I’m off work now until January 2 and looking forward to time with my family and by myself, doing things that bring me joy and that I don’t usually have a lot of time for during the normal work weeks. I made a big pot of homemade vegetable soup over the weekend, dried some orange slices for a garland, finished a knitting project last week and am close to finishing another, finished a book… we have a jigsaw puzzle locked in, three gingerbread house kits, and I have crafting projects and books to last me until June if my free time allowed. 2025 has been a ride and I’m ready to lock the door and light the candles and shut the world out until I have to rejoin in 2026. With that said, here are a few recent pins to round out the year. Thank you for joining me in this humble space this year and God willing we will see each other on the other side.
I love this look. I have always wanted to be the kind of woman who could wear a little scarf around her neck like this and look natural but I’ve never been successful. This makes me want to try.
I have a pair of wingtips almost exactly like these but the grosgrain bows here are just *chefs kiss*.
My hairstylist gave me a bixie in October and it almost drove me insane. We had to have a big discussion before my cut last week because…
Despite our continual societal march towards industrialization, automation, capitalism and cookie-cutter consumption, there is something in the human spirit that is fascinated by the unknown. We love a good scary movie and a bonfire and a mask purchased at the pop-up Spirit Halloween store. We love our pumpkin spice lattes and Jack o’lanterns and dancing paper skeletons. There’s something in us that loves the prospect that while we wander the dark and misty streets with our kids and their bags and buckets of candy, everyone masked and gleeful, we may be rubbing shoulders with otherworldly things called over for just one night. And that after we retire to our beds, turn off lights and close our curtains, our woods and lanes and fields and churchyards are theirs for those dark hours before dawn; the hag, the horned man, the cold one, the thing that is pulled by the moon.
There’s something very Practical Magic about this house but it also feels nostalgic for me, too. A lot of houses in the small town where I grew up looked and felt like this; old farmhouses, including my childhood home and the namesake of this blog.
Nine years ago, my kiddo was still in elementary school and I decorated my car as ‘Under the Sea’ for her Trunk or Treat. I posted it on Pinterest so I’d remember it. The cool thing about that year’s Trunk or Treat is that her dad and her stepmom also participated with an undersea theme – monster kraken and octopi – and they won first prize while I won second. It was completely unplanned and the kiddo was stoked that her extended family swept the awards. (Now she is driving that car, btw…sigh).
Around that same timeframe I ran a couple of autumn half-marathons in the Sleeping Bear National Park in northern Michigan, and parts of the route looked identical to this picture.
We’re at the stage in our household where the kiddo has Halloween parties with her friends and we’ll be staying home and dressing up to hand out candy. Brandon will be Elvis and my costume is a secret but I’ll post pictures once the cat is out of the bag (probably first on my Instagram). I did manage to wrangle a family pumpkin-carving and Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown-watching session earlier this week and the weather is cooperating with cooler temps, drifting leaves, and damp streets, so we’re all in the mood. I hope wherever you are, you are enjoying the end of October and getting ready for a month of November hygge (November being really one of my favorite months for all of the cozy reasons and Thanksgiving my favorite holiday for it’s comparatively low-key, cozy vibe). Be well and remember that hell is empty; all the devils are here.
It’s been quite awhile since I’ve done a pin post so allow me to share what’s been catching my eye here in southeast Michigan in these final days of September.
It’s been hot and dry here for the past few weeks and I’m more than ready for this kind of weather. Although maybe not too quickly, because the kiddo’s senior pictures are scheduled for mid-to-late October and she and I are both on pins and needles hoping that the weather holds. We want cool temps, peak color, with no rainstorms to strip all the leaves. After that it can do what it will.
My knitting projects are even more scattered than usual. I haven’t finished anything in ages and while I’d like to keep going on something – ANYTHING – to have a finished object, I have to start two new projects. It’s time for me to start my annual contribution to the Mittens for Detroit charity. But even though I pinned the two ideas above (I thought the duck mittens would be really cute for children and I obviously love the stripy pair (and they’d be warm too), I won’t have time to do anything other than a basic pair. I also have to cast on for a baby hat for a work friend, whose wife is expecting and due around the holidays. I’ve waited too long here and am in a lot of knitting hot water.
