"What one has been coded to notice and remember"

"It would be a mistake to imagine that the poppies in Great War writings get there just because they are actually there in the French and Belgian fields.

"Flanders fields are actually as dramatically profuse in bright blue cornflowers as in scarlet poppies. But blue cornflowers have no connection with English pastoral elegiac tradition, and won't do.
...Poppies had accumulated a ripe tradition of symbolism in English writing, where they had been a staple since Chaucer.

"The same principle [of literary selection––as opposed to documentary or photography] determines that of all the birds visible and audible in France, only larks and nightingales shall be selected to be remembered and 'used.'

"One notices and remembers what one has been 'coded'––usually by literature or its popular equivalent––to notice and remember.

     ❧     ❧     ❧

"(Sometimes it is really hard to shake off the conviction that this war has been written by someone.)"

--The Great War and Modern Memory, by Paul Fussell,  1975, Oxford University Press, about literature and the First World War

  ❧ 

Googled "chaucer and flowers". Found this.

Is marriage a legal contract with the state? Penny Cooper, Legal Clerk

River queried whether "a wedding involves entering a legal contract with the state", as I'd written yesterday.
"Really?" she asked.

You know how you say things you're sure about, but when questioned aren't so sure about the details, or the language?
I wanted to be clear, so I looked it up--with the Capable Assistance of Penny Cooper, Legal Clerk, who aims to be correct.

I think "contract" is not the correct legal terminology to describe this, but, yes, upon marrying, you enter into a binding legal . . . relationship? status? with the state that confers benefits and entails obligations.

As an article in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism puts it, "the naiveté of couples notwithstanding, the fact is that marriage imposes a number of important legal duties."*

I like the clear language of the Legal Information Institute from the Cornell Law School:
"We are a small team who believe that everyone should be able to read and understand the laws that govern them. "www.law.cornell.edu/wex/marriage:

"Marriage: Definition

The legal union of a couple as spouses. The basic elements of a marriage are:
(1) the parties' legal ability to marry each other,
(2) mutual consent of the parties,
and (3) a marriage contract as required by law.
______________________________

Back to the Yale article:

"Very few people have a clear understanding of what the actual legal obligations of marriage are. In addition to the fact that there is no formal document that explains these duties and obligations to those planning to marry, most engaged couples neither undergo detailed pre-marital counseling nor speak with an attorney prior to their wedding.

"Often couples become aware of the legal obligations of marriage only in the event of a crisis such as a long-term illness of one of the spouses, the onset of financial problems, or the breakdown of the marriage itself."

*--"The Essentials of Marriage", Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 2003

Back to the Cornell LII site:
TRADITIONALLY, the contract specified these legal duties of the partners:

"The husband had a duty to provide a safe house, pay for necessities such as food and clothing, and live in the house.
The wife's obligations were maintaining a home, living in the home, having sexual relations with her husband, and rearing the couple's children.

"Today, the underlying concept that marriage is a legal contract still remains, but due to changes in society the legal obligations are not the same."

"The Supreme Court has held that states are permitted to reasonably regulate the institution by prescribing who is allowed to marry and how the marriage can be dissolved. Entering into a marriage changes the legal status of both parties and gives both husband and wife new rights and obligations.

"One power that the states do not have, however, is that of prohibiting marriage in the absence of a valid reason.
For example, in Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court held that prohibiting interracial marriage is unconstitutional because it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. Thus, establishing that marriage is a civil right."

Loving v. Virginia was decided in 1967.

 Newspaper article from March 8, 1966, The Danville Register (VA):
There is "an overriding state interest in the institution of marriage".

 

"The Wave"

I put together a photo-book for bink for Thanksgiving, commemorating her 2010 "DVD to ART" project.

I've posted these photos large; you may have to scroll right > to see the whole spread. (The Dalek & Robin Hood art is by bink.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

__________________________

The 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality (Obergefell v. Hodges, the majority opinion was written by Anthony Kennedy) is gooily romantic about marriage:
"No union is more profound than marriage..."
I don't particularly share this view.
This is what I get all swoony about:
"equal dignity in the eyes of the law."

