Wednesday morning random

* I don't know if it's my brain decompressing, or hormones, or what, but I've been having very intense dreams. Not nightmares per se, but lots of stuff crammed into the dream, lots of stuff to process, and sometimes a real feeling of claustrophobia or not-quite-panic (e.g.: almost missing an important flight somewhere)

I don't like it. It frequently happens during exam week which makes me wonder if it's some kind of decompression after the semester.

* Monday night was the CWF Christmas party. It was...subdued. That's the best word for it. We've lost a couple people in the past few years (deaths or moving away) and this year, a couple of people who might have been there, weren't (illness, or in one case, a woman was with her husband in OKC because he was getting chemo). There weren't many of us. And ironically? We do it as a potluck where one person volunteers to bring a main dish (something kind of like ropa vieja this year) and everyone else brings sides or desserts. We had no desserts this year - I brought Harvard beets, a couple people brought corn dishes, there were green beans, there were a couple of starches (potato dishes and a rice dish) and there were rolls.

(Confession: I was slightly disappointed. I don't get "different" desserts often and I look forward to it. Even though the last time I had banana pudding it made me a little sick because apparently I am allergic to bananas now).

It was quiet. I remember the years when one of our older members was well enough and she had it at her house and there were maybe 20 of us, and we sang and laughed and ate and also did a white-elephant gift exchange, which, while it was time-consuming and you often went home with a fairly useless item, was good for some laughs.

This year we just had a short business meeting, wrote our checks for the Crisis Center (we decided instead of exchanging gifts to give money to the local "women's and children's shelter" (meaning: women escaping abuse, sometimes with their kids) so they could provide Christmas for the people staying there. And sadly, we've been told the use of the shelter goes up during December....I guess for a lot of people the holidays are stressful and it comes out in a bad way. They're always very grateful for the help we give, and one of our members is on the board, so she knows the work they do.

Also, we talked about the local homeless population (this was also something we talked about at AAUW). There is not a homeless shelter in our county, and there really needs to be. But until a few years ago, the city leadership denied there even WERE homeless people in town, something most of the residents raised their eyebrows at.

On cold nights, the local library - which has a large atrium type area where cots can be set up - opens its doors to anyone needing a place to be in out of the cold. They also apparently have someone who distributes donated food (and there are a couple microwaves people can use to heat stuff up). And another person who has arranged to collect and distribute donated winter wear. While this is a good first step, really, we need a dedicated shelter here, preferably one with separate wings where families can stay together, and places for solo women and solo men. And that provides some kind of support in the form of counseling when needed or help so maybe some people can find work and, hopefully, eventually stop being homeless.

But yeah, like so many other things in my area: it will take a core of dedicated volunteers who can raise money either from people or corporations or maybe some of the big charities. And I don't know of a building that would work....I do know there are code-issues when you start to talk about things like homeless shelters and a lot of the empty buildings in town are empty because they're not up to code.

Also, a shelter would probably have to be near the downtown somewhere - if you put it too far out of the center of town (where the people who do have some kind of work are working) or where it's hard to get to if you don't have a vehicle, people won't use it. Though again, I'm not sure some people want the problem to be that "visible," though I will say, as someone who is often out early in the morning, right after sunup: it's visible to me, because I see people walking along with their sleeping bags and big rucksacks and you kind of have to guess they're not camping voluntarily....

But yeah. It's just one of those things that kind of stinks about how things go. I suppose the city is perhaps a bit unwilling to face the problem because (a) they'd really rather see the homeless people move on to somewhere else and (b) they want to try to make us look more prosperous than we really are.

* I finished the knitting on Grasse Matinee last night but I still need to weave in the ends, and I also need to block it, most likely: it looks like the hems want to roll. Since this IS sock yarn, I might try a short cold machine wash on gentle, followed by drying/blocking flat.

I still haven't fully decided on which, if any, sweater will be my over-break project. Yes, I need to pick up the owls sweater again some time, but that's an awful lot of yarn to haul. It might be better to dig Celestarium back out and focus on that (more portable) and also some of the other smaller projects. Probably I need to dig out a lot of the stalled projects (I have a couple scarves going, too) and take the smaller ones and try to finish them up.

