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| Our house is a very very very fine house. Cats in yard not shown. |
Another Saturday, sitting outside, enjoying cooler temperatures and hazy skies, thanks at least in part to fires out west. Someone we love here is fighting one of those fires right now, and we are proud of him for what we know is grueling, endless-seeming work, as long as the season lasts.
All of which makes me thankful for our relatively un-volatile climate, here in North Carolina. Long may it remain this way. We've had a good bit of rain lately, especially given how dry it can be in our little drought zone. Our grass at this time of year is usually not this green. Although the gardens are starting to look tired, and I am starting to be tired of dealing with them in the heat, things are still blooming and colorful.
I've been out to the vet to pick up meds for the dog, and to the store. In a little while I'll head over to our parish church for a choir practice with two other singers for the Confirmation Mass on Tuesday evening. I've just been knocking together some Holy-Spirit words to set to the Tallis Canon, since the three of us all know it and could sing any words to that tune as a canon/round . . . which might be a pleasant time-filler during Communion. After choir practice I plan to stay for Confession, which practice I've been sadly neglecting over the past few months –– time to suck it up and just go.
After that, a pleasant evening, I hope. I haven't walked yet today; might wait until twilight, when it cools off even more.
In other news, our neighbor came over last night with his 8-year-old son to help my husband dismantle the treehouse in the pecan tree which has died and will be cut down on Monday. Here it was in its heyday:
And today, after a lot of sawing and dismantling-for-lumber:
I don't think there's going to be any way to replicate this treehouse, alas, but if our neighbor winds up with raw materials for building his own, for his children who still have years of childhood ahead of them to enjoy, then that's something. But we all feel rather sad.
Today's Camellia look:
Pale-pink belt, longline blue marl cardigan, thrifted Birks. The cardigan, as I've said before, was one of my last fast-fashion purchases, but I continue to get an amazing amount of wear out of it, and plan to do so until it falls apart. Part of the whole fast equation is our cultural tendency to view clothing as a disposable good. I can slow things down simply by not treating an item like this as a disposable, that I'm going to discard in favor of something better before its useful life even starts to dream of being over. In other words, it's not the things, at least not primarily. It's us and our practices. Anyway, this cardigan's provenance is nothing I can virtue-signal about, but I can still approach it as an investment I've made, from which I plan to derive a great deal of value.
Okay, so, yeah. I washed my hair and braided it wet, because I was going out to run errands, and now it looks a little strange, but oh well. I might or might not scrape the wonky bangs back with a headband. Feeling tired today, too. I had trouble falling asleep, then got up at 7, and I think my face shows it.
But I can still smile.
Two weeks and one day in, I am still enjoying my dress. The color, of course, is insanely easy to live with, as far as I'm concerned. The shape is easy to alter any way I like. The length gives me a lot of freedom of movement, without being too short. I do wear bike shorts underneath most days, because I just find that comfortable, but most of the time I feel in zero danger of flashing people. The fabric is light and cool –– it's almost delicate, in fact. I know that people have complained of snagging it, which so far hasn't happened to me, that I've noticed. Mostly it seems pretty resilient. I've tossed it in the dryer a couple of times when it was damp, because I wanted it to spring back into shape after getting a bit stretched out, and it came out like new (I put it in a pinned-shut pillowcase to keep it from snagging on anything in the dryer). I don't plan to do that often, or to machine-wash, because I do want it to last me a long time, but it's nice to know that I can refresh it that way when I need to.
Overall, this dress has been sturdy enough for daily wear (obviously), but the fabric also has a slight sheen and silky drape that makes it potentially dressier. Tomorrow Camellia makes her third appearance at Sunday Mass; next Saturday she'll attend a wedding. Oh, and we sing for this Confirmation Mass on Tuesday, too. One thing I was looking for at the thrift store yesterday was something with red in it, since red is the liturgical color for the Holy Spirit –– since I did not find such a thing, I might pull out my kimono instead, which I wore for the exact same reason on Pentecost.
Inside, cardigan-off shot:
And off to sing.
LATER:
Note to self: do not plan to go to Confession on the same day that the entire enormous Confirmation class goes to Confession. Just . . . go another time, that's all.
Also, I took the belt off and felt better.