Whatever you think of the ideals of marriage, a wedding involves entering into a legal contract with the state.
Some people seems to miss this.

I used to be a receptionist at a place that hosted "Shared Parenting" classes on Saturday mornings. Courts would order divorcing parents to attend this half-day class.
Once in a while, an outraged parent would grumble to me,
"How can they make me do this?!"

I would say, "You signed a legal document giving the state this right." Remember?

People are buffaloed by the romance of the institution.
People are stupid.
We should have equal rights to be stupid (within reason).

 _________________
There had long been rumors and accusations about the sexual impropriety of the archbishop, Nienstedt, who'd sent out the anti–marriage–equality DVDs in 2010, along with accusations about him covering up other priests' sexual abuse of children.

Nienstedt resigned in 2015 following St Paul prosecutor's decision to file civil and criminal charges against the archdiocese for failing to protect children.
As of 2020, the archbishop still holds his title and has not been investigated.
--Via the Strib "Request to Vatican to investigate Archbishop Nienstedt in limbo", March 2020.

IG Round-Up

I post on the store's IG a couple few times a week. 

I don't think about what one photo will look like next to another, but sometimes there's a run of colors or themes, and it looks that way, which I like. Here's a round-up from the last couple months:

I snap what I like in the store, so books and cool things are overrepresented. Clothes and furniture sell the most, but I don't care much about them. Also, it's harder to make them look good, I think. (And my coworkers refuse to model.)
I'm proud of my shot of the pink jacket & orange pants w/ a turtles necktie––(above the picture of RBG "JUSTICE")––that took some doing.

Especially since Covid I don't photograph the customers much, which are the most interesting thing. I don't want to stand close enough to talk, even with masks.

No, really, they glow!

I was arguing with someone about The Crown---they said the show was critical of the monarchy,
and I said, as I blogged yesterday,
the words may be critical sometimes, but the royals themselves are filmed so they glow, which does rather soften the edges of any criticism.

I thought, this show is so beautifully done, there's gotta be an amazing cinematographer (team) and seriously big bucks (pounds) behind it. 

And of course there are.

Above: "Olivia Colman (centre) on the set of Churchill’s funeral; a cast of 300 and a crew of 250 produced just a few seconds of footage.

"The director of photography, Adriano Goldman, was keeping his eye on ... the puffs of water vapour that were helping create what he called “God’s light” – the gleaming shafts lancing down from the clerestory windows.

"This is the result of tremendous care enabled by a huge budget of £50m per season (or the cost of around six BBC dramas), and rising."

--via The Guardian article "Queen Olivia Colman, an epic budget and a cast of thousands: a year behind the scenes on The Crown"

Because I'm me, and I think this stuff (not only the stories we tell, but how we tell them) is fascinating––
(and maybe just a teensy bit because I wanted to prove my point––but I am open to being wrong too, because I want to be correct (Penny Cooper says)--not for the power, but for the pleasure of the pieces all slotting together--and when I find out I am wrong, I can make a course correction, which is all very fun and interesting... but in this case I knew I was right because YOU CAN SEE THEM GLOWING and that can't be an accident)
––I went googling for more about the cinematography...

And there it is: glow. From lead cinematographer/director of photography Adriano Goldman:

"I came up with the idea of using vintage lenses. We had... Glimmerglass filters, on the first two seasons...;
we use them just to add a little more glow in the highlights.
And then there’s the haze.

"I always felt that adding some atmosphere helped — or still helps — to make the look less naturalistic, a tiny bit more romantic and period-like, but not too much.

So the overall looks result from a combination of things we do on the camera side, along with the costumes, makeup and sets — it’s a huge team effort."

--from American Cinematographer, "Adriano Goldman, ASC, ABC, BSC discusses his Emmy-winning work behind the camera on the period Netflix drama."

I really noticed it in the first few episodes (after which I stopped watching), but in this fourth season, he's not using the vintage lenses. The glow comes from the lighting--I'd noticed the windows.

On lighting from outside, Goldman says:

"The attention I pay to highlights and windows is very important on this show.

