books — Page 175

Monday Morning (For Lack of a Better Title)

December 1, 2014 at 8:51 am by Claudia

Don and I have lost two friends recently. Both of them lived in our area of the Hudson Valley.

Bob, who was about as good as they come, was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) several months ago. It was quite advanced at the time of diagnosis and within a couple of months he was gone. It hit Don especially hard. Bob was always there for us, bringing his chainsaw to help us deal with a fallen tree, checking the brake line on Don’s now-gone car, one winter he helped Don unfreeze a pipe in the basement. Always giving, always kind. We can’t believe he’s gone; here one day and gone the next, much too quickly to take in.

Mery, who was diagnosed with Breast Cancer a few months ago, died on Thanksgiving. Mery owned and ran a café in Saugerties, NY called Café Mezzaluna. Don played there for Sunday Brunch many times, as have most of our musician friends. Mery was a great supporter of musicians, visual artists and writers. There were art exhibits on the wall. Poets read their work. Musicians played their music.

Mery was a force of nature and her spirit was pure and loving. Cheri, Mery’s partner in life, was by Mery’s side during her illness, all the while continuing to cook the delicious meals that came out of Café Mezzaluna’s kitchen. Needless to say, the community is reeling. Cheri is trying to buy the café so that it can continue to be a haven and joyful gathering place for everyone and there’s a fund in place to try to raise the money. If it fails, this wonderful place will be no more.

Cheri decided to open up the restaurant for brunch yesterday, so we drove up to Saugerties. I’m so glad we were there; to hug Cherie, to be a source of support, to mourn, to witness, to celebrate Meri and the business into which she poured her heart.

Bittersweet and very sad, yet beautiful.

We grabbed a few minutes after brunch and visited the wonderful used bookstore that is in Saugerties, Our Bookshop. I wrote about it in August on Just Let Me Finish This Page. I wanted to look at the vintage children’s books. I’m trying to gather some of my personal favorites from childhood. My mom had some lovely books that she read as a girl, then passed on to us to read, and somehow our estranged sister ended up with them. Mom had all the Anne of Green Gables series, all the Louisa May Alcott books, Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster, and more titles I can’t remember. All from the thirties. All lovely editions.

So I try to buy them when I can.

vintage books

I came home with Anne of the Island by Lucy Maud Montgomery and The Mystery at the Moss-Covered Mansion (A Nancy Drew Mystery) by Carolyn Keene. Don grabbed King Kong. (That’s my signed edition of To Kill a Mockingbird on the left.) There was a newer set of the Nancy Drew books in the shop but I didn’t like the binding or the look of them. The one that I bought yesterday is lovely.

And, on Saturday, some carpeting arrived for the dollhouse.

DH runner 1

Actually, two runners. I got them from a wonderful Etsy seller, Maison de Petite. The runner that she was selling came in a wider width than my narrow stairs could accommodate, so she kindly reduced the size for me. But I underestimated the length, so I’m ordering 3 more – one that will cover the remaining steps and, since I like the look so much, two more for the stairs leading to the bedroom from the den.

Isn’t it beautiful?

DH runners 3

Dollhouses become special worlds, don’t they? No sickness, no sadness, no too-young deaths, no heartbreak. They’re happy, carefree little worlds. I think that’s why so many of us love our little miniature havens.

New post up on Just Let Me Finish This Page.

Happy Monday.

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Houston: We Have Bookshelves

November 30, 2014 at 9:46 am by Claudia

Before we get too far into this post, let me be clear about the bookshelves. They are very basic. The only thing more basic might be boards and cinder blocks and I’ve had a few of those in my lifetime. Nevertheless, basic or not, I love them.

