Now Norma Knits

Nudged

It's great having a guest. It pushes you to do some things in the house that you have thought about, and should have done a long time ago, but just haven't gotten around to doing. Plus, let's not forget, it gives something to blog about.

Gale's recent visit (check out her blog for new photos!) nudged me to give Abigail's room a much-needed decluttering, facelift, and move into the new decade. The last time we redecorated her room was when she was 14 or 15, in boarding school, and was coming home for a long weekend with a bunch of friends from school. I decided the room needed to be brushed up at that point, as it was still very much reflective of middle school, with some remnants of Little Girl Abigail still there.

At that time I did what I almost always do -- decorated the room around one piece of art. In that case, it was a big framed Orangina poster, like this, but with a big white mat and nice black frame around it:

Years ago, in travels to England and France, Orangina was about the only thing Abigail liked about the experience, or so she said. She pronounced it "or-GEE-na," which is kind of a cute memory for me. In those days it was a bit hard to find that drink around here, but we have always been on the lookout for orGEEna for her, so when I was shopping one day and saw this framed poster, I knew it would be a great foundation for her room.

The room's carpet was already navy blue, and the walls were already a bright turquoisy-teal that coordinated well enough with the poster's table, so I put in some black and white accents, navy blue curtains, and several sets of wind chimes with those same colors, and called it a day. Then after high school was over, and she was coming home for the summer before college, she and I painted the walls an even better-for-the-poster apricot-orange color, moved the furniture around a bit, and it's been untouched since that time. 

I'm not in the mood or position to spend a lot of money on decorating right now. Though I really wanted to do something to this room, I decided that it had to be done on a shoestring -- no changing of the carpet, no repainting, no new curtains. Just a hoeing out of built-up years of crap, a removal of little-girl and high-school-girl and college-girl detritus, some new bedding that would hopefully coordinate with the walls and carpet and curtains, and bringing in some more adult and restful elements. 

Thank you, Bed Bath & Beyond, for having some (tasteful and beautiful) orange/rust stuff this year! And navy blue sheets! And I had to find an accent color that would coordinate with those things, and lo and behold, this awesome juicy lime-grass green was there for a couple of pillowcases.

So, for the cost of a new duvet cover, a fitted sheet, a bathroom rug, and two sets of pillowcases -- and I did "splurge" on a very cool lamp from Home Goods -- cost of 30 bucks -- and "shopping" in my closets and basement, a very fun friend with a creative eye and I transformed the room into a color-rich, warm, and wonderfully inviting adult haven. 

The pictures don't do it justice, and I'm not good enough with the photo-fix software to get the colors quite right, but I figure a little added Yorkie enhancement never hurts.

The duvet cover has a real nice subtle paisley print in it, which is so subtle that it doesn't show in the photos. Mr. Jefferies approves.

Here are a couple of my favorite pretending-to-be-Martha elements -- from things found in the storage rooms. One minute it's dust-covered crap, the next minute it's a decorating element.

An old mantel mirror placed on top of the bookcase, with a vintage vase and a topiary rose thingy that was on a desk in another room, where no justice was being done to it. Here it has much more impact. 

Old jewelry boxes that were received as throw-aways in auction box lots over the years, and that I'd been planning on sending to the Goodwill, look like a million bucks in the now-decluttered bookcase, next to the wastebasket. Well, OK, maybe not a million. But they look better than dust-covered crap. And they're the real thing. Right after I put these here, I was shopping in Home Goods and saw a reproduction of this very thing. Just a fake stack of three old jewelry boxes. I'm clearly a decorator, and don't even know it! 

Stacked vintage suitcases have become a bedside table in front of an antique mirror and near an antique lamp that was moved from another room, where it was invisible.  (P.S. Because I know at least one person who will likely be a pain in my ass about this: No, the mirror is not hanging crooked. It's just the angle from which I shot it that makes it appear so. However, it is an antique and it could use a resilvering, but then it would be "new-fake" looking, so it's staying the way it is.) :P

And I think my favorite thing of all is a matted (but not framed) artsy-fartsy photograph of Abigail taken as part of a project by one of her friends in high school who was a visual arts major*. I had this antique frame in one of my closets. I just nailed it to the wall and put the matted print on the wall inside the frame. It gives the impression that the print is framed, and allows the apricot-painted wall to show around it. It makes the entire piece appear larger and is the focal point over the bed. 

