In our new house, last night, I put down the first coat of the most gorgeous pale grey-green paint in the room destined to be my sewing room. it is so very lovely and all that I had hoped for–which has happened exactly once before to me in the paint color-picking lottery. 
After midnight (which is when you finish painting a coat when you don’t start until 8 pm because, hey, you work), I kept admiring the loveliness of the color. From in the room, from the hallway, from the corner of my bedroom where I could just peek at it down the hallway. Sigh. Dreamy.
The room is on the enormous side for a sewing room–definitely much bigger than a sewing nook, cranny or even “space.” I think it is meant to be a formal living room–for which we have no furniture and we would have no regular use. It has 12 foot ceilings with a very large bay window letting all manner of bright happy light into the space. Joy of joys, it has a hardwood floor as well–no more losing pins into the carpet only to find them after I’ve impaled my foot on them. 
So, yes, a house. With room for everyone and our hobbies. I’ll keep you apprised of the painting as we go–move in should happen in the next 2-4 weeks depending on my work schedule. And finishing bunny’s quilt that I started years ago should happen our first full, non-moving, non-painting weekend in the house.
We have been house hunting–finally ready to get rid of our cracker box sized rental where I sew in the living room only hwne there is time and room to unearth my machine. Right, that’s pretty close to never. Sigh.
We actually had found a house and put an offer in, and you can’t hold it against me if I admit that I never got past thinking fixatedly on the downstairs large bedroom that I had declared my sewing room. I looked at paint. I draftd various layouts. I contemplated lighting changes, a flannel board–and even decided that my dear husband (and his father) would make me a gloriously large, personalized cutting table, with cubbies. This is one of my favorite posts from the domestic diva for sewing room ideas, especially this part where she links to a bazillion sewing rooms (ok, not quite that many, but still) for their colors. Swoon.
Alas, alak, we took the offer back. And are now wearily house-hunting again. And my sewing room dreams must be put to rest for a while.
I’ve discovered, rather unscientifically, that there seems to be a direct correlation between the amount and frequency of picture taking I do with the frequency of my blogging. If it ain’t happening here, it ain’t being recorded either. That by itself should be reason enough for me to endeavor to regularly blog
I made this little discover this morning as I walked into my bedroom from my shower to see my sad little six-year old crosslegged on my bed, elbows on the window sill staring out of the window at the falling snow – a la Cat in the Hat. It would have made a truly awesome picture. And yet, no, nope, unuh, no camera at the ready, no camera readily findable, no extra boost of–I should really dash and find it. Nope. I just shivered and got dressed and let the incredibly adorable moment pass. Sigh. And then I realized that if I were regularly blogging, I would 1) know where the camera is at all times, and 2) have been completely excited for blogging fodder.
I’ve been reflecting a lot on what this blog is meant to be–what utility I get out of it or want to get out of it. I think it boils down to record keeping and sharing for me. I’m not a scrapbooker. That’s never going to happen for me. But I could upload my blog content to a book maker like Blurb and print off each year or logical grouping of years. I think my daughter some day might like to know what I loved and hated to make or read. Or how sometimes I was nutty or indescribably happy. Now the bigger question is just what would inspire me to fulfill that want?
Yeah. Sigh. This was supposed to be the month where I remember that I have a blog. What it ended up being was the month where I remembered that I had a camera… with loads of JUNE pictures from my most fabulous Parisian vacation… that remained on my camera until this very moment. The perpetual excuse of “oh, I can’t blog this or that because I can’t take/upload a picture of it.” For example, almost a month ago I bought a bunch of gorgeous fabric at my favorite LQS. And I wanted to show and tell, but well, I fell back on my “camera is full and busy” excuse. Pathetic, isn’t it. And really not so valid when you consider that I could just change memory cards.
I haven’t been reading either. Well, that’s not true, I’ve been reading fan fiction when I have the time to read at all. I’ve a new batch of novels upstairs from the library that sound interesting. Maybe I’ll get a move on those and post soon.
and that I love to write. Yeah, that would be September. Or, now. Sigh. What a summer. I can’t believe it’s all over but the weather turning much cooler. Bunny is back in school–which, oddly enough, is way more manageable for this mama than camp. Seriously, that about killed me.
