When I was a kid (around the time that I was reading The Mixed of Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler), it was my dream to someday hide out in a library after hours, perhaps snoozing among the stacks and reading reading reading to my heart’s content.
I happen to be, at this very moment, nearly alone in a closed library. And musing about all of the possibilities…(so if you don’t hear from me for awhile, you’ll know why)
I have an IRL fetish. I have a few of them, actually, but the one that’s on my mind right now is my IRL fetish for paper.
We have boxes full of creamy think white paper leftover from wrapping dishes in our recent move, and I love the texture of it, the color, and its soft wrinkles. This weekend Catgirl and I used the paper to create a skirt pattern for sewing, and it was an utter delight to use a thick artist pencil on that paper, too. So much so that I was dreaming about all kinds of ways I might use paper again (digital schmigital).
That, and I’m also thinking about the book that sits on the edge of my bathtub to entertain me during my evening soaks. Wet fingers on paper (and the wrinkles that those wet fingers leave on book pages after they dry) are a texture that feels so much more bone-deep satisfying than a swipe of a finger across a screen.
Previous short shameful confessions
Note: featured image is of the old-timey letterbox (and nearby elevator) in the lobby of the Hotel Allegro in Chicago. It made me want to mail a few snail-mail letters to friends…
As part of my “reading lots of books” project, I started reading Cloud Atlas (kindle edition) over the holidays. Quite frankly, I’d been completely underwhelmed by it but kept plugging away because of the hype assuming that it would eventually get better. Eveon so, yesterday, as I was sort of slogging through a low point in the narrative I clicked through to the “home” screen on my kindle and realized, with a sigh of relief, that I was nearly finished with the book. And it wasn’t until that point that I logged into goodreads to consult all of the ah-mazing reviews of this book and finally figured out that…all this time I’d been reading the wrong book.
Because, apparently, The Cloud Atlas
One of my resolutions for this year is pretty simple: to take a lunch. Every day.
So far I’ve done it, but it’s been harder than I thought it would be. It’s so much easier to stay at my desk and keep working. Especially this week, with the beginning of the intersession term (i.e. so many small fires burning).
We’re not 20 anymore…
He said, as we jumped into the car before 7am to take Catgirl to school. We’d had a long evening in Los Angeles with new-to-me Belgian friends Hans and Lien. Dinner was at a popup restaurant, The Hart + the Hunter (by our favorite chefs from Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing) with drinks afterwards at The Dresden Room.
There’s something to be said for an evening filled with vigorous conversation, simple southern-style foods, and the hours flying by.
The next morning, however, one does have to get up and get the girl to school and get to work and…one does realize that it just isn’t as easy to roll into bed in the middle of the night and out of bed in the early morning as it used to be…
One of the biggest productivity-boosters of my current life was getting a dishwasher in August. I’ve just gained 2-3 hours every week that were spent in hand-washing the dishes. And whole I don’t mind hand-washing (in fact, I rather enjoy it), I’m enjoying the extra time in my week even more.
Perhaps there’s nothing “shameful” about admitting that I appreciate having middle-class appliances, but it does feel a bit of an indulgence to me, still, every time I close the dishwasher and hear the whoosh-whoosh sound of its labor-saving technology.
I got so absorbed by my to-do list this afternoon that about two hours after I got coffee, I spied it on the corner of my desk and remembered that I’d forgotten to drink it. And then I drank it.
Some days/weeks/months are just like that, aren’t they?
I managed to freak out the kiddos pretty well the other night by driving down the freeway with the dashboard controls set to metric (it looked to them like I was clocking 120mph).
But they figured out the conversion quickly enough & breathed a bit easier afterwards. :)
As I searched the procession of hundreds of graduating seniors filing into the arena at my son’s high school commencement yesterday, I found him by recognizing the guy who looked the most like Harry Potter. I then zoomed in on his face with my camera to confirm that that was, indeed, my son and not another Radcliffe look-alike. :)
And, I must add that I don’t think I’ve ever seen him happier or more confident than he was yesterday as he crossed that stage (which was, incidentally, the same one where I’d been hooded for my PhD just two weeks prior). I’m so proud of the man that he’s becoming, and so happy to be his mother.
Previous short shameful confessions
I have many, many clocks in my house. They are all set to different times. And not just slightly different times, but radically different times. Like, the clock on the fireplace will say 4:12pm when the one on the kitchen stove says something like 6:45pm. And both times are wrong.
Honestly, it doesn’t bother me much because I usually have my laptop or phone at hand and I know they have the ‘correct’ time. So all of those other clocks just don’t register with me–I rarely even notice them.
But it does seem to be a bit disconcerting to some people who hang out at my place. So recently we considered setting a 10 minute appointment to run around the house and change every once of the clocks to the same time. I’m not averse to doing so–in fact I think it could be kind of fun to have everything in sync for once.
However…like so many other household things that need doing, I realize that I just don’t seem to find the time to get it done.
PS: Picture above is because teatime is always my favorite time of day–whenever it happens :)
I was at a Happy Hour party last night with some colleagues at the cafe that’s in the local train depot. One colleague asked me if I’d been to that cafe before. I replied that I hadn’t been inside very often, but I regularly sat outside to watch the trains.
Oops.
Sometimes I get all relaxed and forget to hide my inner nerd. Sometimes I forget that normal people don’t plan their vacations and their lunch hours and their free time around train schedules. :)
Though I like living in a house for so many reasons, the part I suck at the most is remembering to put the trash & recycling cans out on a certain morning each week. More than once I’ve simply loaded it all up and taken it back to the dumpster/recycler in the parking lot where I used to live because I missed the pickup date at the house.