I used this artists' trick I just learned online recently: Don't center the print inside the mat, but leave an extra 1/4- to 1/2 inch at the bottom, to "anchor" it to the floor. So, pretending that the apricot space around it is another mat, I raised the matted photograph just a bit so that it is not centered exactly in the frame. Pretty neat, huh?

Too bad my photos are not as crisp and clean as I'd like. Having spent two days working intensely with Gale, I'm all self-conscious about that, whereas before I couldn't have cared less. Don't worry -- I'm not bothered by it for the long haul. I'll leave the photography to the photographers and the -- whatever it is that I do here -- to me. However, I do feel all proud of myself that I've used a couple of the techniques she showed me to make them a teeny bit more crisp where need be, a teeny bit softer where need be, and I'm probably going overboard on the "vignette" dark antiquey edge. Allow me to play around a little, will ya?

---------- For Katherine, haha:

*At their high school, they had an arts major in addition to their regular prep school curriculum. Abigail's was theater.

The Dreaded Meme is Alive And Well and Other Good Stream-of-Consciousness Stuff for a Wednesday

Oy vey. Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. You are Meme City, and you know how much I [don't] like memes. It is an endless.stream.of.annoying.crap*. I've made it so I don't see the stupid game updates, like "Sandy (or whoever) has just found THREE MAGIC EGGS in their (sic)** backyard in Farmville!"  **How much do I hate those mismatched pronouns? Sandy/their?????? FFS. 

Over and over and over again.

Also, the ads: Nurses are In Desperate Need! Teachers are in Serious Need!

Of what? I have wondered time and time again.

"We desperately need 50-year-olds to test the new iPad, a pair of Uggs, an orange Macbook (they must have mined info that my favorite color is orange). Sometimes they REALLY show how smart they are by saying, "We need 50-year-old Vermonters to test" ... blah blah. WOW!  That's ME!  I should jump right ON this! (This is a come-on to get you to sign up for some service.) The best one yet is "Free Food For Seniors! 50-year-old Vermonters, sign up to win free groceries." 

Now I'm a senior.

I repeat, oy vey! I can't deal with it! But Facebook has its good points, I have come to acknowledge. I had to search hard for them, but they're there. Perhaps. Not sure. Maybe. 

I must admit, the latest meme in there (or is this "so yesterday"?) had me a bit interested:  Go to urbandictionary.com, type your first name into the search field, and post the first result in your status.

I saw all these ones, like "a name meaning beautiful goddess," blah blah.

Or:

A bodacious beauty with full lips, luscious locks and dark mysterious eyes. Most Teresas are sensitive, caring listeners, but they also have their mischievous, fun-loving sides. A great girl that any one would be lucky to have as a friend or special someone.

Or:

In Ireland, this is a name given to someone that makes you laugh alot. "I was laughing all day because of a Victoria I know."

Mine:

Norma: A blonde moment; including, but not limited to: stating the obvious, trying to relate things that can't be related, pretending to understand when there is obviously no understanding, not understanding in general, etc..If u dont understand this its a Norma. Basically, anytime one says something stupid.

Excellent.

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As I'm typing this, I've got a raging headache. (I don't think it's related to the meme, but maybe.)

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The cleaning lady is here, and she usually incites Mr. Jefferies to too much excited barking. But this morning, I said one word to him: "Enough!" and bam. No more barking. (It's been an hour so far.) Some of you have said this, and I think you're right -- I hope I only use my power for good. (And Mr. Jefferies is one helluva dog.)

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Headache notwithstanding, I must go do some more organizing while I have someone here to help move furniture and stuff.

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Joan just sent me a notice about the indoor farmer's market upcoming at Fletcher Allen, and the part I can't get over is they even allow payroll deductions as a form of payment. Now that's progressive! Of course, it doesn't affect me, because I'm not an employee of anyone except Uncle Sam, so my "payroll deductions" would be from my own checkbook. But given the fact that I sometimes can't even get a shop in New York City to take a credit card, I think it's pretty cool.

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BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA! Some people asked if that photo the other day was my entire stash. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA. Hell no. This is but the teeniest-tiniest appetizer. Just something to remind me that I am a knitter. Or am I? At last reckoning, I believe I have somewhere between 15 and 20 sweaters' worth, plus lots of random other stuff. At my present rate of knitting, it has definitely reached SABLE status -- Stash Amassed Beyond Life Expectancy.

