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.
( And it's there I shall bring all the flowers of the mountain. )
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.
( And it's there I shall bring all the flowers of the mountain. )
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.
