Bella Venezia

I just got back from nine days in Venice. Our group stayed in a house on the Grand Canal. We kept busy covering all of the sights of the city, and also enjoyed times when we could wander around on our own.

And yes, Midge went, too.

Vintage Sewing

Last weekend, I finally finished the two baby quilts that have lingered in my sewing "to-do" stack for over two years. As a reward, I splurged this week and made an ensemble for my Midge doll. For more pictures of Midge, her history, and her escapades in the last year, you can look at my prior posts. I am fortunate to have two vintage Barbie clothing patterns from my childhood, and I used one of them for the dress I made for Midge. Once the dress was complete, it was obvious that some type of accessory was needed, so I designed a little box-bottom tote out of the dress fabric. Midge seems very pleased.

I used the pattern for View A, but I did not make the detachable collar which is shown in this view. (A Barbie-sized detachable collar??? Unbelievable.) The bag was so much fun to make, that I immediatey made a second one for my friend LoLo's Barbie.

National Short Story Month

May is National Short Story month. I didn't realize this until today, but fortunately I happened to bring home two short story collections from the library yesterday. My unwitting salute to NSS month began last night, when I read one story each from the following books.

A friend recently told me how much he has enjoyed reading Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor. In reading about Ms. Ogawa, I was impressed that she has won "every major Japanese literary award." The Diving Pool is a collection of three novellas. The first story, also entitled The Diving Pool, is a coming of age tale narrated by an unnamed adolescent girl, as she experiences the curiosity, angst, and ultimate devastation of a youthful crush.

Press 53 just announced the release of Pinckney Benedict's latest collection of short stories, Miracle Boy and Other Stories. Having never read anything by Benedict either, I checked out Town Smokes, his first short story collection published in 1986 when he was 23. Benedict sets his stories in the bleak, often brutally hard-scrabble rural south. Sutton Pie Safe is the first selection in the book, and contains iconic southern-lit components: a snake, a gun, a beautiful woman, an angry father and his son.

Molasses

My kids have a byline for molasses: "They are so bad they're good." There is debate at our house about whether or not the word molasses is treated as a singular or plural noun. I tend to favor plural. But that's not to say that I won't occasionally lapse into a singular usage. I do like to refer to molasses as a "they." Quite a number of our kids' friends have had their first exposure to molasses at our house. We are sort of self-appointed molasses ambassadors. Ambassamolassadors, you might say. Once we realized that other families were not providing molasses to their kids, we became somewhat aggressive whenever we had kid-friends over at meal time. We would insist that they take at least a small spoonful. Some would resist, and we would cajole and plead and ultimately insist. Inevitably the looks on the kids' faces would range from skepticism to outright hostility upon viewing and smelling the black liquid on the spoon. We tried many times, but I don't think we ever had any true converts. Oh, what they were missing. There is nothing more delicious than a warm buttermilk biscuit, cut open and buttered, then drizzled generously with rich, dark, sweet molasses. Mmmmm....they are so bad, they're good.

Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon - believe everything you have heard. It is all that and more. We only explored the views from a small portion of the south rim over the course of two days, but it was plenty. Our second day happened to be Easter Sunday, and we got up at 4 a.m. in order to be at the rim at sunrise.



Sunrise, and snow on the ground.














Airplane reading on this trip: Ford County by John Grisham, and Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. Both of these books are collections of short stories that use a specific community and its characters as a thematic framework.

David Sedaris Talking Pretty

I just finished Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. Loved this collection of hilarious short essays. My two favorites were "Jesus Shaves" and "The Tapeworm is In." Thankfully for all of us, Sedaris endured some hellacious French classes, and survived to tell the tales. In this book he shares his frustrations with gender assignments for inanimate objects, his impossibly arrogant French teacher, and the ambiguous explanation of Easter to a Moroccan student in his French class.

Summertime: June 2010 in Venice

Summertime, the 1955 movie set in Venice, pairs "spinster" * Jane Hudson (played by the inimitable Katherine Hepburn, age 48 at the time this film was made) and handsome Renato de Rossi (Rossano Brazzi). I was on the phone last week several times, trying to work out a points purchase for a ticket to Venice in June. This movie was recommended to me by one of the travel agents, Bill in Los Angeles, who has been to Venice many times. So glad to have watched it - beautiful shots of Venice. And of course, there's Katherine Hepburn. At one point in the movie, another woman remarks to Jane Hudson, "In Italy, age is an asset." Jane/Katherine's retort: "Well, if it is, then I'm loaded."

*Spinster is the word used in one of the movie's taglines.