tiamatschild: A painting of a woman leaning over a railing to set a candle in a lamp (Everyday Devotion)
I set and started a new batch of sourdough starter a few days ago, and today I made sourdough banana bread with the overripe bananas!

It smells really really good.
tiamatschild: A painting of a woman in a chiton hanging washing on a line (Hanging the Washing Out to Dry)
First day of Governor Pritzker's Shelter in Place order being in effect: I pruned the clematis vine.

I heard the sandhill cranes passing by as I did.

I couldn't see them - we had low cloud at that point in the afternoon, and the sheltered corner of the patio garden isn't a great space for scanning the sky anyway. The silver maple hasn't leafed out yet, but it's still a big presence, and the house, garage, and the neighbor's roofline limit what you can see pretty effectively. But I heard them, that low, carrying, rattling call.
tiamatschild: Painting of a woman resting on a bridge railing - she has a laundry bag beside her (Default)
I bought more postcard stamps today!

I like the shell designs they've been using for the last few years very much. I think they're *super* pretty! These ones beyond this link. I enjoy the graphic stylization!
tiamatschild: A print of a figure with a blue umbrella, walking away along a path in the rain (Walking Home with a blue umbrella)
My paternal grandfather, whom I love very much, is dying, and is moving from the hospital to hospice care at his apartment pretty much right now.

I am at home, because it isn't feasible for me to be there.

I just went with the dog and picked up today's mail, and it had a glossy booklet from the Lyric Opera advertising their upcoming season. My grandpa loves the opera. I nearly started crying in the street.
tiamatschild: Painting of a woman dancing a circle dance - she is smiling, her hand outstreched (Woman in Blue Dancing)
Happy New Year, everyone!

I try to avoid resolutions, because they usually interact with my OCD um, counterproductively, but I do have a goal of posting here at least once a week in the new year!

And finishing my first run through of Final Fantasy VII, and doing more write ups of stuff I read even if it's just little, and writing a fic! or more than one fic! And continuing to work at getting more stable, and working hard to roll with changes in the household and making them productive and -

Well, all my usual goals, admittedly, but it is customary to talk about goals at the new year!
tiamatschild: A painting of a woman in a chiton hanging washing on a line (Hanging the Washing Out to Dry)
Voted this morning!

We had very high winds all day - luckily I hadn't noticed any signs coming loose by the time it got too dark to see. After the primary I ended up fishing a sign out of the stream. I'll keep an eye out in days to come!
tiamatschild: A painting of a woman in a chiton hanging washing on a line (Hanging the Washing Out to Dry)
Researching candidates for this year's primary season! It's going okay, partly because I have decided that if you can't be bothered to reply to the local papers' Get To Know Your Candidate questionnaires or put your positions up anywhere they can actually be accessed and looked at critically, I can't be bothered to vote for you!

Conveniently, this leaves me multiple good candidates this time around. It doesn't always and then I'm tugging my hair out because the only person I can find anything out about has values and positions deeply antithetical to my own, that would endanger the survival and flourishing of people I care about. Not fun. This is more fun! Pleasantly surprising, even!

I need to work harder at posting regularly here, because I miss everybody.
tiamatschild: A painting of a woman leaning over a railing to set a candle in a lamp (Everyday Devotion)
On Sunday I went to the last of a series of conservation workshops I've been participating in as a volunteer. We've been evaluating and stabilizing the condition of a very diverse collection of historical medical texts.

My last book of the day - my last book of the workshop series! - was a frankenbook. I'd been working on a section of very fragile books packed in tight together all day. Some of them were missing covers and had their spines broken. Some of them were pamphlet bound to begin with, with paper covers barely to not at all heavier than their textblock pages. I'd found some interesting stuff. A textbook of psychiatristry from Turkey from the late 1930s, autographed by the author. The papers presented at the first conference of Geographical Medicine in Geneva (in French, German, and English).

But the last book... I thought at first it was another pamphlet bound medical text from the 1880s. A number of publishers sold these cheaply, largely through mail order, in the latter half of the 19th century and into the early 20th. They're very flimsy and the type is cramped - they often don't even have a proper title page. Instead they'll have the title and author and publisher given on the upper half of a page, with the start of the preface underneath for the second half of the page. There's always multiple pages of advertisements. Originally they sold for five cents each: if you wanted, say, a solid cloth binding with stitches instead of staples, you'd need to pay more in the neighborhood of a dollar fifty, and it went up from there if you wanted leather or what have you.

