Save the Best Miscellaneous Crap

May 12:

How has it been eight days since I had anything to say here? What has happened in those eight days? From what I can recall: I had physical therapy. I went up to the studio for a very abbreviated period of time. I ate pizza twice. I did a lot of embroidery. Dave put in most of the garden and planted several planters on the patio.  Dave got a job. 

The last is the biggest news of all, of course. He started this week and it's back to the grind for him.

May 16:

Sigh.

Spring is in full swing these days. It's still cool at night, dropping into the 50s at night and rising up into the 80s during the day. Allergies have shifted from the fatigue-causing kind to the congestion causing time. Yesterday I had to take some Benadryl after our little bumblecat brought in a load of pollen and rubbed it all over me. 

As always, I'm not sleeping well. I tend to wake throughout the night, every sixty to ninety minutes. I asked David to download onto my phone the sleep app he uses on his phone to track his sleep and last night I used it for the first time. I'm not sure how to feel about sleep tracking apps. I want to see some data, but I kinda don't want to know, you know? It seemed to work okay (until the cat came and lay on top of my phone, which I think may have skewed things a bit). The app says I spent 45% of my time in deep sleep. I had a lot of dreams last night, too, about swimming, about some of the staff I used to work with. So I am not a particularly light sleeper, but something is still waking me up throughout the night. I'm going to request a sleep study from my PCP to see if I've got sleep apnea. That would suck because it would mean a CPAP and, ugh. I don't keep regular hours (don't want to either; I love my quiet night hours) and machines like that almost force you to if you want to use them successfully.

While I'm not sleeping, I've been doing some embroidery, mostly tea towels. I am running low on embroidery floss, so I ordered more online. I may start embroidering some quilt blocks for my grandmother quilt (which has been stalled for a month or more). My grandmother embroidered through the end of her life. It's funny, I don't think I ever saw her embroidering, but she had a collection of pillowcases and towels that she had embroidered, so she must have spent some time at it in her quiet hours, just as I do now.

I was Marco Polo-ing with Grace the other morning and I happened to mention an artist who collects the many, many embroidered and hand sewn things that legions of now anonymous women made over the course of their lifetimes. Many of those things were too beautiful to use, or so the makers thought, so they were put away and never used. Now the artist collects them (people find and send them to her or they send her things their mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers made) and she uses them to make new art. She says of those unused things: They saved their best for never. 

We all do it to some extent, have the wonderful jewelry tucked away or the beautiful dress hanging at the back of the closet that we never wear. We have a set of dishes for everyday and one for company and we never use the company dishes because they're too good for everyday. We who make, make beautiful things and tuck them away. Why?

I'm reading the blog of an American woman who married a Japanese man and who has lived in Japan for all her adult life. A few years back, her friend asked for help clearing out her mother-in-law's house. They found drawers and drawers of kimono and obi (the mother-in-law) had rarely, if ever, worn Western style clothes. Kimono are very expensive garments. Even to rent one for the day (for a special ceremony, for example) can run into hundreds or even thousands of dollars, so the blogger estimates that tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of beautiful kimono went into the garbage or to a resale shop.  Is that an example of what happens with our best? 

Why don't we use our best and beautiful things now? Use it all up.

I think I may be less guilty of "saving the best for never" than some, as our tiny casita doesn't give us the space to collect very much. But I am guilty of this with some things, like jewelry. I have jewelry (particularly earrings) that I've never worn partly because I don't wear jewelry much anyway and partly because while I was in school and not allowed to wear earrings, my piercings closed up and I have to go get them re-pierced, a non-necessary task in a pandemic. And I am guilty of this with fabric. Certainly I have some fabric that I never use because no project is "good enough." I am guilty of this with lipstick. I have a huge collection of red lipsticks that I don't use because when do I need to wear red lipstick (and now with masks, why wear lipstick at all?). I have shoes that I don't wear because they are special, like the expensive (for me) Blundstone boots I bought a couple of years ago. I love them and I never wear them. Why?

This morning:

This morning I'm headed up to Judi's to help Dave clean up and move things back down to the casita. He's been up at Judi's for the last couple of weeks taking care of Buzz while Judi has been on vacation with her friends in California. It's been a slog for both of us, having Dave up there. It's been especially sloggy for him because he started his new job this week, so he's been working all day around taking care of Buzz. We have still been getting together for dinner every night, so that's good, though it means a drive across town and back. 

We're slowly starting to eat more takeout, too. (We had been so good about cooking, too.) This past week, we had Korean food one night (bibimbap and kimchee pancakes) and takeout pizza another night. We went out for pastry for lunch yesterday (Dave had to take bread to dinner with his mom and sister, so we got bread and a savory pastry (a mushroom and parmesan something or other) to share and one each of a sweet pastry to split (a kouign-amann for Dave and something called a Boston cream cruffin for me).

In the afternoon, I nursed a blinding headache for several hours, probably unrelated to the amount of sugar we had eaten earlier.

What else is going on besides gluttony?

I'm still binging The Blacklist. I'm still nursing a pinched nerve in my neck. I'm still going to physical therapy for same. I'm still loving the hummingbirds who come daily to the feeder outside our door.