Poem for Monday and Fun Festival Art

August
By Mary B.C. Slade

I come! I come! and the waving field
Its wealth of golden grain shall yield.
In the hush and heat of glowing noon,
The insects’ hum is the only tune;
For the merriest birds forget to sing,
And sit in the shade with drooping wing.

But see! how the purpling grapes hang high,
And ripen beneath my sunny sky!
And see! how the fruits of the bending tree
Turn blushing and rosy cheeks to me!
And soon shall your garners be over-full
With gifts from the August bountiful.

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Monday was another gorgeous, not too warm summer day. I had a pile of work to get done, only half of which I actually finished, but I did make a dent in the laundry, shifting photos from my phone to my computer, and getting some correspondence taken care of. I also may have found an ophthalmologist (next, dermatologist). Also, we walked to the beach.

After the Mariners game, we watched a couple of episodes of the returned and missed Futurama -- which manages both nostalgia and smart commentary on its own cancellations and evolutions -- and this week's Miracle Workers, which has felt a little over the top this season but I still enjoy it. Some fannish and fun creations at the Bellevue Arts Fair:

Greetings from Marymoor

On Sunday we had cooler, magnificent weather, so after a quiet morning during which I went through every box in the apartment looking for something I couldn't remember where I unpacked, we ate lunch and went to meet Daniel at Marymoor Park with the dogs (Cahaya was in L.A. for business, and now is meeting her sister to go to Disneyland). The herons have left the rookery, but we saw geese and ducks (more ducklings!) in the river and caught some Poliwags for Pokemon Community Day. 

We were thirsty when we left the park, so we took the dogs to Redmond Town Center and got bubble tea (well, Starbucks for Paul. Then Daniel went home to work on his house, since Cahaya is moving in officially next month, and we came home to feed the cats and eventually have dinner. Then because of Margot Robbie we watched Babylon, which is in some ways a better movie than I expected though in other ways is about a self-indulgent as most movies about Hollywood are even if they're dark. 

Greetings from the BAM Artsfair

This weekend is the Bellevue Art Museum's Artsfair, so we got out fairly early for a Saturday to make sure we could find parking by the mall. It was very fun -- there were actually two festival stages on either side of the mall, with the higher-end arts fair along one side and the whole first floor of one of the parking lots, the more local crafts fair facing Bellevue's business district. We only ended up buying tea and coasters, but we saw a lot of gorgeous glass and wood crafts, pottery, and jewelry, and we ended up having lunch at What the Pho in the mall. 

 

We stopped at Trader Joe's and World Market, then we came back to our apartment complex, which was giving out popsicles and bubbles (for the children, but we got them anyway), walked on the dock from which we had a rare frog sighting (two frogs!) and saw a couple of families of ducklings, ate leftover Mediterranean food for dinner, watched some terrible baseball from the Orioles and Mariners both, and now I'm watching the Taylor Swift Reputation Stadium Tour on Netflix because somehow I've never watched it before -- I didn't really watch her before Folklore!

Greetings from Heaven and Hell

I had a very nice Friday that started with chores, but then Daniel (whose team has the last Friday of every month off) came over for lunch -- Lebanese food from Tanoor, I had cheese fatayer, hummus, and lebneh -- and we Skyped my parents, after which he went to walk his dogs and we went to the post office and Safeway.

Then we came home for the remaining four hours of the second season of Good Omens. There were many things I liked about it and a few things I did not like, but overall -- and I wrote this in my notes at the end of the fourth episode, so not affected by the ending -- I never adored it the way I adored the first season. 

S

P

O

I

L

E

R

S

!

It started well -- let's be honest, naked Jon Hamm is always a good way to start a TV show -- and there were many laugh-out-loud moments for me. Feeding ducks frozen peas! "There are only three reasons you call me: You're bored, you need to tell someone about something clever you did before you pop, or something's wrong"! Jane Austen, Master Spy!

And most of the flashbacks worked for me, but -- okay, unpopular opinion -- I missed God! God in the first season seemed, well, wryly ineffable; sure, atrocious things happened last season that God either triggered or did nothing to stop, but we were led to believe that none of us really understood the Ineffable Plan, so there was lots of room for forgiveness.

This season I kept noting, "wow, Gaiman really hates God and the Bible"! There wasn't underlying love and forgiveness, and the hostility was all targeted at Heaven; Hell is a bunch of ill-behaved children doing the kind of stuff they do in Faust. All the real evil this season comes from Heaven. Aziraphale keeps working for them after Job?!

