Spring is slow to get going this year and I LOVE it. It’s been grey and cool and wet and gloomy and we even had snow not one morning, but two.
A few brave bulbs are starting to bloom:
These are possibly ‘Tête-à-tête’ daffodils (which my gardening journal says I planted under the horse chestnut last November 4), but I could be wrong.
I had a really busy week trying to get my office/studio/personal disaster zone prepared for Cam to use as a workspace when he and Anna move back on Easter weekend. I moved all the gift wrapping supplies (paper and fabric bags, ribbon, tags, cards) into the laundry room cupboards, inventoried my ridiculously extensive yarn stash (which is in one of the room’s closets), pulled apart and completely reorganised the bedlinens and blankets (which is in the second of the room’s closets), gathered together a huge pile of loose papers and magazines to sort through, and discovered a box of receipts from 2014 to toss out. What a mess. The years 2010 – 2016 were an extremely hectic time for me for a variety of reasons and this, I have accepted, is my time to do all the things I couldn’t get around to doing then.
Grateful to sit down every evening, I worked on the blue alpaca seed stitch cowl and started and mostly finished another toque for the stash while watching baseball. Before bed, I’ve been reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams and Flying Too High by Kerry Greenwood.
Tired today after a lazy week of watching quite a bit of curling (the Men’s World Curling Championships) while knitting (finished two toques), followed by an intense 20-hour visit from Anna and Cam, who brought almost all their stuff from PEI in preparation for their move back to Nova Scotia in a couple weeks. With the contents of their house scattered all over our house, it looks like this place has been picked up and shaken, but I’m so thrilled to get them back I couldn’t care less.
Completely unrelated photo I took of Canada Geese:
I didn’t just sit and knit, of course, much as I would love that. I cook six days a week (Foster cooks the seventh) and bake and clean bathrooms and do laundry and vacuum and dust and shop and pay bills and work in the garden and am continuously engaged in a losing battle against dishes and random stuff left on every flat surface. I thought housework would be a breeze once the kids were grown, but I was wrong. It’s easier, yes, but I can never get over what a mess things become if I dare to focus on something else for a day or two. It’s baffling.
A variety of birds like to sit in a tree right outside the west living room window, which is beside “my” spot on the couch, and they often seem to enjoy the company. This Blue Jay, for instance, sat watching me for at least an hour:
I’ve been pretty absorbed in We Solve Murders by Richard Osman and have been looking for new meal ideas in The Weekday Vegetarians by Jenny Rosenstrach. Shakespeare studies shall resume now that the curling has finished. Next up is A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
When the body of an unknown woman is found in her library, Dolly Bantry calls in her old friend Miss Marple for assistance. A classic.
Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie (1942)
Audiobook narrated by Hugh Fraser.
Poirot solves a 16-year-old murder case, exonerating the woman who died in prison after being found guilty of the crime. I thought the ‘five little pigs’ conceit was a bit forced, but I enjoyed it.
Marple: Expert on Wickedness by Mark Aldridge (2024)
A thorough examination of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple stories as well as tv and radio dramatizations and adaptations. A+ work. I looked forward to getting back to it every night.
Miss Marple and the Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie (1932)
aka The Thirteen Problems, aka The Tuesday Club Murders
The first 13 Miss Marple stories: The Tuesday Night Club, The Idol House of Astarte, Ingots of Gold, The Blood-Stained Pavement, Motive v. Opportunity, The Thumb Mark of St Peter, The Blue Geranium, The Companion, The Four Suspects, A Christmas Tragedy, The Herb of Death, The Affair at the Bungalow, Death by Drowning.
Very entertaining.
Three Blind Mice and Other Stories by Agatha Christie (1950)
The other stories are Strange Jest, Tape-Measure Murder, The Case of the Perfect Maid, The Case of the Caretaker, The Third-Floor Flat, The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, and The Love Detectives.
Lots of fun.
Undoctored by Adam Kay (2022)
I loved his This is Going to Hurtin November 2018 and I liked this one, too. Funny, horrifying, painfully honest.
Wild by Amy Jeffs (2022)
Poetic re-tellings of Old English, Welsh and Irish tales. Fewer wood engravings than her previous book, Storyland (which I liked a lot in June 2024), but I think I liked these texts even more.
We had one final little blast of winter last Wednesday and it was great.
By midday the snow was almost gone and I’m sad to think that might be it for another eight months. I live in the wrong place.
The yard was filled with birds all whooping it up and I watched a Blue Jay repeatedly dive face-first into the snow and wriggle and flap around in it, like Glen does on the couch when he’s hyped up.
These birds were more dignified:
Gardening activities are ramping up with every passing day. I sowed more peas, lettuce, chard, basil, tomatoes, calendula and strawflowers. I cut back raspberry canes, pulled weeds and started clearing away last year’s dead stalks. The bulbs are making progress, with tulip and daffodil leaves poking through and crocuses getting started:
Foster and I did our usual round of errands (farm market, Little Free Libraries, regular library, mail collection) and he scored two first edition Stephen King hardcovers from the early 90s. It isn’t every young man who’s willing to hang out with his mother when he could be doing something more exciting and I’m always grateful for his company.
