galadhir: The furoshiki cloths were a great success. Instead of the usual bin-bag full of torn up...

via https://ift.tt/2QibcrT

galadhir:

The furoshiki cloths were a great success. Instead of the usual bin-bag full of torn up plastic-coated wrapping paper to throw out, after unwrapping the presents, I have a neat little parcel of folded cloths, tied in another cloth, which are all going back in the cupboard for next year. 

As they were tied rather than taped, there’s no sellotape to throw away either. We have generated zero waste in the wrapping line except for a few gift tags, which were made from last year’s Christmas cards anyway. This feels really good :)

Ah fantastic!

I was the only one in the family who made furoshiki this year so they all got wildly distributed about the place, and I got a photo of the ones that went to Maryland, as those were immediately repurposed into capes for the dogs. The one that was for the child here became, as I had expected, immediately a blanket for dolls, and was on the cat for a while (he was delighted and went back to sleep). The others, IDK, they’ll probably wind up in various family cupboards, but I expect I’ll see some of them reused. And it’s inspired at least one sibling to go exploring in her linen closet for sheets she doesn’t use, to make some of her own for next time. 

We didn’t use a lot of wrapping paper anyway this year, but that’s a natural progression of our family’s ages and such. Farmsister used all the paper packing material from various Amazon packages, which also works pretty well. At least that kind of plain brown paper is compostable. And my dad very carefully used newspaper comics that the child hadn’t yet read to wrap his gift for Farmkid, so that she could sit and read them for a few moments to calm down after the frenzy of gift-giving.

mail!

so today we got home oneish, napped with the cat for a bit (she was so delighted, she kept coming and settling down and purring, and then getting up and re-settling just for the delight of having me wake up to pet her, and then settling down and purring again, and it was all very sweet and guilt-inducing because we're going to drop her off at a boarding place on saturday :/ but she'll deal, her memory is short. she's been so affectionate this afternoon, i bet she'll let me trim her claws later).
Then we had the kitchen door propped open so the cat could go outside, she loves to sit under the car and watch the backyard from the driveway. it's cute.
The mailman appeared at the open door while dude was in the kitchen cooking, and so startled him visibly, which was very funny.
He handed over some mail and I'm delighted to report it was a card from buttonsbeadslace and a little package of teas from krait and I am so thoroughly pleased, thank you both. I had meant to ask you for a card, Buttons, but thought perhaps it would be presumptuous-- I've loved watching the printing process, and it makes me feel I ought to try it myself. And I'd just been making tea and feeling silly that I have so little of it in the house at the moment; Farmsister keeps such a well-stocked tea shelf and I just don't bother at home but I do spend quite a bit of time here. So I shall be exploring those, going forward. :)

grrlcookery reblogged your post and added:Ugggghhhh.

via https://ift.tt/2SveUBc

grrlcookery reblogged your post and added:

Ugggghhhh. That means I absolutely can’t watch it. No dialogue and flashies. Ugggghhh. Thank you for the warning. I might have tried.

I’m sorry. it might vary by theater sound system, but I really struggled with it, and I am not a person who normally has great trouble parsing movie dialogue. Adam Driver’s not a great enunciator at the best of times, and behind a mask, well– I mean, it’s our introduction to the character, Poe being like “uhh I can’t understand you” in the beginning of TFA, remember that? Well nobody makes a joke but it’s still the situation. And Rey hisses a lot of things through gritted teeth, and i know Oscar Isaac is capable of correct diction but they didn’t seem to want him to. I really genuinely was cranky about it, until I resigned myself that the dialogue is generally the least important part of a Star War.

If you’ve got issues with either of these things, this is very definitely a small screens only, subtitles on kind of movie. I’m so sorry. It’s not actually half the movie, but there’s a whole planet, whereupon a great deal of the action occurs, that is lit solely by lightning, so it’s just all strobes, quite violently. it’s sort of a neat effect for like one or two shots including some great reveals of a character, but then it just… is the only light.. for minutes at a time, on several occasions. I would estimate with no exaggeration that it’s probably a solid twenty minutes of the movie. I sort of can’t believe they did that, it seems entirely unnecessary. 

wrap-up

via https://ift.tt/2QquUBO

So I made out like a bandit this Christmas, as I always feel I do. Farmsister emailed the weaver whose studio we toured in October or whenever that was, and bought a scarf from her, so now I have a beautiful handwoven scarf. Mom re-knit me the sweater that burnt up in the yurt, but this time in a variegated teal-and-purple alpaca yarn that is so soft and substantial and not at all scratchy. And Middle-Little bought me a cashmere wrap.

