End of the week

Wow. I'm glad it's the end of the week. We started the week anticipating a snow storm - got it on Valentine's Day - shoveled about 30 inches of snow - and because having a break like that in the middle of the week totally discombobulates me in terms of routine, I sort of hobbled through Thursday and Friday. Blech. Looking forward to ...mmm...I'm not sure what, but if it is not too cold, I think I can talk DH into pulling out the snowshoes and walking up the hill to see - well, whatever there is to see, actually.

I saw a story tonight about two Uruguayan(?Uruguayan? I'm not sure what the correct term is for people from Uruguay) sisters, models, who have died this week within days of one another -- no details on weight, height, bmi, etc. but supposedly one of the girls died of "a heart attack". Hello? Hello? Is anyone listening out there? And no, it has zip to do with the fact that they are from South America. Starving yourself starves your heart. A starved heart becomes weak and diseased. A weak and diseased heart will kill you. Period. Anyone out there remember Karen Carpenter? Huh?

Ladies - the name of the game out there is "get stronger" - not "get weaker". Eat well, get plenty of rest and fresh air. Don't chain yourselves to a computer desk for 8 hours a day. Move around. It's good for your digestion (I'm wicked on digestion), and great for your heart. Life is short enough without making it shorter by weakening your hearts. You must be a warrior for your hearts. This makes me cry.

That said, because I cannot always cry, I am feeling very frustrated at the moment. Our house is just ..well, it's just a wreck, frankly, because we have hired "Dave-the-kitchen-and-bath-guy" to come and save us from our house. And, because it is an old house (well, not an ancient house - built in 1939), and has not been attended to very (ahem) well, it needs some shoring up and some of this and that. As a matter of fact, the old gal needs a good girdle and bra, frankly, and Dave is going to provide it. Today, he came and put in the first of what promises to be three or four new jack posts in the basement. The house has one of those curious layouts, with the staircase going straight up the middle of the thing, but the builder did not put jacks on both sides of the staircase walls (now, we won't go into the whole science of what is or is not a "load-bearing wall" - just sort of think of spending all of your time standing on one foot and you get the idea) and now, the kitchen floor slopes 1.5 inches down toward the staircase. I think we can all say together, "oooo, not good." So, before anything else can get done in the kitchen (i.e., we can make it pretty and modern), we need to get the floor straight; otherwise, the ceramic tile will crack and it will just look like a crappy job. So, Dave came armed with a jack this morning...and well, he needs a bigger one frankly, so we have a sort of supported wall (which of course is a major improvement in comparison to what it was before) to live with this weekend. A disappointment, yes..but definitely a step in the right direction for this poor little house. And considering how long we have lived this way, it seems like just this huge change. So, hurray (or, hurrah, if you are from the UK or are into reading Harry Potter) for Dave and his jack.

And, one of the truly annoying things while this process is going on is that there really is not room do DO anything I like to do. Yes, I can perch someplace to knit..or retreat upstairs (because Dave has not invaded the bedrooms yet - that will happen later, I suspect), but what I really want to do right now is SEW. I don't know what it is about bad winter weather, but it brings out the "staple my fanny to a chair and sew my brains out" sort of feelings. Not only is there no PLACE to sew..all of my fabrics, etc. are up in the barn in storage (with everything else) while all of this building is going on. And as lovely a place as the barn is (and, for a barn, it is a rather elegant place, with one long wall filled with windows on the South side and lovely wood floors), it is still a barn, and unheated (except for when we had livestock, in which case, it had a pretty efficient four-legged heating system) and I am not about to haul my sewing machine up there with a huge extension cord and sit there, Bob Cratchett-like, sewing in my coat and hat and fingerless gloves. Not ready to do that.

But, I am collecting some lovely patterns. Gardeners at this time of the year collect seed catalogs - I collect patterns and one of the truly lovely things out there that are available are books of patterns from Japan. Like this one, my current favorite.

It's called Dresses from 60's Movies and contains designs inspired by such actresses as Audrey Hepburn, Catherine Deneuve, and Grace Kelly. Now, frankly, these Japanese sewing books (which are really a different beast entirely from the Japanese craft books - I'm just not into making minature animals and so on) have a couple of attractions. First, the photography and staging of the garments is truly outstanding. Second, they seem to always have really good diagrams for putting the pieces together. The downside is...well, everything is in Japanese, so it helps if you already are familiar with shapes of pattern pieces. The other downside is that, like Burda WOF magazine, all of the patterns are printed one on top of another on just a couple of huge pieces of paper and you have to find the correct pattern pieces. One help is that all the pattern pieces for one particular garment seem to be all on the same side of the piece of paper and are coded along with the garment in the book. The place where Burda WOF is better, though, is that the Burda system is in multicolors, which helps you to find the pieces you want.

But the garments are lovely and, because they are built for Japanese women, they tend to be better proportioned for a petite figure. The downside, though is that they don't go above what would be a US size 10 - so for those of us who are NOT sized like that, you have to trace off the pattern and size it up and make it in muslin. Yes, it is a bit of a chore, but definitely worth it.