There’s an overall lighting strategy I’ve been using from the beginning, which is my ‘realistic’ approach: lights come from outside in.

"The good thing about a big show like this is that we can afford very serious kinds of logistical challenges, like blocking roads in London just so I can position my lights outside a set. [Our sets] are usually on the second or third floor [of a location], so you need big machines.
It’s often two cherry pickers outside supporting a SoftSun... "

I do think this technical side of movie-making is fascinating, but it's a big reason I didn't make any more movies after my few little ones.

Movies are all about light, more than anything: light is your alphabet, you're writing with light––and that requires way more technical prowess than I was willing or able to gain.

Finally, Charlotte Higgins, author of the above Guardian article, says:

"The Crown is not the place to come if you are looking for a critique of the British monarchy. The world of The Crown is burnished, a brighter version of the real....
It is a curious experience, being drawn into the show as someone who objects to inherited privilege and the shameful trappings of empire.

"I’m no monarchist, but at times I have felt, over the past two or three years, that the Queen is the only thing holding this country together, even as the current prime minister attempts to manipulate the constitution for his own ends. The traditional royal virtues – dullness, stability – have their appeal, despite everything."

I'm no monarchist either. (And as an American, I don't feel strongly one way or the other about the British monarchy.) But after four years of a US president run amok, Queen Elizabeth's style of steadily keeping on keeping on does look good.

You never know when you are inspiring...

A friend emailed me this morning that my post about The Crown may have inspired a funny dream in which she was pretending to be the queen.
"You never know when you are inspiring..." she wrote.

Which reminds me that another friend, who has recently become a fan of due South, (dS)––a Canadian TV show that I blogged about a few years ago––this friend came across this old fan-art of mine, on a dS Facebook fan group.

So far as I recall, I'd only posted that here and maybe? for a brief time on my defunct Tumblr. What a hoot to see it has gone traveling!

 "Just brushing off a few hairs, sir."

I'd been very pleased with that photo mashup.
I'd titled it "That time Benton Fraser offered unasked for assistance to James Howlett"*, but that dropped away.

*James Howlett (left) = Wolverine, aka Logan (Hugh Jackman) in Marvel Comics.
Constable Benton Fraser (Paul Gross) of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is from Due South. They're both from the Yukon, so I imagine they'd have crossed paths at some point. 

How do you KNOW (if your dog can eat cranberry sauce)?

"Can you feed your dog cranberry sauce?" a coworker asked me. Oddly, since he doesn't have a dog.

"Do you want me to look that up?" I said.

"Did you work in a library?" he said.

I laughed, said I had worked in libraries, pulled out my phone and looked up his question.

Cranberries are not poisonous to dogs, I told him, but most dogs probably don't want to eat them anyway.

"How do you know that's true?" my coworker said. "How do you know how whoever wrote that knows that?"

What a fun question!
"You can check the sources, see where they got the info," I said.

I showed him the article on my phone, and he watched as I went back several links to a professional Veterinarian site. On it, I clicked on one vet, randomly.
Her page had a phone number.

"We could call her," I said, and he laughed.

Now I wish we had called and asked about dogs and cranberries, just for fun.

"You can always check your sources," I said. "Or try to. If it's only one guy on Facebook saying his cousin said something, that's not good enough.
But at some point, you have to trust other people, that not everyone is lying."

He was really interested, but he showed me his phone--just a flip phone. Like many of my colleagues at the thrift store, he never uses the Internet.

It's a problem--how to think critically when you don't have access to information?

But I know plenty of highly educated people who use the Internet but who don't think critically, so it's not that simple.

Thinking critically is not about access to information, it's about asking questions. 

P.S. Cranberries are okay for dogs––grapes & raisins are not!

