The weather, in one image.
It's not that cold again, just damp. I'm starting to see bluebells, though, which are the whole joy of March and April:
I tidied away the last of my Nativity sets from the top of the perennially dusty study mantel:
It's always a problem to know what to do with that surface, because it's about four times wider than your normal fireplace mantel and draws clutter like nothing else. My solution has been to go ahead and fill it up with purposeful clutter –– those baskets of little toys, for example, which I sorted out when we did a big upstairs-closet cleaning about five years ago, and put in those baskets for the entertainment of children who might come over. Really I thought of them as "grandmother baskets." My grandmother always kept big baskets of extremely random little toys, left over from my father and my aunts, and also from my numerous much-older cousins, in the deep windowsills of her back bedroom. They were among the greatest enchantments of her house, which as a child I thought was full of enchantments: a 1930s-era radio that didn't work, an old single-volume encyclopedia on a stand, with glossy illustrated pages, a candy jar, a mounted large-mouth bass caught by my grandfather sometime in the 1950s or 60s with a florist's pipe-cleaner bee affixed by a wire to its gaping jaws, as if the bass were about to clamp down and swallow the bee. At any rate, I have no grandchildren yet, but the baskets are ready and have already enchanted a selection of visiting children. That mantel is a good place to stow them, too. While it's not exactly out of Dora's reach –– she could jump up there without even thinking about it and wreak all kinds of havoc –– it is out of her line of vision and interest.
I do keep some plants there, though in the winter when we have the fire on, that space gets awfully hot and dry. I wound up moving the orchids I'd set there, though a number of them remain in the same room, but the cactus and the mother-of-thousands seem happy enough with the desert heat belting up at them from the gas fire.
Wearing today:
This is the base outfit, anyway: my wool Camellia dress, with my secondhand grape/magenta Ibex merino tee knotted over. Later I moved the knot more to the center, because the side knot seemed to be pulling both the shirt and the dress out of alignment. Cotton-blend gray leggings –– this color choice feels a little too light for me, and if my navy leggings are dry, I might change into them, but for now, it's what I have on. Boody bamboo socks in "Dove." Doc Martens.
It's not quite warm enough for short sleeves, even in wool, so I added my thrifted emerald-green cotton J.Crew cardigan for a third layer:
I like the jewel tones of the tee and the cardigan together, and I think the blue of the dress, though it's a more grayed shade, harmonizes well with both. Again, I'm not too happy with the pale-gray leggings, which I chose mostly because they're softer and have more natural-fiber content than my charcoal-gray leggings, which were also clean. I might change anyway, though . . . we'll see. Not that I'm really going anywhere or seeing anybody, and not that it would really matter if I were –– I do not actually think that anybody else would be bugged by my leggings choice, except maybe people who think this kind of ensemble is immodest ––but if something continues to bug me, then I make a note of it and tweak things until I'm not bugged. That way I'm less likely to repeat something that bugs me, and to replicate things that don't bug me, and that seems like enough of a little win for any rainy day.
Trying to take pictures in which I'm smiling ––
–– but my most natural expression is Resting Wary Face.
Also, as you can see in the full-length photo above, I'd gotten out my thrifted Icebreaker pink micro-stripe tee as well, because it's a reliable choice. That was my fallback if I hadn't liked how the tee I'm wearing looked. I do love that micro-striped tee. But I'm happy to wear the Ibex tee today, because it is lovely in both color and construction, and according to the label, it's 100% merino, not a blend. I have a hard time understanding how it can be, because it does have some stretch, but I'll just assume that the label speaks the truth. Anyway, it's a very nice item, which I want to wear more often. I can see wearing it knotted over my Pact cotton dress, for example, for a purple-on-purple effect. I have put them together experimentally and like the way the tones layer on each other.
Meanwhile, I could see today's combination, with maybe some more thermal leggings and my Vasque boots, as a good spring hiking outfit, with layers for warmth or to strip off, depending on how the weather might go.
Still reading Pearl, plus Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (though the version I have calls itself Fathers and Children).
Kind of wishing the rain would blow through and be over with. Dallas got snow yesterday, and my college son sent this clip of what he described as "shenanigans." Nobody, including him, is recognizable in the video, but I can confirm that he is the gray-cloaked winner of the round shown here. He said that at the height of things, they had about thirty spectators cheering them on. He did not say how many rounds he won, but from his palpable exhilaration I'd guess that he won a few.
Also, I would get up and take the laundry out of the dryer, but for this poor dog, forced into servitude as a lumbar-support cushion in my kitchen chair. She works so hard, one hates to disrupt her.
LATER:
*Have written some prose.
*Have cut a long poem from the poetry MS and done some thinking about and tweaking of poems in haiku stanzas, which respond to various Japanese shin-hanga prints of the early-to-mid-20th century. Contemplating how that woodblock printmaking school integrated interests and concerns in Western art –– many of those printmakers had studied in Europe early in the century and were influenced by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists (some of whom, interestingly, had been influenced by traditional Japanese art) –- with conventions in classical Japanese printmaking. Also interesting: how print blocks are made by carving away everything that isn't a line. Parallels with poetry revision, thinking about the tensions between line and silence.
*Have folded two loads of laundry and washed the dog's extremely doggy-smelling bed. I should probably bathe the extremely doggy-smelling dog, but NOT TODAY.
*Have changed my leggings from light gray to navy. Blurry photo, but I like this better:
This dress/knotted-tee thing would probably be better as a warm-weather outfit, with sandals. I did wear things like this fairly often during my 100-day challenge, from July-October 2021. I'm not necessarily feeling it as an outfit with leggings or tights, but I'm wearing it nonetheless.
Good thing I have all this time on my hands. A friend emailed me yesterday to ask me how busy I was. Literally, that was the whole email. Sally–– How busy are you these days?
I'm still laughing, because I dunno. Am I busy? Am I not busy? I'm not bored. Time is not hanging heavy on my hands. On the other hand, I haven't left the house since Wednesday. What does busy even mean?
And why does he want to know? That's the real question. There's bound to be some reason –- with this particular person, there's always a reason –– and maybe one day I will find out what it is.