Late yesterday afternoon: kitchen window, Sacred and Immaculate Hearts, stained-glass panel my husband has had since before we were married, made for him by a lifelong friend, which has hung in the kitchen window of every place we've lived for the last almost-32 years. All that, and the side-yard maple coming into its glory. Also spider webs, which are ever with us, no matter what we do.
This morning:
Behold, the night is past, the rain is over and gone. My little redbuds are unleaving, but the next-door oak has crowned itself with gold.
In the shade bed, the hostas are starting to die back.
And I had a little fun with sun and shadow under the camellia tree.
A week from today my college children come home: hooray, hooray! I saw the Viking Son two weeks ago, but I haven't seen my little bass player/artist since we left her in front of her dorm on the twenty-first of August. She did send me, last week, this rather marvelous silhouette photo taken by her roommate, in the window of their room:
I look forward to hugging the person who inhabits that shape. And her Viking brother, too.
The other two won't be here, alas. My oldest and her husband, fresh from their Elvis Wedding Chapel vow renewal in Vegas last weekend (much fun had by all, so I am told by my various sources, including her brother who turned up to surprise her), will be spending Thanksgiving, as they always do, with his parents in California. Number One Son will be up a canyon outside Riverton, Wyoming, on a wilderness EMT course. He spent last Thanksgiving in the same place, doing the same thing, but then one of the instructors came down with Covid, and the other two elected to cancel the course, so nobody got their EMT certification. Here's hoping and praying everything goes smoothly to completion this time around.
I had sent this son a Wool&Prince merino tee for his birthday, and this has become, in a minor way, something of a drama. Package tracking said the parcel was "out for delivery" on the twenty-ninth of October, well in time for his birthday, and in time, so I thought, for him to get it before he went climbing in the Nevada desert. I assumed that it had arrived and thought no more about it. Yesterday, however, he texted me to ask whether I knew anything about his birthday gift and when he was supposed to have gotten it. He was assuming, not without reason, that I'd sent him a book, and that some local meth-head who had picked up his parcel by mistake, as it were, had gotten a literary surprise.
What I eventually found out by consulting the package tracking again, was that the USPS had decided that his address was "insufficient" and sent the package back to the company. Anyway, the drama in all of this isn't that much of a drama, because Wool&Prince customer service were very nice, gave me a coupon code to cover the cost of re-ordering the shirt (fortunately still in stock in his size), and were receptive when I said that the package really needed to go out with instructions to leave it by the basement door. So I hope it gets to him. He's leaving town to interview with wildland fire chiefs in Helena and Great Falls this coming week, and I hope that a) the mailman leaves the package in the right place, and b) that the local meth-heads, though I wish them well, don't wind up wearing his merino tee.
He was pretty excited when I told him what his gift was, I have to say. I'd given him a long-sleeved base-layer merino tee for Christmas last year, and I was gratified to learn that he's worn it a lot with great enjoyment. He remarked that merino is a lot better in the desert than cotton, and that he would really, really wear a short-sleeved shirt in merino. It's also a good-looking tee, in a gray pinstripe, so I imagine he'd wear it pretty often on a daily basis. Anyway, I hope it gets there, and I'm glad I chose it.
My husband still wants a merino button shirt to wear to work, so that's my project for Christmas and his birthday. In the meantime, he's a huge fan of the basic white bamboo undershirts I bought him recently. They're nothing special, no particularly nice brand, just a fairly reasonably-priced three-pack I bought to see how he'd like them. Verdict: he likes them a LOT. He wants more. He wants to phase out his huge supply of cotton undershirts, all of which get sweaty, especially as he's transitioned to aluminum-free deodorant, and hold both odors and stains. He hasn't had the bamboo undershirts that long, but feels that their performance is superior.
Speaking of bamboo, I'm wearing, today, my blue bamboo "Fauxwena" swing dress under my blue Wool& Camellia, which was my 100-day-challenge dress. I haven't worn Camellia as much since my challenge ended, but I do reach for her, so far, at least once a week.
Wearing the bamboo dress underneath, to create a jumper-over-long-sleeves effect, with the bottom dress also acting as a slip. This makes for a nice, soft, breathable, thermal layer next to my skin, underneath the wool overdress. Snag tights in "Thicket," Birk Madeiras, and my favorite little silver-gray beaded cardigan, though I don't think I'm really going to need it for long.
Wet hair twisted up in a bun, held with yet another claw clip.
