Tag: cups

Starry Wednesday


The Starry Night, Vincent Van Gogh. This painting is in the public domain.

Following up on my recent Button Sunday post, sometime in 2019, maybe 2020, I was thinking of Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, one of my favorite paintings, though I admit to a soft spot for all of Van Gogh’s work. When I went searching for it online, just to look at it again, I stumbled across a digital painting by Alex Ruiz that blew me away.

During the summer after (my) fifth grade, our parents sent Debby and me to camp for a week. Debby’s a few years older, and that did NOT fit in with a teenager’s view of how she wanted her summer to be. She hated camp (her word). I don’t remember much about it, but I do remember this. At least one night, everyone went outside and lay in the grass staring up at the sky. This was in rural North Carolina, no light pollution, and I was mesmerized in a way I never had been. I finally asked someone older, maybe a counselor, “What IS that?” and was told I was seeing the Milky Way. Had never heard of it, didn’t know what it meant, but I knew I’d never forget it, and I never have.


©Alex Ruiz, 2011
When I saw Alex Ruiz’s Starry Night, I returned to that magic moment and eleven-year-old me. Alex created it from roughly Van Gogh’s same location as an homage to the artist. Van Gogh is the person in the painting, and this is what Alex imagines he saw that inspired his “Starry Night.”

Ever since, I’ve used that image as a place I mentally go when I have insomnia: Ruiz’s meadow, the breathtaking sky, and Van Gogh in a field of flowers soaking in beauty and inspiration. Though I haven’t written it yet, when the Neverending Saga nears the last novel, I already know the chapter Van Gogh and Ruiz have inspired. It may be a while before I get there, but it’s a transcendent moment of kindness and love and a splendid night sky.

I have a print of Ruiz’s digital art hanging in the writing sanctuary. It makes a good companion to a print Debby gave me at Christmas.


©Ravens of the Night, WingsDomain Art, Photography Canvas Print, 2010

Finally, below is one of a set of four different Van Gogh-inspired cups that I think Tom’s parents gave us for Christmas one year. I’ve photographed it with today’s writing playlist.


Natalie Imbruglia, Left of the Middle; Joe Jackson, The Millennium Collection; Etta James, Mystery Lady: Songs of Billie Holiday; Jewel, Pieces of You and Spirit.

May you find beauty and inspiration wherever you look.

Music and dogs

Friday’s writing required a lot of research. In terms of setting, it’s much easier for me to make up a town, and if I use actual places, for those to be places I know or at least have visited. Throwing my characters into places across the US and Europe–and Australia, for that matter–where I’ve never been is an interesting challenge. I know I can’t possibly get it all right, particularly when it includes decades before I was born. But I want to get it as right as I can and seek accuracy from others when I complete this saga.

Sometimes I’d like to listen to that inner voice that whispers, WHY does it matter? Who’s going to care? Who’s even going to read it? But listening to that inner voice makes me wonder why I’m doing any of this, and the wiser part of me knows it’s because I have to. Or I choose to have to. This iteration of stories about these characters has provided something for me since 2019, and at (almost) six books in, I wouldn’t be giving up something I don’t like doing or am tired of. I’d be giving up something I love.

Here’s the music that played while this mental stew of quit/neverquit bubbled, spilled over, made messes, got a few more ingredients and water from my tears added, and kept trying to escape a cauldron I call “1974.”


The Grass Roots, Let’s Live For Today; Greatest Hits, Volume One; Greatest Hits, Volume Two; and Anthology 1965-1975, two disks; Green Day, Insomniac (I have no idea where this came from); and Greta Van Fleet, From The Fires and The Battle At Garden’s Gate.

For those who have zero interest in my tunes-to-write-to, here are some other photos. Because if you have a soul, you either love dogs or you love photos of them.


Eva and Delta in front of the fire. Amusing for them to be together, as they consider themselves competition for the crown.


Delta. Always so much to think about.


Jack and Delta. Those faces. It must have been closing in on dinner time, the way they are watching me.


I envy Anime’s ability to sleep in a variety of places and positions all over the Hall.

Since I’m putting this post together in the wee hours of Saturday morning, I’ll try to follow her example and sleep.

Happy Saturday!

ETA: Much later Saturday morning, after seven hours of sleep, a shower, outside dog time, and mopping the library floor, I’m back at work, tunes ready for playing, with my brunch sitting next to me. Since my muse characters are gathered in London (at the Savoy–swanky!), I chose my Abbey Road cup for my coffee today.

Cup gift of Timmy and Paul from a London trip they took.

Tiny Tuesday!

Yesterday, I got my best writing done before noon, without any music, because I had to stay laser-focused since I knew I had to leave the house at twelve. By the time I got home mid-afternoon, I was tired and drained*, though I did work a little bit more in the evening before I had to call it a night.

