Tag: Houndstooth

Happy Thanksgiving!

I know some of you don’t live in the U.S., and not everyone in the U.S. celebrates this holiday.

In this particular year, Thanksgiving falls on November 25, which is recognized as the National Day of Mourning. This day isn’t new; it was established in 1970. Here’s a bit of info:

The United American Indians of New England (UAINE) created this holiday to publicize the democide and misrepresentation of Native Americans. The UANIE is a Native-led, self-supporting organization advocating for the recognition of struggles of Native Americans and political prisoners.

Now that everything has to be turned into a culture war, I’ve seen plenty of “the libs are trying to cancel Thanksgiving,” and “here comes the woke culture again” online. (Who or what benefits from stirring up grievances between people? Ratings? Viewers? Listeners? Readers? Membership drives? I always heed Watergate’s Deep Throat: Follow the money.)

I remember the narrative I was taught about the Pilgrims and the Indians, but I was a child. As I aged, that story changed like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Legend of Johnny Appleseed, and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. A holiday with a bit of accuracy in its origin evolved into a larger perspective of theme, recognition, or celebration.

Thanksgiving, of all the holidays, became my favorite. It was the time I was most likely to see family who didn’t live nearby. It was the time I’d be home from college and see not only family, but friends I missed. It was the holiday when I might have a little extra time to travel so I could enjoy my nieces and nephews. Even in school, or later when travel wasn’t an option, we could host friends in our home who might feel alone and far away from loved ones during Thanksgiving.

It’s a holiday without the stress of shopping and trying to find gifts on a limited budget that people may not want or need. A holiday when you’re not forced to be with people, sometimes true (IN MY EXPERIENCE, not necessarily yours) of Christmas and New Year’s Eve, for example but choose to be with them. It’s a holiday when we can derive from whatever stories we were taught these ideas: Sharing. Peace. Community.

I feel like the people who are complaining about woke-ness and cancel culture aren’t actually doing anything different at Thanksgiving from what they ever did. Still fighting and loving their families. Still eating too much and complaining about being stuffed. Still watching ballgames or sitting around telling stories about work and hunting and kids and grandkids and what happened in their own personal histories. Still enjoying a quiet day alone or with a significant other watching something on Netflix, reading a book, maybe taking a walk outside with the dog if the weather allows.

My hope for you is that you have something to be thankful for and a moment to reflect on that.


Timothy and Debby getting ready to eat.


Tom and I happy to have a clean house, full table, and family, friends, and dogs to love.

Saturday Silliness

Seriously, I rarely go looking for dolls, but sometimes it seems like they come looking for me. Like when this guy showed up unsummoned in my email. I took one look at the blonde mess on his head and decided he needed me. (You know he had an agenda when he dressed in that houndstooth vest and New Wave tie–how does that not scream, “SAVE ME!” to me specifically?)

I’ll put the rest of this foolishness behind a cut so you can see what I spent a bit of time doing when I was also managing serious dogsitting/relocating while workers were on the property.

Continue reading “Saturday Silliness”

Photo Friday, No. 781

Current Photo Friday theme: Sacred

A random collection of items from throughout my home, these aren’t all the cultural objects that are at Houndstooth Hall. They symbolize: birth, death, sacrifice, worship, religion, nature, animal totems, angels, magic, myth, music, art, the cosmos.

Many of them, along with those not pictured, represent what I hold most sacred: their givers, who have been my friends and family throughout my life.

Shuffling through Wednesday

There’s a lot of action at Houndstooth Hall on this Wednesday, and it will be noisy, so I may have to be gone for a while to preserve my sanity. Someone I follow on social media posted snippets from a meme. You’re supposed to shuffle your music library and write down the song that matches each category below. Pretty sure you can find all of these on YouTube if you’re curious about any you don’t recognize.

