In honor of nearly two years working from home (partially by choice, partially against my will), I found a series of digital sketches I did back when I had a daily hour-long commute in a big city. It was never my favorite part of the day, but you can really learn to miss anything.
So, a slice of life from 2017. I hope you enjoy the nostalgia of going places with people, even if that place is just work.
Winter cheer has been pummeled a bit by successive lockdowns, cancelled plans, and the deep dread of the future, but that isn’t to say there’s nothing to be thankful for. Delicious Christmas dinner, snowy holidays, and good (if limited) company? Check, check, and check.
I might be young, but I’m burned out of New Year’s resolutions and am opting for a winter theme instead, as inspired by the great CGP Grey. I encourage all who know they will forget their resolution by January 15th to join me…. or, ya know, just aim to survive the year.
Anyways, some year-beginning photos to enjoy. Happy holidays!
A new walk for a new year
Wow, what a good-looking coat! boy!
Birmingham City Centre on New Year’s Day
It’s snowing!
And a beautiful Christmas dinner for two
With the absolute abundance of time I currently have to do art and troll my favorite website, I spent a good part of last week working on a tiny art project. This was inspired by Fox&Hazel’s beautiful petite art journals, as well as the realization that despite five years of study, I still can’t bring the Italian days of the week immediately to mind. Fox&Hazel’s is obviously more expertly done than my attempt, but I learned a decent amount about watercolor, and even more about etymology, so I’ll chalk it up as a win.
I broke out my art supplies, my online dictionary, my guide to Norse, Greek, Roman, and Christian mythologies, enlisted the help of three friends, and behold! A tiny guide to the names of Italian and English days. Enjoy!
Monday is convenient in that in both English and Italian, it refers to the moon. I say ‘convenient’, but actually the English is a loan-translation from the Latin, which gave ‘moon-day’ to all it’s baby Romance languages, and stole the day name as a loan-translation from the Greek. So, English took ‘moon’ for ‘Monday’, but then took the same root for ‘month’. Because that isn’t likely to confuse anyone. Lunedì is Italian for the same. We English took that root separately to refer to lunar cycles and lunacy.
Let’s take a look at a more complicated day: Tuesday. In Italian, martedì is named for Martes, or Mars. Italian, simple. English, less so, since it’s named after a god who only dedicated scholars of Norse mythology (and now, you) have even heard of, who himself took a name from an even older figure that nearly none of us have heard of. The rune here is Tiwaz named for Tyr, the Norse god of justice and courage. Tyr most likely got his name from an even older proto-Germanic god, Tiu, who was an old old sky god (and maybe a war god). Even better, Tiu shares a root with Italian dio, God- also the root of English deity. How’s that for full circle?
All this got so fuzzy and confusing when looking at mythologies which share gods’ names and ideas, but which have subtle differences. Even now, they’re pretty important to people in the know with Norse mythology. So if you are in the know, let me know because I’ve read so many conflicting reports that I’ve given up on independent Tuesday research.
Wednesday, blessedly, is easier to figure out. It came directly from Old English wodnesdæg, and if you ignore the insanity of English spelling for a moment and say that out loud, it sounds a lot like Odin’s day because, of course, it’s from the Old Norse. My favorite part of Odin’s stories is his pair of ravens, Huginn and Muninn, which tie nicely into the wings on Mercury’s staff (his caduceus, if you’re curious). Mercury gave his name to mercoledì. Thank goodness Italian has changed so little over the last few centuries compared to English, or this would have been much more difficult.
Every dull and boring Thursday, or giovedì, gets a bit more epic when you consider that it’s dedicated to a pair of powerful sky and thunder gods, Thor from the Old Norse gives us Thursday, and our favorite old-timey expletive, “By Jove!” gives us giovedì. Jove is another name for Jupiter, a.k.a. Iuppiter in classical Latin, a.k.a. Iovis in old Latin, a.k.a. Zeus in Greek. Wait- these seem very similar. Yep, those Romans really spread their religion all over!
And that leads us to the only day which gets to be ruled by women, and everyone’s favorite day.