And my alarms went off a little upon discovering that people in Hell think Richard Curtis movies characterize human love. I dislike most of his romances and absolutely loathe Love, Actually -- warning, more unpopular opinions! I was never invested in Nina/Maggie the way I had been in Anathema/Pulsifer nor even Shadwell/Madame Tracy.

Bottom line, the Ineffable doesn't seem like it could possibly have an overarching good reason for anything this season; it's just mean and petty. So I was disappointed even before the Disappointing Thing. Though I enjoyed the Doctor Who references and snappy dialogue, there were fewer characters in whom I was emotionally invested -- I missed the children!

Of course I loved seeing Sheen and Tennant, who have better chemistry than just about any two performers I can think of (Hepburn and Tracy, Cooper and Gaga, Jackman and Reynolds), and they were glorious. There are screencaps from this that I will treasure. But getting to see their characters as angels together shows all the problems with rooting for an angel.

And because of all that, Aziraphale's decision in the end did not seem out of character to me. He's self-hating when he strays from what he thinks is right, and because the attachment between him and Crowley is what usually makes him think he's straying, it feels like that romance is being judged as worse than Gabriel running off with the Lord of the Flies.

It may not BE heterosexual vs homosexual, since they're angelic and demonic beings who may not even have genitalia, but visually it LOOKS heterosexual vs homosexual. All the main gay characters are single at the end of the season, while all the straight couples over both seasons appear to be living happily ever after. For me it really left a bad taste.

Here are some photos from the waterfront last weekend when we were hanging out before the concert, including some boats, some beach, the Seattle Wheel, some flowers, some jellyfish, and the spectacular weather we had that entire day:

Poem for Thursday and Friendship Bracelets

A Green Thought
By Katharine Towers

Say instead it was an evening in head-high
bracken with its smell of dark and medicine.
Thinking green of the infecting fern

where you may crouch and not be known,
lodging your feet for good amid the stalks.
A bower is a dwelling place or once it was

a cage for pent-up singing birds.
Look down to see the warp and weft of root.
All the world is in these clutches.

Look up to clock the fern’s drab underneath
blotched with spores you mustn’t breathe.
Breathe in deep. There’s nowhere else to live.

-------- 

My thrilling lunchtime activity for Thursday was returning to the medical building where I had my checkup yesterday for a mammogram. The facility houses an urgent care clinic, radiology, and several other specialties, and I haven't waited more than five minutes for anything whether it was a blood draw or a neuropathy check, which is very nice. It was otherwise a quiet day with a walk on the beach in warm, breezy weather -- we have new ducklings and last night we saw two nutria.  

Good Omens' second season was up by the time of my usual Thursday night chat group, so we all got off quickly to watch the first couple of episodes, which I loved but I want to wait till I see the whole thing to decide whether it lives up to the first season. What We Do in the Shadows was hilarious (Yiddish-speaking vampires!) I KNOW you're tired of hearing about Taylor Swift, but after I posted the Barbie shoe jewelry (which, yes, I made), I had a request to see the friendship bracelets:

All of these were made by other people and traded to me, including the one with the 3D printed Taylor head!


I made these Folklore/Evermore bracelets and traded them away!


I made and kept this "Exile" bracelet because it makes me think of a Loki songvid!


I was told that people bring their bracelets to concerts on carabiners so they don't have to wear 30 at a time, so here are many of the ones I brought to trade!


These were both traded to me by people I met in Pioneer Square -- a "Long Live" bracelet with a dragon and a Reputation bracelet with beads made from the paper "newsprint" wrappers that came with Reputation merchandise!


Here I am eating gelato and wearing bracelets that were at this point half mine, half traded -- several of the latter were later traded again!


I made this one because the little theater mask (smiling on one side, frowning on the other) works whether "Getaway Car" makes you think of Tom Hiddleston or Karlie Kloss!


Here I am in line. I loved that purple cat bracelet, which someone traded to me at the stadium, but a younger girl saw it and really wanted it, so I let her have it since I'd made...


...tiger eye bracelets with silver cat beads because Taylor was in Cats and wrote the closing credits song with Andrew Lloyd Webber, and I kept the set!

Poem for Wednesday and Barbie

Barbie Doll
By Marge Piercy

This girlchild was born as usual
and presented dolls that did pee-pee
and miniature GE stoves and irons
and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy.
Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said:
You have a great big nose and fat legs.

She was healthy, tested intelligent,
possessed strong arms and back,
abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity.
She went to and fro apologizing.
Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs.

