Great Book #11: The Master and Margarita
Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar's vile tongue be cut out! Follow me, my reader, and me alone, and I will show you such a love!This is going to be one of the shorter 100-great-book appreciations I write, not because I didn't love Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, but because I loved it enough to write about it elsewhere (you'll see). I have vague memories of three Irishmen recommending this book over afternoon pints, all on separate occasions, six or seven years ago. I put it on my great books list, tried to read it, and lost interest midway through the second chapter. Then I met Amy at Squam, who said it was one of her favorite novels of all time and that I must read it PRONTO. (The Volokhonsky/Pevear translation, mind!) So I gave it another chance, and I'm so glad I did.'Everything will turn out right, the world is built on that.'The Devil pays a visit to Moscow; mayhem ensues. Naked women run shrieking through the streets, money rains from a theater ceiling, men vanish out of their offices and apartments (one literally becomes an empty suit), a clubhouse full of hack writers goes up in flames, a fat man in a lilac suit gets stuck in a barrel of herring, a pig flies, a cat boozes and swears and shoots a pistol and rides a streetcar. A fanged minion gives our heroine a face cream that allows her to soar above the apartment buildings, so she can go skinnydipping in a far-off river under the full moon. There are only sane men in the madhouse, Satan throws a helluva party, and all the city's hypocrites (which is nearly everyone) are gleefully exposed. (Crooked bureaucrats are systematically removed from their positions with particular relish.) Best of all, a good woman loves a good man and gets to go on loving him for the rest of eternity....with sorcery, as everyone knows, once it starts, there's no stopping it.The pandemonium in modern-day Moscow is juxtaposed with wonderfully vivid scenes from ancient Jerusalem, which are excerpts of a novel written and burned and re-written (see below) by the eponymous Master (the aforementioned good man). The Master and Margarita is a big glorious "eff you" to Stalin and his repressive regime, and even though Bulgakov had to write it in secret and the book wasn't published for more than 25 years after his death, he managed to create a work that revels in its own "artistic and spiritual freedom" (as the back cover says). Irony has never been quite this much fun.
Dinner at Mohamet's
Jill eats meat and Kate does not, hence the goofy poses.During Ramadan, practicing Muslims don't eat until after sundown. We think this must be part of why it was so hard to find places to eat when we were staying in smaller towns (like Eskişehir and Afyon). It wasn't even a vegetarian thing--Jill was as frustrated as we were.But in Eskişehir (ess-keh-she-HEER) we stumbled upon this marvelous little hole in the wall where the owner, Mohamet, and his wife Esme were very friendly and accommodating and loaded us up with eggplant dip and roasted vegetables and salad and the best kind of bread and some majorly tasty salsa. Esme (who was finally sitting down to her own dinner) kept telling us their son was working at a hotel in "Finlandia," and we eventually realized she meant Florida.This meal was awesome for another reason. We stuffed ourselves until we couldn't eat any more (and that hardly ever happened elsewhere--we often left the table feeling like we could keep eating), and the bill came to 15 Turkish lira. That's three dollars a person. We felt downright guilty for paying so little, especially when the meal was so satisfying.Next up: photos from our travels in the Phrygian Valley.
Ideas, part 2: Keeping Organized
Go on, laugh! (If you know me, you know that I have absolutely no business offering organizational tips, because I am an incorrigible slob. HOWEVER, with three published books under my belt I figure I must be doing something right. Right?) So here's my 'system,' and I'm telling you about it partly to jump-start my own tush into actually using it again.
1. The Moleskine Notebook.
This is always the first point of capture—I never go anywhere without a notebook. I like Moleskine notebooks because they've got a pocket in the back for collecting loose notes, little inspiring things I find in my travels, or just things I like to keep with me (vintage postcards, a strangely-shaped leaf, my grandfather's prayer card). (Gee, I could really use a couple more for Christmas...haha.)
[Edit, 2013: My new favorite notebooks are Ecosystem, since they are made in America of sustainable materials. Moleskine notebooks are made in China.]
