New Slippers!

I used the rest of my birthday money to treat myself to delicious quality brand new sheepskin slippers. I’ve been walking around in thick socks, due to the lack of slippers so these are a vast improvement. I love how this pair have the cutaway, making them easy to get my feet into.

First wearing of the slippers! Sentinel is going through an interesting shoe phase and is busy checking out the news from my shoes.

Emu brand! Deliciously warm! Hopefully I’ll be wearing them a very long time.

Why I can’t currently live in a tiny house.

The coat closet rod is full of MY coats. Matt’s are on the door.

From left to right:
  • Red rain slicker, for when it’s really pouring.
  • Bright yellow flagger coat I wear when bicycling
  • Tan mid-weight jacket and matching fetching cap
  • Cute jean jacket
  • Tan vintage car coat whose button fell off and I need to replace
  • Red vintage dressy coat with fabulous button
  • Vintage red wool coat for when the temperature is below 40 degrees (also includes fabulous black hat with built in scarf and matching thick suede gloves)
  • Cream cashmere blend winter coat for when the temperature is above 40 degrees (also includes cute checked cloth cap and leather gloves)

Ideally, I would have one coat that could go on the bike, dress up, dress down and become warmer and cooler as the temperature allowed. I’m sure such a coat exists, but I have yet to come across it, especially at my store of choice, Goodwill. But if I found such a coat, I would have to give up all the other ones, most of which I like a lot, for one reason or another.

Decorating is fun

I enjoyed decorating at my Mom’s house this afternoon. Mostly because last year she had handily taken pictures of each part of the house and included them in the boxes so all we had to do was find the object in the picture and put it in the proper place.

As there were a lot of boxes, this was a very good thing.

Afterward, we had delicious pulled pork sandwiches and potato salad. Yum!

Three sentence movie reviews: Life After Tomorrow


Someone once told me there was a documentary about the girls who were in Annie and a post at the library blog prompted me to put the movie on reserve. I didn’t see a stage version of Annie until I was in my twenties, but the movie–and the movie soundtrack–was a big part of my childhood. It was fascinating to hear the stories of the girls in the Broadway show and on tour; some details were a bit horrifying (ten-year-olds at Studio 54! Where were their parents?) and some girls clearly never got over washing out at twelve, but the subject was fascinating and made the ending song particularly bittersweet.

Requiem: Goodbye to dresses

I have a lot of vintage dresses. I love them and at one time in my life, I wore them a lot. Alas, none of them fit now. I’ve decided to trade them in at my local vintage clothing store. But before they go, here’s a tour of these great specimens, all pretty wrinkled due to being rolled up and stored in Rubbermaid containers for many years.

This dress always made me think of a young co-ed, graduated, single and with her first job at a publishing firm in New York City. I also loved the double breasted buttons which worked well for me in this configuration, but never work in coat formation.

And look at the tag! Miss Executive!

Pendleton Woolen Mills is an Oregon company and so I snapped up this suit just after moving here.

I loved the color. The skirt was very unattractive, being a gathered, pleated-at-the-waist, hitting-at-the-mid-calf monstrosity. I had designs of cutting it into something that would work better, but never did.

Ah! My coat in Massachusetts for a long while. It kept me warm on my cold winter morning walks to work.

I always felt like I was in the rock band Led Zeppelin when I put it on.

I love looking at old labels on dresses. Peck and Peck sounds great, doesn’t it? And according to Wikipedia, it once was. I know I found this dress one of my go-to classics.

And here it is. It covers most of your body, but the cut is incredibly sexy when worn. It was my first realization that more clothing, properly cut, could be much hotter than wearing less clothing.

See those great seams that cut across the bodice? Those made the dress. It also had a side zipper, which I love! This is the dress I will miss the most.

For awhile, this was my go-to dress. It dressed up and down (in fact, I tore a tiny hole in the skirt while playing pool one time) and I loved the lace around the collar.

Nice, eh?

This was a great summer dress, and a bit revealing for my mid-twenties-aged fun. I wore tap pants and a sturdy bra and was quite cool.

I made this dress for a party. It was my first (and only, thus far) foray into sewing with slippery material. I looked good in it and somewhere I have a great picture of my spinning in a circle while wearing it.

This was a favorite dress in high school and beyond. I loved the seersucker and the simple cut and, it being the early 90s, I wore it in the winter with long johns and converse sneakers.

It had this funny detail on the front.

This was my first dress with a side zipper.

I bought this my senior year of high school and wore it a few times until the freshman 15 caught up with me.

The matching jacket is fabulous and I always felt very much the sophisticated 50s co-ed when I wore this. This was also the favorite of Alexsandra, the woman I was trading with. She said this designer mostly did sportswear, so this was an unusual piece.

Boston in the late 90s/early 2000s was a great place to find cheap vintage dresses. I think I paid $10.00 for this beauty. I loved the color, the belt and the detailing.

Wearing this, I felt like the young sophisticated woman about town.