Friday is named for Odin’s powerful wife, Frigg. Full disclosure: I had a hell (no, not Hel) of a time figuring out the real difference between Frigg and Freyja. I don’t know which really gets full naming credit, so I added a pair of Freyja’s cats. (Fuller disclosure, this is my least favorite page. Ah well, the cats are cute).
Frigg at least matches the power and beauty of Venus, who gives her name to venerdì. I have to say I was at a loss as to why Venus got a day, but Juno, the actual queen of the Roman gods, was left out- and then I realized that she gets a whole month to herself, in both English and Italian- June/giugno.
Finally, we reach the weekend, and are freed from the clutches of Norse mythology. One more Roman god, Saturn, gives us a name- but this time in English. Why did we turn to the Romans only now, at the end of the week? Maybe we thought we should pick up the slack, since Italian has abandoned the Roman mythological tradition and turned to Christianity for the weekend. Sabato is the name for the Sabbath, which begs the question as to why we all go to church on Sunday when the world hub of Catholicism speaks Italian and has church baked into the name itself. But then….
There’s always domenica, or, the day of the Lord. So the weekend is doubly Christian in Italian- the same root word gave English dominion, domestic, and dominate. *Dom– is actually a root related to ‘home’ or ‘house’, and all those words involve the home or mastery over it- presumably as God has mastery over us. But since the word for God in Italian is dio, as mentioned in Tuesday, the Sun was an appropriate metaphor. After all, that old root word *dyeu means ‘bright’ or ‘shining’ as well as ‘heavenly’. Speaking of *dyeu, there’s a good chance it is the root of ‘day’ in English as well- a perfect circular etymology always makes me happy.
The word ‘sun’ is, naturally, also related to the Old Norse word. Impossible to escape them.
I have found no good explanation as to why we named days after gods and planets. The same is true of the months before July (when Julius and Augustus Caesar’s names decided to mess with a perfectly good counting system for the latter half of the year, making October the tenth month instead of the eighth). Either way, it’s a bit more fun to remind yourself you have a meeting on Thor’s day, and maybe say a quick prayer for a bit of his strength. Plus, a date on Friday night feels slightly more optimistic when blessed by the goddess of love.
I’ve been losing track of days stuck inside for so long, but at some point, they will become important again. Hang in there! And do some art while you’re at it.
It’s been a busy few weeks here for events: first and most importantly, I got tickets to the biggest dog show in the world (apparently) and encountered perhaps three hundred individual pups of varying sizes and uniform cuteness. I have been informed that dog shows are ‘ridiculous’ and ‘posh’ and ‘full of insane people’, but my own experience was more along the lines of “OH MY GOD LOOK THERE ARE DOGS LET’S PET THE DOGS LOOK AT THE DOGS JUMP WOW!” If you, like me, are starved of contact with fluffy animals, the Crufts Dog Show has a YouTube channel where you, too can watch puppies perform musical theater, or run very fast after a ball. Alas, I didn’t get a single good puppy picture, and anyways, any phone contact would have taken away from the actual dog contact I got, so I’m not sorry.
I also went with an old friend to two bits of Birmingham history: Wightwick Manor (pronounced ‘Wit-ick’, and God help me I’ll figure out the logic between British place name pronunciation some day), and the Back-to-Backs, two lodging places for two very different classes of people from the mid 19th through the early 20th century. Both seemed completely unsuited for their occupancy levels; the Manor stands on 17 acres of land, is approximately the size of my high school, and for over a decade had only a single occupant. The Back-to-Backs were the typical housing situation for a lower-class working family at the same time, comprised of eleven three-room houses around a single courtyard, and held around 70 people per court. It’s one thing to know that Britain has a history of painful class distinction, and another to go to two of these places in a single day. But hey, if you’ve ever been to Hong Kong, LA, or NYC, you see this kind of wealth gap all the time. Both were great trips, although I again took no pictures- really, why bother when their websites have professional photographs posted already? Side note, though: when did all that fabulous William Morris-style wallpaper fall out of fashion? Why can’t my house look like this?
What I did take pictures of were my sewing projects from these last few weeks, and some of the process of creating things from no pattern. Am I a real adult now? Ten long years ago, I came home in tears after a geometry class, wailing that there was no point in learning all this useless and terrible math. Well, joke’s on you, past-Katherine. Bet you wish you’d paid any sort of attention now!