It wasn't until I got it back to the table and (very very carefully) opened it up that I realized it wasn't one cheap pamphlet bound medical text - it was six! Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to get those pages flush, and had even made a spine to cover over the six spines bound together.

People who study manuscripts call that kind of thing a 'miscellany'. They're very common in Medieval and even Early Modern books - people would bind together a group of short works that interested them into a size of book that they felt was 'reasonable', that was an aesthetically appealing size and shape. They become less common the closer you move to the present, and I'd actually never seen one from the 1880s before.

I wonder why the person who went to all that trouble did it? It was a very odd assortment of texts. They ranged from 1875 to 1883. There was one that was a surgical manual, and one that was a primer on women's health, and one that was a student's manual of "venereal diseases" and, which seemed most out of place to me, one of the Asylum Reform Society's pamphlets on how to construct and furnish an effective and humane mental hospital. I say it seemed the most out of place to me because the others, including the volume on proctology, were the sort of things a general practitioner might need on a fairly regular basis in the usual course of their practice. It makes sense to me that you might want them all together and easy to hand. But generally, if one does need to choose a suitable site for a new hospital, there's some warning beforehand. It's not the kind of thing life springs on you suddenly and on the regular.

Unfortunately, who ever had put this miscellany together had chosen to bind it with metal wire, which was now rusting, so I marked the book down for As Soon As Possible attention and copied out all the bibliographic data for each book, and recorded the whole as "miscellaneous medical texts."

I have so many questions! I know I'll never get the answers to them, most likely, but I have them, to turn over in my head and contemplate on. Who was the person who put the books together? How did they choose? Did they do that to more texts from their library? What was the reasoning behind their method? What kind of practice did they have? How did the person who donated the books to the academic collection they belonged to come by them? Was it the same person who bound them together? Why in the world did they scratch out the original "5 cents" publisher's price marks and write in in heavy red pencil "100 cents"?
tiamatschild: Painting of a woman resting on a bridge railing - she has a laundry bag beside her (Default)
Also, this is a stupid problem to have but my bed is covered in library books and I am having trouble figuring out how to fix it so I can get under the covers.
tiamatschild: Painting of a woman resting on a bridge railing - she has a laundry bag beside her (Default)
So it turns out that the problem with wearing a halter top dress you don't need to and really kind of can't wear a bra with to a celebratory open air lunch on the first really warm day of spring, before all the awnings and shade umbrellas are up yet is - - -

Well, when you're as pale as I am, the resulting sunburn is an interesting shape (you can see the bow I was wearing at the back of my neck on my skin!) that unfortunately makes wearing a bra while it heals pretty much pretty uncomfy!

Heck with it. Eight in the evening is a perfectly respectable time of day for pyjamas.
tiamatschild: A painting of a woman in a chiton hanging washing on a line (Hanging the Washing Out to Dry)
I just used the week's last two bananas, which were getting somewhat overripe, to make sourdough banana bread.

So now the kitchen smells like banana rum!

EDIT: Sourdough Banana Bread (From Mrs Stankey, via Don and Myrtle Holm)

1/3 C shortening
1 C sugar [this is actually a bit on the sweet side for me - I used 1/2 C brown sugar, packed, last night and that worked well, so I am planning on experimenting a bit more, with a bit less sugar, but I'm the only one who thought the 1 C white sugar versions were a bit too sweet, so]
1 egg
1 C mashed bananas [or however many you happen to have - I haven't measured.]
1 C sourdough starter
2 C flour [the recipe calls for all purpose - I've used half white all purpose and half whole wheat all purpose in all my renditions and it's not been too heavy ever]
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla or 1 tsp grated orange rind [I haven't tried the orange rind yet, due to never having oranges in the house when I'm making it, but I mean to!]

Pre-heat oven to 350 F. Grease a 9x5 loaf pan. Cream together the shortening and the sugar. Add egg. Mix until blended. Add in bananas and sourdough starter. Add orange rind or vanilla. In separate bowl mix flour, salt, baking powder, and soda. Add flour mixture to first mixture, stirring until just blended. Pour into the greased loaf pan. Bake at 350 F for about an hour or until a toothpick comes out clean. [And then it says Cool Before Slicing, but I haven't done a good job of that ever. Ahem.]

