Lovelihood

With one of our precious few Polaroid exposures, we secreted a shot of The Boy peering at his reflection in the porthole behind the hinged door of the porthole itself. Three exposures remaining.

Packing up the kids' lunches for school is not my favorite activity of the night. When we have leftovers appropriate enough for schoolday meals, it can be managable enough. But this late in the day, I'm hard-pressed to get creative with lunches when I'm working from scratch. Some days, however, I find an elephantine (as in pachydermal, not abnormally large) strawberry.

When I was fourteen my parents bought their first house. Among the relics left behind by the previous owners, along with the wood paneling (no) and the marble green shag carpeting (no) and the photo-idyllic wallpapering (oh, dear god no) was a porthole-cum-mirror hanging on the door to the spare bathroom. For no good reason, I was smitten with the thing. And unbeknownst to me, after I left for college and they sold the house, my mom squirreled away the mirror for a rainy day. Which came last September when she sent it for my birthday. After much internal debate about where it should hang, I finally put it up today opposite the front door and our greeter deer. Who still remains nameless.

A little bit of progress on the Boy's new quilt. We're at the pressing stage, where I steam each seam to the side and lay each butterflied strip upon the previous one with care. Working fifteen minutes at a time, this might take a little while. Still, it's not a bad way to spend fifteen minutes.

I'm guessing that a soynut butter-topped rice cake probably isn't a universally appealing snack. We passed the rice cake section in the grocery store the other day, and I lamented the lack of mini rice cakes in a non-stickysweet variety. And I remembered the PB&J rice cake sandwiches my mom used to pack in my pre-school lunchbox, wrapped in cling wrap that, by midday, would be an oozing PB&J mess. And I remembered, of course, how I hated those sandwiches in the way that a pre-schooler comes to hate anything pulled out of a lunch box day after day. But on Saturday, I picked up a bag of brown rice cakes knowing that I'd be pairing them with the soynut butter (no peanuts in our house) waiting in the pantry at home. And I've got to say, chased down with my nightly coffee, it makes for a pretty satisfying nosh.

I've got what seems like kilometers (I run in metric, might as well sew in it, too) of fabric strips chain-pieced and piled up behind the sewing machine. At some point I'll need to tend to that pile and snip and press and and slap them up on some improvised flannel wall that's really just an uncut piece of batting clipped to the curtain rods that should hold up curtains for the french doors in the workspace except that I never did find an appropriate fabric for that little spot in our home. But probably not tonight.

That quilt of mine is going to be one of those on again/off again affairs, with Easter fixins' to tend to and must-see TV programming to partake of. To satisfy that making urge while basking in the warm glow of television, I spent some time in front of the warm glow of the computer screen to draw out another pattern to stitch out in special sashiko threads with my special sashiko needle, thumb protected by my special sashiko thimble. I couldn't say what makes this sashiko paraphernalia so special, meriting a special expenditure. But part of the fun of taking up something new is surrounding yourself in the new tools of the trade. Right?