X & I went for a drive to pick up more goat chow. This was a rare treat for me to be in the passenger seat. Usually I drive all over the place myself.
I looked at every house that we passed, and thought about how every house held a family trying to keep their shit together.
You never know what somebody is going through, financially, medically, or emotionally.
The facade of the house tells you nothing.
Everybody is going through something. It’s rare that life hands somebody nothing but good cards all in one hand. If you find yourself in that rare happy situation – ride it as long as you can. The weak card will come around.
This meditation has helped me today.
Of course, on another thought, meditations are like underwear. They can give you a good undergirding of support. But they need to be changed often.
It’s fun-nish, making the pattern, but ultimately I didn’t realize how much less fun playing with plastic would be compared to playing with goat and sheep hair, I guess. Should possibly have sprung for glass or some other natural product.
This trim I wove a couple of playtime projects ago was hanging around waiting to discover its Special Purpose. Voila! It is trim around my studio worktable. I love filling my studio/office with things it is pleasant to see.
I just took this off the loom (hence all the threads hanging off it and messy borders). It’s not a scarf – it’s too short and not comfortable. I’m just modeling it.
Beerfest? In the middle of a pandemic? That’s right! Xopher and I printed out the full beer inventory of the Waterbury Craft Beer Cellar and pretended we were looking over the list for an official beerfest. We headed over there yesterday, pretending we were going to Boston, and braved a public indoor venue to quickly load up on 15 exciting-sounding brews. Then we quickly braved a public supermarket to buy beerfest grub: frozen pretzels, frozen waffles, frozen potstickers, momo’s.
We decided to attend the 6 PM session, and when time rolled around, we rejoiced in not having to stand in line outside in single digit weather, but instead just headed right on into our kitchen, and started opening beer and heating up pretzels.
The most hands-down delicious beer I had was Blueberry, Coffee, Chocolate & Vanilla Sour from Collective Arts. Every single one of those flavors managed to come through. The coffee was particularly forward – coffee in a bitter beer is kind of gross to me, but coffee in a sour is a horse of a different color altogether. It reminds me of Dannon coffee yogurt, which I used to chomp down all the time in days gone by. Several years ago at a ‘real’ extreme beerfest, I rated as my favorite another coffee sour – it was some tiny brewery in the Hudson valley as I recall, and I never found their beer again. This one alas is naturally a limited edition, so while I’ll enjoy it while it lasts, it’ll probably be a long time again until I light upon a coffee sour…
And by far the most disgusting beer that came anywhere near my nose or mouth, not just last night but ever, had to be the Hof Ten Dormaal Sloe. Just no!
This morning we rejoiced anew that we had no need to wander around the Boston Seaport neighborhood in -2 degrees looking for brunch.
First real snowfall of the season happened night before last. The above was taken yesterday morning. It’s so beautiful! I love what it does to the light coming in. (Me, having something good to say about snow? Pandemic life is getting to me.)
And today sees me doing my first attempt at cotton dyeing. My first fail was turning the stove on. I didn’t recall where in the directions they said to turn on the heat, but figured it must have been SOMEWHERE… no, apparently not, according to iLiveToDye. I am not sure if that ruined anything chemically. But this spaghetti has been sitting in the dyepot for hours now and is still white. (Not actually spaghetti.)
I’m reading a book, which I look forward to finishing & blogging soon, called Little Book of Life Skills, which inspired me in a kind of gratitude challenge that is actually (gasp) helpful to my day-to-day mood and not just a laundry list of things I really know I should feel grateful about so I can stop bitching already; nor is it just a Facebook parade of “look how great my life is!” and “I’m HAPPY, DAMMIT” not-so-cleverly disguised as a gratitude exercise.
They said to start each day thinking of 3 very specific things you’re grateful for, and one great thing that happened in the last 24 hours. They said this will be a lot better for your daily frame of mind then thinking about what you USUALLY do when you get up in the morning, which is all the crap you should really try to get done or have to get done that day. And it really is better. I’m not saying it makes me gay all day, but I’m saying it makes a good kickoff.
So they way I’ve used it, is I’ve actually tried to think of three unique things to look forward to that day. Which may not exactly be ‘gratitude,’ but what is ‘gratitude’? Are you grateful for your house, your health, etc.? Of course! So what? They said to get specific. That had me morphing the daily exercise into things to look forward to, which of course I’m grateful for.
Does this count as a “book”? It doesn’t have an ISBN number. It’s a set of five little physical books collecting essays written by a group of bloggers called Less Wrong. You could read them all online. I prefer reading books, so I paid money for the books.
I didn’t finish every essay. Some weren’t interesting, some required too much work.
Best quotes:
“We’re looking at a collapse of reference to expertise because deferring to expertise costs a couple of hedons compared to being told that all of your intuitions are perfectly right.”
And I didn’t tag it so I won’t put quotation marks, in case I got a word or two wrong, but: We are each of us basically 3.5 billion years of hacks in a fragile trench coat.
Tytania 