She was advised to play coy,
exhorted to come on hearty,
exercise, diet, smile and wheedle.
Her good nature wore out
like a fan belt.
So she cut off her nose and her legs
and offered them up.

In the casket displayed on satin she lay
with the undertaker's cosmetics painted on,
a turned-up putty nose,
dressed in a pink and white nightie.
Doesn't she look pretty? everyone said.
Consummation at last.
To every woman a happy ending.

-------- 

Good news, you don't have to hear about Taylor Swift today...because we went to see the Barbie movie! That was in the late afternoon after getting to talk to all three of my good high school friends in the morning, then a midday appointment with a new doctor at a practice that had come highly recommended. I really liked her, so of course she's stepping back at the end of the year to spend more time with her two children under five and specializing instead of seeing GP patients! So I either have to hope I like her replacement or go looking for yet another PCP elsewhere, sigh. This place does have excellent phlebotomists and nurses and very little wait time, so I'm inclined to think I want to stick with it. 

Paul and I went to Barbie near 5 p.m., so it wasn't crowded, which made me glad because I know someone who caught covid at the Taylor Swift concert despite the fact that the stadium and its ramps are fully outdoors. The movie is hilarious, full of fun nostalgia -- I knew people who owned a lot of the Barbie toys and outfits referenced -- and strong on the girl power, though it's very second- and third-wave feminist (not a lot of intersectionality despite Barbies of many ethnic appearances, and even narrator Helen Mirren made a snarky comment about how if beauty isn't supposed to be the most important thing, maybe Margot Robbie was the wrong casting). Here I am enjoying it in my Barbie shoe jewelry!

Lyrics for Tuesday and Taylor Town

Ivy
By Taylor Swift

How's one to know?
I'd meet you where the spirit meets the bones
In a faith-forgotten land
In from the snow
Your touch brought forth an incandescent glow
Tarnished but so grand

And the old widow goes to the stone every day
But I don't, I just sit here and wait
Grieving for the living

Oh, goddamn
My pain fits in the palm of your freezing hand
Taking mine, but it's been promised to another
Oh, I can't
Stop you putting roots in my dreamland
My house of stone, your ivy grows
And now I'm covered in you

I wish to know
The fatal flaw that makes you long to be
Magnificently cursed
He's in the room
Your opal eyes are all I wish to see
He wants what's only yours

Oh, goddamn
My pain fits in the palm of your freezing hand
Taking mine, but it's been promised to another
Oh, I can't
Stop you putting roots in my dreamland
My house of stone, your ivy grows
And now I'm covered

Clover blooms in the fields
Spring breaks loose, the time is near
What would he do if he found us out?
Crescent moon, coast is clear
Spring breaks loose, but so does fear
He's gonna burn this house to the ground

How's one to know?
I'd live and die for moments that we stole
On begged and borrowed time
So tell me to run
Or dare to sit and watch what we'll become
And drink my husband's wine

Oh, goddamn
My pain fits in the palm of your freezing hand
Taking mine, but it's been promised to another
Oh, I can't
Stop you putting roots in my dreamland
My house of stone, your ivy grows
And now I'm covered in you
And I'm covered in you

So yeah, it's a fire
It's a goddamn blaze in the dark
And you started it
You started it
So yeah, it's a war
It's the goddamn fight of my life
And you started it
You started it

Oh, I can't
Stop you putting roots in my dreamland
My house of stone, your ivy grows
And now I'm covered
In you

-------- 

Tuesday was a pretty quiet day with gorgeous low-70s weather. I had a bunch of chores to do from having company and having done nothing productive all weekend, then we took a walk to the beach -- not a lot of people in the cooler weather, and there is yet another family of ducklings in the lake by the dock -- and discovered that there are ripe blackberries behind the kayak racks, so I went home to get a container and pick some along with a neighbor I met who did the same thing. They are delicious! My Voyager group watched the sixth episode of the third season of Picard, which I am really enjoying, to my surprise. 

Then we watched the Strange New Worlds-Lower Decks crossover, which is clever and hilarious -- tons of Star Trek in-jokes and some very Galaxy Quest moments -- and now we're watching the first episode of Special Ops: Lioness, which may be too violent for me no matter who's in the cast, though Saldana and De Oliveira are terrific. Part of the fun of seeing Taylor Swift was seeing the whole city get excited about Taylor Swift: the Space Needle put up oversized friendship bracelets, lots of restaurants had Swiftie special menu items and drinks, and we saw bracelet-making and decorated carts all around: