All Purls. No Swine.
Argh. It's setting up to be one of those days, and it's barely even light outside. Here's an oldie but goodie reflecting the situation this morning at Chateau Right: Dear Spectacles, I’m giving you fair warning here: I’ve had enough. Enough of your silly games. Enough of listening to you snicker as I stumble blindly… Continue reading An Open Letter To My Spectacles–2023 Edition
January 12, 2023 is this year's "Kiss a Ginger Day!" No sense letting Prince Harry have all the fun, so I think I'll throw my hat into the ring with a post originally published on the member feed on Ricochet, six years ago today, on January 12, 2017. Tempus fugit, as they say....(If you're a… Continue reading Growing Up Ginger, 2023
Today, September 22, 2022, is the first day of Autumn: Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the… Continue reading To Autumn, 2022
About a week ago, I made an executive decision: Come this next Sunday, I’m sending almost all of my sheep to the auction. All that is, except: Dizzabel, the tiny lamb who entered my life last January when I discovered her, down the bottom of the field, in the snow, crying, at about 10PM when… Continue reading Changes: Down Here on the Farm
To be perfectly clear from the outset, I've been living in a construction zone since 1986, the year the late Mr. Right and I moved out to the country and started on our house. Large swaths of the drywall were never painted. Much finishing was left undone. Doors have been missing. Floors were, in some… Continue reading Feeling Grateful, Blessed, and Very–Very–Clean
It happened to me last week during a conversation with my darling Auntie Pat. (Ninety-nine next month; may she live forever.) I’d phoned her up, and after a false start in which she may have been holding the phone upside down and speaking into the earpiece (shades of my dad in the months before he died;… Continue reading That Moment When You Realize You’re Old
I’m proud of my country. Not in the Michelle Obama “first time” sense, but one which, for once, I’m comfortable “sharing” (as the abominable Markle might put it.) My Lord. So many flag wavers. You’d think the country had turned “American” all of a sudden. Loved it, from the Horse Guards, to the Trooping the… Continue reading A Very Un-British Feeling
Full disclosure: I'm 67 years old. This upcoming September (2022), I'll be 68. No point pretending otherwise. No point writing posts either celebrating--or bemoaning--my "hotness" in a previous life about half-a-century ago (so I'll spare you the bikini-beach-babe pic, unless you're really determined to view it, in which case knock yourself out). Things are what… Continue reading Semper Fi! My Marine Corps Tulips. And Some Other Stuff As Well.
I am the grandmother of an eight-year-old girl. Technically, she is my step-granddaughter, though the distinction makes no difference, I assure you. Her mother is my stepdaughter and beloved friend. Her first few years have not been idyllic. And she’s had to learn to be a little tougher than I would like, a little earlier than I would… Continue reading My “Feminist” Fever Dream
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.”–Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace Augusta Ada Byron (she was the poet’s only legitimate child) was born a little over two-hundred-six years ago, on December 10, 1815. She was a few weeks shy… Continue reading The Analytical Engine: “Dad” Edition