2. The Rolly File.
I wrote about the rolodex here. I haven't actually used this system in awhile, but I'll definitely be returning to it for my next adult novel. There are simply too many bits and bobs (period details, funny turns of phrase, historical anecdotes, &c.) to keep track of any other way.
3. The Brain Dump.
This is when you take a big sheet of paper (I used newsprint left over from a drawing class I took at Parsons a gazillion years ago), label it with your working title in the center, and start filling in the page with characters' names and their relationships to one another, their histories and motivations, along with anything else that occurs to you—plot points, epigraphs, research reminders or cross references...anything at all to do with your story. The brain dump is loads (har, har) of fun, not to mention a 'map' of sorts that you can refer back to again and again as you write. (I'll talk about how I outline in a future post.)
Mind map for The Boy From Tomorrow.
(I'm not giving anything away by showing you this, since I doubt this story will ever make it off my hard drive.)
4. Scrivener.
One of my Yaddo buddies, Cole, gave me a brief run-down of the features of this neat-o word processing and organizational program last year, and I eventually downloaded a copy of my own. It's got a virtual binder, so instead of having this unwieldy Word doc full of unfinished scenes, you give each scene its own page, so it's all that much easier to keep track of. I started another Scrivener project called "The Repository" and that's where I'm keeping my notes and ideas for all the stories apart from the one I'm currently working on. Infinitely better than a thousand Word docs across several dozen folders! (Also, it's going to make all the little pieces of Moon 2.0 SO much easier to manage—if I ever do get to write the second edition. SIGH. Still on hold indefinitely.) And there are a lot of other features I haven't even gotten around to exploring yet.
I swing back and forth between wanting everything in ink on paper (hard drive failure! DISASTER!!!) and having everything in a file on the laptop (too much gee-dee paper everywhere); it's like I always feel I could be more organized if I did it the other way from how I'm currently doing it. Ultimately the best method seems to be half and half: first scribbling each idea down in a notebook, then either inputting it into Scrivener (if there's already a place for it) or putting it on a rolly card for future use.
As disorganized as I am, I love hearing about how other people keep their ideas in order. Do you have a 'system'? Leave me a comment!
How the Lion Got his Name
Aslan means "lion" in Turkish. Cool, huh?(Above and below are pics from Hattuşa, the Hittite city.)
People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time. If the children had ever thought so, they were cured of it now. For when they tried to look at Aslan's face they just caught a glimpse of the golden mane and the great, royal, solemn, overwhelming eyes; and then they found they couldn't look at him and went all trembly.
Aslankaya ("lion stone") in the Phrygian Valley. (The Phrygians were a seafaring race that conquered the Hittites and settled in Anatolia—way inland, which is odd, right?—possibly in the 12th century B.C.)
Rainy Days in Bursa
Gorgeous tilework at the Green Mausoleum.The next morning we took a ferry (then a bus) to Bursa, where we strolled through a peaceful green park dotted with Ottoman tombs (the Muradiye Complex) and spent a couple hours in the local baths (crazy-hot bath, sauna, naked ladies with ponderous bosoms squirting Pantene into our palms and watching us lather up like we'd just arrived from another planet). We were disappointed to find the Green Mosque closed for renovations, but as we were standing by the doorway trying to peek inside a man stopped to chat with us. Yunus (a businessman overseeing the installation of the new carpets and tilework) ended up giving us a mini-tour of the mosque and then taking us back to his office/shop/studio for apple tea. Eventually our cynicism kicked in--was this all a ploy to get us to buy stuff?--but in the end we only got a couple small things that we actually needed (e.g., a wedding gift), and he didn't seem to mind. He gave us his card and told us to call or email if we ever needed any help in our travels. So in Bursa we first saw just how genuinely friendly most Turkish people are!
Istanbul, Evening
We got off the tram at Sultanahmet and tramped through the park (the Hagia Sophia on one side, the Blue Mosque on the other; loads of people milling about, roasted corn on the cob for one Turkish Lira) to our guesthouse, and drank in this view before heading out again for dinner.
