Author Archives: sara

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About sara

i live in michigan with my teenage daughter, my partner, and our three cats. i am a paralegal, legal manager and corporate governance specialist, and when i'm not reading contracts or maintaining the dusty archives of our arcane corporate history like some weirdly specific librarian, i enjoy knitting, books, running slowly, making candles, and bird-watching. i started blogging way back when I was an expat living in australia and in recent years have tried to be more diligent about keeping this space up to date and as a creative outlet for the things in my life that inspire me and balance my 9-5.

a calm and sunny day + life and bathroom update

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Happy Friday friends. I worked from home today for the first time all week and it was – just what I needed. I am coming off of a 2-week period of busyness at work, with parenting, and a bathroom renovation and so a calm, sunny day in my home office, with only ONE MEETING, getting through emails and clearing my to-do list with sleeping cats around me and a classic jazz playlist felt like a luxury. I love the feeling of being able to shut down my computer on a Friday feeling caught up, with pins in the things I need to pick back up on Monday. It makes me feel like I’ve earned my weekend and if work stress crops up, I can remind myself that I have things in order and even if they’re not finished, I have a plan to get them there and, in the meantime, my only job is to relax and feel at ease with my down time.

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 The bathroom reno is going well and I am going to love the new space. Brandon picked out some really beautiful tile, which is all in place, and the shower is done! But the two weeks leading up to this were loud and dusty, with a marked lack of privacy. Although Brandon and his cousin Tony were able to do all of the demo work, after that we had tradesmen in doing drywall and tile-setting and often working until into the evening. Thankfully, that is at an end as of yesterday. We’re still all sharing the kid’s bathroom as there is more work to do – painting, vanity, mirror, lighting, plumbing – but everything has gone on schedule and very smoothly thanks to Brandon’s hard work (and his cousin’s support) and I feel like we are over the hump. My only disappointment is that the art tile I purchased from Pewabic in Detroit just isn’t going to go with the shower tile. I thought it was going to complement the floor, but it just misses being complementary and ends up clashing. There was no time to pick out another one. I’m sad that we won’t get our extra special Detroit touch, but sometimes things just work out that way and I’m sure we can find a place for the tile somewhere else.  

The other big news – I have a new boss at work and I could not be happier about that. For the past six months, we have been very short-staffed and while we “kept the lights on” (which was what I committed to do when my prior boss left), it is always frustrating to feel as though I am being slammed left and right, only able to do triage and firefighting and nothing is done as well or as thoroughly as I’d like it to be. This week was the light at the end of the tunnel, but no less frantic. We had meetings with overseas colleagues late Monday night, early Wednesday morning, I had four office days and the nights that we didn’t have calls, I had the kid’s soccer games and EMT training to rush off to (EMT training is always a fun time, though – I got to volunteer to be an accident victim that the kids extricated from a vehicle and loaded into an ambulance!). This is a lot for an introvert like me so I warned Brandon that this weekend I will be in full goblin mode. I have knitting (Wolop advent cowl, and I just cast on the Perfect Knit T-shirt by Lion), I’m halfway through ‘Wild and Wicked Things’ by Francesca May and have ‘Weyward’ by Emilia Hart on my Kindle. I want to water my plants and feed the birds and get a vanilla latte tomorrow morning and hang out in the sunshine with a cat or two and have nothing else to do besides that. The kiddo is off on a snowboarding trip with her dad for her Spring Break so I told Brandon that Saturday night is date night, even if we just get takeout and eat it in bed with a nice bottle of Chianti or Shiraz and episodes of ‘White Lotus’.

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we’re all loving watching the Friends of Big Bear Valley eagle nest cam

I hope you are all doing well and looking forward to whatever brings you joy, peace, and inspiration this weekend!

recent pins – the bees are flying* edition

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Despite what has been a mainly gloomy and wet week, I managed to get outside for a run one day. The rain has left the streets pooled and clogged with mud and winter detritus. The red-winged blackbirds, my March friends, were loud in the reeds and the sky overhead was changeable, one moment swollen and sullen, the next breaking with sudden and blinding sun. All of this made me feel, friends, that despite being in the teeth of winter for what feel like a long time, no winter, or freeze, or storm, or cloud, or desolation, can last forever. There is always hope and as that great wheel turns and turns, we shall have spring again.