I really like this outfit although I’d wear it with my Sambas. And I never understand how women can tuck sweaters in – even a half tuck. And it’s been too hot. But everything else I like.
I don’t know if my wild femininehas revealed itself, but I like the concept of putting the ‘people pleasing maiden’ to rest.
One of the major projects that Brandon and I have to tackle in my 1962 Colonial is a kitchen remodel, but thinking about what that will entail (especially with a teenager and three cats and working from home 2 days a week) usually makes me think “hey, this too-small, outdated, not-ideal kitchen is JUST FINE!” But the day is coming and when it does, I am GOING to have a wide windowsill for plants. (Not those little angel figurines, though.) I love plants and I have one cat (Emmett I am looking at you) who is a plant murderer and will chew anything that is lower than six feet off the ground or that he is able to climb to. So my little collection of Thanksgiving cacti, Pothos, Hoya, snake plants and Pileapeperomioides are scrunched up on the mantel and high up on shelves and in less than ideal spots for their growth and display. Someday I will have a nice wide kitchen windowsill and I will have a nice little collection of plants there to bask in the sunshine.
So that’s about it for this morning. I have to get out for a quick run and then I’m off to help the kiddo’s marching band at one of their competitions this afternoon (pray for them; it will be 80 today and blazing sun, in full uniforms. These kids are absolute troopers).
Despite returning from band camp mid-August, I haven’t yet fully unpacked the last bits of sandy gear still stowed in the garage. I was back to work for a week before heading off to Chicago, my favorite city (sorry Detroit, you are a close second). We stayed in a South Loop loft with a view of an Al Capone hangout and a slice of the river and watched “Murder She Wrote” reruns. We visited the Gilded Age Driehaus Museum and the Art Institute for the Gustave Caillebotte exhibit and hosted a happy hour for some of Brandon’s college friends. The highlight was joining the Gallagher family reunion with 50,000 other Oasis fans on a windy, cool evening at Soldier Field.
Then after we got home, we had a few days to do laundry and soothe the cats’ mad feelings and catch up at our respective jobs, and we welcomed Brandon’s family to stay for a few days.
My kiddo’s last year of high school has now started and it will be an autumn of marching band and football games and band competitions and “lasts”. The weather has taken a cool turn so the afternoons are honeyed and the evenings downright crisp. I’m sure we’ll have at least one more return to summer weather before it’s all said and done.
Watching: La Vuelta (last of the cycling Grand Tours for 2025)
Reading: I’m in between books right now after finishing two excellent reads – “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” by Stephen Graham Jones and “Silver Nitrate” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
Making: a custom bag charm by request (my kiddo wearing hers around is great advertising), a pair of vanilla socks that I started during band camp, and if you can believe it I still have to finish the Perfect Knit T-shirt which I said I’d do in July.
Wearing: shorter hair after getting 6 inches chopped off; my Adidas sambas, boyfriend jeans, loving my Katie Kime monogrammed Oxford, and a new pink Teddie sweater from J. Crew.
No schmaltzy title quote about August – let’s cut right to the chase – it’s August!!
July was long. It’s Tour de France month around here and being a good fan of professional grand tour cycling is a time commitment. For three weeks in July, Brandon and I watch four to five hours of stage racing every night except for rest days, and then usually another hour or so in the mornings listening to podcasts and reading news about the cyclists, the teams, and the stages. It’s fun to be that obsessive about something but by the time the peloton rolls into Paris we are ready for the podiums; we shed our tears and reclaim our lives and free time. (But not before we saw my favorite cyclist Wout van Aert take a blistering victory in a shockingly thrilling stage 21 on Montmartre!)
In spite of our commitment to the Tour, we also spent time at our pool club, ran a 5k, went to a couple of local parades, annoyed the neighborhood with fireworks, and spent a lot of time indoors because our neighbors did a complete overhaul of their yard, paving, and landscaping that took two months and involved seemingly every possible variety of heavy machinery. They luckily escaped to one of their other homes during the construction, which saw our street clogged with construction vehicles for the aforementioned two months, but as we are humbler types, we simply had to crank up the air conditioning for white noise and become friends with the workers (who were all really nice fellows). Then our air conditioner wheezed to a halt and one of Brandon’s friends Frankensteined a new motor for it that has been happily cranking away keeping us cool ever since and we’ll replace the whole old unit in the fall.
