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.

The F*ck It Dye-It!

My pox feels better.

I dyed today. I have so much yarn left over from the fair isle hat I could easily do another. But I thought how I would improve it, and I wanted a dark brown in place of the green.

I did not achieve what I wanted. First I come up with a brown almost EXACTLY like the medium brown already in the hat (even though that was a ProChem color and these were Greener Shade dyes). I added green then I got something too close to the green already in the hat. Then I added more orange and got this and said Fuck It.

Book Corner 2022.40

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

by Ken Kesey

This was a hard read because it’s narrated from the point of view of one of the mental patients; namely, the Chief, the most memorable character in the movie – I came into this having seen the movie, once, about 15 years ago. I was psyched that it was told from “Chief” Bromden’s perspective at first, but it’s a little hard to go with him down so many of his schizoid journeys.

It was fun to read how Nurse Ratched and MacMurphy were originally written; and the most memorable, climactic scenes were very true to the book.

PS Extremely sexist and racist.

Book Corner 2022.39

Pig Years

by Ellyn Gaydos

This book is about the hard work of being a farmhand, spending a day with back bent doing serious vegetable farming, and killing animals. Killing a lot of animals.

Very poetic. Was sometimes hard for me to read for an hour at a time, because of its lack of narrative arc. But beautiful in places.

“I love him too, but I am promised to farming. I choose it over him every time. It is not like choosing between two people. How could you trade the sky, the water, or the mountains for a single heart? Instead I imagine the earth opening to take me into its fold.”

“In the heart of summer, [we] are dwarfed by the farm, the sheer life force of it, pulled by the demands of plants and animals, pressed like blunt objects into the ground, buried in the work we have wrought.”

“[T]here is always enough food to eat. This is the compensation for the crude work of training life into channels of fecundity.”