Friday, December 31, 2021

2021 :: we won't be sad to see you go

a blue-toned photo from each month of 2021 and a selfie that seems to fit the messy hair and the hoodie and sweatpants that were so prevalent this year. 

a selection of 2021's creative output. it came in fits and starts. weaving, cooking, stitching, quilting, lino prints, baking, gardening and dyeing. need more creativity in 2022.


and no year would be complete without the cats and the kittens. we said goodbye to our sweet freya (bottom right) when she got hit by a car. but everyone else is just fine. 

omicron is raging, and betty white died on the last day of 2021, sealing its spot on the worst year ever lists, but let's still hope that 2022 will be better. happy new year, one and all. 

Tuesday, December 14, 2021

home for christmas


three flights, one missing bag, nearly 24 hours of travel later and our peeks is home for christmas. bob is so happy to see her and we totally get him. i took the day off to make The Soup, vacuum and secure all her favorite snacks. her good friend, who wants to spend christmas with us(!) came along to the airport to pick her up. husband met us there between meetings. then us three girls came home to snuggle up with the kittens on the couch and watch christmas movies (love actually was first up). aside: dang, it does not age well, and yet remains weirdly charming. i have a quite a lot of work to do up to christmas, but the whole week off between christmas and new year's and i'm looking forward to making good food, playing loads of cards and board games, building a big lego set (i still have a couple stashed away) and having lots of good conversations. now, just to make it through the next ten days of work. 

Tuesday, December 07, 2021

dad's birthday


today would have been dad's 88th birthday. in this picture, he looks remarkably like jonathan franzen. i wonder if that's why i've always liked jonathan franzen. i look at this picture and i find myself wondering who he was then? it must be from the late 70s, as i know it's from our house in town. i was probably 10, which would have made him 44. who was he at 44? he was in the state legislature. he owned and operated a weekly newspaper. he golfed with his buddies on wednesdays. he was a husband and a dad of two daughters. but who WAS he really? can we ever really KNOW our parents? we see them so differently from our child's perspective. can we ever access who they were? 

it's a weird thing to ponder, because at the same time as we have no idea, who we are is so utterly formed by them. what do i remember of those days? i remember that making him laugh was the goal. that was always the goal. i definitely still do that today, sometimes to my detriment, as always going for the laugh isn't always appropriate. but i still have a deep need to do so. 

i find it hard to go back to the child me, to remember what i thought and how i saw my dad. 

but today, on his birthday, i miss him. i think i write this every year, but i would so much love to talk to him about the state of the world - about trumpty dumpty and climate change and roe v. wade and the rest of it. i don't think he was one to make it all ok for me, but his perspective would always make me think about it in a different way and well, despair less. i miss him. a little bit every day, but especially on his birthday.