And with that very solemn intro which does not at all match what will be a fairly fluffy post, here are a few recent pins to slake my thirst for the season ahead.

Believe it or not, I actually have two of these types of old lanterns in the basement. They’re so cool but I’ve never known exactly how to use them to their best advantage! Link here.

And here is the tutorial.

Similarly cute idea. I have been growing morning glories on a rusty old trellis on the east side of our house for a few years now and this would be a fun addition once they start filling out.

This is the general vision I have for the southwest corner of our yard, under our pine trees. I love hostas and ferns, and buy a few every spring to gradually fill in. I doubt we’ll ever have a water feature but I do want a nice stone birdbath for that space and the colorful birdhouse is sweet!

More gorgeous hostas.

*From the post title. The final line of this poem always feels so significant to me (probably also because it is the last line of Ariel, and this line leaves too much unsaid; her fate was coming fast to meet her), full of a mix of emotions as these tiny creatures are summoned forth again to rise with the spring, no matter what obstacles they face. Joy, despair, survival, fight, death, rebirth.

“Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.” (Wintering, by Sylvia Plath)

the last friday in february

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After an extraction and two years of orthodontics, my braces came off Wednesday. I still have 14 weeks of Invisalign and then lifelong retainers, but as of now, the metal is GONE. The Invisalign is no joke, but it’s an improvement over what was an uncomfortable and confidence-eroding couple of years. Entering my 50s and dealing with peri-menopause and its changes to my body and mind was bad enough without braces. But I didn’t do the orthodontics for aesthetics and now, at the end of the treatment, my bite is almost fully fixed and my front teeth won’t continue to chip, loosen and erode, so I guess I can say it was worth it in the end.

Today I am observing the economic boycott. (I probably can’t say the same about the kiddo who needed a Starbucks on her way to school.) This boycott seems like a small thing to protest such enormous fuckery from the regime of the Orange Manbaby and Apartheid Clyde, but I’m committed, and have also been burning up the phone lines with my 5 Calls app. I’m sure that my senators and House Rep are beyond sick of this constituent. I could talk a lot about this political timeline but that’s for another post.

So in a happier topic, this weekend begins a several-week foray into renovating our master bathroom. We live in a 1962 Colonial and while the bath may have been redone in the ’80’s, it’s still what you would expect, which is pretty bad. Brandon is doing a lot of the work himself and I’ve been of limited support (mostly just saying ‘yes that sounds fine’). He has all of our household’s skill with decor and aesthetics. I’m most excited about a trip to Pewabic in Detroit to pick out some cool accent tiles. For awhile, we will all be sharing the kiddo’s bathroom, which may result in her spending more time at her dad’s to avoid the enforced togetherness!

The kiddo has a full-day CPR class tomorrow for her EMT Cadet training and I am hoping to finish up a couple of knitting projects and get some reading done. My library haul this week included two Dune graphic novels and a historical fantasy from Francesca May ‘Wild and Wicked Things’. And lastly, on this Friday evening, I leave you with something that absolutely made my heart leap with joy. In these uncertain times, seeing all four original members of REM reunite this week at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, GA to sing ‘Pretty Persuasion’ with Michael Shannon is a light that we all deserve.

february 28 economic blackout.

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Read more here.

If you’re mad about what’s going on, I urge you to investigate grassroots efforts to show your disgust.

DEI is NOT the monster that MAGA makes it out to be. Personally, I have benefited from DEI and I would imagine many of you have, as well, even if it’s not transparent to you. DEI initiatives support pay equity and job protections for working women (so we have a job to return to after maternity leave, for example, and facilities for nursing mothers). They also ensure equal hiring opportunities for women and prevent discrimination and harassment in the workplace. These are things that I and most if not all of the women I know have relied upon, even if they’re not aware of them or don’t intellectually understand how critical they are to our ability to support ourselves and our children and pursue our careers with dignity and equality.