Ideas, part 1: Fill ’er Up
Last winter I gave a presentation to my friend Kathy's class on creativity at Temple. By 'presentation,' I mean I packed up all my bits and pieces from The Practice Novel to Petty Magic (notebooks, research materials, rolodex, printed drafts dotted with stickies), laid it all out on a table at the front of the classroom, and said this is how I work.It was an early morning class at the beginning of the semester (sigh, two strikes already). Kathy and I were the only people in the room who weren't looking like zombies. (Only one student asked a question: "Are you left-handed?") I was feeling all pumped up and enthusiastic and I kept thinking what a shame it was that nobody in the class was awake enough to be interested. Then I thought, duh, why not blog it?My notes from that presentation fell into three stages: where I find my ideas, how I organize them (or, ahem, attempt to), and how I eventually use them (this part's fun because I can show you a passage from the finished book and then tell you where the idea originally came from). So, onto part 1!Like I said, a huge part of preparing myself to write is 'filling up': reading on any topic that interests me, traveling in search of new experiences, savoring music and plays and art and movies. I hope this is obvious, but I feel the need to clarify here: when I say I get ideas watching a movie or reading somebody else's novel, I don't mean I use somebody else's ideas. The idea I get usually doesn't have all that much to do with the thing that triggered it; oftentimes it's a single word that sparks an entirely new idea. Either that, or it takes someone else's idea in a different direction (e.g., I made up 'Everyday Life in the Twenty-First Century: A Handbook for the Chronologically Displaced' in Mary Modern, and realized ages later that my subconscious must have been thinking back to the 'Handbook for the Recently Deceased' in Beetlejuice).Anyway, here's the list I made of places I find inspiration:1. Strangers (crazy or not) on public transportation.One evening on New Jersey Transit a wild-haired man ran through the car shouting "Beware the marsh bandits!" Someday I will use this.2. Pop culture--movies and television.
3. Reading eclectically.I read a lot of books about espionage before/while I was writing Petty Magic--until it's research, it's just for fun. Details are so important, especially when it comes to historical fiction, and it was neat to collect facts and tidbits I knew I could use later on (Allied planes dropping bits of tinfoil to jam Nazi radar, leaving messages in toilet roll dispensers, etc.) I also found the stories of individual spies (Violet Szabo and "The White Rabbit" in particular) really inspirational; it didn't seem plausible that my hero could escape the Nazis until I read that F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas had done it multiple times (and even when his escape attempts failed, he survived).(I think I'll write about research in a future post.)4. Music.I went to Berlin to do some Petty Magic research in September 2008, and brought home a 4-CD set of cabaret music from the 1920s. I popped in one of the discs and as soon as Irgenwo auf der Welt ("Somewhere in the World") came on, I knew it belonged in the book.5. Friends' funny lines.You know what they say about Irishmen: all potatoes, no meat.6. Things misheard."Lord of the slippy." If I could tell you what was actually said I never would have gotten the idea.7. Far-off places.
We were ushered through a doorway and up a spiral staircase, and a knight glared at us from a niche halfway up. We reached a landing and passed through a door into an inner courtyard. Here all the architectural periods in the castle's history converged—medieval, faux-medieval, and quaint half-timbering—so that if I hadn't known better I'd have thought I'd stumbled into a warren unawares. Vines of ghost ivy snaked across the stone and wood façades, and griffin-headed gutter spouts high above our heads unleashed the rainwater in roaring cataracts onto the cobblestones. The whole place would have been very charming in summertime, but that night, the last night of the year, the narrow windows reflected nothing but the storm clouds.
(A description of this place.)8. Art.In Petty Magic there's a whole chapter set at the Met. Also, I got the Leuchterweibchen (horned mermaid chandeliers) from a tour of Bunratty Castle and the fanged mermaids from a curio cabinet in a guesthouse in Ecuador.
9. Graveyards (names, histories, mood).It's so true, what John Hurt's character says in the film version of The Field: "I love the smell of a graveyard. 'Tis a sweet and peaceful smell." I like graveyards. Weird as it might sound, contemplating my inevitable demise has only ever spurred my creativity.
Stacked up and ready to go. (An Islamic graveyard outside Göreme, Cappadocia. Elliot took this one.)
