Lovelihood

I've reached that momentous, but ultimately anticlimactic, stage of quilt construction where I'm stitching whole blocks to other whole blocks. It seems like such an end-nearing step, except that once that's through, there's still the business of sandwiching and quilting and binding. I might, for the first time, break out the walking foot and give machine quilting the old college try. Maybe.

Picked up my first new pair of glasses in two years. Tortoiseshell (faux, presumably) with those lenses that darken in the sun, and, most importantly, nosepads to keep the glasses on my squat little feature that was clearly not built to accomdate eyewear.

In cooler months the Mr. makes up what we call Black Death Chicken, immersing a modest bird in a tar bath of various concentrations of soy. Our whole-chicken proclivities have extended into the warmer months with the old beer can up the nethers trick. A new family favorite, and a wonderful excuse to have a meal out on the deck.

So all this time I guess we had a scrawny little apple tree in the back yard.

Don't get me wrong. I love my boots dearly. But even in Seattle, where it was overcast and intermittently wet out today, one longs for attire that doesn't aspire for so much coverage. I'd been searching for the summer-friendly, spiritual kin to my boots all summer. Something simple but interesting, feminine but not girlie, casual without crossing the line to sporty. To wear with all the things I'm often seen wearing, jeans, skirts, shorts, dresses. And of course, something that doesn't eat at ankles and toes. I do believe I have myself a winner.

I cranked on my standard playlist of hipster tunes and the Lego rattling in the next room, and pushed aside quilt detritus to get some more Kindergarten preparation out of the way. New snack baggies had been on the list for a while, the last set shredded and, quite frankly, kind of disgusting from a couple years of use. Ditched the velcro (which proved a weak point in the construction of those other bags), went with a sweet Echino linen lined with muslin, and just went at the raw edges with a down and dirty zig zag stitch, a construction much like sandwich baggies before the advent of ziploc. No messing with right sides and wrong sides and turning and topstitching and french seaming. Cut, fold, sew. Eight baggies, two feet of fabric, a freshly-wound bobbin, one hour. Tested the result with a handful of pretzels. Works just fine.

As a young couple, we never had that accumulation of scavenged furniture and and ends from our parents' homes you find in every post collegiate home. Instead, we inaugurated our cohabitation with one frenzied trip to Ikea where, in a single loading of a rental truck, we furnished the first few years of our lives together. Most of that stuff years ago fell out of favor, were replaced with more reliable things or are gathering dust and spiders in the basement. But the dishes we've used every day. We finally replaced the set we'd been using for the past dozen years, our family's cereal-eating needs having long since outgrown the surviving number of bowls. The new set, also from Ikea, is sweet and simple, plain-white, unfussy, inexpensive. But, being all white and, of course, brand new, they seem a luxury all the same, like the first set of dishes we've purchased as adults.