My sewing is more ‘try to do a bunch of math but then mostly just eyeball it’ than ‘measure twice, cut once’. But in the interest of not wasting fabric, I have been trying to be a bit more careful about measurements.
First is my impeccable new pen case, which I’m very proud of because it shows that I learned basically how to install a zipper properly.
Step 1: Find fabric at a random store that you MUST HAVE even though you don’t need any more fabric. This is very important to all sewing projects, but unfortunately seems to be an exclusively genetic trait. If it doesn’t run in your family, you’re out of luck.
Step 2: Invent a project for said fabric. Cut things. Sew things.
Step 3: Cry, because you cut and sewed wrong and now have to seam rip the whole thing to pieces, and then try again.
Step 4: Brag!
Project 2 was a sewing case, and took the exact same steps as above but with a lot more math and a lot more cutting and a lot more frustration. Also, cheap craft felt because interfacing is expensive. Huzzah!
Last but not least, I got this dress which would have fit me at eight years old, but certainly wasn’t going to fit me now. Luckily, I have scissors and aforementioned rusty geometry skills, and it cost $5 from one of the thirty thrift stores within a mile of me, so now I’m never going to buy new clothing again (until I find some I really want, all bow down to my incredible self control).
So, that’s my slice of life for this rainy day. Now my university application is in, all I’ve got to do is wait around and (help) go to the gym. Huzzah!
So, it turns out that moving is stressful, and finding an apartment with only three days to do it is stressful, and realizing that the landlord is never going to take this horrendous lamp out of your living space because he’s impossible to contact is… well, stressful isn’t quite right. Horrifying?
But there is an antidote to the horror! And the antidote is the fact that Birmingham has the largest German Christmas market outside of Germany! It was a glittering wonderland with amazing food and a German performer singing karaoke Backstreet Boys at the top of his lungs, so what more could you ask for? Better photos, maybe, but that’ll have to wait until my next visit.
Other photo highlights include weird plants, a successful British baking adventure, and a tiny taste of the best restaurant in the city (so far). Next time? I’ve got to check out these famous Birmingham canals I’ve been hearing about.
But also, NaNoWriMo is happening this month, so I can’t be wasting valuable words on the blog. More to come, probably!
After a long week of apartment hunting, the less terrifying terror of Halloween was a relief. Of course, I forgot it was Halloween at all until I was approached at 8pm with the hopeful, “So do you want to carve pumpkins?”
Unfortunately, pumpkins vacate every store in the area after 5PM on the 31st, so our run to the shop came up short. Fortunately, we weren’t that picky about our choice of hard-shelled fruits/vegetables.
Is there a better holiday than a low-pressure invitation to do some fun, out-of-the-ordinary craft projects with people you like? I think NOT! Here is the bragging rights to our beautiful Halloween Squash-o-Lantern and Jack-o-Melon, perfectly designed to scare away neighborhood demons and feed neighborhood squirrels.
So, happy Halloween, and happy All Saints Day!
When I got back from China, I got the glorious opportunity to hang with my besties and family, so here’s a backlog from that trip.
Wondering why there are so many flower pictures? It’s genetic.
66% of these are self-portraits, because 1) I’m self-obsessed and 2) it seems weird to stare at someone else’s face for this amount of time.
Because some addictions can be managed and some cannot, I no longer have a Facebook profile. But this gets rather in the way of things, because how am I supposed to efficiently share my world-class phOtOgraPHy with people that doesn’t include a miserable email chain? Before you say it, Instagram is not an option. I had a hard enough time tearing myself away from a website where my high school classmates pretend they’re living the lives of Friends characters, and distant acquaintances post vaguely threatening messages about race in America. You think I could handle a site dedicated to pictures of puppies and food?
Clearly, the problem is not me. The problem is other people. I will solve this problem the only way I know how; ignore other people and get validation exclusively from people who already like me enough to scroll through my photos. (It’s my parents, this blog is now just for my parents). I will maybe post my pictures sometimes.
Here are the pictures from CO/DC, a great last vacation in the great country of America, with great ladies!