MLB season started on Thursday and I’m ready for another few months of frustration and disappointment. Thanks to all the extra tv time, I finished the baby blanket for the gift stash and am three-quarters of the way through a toque, also destined to be packed away until someone needs a hat. My goal is to create a cache of items so that if I drop dead tomorrow, my survivors won’t have to worry about their source of knitted accessories for a long time. I have no fortune to leave, sadly, but I do have lots and lots of wool.
Aside from baseball, I watched a very good three-part series called Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator on PBS. The parallels to another orange-hued dictator-in-the-making were depressing. Will his peers stand up to him the way the Roman senators did? Doesn’t seem likely.
I’ve been reading Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood, Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz, Don’t Believe Everything You Think by Joseph Nguyen and The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell.
The thought stayed with me and then in November I found this at Value Village:
A sign, obviously.
So, on January 1, I duly began and have read some Shakespeare almost every day since. I am doing this purely for pleasure and will not try to say anything intelligent or insightful or scholarly about any of it. Just vibes, as everyone seems to say now.
Here’s what I’ve read to date:
1. The First Part of King Henry the Sixth
I truly enjoyed this and didn’t find it boring at all, as I had feared. Favourite quotation:
O, were mine eyeballs into bullets turn’d,
That I, in rage, might shoot them at your faces!
-Sir William Lucy, Act IV, scene vii
2. The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth
Another good one. Favourite quotation:
Could I come near your beauty with my nails,
I’ld set my ten commandments in your face.
-Duchess of Gloucester, Act I, scene iii
3. The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth
Fast-paced and full of horrible schemers, like the first two parts. There are several to choose from, but I think my favourite quotation from this one is:
Thou hast spoke too much already; get thee gone.
-Queen Margaret (to King Henry, hilariously), Act I, scene i
4. King Richard the Third
As much as I enjoyed all the backstabbing melodrama of the first three plays, I found it a bit much in this one. “Too nasty” is all I’ve written in my notebook about it.
5. Titus Andronicus
Roman general Titus Andronicus returns from a long war fighting the Goths and kicks off a seemingly endless series of unspeakably violent acts ruining the lives of everyone in sight.
Blech. Did not enjoy at all. “Grim and depressing,” I wrote at the time.
6. The Comedy of Errors
Twins, separated at birth, end up in the same city, where continual mistaken identities convince everyone they are mad.
It was silly, of course, but I liked it.
7. The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Two friends compete for the love of the same woman, even though one of them already has a fiancée. Creep.
Annoying, unlikeable characters. Not a favourite.
8. Love’s Labour’s Lost
Four young men fall in love with four young women and much flirty wordplay ensues.
Tiresome and tedious. The romance-y ones are definitely not my thing.
9. Romeo and Juliet
Two teenagers with bad judgement and no impulse control make unfortunate life choices. Actually, everyone in this is pretty terrible, come to think of it.
Fun when you can appreciate the ridiculousness of it all.
It’s been a quiet week – just the way I like ‘em – and, after a few unseasonably warm days, it has turned cooler again. If only it could stay this way. Evening walks with Glen have been a treat – chilly, damp, grey, bug-less. Just us and the four thousand gulls picking through the recently ploughed field.
There are no spring bulbs up yet, but they’re coming:
Merlin hasn’t detected any spring migrants yet, so it’s been all the usual suspects: American Crow, American Goldfinch, American Robin, Black-capped Chickadee, Black-headed Gull, Blue Jay, Canada Goose, Common Eider, Common Grackle, Common Raven, Gadwall, Hairy Woodpecker, House Sparrow, Killdeer, Mallard, Mourning Dove, Northern Cardinal, Northern Flicker, Red-winged Blackbird, Ring-billed Gull, Ring-necked Pheasant, Song Sparrow, Swamp Sparrow, White-breasted Nuthatch.
It hasn’t been a stellar photography week. Exhibit A:
In my defence, he was waddling away from me as quickly as he could.
Exhibit B:
Again, in my defence, this was taken through a wet window across a rainy yard.
Exhibit C:
I forgot I’d changed the camera setting the night before (after an unsuccessful look for the aurora) and snapped what could be an intriguing album cover.
Now that I’ve finished all of Foyle’s War, I’m on to Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries in the evenings and I am loving both the soundtrack and the costumes. I’d probably skip the feather boas, but otherwise I’d wear her wardrobe in a heartbeat. I’ve been reading Three Blind Mice and Other Stories by Agatha Christie, A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman, What Your Body Knows About Happiness by Janice Kaplan and The Bean Book by Steve Sando.
An exciting visit to the Little Free Library:
I am powerless in the face of those kitschy covers. These were both published in 1959.
