is a very short novel about an young English woman spending the cold season in India, which was apparently a thing that wealthy young ladies did in the early 20th century. It's written as letters home to Olivia's fiance in England and is a lighthearted and funny account of a pleasant time in India. There's hardly any conflict to speak of, other than everyday annoyances, a welcome respite from real life problems.

My copy didn't have its dust jacket, but here's a picture of it.

Pink Sugar is about Kirsty Gilmour, a young woman who has been living under the thumb of a querulous stepmother. When the stepmother dies, Kirsty is finally free to do what she wants, which is to move to Scotland and rent a beautiful house in the country where she impulsively decides to shelter a family of young children whose mother has just died. Kirsty is lovely and rich and perennially cheerful, and so incurs resentment from some of the people in her new town. It's that edge, the resentment, the difficult lives of Kirsty's new neighbors that keep Pink Sugar from being a Pollyanna. It's a light, entertaining, comfortable read.

The Proper Place is about the aristocratic Rutherford family - Lady Jane, her daughter Nicole and niece Barbara who find themselves in financial difficulties after the death of Lady Jane's husband and must sell the family estate and move to a small fishing village in Scotland. The Rutherford estate is purchased by a Mr. and Mrs. Jackson, a mere Glasgow merchant and his wife, who feel it's time they were in possession of a country house. Here's where snobbery could take over, but it doesn't. Angela Thirkell would have mocked the Jacksons, but O. Douglas portrays them as likable and sensible (though Mrs. Jackson has regrettable taste in furnishings and paint colors). Meanwhile, Lady Jane, Nicole, and Barbara become involved with the people of their new community. Like Pink Sugar, The Proper Place has just enough seriousness to save it from being a Pollyanna, indeed, there's a heartbreaking occurrence at the end.

The Day of Small Things is a sequel to The Proper Place. I was glad to get my hands on it, because after the sad ending of The Proper Place, I wanted to know what happened next. The story continues in the same vein, with the doings of the Jacksons and the Rutherfords, although their circumstances have changed somewhat and Barbara turns out to be not very likable - a fact freely admitted by the narrator and the book's characters.

Also, back in 2014, I read The House that is Our Own by O. Douglas and you can read my review here. I didn't enjoy it as much as these others. There are still quite a few O. Douglas books that I haven't read yet, and I'm going to continue to seek them out. Have any of you read any O. Douglas? If you did, let me know your thoughts.

One note, O. Douglas' books aren't easy to find in the US. None were at my local library and I had to buy them from Amazon UK, which has very reasonable prices and shipping rates. (Actually, Olivia in India came from a seller in the US, but it's one of those dreadful editions that's like a xerox of the original.

Fun Times in Boston

2017-11-20T06:29:00.001-05:00

Jon and I went to Boston last week for the Schwartz Center Compassionate Care Awards Dinner. Jon was one of six finalists for this award. The final winner was Dr. Rana Awdish, a physician in Detroit. It's a huge honor to be a finalist and the dinner was an impressive affair. The governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker was there! Jon's mother and three of his brothers came from Buffalo, Pittsburg, South Carolina, and New Hampshire to attend the dinner with us, and Jon's niece who lives in Boston came as well, and also the associate dean of the UVA school of nursing, who came to represent UVA, but who is also a friend. Not only that, my friend Norah, an old classmate from high school and college works in healthcare in Boston and attends the dinner every year. We haven't seen each other in years, so it was great to hang out with her and her colleagues. Altogether a fabulous evening!

But Wednesday night and most of the day Thursday I had to myself because Jon was busy with Schwartz Center activities. Wednesday night, I had dinner with Swati - she and her sister Chitra are my first friends. We moved to Boston when I was three and my mother almost immediately made friends with one of the other mothers at our library story hour. This other mother had recently moved to the US from India and she and my mom, both new to Boston became very good friends and also became friends with a mom who'd moved here from Germany. So our three families, all transplants, became close and even spent holidays together. My family moved away when I was five, but we continued to keep in touch and visit back and forth. It's funny how after an absence of over twenty years you can still pick up with an old friend as if you'd only seen each other yesterday.

The T red line from South Boston to downtown

Thursday, after getting my hair styled at a blow out bar near our hotel (we stayed in the Seaport area in South Boston) I took the T downtown. First I visited the New England Holocaust Memorial.

Each of the glass towers represents one of the concentration camps. The assigned number of each prisoner is etched into the glass of each tower.

