How is it Thursday?!

In the New Year I decided to just throw myself out there and volunteer for things and say yes to finding purpose. But now I am maybe a smidge more (over)committed than I realized – this non-stop week is both refreshing and overwhelming.

We are supposed to get snow here in Seattle over the next few days and I am super excited and equally super anxious as to how this city handles snow…we live on a hill…a steep hill.

Stay tuned!

I bought this New Balance jacket in October. I think I’ve worn it almost every day since. It is almost mythical – lightweight but warm enough. I may or may not have purchased another one just in case something happens to the original! If you are not a fan of the off-center zipper placement there is the traditional version.

I cannot wait to travel again. The first place I want to go when it is safe to do so is Paris. Paris is my happy place. The place where I feel the most at home mentally and physically. In the meantime, I have been going down the rabbit hole of all things Paris – I’m particularly fond of looking at this round up of chic Parisian apartments.

As a parent of a middle school girl I am constantly trying to ensure her well balanced happiness. Especially now after moving her across the country in the middle of a pandemic to start a new school via virtual learning. Now I am obsessed with keeping the number of good days higher than the bad days. This task is made even more difficult as she watches her friends across the country start to get back to a sense of living more socially. I found this article had some interesting points.

This is the perfect sweater. The silhouette, the knit, the range of colors. Oh and it’s under $20 so if you wear it to pieces by the end of winter – that will have been a good ride!

I find it fascinating to read the biographies of my favorite writers and poets. Sometimes there is an “Aha!” moment that sheds new insight in to their works. Or not. Sometimes I read an author’s bio and think “I never would have guessed!” Elizabeth Bishop is a hell of a poet with a hell of a life.

Paris, 7am by Elizabeth Bishop

I make a trip to each clock in the apartment:

Some hands point histrionically one way

And some point others, from the ignorant faces.

Time is an Etoile; the hours diverge

So much that days are journeys round the suburbs,

Circles surrounding stars, overlapping circles.

The short, half-tone scale of winter weathers

Is a spread pigeon’s wing.

Winter lives under a pigeon’s wing, a dead wing with damp feathers.

Look down into the courtyard. All the houses

Are built that way, with ornamental urns

Set on the mansard roof-tops where the pigeons

Take their walks. It is like introspection

To stare inside, or retrospection,

A star inside a rectangle, a recollection:

This hollow square could easily have been there.

–The childish snow-forts, built in flashier winters,

Could have reached these proportions and been houses;

The mighty snow-forts, four, five, stories high,

Withstanding spring as sand-forts do the tide,

Their walls, their shape, could not dissolve and die,

Only be overlapping in a strong chain, turned to stone,

And grayed and yellowed now like these.

Where is the ammunition, the piled-up balls

With the star-splintered hearts of ice?

This sky is no carrier-warrior-pigeon

Escaping endless intersecting circles.

It is a dead one, or the sky from which a dead one fell.

The urns have caught his ashes or his feathers.

When did the star dissolve, or was it captured

By the sequence of squares and squares and circles, circles?

Can the clocks say; is it there below,

About to tumble in snow?