I’ve wanted built-in bookshelves in the den since we moved in. I had visions of beautifully constructed built-ins along the wall behind the sofa. But because other needs/expenses almost always seem to take precedence, we’ve never been able to do it. We’ve lived here nine years. Last year, I saw a post on another blog where the thirty-something owners had put up bookshelves using standards and brackets. I was immediately taken back in my memory to a house I lived in in my mid-twenties. I remember doing that very thing, on a more modest level, in my bedroom. It seemed a bit retro – sort of mid-century modern, a style I grew up with – it was just called contemporary in those days – and not necessarily a look that I wanted to recreate in my current home.

But I kept going back to that photo and eventually came to the conclusion that it would look entirely appropriate in this den of ours.

Why not? Why not, I said to myself, do something like this NOW, rather than wait for some date in the far-off future when I might have the funds to hire a carpenter to build a fancy bookcase? I showed the blog photos to Don, and he said, “Go for it.”

Even so, I didn’t get around to it until this year. When I decided that now was indeed the time, I measured the wall space and the length of the sofa, checked for the location of the studs using my stud finder, which can be finicky, so I checked it over and over again, devised one configuration, then scrapped it and went for another. I drew up a plan.

Then I figured out the length of the shelves, based on the footprint of the sofa and the location of the studs. Left side of the sofa: 37″. Right side of the sofa: 24″ Three standards on the left. Two standards on the right. Six shelves on either side. A total of 30 brackets. Last week we went to Lowe’s and purchased everything – the pine was special grade because I was planning on staining it and didn’t want a lot of knots. One very nice guy at Lowe’s figured out how much wood we would need and another very nice guy cut all the wood for us. I crossed my fingers and hoped all my calculations were correct.

We brought everything home and earlier this week, taking advantage of a very warm day for this time of year, I sanded and stained all the shelves-to-be.

Yesterday we put them up.

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After sleeping through most of it, Scout decided to check out the action in the den.

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That drill has to be about 25 years old. I bought it when I was living in Cambridge, MA. Someday I’ll upgrade to a fancy new one, but for now, it works.

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I originally considered painting the wood, but I’m glad I decided to stain it instead. We have lovely pine floors and wood blinds and I felt that staining the wood would result in a warmer, cozier look. We really like it.

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Late in the day: shelves in place, drill, chuck, wood, measuring tape, screws, screwdriver, and level scattered around the room.

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Photo taken this morning, so it’s still darkish in this room. I’ve added a few books, but I’m going to let the shelves evolve. I’m not going to grab a lot of books from the upstairs bookshelves and move them down here. Both of us added a few favorite books, some signed by the authors, some vintage. My To Be Read pile moved from the desk to the shelves. I’ll eventually add some books from the shed (fingers crossed.) And let’s face it, I accumulate a lot of books, so these babies could be filled in no time.

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I forgot how fiddly brackets can be. They don’t always fit snugly, they sometimes move to the right or the left. And I’ve learned, especially on these shorter shelves, that things need to be balanced, not necessarily visually, but most definitely in terms of weight distribution.

This room is very small, with windows on all sides, so it’s notoriously hard to get a good photo. But here’s my best shot this morning.

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We never think that something like this will make the room look bigger, but, as is often the case, it does. And Don loves the way the shelves on the left and the window frame one of our favorite pieces of art. Me. too.

I’ll post more photos as I add to the shelves and one day I’ll take you on a little tour.

Total cost for everything was about $300.00. We used a prime grade of pine, bought stain and a paintbrush, screws, standards and brackets.

Oh, and one of the first things I added to the shelves?

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The wooden egg cup Scout and Don gave me for my birthday. Isn’t he adorable?

Happy Sunday.

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Snow, The Spontaneous Thanksgiving & P.D. James

November 28, 2014 at 8:47 am by Claudia

thenoreaster-during

During the Nor’easter.

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Later.

We had quite the event here on Wednesday. The snow started in mid-morning: heavy, wet, sticking to branches, power flickering off and on all day long. Thankfully, the power never went out, though it certainly did for many in the Hudson Valley. Don went out to the shed and played around with the level of the ‘shoes’ at the bottom of the snowblower. Since we have gravel on our driveway, a certain amount is going to get thrown while operating it and the idea is throw as little as possible. Even so, half-way through snowplowing, Don had to adjust them again.