In addition, they provide accessible workplaces for employees with disabilities, and they prevent gender, race, and age discrimination in employment, among others. These protections exist to ensure that companies attract, consider, and support a broad range of candidates and that ANY qualified candidates – no matter their race, gender, ethnicity, age, and status – are not overlooked in hiring.

These are just a few of the most obvious ways that DEI has made our workplaces safer and more efficient.
I fail to see how these are bad practices.

So I will be planning ahead and participating in the February 28 economic blackout.

dispatch from a northern weekend

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Seeking the snow last weekend, our first stop was my mom’s house – almost 4 hours north, on the west side of the state. Snow was knee-high (conservative estimate). Brandon and I woke up Saturday morning to run the Betsie Bay Frozen 5k, which is one of my favorite events. It hasn’t been run since 2020, before the world shut down. In the olden days I would have posted a full separate race recap with my time but in today’s world, post-50 years old, having survived a pandemic, menopause, teenage kid years, the Orange Menace and his Nazi cohorts attempting to ruin democracy as we know it, and various other life events, just getting out there and running it is enough.

We then drove 2 hours further north, to the village of Walloon Lake, which is most famous for being young Hemingway’s Michigan playground. We found a historical marker, and there’s a statue of him somewhere around, but the wind was blowing fine snow into whiteout conditions everywhere so we gave up looking. Instead, we skied at Boyne Mountain (the kid snowboarded) and enjoyed our perfect little Vrbo. As we get older, my ability to stay in a hotel has decreased significantly. I hate being cheek to jowl with mass humanity, having to either pay for every meal and snack or rely on hotel coffee and crumpled snack bags. Give me an AirBnB or a Vrbo every time. I know they’re wreaking havoc on small communities but selfishly I want exactly what we had this weekend. Which was a cozy cottage on a private lot with a fireplace, hot tub, separate bedrooms for us and the kid, a beautiful living space and kitchen, fully appointed. We cooked, we had good coffee, we had a fire, we watched movies, read books, I knitted, and we had privacy. I threw caution to the wind and ate what I wanted to eat, drank Horny Monk from the Petoskey Brewing Company, and made a fool out of myself on the slopes. (I fell. A lot.) The snow was almost claustrophobic – piled higher than street signs and just continually sifting down. The drifts outside the Vrbo were up to the windows with paths cut into them to access doors and the driveway – if you don’t have a snowplow or a snowblower running constantly, you would have big trouble.

All in all, it was a perfect swift getaway with my two favorite people. The world is hard right now and being away for a bit is a luxury. We don’t have a lot of travel planned for the year, so the times we do have together will be all the more important.

pins of the week – the one before Valentine’s day that has nothing to do with Valentine’s day

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We are headed off for a long weekend in northern Michigan – we have a Frozen 5k to run on Saturday morning (it is going to be COLD), a rental cottage further north, and a couple of planned days skiing and snowboarding (and maybe knitting in the lodge for one member of the travel party who shall remain nameless). But I’ve had some really pretty images swirling on my PInterest feed and wanted to quickly share them before we leave!

I’ve been saving my Harney & Son’s tea tins to reuse as knitting needle holders in my home office but I also love this idea and this one as well. I’ve made candles in my old tins before, as well. (I may or may not have actually ordered tea from them because I loved the tin it came in.)

I’m going to have to knit these fellows for the same reason as I loved the fish tattoo a few weeks ago.

I’ve never had much luck with seed starting indoors. I don’t have the space for it, and Emmett is a voracious plant-chewer. But I wonder if this idea would work for just a few tomato plants…

The leather pants are nonstarter for me but I love the haircut, the glasses, and the scarf.

