18-Sept-99 Broadmoor
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We went to a few yard sales this morning and came back with three hanging plant brackets, one thingie that goes around the pipe to a radiator (steam heat here), a Springbok puzzle of a Winslow Homer painting, and two yards of African fabric. I finished cutting out four shirts on Thursday evening and bought interfacing and thread on Friday, and now I'll have to decide whether to cut out a fifth or start sewing on some or all of the first four.
What's that? Oh, “Nu? show us the fabric,” you say? Here --
That woodgrain effect must be a moire artifact of the scan. If I were going to put fabric scans on a commercial web page I'd have to find out how to get around that. For here, it'll do. Hmmph. Should have called the page Broadcloth and Broadmoor.
We were just on the fringe of hurricane Floyd here, but enough that a forty pound pine bough fell in our backyard. I cut it into chunks to bundle and put on the curb. After mowing the lawn, and let me tell you, that happens rarely enough in this backyard that it's worth noting, we went out to Mass Audubon's Broadmoor sanctuary in Sherborn. We used to go there often, because it was on the way to where Anne used to go horseback riding. We would drop her off for her lesson, go back to Broadmoor and walk a little, and come back to the stable to get her. She drove herself to the stable her last year of high school, and we only get out there a couple of times a year now. There's a beautiful new boardwalk running for about fifty yards along the edge of a marsh, with two areas pushed out from the main walkway where you can sit on a bench and look. You feel you're right in the heart of the marsh. A little further on you come to the older boardwalk right across the marsh. There wasn't much there execpt for a lot of mallards today. The loosestrife and water lilies have gone by, and the sun was getting low and the dragonflies weren't active by the time we got there. A little further on, through a small woods, you come out to an abandoned orchard with fields and scattered trees. A huge oak was the hub of the bird activity. There were probably twenty warblers up in it, in crick-in-the-neck territory in the top branches, and chickadees, titmice, and a nuthatch. I saw something in there that I think was a bluebird; it was backlit so I'm not sure of the color. We've seen several there before, so that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
We stopped at the tiny Bread and Circus in Wellesley Hills on the way home. They tried to fit into a small floor area by making the aisles narrow, and it's really hard to get through the store with a shopping cart. We thought it was an off hour, around six on a Saturday. We'll stick to one of the Newton B&C's.
We watched There's Something About Mary on HBO in the evening. We hadn't seen it before, and that should tip you off not to expect current movie reviews from me. Anne stopped over in the middle and watched some. She's seen it a couple of times before. The first time was a print dubbed into Russian. She says it's twice as funny in English. (PS, I'm editing this page a day later. It still hurts, thinking about that zipper scene.)
I've been getting off caffeine for Yom Kippur. It's never as bad as you might think not eating or drinking anything for 24 hours (even though it usually works out to 26 or 27 hours, really) except for the terrible headache I used to get for the entire afternoon. Something I read around eight years ago said that was caffeine withdrawal. I've been going off caffeine for the occasion every year since, and it sure makes a difference. It also makes me useless at work for most of the week before. I try to cut down gradually, half a mug in the morning and afternoon for a while, then half a cup, then just half a cup in the morning, and maybe no caffeine for the day or two before the fast. Maybe half a cup of tea tomorrow morning. I'll see.
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