More thoughts about the Camellia vs. the Sierra, which is my reward dress. In many ways, they're very similar dresses, both unstructured "swing" styles. My Camellia is a medium regular-length dress, while my Sierra is a small long. I think I might have worn a small in the Camellia, though it would have been a bit shorter, and the length of the medium regular is very comfortable to me.
The Camellia armholes are larger and deeper, and of all the features of this dress, that's one I might change. I could wish that they weren't quite so large and deep. This wasn't really a major problem for me, mostly because I always wear a bralette that looks like a camisole underneath, rather than a regular bra, but a little more coverage might have been nice when I was wearing it by itself in the summer. I love the Sierra's arm openings, by contrast.
I also prefer the way the Sierra's pockets are set in. They're stitched down on the inside, which means that there's visible stitching on the outside, which could make the dress read as a more solidly casual piece than the Camellia. What I find, though, is that being stitched down makes the pockets pucker a lot less. I have my hands in my pockets in all these pictures; I really should take some more with my hands out of my pockets, because they do tend to go kind of stretched-out and, again, puckery. Like the armholes, this isn't a huge problem for me, and I do like the dress, but here again, I think the Sierra wins.
Finally, I prefer the heavier fabric of the Sierra, though I'm glad to have had my thinner, finer Camellia for the hot weather that persisted through most of my challenge. The French-terry-type fabric holds its shape better overall than the Camellia's knit does. I would be curious to compare my Camellia, though, with the merino-tencel blend Camellia, because in the reviews of the latter, people indicate that the fabric is a little thicker and heavier than the all-merino (well, merino-nylon) Camellia that I have. Overall, while I like unstructured dresses –– swing dresses, A-lines, soft loose sheath dresses –– better than I like dresses with a lot of tailored structure, I think the Sierra strikes a better note between structure and shapelessness. My Camellia can start to feel a little too shapeless, at least for the winter.
Also, this is not the least flattering picture I took this morning, but it's maybe illustrative:
Even with a whole other dress on underneath, plus tights, the fabric is thin. I'm not that worried about it –– this isn't really what people see when they look at me, and part of it is that I do have my hands in my pockets (though on the other hand, I have my hands in my pockets a LOT). But it's thin. In the Sierra, on the other hand, whatever's underneath doesn't show through at all, and I like that. If I were going to buy another Wool& dress right now, which I'm not, it would be a Sierra, simply for that reason.
Anyway, an ongoing review, I guess. I still love my Camellia, and I know I'll wear her a good bit for a long time to come. BUT for a uniform and a default mode, I think Sierra wins for me. I could wish that there were more offerings in that fabric than there currently are, and more colors available in that fabric and style. On the other hand, maybe it's just as well for me that there aren't!
Today's agenda:
*Correct poem proofs for a magazine issue about to go to press.
*Do some housekeeping, because my husband has students coming over tomorrow, members of a men's group he sponsors on campus. They're going to tour our neighborhood brewery, because he was appalled to learn that none of them know how beer is made. Then they're going to walk over to the site of our local Revolutionary War skirmish, the Battle of Ramseur's Mill, which was one of the little events that gave the Intermountain Men the heads of steam that carried them to win the Battle of Kings Mountain. One of his colleagues is a Revolutionary War re-enactor, so he's going to be their tour guide at the battlefield site. Then they're going to come back here to cook hamburgers and have a bonfire.
*Get out dog supplies I had cleaned and put away when our old dog died. We are set to bring our new dog home on Sunday afternoon, so I doubt there will be a Shop My Closet feature this week. Instead, the feature will be Meet My Dog. I am excited –– I've missed my old buddy, especially in the kids' absence, and I've found this fall that I spend far too much time lurking about the house by myself without something to make me go out. I'd like to say that I spend all that time writing, but I don't. I get work done, but the days tend to be a bit too shapeless sometimes. Having a young, energetic dog to walk, and people potentially to meet at the dog park at one end of our town's greenway trail, will be good for me, something to add a little constant formal pressure to my day. She is a young dog, just over a year, but the guy who's rehoming her has done a lot of training work with her, which is fabulous. It will be up to us to be consistent in maintaining that foundation, so that she continues to be a good dog as she matures, but we're a lot more up to that than we would have been to starting from the ground up. We got very lucky with our last dog, whom we adopted basically on the strength of a first impression, but this time we've been careful to know what we're getting into. Fortunately her current owner has been very forthcoming with a lot of details about her habits, personality, background, and behavior. Anyway, more about her soon, I hope!
And now to enjoy this glorious sunny day.