And lastly, don’t forget this truth.

the friday files, harlequin edition: several intrepid heroines, a dummy, and a gurney

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This week has been a total blur – but I look back and feel like I traveled miles. There were work complexities, three days in the office, depression and rage over
the current political situation (always, now), a comparatively and thankfully minor ice
storm, and an evening spent at EMT Cadet training for the kiddo. (As usual, this was the
high point for me. This week our intrepid heroines strapped the lifelike dummy to the gurney and fluttered around him performing industrious lifesaving maneuvers. Then, they took turns hurtling the gurney up and down the halls, banging him around the corners, and loading him into and out of the ambulance. I’m glad that the dummy made this appearance; a couple of weeks ago it may have been volunteer moms strapped to that gurney. I speak from personal experience.)

I finished the latest Haruki Murakami book. “The City and its Uncertain Walls” was not
as swiftly immersive as “1Q84”. The book felt a bit disjointed, which makes sense as I
learned it was written in two different time periods of Murakami’s life. The cast of people and places include a teenage couple in love who become separated; there is a walled city with a library of dreams, perishing unicorns, and characters who become separated from their shadows. There is another library in another world, a ghostly librarian with a quirky fashion sense, and a boy with a Yellow Submarine parka. The plot and poetry lies amid those details. If you love Murakami and would read his writing even if it was on a bathroom wall in a Tokyo train station, you’ll enjoy the delicate unfurling of this book. If you don’t, or if you’re not familiar with him at all, this may not be the book for you.

In other reading news, perusing the NYTimes, I saw this starter pack of romance novels and I’m intrigued. I think the last romance novels I read were back in early high school. One summer vacation, our rental cottage had a rickety bookshelf full of old Harlequins and I worked my way through all of them with single minded determination, staying up late, gritty eyed with fatigue but determined to find out if the romance between the plucky yet wilting amnesiac with a secret twin and the arrogant aristocrat with the eyepatch and the tortured history could ever bear fruit. That led to spending allowance money on a few Regency romances at our local bookstore ‘The Printed Word’ (where I also bought my Tiger Beat magazines, horoscope rolls, and later, the biography of Ed Gein which made the clerk ask suspiciously if my mother knew what I was reading). I really only remember ‘Lady Lochinvar’, a Barbara Hazard banger (no pun intended) with the requisite strong-willed heroine and a worldly and fairly smutty viscount, but I know for a fact there were more than that on my shelves for awhile, until they became embarrassingly unsophisticated for my high school literary ambitions. One of my mom friends has a Goodreads account full of ‘new’ romance – she says she likes her reading to be “spicy”. She’s Canadian (and btw Canadians – I am SO VERY SORRY about our embarrassment of a “president” – over 75 million Americans did not choose this for you or for us) so many of these are centered in the hockey world, and have seemingly endless riffs on the word ‘puck’ in the titles. So there’s definitely a market for it and if romance is written up in the NY Times, it HAS to have an aura of respectability, right?

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Several of the classic titles I may have read as a teenager, and one that I most definitely did not…

I feel like I might be coming down with a head cold so perhaps some time spent under
the duvet with a couple of recommended steamy romance novels may be the best plan
for the weekend ahead. I will report back.


In the meantime, be well and safe – xo.

friday five – the 89th day of january

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It’s the final day of January and I’m cautiously optimistic that we have made it through what was a very long month of frigid cold, post-holiday crash, political chaos, and dry skin.

1. Dry January. For the first time in several years, my Dry January was a booming success.
I made it the entire month (plus an alcohol-free NYE). For the last few years, I’ve made it
for some time period (17 days; 28 days; a few years ago I only made it as far as January
6 as you may remember what happened on that date) but usually not for the full 31 days.
While I felt like I flew through it without ambivalence or struggling, I did put work in – I joined the Dry group on the Weight Watchers app, which is full of some of the best people I could have hoped to connect with. I read sober curious literature and listened to several podcasts (‘This Naked Mind’ being my favorite). I think it’s the influence of our societal approach to drinking that I feel self-conscious about bragging too much on my Dry January because I worry that people will think I did it because I have a “problem” with alcohol. I could write a much longer post about this (particularly what our modern culture deems “problematic” when it comes to a highly addictive substance that is not only socially acceptable, but widely encouraged) but for now – no, I don’t feel that I have a “problem” with alcohol. I really enjoy red wine, and have a fairly high tolerance for it, but I do not categorize myself as a “problem” drinker. However, there is a preponderance recent evidence that any amount of alcohol may not be good for us. I had such a positive Dry January that I have now determined that I will also commit to being alcohol-free for the month of February and see where it goes from there.