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I have been allergic to aspirin and ibuprofen for 25 years, since just after Abigail's birth. I was able to take them before my pregnancy for her, but I suffered three occasions of anaphylactic shock symptoms since that time -- two from aspirin and one from ibuprofen. Not fun, and the time I figured I was closest to actual death (this is debatable, because this is a lot like being "a little pregnant," I suppose) I was in England at a hospital with no ID on me and had been dropped off there by a cab driver in the middle of the night after a shift at work. My final thought just as two nurses caught me by the elbows before I hit the floor was, "I'm in a foreign country without ID, and nobody knows who I am or who to contact when I die." Thankfully, that did not occur. The young doctor there saved my life. 

So you can imagine I have been fearful of NSAIDs since that time. 

But there was a lecture given by a cardiologist in one of Ally's classes last year during which the doctor said that aspirin allergy can be "cured." I seriously thought she was full of shit. But I kept thinking about it and thinking about it, and there really are times, especially when I'm suffering this tendinitis that seems to be plaguing me more and more often, when I sure would love to be able to take an anti-inflammatory. So one day I made sure that David was home, I told him what I was going to do, and that the car had gas in it (we live about 4 minutes' drive, maybe less, from the hospital). I took a baby aspirin.  

NO REACTION!

And I followed the protocol mentioned by above said cardiologist, and pushed the amount a little higher each day, and over time I have now taken the equivalent of two adult aspirin tablets at a time without a reaction. I've done it a few times now, so I assume I'm safe.

It has been several months now, and I've taken aspirin on and off during that time.

And so last week I really wanted to try the same thing with Advil. Long story short, I am still a little bit iffy on the Advil. I sometimes get a little red and a tiny bit of itch in my throat, and I know I still have to be very careful, but I have been taking some Advil on occasion, when I know that David is home in case I need to get medical attention fast, and it's been OK. 

So I'm kind of cautiously happy about that. The tendinitis seems like it just will not go away without an anti-inflammatory, and I'm very glad that I can now take something.

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LOST's new season started last night. I'm LOST.

Reorg

It suddenly dawned on me, due to a series of recent events that started to stir up my way of thinking on the subject, that my workspace needed an overhaul. It was not so much because it wasn't working just fine for me, as it has for, I don't know, 15 years, and not because I was desirous of replacing any of my utilitarian and inexpensive office furniture (though if HGTV wanted to come in and give me a complete redec of my office -- nay, of my entire house -- I would not turn them down). It could be considered, if one were not the frugal Yankee one is, to be TIME ALREADY for a freshen-up. 

My workspace was still set up for transcript production. I have only done one transcript in three years, and that was only because an attorney friend asked me to do a deposition about a year ago or so, and I said yes. I felt like a rusty iron fish out of water doing so, and I will not do it again unless I am forced to due to circumstances beyond my control. 

The work I do now does involve using my laptop and my steno machine, and rarely my printer, but for now and I hope into the foreseeable future, I no longer produce transcripts at all. So the bookshelves next to me with the reams of paper and tabbed dividers and transcript covers and medical and legal dictionaries and the unabridged (all of which are obsolete and redundant what with the internet at my fingertips) and the envelopes and the billing sheets, and all the rest of the freelance court reporting paraphernalia were doing nothing but taking up space and being not seen by me. 

Why not, I asked myself, pull my workspace into the now? Workspace for prepping for my classes, and Blogging Central -- knitting and gardening books next to me for inspiration, my cameras and cables, some yarn and some knitting supplies in case I decide to start a new red scarf as I'm waiting for something to download on the computer or I'm reading blogs or whatever.

This Dutch oil painting that I got off eBay several years ago was hung in a place in a different room that did it no justice. Now it is the focal point of my room, and what a difference it makes. 

