the stranger

you'd go crazy too

if you married a nazi

(played by orson welles).

advent

we are continuing our new (as of last year) tradition of weekly advent parties. it's one of my favorite things that zoë brought home from germany. also? her recipe for linzer torte, which she baked saturday night in a veganized version for our sunday evening coffee. leander joined us. candles, dusk, christmas music, coffee, cake.

charade

"don't like to kiss back?"

"no. doctor said it was bad

for my thermostat."

beautiful soup

kale and white vegetable soup with warm gluten-free rolls at kamasouptra the other day. a trip to the library + a bowl of soup (which falls nicely into my only-if-it's-under-five-dollars rule for eating out) = what a lovely day with my girl.

below, my favorite library find yet, from old portland town by herbert g. jones. "evidently (trollope) had an eye for our ladies, as he said they were very comely and sturdy, apparently well able to take care of themselves." amen!

everything is connected to everything else

for the first time in many years (eight? nine?) we celebrated a somewhat traditional thanksgiving, in honor of mark's mom coming to visit us (it's been even longer since she's been to maine). it was wonderful to have her here, and we got her out to see some sights despite the mostly gray and windy-cold weather.

i cooked a feast with help from my friends. jason came over to help us eat it (and then david showed up later, too). it was pretty damn delicious if i do say so myself.

the menu:
*tofurkey
*gravy
*mashed garlic potatoes
*magical sweet potato casserole
*cornbread and chestnut dressing
*marinated brussels sprouts
*tiny peas with slivered almonds
*gingered cranberry sauce
*pumpkin chocolate chip bread pudding
*gingerbread pumpkin custard
*jason's incredibly delicious apple pie

as it turned out, it was also one hundred percent vegan, which was all about the earth balance buttery sticks and coconut milk i happened to have on hand.

below, my dad's traditional holiday grace:

elf

it makes me cry, but

then that's to be expected:

christmas just gets me.

last words

as a good friend of mine puts it, "one person's deathbed is another person's craft fair." he refers to my current personal stitchery project (i.e. the thing i idly do while i'm watching movies but i'm not sitting at the sewing machine getting actual work done or eating an entire bag of trader joe's spicy flax seed chips). i'm collecting famous last words (apocryphal or not) and embroidering them. so far i've done james joyce and emily dickinson (and i bet you can guess which is which!), and i'm working on robert louis stevenson. this kind of thing can be a little addictive...

birthday party

cake + friends + books + birds. also, i stitched up a hoop for my girl, with lyrics from a favorite song (it can make us both cry, it's such a beautiful sad song) and she liked it.

happy birthday, bean!

this little bean is eighteen years old today. i'm mystified as to how that happened so fast! she was about one year old in this photo; a year before that, on the night of november 18th, mark and i went out to dinner at our favorite baltimore indian restaurant, akbar, with my mom and my brother david. we ate there so often that we were pretty chummy with the waiters, but they became alarmed when i went into labor there and all four of us talked excitedly about it. the way i remember it, they brought us the check really really quickly.

they shouldn't have worried, because she was born more than twenty-four hours later. she had her eyes wide open and a determined look on her face.

i love you, bean, and i'm so proud of who you are at eighteen.

gilda

"it amuses me

to feed you beautiful things."

she's a kept woman.

'excellent!' i cried. 'elementary,' said he.

i've been stitching endless scarves lately (well, okay, not endless, but you know. stitching many lines on long, long scarves, great piles of them), first for our close buy catalog orders and now for whole foods stores and our upcoming craft fairs. last month i mostly watched dexter, breaking bad, and the occasional episode of intervention or hoarders while i sewed. kind of grim and gory viewing, actually. let's think of it as a halloween theme. this month i find myself more interested in black and white movies (as mark so insightfully noted, it's the closest i can get to watching christmas movies without actually watching christmas movies). yesterday i watched a bunch of basil rathbone sherlock holmes mysteries. my favorite was when dr. watson got hypnotised by a big swirly thing in the woman in green.