(From The Complete Sourdough Cookbook, Don and Myrtle Holm, The Caxton Printers, Caldwell Idaho, 1982. ...addendums in parenthesis added by this blogger.)
tiamatschild: A painting of a woman leaning over a railing to set a candle in a lamp (Everyday Devotion)
Speaking personally, I think the loveliest thing for a rainy cloudy foggy gray day is a really good local public jazz station, played at a volume where you can really focus on the music if you want to, but can also drift off to focus on Important Other Things as needed.
tiamatschild: A painting of a woman in a chiton hanging washing on a line (Hanging the Washing Out to Dry)
Earlier I had to move a really big spider. The spider really did not want to move.

And that was pretty much my budget of conflict for the evening.
tiamatschild: A painting of a woman in a chiton hanging washing on a line (Hanging the Washing Out to Dry)
"No! I turned that in yesterday. You can't fine me! I'm innocent!"

- - - Me, upon discovering that the books I returned the day before haven't been checked in yet, so the library's electronic account records are warning me I have imminent fines
tiamatschild: Painting of a woman resting on a bridge railing - she has a laundry bag beside her (Stopping By Woods On A Sunny Afternoon)
1) A very young volunteer oak sapling carefully protected from lawn mowers by a tomato cage.

2) Dozens of graves at the Lutheran cemetery that had been planted with petunias. Magenta petunias. Or deep purple. But always either magenta or deep purple, never both together. Why so many all a mass of magenta or deep purple petunias right at the base of the headstone? I can but speculate. (My speculation involves a community group project and a garden center sale. ...my speculation is boring. But sincere.)

3) Three mourning doves on a wire. The first dove faced right. The second dove faced left. The third dove faced right. Mourning doves like to sit this way, when they sit in groups, and it never fails to get me to crack a smile.
tiamatschild: Painting of a woman dancing a circle dance - she is smiling, her hand outstreched (Woman in Blue Dancing)
The local Chamber of Commerce does a thing where they send out a calendar paid for by advertising from local businesses and illustrated with photos of the town from the previous year. Next year's arrived in the mail yesterday, and the image for April is of the neighborhood Holi festivities!
tiamatschild: Painting of a woman dancing a circle dance - she is smiling, her hand outstreched (Woman in Blue Dancing)
I, I am the true hunter of the Christmas ornaments!

All shall pay homage and tribute!

...I've been reading a lot of pulp lately.
tiamatschild: Painting of a woman resting on a bridge railing - she has a laundry bag beside her (Default)
My folks are out of town this week, helping my grandfolks (my dad's parents) move to a flexible assisted living complex. This means sorting forty odd years worth of stuff, and deciding what to move to the new apartment, what to sort out amongst the siblings (Dad and his two sisters), what to throw out, and what to donate to charity. We are apparently inheriting a snowblower.

Among other things. I have a new project! Gonna scan decades worth of projector slides.

I'm still behind on comments, and have only written a little, which is annoying, because it's not as if I don't want to talk, I just keep feeling so tired. ...which, uh, I keep you know. Saying. Bluh. Unfortunately it keeps being true. On the other hand, I have a fair amount of a different kind of energy. Plugging away at exposures, and I've been clearing out the garage, which we've been meaning to get to for ages and ages.

The promised snowblower is making it rather urgent.

I think I saw a cooper's hawk on Wednesday, though I'm not sure, because it was moving very fast and basically all I saw was a flash of red and cream and the acrobatic maneuverinI through low and close branches.

And currently I'm trying to sit with a deeply uncomfortable fear I'm a bad person because I told my youngest brother I'm more likely to be really interested in women poets than men who are poets. So I guess I'll just. Sit with that. For a while.
tiamatschild: Painting of a woman dancing a circle dance - she is smiling, her hand outstreched (Woman in Blue Dancing)
You know you're really a grown up when your younger brother buys you a RID2015 Optimus Prime for your birthday and apologizes because it's not a Rescue Bots Optimus.

(He was delighted to know that I love RID 2015 as well.)

Also, Mom and I went to the arboretum, where we saw some cool art installations and petted a bed of lambs' ears (which was marked 'touch', which was good, because we were probably both going to touch anyway).

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tiamatschild: Painting of a woman resting on a bridge railing - she has a laundry bag beside her (Default)
Nanni

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