"Grapes and raisins are known to be highly toxic to dogs, though research has yet to pinpoint exactly which substance in the fruit causes this reaction. Because of that, peeled or seedless grapes should also be avoided."
Via AKC

_____________________________

"Wikipedian Protester", by xkcd  [CITATION NEEDED]

Loving to Hate "The Crown" (Plus, it gets fly fishing wrong)

I cringe at how reverential the Netflix show The Crown is to the monarchy. I couldn't finish the first season because of all the vaseline on the lens. Even when being critical, the filmmakers backlit the queen & co. so they literally glowed.
And set them to heroic music.
It's Filmmaking 101: How to set the emotional tone so you criticize while upholding.

Still, I've been recovering from dental surgery, and I am enjoying the latest season of The Crown--mostly for the once-over-lightly review of the 1980s: the IRA,  the Falklands, the music Diana listens to...
But also for the pleasure of meta-viewing:

Some brutal insights into personal flaws aside, it's overall very dewy-eyed.
HOW DO THEY DO THAT?

Well, the queen still glows.

Shooting into an open window--that's a filmmaker's choice.

Well, of course. NOTHING on a screen is accidental--every single thing is a decision.

And cinematographers don't shoot INTO a bright light source on purpose.

Last night I watched an episode that's a perfect example.

The episode is devoted to the life of Fagan, the man who lost his job and therefore his family, due to Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher's brutal economic policies.
Fagan breaks into Buckingham Palace to complain to the queen about how Maggie Thatcher has wasted millions of pounds on an unnecessary war.

 

The queen comes across as the compassionate one...

but, alas, her hands are tied.
What can she do? The prime minister is a Meanie!

Poor queen. She comes across as the good guy vs. bad guy Maggie.

But really, the man could JUST as rightfully have leveled that complaint at the queen:

"You are an unnecessary expense on the backs of the citizenry.

What bloody good are you and your family to me & mine?"

I am sooo aware of the show's manipulation, I feel callous.

The show does bring home Princess Di's unwinnable position with the royals, but when she first sneaks down to the palace fridge for a bout of overeating, I was thinking, "Oooh, those puddings look good!"

 

And they get the fly-fishing wrong!
Do I care?
I do not.
But someone wrote a tweet of mock-outrage about it, and Slate interviewed him:

What was so egregious about Charles’ fishing?

Casting a fly is one of the things that anybody who has been fishing looks for in anything that involves fishing. There’s a real aesthetic beauty to a well-cast fly. It creates this pleasing shape and it lands without a whisper of a ripple on the water.

Purely the technical aspect of casting his line in such an incompetent manner—this is a man who was brought up with these country pursuits his entire life. His muscle memory wouldn’t allow him to cast as poorly as that.

The way that he treats the poor fish once he’s caught it, that’s properly homicidal. The poor actor.

--slate.com/culture/2020/11/the-crown-fishing-letter-interview-accuracy.html

I far prefer the comedy The Windsors.

Still generally affectionate--One-Day-to-Be-King William is presented as the sane one, and it never shows the queen--
but it mocks the personal foibles & idiocies of Charles & Co. 

Meghan has a crisis of faith when she realizes avocados aren't environmentally sustainable. Camilla seduces Trump for the good of the nation.

And it questions the whole set up. 

 

I'm not saying there are no good arguments for a monarchy. But glowing royals isn't one of them.

Book Display: Duplicates

I pulled books we have two copies of--there aren't usually too many--to put on display:
"This Winter... Start a 2-Person Book Group".

I think it's a great idea and I did this last year too, but the books don't really sell that well.
Many, you can see, are old "of-the-moment" bestsellers.
For a lot of these, it's really a Last Chance Before I Recycle You. 

(Some are keepers, and I've added more, as I come across them--including E. M. Forster's Passage to India, and Love Medicine, by local author, bookstore owner, and National Book Award winner Louise Erdrich [her Birchbark Books blog].)

So, yeah--there are lots of old bestsellers that everyone bought and read, or classics that were assigned in school--The Red Badge of Courage, The Scarlet Letter, Catcher in the Rye.

Currently, we have four (4) copies of Eat, Pray, Love and of Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life.
Will these still be read in fifty years, or even twenty?

Some will, maybe.
Purpose reminds me of Oswald Chambers's daily Christian devotional My Utmost for His Highest (1924). We occasionally get copies of it, and I guess it's still popular? George W. Bush liked it, according to Wikipedia.
But Utmost is an old chestnut and it never sells.