For a first time effort, he did really well! The snow was so heavy and wet that it would have been very, very hard to shovel it all. Even so, there are areas around the house and the driveway that have to be shoveled. We did that yesterday and my back, which is unused to all the shoveling after nearly a year off from that nonsense, is crying out a wee bit today.

We’re so thankful for our new snowblower.

We didn’t get as much snow as predicted and since it’s early in the season, it will start to melt in the next couple of days. Good, I say!

Someone in this house loves the snow, but all of her sniffing and exploring and adventuring has her all tuckered out:

thenoreaster-tuckeredout

We had a lovely Thanksgiving. We had plans to dine at our friends’ house, but, in the end, decided to stay home because with all the driving, plus dinner, we would have been away from Scoutie too long and we didn’t feel comfortable with that. We also didn’t feel at all right about going there, eating, and then departing almost immediately, which is what we would have had to do. So we ended up having a spontaneous Thanksgiving – no traditional anything.

We watched part of the Macy’s parade just to see how it would look on the new television. We only made it through a small portion of it because, as always, it’s just a big PR extravaganza for NBC and the stars of their TV line-up. Way too commercial for my taste. I grew up watching the J. L. Hudson parade in Detroit that aired on Thanksgiving morning and I’m afraid I’ve never liked the Macy’s Parade. Hudson’s was simple and extravagant at the same time: lots of floats, lots of bands, culminating in the arrival of Santa Claus and Christmas Carol (who wore a lovely red and white outfit) on the steps of the downtown Hudson’s store. It was magical and for all of us and it wasn’t about celebrities.

Hudson’s, by the way, was a wonderful department store – beautiful in the way that all flagship department stores of a certain era were. It had a gorgeous main floor, wooden escalators, sumptuous fittings. Some idiot or idiots decided to tear it down many years ago. I’ve never recovered.

And, in this everything-is-the-same-everywhere-you-go age, it was taken over by….get ready for it… Macy’s.

I can’t go there. It’s too depressing.

Back to yesterday. We took time to count our blessings. We made a simple dinner which was decidedly non-Thanksgiving-like. We shoveled some snow. We played Crazy Eights – a card game that was played a lot in my home when I was a kid. I taught it to Don and we had the best time! We played for hours and laughed and laughed. We’re going to play it again today.

And we discovered that Netflix has old episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000! Oh my goodness, I laughed so hard I was crying.

Perfect end for the day.

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This morning.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the passing of the great crime writer, P.D. James. I wrote a quick post about it yesterday on Just Let Me Finish This Page. She died yesterday at the age of 94. I read all her novels, starting with An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, which was written in 1972 and featured Cordelia Gray, who surely must have been the model for a whole generation of female police detectives to come. I had always loved mysteries, and when I was a teenager the whole gothic mystery/romance genre was very big. When I discovered P.D. James, I entered a world of grown-up crime novels, with complicated characters and plots, plots that didn’t revolve around a romance, but did, in fact, revolve around a murder or two that were never prettified, and writing that was unsparing in the depiction of the pain and loss and sorrow and anger and rage that surrounds any such death.

Many years ago, when I was living in Cambridge, I went to an event where P.D. James spoke. It was held in the sanctuary of a church. Afterward, she signed a copy of her latest book for me. She was highly intelligent, charming and funny, a wonderful speaker.

Rest in Peace, P.D. James. And thank you for years and years of reading pleasure. You set the bar for all who followed you.

An appreciation of P.D. James written by Louise Penny.

Happy Friday.

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Monday Morning (For Lack of a Better Title)

Houston: We Have Bookshelves

Snow, The Spontaneous Thanksgiving & P.D. James

Lambs Like to Party

A Note

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