Welcome, new year. What will you bring us? This is the year I turn 60, God willing --- a whole new decade on my personal New Year's Day in November. But other than that, who knows? Time keeps so many mysteries in its folds.
We ended the old year in a lovely evening with friends we hadn't seen in far too long. When we got home, Dora was panting with terror in her crate, because the shooters were out and fireworks were going off, the night filled with booms. We didn't get much of a walk, because all she wanted to do was bolt back to the house. I wound up spending about half the night in the rocking chair next to her crate, touching her through the bars, until at last she lay down and went to sleep.
Did U know that people around here shoot off black-powder pistols to say Happy New Year?
Well, they do.
I don't think it's very nice of them.
So now I'm up earlier than is probably good for me, although it's not that early, and we want to go into Belmont for Mass at 11. Coffee is making. House is otherwise silent. It's cloudy out and promising to be a chilly day: 31F currently, with a high of 50, which isn't bad but isn't all that warm.
Meanwhile, it's still Christmas. It's fixing to not feel like it at all: the lights will come down all over town, the last Christmas trees that aren't Catholic will get kicked to the curb or dismantled to languish another year in the attic. Our Catholic tree is looking pretty brittle, but I think it can hang in there until Epiphany. I think I'll change out the Christmas cloth on the kitchen table for a blue one, since today is a Marian feast, and give the poinsettias a wash. Christmas has its shifts and mini-seasons within the larger context of Christmastide, and this is one of them. Eventually I'll take the two red-check tablecloths off the dining-room table (but leave the pine-tree runner), and put one on the kitchen table for some brightness and cheer until Lent.
And here we go. The blue tablecloth is as easily done as it is written:
I like this winter-blue tablecloth, though I often forget that I have it (I don't have too many clothes, but other things . . . maybe this will be the year I work on my tablecloth collection). My mother bought it one year, probably twenty years ago now, to set her Christmas table, and then didn't want it when she moved house eleven years ago. The window of time I have to use it is a pretty small one: it's too small for my dining-room table, so I don't tend to use it for Christmas, and after that we don't have much winter. But I like this icy blue as an alternative for a Christmas table, and it IS still Christmas for a few more days, so.
Ah, the morning shooting has started, how lovely. Mind you, nobody is shooting at anybody. This shooting isn't violent, just loud. It's an old, old tradition in these parts, meant to bring luck in the new year, and I always loved it until I had a dog who was traumatized by it.
And now I'd better go and dress myself in something blue for the day.
Wearing:
Here's a look I like to call Postulant Chic.
*Wool& Camellia (M), originally Lapis Blue, redyed with Rit Royal Blue, worn as underlayer
*Secondhand Not Perfect Linen Smock Dress (S/M) in (I think) Dark Grey-Blue. The seller didn't name the color, and I've been waffling about what it actually is, but this is today's guess.
*Secondhand Chicos linen shirt (Chicos Size 1), originally pale blue, redyed with Rit Evening Blue
*Secondhand Peruvian Connection alpaca cardigan
*Snag merino tights
*Xero Tari boots
*Brooch given me by my husband on some gift-giving occasion
With my wool dress on again as a slip/base layer, I should be plenty warm. But to be sure, I've also added a wool scarf:
*Very old wool scarf, as in it belonged to my grandmother, redyed with Rit Indigo
I've started a new wardrobe-tracker spreadsheet for the new year, so that I can keep track of everything I wear, and my patterns of wear, rather than simply tracking wears of Wool& dresses. I'm just inputting items as I wear them, which might get unwieldy, but is really the only way to go, I think. I'm just not going to sit down and itemize and categorize my entire wardrobe on a spreadsheet in one fell swoop.
AFTERNOON UPDATE:
Lovely Mass, nice chat with young Brother Gabriel after, home for a lunch of burger patties on Dave's Killer Bread.