(More on names in a previous post.)10. Your own life and family history.That's where the whole idea for Mary Modern came from. (See my author essay at the back of the paperback edition; if you have the hardcover or ebook edition, email me and I'll send it to you.)---Where do you find inspiration?(Next time I'll talk about how I organize my ideas using rolly cards, Moleskine notebooks, "brain dumps," Scrivener, and suchlike. Link to Part 2.)
Savoury War-time Pie
Grandmamma had heartened herself with gin now and again from a bottle produced from somewhere amongst her voluminous black skirts, and was game to the last, if a trifle maudlin.
(from a description of a Soldiers' & Sailors' Wives Club event)
Remember the war-time soup that called for everything in your compost bin? Here's another recipe from the book I was reading at the NLS last winter (Mrs. Dorothy Constance Peel's How We Lived Then, 1914-1918: A Sketch of Social and Domestic Life in England During the War). This time I actually tested it--veganized, of course--and my updated recipe follows the original.
Vegetable Pie with Potato Crust(Meat shortage)
2 onions, 2 carrots, 1 turnip, the outside sticks of half a head of celery, 1/2 lb. artichokes or two potatoes, 1/2 pint bacon-bone stock and 1 oz. lentils. For the pastry, 6 ozs. cooked potatoes (mashed), 6 ozs. flour, 2 ozs. cooking fat, 1 teaspoonful baking-powder.
Wash, clean and prepare the vegetables, cut them into small pieces and arrange them in a pie-dish in layers, putting the lentils, which have previously soaked for twenty-four hours, in the centre; pour over the stock and 1/2 pint of water; put into the oven with a dish over it and bake for 2 hours (or boil in a saucepan and put into a pie-dish afterwards if more convenient). For the paste, steam and mash the potatoes, rub the fat into the flour, then rub in the cooked potatoes, add a pinch of salt and the baking powder; mix to a fairly stiff paste with a little cold water, roll out and place over the vegetables in the pie-dish, trim the edge and mark it neatly, bake in a moderately hot oven for 3/4 hour.
And here's my vegan version:
filling:--two onions--two carrots--three sticks of celery--one turnip--one 6-oz. jar of artichoke hearts--two cups vegetable stock (I used Better Than Bouillon)--one cup lentils (soaked overnight)--salt and pepper--herbs and spices (rosemary, cumin) to taste
pastry:--one medium potato, mashed--1 1/3 cups flour--1/4 cup Earth Balance shortening (half a stick)--1 tsp. baking powder--dash of salt
Preheat oven to 375º. Finely chop all vegetables (including the potato skins!) and sauté with herbs in olive oil until soft. Take off heat and add vegetable stock and pre-soaked lentils. To make the pastry, follow the original instructions (mix the shortening into the dry ingredients, then add the mashed potato, mixing together with a little cold water. It should make a nice easy-to-roll dough). Spoon the filling into a casserole dish (will yield too much filling for a pie plate), roll out the pastry and cover, sealing the edges of the pie with a fork. Bake for 45 minutes, dabbing the crust with a bit of Earth Balance vegan butter if you have it.
Turned out mighty tasty, if I do say so myself!
Edit, 17 September: Kate and Elliot tried out this recipe using two standard pie plates, and as you can see it worked out perfectly:
Marvelous fruit
Pomegranates growing in the courtyard at Hotel Yaka in Kizkalesi.
We got watermelon with breakfast most days--peaches, sweet melon, grapes, and/or figs, too, if we were really lucky.
We were tempted to raid this truck...
...and somebody did, promptly disposing of the evidence.
Figs for lunch! (On the beach at Iztuzu, near Dalyan, on the Mediterranean.)
If you are in Istanbul at the right time of year (i.e., now), look for this guy on the main drag just south of the Blue Mosque. His pomegranate juice is only 5 Turkish lira (about $3; other vendors were charging twice that). Pure pomegranate juice is so intensely delicious it makes your tastebuds explode.
Home from Turkey
The splendid front door of the Ulu Cami (Great Mosque) in Bursa.
Walking at Midas Sehri in the Phrygian Valley.