2. Vibes at home. Emmett, who is our most loving, anxious, needy cat, had a dentist
appointment on Tuesday and had two premolars extracted. All of our cats have
“emotional problems” and require accommodations – two of them are on Prozac and the other is a small, cute, virulent sociopath. When one of them disappears for a day and comes home loopy and smelling of the vet, the other two become unhinged and treat the patient like a dangerous interloper. So there has been hissing, separation, pain med dosing, treats, sleeping accommodations, and general household disruption. Emmett is fine and recovering nicely. Sarge and Josie, on the other hand, are still recovering from his ordeal.

3. Journaling. One of my goals for the year is to use my physical journal more. I have used a Hobonichi Techo Cousin paper planner for a few years now without taking full
advantage of all of its space and features (monthly, weekly, and daily pages). I’ve been
scribbling more thoughts this month. I plan to use one of the layout pages for an informal monthly goal-set, using key words, quotes and actions, and update the bottom half of that page at the end of the month with my reflections: what went well, what didn’t, what I achieved, etc. I’m looking forward to settling in at my home office desk tomorrow morning (early, because I’ve been sleeping so well with Dry January) with a big cup of coffee, my sticker folio and my nice pen and washi tapes to reflect on January and set up the February page.

4. RTO. Next week begins the more organized RTO (“return to office”) push at Widget
Central. Executives have been hands-off about office time, leaving it to managers to set
their department’s guidelines. I’m usually in one or two days a week and set my own schedule for what those days are on a weekly basis. Next week, however, the mandate is for three office days for everyone with Tuesday and Thursday mandatory. This can be a polarizing issue for people but I’m fairly ‘meh’ about it. I like working from home and think I’m pretty disciplined about it, but I also like the office. I do appreciate that feeling of separation of my home space and workspace. I am productive in either space with a possible productivity edge in the office, I like my coworkers, and as an introvert, it’s good and healthy for me to socialize with people on a limited yet regular basis. I’m much more opinionated about the quality of my work experience. Trust and flexibility are key – I do not want to be micromanaged, nickel-and-dimed about coming-in times and leaving-times, I want the ability to flex my time if I need to be home for any reason, have an appointment, etc. (I think a lot of the issues that people have with remote work come down how well managers are trained to identify and handle a poor performer – if you have an employee, ANY employee, that you cannot trust to do their job and be responsive during core work hours, that’s a performance / management issue, and it’s not going to be addressed or resolved based on the location of their workplace.) The biggest issue for me is going to be organization – meal planning and prep for full days in the office with a commute, packing my breakfast, lunch, snacks, and workout clothes, and making the most of all my days, office and remote.

5. Weekend. No big plans. Babying the neurotic and recovering felines: Brandon is
planning a redo of our master bathroom, so we need to go to Ikea to buy the vanity
we’ve selected; the weather in Suburban Elysia will be clear and seasonal in the 30’s, so
I hope to get out for at least one run. I’m working on a small secret knitting project and
will likely finish up my recent read, Haruki Murakami’s ‘The City and its Uncertain Walls’
which I’ll review next week.

Hope everyone has a peaceful, healthy weekend! xoxo

maker space: finished! christmas 2024 socks

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I should feel sheepish that I’m posting my finished Christmas socks a month after Christmas. But for me, this is actually fairly timely as I think I once finished Christmas knitting in March. Progress not perfection!

These are a mashup of the Vanilla Socks on 9 inch Circulars basic pattern from Kayla Litton and the Summer Camp Socks by Jill Zielinski. Main color is West Yorkshire Spinners Sparkle “Yuletide” and heels, toes, and cuffs are WYS “Evergreen”. I usually do 64 stitches on US 0 (2mm) needles.

Cast on: December 13, 2024

Finished: January 24, 2025

Raveled here.