I've spent the last couple of hours culling my tablecloth collection and consolidating it in one place. I'd had tablecloths in the dining-room cupboard where I keep lots of little Christmas things and other odds and ends, but a) they took up a lot of space there, and b) I never used them. So I've thinned out my collection of everyday cloths, reduced that to one butler's-pantry drawer, and put the dressier cloths (white damask, and a beautiful Battenberg lace one of my grandmother's that's in dire need of repair) in the vacated drawer below that one. So now I have a drawer for everyday napkins, a drawer for everyday tablecloths, a drawer for dressier tablecloths, and a drawer for dressier napkins --- and they all fit neatly in their allotted spaces, with no overflow.
I've also done some culling of old homeschool books and resources --- nothing I can sell, but somebody at Goodwill might think they're a treasure --- and shelved most of my most valued homeschool books, the ones I want to keep, on what used to be just my history shelf in the study.
Now it's kind of the Everything Shelf, but that's all right. My aim is to work my way around the shelves in this room, which was our homeschool library, thinning out things I really don't want to keep, consolidating things I do want to keep, and gradually transferring my poetry library to a tall shelf in here, as it doesn't all fit on its current shelf in the sunroom. In short, I'm kind of claiming this room, and will slowly shelve elsewhere anything I don't want at my personal disposal right here. Nobody but me will notice that I'm doing this, but it will make a difference to me, let me tell you. My books reside in great piles all around the house, which is partly just a function of my reading habits, but also a function of my not having had a dedicated space for them. I'm not making any announcements, just quietly colonizing this room until I have it precisely as I want it, and all my own books within reach. I don't mind having the big history/homeschool shelf in here, because I'm fond of all those books, but other things can vacate to make room for books I want to have at my fingertips.
This, at any rate, is my dream.
Also, good new-year thoughts from Instagram accounts I follow: here and here. You know what my thoughts are already, at least regarding clothing, and my two rules, which I think are reasonable enough. But I like the idea of numbers for the year, and a maximum number each for new and secondhand acquisitions. For me, 0 seems like a good number for new acquisitions, because I made so many this past year. I haven't put a number on secondhand buys, but I might take it month by month, with some chunks of no-buy (one of my plans for Lent, in fact) interspersed.
Otherwise . . . I think I just want to keep on keeping on. I'm glad to have been doing some gentle strength training and to sustain that practice at home on a pretty regular basis, in addition to walks with the dog. My plan for 2024 is to keep that up, and to continue to build strength and muscle. I hope to finish more books (as in, books I read). I hope to do some good writing, fiction, poetry, and criticism. I'm excited about the two books of my own on the horizon. I'd like to attend at least one literary conference. I want to pray more and better, be more assiduous about scripture reading, and go to confession a little more regularly than I have been doing. Gently does it, but I hope to continue cultivating habits that will serve me, body and soul, as I walk my walk through this year.
AFTER DINNER UPDATE:
More reshelving and some more culling of books. The back seat of my car is loaded with stuff to donate: more books than anything else, but also some clothing and tablecloths that aren't quite worth putting up on Poshmark, but still well within their useful lives, I think. This reshelving process is going to take me . . . forever, maybe. And it's not going to solve the problem of my having more books than shelf space --- and not wanting to get rid of the books. It will get better, I hope, when the Fire Son loads up to go back to Montana in the spring, because he has his car and says he wants to take a lot of stuff back. If I could close my upstairs closet door, that would be a big win, but I look forward to regaining more storage space. AND I kind of look forward to losing some of those books stacked in the upstairs hall. I mean: I have books I could stack there, if many of those books went away.
I'm going to be prowling about the house a lot, plucking up books of mine as I see them, for who knows how long. My major goal is to collect all my reference books in one place: criticism, literary essays, books on craft, anthologies, dictionaries, style manuals, etc. THEN I want to devote the tall shelf to poetry. This is eventually going to involve my finding a place to move an entire set of 1973 World Book Encyclopedias . . . among other things.
But yeah. It feels good to be moving things out of the house. It feels good to anticipate one child's moving a carload of things out of the house sometime in the foreseeable future (and donating or otherwise getting much of the rest out of here, too).
I did, after all, make an announcement over dinner about my plans for this room. The husband is all for it. One thing I'll do less of in 2024, presumably, is gripe about how I don't have an office.