Wednesday, May 06, 2020

working on things

I took today mostly off. Had my campus e-mail open for a while to answer questions (and there were a couple from one class about the exam tomorrow, but they were easily answered). Got a few things I'll need to grade coming in, but I can do that tomorrow while keeping my e-mail open in case anyone has problems with the exam.

I did run a couple errands - had to mail off a duplicate copy of a cookbook to a friend that I had offered it to. And I went to the Green Spray and was comforted to see the shelves fairly well-stocked: they had lots of flour (I bought another five pound bag of the unbleached bread flour) and milk and they had some meat (with signs limiting purchase amounts, but it was pretty much all giant family packs, and I didn't need meat anyway, so I didn't buy any). They had eggs and tp, neither of which I needed either, but I saw them there on the shelf. I bought some salad greens and will have a salad with dinner tonight.

The other part of my dinner is baked potatoes - after I complained about only getting "weird" blue potatoes in my produce box (I will have to figure out a recipe for this round of them), my friend Lynn sent me some REAL potatoes and I put the two smallest ones in the oven to bake, and I'm going to pull some of the frozen bacon out and fry it up and have sour cream and bacon and maybe cheese on the potatoes.

I'm working on a few things - I started trying to teach myself "Bethena" ("A Ragtime Waltz") by Scott Joplin on the piano. I'm only working on the first two pages (it is like six pages long, but bits of it repeat). It will amuse me if I come out of the lockdown being able to play this well, it would be really funny (in a nice way) to get my piano teacher back here and sit down and play this fairly complicated piece for her.

Someday I want to get a book of Joe Hisaishi's piano music - he is the composer who wrote a lot of the music for Studio Ghibli and I have been listening to some of it as background music on YouTube while I grade, and it's just....nice. As I said once before, it's kind of a hybrid of classical, quiet jazz, and New Age and it's pleasant and calming and I'd like to be able to play it. I found one on Amazon but I've spent SO MUCH this past six weeks that I just stuck it on my wishlist for the future. Either my brother and his family can get it for me for Christmas, or at some point this fall when I feel a bit more flush I can order it for myself.

I watched "Ponyo" the other night. I'd seen it a few times before but this time I was more struck by the parallels with the (Andersen, not Disney) version of The Little Mermaid - the whole "turn to sea foam" thing and the "can be saved by true love" thing (though it's left a bit ambiguous, I think, if the "true love" is brother-sister affection, or if there's the implication that Human!Ponyo will grow up to be Sosuke's love interest. (I like to think it's more of a sibling-love - Storge, or whatever the Greek word was; one thing I think is a flaw in a lot of Western popular culture is the implication that romantic love is the main love, or the only love worth celebrating)

I will say I can see one way in which current events have affected me - the storm, you know? Where the sea is angry because Ponyo wants to be a human girl? and Lisa and Sosuke have to drive home through it? It never bothered me that much before but this time I felt a fairly intense (and surprising) emotional discomfort watching it. (I've driven in bad rainstorms, where you can't see very well in front of your car, and it is nerve wracking, but that was long before the first time I ever saw the movie and it didn't bother me then)

I've been picking away at a few things - knitting on the hat, and I added a few rows to the grey cardigan while watching Ponyo (and now that I've found my place in it again, it will be easier to pick up again). And I'm still crocheting on the afghan which is the thing that appeals to me most to work on when I am tired or a little frazzled because there's no increasing or decreasing or keeping track of rows or length - it's just "do four double crochet, do two decreases, do four more double crochet, do two increases." And on, and on, and the colors slowly shift and there is something kind of soothing about it. (Maybe when I finish it the year of horrors will be over? I started this right after going up to my mom's after my dad passed away. Yes, I know: magical thinking. But it would be kind of lovely to hear, as I put the last stitch in, "There's a successful vaccine, all the pharmaceutical companies are gearing up to try to make seven billion doses." Heh. Maybe I need to crochet faster...)

I'm still planning to re-read the rest of the Chronicles of Prydain but after the crawling-out-through-the barrow scene I needed a break so I also started The Provincial Lady in Wartime. We'll see how I stick with THAT, I had to put it aside at some point last time I tried. (Is anyone else having problems "in these times" with books/movies/tv shows that are either scary, feature scenes of claustrophobia, bad storms, or violence? I mean, I had to quit watching Criminal Minds a long time back, and I can't watch the shows-set-in-hospitals any more....but I worry that what I CAN tolerate will get ever smaller and narrower. Or maybe this is just a temporary thing)

As I said, I spent a lot of money frivolously this month....I have a couple more things coming to me. Some staple items from Target (that's not so very frivolous; I need more corn oil and baking cocoa and Vitamin D supplement, and I also ordered five pounds of their house-brand whole wheat flour because you can't find it anywhere locally. I hope it's good. I have a vague plan to add some to a recipe I have where you make a pretty standard bread, but also add cinnamon and cardamom so it's good with various sweet spreads on it - not really a sweet bread, but one that's a little spiced. The original bread is all white flour but I think if I used 1/3 whole wheat and let it rise longer it should do fine. That might be a weekend project....)

I also ordered a Galarian Ponyta plushie. I do not play Pokemon but I like some of the creatures and I've watched the cartoon from time to time. This Ponyta is a pastel unicorn and when I first saw the character early this year I said "If they make a plushie of it, I have to get it" and the Pokemon center had them in stock this week....

I also ordered a Squishables hummingbird. I don't know why; it just appealed to me. It is a very round bird. A borb. And in fact, I might name him Borb (he has to be a "he," it is a ruby throat and it has the red throat patch only males have).

Part of it is, yeah, these are comfort objects to me (I ordered a pony - which I named Creamsicle because of his color - from Squishables earlier this month), part of it is I would like these businesses to keep on going (I ordered direct from Squishable, not through Amazon - Squishable.com has a better selection and they ship faster). Part of it is that it's mail that's not a bill or a charity solicitation. Mail gets very important these days. Or FedEx. Or UPS. Whoever is bringing the stuff.



I know some ink has been spilled about "getting back to our roots" or whatever the heck in all this but one thing that has reminded me of what I have read about earlier times (and experienced in my own childhood, back when it was typically "4-6 weeks to delivery" for most anything - and having to beg my mother to write a check to send off for what I wanted to buy with my pocket money (calling the place and using a credit card was not until later - at least not in my family)

I dunno. The mail being a big thing is maybe a good thing. And being grateful for getting what you need at the grocery store is a good thing. And not worrying so much about "productivity" is probably a good thing. But this is a really hard way to learn those lessons.

This weekend, maybe I try to do some sewing in between making bread.

3 comments:

Lynn said...

I agree with you about romantic vs sibling love. Nothing wrong with the former, obviously, but sibling love or friend love deserves equal representation. Several TV shows have been ruined for me when work partners whom I had always thought of as having a brother-sister-like relationship end up romantically involved.

Again, you are most welcome for the potatoes. It was fun sending them because it would be such a weird thing to do in normal times and because surprising people is always satisfying to me.

Roger Owen Green said...

I LOVE Ronny Howard in this!

Don said...

Until you can wrangle a book of Hisaishi's music, you might find it worthwhile to search Musescore.com for downloadable arrangements of his tunes. The quality and playability varies, but the best are very good.