Or maybe I take the Augusta cardigan, seeing as it's worsted weight and might knit up fairly fast. I don't know.

* Am surprised at how tired I am this week. I am not doing any extra, I am sleeping about the same amount. Maybe just the end of the semester? I don't know.

* I finally got around to watching "Paddington" (after buying the dvd over a month ago). I liked it. It's a bit different from the books. I remember the books as being MUCH more slice-of-life, as in "Paddington goes to school with Jonathan and things do not go as planned" or "Paddington unwittingly foils a counterfeiting scheme and winds up unknowingly delivering its ringleader to the police." The movie version injected a good bit more Peril (in the form of a taxidermist who wanted to taxidermy Paddington) and also had a sort of hand-waving backstory as to how Paddington had a link to England and also how he managed to learn English....I think in the books he just kind of appeared, and it was just assumed that Of Course Bears Can Speak English, Even Bears from Darkest Peru.

I would have liked more of the slice-of-life comedy that existed in the books - there were a couple scenes of it (Paddington foiling the pickpocket).

Also, I remember Mr. Gruber playing a larger role, and being a friend of Paddington more than of Mrs. Brown, but that might be misremembering. I do remember Paddington going to visit Mr. Gruber frequently, sometimes to get advice, sometimes to just share elevenses. (As in the movie, the book's Mr. Gruber was implied to have been a refugee of sorts - in the books, I assumed it was from Nazi Germany; the movie, I am not sure about - could have been Hungary, and he fled when the Soviets took over.)

And I remember Mr. Curry in the books as being less creepy and sinister and more just that annoyed neighbor with no sense of humor (I think in the books it was also implied he was East Indian? Or maybe that was just one of the cartoons made?)

But, the need to inject Peril because of Excitement aside, I liked the movie. I thought Paddington's voice actor was particularly well-chosen. I guess there's a second movie, playing now in the UK, probably will come here. While I don't go OUT to the movies, I might get the dvd when it comes out.

* I am also reading "The Box of Delights" by John Masefield. I started this last year and got side-tracked so picked it up again this year. Because of the Christmas theme, in part. A couple of thoughts:
 - apparently this is a continuation of "The Midnight Folk," which I also have, and now I wonder if I should have read first, because some of the things referenced in this book feel very like you've been dropped in the middle of the story and you kind of have to figure it out.

- This is the kind of "fantasy" I like. I could never get really that into the traditional "high fantasy" (like Lord of the Rings) because it was so divorced from our world. But in this novel - it's set sometime in the mid 1930s, I guess - it's England, but it's England with some possibility of magic, and with some talking animals (the Mouse, apparently). And there's a good v. evil conflict. But there's that grounding in reality: the humans are human, the adults don't totally understand what the children are up to (and, I suppose, some degree of the "magic" could be in the imaginations of the children), and there are solid real things like meals and Christmas trees and snow to help ground the story.

- I have a bad habit often of imagining cartoon characters I know (because that is most of the tv I watch these days) in the roles of some book characters. I can't help picturing Maria Jones as a sort of British Louise Belcher, and honestly, I think Louise would like the pistol-packing, villain-biting, Maria. (How old IS Maria supposed to be? I assumed she was a quite small child, but her level of toughness and bloodthirstiness suggests a minimum age of 8 or 9, at least based on my memories of my own childhood). I know Kay is about 13, and that children in past years seemed younger than they do now (they were innocent for longer).

At any rate: I am enjoying the novel. Part of me feels a bit guilty for not reading something "harder;" this fall I have read a lot of mystery novels and fantasy stories (I need to get back to finishing "The Grey King" some time, and then the last novel in "The Dark is Rising" sequence).

I suspect part of it is that I like these novels - and perhaps, on some level, need them - because they show a world with a clear division between good and evil, and that good wins, and that sympathetic characters choose the side of the good. And there have been sufficient horrors in the news this fall, and in some cases the good/evil divide is not as clear as I'd like it, and there have been cases of people whose work I perhaps once enjoyed turning out to be really rather unpleasant human beings, and....I don't know. It's an escape, I'm sure, but I'm not sure it's any less-healthy of an escape than what many people do.