I wandered around the North End, sort of following the Freedom Trail, but I lost it after passing through a construction zone. I ended up at Paul Revere's house, which I toured . The house was built in 1680, and 17th century houses are quite different from the 18th century houses that we usually associate with the colonial era. It is forbidden to take pictures inside, but the house is dark and cozy with stupendous fireplaces and impressive wood paneling and beams. The first floor is furnished with authentic 17th century furniture and upstairs are 18th century pieces that belonged to Revere himself. I was the only visitor, so maybe that helped, but it was easy to imagine what life might have been like in that house in the 17th and 18th centuries. There's also an adjacent visitors' center with more exhibits, including silver made by Revere, and a gift shop, where I couldn't resist buying their cross stitch patterns. For the modest $5 entrance fee, it's well worth it to visit.

Paul Revere House

The manganese used in glass making would discolor over time, leading to these colored glass panes. People at the time considered it to be a defect. Below are some random North End pics.

I love the old-fashioned letter box. Still in use!

In Copp's Hill Burying Ground

I want to buy this house and turn it into my Fortress of Solitude

It had begun to rain, so, sheltering my hairdo under a hood, I made my way to the Boston Public Market, a large indoor market with everything from groceries to prepared foods and coffee to gifts and handicrafts. Everything sold there must be local. I love, love, love markets and this one reminded me of the English Market in Cork, Ireland. I settled down with a chai latte and then returned to the T and rode back to the hotel, rested for a bit and then headed over to the dinner at the nearby Boston Convention Center. We had a great time, but I made an early night of it since I had a 5:50 am flight home the next morning. (It's totally worth it to get up insanely early and be one of the first flights out. I had no delays and was in Cville by 9:30 am. Jon, on the other hand, had a later flight and could sleep in, but got delayed and wasn't home until nearly 11:00 pm.)

Soft Reveal of the Porch

2017-11-13T06:25:00.001-05:00

The porch is finished, more or less. There are a few decorating things to settle, but the major components of this project are complete.

First of all, here's how it looked when I started.

I put the basket chair at the curb and the new neighbor next door asked if she could have it.
I'm glad it gets to stay in the neighborhood.

And here's how it looks, as of yesterday:

The tree is intended to be a holiday decoration.
I'll decorate it and dress up the pot later.

Endless potential for seasonal tablescapes. I just threw this together very quickly for the photo.

I bought the green iron star on Etsy.

Now I need to do something about the cafe table and chairs. I bought them second hand ages ago and I don't really want to get rid of them. They're in good shape, just filthy and the chairs still come in handy. I know I said no seating on the porch, but once these are painted, they might look OK on the far end. Maybe we could sit out here for dinner sometimes.

I'll need to spray paint them but I have no idea what color.

In case you forgot, here's how the dresser looked before (below). Now, the drawers hold small garden tools and other outdoor things.

Also, I'd like to design some kind of attractive outdoor shoe storage solution - mainly for snowy winter boots. I have an old wood crate that might serve. I'd just need to clean and paint it. If I use the leftover primer and white contrast paint, the cost will be $0.

Budget: I didn't track expenses very carefully, but this was not an expensive project. Here's what I had to buy, with cost, if I can remember. The single most expensive item was the black paint for the porch floor. I did spend quite a lot of time, mostly scrubbing the floor, but I really had a lot of fun doing this project. It was so satisfying to turn my embarrassing disaster of a porch into something presentable.

Masonry Patch

All Purpose Latex Primer

Roller Pads

1 Gallon Latex Masonry Paint (Sherwin-Williams Inkwell) ~$50

1 Sample Quart Latex for contrast stripe (Sherwin-Williams Snowbound)

1 Gallon Water-Based Urethane Masonry Sealer ~$30

Set of 8 Drawer Pulls $42 (Wayfair Hickory Drawer Pulls, which I think are close to what was on the dresser originally.)

Cast Iron "Earthquake Star" $23, from Eagle-Eye Finds Etsy Shop.

Wegman's "value" flower bouquet $4.00 (The vase is an old sap bucket that I had on hand.)

Wegman's pie pumpkin and squash - which we will eat

Wegman's mini tree $24

Still need - spray paint for the cafe table and chairs.

I used leftover primer from the floor for the dresser and paint that I already had on hand, Sherwin-Williams Copen Blue. Would I have used this color if I'd set out to buy new paint for the dresser? Probably not, but I'm satisfied and I can always paint it a different color in the future.

*Those are not affiliate links, BTW. I have not monetized this blog. It's really just a hobby.