I can see it now, and it never fails to make me smile. I bought it from a gallery in Holland, and it was supposed to have been done by a decent artist and appraised by a decent auction house (but I really know nothing about these things, so I had to take it on faith), and I bought it for well under the supposed expected selling price. I might have been the only bidder. I was worried it might not even arrive, but it did, and timely, and it was well-crated. The back has a piece of baling twine as its hanger, and I've left it that way, rather than put on a wire. To be perfectly honest, I have no idea if it's anything more than a paint-by-numbers dealio, but I love it. I love its subject, I love the story it tells. It's an old fisherman (how do we know it's a fisherman? I don't know....you can see the beach and ocean out the window, and the dealer said it was a fisherman -- I took it on faith again), perhaps in a lighthouse (so then why is he not simply the lighthouse keeper? I don't know) knitting a sock. 

Anyway, the painting charms me with his loaf of bread and jug of ale on the table, and his clock, and I guess that's a pipe on the wall, and his yarn is tensioned around the arm of the chair. And now it's here for me to see, every time I'm sitting at the computer. And it was a big "DOH!" moment, because I had no idea how incredibly well it would fit this space and fit with the colors of the room and over this little side bookcase on the end of my work table, over a pile of red yarn at the ready for red scarf knitting, and some other special yarns for my tactile and visual pleasure -- and maybe even some knitting inspiration, if we get lucky.

Here is a pulled-back shot of blogging central, showered in the full-spectrum (but blue by the camera's standards) light of the Ott-Lite over my workspace...

...which has already been slightly modified to even better use the space, adding more yarn, and a place for my camera cables to be tucked neatly beside the greeting cards. Here is a photo, with apologies for its fuzziness and glare:

 

Favorite Things

You know how when you see something every day, you don't notice it anymore?  That happens a lot in my house.  I've got a lot of stuff.  A lot of collections, quite a lot of space.  So it isn't until I do the seasonal cleaning and rearranging -- which, let's admit, does not happen every season or even every year -- that I remember to notice some of the things I have.  One of my favorites is this:

Is that not adorable?  It's my mother and my aunt.  My mom is the one on the right, I believe.  I'm only guessing that, because she's always been known as "the sad twin," she claims.  But in this photo both girls look pretty sad or tired or overwhelmed, which makes it all the more precious to me.  In the same way I'm drawn to winter scenes and gray clouds in paintings, the sad face in photos is often the more beautiful and compelling face.  I remember that doll from when I was a little girl.  It had a porcelain or ceramic face and legs, that, by the time I had it handed down to me, was broken, paint-chipped, and rather ugly and scary.  Or maybe I'm the one who trashed it; who knows. 

This is in a grouping of other old family photos, and where it was before, I had failed to notice it anymore.  So I moved the entire grouping to a more visible location.  When I do that, oftentimes visitors will say, "You've got a whole lot of new stuff."  Nope.  Just moved stuff around.  It's like going shopping.

I'm trying to put up a brave fight against this cold.  It's a virile one.  Fevers and chills. 

A'right, Then. Yank It Is

Not to give up the Godiva name, I'm going to go with "Yankee Godiva."  I love the ring to it, and how it has the same sing-songy number of syllables and sort of rhymes with Lady Godiva. 

I'm using the same pebble rib stitch pattern that I started out with rather than the stitch pattern in the real Yank pattern, but I'm otherwise following the pattern as written.  Well, except for the fact that I'm knitting it in one piece 'til the armholes.  And I've ripped out the first attempt and started over with the right number of stitches, so Margene would stop mocking me. 

Two nights ago I managed to reknit the entirety of the ripped-out yarn, plus a little more, and I'm making great progress and a gorgeous squishy fabric on US 9s.  I was not able to knit a single stitch yesterday.  Cleaning help arrived at 9 a.m. and I announced to her that I would be working alongside her.  Together we moved furniture, moved paintings and pictures, washed and moved around pottery and other objets d'art, deep-cleaned, and emptied and moved the cabinet that houses the blue pottery collection to a location that is, as I thought it might be, far better suited to it.  Suddenly it is the focal point of the living room and looks like a million bucks, whereas before it was rather invisible in the dining room. 

We lightened up and rearranged colors for the spring/summer look.  It's amazing how just moving my own stuff around makes everything look fresh and new again.  It's quite economical and saves me from the urges I sometimes get to hire a dozer to knock the whole thing down and start anew.  It's also amazing that the dried-flower-and-herb mini Christmas tree was still sitting on the coffee table, no matter how tasteful and pretty it might be.  The robins arrived yesterday; it was time to lose the Christmas tree.