Another great label! And this dress completely looks like it is styled in California.
Another good Boston buy. I bought this for then-boyfriend John’s cousin Karen’s wedding. John wore a suit and a green striped tie and we looked great. Everyone looked great! East Coast people know how to dress up at weddings.

Detail of the waist.
This dress doesn’t look like much on the hanger, but I loved it because I could wear it any time of year due to the pink or grey. I bought it right before I left Boston and wore it at the going away party we had at the house. I also love that it’s homemade and the skirt detail reminds me of those birthday cakes with dolls in them that were popular when I was growing up.

Bodice detail. Someone was a good seamstress.

Skirt detail. I wore this for a party at church and one of the women was overcome because she had made this exact dress for a dance in high school. “Warren, don’t you remember this dress?” she excitedly exclaimed to her husband. Warren did not. She told me that she had made it in red and black, which caused a bit of talk at the time.

So ends my tour of dresses. Keep looking for a shot of me in my new dress. And when shopping for dresses in Portland, be sure to visit Alexsandra’s Vintage Emporium. Those out of town can click on the link and you can shop there from your computer.

Just one thing: Shelves in Order

Hey, no doubt you’ve read the fascinating post detailing the bathroom shelves becoming organized due to diligence, Ikea magazine boxes and a box cutter. No? Click here.

Mission for the week of December 4-10: Clean out uppermost shelf in pantry.
Future Patricia here! I’ve journeyed all the way from January 1, 2012 to tell you that I did not accomplish this mission and then never set a mission for the rest of the weeks in December. I was really busy actively avoiding preparing for Christmas which looked like a lot of reading and watching movies and not much doing anything else. “Just one thing” will return in 2012.

Three sentence movie reviews: Being Elmo


“There’s a whole movie about Elmo?” everyone asked me when I mentioned I was going to see it. I was unsure too, I mean, Elmo the slightly annoying after-my-time Sesame Street character? But it was a fabulous documentary, because it was the incredibly moving story of someone on a path he was supposed to be on, and a story that included Jim Henson, who always cheers me.

I saw this for free (Thanks Kelly!) but now that I’ve seen it I can recommend it for people to pay money to see.

Poem for November 2011: Solitude

You can read Solitude by clicking on the link below. I can pretty much guarantee you know the first two lines.

I was drawn to this poem because of two passing comments made in books I read this month. In Anne’s House of Dreams, at one point Anne says to her friend something to the effect of, “you will have all the joys and sorrows a mother can expect.” In Wendall Barry’s A Place On Earth several of the characters experience great sorrow, but continue to go about their business, integrating the sorrow into their lives for the time being.
This was interesting to me because I feel as though today we do not accept sorrow as a normal part of life, but rather a misfortune which just happens to find us on occasion. This poem, especially the last lines, seem to refute this notion, saying instead that we all need to pass through sorrows to get to the “halls of pleasure.”
I also spent the entire month debating the tone of this poem. Is it one of those nineteenth century instructional poem, basically saying, “unfortunate things happen, but you are better off looking on the bright side?” Or, instead, is it tinged with a bit of bitterness, with the ultimate meaning being, “people will be your friends when you are happy, but once you experience sadness, you are on your own.” After a month of reciting, I’m inclined to the latter opinion and I think that the second conclusion is the correct one, and I offer the last six lines as proof:
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a large and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.


The bit of reading I did about the poem (okay, I just read one Wikipedia entry, it’s not like they pay me for this gig) said that Wheeler Wilcox encountered a woman dressed in black crying by herself on a train. She spent the ride comforting her and the poem sprang from that experience.
I take comfort in this poem. It says my sorrows are okay.
As for memorization, it went in pretty easily, but I think it will be hard to retain, simply because the order of the things are easily jumbled. Sometimes when I’m reciting, my mind wanders and I discover I have skipped entirely one pair, usually feast/fast, but sometimes glad/sad. For this reason I will put it on daily rotation for December and January, just to solidify it.

Books read in November 2011

Aside from the book group selection, I only read YA (aka “teen”) books this month. For those of you looking to boost your book-reading bragging rights, YA books are good for that. They don’t tend to take a lot of time to read, and some are very well written like this month’s selection, A Monster Calls.