So now that school has been back in for a whole week, I’m managing our first crisis of this school year: hubby’s car, his non-piece of shit Mazda 6 with less than 70,000 miles and only 6 years old died. Died as in dead. As in fork out $5000 for a new engine or forever let it hold its peace. Sigh. And cars for clunkers effectively reduced my options in car lots. Sigh. So i’ll be helping the economy along in my own sweet way some time this weekend because this family can’t make it on one car alone. And I will never buy another Mazda again. Their reaction to our issue was beyond lame–which is stupid because my last 3 cars have been Mazdas and I was super close to deciding to get another one later this year when I want to replace my piece of shit 10 year old car.
In other happy news, I am almost done with a sweet little baby blanket for a friend whose daughter is 7 months. And I started working on a version of this lovely embroidery pattern. I hate the cushion that they do, but I was thinking of making a lap quilt with 9 large embroidered blocks with this one in the center. Then I’ll do one block of each type of flower. I think.
I’ll be back with pictures soon–including a lovely stack of yummy fabric I bought this weekend at my LQS’s sale.
I just realized as I picked up needle and thread for the first time in probably a month on Sunday that I am a seasonal sewing type of person. Namely, I hardly ever sew in the summer. You’d think that would be because I am out and about enjoying life. This summer, I’m billing, billing, billing. So, no not so much with the enjoying life part this year.
But, historically for me, I tend not to want something that confines me to one space, no heavy quilting, or frankly thinking all that hard while I’m piecing etc. And certainly no working on some afghan that is getting heavier and hotter by the moment.
I almost always shake out of the no-sew funk around Labor Day. Which I am looking forward to. I’m a little entertained at myself that I only ended up sewing this weekend because, wait for it, it was unseasonably cold… like late September kind of cold
See, I know what I’m really made of.
The subtitle of this books is: “A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defense in Occupied France.” I’m not sure that’s necessarily true–I think the book is mostly about her struggle and experience after getting caught being part of the resistance in occupied France. Whichever way, it’s fascinating, sometimes horrifying and heartbreaking reading.
After reading the Diplomat’s Wife, I became more interested in the resistance movements in varying countries occupied by the Nazis during WWII. While on a recent trip to France, browsing a most fabulous book store, I came across Resistance and resolved to get it from my local library as soon as I returned home. (On a sidenote–I must talk a bit more some time about this book shop and how it in the end depressed me.) It was a strange read for me–the kind of book that instantly sucks you in, you read longer than you should, but when you do finally put it down for some reason, you discover that it’s hard to pick back up. After doing that a couple of times, I think I realized that it was because I was so emotionally invested in her story–and I knew that her experience was only going to get worse.
Agnes Humbert was one of the first members of the first resistance cell in France. You see her flee Paris as the Nazis take over and then return with some idyllic and mostly naive sense that there must be something she can do in Paris to help her country. And she does. She had many interesting political connections before the war, which enables her to get in front of the right people at the right time. Initially her work is merely leaflets to be distributed to Parisians who have only heard the Vichy french or German point of view of the war–a perspective decidedly out of whack with reality. Eventually, leaflets are no longer enough and she spearheads an underground newspaper–appropriately called resistance. In the final days of her efforts, she harbors a British soldier who is trying to escape and helps coordinate the dissemination of stolen important intelligence documents and maps. With just over a year of efforts to the resistance under her belt, a member of the cell’s inner circle betrays them all and the gestapo takes her away unexpectedly.
Agnes spends about a year in a horrid french prison with vermin, little food, torture, and freezing conditions. Eventually, she is tried with the rest of the cell, but being a woman is spared the death penalty, unlike her comrades. She then is deported as a political prisoner to Germany, where she discovers that political prisoners there are no different to the Germans than murderers, thieves and other convicts and she is set to hard, progressively dangerous labor. The next many sections of the book cover her movement in Germany to a couple of different work factories, where her greatest accomplishment other than staying alive is knowing that everything she produces in the factory is subtly defective–not enough so that someone immediately inspecting it could tell, but so that as soon as it is untraceable to her and needed for use, it would not meet its function. For which I felt glee for her as well.
