Same as everyone else on lj

My friend ladysea is so cool. She made me these two large bowls (good for fruit! good for chips! good for just looking at!) with black and blue glazes. Also she did some really neat small trays and bowls for me to give ksumnersmith for her jewelry-making, bottom-heavy so that bead-seeking hands wouldn't upend the whole thing. Also she does wall-hangings and platters and is learning raku and all sorts of nifty things.

Also ladysea has lovely dark hair that hangs down to her waist or so, maybe even longer -- I don't have her here to check. Lots and lots of nice hair.

I also like jonsinger. He is the finest jonsinger I have ever met. You may observe his beard and hair your very own selves if you go look at his icons, and some very shiny vases and bowls he has made are also in that icon set. They just sort of glow, even in the pictures; better still in person.

So in short: I think all the hype was fully justified, even though I didn't stay up until midnight Friday to get either of them.

Domestic and imaginary

My pleasures today are domestic and imaginary. The last pan of oatmeal raisin cookies is out of the oven, and so the house smells like cinnamon, allspice, and cloves, with oats to steady them. This is one of the scent-combinations that says, "Someone loves this house," to me. I'll soon have to figure out what we're having for dinner and who's cooking it, but until then, we'll have the smell of spice cookies.

The book is booking. Book book book. It's being enough fun and absorbing enough that I will be surprised if I take my birthday off this year. I can, of course. It's my birthday. I can do what I like, approximately, within reasonable limits. It's just that I suspect that what I like will involve some book, and that's a good thing.

(Thursday is my birthday. Somewhere around Saturday my brain switched over into pre-birthday mode. Birthday! Birthday birthday! I like birthdays. We are very good at birthdays in my family.)

I'm enjoying this period of rereading before my birthday. I got to open the presents from seagrit and jffgrnfld and Amber when they were here, and markgritter finished his copy of HP7, but I'm going to hold off until after my birthday to dive into that pile, because lots of rereading all at once feels like fun right now.

Okay. Dinner cogitating. Then more book.

"There is no Dana. There is only Zool.": the holiday version

I will never tire of Midsummer and Midwinter. By which I mean, I will never tire of Midwinter, and I acknowledge that I have to have Midsummer with it for balance. (Like Arlo says, you can't have the thing without the other thing.) But sometimes it is not time for another fantasy novel Midwinter festival. Or Midsummer festival. Or even spring or fall equinox. Sometimes it is time for there to be a special thing that happens to magic once a year that isn't about light and darkness, warmth and cold, but is about magic's own thing. Sometimes it is time for there to be a holiday for the birthday of the first king, or the invention of the seed press, or the defeat of the horrible horrible enemy at the Battle of Wherever.

Midsummer and Midwinter have resonance. They have immense myffic whatsis. And I have leaned on that whatsis in the past, and will again. But what they do not have, so much, is texture. "This non-equatorial culture has a Midwinter Festival!" You don't say. Golly, just imagine. But if you say, yes, of course, Midwinter and Midsummer, harvest and planting, rhythms of life and all, but also, also, also the day when this nation cut loose from their neighbors to the west. Or the day when the founders landed on the barren bit of rock. Or the day when one subculture observes one thing while another is up to something completely different and the two of them are not entirely pleased with each other for doing it wrong and ruining the whole thing. Or the day when the decadent cityfolk drink and dance, but this is serious to the farmers! this is hard work!

And it's all being character again: you know something about my mother if I tell you she tends to observe Arbor Day whenever possible, as a suburban person in a non-agrarian culture. Similarly you will know something about Lord Wossname of Thatplace if you know that he does not give the servants the day off for the festival of fools and has lost two cooks over that point but will not yield, despite his sister's shouting on the subject. Do people know songs for Brewer's Thirdday, or is it a non-singing holiday? It's not about treatises. It's about what drops into the lines as you go.

It makes it nubbly. Sometimes you want things to flow past your fingertips without catching, but sometimes being able to feel and see the stitches is just what makes it interesting, and maybe a little beautiful. And also sometimes where your fingertips catch is where you've dropped a stitch, and you need to go in and repair it or rip out that row before you get any further, and that's all right, too, because it is worth doing right.

"There is no Dana. There is only Zool." More so.

Dear book:

Okay, it was time for me to be in bed an hour ago, because why? Because I was tired. And then you got me out of bed to write another 1.5K, and that's lovely, very fine work, well done. Go book. But as I am now alternating one eye open and then the other because keeping both of them open at once is too much work, do you think you could LET ME SLEEP? Thanks so much.

Love and kisses,
mrissa