All of this was, of course, rather ill advised since I just had my back put back into place the day before by the chiropractor, but I felt up for it and wanted to take advantage of the help.  At mid-afternoon, I made us grilled mozzarella, pesto, and dried-tomato sandwiches and seltzer water/tart cherry juice/lime drinks that we scarfed down and then continued on with the cleaning and organizing. She really has a great eye for the placement of things, and I'm sure (since she said so repeatedly) she had much more fun doing that with me than cleaning toilets and floors.  (Though we did that, too.)

We made a very big dent in it, but there is still much to be done.  The cleaning help has really been quite slack for many months -- I think because I'm so busy and things get so chaotic around here, they think I don't notice.  But I do.  I have that French-Canadian/farm-girl blood in me, ya know.   So I think I showed her how it should be done (and I do think she noticed) -- down on my hands and knees with a bucket of soapy water, reaching into the corners and around the table legs and into cracks and crevices and baseboards that had clearly been ignored for too long.  For many years, in fact, I refused to buy the cleaning lady (it's the same one we've had for 20-something years, but she now brings an assistant -- it was her assistant who helped me yesterday) a mop.  I'm sorry, but a floor cannot get adequately clean with a mop.  But after a lot of years, and she and I were not getting any younger, I took pity on her and bought one.  I sort of regret that decision. 

Just call me task master.  

And when she left at 6 p.m., I was spent.  I had to just SIT.  There was no energy left for creating a meal or knitting a stitch.  But the place looks damn good. Well, some of it, anyway. 

 

A clean coffee table is a beautiful thing.

Yurt Sweet Yurt and Other Stuff

1.  I want one!

2.  The Thomas Crowne Affair (the 1999 version), I've mentioned before, is my all-time favorite fantasy movie.  I want to be Rene, and I want my Pierce.  I'll take that one to my grave.  Yesterday Cookie asked me, "Yes, but what happened after the plane landed?"  Easy:  They continued to live in mad passionate love, engaging in their high-risk hijinks 'til they died. Rene's character, sadly, is working on cirrhosis of the liver, but I've decided that she continues with her green drinks and gives up her alcohol, so they live happily, dangerously, and hotly ever after. Cookie said I'm such a romantic.

3.  I don't know what took me so long.  I've been searching for the "right" gym music for such a long while.  In a "duh" moment, I ran across my collection of Broadway Musical CDs and started loading them on my iPod.  They're perfect!  Up-tempo music that I like, and that tell a story, and since I know the plays and the song lyrics by heart, they keep me engaged and the time flies.  Yesterday was The Lion King.  The day before, The Man of La Mancha; the day before that, Les Miserables.  I've got Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Phantom of the Opera in the lineup.  I have lost or misplaced Chicago.  I have to get my hands on that one, because it's one of my favorites and has just the right attitude for kicking butt at the gym (and in life).   

4.  I'm making good progress on the little 2- and 1- and 3-pound weights that I'm restricted to right now because of my injury.  It turns out that a couple of the macho guys at my gym have injuries, too, and so we can work out together with our cute little pink weights and our isometric exercises.  I can hold the plank position (as per Cindy's instructions) for about three hours.  Not really.  But it seems like it.

5.  I'm also making good progress on the first sleeve of La Boheme.  Loving the increases. I took several photos, but they're all blurry, so fuggedaboutit. Anyway, I'm doing the knit into the stitch below, like I would for a mitten thumb gusset, and it's the best-looking sleeve increase I've ever tried. This sweater is a super-simple pattern, and it is becoming my simple little masterpiece. The best news is that after the wash, the body of the sweater did indeed return to exactly the right size when it dried. Phew. 

 

124. All About The Macramé Hanger in My Blue-Cabbage-Rose-Papered Dining Room

I love it how the readers pick up on something and turn a post into something that wasn't originally intended, thus opening up another post.  See how this symbiotic relationship works?  Neato. 

This story is insipid and banal, though; I'm warning you. You might rather spend your time doing something useful like flossing your teeth or picking your belly-button lint.  But first, Rilona time-lapse photography continues.

May 3, 2008, ~2:30 p.m.

