Hard Clothes

I've actually worn "hard clothes" two days in a row, a pandemic first.

We went out yesterday to meet Kelly at the museum to look at an exhibition of Georgia O'Keefe and Henry Moore art. O'Keefe and Moore were contemporaries and some of their work overlaps thematically. Georgia O'Keefe spent decades in New Mexico mostly painting and drawing and Moore worked in England mainly making sculptures, so it's interesting to compare their work. I think it says something good that O'Keefe can go up against other iconic artists and emerge victorious (in my opinion). Not many women in the art world have the opportunity to do that. (Though it is like a comedian I saw recently remark on the white men who set certain world records: "Were you the first or were you one of the only ones who were allowed to?")

After viewing the exhibit, we went to a nearby tiny, independent grocers and Dave and I picked up some vegan green chile tamales, bok choi, Winesap apples, and quince, all local, all impulse purchases. 

About the quince: Every fall, I buy some quince and let them go bad so I can smell them. It's one of the few yearly rituals I engage in and it has its roots in my childhood. I grew up with a wizened old quince tree and I can clearly remember the smell of its fallen fruit rotting sweetly on the ground. That smell is one of the very distinct smells from my childhood and I try to recreate it every year, even though that tree is long gone and now I have to buy the quince from strangers. 

Last night I sewed for a bit, nothing major, just a small project I've been thinking about making for awhile. I finally just made it and it turned out okay. 

I was tired but couldn't sleep, finally managing to fall asleep around two-thirty--which was unfortunate because I had to be up at seven-thirty to make it to my optometrist appointment.

This morning I had an eye exam and I ordered a new pair of glasses with progressive vision lenses. I kept with the style I've been wearing for the last seven or so years, the retro 1950s browline style. I love how aggressively ugly they are. Shirley Jackson is often pictured in her later years wearing this style. (I just looked up when she died and she was only forty-eight years old when she died in 1965. Crazy, right? I wonder where her work would have gone if she had had another twenty years--or even ten. What a waste.) The glasses were really expensive--over $600--so hopefully the prescription works out. (My prescription is really difficult and my vision is such that it's basically not able to be corrected to 20/20 anymore. Lucky me.)

After my eye appointment, I came home and took a two-hour or so nap and woke up with my neck crunched up on the right side. It's never ending with my neck, with my sleep, with the whole thing, all of it.

Dave and I sat and had a quick snack of reduced-fat cheese doodles from Trader Joe's. We so rarely buy junk snacks like that so we tend to go a bit overboard on them when we do. It can be a problem, this snacking frenzy, so the bag of Trader Joe's junk food went up onto a high shelf in the closet in Dave's office and they will get slowly doled out in the coming weeks. (Some more slowly than others; It only took us two days to eat a package of eleven Trader Joe's Tim-Tam knock off cookies and a small bag of not very nice pizza-flavored Sardinian-style snacks. But never fear, there are still bags of mochi crackers, rice crackers and I forget what else, up in the closet.)

What else? My dental hygienist recommended the Netflix series Lupin to me, so I watched an episode and liked it. It's not something to fall asleep to (how I mainly use Netflix) as it's in French and is a thriller/mystery type show, but it is good. I'm also watching Pitch Perfect on repeat. It will be gone from Netflix on the 30th of this month, so I'm watching it every day basically, mostly putting it on in the background as I do other things. It's such a genial, easy to watch movie, dorky and fun. I like it.