I preface this post with the admission that while I have tried to do my research, I am no expert on Cambodian history and before you quote me, this should be fact-checked with someone who isn’t a random American travelling through a foreign country for six days with access to Wikipedia.
Sometime in high school, while scrolling through my ever-present and ever-important Facebook feed, I encountered a story about a mass shooting, and then some inane ‘personality quiz’. I wondered if that was what life was like; horror and triviality interspersed, both receding quickly into the distance and replaced with fresh horror and triviality. This kind of deadening of my ability to distinguish importance from passive interest is one of the reasons I got rid of my Facebook account, but that is neither here nor there.
This is not the most cheerful way to begin a post about a delightful vacation, but I’m having a hard time distilling my short time in Cambodia into a coherent tone. It was alternatively a trivial distraction, awe-inspiring monuments, and a reminder of overwhelming cruelty.
I did not go to the Killing Fields where over 1 million people are buried, nor did I visit the museums commemorating the victims of the Khmer Rouge. I had the pleasure of staying at a very fancy hotel (a Christmas gift) where waiters at breakfast pulled out my chair for me like I was rich or something, and where I got to eat beef lok lak and drink by the pool. I also had the pleasure of hearing fantastic music performed by those who had lost legs to land mines, raising money for charities. I was staying in Siem Reap rather than Phnom Penh; it is primarily a city of tourism based around much older history than the violence of the 1970s.
Angkor Wat is such an incredible display of design, manpower, and international cooperation in restoration that it does the whole thing an injustice to read about it without spending days marching through the heat, exploring. So I will force you to do the injustice, until you decide that Cambodia is your next destination, and you can right the wrong you have committed by not seeing Angkor Wat in person.
This is where I spent my holiday, awed and violently sweaty. Angkor Wat itself has its own history of violence; Informational signs and guides inform visitors that after the king who had the temple built died, invading Cham people sacked the city. The signs describe the invaders as the ‘traditional enemies of the Khmer people (they leave unmentioned that the Khmer Rouge went out of their way to target ethnic Cham people and other minorities).
But then, wonder of wonders! The next king had a new temple built, and a new city, and more and more temples until the whole of the ruins encompasses many more kilometres than can be explored in a single day. There are miles and miles of stone crafted into carvings and bas-reliefs. The symmetry and grace of the architecture is unrivalled by anything I have ever seen. And who doesn’t want to be smiled down on by a series of huge, benevolent gods?
The signs also informed me that Angkor Wat is a unique ancient site in that it was never really abandoned. Although it was originally built as a Hindu temple, its purpose changed with the times. Today, it is primarily a Buddhist site.
I found that it was also unique in that there are very few ropes or prescribed paths. Unlike most sites, people are not herded in a line to watch the conveyer belt of history scroll past. Visitors are allowed to wander more or less uninhibited in most of the temples. That alone is a testament to the restoration efforts of the site, originally headed by some impressed Frenchmen and now upheld and continued by Cambodian, Chinese, Japanese, and German teams (and more, probably). The restorers have done their work well; there isn’t a lot of fear that massive stones are going to collapse on your head if you step past a rope.
Where the trees have taken over, it was a deliberate artistic choice on the part of the restorers; Ta Phrom (or the Tomb Raider temple) has been left largely as it was found, in the middle of a slow natural disaster. Where heads have been stolen from statues by art thieves and looters, only about half have been restored and replaced. Others are left to ruin, a testament to the ravages of time and humanity.
Upon leaving the ruins, Siem Reap is a wonderland of 50 cent beer and scorpions on sticks, tuk-tuks, lotus farms, and cheap tourist night-market goods. And then on the nearby Tonlé Sap lake, a whole village—church, temple, school, basketball court and all—floats on the water.
Houses on rafts!
Siem Reap is a tourist city now, a destination so popular even with families that it has actual white children. (I have seen perhaps three white children since arriving in China two years ago, and they look so strange). Wikipedia tells me that perhaps 50% of the jobs in the city are tourism related. I can only hope that this influx provides enough income to locals to enhance the city and the temples, and not so many that the place is overrun and destroyed. In any case, I wholeheartedly recommend Cambodia as a place of wonder and reflection, and a place to get a cheap drink.
I Definitely Have Life Plans 