Touring the terrace houses at Ephesus.
Elliot pretending to bird-watch after pelting us with pebbles at Hattuşa (once the capital of the Hittite Empire).
Walking in Cappadocia.
Hot air balloons in Cappadocia, early morning.
Ceiling detail of the Kirkdamalti Church in the Ilhara Valley, Cappadocia.
The Hagia Sophia. I understand why the guidebooks say you'll be stunned into silence.
The Chora Church, Istanbul. This might sound odd seeing as it's a Byzantine church, but it really is an enchanting place.
The Baghdad Pavilion at the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.I'm going to try microblogging this trip—one photo and one anecdote per post. Should be fun!
Golconda
The view over the entryway from the ramparts at Golconda.There are only a few more stops on my India trip to share with you; from Hospet (the nearest station to Hampi) I took an overnight train to Hyderabad, and I had the day to pass before taking another night train to Aurangabad (the jumping-off point for the marvelous caves at Ellora and Ajanta). Then I took a morning flight back to Mumbai and chilled at the airport until it was time to go home.
So I arrived in Hyderabad around 4AM, which meant that I was pretty much at the mercy of whichever shady character wanted to lead me to a hotel that wasn't shuttered for the night. I ended up at the 'Hotel Reliance,' where there was a bucket of water beside the Indian-style (i.e., hole-in-the-floor) toilet in lieu of a working faucet and the ceiling fan rumbled and shook like it was about to fall on my face. The consolation prize: I had not one, but TWO numbers scribbled on the wall to choose from! I was a lucky girl indeed. This room made me think of the horrible place Kate and Elliot stayed at in Hong Kong, where it appeared the air shaft led directly down to hell. I laughed to myself, tried to get a couple hours' sleep, and thought up the perfect last line for my magnum opus. Then I got up, went to half a dozen places before I found a restaurant with veggie-friendly breakfast options (many more Muslims than Hindus in Hyderabad), and bargained for an auto-rickshaw to Golconda, a vast medieval fortress a half-hour ride from the city.(By the way, I got pretty good at bargaining with taxi drivers. I'd ask for the price listed in the guidebook, they'd initially refuse, I'd start to walk away and they'd call after me saying they'd do it for the price I'd asked. I was always too timid to do this before, especially when traveling on my own.)
The Balahissar Gate.
Balahissar Gate detail.
The mortuary baths. Fairly self-explanatory.
I glanced up from taking that shot of the mortuary baths to find this little boy looking down at me. I love this shot.
You pass all sorts of royal residences, mosques and temples and stables and such as you traverse the grounds and climb up to the summit. There's a multi-story hall at the very top with a view out over the rest of the fortress as well as a refreshment stand and a Hindu temple (you can see it below).
On the way down again.It was really hot, so I treated myself to a ridiculously overpriced peach iced tea at a slick Western-style café down the street, then went looking for some nearby Islamic tombs. I took a few wrong turns and gave up when I got too tired and cranky. This part of my trip was about deciding when I'd seen enough and that it was time to relax. So I took an auto-rickshaw back to the city and rested up before the night train to Aurangabad.Kate and Jill and I are leaving for Turkey tomorrow (Elliot is meeting us there in a couple weeks), so I'll be taking a break from blogging until September. Enjoy the rest of your summer!
Vegan Banana Pear Bread
Last summer I used Gail's basic banana bread recipe a few times, jazzing it up with spices, walnuts, and vanilla, and now I figure it's easy enough to veganize. At the last minute I added a couple pears, hoping this bread would recapture some of the divine deliciousness of those banana pear muffins (edit: the recipe doesn't seem to be online anymore, unfortunately. I'd originally found it here). Not quite as divine, but still really tasty (and very moist).
3 or 4 mashed super-ripe bananas (about 1 1/2 cups)2 pears (peeled, cored, and diced)2 cups flour1/2 cup (1 stick) Earth Balance vegan butter (melted)1 cup raw sugar (can reduce to 3/4 cup)1/4 cup canola oil3/4 tsp. baking powder1+ tsp. each of cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg, or use pumpkin pie spice1 tsp. vanilla1/2 tsp. salt1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
Preheat oven to 350º. Mix the butter, oil, bananas, and pears, stir in the sugar and vanilla, and then add the dry ingredients. Pour into a greased 4 by 8" loaf pan and bake for one hour (or until fork, knife, or toothpick comes out clean).
