Life as of Late

 

A sneak peak of the pelisse (coat from the regency period) I just made.

I thought I'd give you a little update on my life, since you haven't gotten much lately.  So here is my life as of late:

• I've been accepted to work at the Shakespeare Festival again and am super excited.  I love Cedar and the wonderful costume shop.  And they just announced they're doing Les Miserable which will be beautiful and incredible.  I'm so excited.
• I spend a lot of time looking for housing for Jen when she gets back 
• I finished the first draft of that 10 page research paper I talked about 
• I finished my pelisse (collar pictured above) I was making for my Historic Costume class.  I've decided I like to make things more complicated than they need to be.  I could have made a simpler dress, or done renderings for a show, but no, I had to make a coat and adapt the pattern and learn new sewing techniques.  Yay for lots of learning, but no yay for staying up till 3:30 am trying to finish it.  Luckily I had time to finish detail work on the bus and before class.  I finished just in time!  It was a pain, but i do think it turned out nice, especially the trim on the collar, as pictured.
• I watched "Little Dorrit" a BBC adaption of Charles Dickens book and all 7.5 hours of it are worth it.  I watched it while I sewed and fell in love with the characters.  The hero and heroine are so good and I just love them. 
• I had a too sweet week.  As of August I only eat one serving of refined sugar a week, and this week I was naughty.  I had a brownie, ice cream, a 1/4 of a doughnut and two very sweet waffles, but not in one day.  It was at least over 3 days.  So here is my confession to you all.  Yes, I feel guilty.  And my body is wishing I didn't do it as well.  I guess I've trained my body not to handle sugar because I started shaking after my 2 waffles.  Tomorrow I'm going to be good again.  

So there you have it, my random doings as of late.  I hope you enjoyed.

Love,

Valerie

A Few of My Favorite Things

This morning on Music and the Spoken Word they sang a beautiful rendition of "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music.  It has inspired a post of my favorite things.  I figure it goes along with the month of Thanksgiving too.

So here are a few of my favorite things:

The smell of the dryer going
A windy Autumn day when the wind is swirling leaves around like confetti
Delicious Sunday dinners (we had yummy eggplant Parmesan tonight)
Friends that call out of the blue
Hearing old family stories
Reading cooking blogs
Sewing (I bet you couldn't have guessed that one ; )
Music - especially opera and Mindy Gledhill
Laughing with my mom

And this is going to be one of my upcoming favorite things:

This beautiful girl comes home in just over a month from her mission!  I'm so excited to have her home! 

Focus on what you know

I've been working on a research paper for my theatre history class for the past month or so... although you could say I've been working on avoiding it for the past month. No, not completely, but doing research has been a lot more challenging than I expected, thus I've stalled the actual writing.

I just feel so inept writing about a subject I know imperfectly (sometimes this perfectionism can really get in the way!). But today I had this epiphany as I walked to one of my classes yesterday.  The thought came to me:

"Focus on what you know"

It was one of those moments that make you say, "Of course!  Why didn't I think of that before?"  It's just like the gospel where you can get caught up on all the things you don't know or are too complex for our little human minds.  We can get stuck and frustrated trying to understand how we came to be when there is no beginning of time OR we can focus on what we know.  From my experience, focusing on what we know brings so much more peace, calm, and eventually more enlightenment.

I was pleased when I realized that the same idea applies to studying and writing.  And guess what?  As soon as I started focusing on what I know about the decline of Roman theatre the task didn't seem so daunting.  I realized I knew more than I thought I did and I actually did have something to write about.  

I've got an outline and I'm ready to go.  There's still much to learn, but I've got a place to start.

And all these books and more to learn from:

Now lets see if I can crank out 10 coherent pages for Monday. Thank goodness it's only a first draft!