The Jolly Flatboatgirls

 Again! After “The Jolly Flatboatmen” by George C Bingham, 1846

Above, cropped. Original here: www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.75206.html

Thanksgiving Ride

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, here, there, and everywhere!

I am thankful and chuffed about my new, navy blue and white casserole pan (below) from the thrift store. Abby had priced it $4, and it'd been hanging around the store for a couple days before I bought it on Tuesday.

I looked it up this morning:
it's lotus enamelware, made by the Norwegian Catherineholm co. that closed in 1972. [Here, a collector's guide.]
So, it's sort of like finding vintage Marimekko (well, though enamel lasts longer than fabric). It goes with my Dansk pans--modern remakes of a 1950s design--also from the thrift store.
(Of course. It goes without saying that most anything I own is from the store.)

I made this sweet potato casserole with no added-sugar, which is not to say it's not sweet (or that it's low-calorie). Grated apple, dried apricots, and coconut milk make it, for my taste, a dessert. I was going to sprinkle pecans on top, but that seems like overkill.
I'm taking it to bink & Maura's in a couple hours. It's 1 p.m. now, and snowing, so bink is going to pick me up. Also the casserole weighs a ton.

Last night I made the Morrocan fish dish. (The recipe I'd posted yesterday). It was excellent! Chopped up parsley & garlic, smushed in olive oil---that's ALL YOU NEED for anything to taste good.
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I'd put together a little packet of Thanksgiving presents (below) for Marz.
The Tucci cookbook is off eBay, not from the store. But the snowflake dishtowel, garlic press, and the Green Pan are. Tucci recommends that brand of nonstick pan--it's enamel, not Teflon.
I fried eggs in it this morning, and now I want one for myself. No stuck-on egg.

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Marz got her hair cut in West Duluth before she drove down.
West Duluth is gentrifying, in part. (Yoga studios and breweries.) Marz calls that newly chic part "Little California".
The haircutting place is not in that West Duluth.
She showed the hair cutter a picture of the young Luke Skywalker and said she wanted his haircut.

She got... a mullet.
Which Luke's sort of is, but not that pronounced.
It looks great on Marz, just unexpected.

Mullets are back in style, sort of.  I don't know why people don't like them, actually. Is it a class thing? (I'm betting it's a class thing.)
I'd never been opposed to them. Had one myself in the '90s.

BELOW: Here's a splendid modern-day mullet!
Promoted by Irish musician and comic Garron Noone on IG. Sharp sides lead to a waterfall topped with a chicken crest... (You can't see here, but the young man has a splendid golden mustache too.)

It's hilarious and wonderful having a college student visit. Mostly Marz is off seeing other friends, and when she's here, she's putting together Russian Empire flash cards for the final exam in ten days.
As I cooked, she read some out loud to me, and answered them.

I know almost nothing of Russia before the Soviet era but wasn't entirely surprised that it's a lot like now. Expansion! Autocracy! Injustice! Body Parts!
(Makes Donald look like a kook of an amateur. Not that they didn't have those too.)
Marz says our January 6 would fit right in.
Let's storm the Kremlin!

Heaven help us.
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I hate people telling me to be thankful. So treacly pious. And actually, so mild. Too mild.

'Thankful' doesn't touch what it is to find oneself in existence, a conscious bit of carbon.

So, I won't say I'm thankful for you blog-worlders, I'll say I'm gobsmacked that you and I exist in the same tiny pinprick of time and space.
Hello, there!
How's your ride going?

Dinner at Base Camp

Busy shopping, cooking, and because I’m feeling a little low, rereading Murderbot for comfort (like it rewatches Sanctuary Moon).

The Girlettes debate dinner. 

“Plants!”             “Animals!”

What I’m making for dinner today for Marz—Moroccan baked fish. (Notes from bink, who used to make this.)

I’m sad about no sugar—it’s only for toys. I feel physically better without it, no doubt about it, and I’m not having cravings, but I’m feeling the loss, like from breaking up… ending this long-term relationship. It was toxic, but it was so satisfying…

A friend told me about her concept of “base camp” when life changes – – like, if you’re climbing Mount Everest, you have to stop at different base camps and acclimate to the climate, the oxygen level. And if you don’t and you go too fast, then bad things happen. (Like you die or get the bends—I’m not sure.)

This was helpful – – you make what seems like a minor change (say, in what you eat), and a lot of attending changes may unexpectedly follow. Daily habits are attached with fine threads to many other parts of your life. So you might feel some feelings if you mess with them.

And that’s okay. Rest at base camp. 

