want to know how i know fall has really arrived? dust on the radiators being burned off…..if you live in NYC you know what i mean.
One reason fall is so exciting is that it engages all the senses in a new way. (Especially true if you live in the north.) The colors on the trees are so vivid; the crunchiness of the leaves underfoot is so delicious; the crispness of the air tingles on the skin and in the nose. If you live in a rural area, I imagine you smell smoke in the air…….and if you live in NYC, you smell that very particular smell that means the heat has been turned on.
It’s the smell of the summer’s accumulation of dust burning on the radiators, I guess? When I came into the kitchen to make my coffee this morning, I felt like a dog because I paused, cocked my head and made a quick sniff, looked side to side, and sniffed again. Yep, that’s it. The heat is on. Which means the heat is on from now until next April or May, whether we like it, need it, or not.
My building was built at the turn of the last century – 1901 I think? Maybe 1905, I can’t remember now. I believe we have a boiler in the basement that heats oil — I see and hear the big oil truck parked at the curb now and then. I don’t know how the decision is made about when to turn on/off the heat, but it’s a binary thing, and we have zero control over it. The only way I can regulate the temperature in my apartment is to open the windows. So during the winter, the heat is blasting in my apartment and the windows are open, but that does not mix to produce comfort. Instead, I’m simultaneously very hot and very cold.
As I get older and mark transitions between things, the transitions feel a little different than they used to — more notable. Ah, it’s fall again. Another fall, one more fall, a finite number of them still to come. Of course there has always been a finite number of them to come, but when you’re a kid that’s not what you think about at the transition! (Correction: that’s not what most kids think about at the transitions, unless they’re dark little kids who read too much Camus, like me.)
Still, even though I know I’ll be cursing the radiators and the boiler and the incessant hounds-of-hell heat before too long, at this first moment I note the smell with a bit of delight. Fall is here. The light hasn’t done that cool shift thing that it does, but the radiators are on. Seasons turn.
I thought the murder scene was a cab, but I was wrong. The team spent all morning preparing the cab for a driving-around scene, with Mariska in the cab.
Hair and makeup are still outside my window, and now the team is setting up tables and tents. More to come….
I thought the murder scene was a cab, but I was wrong. The team spent all morning preparing the cab for a driving-around scene, with Mariska in the cab.
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- Mariska’s inside – lighting the scene
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- and there she is!
Hair and makeup are still outside my window, and now the team is setting up tables and tents. More to come….
announcement to texans and new yorkers: nobody likes you if you think you’re the best.
Maybe, in your life, you once had a relationship that was unsatisfying, but there wasn’t really anything wrong with the person. Everyone said Oh, s/he’s so great, such a nice person, funny, etc. I did once, and I agreed with them! Still, “perfect” as he seemed to be, it was not a good relationship for me. Around that time, I heard Joan Baez sing a song that included the line I used as this blog post title: a saint is hard to live with at home. It cracked me up, it felt very familiar and personally true, and obviously it stayed with me.
This line came to mind this morning when I saw the following article in the NYTimes:
we're perfect
Yep – that’s what it says. More city preschoolers are perfect. Test scores show. To me, that suggests that the tests are imperfect, or imperfect for assessing what they need to assess. Had I seen those data, I’d have written an article pointing out the problems with the test. But New Yorkers – you know how they are – instead say that we’re just perfect.
As a Texan, I really get that, and it’s one thing I find dear about New Yorkers. Well, dear and really irritating. Just like people get irritated (or worse) with Texans for their/our grandiose views of themselves (ourselves). NYers and Texans should either get over ourselves, or at least keep our mouths shut a little more often. 
And look at this – what do we see in my gigantic knitting bag next to my place on the couch:
peasy and mondo, mixing it up together in the bag
That’s my Peasy sweater (I’m knitting a sleeve right now) and my Mondo Cable Cardigan (also on a sleeve). Two sweaters! But lost in sleeveland, the seemingly endless land of stockinette tubes. Yesterday I did a little Peasy sleeve knitting, then a little Mondo sleeve knitting, then back to Peasy. It didn’t feel like too much of a break, switching to the other. I don’t have a purse knitting project going right now, and I keep thinking I ought to cast on something small and quickly-finishable, but then I know I’d just do that instead of sleeves, and the sleeve-knitting elf hasn’t found my apartment yet so if it’s going to be done, I’ll have to do it.
Everything there is to do in this world has a bit that’s less fun than the others. I read an article by Jane Patrick in one of the first issues of Handwoven, where she talked about how much she hated sleying the reed (I think that was the detail). Then she realized that’s a necessary task, she’s always going to have to do it when she weaves, so she tried to reorient herself to the idea. That happened to me when I took my intro stats course as an undergrad – at first I hated it, but I realized it would be my essential tool so I found another way to think about it, and now I adore stats. So my mission is to find another way to conceptualize the endlessness of sleeves.
Happy Thursday, y’all.
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