forgetgutenberg

Despite some strenuous effort to kill it (mainly in the form of utter neglect), this orchid stands tall:

It’s not every day you wish you were more like a plant.

Helped set up the Mind’s Eye Yarns booth at Gore Place. Lucy dyed a lot of yarn (something like twenty-eight pounds, and that basket didn’t hold all of the sock yarn), packed up the shop, and managed not to loose her assistants to the adorable angora bunnies until after setup. Mostly. (And the goats! Baby goats! Baby sheep! Crabby alpacas!)

Then I went to work, which was, let me tell you, full of awesome. (Actually, it was – someone else had already done the awful heavy thing that is sort of my job to deal with, and they are forever my favorites for it.)

Then I went back to Gore Place, wandered around, ate pierogies (I really actually had been craving pierogies for … ages), helped break down the booth and put the store back together again… (It’s such a good thing there were three assistant yarn-wranglers and not just two.)

And today, I spun some lovely blue singles and thought about getting cashmere, but didn’t. Soon. I have to finish something first.

Don’t bother to think about where you’re aiming the camera. Sometimes it works. Often it doesn’t. It’s one of the reasons I got a digital camera.

Well, on the one hand, the bread turned out fairly well. A little salty for my taste, and denser than I’d been hoping. (Next time I won’t follow the recipe, and I’ll try to start earlier.) (However, sandwiches for lunch two days in a row = victory.)

Work. Work, work, work.

And there’s the rest of it. Work. I’m afraid I’m turning into a line from a Stoppard play.

I’ve given up on thinking about the retail aspect of books, since I just don’t get money and can’t really work out why it matters so much. Which leaves me with bookstores as community spaces, and I’m suddenly feeling a lot more charitable about the disposable book. (So, in another piece of “the internet and I are, like, totally on the same wavelength” synchronicity, Warren Ellis was talking about “bookazines” (which is a completely ridiculous name, as far as I’m concerned, and makes me just a little less inclined to give the idea any merit at all, but there you go) and I finally looked at these “Buks” (there’s an umlaut, so it’s only a little bit ridiculous) the Other Bookstore has on the counter (conveniently right next to the line for the cafe), and hey. Fancy that – neat, pretty cheap, intentionally disposable pseudobooks.)

Also, check out this Coilhouse post. Who knew, MTV was once fabulous. (Seriously. What’s up with being all obsessed with silent text? It’s just a fad. People read out loud for a lot longer than they’ve been quiet.) (Apparently I did miss out on something because I didn’t have cable.)

A cafe is not absolutely necessary for a successful bookstore. It’s a perk. Nerd-appeal, or at least knowing the market and filling a valued niche, is absolutely indispensable. Location is, while not everything, pretty handy.

I’ve totally been converted to the side of cafes in bookstores, by a local bookstore and their cafe, run by a totally different (but awesome) set of people – no burned chain coffee, this. I think it’s a good perk; sitting down and drinking coffee often drives me to buy a book. Or something.

I don’t know. I’m a voracious reader. I like stories. As you may have noticed, I’m having a lot of trouble getting worked up about the survival of books as we know them. Don’t get me started on the publishing industry – if it’s not time for a change there, I missed something. Even Amazon isn’t ruffling my feathers much these days – it’s not their fault some of their customers are inconsiderate. (All right, there was some kerfluffle with their POD service that I paid a little bit of attention to, although not enough to remember a single detail.)

Which leaves me at bookstores. I don’t believe that books themselves are all that, necessarily, but bookstores? I’d like to see a lot more bookstores. I want the indies to survive and thrive. Bookstores are, or can be, incredibly important to community. Historically, coffee shops and bookstores are responsible for getting people together in world-changing ways.

Bookstores are a place for ideas to be shared, right, and recommendations – discoveries of people and words. Which is why a place with well-read staff is so much better than a chain with people who don’t read, and booksellers who don’t have any way of impacting the store’s stock.