Quirky Thrift

 

ABOVE: nodding salt and pepper shakers, made in Japan. Their  heads rest--and rock--on the neck wedges. A tube extending down from the head holds s + p, which shakes out through the nostrils (!).

BELOW: Note says china was given "to Henry and Lena Yackel approx 1935"

BELOW: Pine cone owls

BELOW: Handpainted squirrel on wood I put up on the housewares' work wall, and the book cover with the teddy bear, Defy the Night

Not quirky... BELOW: Pottery tea pots and canister;
Meakin Ironstone

Proof of Life: "git up on the tough ones"

It's 7 a.m. as I sit down to write this Saturday morning, 32ºF (0ºC), and the sky is just lightening up. I'm drinking coffee in my new pink armchair, facing the window. On the radiator in front of me, Pearl Duquette is showing off her wool socks (knitted by Sarah W. in London a few years ago, and only worn in winter).

The girlettes' arrangement on their plank-cart reminded me of something...  Some painting...

Got it! The Jolly Flatboatmen, by George Caleb Bingham.

This painting doesn't mean anything to me, it's just filed in my memory. Though looking at it now, isn't that man looking at us compelling? His long legs...

(Bingham lived in Missouri, where my mother was from. I was born in Columbia, MO, where my parents met at the university.)

Bingham's "Fur Traders Descending the Missouri" is a favorite of mine--partly because what looks like a cat in the boat is actually a baby bear. Here, at the Met.

Speaking of bears, BELOW: A donated Harlequin romance.
The bear! What is going on with that bear? Its arm...

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I'm glad it's the weekend, to rest up. I'm acclimating to my physical job. I'm stronger, and generally I'm not sore the day after work anymore. But I overdid it at work yesterday, and today I got the aches. I'm quite happy for why, though!

What I'd done was, I'd stayed an extra coupla hours--volunteer--to clean up the Housewares workspace, below.
I climbed up on the shelves and got down on my knees to pull out fallen, misplaced, and hidden things.

This is it AFTER I organized:

I'd hesitated to tell management I was working late, off-the-clock, because I think it's illegal to volunteer to do the tasks for which you are normally paid.
However, my workplace follows no such law.
Manageress said, "Good!"
Big Boss said, "Feel free to stay till close!"
I did.
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Here, below, is the sink and pricing station (around the corner from the grocery cart).

This area badly needs some beautifying.
I'd hung that blue-circle print on the wall years ago, to brighten it up, even though I didn't work there.
(My wall in my BOOK's work area was covered in pictures.)

I found another valuable item stashed away by the previous sorter, who'd been fired--a vintage, Mexican, wool blanket.
Not this one, below, but one like it.
This guy was such a jerk. Selling something like this for, say, fifty bucks, will make a big difference to our poor store. (The average price of housewares is probably $1.99.)

Volunteer Abby and I are the main Housewares staff. We both sort donations (tossing maybe 25% as broken or rubbish), wash, and price them, and put them in grocery carts.
Abby comes in 6 hours/week. She is super speedy, but says she isn't good at displays (I can see that), and she almost never puts things out on the sales floor.
I spend about a third of my time on the floor, organizing, culling, and displaying stuff--which I love.

Several volunteers help a few hours a week, putting things out for sale. They are mostly lovely people, and mostly bad at arranging things. Only one woman makes things look nicer.

Arranging things (at work) and making things look good makes me feel so very, very happy, I was curious about it. Last night I searched "dopamine of getting things done".

I like what The Guardian says--it's about the satisfaction of To-Do lists, but applies to what I am satisfied by, too. The wonderfulness  of lists (sorting/arranging, in my case) is, they say, down to three reasons.

1. They dampen anxiety about the chaos of life.
Yes!
I love feeling that I've organized a bit of a disordered world. You can't beat entropy, but you can beat it back a little, and that's a rush.

2. They give us a structure, a plan to we can stick to.
For me, it's my workplace that provides structure--at home I don't feel that structure, even with to-do lists. So I appreciate that, and I also appreciate that it provides limits--I have to stop when the store closes at 5:30.

And,
3. They are proof of what we achieved that day (week, month).
Yes! Proof of life.
Like knitting, which I only did once--it's so pleasurable to see the material form:
I did that! Therefore, I exist.
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I texted Emster the mask of the god of chaos that I'd posted yesterday. Her reply is so purely her, I want to save it here.

I love a gild of a text [I don't think that's a typo] and also "git up on the tough ones".

_________________

After "The Magdalen Reading", this is another favorite painting--Botticelli's "St. Augustine in His Study" (c.1490).
I love it for the curtain!
Salmon pink and acid green! One of my most favorite color combos.
Also I like his tuft of hair in a pony tail, which reminds me of Cindy Lou Who.