Romping elephants
There's a donations/lost-and-found closet at Sadhana Forest where you can often find some really cool free clothing. Someone got rid of these awesome elephant pajama bottoms just because of a rip in the seam. So easy to fix!
Elephants are my new obsession, although I don't yet have as much proof of it as I do my owls.
Lakshmi, the temple elephant at Hampi, out for her morning constitutional/bath.(More proof here and here.)
This fabric is really cool, but the pants were enormous. So I decided to make good friends with my seam ripper, and turn them into a romper using a pattern mash-up: the tried-and-true Mendocino sundress crossed with the McCall's pattern I used for my mermaid pajama bottoms. (Jill Draper was wearing an adorable strapless romper on our first night at Squam and I thought, I really need to make one of those! Perfect for bumming around the house.)I tried on one of my sundresses by pulling it up over my hips just to be sure I could get away with not using a zipper or some other form of closure.(Olivia wandered in while I was at my sewing machine, and wanted to try on the pants.)There are several sun-faded patches, but there was nothing I could do about that. The bodice is made up of four pieces from the lower legs. If I could sew it over again I'd make the legs longer, but oh well. I didn't reinstate the pockets (too much poochiness around the hips? and anyway, I'm lazy.) I fretted a bit over how best to join the two pieces, but it wasn't a big deal--I gathered the waist with a stray length of elastic thread, turned one piece inside the other with right sides facing, and stitched away.And I just used the drawstring for the straps! So easy!I always wonder how bloggers like Mena at The Sew Weekly can make a dress for a couple of dollars. Basically I need to start cruising some estate sales and flea markets! But I had thread to match and elastic thread left over from the sundresses, so this project was ALMOST free--I did run out of elastic toward the end, and had to buy one more spool. So total cost = $1.79 plus tax.
Weird angle, but you can see how I got the elephants lined up on the front center seam, woo hoo!(Thanks for the pics, Snook!)
All that high school vocab finally pays off
(Click on the screenshot for a better view.) How cool is this: today's Dictionary.com word of the day is melismatic, with a usage quote from yours truly. Am I the coolest nerd on the internet? At least for today?
Hampi
After flipping through my new friend Chris's (from Sadhana Forest) Hampi photos, I was really psyched to go there myself. He told me about watching monkeys stealing handbags from the local shopkeepers (!); I saw plenty of them on the roofs and climbing the gopuram (above), but didn't stop to take photos since I'd already gotten a good one at Mamallapuram.The Virupaksha Temple is situated at the foot of one longish street of restaurants and travel agencies--but not a single grocery store, figure that one out ('Where do you get your food?' I asked one travel agent. 'At home,' he said. Yeah, right. I didn't see any evidence of home gardening anywhere I went, and even so. They must have a top-secret no-tourists-allowed grocery store hidden someplace).
Inside the Vitthala Temple.The ruins at Hampi are spread over a large area (something like 26 square km), so it's hard to see everything even if you do rent a bike. I decided not to because my calf was still acting up, but if I could do it over again I'd take another paracetamol and suck it up. There were a couple of ruins I really wanted to see (like the elephant stables), but gave up around 4pm after spending too much time in the heat. On the other hand, there are so many temples that, as majestic as they are, they all start to look the same after a couple hours.It was strange to me how few Western tourists I met. I heard one pair comparing Hampi to the Roman forum as I walked by (ancient empire, check. stunning monuments, check...), and marveling at how quiet it was.
Goat stampede!
There was something rather Indiana Jones-like about wandering through these ruins. Minus the Nazis, of course.
Lakshmi, the temple elephant. Chris said I'd get to see her if I went to the temple around 8am, and sure enough, there she was. After giving blessings to the locals, her trainer rode her down to the river, where he sudsed her up.