Looking ahead, August will be a busy month. The kiddo is wading into her senior year activities and every once in awhile I realize that the clock is ticking down on her childhood. I am then seized with such a wave of complex emotions that I can’t begin to process without sinking to the floor in a fetal position, so I push it off and like Scarlett O’Hara, tell myself that I will think about it tomorrow. In the meantime, she asked me to chaperone her final marching band camp and God help me I agreed so for a week later this month I will be overseeing a cabin of band campers in a remote location without cell service in the forests of western Michigan.
In the meantime, this weekend I have a lot of free time – Brandon is at Jazzfest in Ohio with his childhood friends. The kiddo and I have the last college tour on Monday, and before then I want to buy new porch flowers as my wave petunias crapped out mid-July, and break my week of non-running. I did great in July with running and then this last week just felt totally fatigued and unmotivated. Last night the kiddo went to bed early (she’s working a lot of hours outside at the garden nursery this summer) and I whooped it up on my bachelorette Friday night. I watched “Mr. & Mrs. Murder” on Hulu and ate a thin crust pizza and went to bed late and left my socks on the living room floor and did ZERO KNITTING even though I have two projects that I’d planned on finishing in July.
I’m almost looking forward to having some band camp stories to tell later this month. I’m told the food is good but in my head this is how I picture myself.
Happy Friday! It’s sunny here in Michigan today but chilly, thanks to a northeast wind sweeping across Lake Huron out of Canada. We had to cover up our baby plants last night. We’ve had a couple of nice days, but I think we’re all more than ready for sustained warmer weather.
This week’s edition of recent pins is dedicated to a book genre I loved as a kid – the girl detective! A few of my favorites: Trixie Belden (I own the complete series), Nancy Drew (of course), Kay Tracey, and Meg Duncan. I think it’s interesting that the format for many of these stories included motherless (or fatherless) women (Trixie being the exception). Meg’s mother had passed, and her father had an ‘important government job’ and was frequently away from home. We know that Nancy’s mother had also passed, and her influential attorney father Carson Drew, while a strong figure in her life, relied heavily on his housekeeper Hannah and left Nancy to her own devices frequently. Kay Tracey had lost her father, and lived with her mother and her older brother Bill. Trixie, by comparison, was more relatable for the average reader – she was 13, had to do chores, had a family structure, and yet STILL managed to get into hijinks and mysterious, creepy situations. She was tomboyish and frequently felt less attractive than her chums Honey and Diana, which felt familiar to me. She rode the bus, wore jeans, hated math and sewing, wanted her own horse – no Mustang or roadster, no titian hair, no handsome boyfriend like Nancy or Kay.
Despite their different backgrounds and characters, these were all strong female role models in an age before we were regularly told “you can do and be anything you want”. The covers of these books are artwork in and of themselves – the illustrators usually did Trixie dirty but the Nancy and Kay Tracey covers are beautiful and dramatic. I’d love to have a few framed and hanging in my office.
For the most part, these books were written by ghostwriters under pseudonyms, sometimes several authors contributing to one pseudonym. This is an interesting article about Nancy’s creators (and if you’re interested, there’s a great book out there called ‘Girl Sleuth’ by Melanie Rehak). Trixie’s creators are harder to pin down. Julie Campbell wrote the first six books, and after that, Western House Publishing created the ‘Kathryn Kenny‘ pseudonym to continue the series. Kathryn Kenny was multiple authors, both male and female, and although I loved the entire original series, there are subtle changes in voice and characterizations as the books progressed.
I would have gone crazy for this cake at a certain age (umm, like 51)!
I liked paper dolls as a kid, even when I was too old to play with them. I vividly remember a rainy day, requesting my mom to make Trixie and Honey paper dolls for me and she complied, with an outfit or two each. I wish I’d saved them. I would have loved these.
And would it be immature or weird for a 50-something woman to carry a suitcase decoupaged with Nancy Drew covers and images? Nah, I don’t think so either.
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.
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!
*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)
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.
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…
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
Six Ten 