Classics that people choose to read on their own, not for school, usually sell fast.
We get plenty of Jane Austens donated, for instance, and Charles Dickenses, but rarely have two copies of any title.

There are some crossovers too––popular and read in schools––such as Lord of the Flies, which always sells. And tons of Bibles & Shakespeare come and go all the time.
Mark Twain is sort of neither/both.

We keep no inventory, and since I don't work the cash register anymore, I don't get to see who buys which books.
But judging from what I see on the shelves, here's a rough guide to what sells and what doesn't.

Best Sellers

Fiction--all sorts, but especially pop–crime/thrillers (James Patterson, Lisa Scottoline, MN author John Sanford's "Prey" series), and old standbys such as Agatha Christie (but not, surprisingly, Sherlock Holmes books) @ only 49¢ each
(. . . Also surprisingly, romance books––also 49¢--are slow sellers)
--and literary fiction (Camus, Elena Ferrante, Toni Morrison) and most classics (Tolstoy, Hemingway, Woolf), except for authors out of favor, such as Rudyard Kipling (and, for some reason, Henry James never sells, except his Turn of the Screw, but James Joyce does, so readability's not the issue),
some pop-classics beloved by men especially, it seems-- not sure what to call these--such as On the Road, Fight Club, and anything by David Foster Wallace;
and sci-fi, if we have it, which we usually don't;

cookbooks;
kids picture books (49¢ each);
current magazines (25¢ each)--old copies of National Geographic and The New Yorker sell, but other back issues, forget it;
arts & DIY (Van Gogh & knitting, yes--home repairs, not so much);
books about trains (this surprised me);

books about witchcraft, astrology, dragons;
Buddhism (emotional regulation?) for Westerners (Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hanh, and even older writers such as Alan Watts);

very-current affairs & pre–Vietnam War United States history, but not mid-range history: books about the era of the Bushes, Bill Clinton, and Reagan don't sell, and neither does feminism; history of other countries doesn't sell particularly well either;

extra-cool "cool old books";
How-to-Write books of the encouraging kind, not the technical kind (some standards remain good sellers, such as Bird by Bird by Annie LaMott, Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, and So You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland);

current books about race (White Fragility), and classics (Frederick Douglass and Autobiography of Malcolm X, but not Roots).*
Books about Indigenous peoples.

Middling Sellers

Books about science and nature (even classics, like Thoreau or Annie Dillard, or like-new ones with neat pictures--I'd thought these would sell better);

YA (young adult--I think these need to be super new: I overheard a teenager saying that if books are old enough to be in this store, they already know about and have read them);

Self-care & psychology, including 12-Step books;
Christianity and other religions (Bibles are steady, theology is slow);
travel and places; world languages; poetry;
pet books; gardening (sells well in early spring);
biographies (these date fast--forget books about old TV stars);

Music---it depends. Some sheet music sells, biographies of some musicians (Bob Dylan) too; others (Jennifer Lopez, Aaron Copland), not.

Worst Sellers

Books about sports do not move--especially books about golf & fishing, but even soccer and yoga;
business & management--blah;
health, childbirth and child rearing (do people only want the most current info?);

"cool old books" that aren't great but I wish would sell just for how cool their covers are;
drama--plays & books about theater almost never sell;

inspirational books about angels or family, a la "The Love of a Sister" or "There's Nothing Like a Grandparent" (again, I was surprised--I'd thought these would be popular, but nope--even if they're like-new);

Old bestsellers made into pop movies such as Bridget Jones's Diary or The Devil Wears Prada, or anything with a title such as The Gardener's Daughter's Secret Recipe for Giraffes,
and mid-century authors such as John Irving, John Updike, Mary McCarthy, et al.

