And the trees are softly blooming
I really don't want to cruelly jinx anyone, but I had a really nice day.
1. For Mother's Day, my mother came over and parked in the side lot of the nearby sinks-and-floors business and brought a folding chair in her trunk so that I could sit a reasonable but audible distance from the driver's seat and we could converse, masked, as we did for about two hours. It was very good. I got to hand her the copy of Patrick Quentin's A Puzzle for Fools (1936) which I had been holding on to for some months. The absence of physical contact remains un-ideal.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch took a picture of us as together as we could be all afternoon.
I have no pictures ofa_reasonable_man who happened by overlapping with the end of my mother's visit and looking quite dapper in his retro-dystopian combo of surgical mask, neckerchief, and Panama hat, but we had a very pleasant walk around the neighborhood and found some lilacs blooming even more enthusiastically than the ones off our back deck.
2. The situation with our bedsheets had grown ludicrously dire, so Rob and I took advantage of a sale last weekend and ordered two new pairs that were neither transparent with the decades nor gently distressed by artisanal cats; this weekend they arrived. One is decorated with a pattern of seashells and the other with shells, starfish, and sea-wrack. They make me feel better about missing the sea.
3. I still haven't managed to see Lone Scherfig's Their Finest (2016), but Ian McDowell made me aware last night that the soundtrack contains Bill Nighy singing "Wild Mountain Thyme," a song of significant emotional importance to me. That version is an anachronism in 1940—it was codified if not invented in its present form by the McPeake Family in the '50's—but I don't care. I had otherwise most recently heard Nighy sing "In Western Lands" from the 1981 BBC Lord of the Rings, which is not all that inapropos these days, either.
4. Things my life as a reference model suddenly requires: more shirts. More than one tie. A sleeveless pullover. A belt.
All photos by Rob Noyes and natural lighting. I am reading The Collected Poems of A.E. Housman (1940) because I wanted a book from the right period, because it matches my tie, and because while Kipling would have been thematically-ironically suitable for both Regency and WWII St. Clair, my edition of the Barrack-Room Ballads is from 1899 and I just can't with the swastika colophon thing right now.
5. By kind gift of my parents, we had two New York strip steaks from a local butcher in our refrigerator and tonight we crusted them with kosher salt and fresh-ground black pepper and pan-seared them and finished them in the oven and ate them incredibly rare and tender with mashed potatoes and not too much horseradish and it was stupidly luxurious, like we live in a tenement and they just fell off the back of a truck or something, which is only moderately untrue.
May there not be worse things.
1. For Mother's Day, my mother came over and parked in the side lot of the nearby sinks-and-floors business and brought a folding chair in her trunk so that I could sit a reasonable but audible distance from the driver's seat and we could converse, masked, as we did for about two hours. It was very good. I got to hand her the copy of Patrick Quentin's A Puzzle for Fools (1936) which I had been holding on to for some months. The absence of physical contact remains un-ideal.
spatch took a picture of us as together as we could be all afternoon.
I have no pictures of
a_reasonable_man who happened by overlapping with the end of my mother's visit and looking quite dapper in his retro-dystopian combo of surgical mask, neckerchief, and Panama hat, but we had a very pleasant walk around the neighborhood and found some lilacs blooming even more enthusiastically than the ones off our back deck.2. The situation with our bedsheets had grown ludicrously dire, so Rob and I took advantage of a sale last weekend and ordered two new pairs that were neither transparent with the decades nor gently distressed by artisanal cats; this weekend they arrived. One is decorated with a pattern of seashells and the other with shells, starfish, and sea-wrack. They make me feel better about missing the sea.
3. I still haven't managed to see Lone Scherfig's Their Finest (2016), but Ian McDowell made me aware last night that the soundtrack contains Bill Nighy singing "Wild Mountain Thyme," a song of significant emotional importance to me. That version is an anachronism in 1940—it was codified if not invented in its present form by the McPeake Family in the '50's—but I don't care. I had otherwise most recently heard Nighy sing "In Western Lands" from the 1981 BBC Lord of the Rings, which is not all that inapropos these days, either.
4. Things my life as a reference model suddenly requires: more shirts. More than one tie. A sleeveless pullover. A belt.
All photos by Rob Noyes and natural lighting. I am reading The Collected Poems of A.E. Housman (1940) because I wanted a book from the right period, because it matches my tie, and because while Kipling would have been thematically-ironically suitable for both Regency and WWII St. Clair, my edition of the Barrack-Room Ballads is from 1899 and I just can't with the swastika colophon thing right now.