The problem is that an independent with lackluster staff is, if anything, worse than the chain. You’re already paying more – because publishers don’t offer the best discounts to stores ordering small quantites – and you’ve probably made a special trip. If the staff is boring, or doesn’t seem to know their stuff, or somebody’s cranky, and the first impression is bad – well. Why bother to go back, right?

Unless you approach it as something other than an ordinary retail transaction, which it really ought to be anyway.

It can’t be about money. Well, let me rephrase: it can be about money, but only if we don’t mind continuing on in the same old rut.

Just in case some other poor soul had the same thought I did, I would like to point out that starting your day’s bread-making at 9 p.m. is not the best plan ever. It’s rather later than I wanted to be awake, now, and I haven’t even started baking.

On the other hand, I’ve been having a lot of fun making bread. I’ve successfully done sourdough twice now, with some help from the starter my co-worker gave me. Tonight’s experiment is the bog-standard white bread recipe at the beginning of Beard on Bread. This is largely because I was too darn lazy to hunt down the recipe I always mean to make (it’s the one that (I think) won a blue ribbon at some (county?) fair in Texas, lo many moons ago).

So I’m trying to avoid opening the oven too many times while it’s rising, hence telling you about baking. I’ve never been a natural baker – if I am going to make something to feed people, it’s probably going to be made in a skillet out of whatever I have in the kitchen. (Sometimes this works very well, and I end up with stone soup – I say, I have broccoli, and someone else has tofu, and there’s this random bottle of sesame oil … and it balloons from there. Sometimes it doesn’t work so well, because I’ve overcooked the pasta.) My specialty is really apalling things you can put on pasta – cinnamon and nutmeg cream sauce being a perennial favorite.

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about cooking practical food. You know, staples. Bread is always a good thing to have around, and a household can go through absolutely incredible quantities of it (so no worries about it going bad…) Also, good bread is difficult to find at the grocery and usually expensive. Not to mention that, secretly, bread is a lot of fun to make (you get to punch it!) and doesn’t really take a very long time. Yeah, so there’s hours and hours of rising time, but it’s not like you have to stand over it and make sure it works. It either does or it doesn’t. Assuming, at least, that you’ve remembered not to make the yeast unhappy or put the wrong amount of salt or done something strange with the flour …

If it works, oh, it is an immensely satisfying expression of the desire to get creative and make something. Also, it gets eaten, so there’s no worrying about where to keep it. Knitting is no good with butter.

There, it’s nearly time to put it in the oven.

Today was a perfectly lovely day, with electric blue skies and little puffy clouds.

It’s time to get out of the winter cocoon. (I love parts of winter, but … really, summer is best.)

The first weekend in May is Somerville Open Studios. My space is going to be part of it this year, so mark your calendars.

The best thing about this here piece of work, if you can decipher it, is the fact that I am using a shuttle from a Fisher Price loom.

Anyway. It’s also a great stash buster. I’m using some silk/cotton (the blue) and cotton (lavender) that I had lying around. I was never going to knit with it, that’s for sure, but I think it’s going to be a pretty nice scarf. (This time, the warp might actually have been long enough. We shall see.)

Dandelions are one of my favorite flowers, because they’re so good at showing up in otherwise nasty drab places. The alley where this one sprouted is otherwise extraordinarily vile.

But it’s a useful reminder. There are wonders to be found in the most out of the way corners, and it is worth looking. Even on grey, horrible, rainy days.

This morning, I looked up at the clouds, and they were astonishing. The silver and white and … strange textures of storm clouds are spectacular, and every time I see them I think “I should take a picture of this.” Usually I don’t, either because my camera isn’t sensitive enough to capture the subtleties of shading, or because it’s also raining.

I’m experimenting with sourdough.

I must confess: I have a deep and abiding fondness for legitimately obtained lens flare. Doing it in photo editing seems like cheating, but as an effect … sometimes it’s just too perfect. (I would like you to notice, before you say anything about me taking pictures while driving, that I was stopped. Waiting for an arrow.)

So, for an all-too-brief time, there was a Gnomes section in the basement. I believe Book Gnome predates that. I think that every bookstore should have a gnomes section, just in case. You never know, after all, and there are probably some gnomes out there who’d appreciate the nod.