Read
A Place on Earth
Wendall Berry
Read for Kenton Book Club
Ah! After slogging grumpily through last month’s selection, this was a breath of fresh air. It was hard to get into at first as I spent a lot of time thinking, “now who is this character again?” But that eventually resolved itself and the characters became known and the writing was just lovely. I hadn’t read Wendall Berry before, but I’ll seek him out again.
Anne’s House of Dreams
L.M. Montgomery
After the scattershot nature of the previous “Anne” book, this was a welcome relief. This time, there was a narrative structure which vaulted this book in to the category of “my favorite book of the series so far.” The cast of characters was varied and interesting and even characters from other books came to visit now and then. There was a very nice narrative arc, unseen in any of the other books. And I greatly enjoyed Anne and Gilbert as young marrieds, though Gilbert at times seems to just fill the “husband” character and not show much of his own character.
Jasper Jones
Craig Silvey
Read for Mock Printz
Of the grim/tense category that all these Mock Printz books seem to be, this falls into “tense.” I found the writing for this novel very uneven. For example, the story goes along and I’m populating the pictures in my head based on the book and then suddenly it seems that it’s the 1960s. Insert record needle scratching off record. What? Really? Huh. This happened several times: the mother seemed to be a normal book mother and then suddenly she wasn’t, the love interest had a too-convenient part to play. Also, this book takes place in Australia, which normally is a fun thing, but this book had a lot of Australian things that it didn’t bother to translate into American. And there was A LOT of cricket.
So I never really took to this book. But I did like the following passage:
“I take a small incendiary pull. Of course, it attacks my mouth and burns down the length of my throat. I gag immediately, wiping my lips, trying to keep my lungs at bay. I slant my head and pretend to read a label that isn’t there through my clouding eyes. This shit is poison. And I realize I’ve been betrayed by the two vices that fiction promised me I’d adore. Sal Paradise held up bottles of booze like a housewife in a detergent commercial. Holden Caulfield reached for his cigarettes like an act of faith. Even Huckleberry Finn tapped on his pipe with relief and satisfaction. I can’t trust anything. If sex turns out to be this bad, I’m never reading again. At this rate, it will probably burn my dick and I’ll end up with lesions.”
Imaginary Girls
Nova Ren Suma
Read for Mock Printz
Another of the “tense” YA books for Mock Printz reading. I hope all these adolescents are learning to breathe in yoga classes, or they are going to be incredibly tightly wound. This was nicely written and I spent the book engaged with puzzling through it, trying to figure out just what was up. I think it will inspire lively discussion when we get to discuss it. But I didn’t like it. The main character’s sister was quite unlikable and she was the book, so I spent a lot of time in puzzling dislike. “What’s her deal?” I kept wondering. I’m interested to see what others think.
A Monster Calls
Patrick Ness, Siobhan Dowd
Read for Mock Printz.
Seemingly all ten of our mock Printz books this year are either grim or tense and this one falls into the grim category, what with a thirteen year old’s mother very sick with cancer and his father living across the Atlantic with a new family and him not getting along with his grandmother and all. But despite it being grim, it was a fabulous story and my favorite Mock Printz book so far. It’s short and there are wonderful illustrations and I highly recommend it for anyone going through a situation that involves loss. Even if loss isn’t currently a part of your life, this book is worth reading for its very moving story.
Daughter of Smoke and Bone
Laini Taylor
Read for Mock Printz
“This book is awesome! I’m totally giving it five stars!” was something I thought repeatedly as I gobbled up this book, right up until the last page when the author actually used the words “to be continued.” Invoking the “to be continued” phrase automatically breaks my “series rule” which is as follows: The first book in a series must be a complete story on its own; the second book should be a happy surprise, not a given.” Authors that can’t be bothered to come to a clear break in their plot are, in my opinion, lazy and should be rewriting a bit more before publishing.
So, the ending was disappointing, but until then I couldn’t get enough of this book what with the kick ass female character (“This should be a movie!” I thought several times before I remembered how well Hollywood manages to diminish strong women literary characters) wonderful fantastical elements and a very interesting puzzle to unravel. Highly recommended, even with the disappointing ending.
Shelter
Harlan Coben
Recommended by my friend Maureen with the caveat that this book breaks the “series rule” (The first book in a series must be a complete story on its own; the second book should be a happy surprise, not a given) I read this in a day. Despite my compulsitivity, this book was awful. The writing was bad (though did not approach Twilight-esqe levels) and I feel like Coben’s approach to writing a “teen” book was to read about seven of them and then take every cliche possible and shove it in his book. Let’s count them up. We have: 1)The essentially orphaned, and mostly unsupervised main character, 2)The loud, eccentric best friend who might as well be wearing a jester hat, lest you not get that he’s supposed to be the comic relief 3)The prickly fat girl who wears a defensive shell a mile thick, but is hiding a heart of gold and has a secret 4)much plot development action involving cell phones and 5)a large population of adults who “just don’t get it” 6)Teachers who are all apparently very angry former drill sargents.
You know what else this book set in the present day had? Nazis. Really? Yes really! Because there is no better antagonist than WWII era Germany. But wait, there’s more! A Strip Club. Prostitution. Mysterious White Van. Strange Tattoos. Stranger Tattoo Artists. Thinking over all of these elements put together I feel a building rage at the pure stupidity of this book. One or two of these elements in the hands of someone who can write would have resulted in something worth my time. But at this point, all I can do is warn you away. Go ask a librarian for a good YA book and leave Harlan Coben to the airport-novel-reading adults.
Also? Incredibly dumb character name. Mickey Bolitar! He was born in the mid-90s, for god’s sake, not the mid-50s. In fact, I just checked Wolfram Alpha and the graph of the Mickey distribution shows a dip down to pretty much zero in the mid-90s when this character would have been born. It’s rank is beyond 1000 currently. Mickey Boliter! Stay away! Far away.
Started and did not finish–None