Beautiful, but you couldn't pay me any amount of money to bathe in it.
And a couple photos from the Mango Tree, the fanciest restaurant in Hampi. The food is good (and not as expensive as everyone says) and the views over the river are really lovely. Here's a photo of my thali meal (mentioned in my Madurai post). Not a 'proper' thali, where the waiters keep coming by until you're all rice-and-chutneyed out, but you get the idea.On my way out, I spotted these kitties under a bench. Too cute.
After Hampi I took an overnight train (from nearby Hospet—Hampi is a half-hour rickshaw ride from the train station) to Hyderabad en route to Aurangabad (where I'd base myself to see the amazing caves at Ellora and Ajanta). Hilariously skanky "hotel" room, awesome medieval fortress at Golconda. Looking forward to showing you those pics!
Harmony Homestead Dispatch #12
A piece of an old syrup bottle I found when I was digging in the garden.
Gail with her pups (Maddy, Ophelia, and Grace).
A monarch (?) caterpillar I found in the garden and moved to a milkweed plant by the greenhouse.
Back to our favorite swimming-hole on the Poultney River.
Greg Marley teaches us about sustainable foraging for wild mushrooms at SolarFest.
Shrooms!Naturally, I can't show you pictures from the very best part of my Vermont trip because I forgot to bring my camera. I went to see As You Like It with my friend Sierra—so much fun to see Shakespeare performed on the lawn of a stately old home, and it was such a treat to see my friend Tom playing Jaques—and then we stayed up late watching for shooting stars. We crammed a lot of fun (creek swimming, sloegin fizzes with dinner, Dorset farmer's market) into my last twenty-four hours.I'm home again now. Need to finish up my India blogging before we head off for Turkey in a couple weeks!
Summer knitting
The Little Child's Sock pattern from Nancy Bush's Knitting Vintage Socks, in Jill Draper's marvelously soft sock yarn. I wanted to knit something more intricate because this yarn is special, but travel knitting needs to be easy or I'll make lots of mistakes while I'm chatting with new friends. Finished sock #1 on the lawn at SolarFest last weekend. (Ravelry link.)
I have such a knack for finishing winter sweater projects in the middle of the summer! I started this one (the Lily of the Valley cardigan from Rowan 45, heavily modified--Ravelry link here) in February, and wearing it prompts happy memories of both knitting with my new friend Kate at an Edinburgh café and going to see Harry Potter at midnight last Friday. (You need a cozy sweater up here most nights, so I guess finishing it in June wasn't so silly.) I'm going to blog about this one once I get more photos.
Getting a head start on Christmas knitting (Ravelry link).
Harmony Homestead Dispatch #11
Above: the view from my tent, 6am; nasturtiums from the garden.Below: SALAMANDER!; Shannon spending some QT with Queenie; Michael, Shannon, and Jim hanging out by the campfire before Gail's birthday dinner; another piece of pottery we found in the garden (from homesteaders who worked this land in the early 20th century).
It's really good to be back!
Back to London
Through the shop window at Hope & Greenwood. Diarmuid likes to think of it as the magical sweet shop that only appears once a century--which, fortunately for all us sweet-toothed non-fairy folk, is only a fancy.
And speaking of Diarmuid and fairy creatures (the author, that is), I was delighted to find this marvelous book on display in the side window at Foyle's:
Kate and I arrived around lunchtime (on March 19th), so we met up with Seanan on his break at Foyle's and then went to the National Gallery for the afternoon. The next morning (our only full day in London) we had a big yummy breakfast in view of Tower Bridge, and then did the tour at the Tower of London.
Stealth shot! Seanan hates having his picture taken, but Kate managed to capture him on film (hmm, I guess that's a figure of speech now).
Then we met up with our cousin, Kate Scherer, for dinner. Kate S.'s grandmother Mary was our grandmother Dorothy's sister (you can see a portrait of all five sisters here). We had never met in person before, and as I explained the relationship to my Kate, 'This is like your granddaughter and my granddaughter getting together for dinner.' Once I'd put it that way we were even more excited to meet her.
It was a really nice way to end the trip!