1 This song will play at your wedding
Beatles: If I Fell (wedding was long ago, but it’s perfect, because I have an entire unwritten novel’s love story based around this song, lol)

2 This song best describes how you die
Gregg Allman: These Days (apparently I’m going to die of guilt for how I mistreated a lost love)

3 This song will play at your funeral
Lenka: Trouble Is a Friend (trouble must have been TOO good a friend)

4 This song is your theme song
Taio Cruz: Dynamite (hell, yeah, I’m gonna rock this club, I’m gonna light it up like it’s dynamite)

5 This song will play when you think of someone you love
Mr. Mister: Broken Wings (this song always makes me think of Paul McCartney, and I DO love him; it’s true)

6 This song will play when you think of someone you dislike
The Alan Parsons Project: I Wouldn’t Want to Be Like You (damn, my iTunes library is psychic)

7 This song will play when you get something you want
Portugal. The Man: Feel It Still (hmm, the first time I ever heard this song, it played on a TV show while two girls were shoplifting)

8 Add “with a lighter and matches” to the end of this song
Gary Jules: Mad World (with a lighter and matches) (it works!)

9 This song best describes your week ahead
Don Henley: The Boys of Summer (don’t look back, you can never look back)

10 This song will make you fall asleep
Fleetwood Mac: Sara (possibly, but there are other likelier candidates)

Toasty

There was a floor furnace in the house on Twelfth Avenue my friends and I rented when we were undergraduates at Bama. I remember so many fall and winter days coming home from class, exhausted and cold, to sit or lie next to the grate of that furnace so I could get and stay warm. It was an old house with very little insulation and windows that often allowed cold air to whistle through their frames into the rooms.

Often, I’d fall asleep, and my feet would slip or relax and land on the furnace. The soles of my shoes would start to put off a scorched smell that woke me up before much harm was done.

I’m chilled today, though it’s not that cold outside, so I’m sleepy. Fortunately, our gas fireplace isn’t turned high enough to scorch my socks. I can barely keep my eyes open as I edit. Geez, I hope my novel isn’t boring.

All cats are grey

The reason for another coloring page is because I ended up giving myself a massive headache last night. I had dinner cooking when I decided to go back to Tim’s to give him his mail and have a chat of ten minutes or so to catch up after his return home from Maine.

Beware: long and winding story ahead.

Suddenly I realized 25 minutes had passed, but I wasn’t too worried because Tom was home. When I walked in the door, four dogs were freaking out (and one of them peed on the dog bed in the master bedroom), Tom was trying to shut off the smoke detector, and the house was full of smoke. Nothing from dinner was burned, but the mini meat loafs (loaves?) which I make in muffin pans (meat muffins?) had spilled grease into the bottom of the oven. Tom put a baking pan on the shelf below the muffin pan, which basically meant that meat grease was smoking on two surfaces. Thus the mayhem that followed.

Tom took the dogs to Aunt Debby’s so they’d stop freaking out about the noise from the smoke detector. He also detached the main smoke detector to shut it up. But the smell of burning grease was so overpowering that I lost my appetite. After Tom ate and did dishes, I threw the dog bed in the washing machine and set the oven to clean. If you don’t have a self-cleaning oven, at least a gas one, this means the temperature is so high that the door locks to prevent any injuries. And it basically turns anything on the interior surfaces to ashes. It takes three hours to complete the job.

The smell was by then giving me a headache, so I had four diffusers misting and four sticks of nag champa incense burning in different parts of the house. All the widows were open with fans blowing. When the oven finished cleaning, the dogs came home, the smoke detector was reattached, and everyone went to bed. Except I couldn’t sleep because of the headache, plus I could feel my blood sugar dropping because I didn’t eat. So first I got up and ate a snack and drank some water, then I tried again to sleep. Nope. So then I got up again, put the dog bed in the dryer, and took headache meds and drank more water, plus put the Wyndmere essential oil blend “Head Aide” on my pulse points. All that knocked me out, so SUCCESS.

I still had a residual headache when I woke up today, and my blood sugar was REALLY low. Drank some apple juice, ate some sweetened cereal, and wiped out the oven and cleaned the glass on the oven door and the stove surface. Afterward, I tried to write, but I couldn’t bear to look at the computer monitor, so I colored the rest of my headache away.

Then I thought I was cold, so I went to take a warm shower, but in the shower, I realized I wasn’t cold, I was shaking because my freaking blood sugar was too low again. So after the shower, I finally ate last night’s meal as a late lunch.

Everything’s normal now, and all you got was a long, boring story and a gray cat. The post title comes from The Cure song “All Cats Are Grey” (in the caves), but it’s also a Benjamin Franklin phrase, “All cats are gray in the dark.” So now you got some trivia, too (and I spelled “gray” both ways to satisfy everyone). You’re welcome.