Author: christinestaffa

My life's journey has taken me from the streets of New York, up the Hudson Valley, to a little goat farm under Vermont's highest mountain.

Book Corner 2024.52

The Master and His Emissary

by Ian McGilchrist

And we have a winner for best non-fiction of 2024. This is really a game-changing book for me.

The right brain is primary, and the left brain merely its emissary; yet the left brain often takes over, thinks HE is the master, and becomes a bully. All these decades I’ve thought of myself as left-brained, extremely so, maybe pathologically so. Maybe I just have to get the thing back on a leash. Maybe it just went haywire in my adolescence and I let it start getting away with murder.

The book begins with neuroscience and then deep dives – deep, DEEP dives – into the history of civilization, art, and science. I had no choice but to zone out for a lot of it; artistic discussions over my head, foreign language quotes not translated until the endnotes. This was 600 pages of heavy duty. But when I could glean what he was saying, it was a fascinating perspective.

My New Year’s resolution – in addition to “stop getting mad when people call me” – is to see if I can put my left brain back in its place. You serve at my pleasure, left brain.

Post-Sick

I was sick Xmas Eve & Xmas Day. Yesterday it broke and I had that glorious post-sick feeling. We did a jigsaw all day then ate empanadas. This morning I tried to walk on the hotel treadmill but it felt too exerting. I still get an annoying tickle in my throat at random times and it makes me cough.

Promenade

Heard in NY:

“I like your glasses.” Good, I still have doubts about them.

“Have you lost weight?” This guy must have had a really fat image of me. I am of course at a higher weight than at any prior point and was not wearing something particularly slimming.

“You don’t change!” But everyone around me does! Everyone I knew looked so gray.

Color Experiments

Look at them askance, kind of blurry. I think the top one is particularly interesting if you make it blurry.

I came across another article in Spin-Off about paying attention to value more than hue. Same concepts used by Deb Menz in COLOR IN SPINNING, though I don’t know if she invented them; the top is an attempt at “high major” and the bottom is a “medium major”. Major means spanning light, medium, & dark values; and high means emphasizing light, and medium means emphasizing medium.

Book Corner 2024.50

Complete Peanuts 1956-1957

by Charles M. Schulz

This may be Peak Peanuts. It’s definitely peak cuteness. Linus is still crawling when the year starts. Snoopy is starting to do “impressions”, but he’s still a dog.

This doesn’t look like it’s going to be one of my peak years for book reading, quantity-wise. WOLF HALL took up a shitload of time, and since then I seem to be abandoning long books halfway through. It’s hard to read other stuff after WOLF HALL.

Spinning Orange

Spinning orange. Nobody wants orange. I like orange, but this particular shade was not what I was going for. So naturally, this particular batch of mohair happened to be the most beautiful and easy to process. The lovely smoky dark stuff you see upper right, OTOH, was such a bitch I refused to go on after carding only four batts.

“You could have overdyed the orange, Tytania.” Jeezus, like I don’t have enough to do. I do intend to try blending some with brown.

Proud that I also motivated myself to sew a fleece lining into one of my knit hats, for warmth and snugger fit. Taking yesterday off was a GREAT idea.