So this morning, I took a suggestion from the book that launched Tiny Tuesdays in the first place.

It wasn’t quite as glorious as it looks with the Instagram filter, and it was more brunch than breakfast (because I have to wait at least an hour to eat or have any dairy products after my first meds of the day, I usually forget to eat and end up doubling up breakfast/lunch, then have a snack mid-afternoon to tide me over until dinner). One egg that was supposed to be over-easy, but I broke the yolk so ended up scrambling it, a mini bagel with cream cheese, a small apple, two strips of bacon (halved so I could fit them in my favorite small frying pan), with coffee, water, and a wee glass of orange juice.

This is the music from yesterday. I have more Fleetwood Mac, but there were a lot of repeats found on the CDs I’d previously listened to, so I finally moved on to the “G”s. Who’s up next, I wonder? (For part of it, my timing is perfect, because Tom is working in the office today. He wasn’t at all excited about maybe having to hear one of my favorite bands from my early teens. He doesn’t mind when my iTunes shuffles them in an occasional song at a time, but entire CDs in one sitting are a nope for him. 😂)


Fleetwood Mac, Behind the Mask and The Dance; Peter Gabriel, US.

ETA: *I’d forgotten to put a note about one reason I was drained. Too much news. I get so exhausted by our national news when I see news from other parts of the world–like southern Turkey and northern Syria right now, dealing with the devastation and loss of life from earthquakes. So many parts of the world have to cope with those things when they are already reeling from humanitarian crises. Here, we have so much and often give so much, at home and abroad, but we behave so deplorably toward one another within our borders. Even bringing these things up publicly, one runs the risk of accusations of performative politics, being “woke,” being a sheep and a “libtard.” If that’s what compassion and hope and the occasional plea for awareness, kindness, and education are, I reckon I’m guilty.

Intentions

Today is a New Moon solar eclipse–happening in Houston mid-afternoon, around 3:30, I think? It likely won’t be visible to North America or the UK, but there will surely be online videos of it from other parts of the world.

This is the second New Moon of April, the Black Moon. Every day, we’re offered celestial gifts from the heavens with the stars, planets, comets, moons (and the litter humans are leaving there, as Lynne reminded me the other day). Now and then, however, we seem to get a special treat, a reason to say thank you for the abundance of good things.


I woke up determined to make the most of the day in ways that feed my soul. It actually began with feeding my body a breakfast using a tiny portion of the leftovers from our friend Steve R’s birthday cake we had on April 28. His last birthday was in 1992, and though he was in the hospital, other friends joined us to fill the room with laughter, stories, cake, balloons, cards, and joy. He died a couple of months later, and the following year, I knew I’d rather relive the joy of his birthday than the pain of his loss, and we’ve been doing this–always with some version of chocolate, because that’s what he loved–every year since 1993. The number and variety of friends, family, and colleagues joining us through the years has been exactly what Steve would have wanted: inclusive, a reminder that love never dies, and there is always a reason to celebrate.

Lovely as that is, since I was involved, kitchen mishaps were fated. On Wednesday night, I decided to put the recipe and a box of cocoa on the kitchen counter so I’d remember when I woke up on Thursday that I intended to bake a chocolate pound cake. This is one of the few cakes I make completely from scratch, using the recipe we were given in Home Ec when I was fifteen. Now mind you, there are certainly other chocolate pound cake recipes–in fact, Lynne has one from her Aunt Lil that’s fabulous. But this one is pretty mistake-proof for me after all these years. Or so I believed.

First up, I couldn’t find the recipe. This caused me to go through my three little recipe boxes (two are mine because I outgrew the first one; one was my mother’s). No recipe, but the effort did lead me to get those things organized during my frantic second attempt to find it. For a brief moment, I considered texting Lynne–she had the same home ec class, and for all I know, she still has HER old recipe box–then I looked at the clock and knew that was a bad idea.

I finally found it clipped with my most-often-used recipes that I keep more accessible. Why chocolate pound cake was included, I have NO idea. I don’t even make one a year. But whatever. Panic managed.

The next day, I realized I didn’t have one of the ingredients I needed. I checked online for a good substitute and worked through it, but it was chaotic. Bowls, measuring spoons, and cups everywhere; flour and cocoa powdering the counters; and for some reason, my mixer was NOT blending butter and sugar into a creamy texture and kept spitting bits of butter out of the bowl. Fortunately, adding eggs taught that mixer and its mixture a lesson.

There was also vanilla extract in that part of the batter, so let’s pause to discuss challenges that come with age and a…quirky…immune system. When I took the cap off the bottle of vanilla extract, I realized it was new. It had one of those white seals on it that has a little plastic tab that you pull and the seal comes off. IN THEORY. When you have arthritis-weakened fingers, it’s not always easy. Tom wasn’t home in that moment, so I finally improvised by getting a pair of pliers to pull the tab. It STILL wouldn’t cooperate, so I stabbed it to death with a paring knife.