Okay, it's almost 9 a.m. now. Time for breakfast.
An unexpected thing about not-eating added sugar is that I don't miss it, (amazingly!) but I miss 'knowing what to eat'.
Sugary food is the easiest, most available, and often cheapest option.

And I miss the role it played as an automatic time-filler. Got a little empty time? Facing that in-between time after work?
Easy! Hunt for a snack.
I've heard people who quit smoking talk about that---they don't know what to do with all the little spaces of time that smoking used to fill.

The loss of that constant friend makes me feel a little sad, a little beleaguered. Now I have to expend energy thinking of something to cook. I don't care much for cooking.

Feeding myself has gotten a little easier though, and a little more automatic, with a few fast-and-easy go-to's that I don't have to think about, like sliced apple & peanut butter; cheese and seed-and-nut crackers; tuna and noodles; a banana and walnuts, or yogurt… 
ALL of these take more effort than eating directly out of a tub of ice-cream, but they are managable.

I'd say Manageability is key to making changes. If it's not manageable (whatever that is for you), you won't do it for long.

Git up on the tough ones... But manageably.

At the museum...

My sister and I went to the art museum last night, where we found a representation of MOOD OF THE SEASON, 2...
[“Durga Slaying the orange monster” was the first one]…
A mask of the Yoruba people of Nigeria representing Eshu, the god of Chaos. The dancer wearing it would hit onlookers with a staff... as A Warning!

As the US Coast Guard motto says, Semper Paratus:
Always ready, be PREPARED!

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Something's going on with my hair.
The other day I posted that photo of me looking like a model for a knitting magazine;
the next day, a coworker asked (as a compliment), "What have you done to your hair?"; 
and yesterday I saw my sister for the first time in 9 months ago, and she said,
"OMG, you look like Ali McGraw!"

Maybe it's the SWEATER?
I never wear Scandinavian patterns, but I liked this warm cardigan. Thrift, of course.
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Also at the museum---inspiration for a print! A woven wool saddle blanket by a Hopi artist, c. 1900,
So simple, so strong!

I'm in a dash--leaving to go to work in 5 minutes, so just one more cheering thought:
The algorithm has determined that I like pithy phrases from physicists. Today it gave me:::

Pink chair

My new pink chair! From the thrift store, of course--bink drove it home for me yesterday. My once empty apartment is filling up. I think I like that...?

I love the chair, anyway. It's comfy and and in surprisingly good shape, with no signs of cigarettes or cats.
I'm considering taking off its skirt, a dust catcher. It's got cute wooden legs.

BELOW: The return of my annual 'Two-Person Book Club (Start Your Own)' display. Books we have in duplicate are usually once-popular titles, now unwanted; but I enjoy gathering them together, and it shows care.
A volunteer said, "It makes us look like a regular bookstore."

______________________

When Big Boss drove me to work yesterday, he said, "You should make videos for youTube of how to make lunch with food from the food shelf."

What a neat idea! I think I'll try it next week.
I'm not wanting to film anymore Growing Older videos, but making them gave me confidence to make more. This might encourage me to research recipes too, which I'd like to do.

BELOW: The spaghetti and meatballs I made are in the red and white crock-pots on the counter in the break room at work.

On the table is the usual kind of regularly donated food: candy and commercial bakery, near or passed its sell-by date. The ingredients lists are entire paragraphs. We give the food to customers, keeping plenty for staff.

I used to eat donuts every time I worked.

Fresh fruit sometimes gets donated too, but it's often old or somehow unsettling--green oranges, here. A vegetarian volunteer took home the bag that had sat around for days.

Snow! Xmas card! Helpful Meatballs!

I. Meatballs & Bears

It's snowing this morning--lightly, but enough to whiten the grass.
I'm glad that last night I'd lined up a ride with Big Boss to take my hot lunch to work this morning.

Yesterday, the food shelf had a big bag of frozen Impossible Burger "meat"balls (soy, but very like ground beef), and I made so very much spaghetti and sauce, I didn't want to carry it in.
BB lives about 3 miles away--near the store, but he always drives--so I felt free to ask him to swing by.
He's good like that--will pitch in and help people move or whatnot.

Also, it turns out to be a good morning to test-print one Xmas card. Messy.
I like the bear a lot, but is it too simple? Maybe some green behind, instead of black?

I used red oil paint, which is okay but not tacky enough.
I'm mad because if I want oil-based color block-printing ink, I have to order it online. I went to Michael's and Blicks in nearby suburbs, and the art college supply store closer to me... nope.
And that's it--the other big art-supply stores have closed.