Mid-centuryish politics and social sciences (no Margaret Mead or Gloria Steinem, no Eisenhower or even Watergate; Kennedy's assassination is old hat--I'm going to try a display of the many books we have about him next week--the anniversary of his murder--and see if they go, but they don't usually move off the shelf)

Authors who fell from grace, such as once-favored son of MN Garrison Keillor, Bill Cosby, and Woody Allen;
and right-wingers such as Bill O'Reilly & Ann Colter (someone took a book with her face on the spine and hid it behind the others--this happens sometimes).
The public has spoken.
These never sell and can go right to recycling.

"I'm sorry I am not able to fix it."

From the goat farm in the high desert, Marz reports she found a box of VHS tapes and DVDs dumped in the wilderness. Out there––off the grid, far from a paved road or any city services––there is no way to "throw things away".
Anything dumped will remain till Judgment Day.

Of course that's also true here in the city where I work at a thrift store. There is no "away", there is only "out of sight". Donating things to a thrift store may feel like a solution.
It's not.

I'm sorting toys at the thrift store now, as well as books (it fell to me when the toy volunteer quit). At least half the toys are plastic, and half of them are broken, filthy, unfixable.
What am I supposed to do with a cracked plastic truck that could pinch or slice flesh?
Or a plastic doll with magic marker all over its face?
It all goes in the Dumpster.

Here's the thing:
Once we've bought something, it becomes our responsibility for life. It's like adopting a pet animal. If it––the puppy, the clothing item, that great OXO lemon peeler––doesn't work out for you, you can try to re-home it instead of throwing it out.
But what a pain, right? Who even does that?
Maybe with pets.
I follow a Rescue Dog group, and the time and money (and love) involved in finding new homes is immense. 

Donating stuff to a thrift store is a stop-gap. Unless the donated things are in great shape and otherwise desirable (vintage, in fashion, worth money), they will immediately either be
1. put in the Dumpster, or
2. sold for pennies to be recycled downstream.

 

 

It certainly is better to donate ripped clothes such as this ^ coat donated to my workplace, than to throw them out. Thrift stores sell otherwise unsaleable clothes to textile recyclers.
(The note gives me the sense that the coat's former owner thought someone might repair it--a sweet but naive expectation.)

It's handy if you label textiles you're donating that are too worn for further use. Clothes and other fabrics that come in labeled "for recycling" save the thrift-sorters work. Sorting thrift is dirty, dusty, heavy, and poorly paid work.

Recycling keeps textiles out of landfills for a little while longer... they get shredded for industrial use, mattress stuffing, rags--some even gets rewoven into fabric---among other things.*

But it's not an ultimate solution--it takes more fossil fuels to transport and process textiles, and there are more than are needed or wanted by anyone. And things can only be recycled so many times before they end up in the landfill.

There is no ultimate solution.

If you're not sure you want that new puppy, shirt, kitchen gadget, rubber ducky for its lifetime (which, with plastic, is forever)...

DON'T BUY IT.

________

P.S.  Not buying things won't fix the fact that our economy is based on people making & buying stuff to be thrown away, of course, so that's another thing we can work on re-visioning...

 *Mild (not inflammatory) article about "The Basics of Textile Recycling"

Wave of Joy

I left work early--too excited by the election results to stay.
(We won???
We won!!!)

I biked over to bink & Maura's on this unseasonably warm mid-afternoon. Sitting in their backyard, we kept hearing cars honking, so we pulled up their BIDEN HARRIS lawn sign and walked over to the busy intersection near their house.

There we found the kid in this picture (Nick, age 13).
He'd been out on the corner with a sign for three hours when we arrived. Other people had joined him off and on. 

We waved signs with him until I needed to bike home before it got dark. Here's Nick, Maura, me, and a another stranger who joined us too:

(It was fortuitous I wore the Captain Kirk T-shirt to work this morning. I had not expected to hear final election results today.)

The response was amazing: most car drivers honked.
But they didn't just honk---they tapped out rhythms on their horns, they held their horns down until they were out of sight, they rolled down their windows and cheered.
They pumped their fists, gave peace signs and thumbs up (and one thumbs down), held their own signs out of sunroofs, and waved so hard their cars rocked.
Also, they took our pictures on their phones.