My kitchen looked like some cartoon character threw in a stick of dynamite. Dynamite. Knives. Explosions of flour and cocoa. BAKING IS VIOLENT.


Finally, this lovely batter was in the oven. I cleaned up the scene of the crime(s), and the timer was set, so all should have been peaceful. I went back to my manuscript and was on a flight from NYC to Atlanta when I smelled… something burning? Was a fictitious engine on fire? I don’t write those kinds of novels. Was it…THE CAKE? How was that possible? THE TIMER WAS SET. It was nowhere near time for it to be finished baking, much less burning.

I rushed to the kitchen and opened the oven door to find the batter had overflowed and was landing on the floor of the oven to burn and smoke. Fortunately, Tom was now back at his desk and working, so he hurried the dogs outside before the smoke detectors began to shriek. That shrieking triggers more dog drama than you’d see in a performance of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (which I’ve only seen small clips from, so for all I know, that’s a lousy analogy).

Out came the cake. Out came the racks dripping with batter. Got those cleaned. Trimmed the over-baked edges from the batter and off the sides of my baking dish. Got the bottom of the oven cleaned. Had the kitchen window open, the exhaust fan over the oven on high, and my kitchen fan blowing smoke away from the smoke detectors, which never went off, thank goodness. Once everything was clean, I put the cake back in the oven to finish baking and hoped for the best as I set the timer at five-minute intervals to cause myself maximum beeping annoyance.


It turned out fine according to the Houndstooth Hall humans and was served with fresh strawberries, thawed frozen strawberries in juice, whipped cream, and vanilla ice cream.

What was this post originally about?


New Moons are a good time to set intentions, so I began today with my own kind of ritual. On a happy visit to Body Mind and Soul earlier in the week (that reminds me, today is INDEPENDENT Bookstore Day, support your local booksellers, of which BM&S is one), I got a new Focus blend for the Writing Sanctuary’s Mr. Mister. An amethyst heart and an aquamarine are on this nice little incense burner, looked over by a striking amazonite point, all new and lovely finds at BM&S. I’m prepared for a good day of writing.

Apparently, today, a gnat’s intention was to drown in coffee. He succeeded, and I traded my coffee cup in for lemonade in a bottle with a gnat-defying cap.

Except Tom must have known my original intention was to imbibe coffee, so he came home from his regular Saturday volunteering gig with this surprise for me.

I’m gonna have a good day. And now that you’ve been treated to a sight of your daily cow, I hope you are, too!

Button Sunday


This button from my personal collection I first shared on here in 2012. I don’t know where I got it.

I might have said before that though “Dr. Seuss” began publishing children’s books in my lifetime, I never read any of them that I recall until I was a young teenager and Lynne introduced me to them. It’s funny, because The Cat in the Hat was written by Theodor Seuss Geisel at the request of a publisher after there was public grumbling about how the Dick and Jane books children were reading in school didn’t encourage them to want to keep reading more books.

I was one of those children who read Dick and Jane books in school even after the Dr. Seuss books appeared, and while maybe they weren’t riveting characters or stories, I was thrilled any time I could read anything. Everyone in my family read, and it was frustrating for me that I couldn’t. I think I didn’t realize that everyone has to learn to read. I wanted to be able to do what David (eight years older) and Debby (five years older) did.


In 2013, I first posted about this mug gifted with hot chocolate from Debby and commented on how it made me think of The Cat in the Hat. It still does, but the other day when I pulled it down, it also made me think of Eddie Van Halen backstage at a 1981 concert (especially because of the green shoes).


But hey, Elton John sported the look in 1972, which predated my own socks, seen below, hanging behind our Charlie Brown tree in the Tuscaloosa house on Twelfth Avenue when I was a college sophomore.

Not to be overlooked are these sock dresses I made for my Top Models.

Our lives are full of recurring themes and patterns, and apparently in my case, the appeal of red and white stripes.

Mood: Monday

Goooood morning! Today, February 7, happens to be National Send a Card to a Friend Day. This is a chance to tell a friend hello, or what they mean to you, or maybe remind them of a funny memory you share. But do this NOT NOT NOT in an email or a text message or on social media. Use honest-to-goodness snail mail that will be delivered to them in a few days.

Some of you do this anyway, so maybe on this day, pick a friend who isn’t on your usual list.

Perhaps as you drink your coffee, tea, water, or apéritif of choice, you can make a card, buy a card, or use one of those cards that comes to you free in the mail from some charitable organization. Write your message, address it, put a stamp on it, and mail it. Yes, it takes a few minutes, but show a friend he or she is worth those minutes. It’ll lift your mood today and also that person’s mood when the mail arrives.