I just checked, and the shipping cost is more than the price of a small tube. So oil paint it is. Or hand painting!

II. Surfing the Chaos.

I'd rebounded emotionally enough from the election to read the Economist issue last night on "what to expect".
I LOVE their tone-- never hysterical, they say things like,
"So-and-so worked for the KGB. This is worrisome."
I can take that in.

I live in such a liberal area, the election results feel unreal.
This sign a few blocks away shows results (I'm not sure if they're for  the neighborhood or the whole city, but they'll be similar):

But we remember in our bodies how it went last time. Up close and personal, Covid, Black Lives Matter. And plenty more remote events that still impacted like body blows.
You know.

In our homes, a mile from George Floyd Square, we breathed in the acrid smoke of burning auto-parts; lying in bed, we heard the helicopters overhead.
Walking down the street, we saw the National Guard standing with machine guns...
(I was living a mile the other direction that year--same difference.)
This wasn't directly down to Trump, but it reflects his world of chaos and force.

I dread a repeat, but I'm going to focus on getting better at surfing the chaos. I'm grateful I'm in a good workplace to do that.
Make lunch!

Find the Good, and Praise It.

I accidentally hit the Photo Booth icon on my laptop this morning, and it showed me this person: 

Me! looking like I could be a silver-hair model for designer Gudrun Sjoden...      

        LOL 😂 (This is a fluke of Morning Hair, I promise.)

 Sjoden, below, second from right.
Her stuff is nice, though beyond my price (though not insanely expensive, as nice fashion goes (a turtleneck is $68, corduroy pants $118).
Her drapey styles look best on tall people (not me).

I must stop saying things like, "I like Physics best."
There are so many things I like "best"--many varieties of wisdoms!
Like, Find the Good, and Praise It.

Another favorite is the Jewish concept Tikkun Olam--Mend the World. Or repair/ heal... its popular modern meaning. (Historically it has other meanings.)

Here, an artist friend I reconnected with this fall, Anita White, uses "Tikkun Olam" to illustrate/advertise SOUP FOR YOU---serving free hot soups, with salad and dessert, for anyone, every weekday in a church a couple miles from the thrift store.

Anita's motto is, ""Nothing is so scary you can' t draw it!"

Soup for You! was started by Chef Judah:

"Born in the ghetto of Tunis, an Arab/Jewish child of a Holocaust survivor, Chef Judah was orphaned at an early age and became a child beggar.

“I was hungry the first 8 years of my life” says Chef Judah. Thankfully, he was adopted and brought to America as an immigrant/refugee... More than 40 year ago, he landed in Minneapolis, where he experienced homelessness and hunger once again.

“I was a troll and lived underneath the Franklin Ave Bridge, for an entire year.”
After surviving the streets, Chef Judah found himself at St. Martin’s Table, a non-profit café and bookstore. For the next 15 years, he honed his skills there in global vegetarian soup making."

I would like to meet him! I must go for lunch one day.

A couple good things I saw online:

I didn't love the book The Salt Path, but the movie looks promising--to be released in April 2025:

Another women's march after the 2nd inauguration of DT, this time called a People's March:

And, I want to read her book, Orbital, about a day above Earth:

Finally—not from online—bink taking the new bears out to see the world, as they requested a Grand Tour. Here in the bird sanctuary by lake Harriet, a mile from my apartment:

Off to work now.

May your hair look good or other good things come to you today!

Small Sparkle Sunday

Just a quick hello, this Sunday morning.
I felt better after a walk yesterday and started to decorate my apartment for winter holidays
. . . with help!

They all want holiday outfits too.
I like to decorate, and I'm extra motivated this year because I want it to be sparkly for Marz's stay over Christmas, but I'm slow. No magic transformation in an afternoon---it's more like putting out a few trinkets, sitting down to admire them, and declaring it a day.

Penny Cooper just chimed in that one ornament does transform a room. And she's right.

bink's coming over soon---I'm going to try no-white-sugar banana oatmeal pancakes--in this recipe you mix in the blender
banana, eggs, oats, almond milk, cinnamon, vanilla, baking powder.

Plenty of sweet in that--if I were actually diabetic, even too much.
I know this is all predictable, boring to hear about, even? but I am shocked to look back at how much processed sugar I was eating all my adult life.
Ketchup!
The other day I thought I'd treat myself to French fries, and then realized I couldn't have ketchup, so then I didn't even want them.
Turns out I only liked them if they were sugar conveyors.
You know.

But it's going well, at four weeks. I'm just starting to look at sugars that occur naturally in foods, like bananas and oats.
But I do NOT want to freak myself out with too much change, too fast. That can backfire, I know very, very well.

