So I have the go ahead to resume walking and free weights, in an attempt to recover my energy, which has gone walkabout. Weights went okay yesterday, workout divided into two shorter sessions.
But walking, or rather staggering, around the block takes more stamina, it seems. Handsome Partner, in the days when he could still more or less walk used to say,well, I'm off for a little stumble, see you in a few minutes! He definitely came to mind as I trudged around, stopping gratefully every few minutes to take pix of the last flowers of the year with bees still putting in their workday.
Some of these are just plain lovely to enjoy, with the fall tree colors, and some, the fallen wild cherry logs with lichen all over them, are great design suggestions. Reminds you of Kaffee Fassett, who's very keen on lichens.
Close friend Girija invited me across the street a little while ago, saying I have something you will just LOVE, brought from India yesterday.
Evidently her husband, on a flying visit to India to settle his father back there at home, had been instructed to pick up various packages shopped for by G's craft-loving sister. And there was a wonderful treasure trove of seed beads in wonderful colors, flat sparkly gems for shisha work, gold and silver thread, oh gosh, what a treat. All for me!
When husband R. stopped off in HongKong on business on his way back, he'd had to offload some weight, since the amounts are smaller from HK to the US than from India, but he was strictly instructed to KEEP my things, no matter what else went!
So I'm blessed with all these good wishes, and the accessories for my future stitching adventures. Also some Indian sweets to celebrate Diwali which starts late next week and goes on for several days.
We have new neighbors, replacing the old friend who moved away, an Indian family who instantly decorated for Diwali, including chalked drawings on their threshold, very traditional designs.
Oh, the Dollivers are thrilled that I'm recovering to the point of considering their plans for my beads...they are jonesing for Diwali outfits now. We'll see.
Longest break in the history of my blogging, alas, accommodating having pneumonia, and with any luck I'm on the way out of the valley of the shadow. Not fun at all, but neighbors bringing soup and doing errands and son checking in a lot, were all a great help, and the antibiotic is supposed to work, too. So I'm almost back.
Looked out this afternoon and there's a squirrel noshing away on my decorative pumpkin. Bits all over the step. I explained to him it's decor, not food, and he waved a paw at me.
You'd call it displacement activity. It's the sort of thing you do when you can't think what to do, sometimes because there's so much to do, and an upcoming recital to be nervous and anxious about, why did I agree to it, why was I born, etc.
Sometimes it's in the course of recovering from a nasty reaction to the high dose flu shot, which involved checking in with the CDC, my doctor, the place where I got the shot, and is taking its time going away and hitting my energy and my optimism, too. And right now it's all of the above.
Anyway, here's my current displacement activity, to wit:
One needlecase from scraps of felt and canvas, stenciled and drawn with metal pens, one cellphone purse, made from a leather patch (thank you, Judy, again) which I folded, stitched and painted, one scarf thing I made for the top of my bedroom curtains, from items found at the thrift store yesterday. And the gangshot is of the Heap o' Dolls, Elton's glee club, all piled up on his piano.
These items are all in the same part of the house, the Ds rocker now in state in my bedroom, complete with conservatory greenery they require, Elton on the bookcase over to the right of this. They claim it was all their idea, if you like it, that is. If not, it was Boud's doing.
Silly stuff! I'm easily amused.
Through a great freecycle, thank you again, I accepted custody -- you never really own designs and concepts -- today, of a fabulous treasure trove of cross stitch magazines, thread counters, charts and small kits, and have been totally engrossed in looking and leafing and planning and thinking. Some of this will come with me to the embroiderers' guild meeting to give as presents, some will go to other friends, some will stay with me.
And some are already on my agenda of items to get to after the current stitching is done. I like to see how designs can be changed and adapted to other embroidery forms. Cross stitch can often be needlepoint or surface embroidery, with a bit of thought and planning. Or it can suddenly demand to be goldwork, if I'm involved in it.
The Kindle reader I suddenly found in my life has proved to be better than I expected, to wit: though the cats both try to sit on it and put their paws right where I'm reading, in true feline style, they can no longer stop me from turning pages, yay.
Then, if a book is huge, it still weighs the same on the reader.
And finally, best of all: I've downloaded classics from Gutenberg Project, may they live forever, and find that on revisiting Vanity Fair it's much much funnier than I thought. I had to read it as a teen, and slogged through it, missing most of the irony and deliberate two dimensionality of the actors in it, and now find it's Austen with cap and bells, and I keep having to stop to laugh. And I can enlarge the print -- classics in print often have distressingly tiny fonts.