5. By kind gift of my parents, we had two New York strip steaks from a local butcher in our refrigerator and tonight we crusted them with kosher salt and fresh-ground black pepper and pan-seared them and finished them in the oven and ate them incredibly rare and tender with mashed potatoes and not too much horseradish and it was stupidly luxurious, like we live in a tenement and they just fell off the back of a truck or something, which is only moderately untrue.
May there not be worse things.
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Thank you. It was a wonderful respite in a roar of chaos and stress. I just hope not to tempt irony, because it's been wearing out its welcome lately.
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Thank you. I've barely seen her since early March; it's been mostly through glass when I have; I worry a lot about her safety; but we sat out in the sunlight and talked and even the one dude who could not be arsed to wear a mask did not come close enough that I felt obliged to yell at him and other well-masked passersby nodded to us and it was just nice. I still can't figure out a safe way to get out to Lexington (I have no car, I can't find a route that feels sparsely populated enough for the two-hour walk, I am just a flat nope at present where public transit is concerned), but we saw each other for Mother's Day. It was important.
Those steaks sound delicious!
Considering that one cannot visit a steakhouse right now, and one may not be able—for various reasons—to visit a steakhouse for quite some time to come, we were really pleased.
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I am delighted your visit worked out. I hope it was restorative like rare beef.
Also, you do good work as a reference model. If I see a sleeveless pullover in something like a mustard or an olive once Times Are Better, I will snurch it for you. Thanks, Ivor, you’re a mensch.
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Oh, if you can't embroider in your memoirs, where can you!
(Does Aunt Sonya live in a tenement because she’s Jewish? Also a pinko socialist queer artist, my child.)
(These are true facts. Though I could reconcile myself to not living in a tenement one day, just to buck convention.)
I am delighted your visit worked out. I hope it was restorative like rare beef.
Thank you. It was great.
Also, you do good work as a reference model. If I see a sleeveless pullover in something like a mustard or an olive once Times Are Better, I will snurch it for you. Thanks, Ivor, you’re a mensch.
Any time, ziskeyt.
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Love.
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I am so glad. (Also it is fun.)
Love.
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I especially like the second last post picture. It really shows off the lines of your face.
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Thank you. I can live with un-ideal for the time being so long as everyone stays safe enough for something closer to ideal in future. It was really good to see her at all.
I e-mailed mine pictures of wild flowers.
Nice. (Would you normally have seen her? I don't know how easy it is for you to visit or be visited when there's not a pandemic on.)
I especially like the second last post picture. It really shows off the lines of your face.
Thank you so much! I have a complicated relationship with my face, but at the moment am feeling rather friendly toward it.
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Thank you!
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Thank you!
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Thank you. I can do a lot by phone and e-mail, but face to face is really important, even—especially—masked.
I don't know what sort of picture the reference images are for, but I really like the fourth one anyway, where you are holding the book and looking out over the balcony. I think it's something about the air of carefreeness and leisure - like, you could be reading the book, and indeed you often do, but it's not so pressing that you can't idle away a few moments gazing down into the street too.
Thank you! That's a really nice thing to hear. They are actually references for written fiction, although it is not inconceivable that one of them might end up forming part of a cover.
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(
Thank you. And I really did appreciate what you said about the mood generated by the photo. That means it's working on a character level and not just costuming and that's important to me.
Someday when it is safe for people to be in rooms with one another without masks on,
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I actually do think we could get a cover design for this novella through and unto which I am being dragged by my hidden sealish ear out of this set. Hrm.
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Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.
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Great pics.
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Nothing has changed. It's not safe. We don't even have antivirals. I hate it.
Great pics.
Thank you!
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Oh, nice! I've been really charmed by the cherry blossoms still hanging on around here. They will eventually yield to summer leaves, but at the moment they feel slightly talismanic.
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I'd love to see them if so. (I respect not including the photobombing thumb.)
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I am glad you got to see your mom.
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The tie should belong to the twentieth century, at least! (It may be endemic.)
I am glad you got to see your mom.
Thank you.
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That second to last of the reference model pictures is somethin' else.
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*hugs*
That second to last of the reference model pictures is somethin' else.
Thank you. I am honestly really pleased with this photoshoot.
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Thank you.
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It is still a good photo and I am glad you took it.
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*hugs*
Nine
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Thank you!
*hugs*