So, that's it for now. Sparkle on!

Shiny at the Store

Bears in the thrift store's parking lot, excited to be GOING HOME yesterday!
Marz named the bears Abbott (taller, paler) and Costello (littler, dark one). They are to be given baths today.

That's the bike pannier ^ I transport soup in, which Ceci had asked about. I put the soup in ziplock plastic bags.
It's not even 4 p.m., but look at how low the sun is, throwing shadows on a slant.

As I left work, I took this photo, below, to show one of the Super Volunteers, Marc, how the glassware he'd shined (wiping every smudgy glass with a cloth!) glows in the setting sun.
I also like the customer's fashion. Are those Crocs?

BELOW: Earlier, I'd helped Jester (aka, Mr Mushroom or Grateful-J) price artificial Xmas trees ($25–$40). You can see some in the mirror, behind us.

Jester is assistant manager now. He is truly an ally in kaizen--continuous improvement, often slow and small. It adds up big time! Staff morale is way up too.

Below is the housewares improvement I'm most proud of:
I stood the big glass plates in racks.
They'd always been stacked flat in piles before. If you wanted to look at them, you had to sit on the ground and unstack them. Which almost no one did, of course.

     Genius, huh?

________________

I hadn't mentioned because it didn't affect me, but the guy who worked in Housewares for a short time before me was fired for  stealing.
Turns out it wasn't just flagrant theft though. Yesterday I found a stash of vintage goods he'd priced low and hid away with his name on them.
I repriced the dishware and set it on the vintage shelf:

I set aside the record albums he'd priced 99¢, to look up later. It included what looked like a first? release of the Beatles' White Album, which sells for hundreds of dollars.

I'd mentioned a coworker pricing undies way cheap for me. Everyone at work does that for one another, and I think it's good and fair--it helps make up for earning minimum wage.
(Full disclosure: when Big Boss rehired me, I got a 50¢ raise above min. wage. (I'd asked for a dollar, but that was a bridge too far.)

Pricing low to buy and re-sell is different. It harms the store to drain off all the cool stuff like that.
_____________________

I'm not feeling great today--not sure why. My first week of working four shifts again? It's fun but physically tiring work.
Or it it emotional tiredness?
Post-election slump?

The Big Picture [religious/philosophical] thought system I like best/believe in most is Physics. (Physics for lay people, anyway--as explained by popularizers like Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Brian Cox.)

This perspective––"You are here"––is cheering and helpful to me:
Chill out!

____________________

Here's Brian Cox being chill ("gloomy but smiley") about the End of the World, with Philmona Cunk (comedian Diane Morgan). They are so good together, starting at minute 1:22

Luckily I have nothing much to do this weekend, so I can chill out. I'm going to go for a walk around the lake now. It's sunny and cold---brisk! Nice.

Wishing you all well! XO

Bejeweled.

 Ta-da! I filled the glass trees with jewel-beaded fruit from Xmas donations at the store. So pretty!

I met my friend John for coffee yesterday, and to receive my copy of his new book, Bellosio: An Age of Miracles---a world-building tale (like Dune or Game of Thrones--but no magical animals, he promises) + a whiff of A Canticle for Liebowitz.
(Available here at Bookshop.org.)

He'd told me the germ of the plot when we sat outside, face-masked, the first chilly spring of Covid.
Later, as I've done with some of his other books, I read the first few chapters and gave feedback, which he said was very helpful.
Still, I was shocked to see the dedication:

Me and Descartes!

I felt real, like the Velveteen Rabbit-- kinda like when I first saw my name on a Library of Congress heading--even though that was for hack-writing a geography book for Lerner Pub.
(I mean, that was good work, but it wasn't personal work.)

I felt honored and pleased and shy. “It wasn’t that big a deal.”
But other makers-of-things have told me that personal support--including actual editing and critical feedback, as well as emotional--means a lot.
Independent creative work maybe doesn't get enough solid support. It is a big deal.

Speaking of sci-fi, these are the books on my sci-fi bookshelf. I'd just mentioned one of my favorite books is World War Z.
I also very much enjoyed Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weil the guy who wrote The Martian, but better.

Also Walter Tevis's Mockingbird and Joanne Sinisalo's Troll: A Love Story.

But I've mentioned a hundred times, one of my favorites is the sci-fi Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells.
I recovered the dust jackets, to help me envision the various skin colors of the  characters, including the main character, Murderbot, who also has no gender or sex.
(The original art makes it look like a white male, which is already our default: I want to shake off that programming.)

It’s a sci-fi world we’re living in… 

Isn't it amazing we even exist, this little bundle of atoms with consciousness?

Enjoy life, everyone!