I spent quite a while moving books around this week in my never-ending game of Musical Bookcases. It’s a good opportunity to weed some titles I’m no longer interested in, I tell myself, yet somehow everything always makes it back onto the shelves. In other hoarding news, I made some progress on my yarn stash inventory (I should be knitting 16 hours a day, seven days a week), and finally got all the tea together to make an intimidating wall o’ loose tea packages in the pantry. No more David’s Tea shopping for me for the foreseeable future.
For many years now, it’s been hard to see the point in blogging. No one visits, or, if they do, they don’t comment. I have persisted, half-heartedly, because I like the idea of recording things – books I’ve read, places I’ve gone, birds I’ve admired. I need to write things down or I forget.
To minimise what has long felt like wasted effort, I had taken to writing only two monthly summaries: one of what I’d read and the other of photos of anything that had captured my interest. Eventually, I dropped the ‘month in photos’ post, even though I enjoyed the opportunity to review the past month and pick favourites. Despite keeping a paper journal of everything I read, I could never quite give up on the book review posts, though, because the blog’s search function does come in handy sometimes.
Thanks to Feedly, I still keep up with about a hundred blogs, although the number dwindles every year. People get discouraged and give up, or switch to Patreon or Instagram or Substack (which pays actual Nazis to create newsletters, btw), or drop the personal (and, to me, more interesting) posts to focus on whatever bland content SEO demands.
I do enjoy the hardy bloggers who stick it out – like Lucy at Attic24, Julie at Little Cotton Rabbits, Barbara at Coastal Ripples and Pip at Meet Me at Mike’s – even though I am also guilty of not leaving comments. I guess it’s nosiness, but I love the glimpses into their daily lives. I like seeing what they’re interested in and what’s particularly trying to them at the moment and what they’re doing with their time. And every time I see them add another post I think again about how nice it would be to have years and years of detailed records of a life. How gratifying it would be to look back on.
Anyway, all this blah blah blah is me trying to remind myself that even if no one ever sees a thing I post, future-me would be grateful to current-me for taking the time to jot things down.
So, to keep it brief, this past week, I:
-celebrated Anna landing a permanent, full-time OT position only 20 minutes away (instead of the current six-hour drive to visit)
-started putting Merlin in the window again to listen to the birdies (no spring migrants yet)
-have been reading A Pelican at Blandings by Wodehouse, Undoctored by Adam Kay, Marple by Mark Aldridge, and listened to The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie
-sowed Brandywine, Sweet 100, SunGold and Roma tomatoes, as well as Bright Lights chard, Sugar Ann bush pea, Grand Rapids lettuce and basil
-tidied all the seeds and potting stuff
-cleaned out and reorganised all the pantry shelves
-opened all the windows because it’s been unseasonably warm for mid-March
-watched Blue Jays spring training baseball
-went to the farm market for fruit and veg
-scored a couple old music books at the local Little Free Libraries
-cooked a gigantic pot of chickpeas to freeze (but have since used four jars so so much for a huge freezer stash)
-worked on the never-ending blue alpaca lace wrap and a very chunky baby blanket (nothing exciting – just using up stash)
Short, autobiographical tidbits sprinkled amidst an extremely detailed analysis of the 2003 Gwyneth Paltrow movie View from the Top. I haven’t seen the movie, but it sounds terrible. The book is a bit strange at times, but really funny.
A Deadly Affair: Unexpected Love Stories from the Queen of Mystery by Agatha Christie
Audiobook narrated by Judith Boyd, Hugh Fraser, Joan Hickson and David Suchet.
A collection of Christie’s short stories. Not as gripping as her novels, but still enjoyable.
Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (2024)
Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters in 412 BCE Syracuse, decide to put on the play Medea starring Athenian prisoners-of-war being starved to death in a quarry.
It won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, which surprises me because I found it terribly sad. Creative and well-written, for sure, but definitely sad.
Howards End by EM Forster (1910)
I was inspired to finally read this after watching an excellent adaptation on PBS at Christmas time. After the briefest of romances between young Helen Schlegel and Paul Wilcox falls apart, Helen’s sister Margaret befriends Paul’s ill mother, Ruth. After Ruth’s death, the Schlegel and Wilcox families continue to grow closer, despite their very different approaches to life.
I enjoyed it, but it was a bit slow at times.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (1926)
Audiobook narrated by Hugh Fraser.
Poirot is drawn out of his rural retirement, and the growing of vegetable marrows, to solve another murder. I’ve read this so many times I practically have it memorised, but I still love it. Pure comfort reading.
Normal Rules Don’t Apply by Kate Atkinson (2023)
Audiobook narrated by Paterson Joseph.
A collection of interconnected stories, all a bit eerie, creepy, unsettling and sad. It was good, like everything Atkinson writes, but I’m not sure I’ll be recommending it as heartily as Life After Life and A God in Ruins.
You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith (2023)
A collection of short – sometimes very short – pieces about her marriage breakdown, drawn-out divorce, the ugly aftermath and development of a new normal with her children. She writes of her husband’s disdain for her writing career so her success must be absolutely delicious. I am delighted for her.
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