A few weeks ago I decided to repot my rattail cactus. It's been underachieving on my windowsill in a too-small pot.  That type of cactus really needs to be hanging, but I don't have any nice hanging pots.  I am rather fond of this Asian pot that my mother gave me several years ago, and it was empty, having been vacated by the moving-up of something else, so I put the cactus in there. But that didn't solve my hanging dilemma.  I seemed to recall that somewhere deep in a drawer (and it turned out it wasn't too deep and wasn't too far away -- right in a kitchen drawer) I had a macramé hanger that I got a few years ago at Home Depot.  Nothing too special and certainly not vintage Norma or anything, although I was a teenager in the '70s and macramé was as hard-wired into a '70s teen as an iPod is to the 2000s.

In addition to this being an anticlimactic story, it is accompanied with an anticlimactic photo.  It was gray and rainy yesterday and this looks pretty bad with the flash. The plant is only now starting to recover from being repotted. I think it's going to be happy in its new pot, but it doesn't yet look its best. Only question is, are the flowers that this cactus is supposed to throw out going to clash with the pot?  (answer: Yes.  I didn't think of that when I potted it, of course) And neither the pot nor the hanger coordinate with the dining room.  At least not now.  I swear, I used to care about this stuff more.  I did.  Really.

Now, about that dining room:  See that something-or-other to the left of the hanging pot?  That's our leaky, horrible, rotten sunroom.  It has been nothing but trouble since we constructed the house. The company that sold it (it was a kit) went bankrupt shortly after it was done. This thing was designed for the Pacific Northwest, where it must not ever RAIN (haha), not the extreme weather conditions of the Northeast, where we do indeed get precipitation and freezing and thawing and snowfall and ice.  Just a hunch here: This might explain the company's bankruptcy.

Anyway, after many years of hiring people to patch it and repair it and try to upgrade it, hemorrhaging money all along, it is slated to be torn down and rebuilt properly, hopefully starting in June, with a pitched roof to shed the snow and weather-tight windows.  As part of that project, the dining room is going to be opened up a bit and it will be separate spaces, but they will flow into one another. That is when I will finally get rid of the dreaded blue cabbage rose wallpaper that I loved so much in 1990, but now?  Not so much.  I figure when the cute contractor is working on the adjacent sunroom, he will provide nice-enough companionship that I won't mind stripping that wallpaper.

What?  My bad?

Okay.  In its (the wallpaper's) defense, I offer the following.  a) I was young.  b) People's tastes change.  c) Reread b and add:  "A lot." d) When I was in psychotherapy in 1990, one of the million and a half things I realized is that a lot of my decorating choices were born of trying to recreate my paternal grandmother's home, which is where I had a little bit of stability in my childhood. e)  I'm over that now.  f) This is my china pattern, which I do still love:

Wedgwood Rosedale.  It's discontinued.  Many of these pieces I hand-carried back from London in 1983 and 1993-94, so they are pretty special to me, although I've evolved into the kind of person to whom fancy china and crystal means less than it did then. I like having nice things, but .... meh.  This china has been used only a handful of times in 26 years.  Seems kind of silly.  Plus, it really wouldn't work in a cave or an Airstream. Or is that just me? I guess why NOT set a nice table, even in a cave? I know the psychology of the thing is, if I couldn't have nice china, I'd be coveting it.  We humans can never be happy, it seems.  But the thing(s) I want right now have less to do with things like china and more to do with experiences.

g) A friend who was a decorator went to a decorating show in approximately 1988.  She came back and excitedly said, "Look at this wonderful wallpaper I found for your dining room!"

h)  Anyhoo, I thought it was great for a lot of years, so I guess I got my money's worth.  Now it's just about the dread of pulling off the Band-Aid.  It is a bitch of a job, removing this high-end vinyl-coated wallpaper, and it wrecks the walls. I hired someone to take the wallpaper off one of the bathrooms recently, and my walls and ceiling are a mess, so I don't want that to happen to my dining room. And I can't paint over it, because it is vinyl-coated, not that I'd want to do that anyway.  I like doing things right if I'm going to do them.  All I want now is for my dining room walls to be a nice smooth shade of dark burnished gold or plum or mocha (all of which I finally realize will not only coordinate with my china and my pottery and my antique botanical prints, but will actually make those things "pop") or....anything at all, I guess, other than blue cabbage roses.  They're so twenty years ago.

118. What Time Is It?

It's time for the vinca to bloom.   

Time for the pulsatilla to flower.

Time to eat asparagus.

Almost time for Rilona to bloom.