I know Trollope is very good, having reread some of it as an adult, so maybe I'll download ole Anthony soon. I have the complete Gutenberg Austen, though I have reread her many times, until my book fell apart. This is another reader plus: your book won't wear out!
Just sayin'
But it does cut into my DVD watching. And cooking. And other obligations in life, which I have to scramble to catch up with. Tomorrow is the Festival of the Arts, which I'll cover in Art the Beautiful, but meanwhile I have to make sure all my stuff for the various commitments is organized and processed and generally ready.
Plarn for the giant loom, other interesting materials same destination, art ready to display on the clothesline show, embroidery to show at the guild table area, camera loaded and battery charged for pix of all the above. Good thing I live pretty close to the Festival site, since last year I had to nip home to get another memory card when the one in the camera filled up faster than expected. This year I'm ready.
I am, I am.
I've set up a blog for our chapter of the embroiderers' guild, if you'd like to follow our doings, you can go to http://princetonega.blogspot.com/
and see our first blogpost. If you'd like to receive all our posts from now on (that won't be a huge number) directly to your email, just enter your email address at the bottom of the header, and follow the prompts, and you'll never miss a sparkling post full of pictures and fun and works in progress. Even if I do say it myself.
Instead of running about doing errands, catching up with art commitments, working on the computer for organizations, and generally doing, not being, I went to the Preserve, our local wilderness area for the afternoon.
I found a whole new trail has been opened, that I walked, on grass through trees, instead of along the dusty old farmtrack that used to be the main trail to follow on the way to the other areas. Very cool. Whole new vantage point, and I've been wanting to walk this for years,but it was only just made into a trail. Perfect day, in the 70s, cool enough to walk a lot, warm enough to sit and rest when I realized I probably should.
September brings these great black eyed susans, or
whatever they are, covered in little brown butterflies, and various
little blue wildflowers who come out after the heat of the summer has
passed.
And I just had to take pix of reflections of trees and sky and clouds, and teepees built during the summer program by small naturalists, while I was listening to frogs leaping into the water all around, and watching small fish in the shallows of the lake.
Then home to read, except that it consisted mainly of sleeping with two cats on top of me. No pix of the sleeping heap of bodies.
For some people
It's still happening.
Picnic 2013 of our local ARS chapter, Princeton Recorder Society. I was playing in the three main playing groups, so I wasn't able to pic and play at the same time, but there was good music at this event.
Here's our treasurer, Bob, taking a bow after playing a series of bass solos:
John Burkhalter, seen here holding soprano recorder after
playing brilliantly, is a virtuoso recorder player, and a generous one,
too, to less accomplished players, ask me how I know this, and I now find his mother is an artist. He hopes to put her and me in
touch, which will be wonderful. She lives in assisted living, far from here, but computers don't care!
And the food, all made by ourselves, was great as usual.
My default devilled eggs all vanished, I like this, no leftovers to
carry home, just the container!
Time to talk with your friends, catch up.
For outdoor playing you need perfect weather -- we were under cover so rain wouldn't have mattered too much -- but wind can be an issue, so you have to remember to peg down your sheet music on the stand. But the sound of the music drifting on the air was lovely, perfect day in the 70s, sunny.
Good time.
This may look like a plate of molasses and ginger cookies fresh from the oven to celebrate White Rabbits the First of September, but in fact it's the end of a concatenation starting with the reading program I took part in this summer.
That ended in my being drawn for first prize, my Kindle. That was the first salvo in a few days' intense learning and frustration and software cursing in the course of finding out how where and when I can upload, how to convert files to something Kindle likes, very fussy over its food, K rations, you know, how to move books from out there to in here, etc.
And I now have uploaded on my K a number of marvellous totally unavailable in print, works, one of which is about food in wartime. The First World War, that is, written in 1917 at the request of the US Gov, for housewives encouraging them to be frugal and stop eating a pound of meat a day, and so on.
And at the end is a series of actually perfectly nice recipes, one of them for molasses cookies. Nothing to do with frugal, since they involve a lot of ginger and molasses and the flour they were supposed to economize on, and I subbed olive oil for the solid shortening they wanted. And added walnuts on the top, also not frugal.
So here they are. Already little care packages are in a couple of neighbors' houses. I actually put the batch into the freezer in the innocent belief they would last for weeks of teatime, but oh well.