betreuer

zoë's great friend alisa came to visit this week. alisa was her afs betreuer while zoë was in germany (in the u.s. this is the liason, a contact person who can help the exchange student with any difficulties that come up; in zoë's case, alisa was a steadfast friend and a constant in her life through that year's ups and downs). she is spending three months in the u.s. doing an internship in michigan, visiting american friends, and spending some time with her own u.s. host family in virginia. she was in maine for four days, and they turned out to be mostly gorgeous, sunny and bright. she and zoë spent a lot of time exploring portland, speaking some german, visiting cafes, and even a day hiking up mt. megunticook and wandering around camden. yesterday we did the cliff walk so alisa could see some serious rocky coastline before she left town.

alisa was a joy to have around. mark spent the last day attempting to convince her that she should probably enroll at usm and live in zoë's room.

below, the mädchens model their dirndls, recreating their famous bavarian dirndl photos of 2009.

burns another, brighter life

look, the christmas cactus (which i had forgotten about and woefully neglected for a time) is blooming! don't you think that means i should be allowed to start listening to christmas music?

also, here is some more minnow for you, since kg insists he's never gratuitous.

floor

i'd hate for you to imagine that we're still living with the tar paper floor in our kitchen, so here is photographic proof (with gratuitous dog) that we eventually got that stuff off (with the help of a rented wallpaper steamer, hours of scraping, boiling water, a shop vac, and then hours of scrubbing with murphy's oil soap. in case you wondered how it's done).

we are still planning to paint or something, but for now this old, stained, beat-up wood is looking pretty nice in comparison to the floor's earlier incarnations. i am envisioning a homemade hand-braided rag rug tossed on it. i see on the internets that a person can make such a thing herself from scraps of fabric and old clothes! then again, a person can (as i once saw martha stewart do) thatch the entire outside of her house.

room

zoë and i finally finished our latest painting project, her bedroom. for years it's had deep red and pale yellow walls. her vision for its facelift was kind of scandinavian: soft white walls and trim, with orange doors and a medium gray for her huge wall of bookshelves. below, note the yardsale quilt, orangey pillow, banjo.

her desk, with an antique german typewriter which was a gift from our elderly german neighbor (i mean, it has a german keyboard, with the ü and everything! also, it works and she uses it to write letters. i love to hear the clacking of the typewriter coming from her room almost as much as i love the sound of banjo- or ukulele-strumming).

the timing of it is a little bittersweet -- fixing up her bedroom right before she takes off into the world. when we had finally finished putting all her books on the shelves and i stepped back to admire it, i couldn't help imagining it empty and quiet, without her living in it. but she'll be back...right?

by the way, zoë inherited the most fabulous collection from my mom: THE NURSE BOOKS. it's an amazing sight to see, truly, almost two whole shelves of them.

a couple of my favorites: island nurse.

and of course the charmingly titled nurse a la mode.

catfish

most awesome use of

google street view that i've seen

yet in a movie.

salmagundi

hmm. this blog seems to have become "mean mama ambles around the countryside." probably i should say something political today, but for some reason i'm not in the mood.

i do spend my time doing things other than gazing at the ocean and climbing mountains and so on. for example.

well, okay, there we are again in the maine countryside; hiking in topsham in the woods behind emily and matt's house this weekend. they invited us for another delicious brunch.

matt and emily take their breakfast food very seriously.

annie carved the stunning little bird below, and along that same theme, emily gave me a birthday present...

one of those joseph cornell-esque bird shadowboxes i coveted at nest!

in other news, zoë's friend lilly was home for the weekend from college (she goes to barnard, where zoë is going next year), and it was lovely to see her.

and in the very least photogenic of my news, we are removing the horrible old floor in our kitchen. it is...horrible. it's become one of those projects that ends up taking ten times longer than you plan for. in the end, we will get down to the wood, and we'll paint it. we're leaning toward light gray, possibly using a marine paint.

did i ever tell you how much mark likes finding stuff on the beach? check out the stuff he found on a recent cliff walk with isaac! also, check out my new tilt/shift application on my camera/phone. oooh, pretty.

rabbit rabbit

in honor of yesterday, here is a spooky rabbit rabbit for you. is it just me, or did october fly by?