Valerean

One thing I said to my guy last year that motivated him to start taking little day trips with me was this: "We won't be able to travel forever in our old age, so let's do it while we still can." For the last week of my vacation in August we both fell ill with the flu, which we think we caught while visiting the city during my first week of vacation. We're never sick at the same time, so that was quite disconcerting. Our symptoms grew fairly severe for the first four days as well, and we spent most of the time in bed. I got up to take care of the dogs, dose us with medicine and prepare light meals, but that's all I could manage. I haven't been that sick in a long time. My recovery lagged a lot longer than has been usual for me, too. At one point I thought, "This is how our life will be when we're too old and frail to get out and about much." That really depressed me. Rather than keep that sadness to myself, I talked to my guy about...

This unsual drawstring purse came as part of my Vera Bradley bag lot, and a little research allowed me to discover it dates back to 2011, and the watercolor floral pattern is retired. These purses can still be bought used around $20.00 on places like Poshmark and eBay, so it's probably not very rare. I liked the colors and the design, so I'm going to repair it for myself. There aren't a lot of issues with this purse. One part of the drawstring came loose from the cinching strap, so that will have to be tucked back in. I found some edge wear on the bottom right. Also a bit on the bottom left. There are some soiling stains on the magnetic front pocket straps, and a bit of edge wear on both flaps. First I poked the loose drawstring through the cinching strap with my awl. Now the purse can be cinched closed again. For the edge wear and staining I debated on using either a complimentary fabric or some lace cut out appliques. Lace won. I se...

I thrifted this pillow because I thought the watercolor-style patchwork was lovely, and I need a new knee pillow of this size for my bed. The cover was completely stitched on, so I had to get my seam ripper to remove it. To my surprise there was a very cool embroidered older pillow inside. I've never seen the like. I'll guess the inside pillow came from someplace like Pier 1. It's vaguely Hawaiian in design, but it might also be Turkish. Anyway, it was a neat thing to find.

One night I dreamt I was hired to write for a hiphop artist, and moved into his home to work for a few months. His mother, who lived with and took care of him, and I hit it off right away and spent a lot of time cooking together. The young man was very nice, and seemed sincere about having me write his songs for him. I spent the entire dream working hard but feeling immensely puzzled, as if I should explain that I've only written one song and as a novelist was probably not the best choice to help him. Can't remember a word of any of the songs I wrote, but there were a bunch, and he was really happy with them. I woke up with a sense of great contentment -- and still a little puzzled. Image Credit: Image by WELC0MEИ0 from Pixabay

I wasn't sure I wanted to watch A Quiet Passion , a movie about the life of poet Emily Dickinson, whom I've admired since the first time I read her work. Sometimes you can know too much about your heroes. Yet I was curious about what influenced her and the sort of family she had. Emily lived in Amherst, Massachusetts all her life, and was one of three children born to a prominent lawyer with strong religious convictions that likely dated back to his Puritan roots. She was raised, as most girls during that time were, to be modest, thoughtful and pious. Despite her upbringing (and here I can directly sympathize) she had an intense and often fierce curiosity about life, death and the meaning of it all. At the same time she lived a very closeted, isolated existence as if to keep the world at a distance, perhaps finding it too painful to stray beyond the familiar and familial. What seems like a colorless and uneventful life allowed Emily to pen almost 1800 poems, a body...

Back in June my guy and I visited Celebration, Florida to walk around town and admire some of the beautiful houses there. To see pics of our day, check out my album here .

Watching Impromptu , a movie about the love affair between George Sand and Frédéric Chopin, was rather like attending my first professional writers' conference. You have an opinion of your peers based on their work, and then you meet them in real life and discover they are very different from your idealistic notions. This is not a bad thing, actually -- I don't think anyone should occupy a pedestal -- but it is disconcerting to say the least. So was this movie. The premise: Radical novelist Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin (Judy Davis), who lives in Paris as George Sand, falls in love first with the music of Frédéric Chopin (Hugh Grant), and then pursues the composer like a lovestruck groupie, this despite having a complicated life and string of past and present lovers creating havoc in it. Chopin, the only decent character in the entire production, is in a health decline with tuberculosis, and really just wants to be left alone. Chaos ensues as Sand chases Chopin around P...

For my first Vera Bradley upcycle project I'll start with this much loved tote in the retired Minsk Plaid pattern from 2012. It arrived with signs that it was used for quite some time and even repaired by the previous owner, which made me very happy. I like to think that person liked to mend things like me rather than buy new -- or maybe it was a thrifter who found it before me. The solid black fabric on the handle straps was added to cover wear and tears, just as I repaired another Vera bag with the same problem back in April. To prevent the straps from becoming too thick from my planned repair I'll first remove the old repair. That was actually really hard to remove, it was applied so well with hundreds of tiny machine stitches -- took me about an hour with a seam ripper. With that removed, you can see what the person who repaired the bag before me tried to cover up -- a lot of strap wear. I went to my scrap bin in search of a black solid I could use to re...