Better on the neighbors' hips than mine...
Hectic time lately, what with software and hardware and too many commitments all falling over each other at the same time.
So to help me get in the spirit, a nice Silver Spotted Skipper spent a lot of time on the sedum out front. Quietly flitting and sipping, sipping and flitting. Telling me something.
Happy Holiday to blogistas for whom it's a holiday weekend, and happy Ordinary Weekend to the rest of the world. September here any minute now.
After saying loudly for years I would never buy a Kindle, because it's the equivalent of paying to enter a bookstore to buy books, a Kindle has come into my life. And I didn't buy it. I got it the old fashioned way -- I won it in a drawing!
After getting my lovely Renaissance book last week, I forgot that there was also a drawing for various prizes to close the summer library reading program. Then today a phone call from Rina Banerjee, branch manager of the library I was involved in, to tell me I'd drawn first prize, a Kindle. Yay.
So I hotfooted it over there, and here's Rina with the
lucky winner, doing the Grip and Grin for the libe's pr, and well
deserved it is.
So this
afternoon is all about finding where the on switch is, and going from
there. I've managed to register myself, and my big plan is to learn to
download ebooks from the libe.
Steep learning curve here,but I'm very proud of realizing that I can charge the K
using the adapter from the Ipod Touch, what a concept,and it's now all
green lights and ready.
More than I am, but this is pretty thrilling, I can tell you.This is the first thing I ever won in my entire life!
Monet could have lived in my little town and enjoyed this
walk with me this morning. The red flowers are cardinal flowers, doing
very well this year. I have one or two where I live, who planted
themselves or maybe birds did, and since they like to live near water,
they intelligently took root right at the foot of the downspout!
Not many places in life where this happens, but I just got one. This summer I took part in a reading program, where all you did was read what you wanted and log the titles and authors into the library's LitFinder.
At the end of the program, next week, there will be a drawing for a Kindle and a couple of other things. But no matter how the drawing goes, every participant got to come into the libe, bringing their log printout and choose a free book from a cart of choices. So today I did. That was great fun, and I scored a wonderful book, seen here. I took off the jacket so as to show you inside as well in one shot. Now this is cool!
Spent a good time outside reading it and studying what's in there. At the Uni, I did a heavy duty section of my degree on art history, mainly the Renaissance in Europe, so this was a kind of nostalgia trip as well as new learning. And I was tickled, after last week's trip to the Unicorn Tapestries in NY, to observe places in other medieval works where the unicorn shows up.
Then there's the show of sunflowers, seeds a gift of a friend who lives across the street and can now enjoy them along with me. The purple plant is a purple sage, smells wonderful when you brush by it. It's not the sage I use for pesto, though -- that's common sage and I grow it out back.
All this leisurely activity, stitching a little, reading about the Renaissance from a safe distance, reading my medieval mystery story, another Dame Frevisse, I see a theme here, is taking place while my friends are across the street digging and hauling and generally overdoing it, while I get to kibitz.
Farmshare day today, after a morning of enormous storms, serious downpour, the kind you can't see through, tornadoes a bit north of here, but here we got lucky. By afternoon the sun was out and steaming the earth.
So today's farmshare was the sort of great food you get in the middle of the season in the middle of the state in the middle of the farmshare. And the extras: as much corn as you could deal with, a large and juicy canteloupe, blackberries picked at six this morning before the storm, peaches and tomatoes, likewise, and flowers in the field, borrow the clippers and pick at will. Jill the Farm Lady tells me that the extra flowers, to pick freely, will be the norm every week from now on
So there I was in a field of zinnias, fighting it out with the butterflies and happy bees, as I clipped and picked and had a wonderful time.
The bees did not stop when I picked the flower they were on -- just went on seriously working until they were Ready To Move On. And the sulfur butterflies were all over the place, following me as I left.
Good thing I had my farm mud shoes on, since there was about six inches of mud to navigate after the torrential downpours of the morning. But what a heavenly afternoon followed.
This was after a trip to the thrift store, where I scored a beautiful pink linen top which I may wear and then again I may stitch, and then again I may do both...and to the library to pick up Mrs Bradley and Call the Midwife Season Two.
A walk in the wet woods around here cleaned my shoes up a bit, though that wasn't the purpose, but it works for me.
And now I'm here, after eating a quarter of that melon with ginger sprinkled on. Nice glass of chardonnay.
Come to think of it, this whole day works for me.