And Dude? Well, I lost a bunch of jewelry in the yurt fire. I recovered some of the silver pieces, but the amber– well, amber burns, it turns out, you can just straight set it on fire and in fact lower-grade amber gets included in incense because it burns so well. So he bought me amber from Latvia via Etsy. So I’m delighted about that.

As I’d hoped, Farmkid immediately untied the furoshiki I’d made her, all pogaji-style pieced so it’s finished on both sides, and put it to use as a cape, doll blanket, cat blanket, blindfold, and a number of other things; it’s possibly more useful to her than the things I wrapped in it. 

She also got literally one hundred unicorns, as that’s what she’d asked for. And grandpa made her a stable to keep them in, with bright red doors, a seafoam-green floor, yellow interior walls, and a bright shiny gold-painted roof. 

She even got a pair of unicorns, one to keep and one to give to her best friend. So it was a very unicorny Christmas.

She was so good, balancing being So Hype For Christmas with not actually being unbearable. On Christmas morning, her father had run out to do the animal chores so he’d be available for gift unwrapping, but she woke up before he was back, and was in absolute agony waiting for him to return because of course we couldn’t start without him, and I got her to come sit on my lap and let me read to her, quietly with no whining and no fidgeting. It was only about three and a half minutes, but it was still three and half minutes’ respite from her shrieking. Then her dad’s footsteps sounded on the porch and she took off shrieking on a lap of the kitchen, leaping on both feet and scream-singing “It’s time to open presents! It’s time to open presents!” in startling counterpoint to her total stillness of a moment before. 

It was good, it was manageable, I can’t imagine how my parents dealt with four of us at that level of hype– but conversely, I do sort of remember, when there’s a herd of them they can kind of all run together and both wind one another up and bleed some of the chaos off into each other. 

My family were all delighted by my gifts of photo prints, so that was good and I’m glad. It turns out not to have been too chintzy after all. 

This morning we all got up and got ready and got out the door before 8:00. The Farm-Fam is driving all in one shot to BIL’s family in Chicago, and are hoping to make it without stopping– it’s 11 or 12 hours in the car. In past years they’ve left midday, arrived Buffalo at dinner, stayed over, and kept going, but that’s time-intensive. Farmkid’s big now, almost six, so they think she can make it. 

So I took her in my car, and read to her for the first five-hour leg of the trip.  Dude drove, and I read, and we got through about seven or eight chapters of The Cloud Roads. I had to once again figure out how to censor the important pivotal sex scene of the series, and don’t remember how I did it last time, but it doesn’t really matter– the point is that those two characters go from being tense slightly-antagonists to being firm allies, and I do think I managed to convey that. She’s gonna read that book for herself at like age ten and be like wait a minute aunt B skipped this part. LOL. (It’s not explicit, I’m sure she’ll be fine.) 

I’m rather hoarse now, but I feel like it gave her a good mellow start to the trip– it definitely made the time fly by faster than normal. I kept looking up and saying “oh we’re here already?”

We stopped at a Chipotle one exit past where I normally exit to go home, and then we just had to retrace our steps slightly, while they went on. They’ll still be driving, now, but they ought to be most of the way there I hope. 

As soon as we pulled into our own driveway, Dude went in to talk to the cat, and I went straight back out with the Dustbuster and cleaned the backseat where Farmkid had eaten tortilla chips into tiny crumbs everywhere. It was pretty impressive. 

I’ve just received two cards from online people, Dreamwidth people in fact, so I am going to go over there to thank them! How delightful.

I hope everyone had a good holiday according to their own traditions. Now Dude is engrossed in making the leftover gourmet cheeses we brought for Christmas Day appetizers into Fancy Mac And Cheese, and it’s gonna be real good. I’m psyched. 

I need to get started on laundry and start packing for Iceland, and like a fool, I’m working tomorrow. Ay yi yi. But I had to spent a while in bed this afternoon solely for the sake of our poor neglected cat, who needed a face to lie upon and purr.