The Chinese drama The Prisoner of Beauty is one of the best long historical/political series I've ever watched, so I was surprised after finishing the last episode to see how polarizing it's been among fans (this is also why I don't read reviews of series and movies before I watch them.) Evidently the male lead is considered ugly, which is absolute crap. I thought he was quite handsome in an unconventional way. Also there are a lot of people saying this series is mediocre, which leads me to believe they didn't watch it. The main story: to broker peace, old enemies arrange a marriage between Xiao Qiao (Song Zu Er), a beautiful and clever young woman, to Lord Wei Shao (Liu Yuning), the cold and apparently ruthless head of the Wei family. Xiao actually takes the place of her cousin (who has fallen in love with a stableman) and is quite resigned to a difficult relationship with her new spouse, as her family turned their backs on his, resulting in the murders of his...

I thought I'd share my methods for upcycling thrifted Vera Bradley bags so that anyone else who's interested in doing the same can follow my process. A disclaimer: I paid $9.99 for this lot, and I'm only interested in making them useful and pretty again. As always any vintage textile of value (including bags) should be cleaned and repaired by an expert conservator to preserve it. The first step in my project is to clean out the bags and then give them a bath. Unless the bags have never been used I tend to find debris, dirt and random bits in the pockets left behind by the original owner. In this lot I found a tiny claw-type clip in a pocket of a purse, and a key chain with a fabric fish on it attached to the strap hardware on another. After they get a bath I'll reuse those, too. To launder the bags, I secure all the loose straps or elements with safety pins and group them in colors for washing: all reds and pinks, all blues and greens, lights or darks, ...

The vintage copy of The Sketch Book by Washington Irving that I won at the thrift auction for ten bucks arrived, and it's older than I assumed: the copyright date on the illustration page is 1899. It's a beautiful, fragile little book. I'm having fun imagining who might have bought it 126 years ago. Did you know that Charles Dickens was a huge fan of Washington Irving? Or that Irving was the one who coined the term "Gotham" for New York City? I have never read any of the author's work, so I'm going to save this for Halloween, when I fully expected to be scared witless (again!) by The Legend of Sleepy Hollow , which is in this short story collection.

The lot of Vera Bradkey bags that I thrifted to rehab just arrived; let's dig into the box and see what shape they're in, shall we? All the bags fit inside this roomy weekender, which is in very good condition with no tears or stains. These bags, which fit under airplane seats, retail anywhere from $60.00 to over $200.00. This big tote had/has some handle wear, and looked to be much loved by the original owner. Someone covered the worn handles with solid black fabric, just as I would have. :) A very pretty purse with an unusual drawstring type closure, also in very good condition. Three smaller bags -- the one on the left is an insulated lunch bag, and the other two are cosmetic/storage bags (the dark pink one is velvet.) Here's a nice purse in good condition. The original owner left a keychain with a fabric fish on it. Maybe they were a Pices! Finally here's a purse with tons of pockets in a very pretty print. Everything does have wha...

Sometimes a project you mean to knock out quickly has other ideas. Such was the case with a market bag I decided to make out of blue scraps from my bin way back on May 18th. Once I pieced it I just knew it was going to take longer than a night, which had been the original plan. I began seeing lighthouse spotlights, and wanted to interpret that in embroidery. Since my arthritis has curtailed my hand stitching that created a time management problem for me. I'd have to work on it when my fingers allowed me to. Very often such complicated artistic choices happen out of the blue (forgive the pun) for me. I don't know why. I become obsessed with something and I can't rush the process. I take it on despite my limitations. I cannot be persuaded to abandon such projects, even when I get sick and tired of them. I worked on this for a short time almost every day since I took the fabric scraps out of my bin. It often frustrated me. It really challenged the ab...

One night at the end of April I dreamed all night that I was lost in a huge hotel, and spent hours searching for a tote that I'd put into an employee cubby. I had my wallet and purse, and I seemed to be an employee there who had just gotten off work. A very tall blond woman (never a good sign in my dreams) accompanied me for a while, and paid for some clothes at the hotel boutique for herself and a lady attorney when they discovered I had no credit cards on me -- they were in the tote, presumably. I'm not sure why I offered to pay for the clothes, either. Throughout the dream I was pretty anxious, and yet I took time to stop and talk to the guests. One man had a tall, intellectually disabled son, and while he was struggling for words to introduce him I said, "He must be a wonderful son" and made the man very happy. Another set of parents had two very small, possibly physically disabled twins (paraplegics?) who were constantly crawling around and pulling pranks...

Last Friday My guy and I went for a hike at a local wildlife refuge and park that I've never seen. We're not hardcore hikers, but we do like walking through nature and discovering local wildlife spots. This place is very much like the Florida of my early childhood. There were woods right next to my house like this. As I was taking photos my guy tripped on a stump remnant and fell. Because of old age equilibrium problems and some side effects of a terrible fall he took 25 years ago he's been doing this a couple of times a month this year. For the first time I wondered what would I do if he broke a hip and we were a mile from anyone who could help. It's hard to get a signal for the phone out here. He weighs almost two hundred pounds, I could maybe drag him a short distance but lifting and carrying him for me would be impossible. Fortunately he didn't injure himself this time. Old age sucks. I do love coming out into nature, because I find it...