The ending is inspiring. She stays on to help with intelligence before going home to France. All told she spent nigh on four years behind bars of some sort for her little over one year’s largely publication efforts at resistance.
I don’t know if I can love a book about so much misery and destruction. But I can say that it was very worth while–one that I won’t forget. And that I am better educated for having read. One commentator to the book praised it saying that the quality of the writing is not what one would expect from the many memoirs made about WWII–rather, it was great literature. I wholeheartedly agree. I think it’s even more important in the grand scheme of important WWII books because it’s a woman’s point of view, who was in the thick of it, who used her brilliance to make a difference.
I’d read it again–I mean as a “go back in time and make the choice to read it again” but I won’t really re-read it. I’m not sure where I stand on this book overall yet.
The Diplomat’s Wife is an interesting premise, beginning with a story that immediately gets you in the thick of the protagonist’s WWII resistance efforts, arrest, struggle to remain alive, rescue and convalescence. And it makes an admirable transition to love story where you root for her to want to live again. For about the first half of the book, I am amazed at the twists and turns of the plot. But it ends up being far more convoluted than I usually like in a story. Once you realize the type of gyrations the author is willing to employ, it’s terribly easy to predict the rest of thee entire book, which removes a lot of fun of the read.
All that said Jenoff is a tremendous painter of pictures with her words. I was there in the darkness of her cell. I was with her in the mildewy gardener’s shack with the very hot American soldier. I could clearly envision a grey, hopeless day in Poland at the park. From this perspective alone, I would recommend giving it a read. The author is really quite talented–I think she just needed an editor or someone to tell her you don’t actually have to use all of the standard “gotchas” of pseudo-suspence novels in one go.
Her talent with words has sufficiently captured my interest though to to add a book on the Resistance to my TBR list and I will likely read her acclaimed “The Kommandant’s Girl” at some point.
No, no, no. (Note to self, read the first and third Pamela Aidan book soon to detox from these successive poorly done “fan fics” I’ve read lately). Le Sigh.
According to Ms. Berdoll, Darcy and Lizzy weren’t really good at communication before their marriage (fairly realistic) and that they don’t really need to ever talk to improve that–they just need to do it a lot (less realistic). Frequently. All the time. Anywhere. Everywhere. Hold up, middle of a serious conversation, well, it’s time to get it on, now what were you saying dear?
It was tedious. Yes, they are newlyweds. I get that. They do it like bunnies. But their actual character development and relationship building was so sporadic and disjointed–it was really difficult to figure out where they had progressed on what subject. The first few chapters of this book establish this pattern of “hunh? *head scratching.* They’re in the carriage, and Lizzy seems pissed at Darcy even though it’s the wedding day… no resolution, just sex. A few chapters go by and we go back with Lizzy thinking about what insensitivity had her pissed at him that day back in the first chapter.
It was also tediously long. If we hadn’t been there with them in the bedroom for so many pages, it all could have been so much shorter. There’s also some crazy kidnapping of Lizzy and near (well, actually partial) defilement by the nasty man and Darcy turning into some cool killer in his rage. I won’t speak to the fact that I don’t know why some women think it’s romantic to be saved from defilement.
This is really the usual formula of post-marriage Darcy stories: sex, infertility issues, miscarriages, kidnappings, etc. One unexpected feature was the author’s lingo. Bring a dictionary. She goes old school and won’t settle for words of less than four syllables. At first it was jarring, but after a bit you get used to it and she does stick with it the whole way through–which is a good thing.
The only redeeming quality to this book for me was that, I’ll read anything Pride and Prejudice related, it was one book that was huge and thus ideal for taking on a long vacation knowing it would last me longer than the plane flight. Now it’s with a bouquinist on the banks of the Seine waiting for some American P&P devotee wanting a tome for the long plane ride home. Again, pass on this one–unless you are looking for just one travel book to last you a few days-because hey, you’ve got nothing better to do.