Time for seedlings to thrive.  This is the first time I've tried Gardeners Supply's Deep Root Seed-Starting System, and I wholeheartedly endorse it.  The seedlings are far ahead of the ones I started at the same time in the smaller APS seedstarting system I had heretofore sworn by for probably 15 years.  Sadly, I see that the Deep Root system is sold out.  Hopefully they'll get more next year.

Time for the blue grape hyacinths.

And the ruffly daffodils.

It's time to do a Tabata workout with my Gymboss timer.  The Gymboss has a setting that makes it super-easy to program eight intervals with 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off.  It works GREAT, plus it's lightweight and has a strong clip to attach it to your clothes. It came WITH battery included, and the shipping was fast and inexpensive.

And it's also time to buy new (old) clocks.

  Of course you know which one is my favorite.

I don't know what is up with the thumbnails on Typepad.  Is everyone having this problem?  They seem cloudy to me.  When you click on them to make them full-size, they are clearer. [Edited to add:  I guess the thumbnails are only cloudy on the preview.  They published clearly.  Phew.]

Worth The Wait

We have developed a very low-stress approach to the holidays in this household and in my extended family. We have pretty much everything we need all year long, and we've abandoned gift-giving in the traditional sense.  There is a little bit of a loss of the element of surprise, but it cuts way down on hassle, stress and obligation, getting things one doesn't want, not getting what one wants, and worrying whether you've got the right thing for someone. I do very little seasonal decorating -- unless I'm in the mood (which isn't often anymore).  I don't buy gifts -- unless I'm in the mood (which isn't often anymore).  People don't buy me gifts -- unless they're in the mood (which isn't often anymore). I usually send out less than 10 cards. I find that lack of: 1) keeping up with the Joneses, 2) the stress of fighting the shopping crowds, and 3) those astronomical January bills, to be the biggest gift to myself.  So freeing.

Even though the budget here is far from unlimited, what with us still paying off tuition loans and still supporting our daughter, and still holding off on quite a bit of deferred maintenance on our home, if I want to buy a new pair of boots, I do.  If I want to buy a pair of fairly expensive Italian jeans, I do.  In my older age, I have far fewer wants.  Material things....well, have you seen the bumper sticker that says, "The best things in life are not things"?  Most days I feel that way.  I do still have longings and wishes and wants -- I think that's part of the human condition -- but not many, and the longings and wishes and wants I have are mostly not for things.  In fact, most days I'd like to unload probably 60% of the stuff I own and 50% of the space I occupy.

But once in a while, I want something, or I want to improve, and make useful, something I already have.  I try to choose well, so the things I attain will have lasting value and appeal to me.

I bought these four antique botanical prints 12 or 13 years ago, when I was living in England.  I mentioned them in the blog a month or so ago, and until that time they'd sat in a drawer, out of sight but not forgotten.

Professional framing is a luxury. I gasp every time I hear the price of matting and framing. These prints mean a lot to me, and I wanted to have them done well, in a manner which befits them, so I waited for a time when I could feel comfortable to have it done. 

This is my so-called holiday gift this year. ("so-called" meaning it is largely irrelevant to the holidays -- it's just that I chose to have it done and it just happens to be around the holidays, so I am calling it a "holiday gift," even though no holiday gift is expected or necessary)

The framing is complete, and the mats are beautiful. It's hard to tell from the photo, but the outer mat is linen. When I was working with the talented fellow I've had do lots of framing for me over the years, he handed me about 60 cream-colored mats.  I knew what I wanted, and it wasn't there.  I said, "Do you have any linen?"  He looked at me with that look, and a pseudo-annoyed gleam in his eye, that says, "Oh, that Norma.  There's just no pleasing her."  But the thought was thought in a very approving way, I could tell. 

He hunted in the back room 'til he found a linen sample that was dirty and dog-eared, because it had been around so long and apparently no one had chosen it before, or at any rate, in a long time.  He apologized for the state of the sample, and he rubbed it with an eraser to get off some of the dirt. We both knew it was The One. You can probably tell from the photos that they are triple-matted in what I think is a tasteful and understated presentation, and the gold frames we chose together are in keeping with the British antiques.

It was worth the wait.

(Please pardon the setting sun's glare. It's a good thing I had them put UV-blocking glass on, hm?)