All kinds of Americans came by... a parade of everyone, in pick-up trucks, Teslas, SUVs, souped up cars with dark windows, beaters with rusty wheel wells––on bikes, on foot, walking their dogs. 

It really struck me that people made eye contact.
We've been so separated during Covid, it felt like people were hugging us. And smiling. Smiling like it was the happiest day of 2020. Which maybe it is. 

A lot of my happiness is simply relief at the end of Trumptimes.

But there's also this.
Welcome, Madam Vice President:

...and wait...

 Casablanca, 1942

We wait.

Estragon: You’re sure it was this evening?

Vladimir: What?

Estragon: That we were to wait.

Vladimir: He said Saturday. [Pause.] I think.

 

--Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett

 

(Patrick Stewart & Ian McKellen, here)

 

I Wait

 Tom Hanks in The Terminal

Keep ‘Er Movin’

 Watching results in Milwaukee with bink & my auntie and local BlueMoon ice cream and Keep ‘Er Movin’ beer (from Wisconsin omedian Charlie Berens). 

Too soon to say anything... I’d  cross my fingers except they’re holding snacks...

Today!

 

I dare to hope

I made this in January 2017, when Trump was inaugurated. It's truer than ever now.

I don't know, we don't know, what's going to happen tomorrow, Election Day, and in the coming days and weeks. 

I dare to hope we will be our best.

"I once dated someone who left me for a stuffed animal."

I just started watching the final season of Schitt's Creek, and I almost died of delight when David said this line.

Book Display: First; Once; One; 101; 1,000

I took down the Halloween books display at work yesterday afternoon. I had no plans for the next display--was just going to put out the best of incoming donations. The incoming donations included a couple history books with dates as titles: 1776 and 1914. So I scrounged around and came up with enough books with numbers in their titles for a display.

I like this sort of thing because it invites browsers (including me) to look into books they otherwise wouldn't bother with.

No problem with numbers one (including "first" and "once") through seven:
Empress of One; Two Towers; The Last Three Minutes; The Rule of Four (bonus: Quartet in Autumn); Five Chiefs; A History of the World in Six Glasses; The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens (bonus: The Seventh Mesa).

But then I had to skip eight and nine to get to 

Ten North Frederic and Room No. 10; the Spanish language Once Minutes ("Eleven Minutes") and The 9/11 Commission Report--hey, that could count as "9", since I already have an "11"; and Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, on top shelf).

The order cannot hold, and we have to hop, skip, and jump:
19th Wife; 21: Bringing Down the House; 24 Days; Thirty Years War; Fifty Shades of Grey; (Pentagram tucked on the bottom left because it's tall); 101 Uses of a Dog (top shelf); 365 Days of Wonder; 1,000 Places to See Before You Die (top shelf); Arte Y Cultura en Torno a 1492; 1776; 1914; and 1915.

Penny Cooper's Halloween

My personal battery has not been holding a charge and keeps running low.  So I didn't do anything special for Halloween yesterday, even though I worked––in the past, a good reason to dress up and be festive.

Penny Cooper's battery, however, remains on Full. She has been eagerly awaiting Halloween, and she celebrated all day.

First, she arranged a Halloween breakfast picnic with her favorite food--a croissant, which she shared with me.
bink was given a cinnamon walnut roll.
It was cold, so Penny Cooper wore her blue coat.

BELOW: Then Penny Cooper came to work with me.
Here she is straightening the children's books. She was very pleased with her costume, which she made herself: an orange hairband worn as a belt.

BELOW: "This doll won't be activated until you put a plant in her."

BELOW: On the way home, Penny Cooper stopped in a neighbor's yard to wrangle a tarantula. I say "wrangle" because it sounds good with "tarantula", but in truth, she was making friends.

HouseMate had carved a jack-o-lantern and bought candy to set out on the stoop. There weren't many trick-o-treaters.
The Girlettes were given doll-sized Tootsie-Roll pops. 

BELOW, L to R, starting in back row:
Low, Penny Cooper, Pearl Duquette (red dress), and SweePo (in pink)--still smudged with dirt from digging up Frederic the Potato. They don't want to wash it off!