Quarantine Halloween

Cozy evening: Oktoberfest food of an array of sausages and sauerkraut in front of the fire, followed by watching the holiday-appropriate Coco while sipping a heavy, dark, sweet blackberry dessert wine.

I earned my cozy evening by spending the day frostbite sailing, masked even though outdoors, as I am being extra cautious since my days in the jury room last week.

Watching

It feels a little bit weird to say I've wanted to increase the movies or TV I watch. I guess I figure it beats scrolling endlessly through news sites and social media in search of uplift (hah, as if) or even stimulation (boring). So I've been increasing my time on the bigger screen. Here are some of the things I've watched:

Movies

I found a fun new app: "Letterboxd". I don't understand the name, but I found it by searching "Goodreads for Movies" and that is exactly what it is. It allows me to keep track of what I want to watch and what I have watched. It has a social aspect - anyone else want to get it and track each other's movies? (Doesn't do tv).

Radioactive: about Marie Curie. Really interesting and well done. I watched it over two nights.

The Trial of the Chicago 7: written by Aaron Sorkin, it makes a coherent narrative about events that resonate with today. I'm just barely old enough to remember this in real life - I was a freshman in high school in 1968, just awakening to a political conscience. 

The Glorias: really entertaining movie directed by the always unusual Julie Taymor. Striking use of color in the direction. The women's movement has come under a lot of justified criticism recently for having been the white woman's movement, but this shows Gloria Steinem as having been brought into the movement from the beginning by people of color. Split over two nights. Loved the end.

Enola Holmes: very disappointed in this not very entertaining bit of fluff. Didn't even meet my low standards for fluffy type of show.

Under the Tuscan Sun: catching up on things I didn't see the first time around (2003). Entertaining enough, and totally removed from today which was the goal for the evening.

Ocean's Eleven: I've rediscovered that a caper movie, beautiful thieves deceiving each other, is my favorite form of movie. I inherited this from my mother who loved them too. Scarce today, but I do have the rest of the series to watch. From 2001, some things are eerily different than today - big chunky cell phones, anyone?

Battle of the Sexes: Billy Jean King in context. I really liked it. 

Television

It turns out that Netflix and Amazon Prime are the easiest streaming channels for me to watch on my tv. (I still have basic cable which also gives me on-demand networks.) So my TV watching is heavily geared towards those outlets. I don't actually watch any current network shows.

The Queen's Gambit: Just finished it last night, took me three nights. Las Vegas and Europe and the midwest in the 1950s and 1960s. So very stylish, clothes and interiors, the coloration of the cinematography helps evoke the period. It makes you feel good. I read the original book decades ago and this is a different feeling. Very well done, enjoyed immensely.

Mrs. America: I've watched a couple of episodes and want to watch more. Covers in detail and with shifting points of view events covered briefly in The Glorias. 

Occupied: Such an interesting premise. Norway goes all green and shuts down oil production in the North Sea. An energy starved Europe stands by while Russia moves in and takes over "temporarily". Focuses on compromises one makes to survive. I'll watch more of it.

Snowpiercer:  Stars my beloved Daveed Diggs. It's a little weird and hard to follow, but I think with another episode I'll be hooked.

The Good Wife: Seven seasons, started in 2009, I hadn't watched any of it. Classic network drama. Sucked me in the way Grey's Anatomy did. Good sympathetic but flawed characters trying to get by in the world. At least one good legal case per show, with longer term plot threads moving between the shows and through the seasons. I'm only part way through season three, so I've got a lot to go! I play it in my basement while I'm doing chores or sewing, because it doesn't demand all my attention.

Piccard: Star Trek. Not the best, by a long shot, but fun to catch up with TNG characters, in the "whatever happened to ol' ...." sense.

Schitt's Creek: I waited for the last season to come on Netflix for free. Stevie is my style icon! So sweet to the end.

Away: I love a good space yarn, and here they are off to Mars. It's ok, I'll watch more than the 3 or 4 I've seen so far, but so far not so engrossing as some of the others. 

Madam Secretary: If only I lived in that universe, where reasonable people try to behave well. I finished it this summer.

Grace and Frankie: I finished it on Netflix, sigh. But are there more seasons coming?

Below Decks Sailboat: I haven't watched reality TV (except for HGTV) until this. It was my guilty pleasure, the single season I watched this summer, being a voyeur to good looking young people hooking up and breaking up, in a fantasy setting, trying to do their jobs serving badly behaved rich people. I tried another season, and it didn't work as well for me.

Want to watch: Little Fires Everywhere for escape.

Style Icons

Looking at my clothes, trying to decide what to do with them, made me muse a bit on what I own and how I want to be seen in the world. My entry into the working world was coincident with the era of skirted (but man-tailored) suits. I had shirts from Brooks Brothers, and little silk floppy bow ties. I was happy to have a uniform. As I grew more confident at work, I finally evolved to slacks, a blazer, and a T, or rarely, a tailored shirt. Imagine my delight to find Samantha Bee create a name for herself in exactly the style I wanted! At last!  A role model of a woman whose work and look, both, I admired!

 But, since I was roughly twelve years old, there is a style I adopted and wore as much as I could, when not at work.  But, not until very recently did I ever see someone representing the way I choose to look. But, finally I did. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Stevie Budd!

The plaid shirt, tee, jeans, and sneakers is me. Though lately, more likely yoga pants than jeans.

(Except for the hair on both. I'm a short-hair girl for life, since I got my ponytail cut off right after my high school yearbook picture was taken.)

Clothes

When I retired, I decided I wouldn’t touch my work clothes for a year, to give myself four seasons to figure out what I might actually wear going forward. This hasn’t been a year that is a fair test of what I might wear, obviously. But I own too many clothes and I feel the need for a purge coming on.

I did a major clothes and closet makeover back in 2012 (and wrote about it here, here, and here). I just re-read all of those posts, so you don’t have to. You’re welcome. Basically, I took all the clothes out of my room, demo’d my old closet, installed new racks and shelves but no doors, and then only allowed clothes back into my room that I would wear right then. And, I vowed to not own more clothes than fit in my newly efficient room. This was not really a big constraint, because in addition to the closet (which has room for boxes on top of the hanging racks) I have five chests of drawers in my bedroom, ranging from small to medium. Work clothes almost entirely hang in the closet, and all other clothes are in drawers.

The visual approach really worked for my work clothes - having everything hanging out where I could see them helped me get dressed in the mornings. But, looking at those clothes now, I think maybe they are getting dirty or fading, being “out there”. So I’ve just ordered a hanging curtain to block the light and keep them less dusty. But that is purely cosmetic, and doesn’t deal with deciding what I want to own going forward.

My unstable weight has contributed to the problem. I have continued to buy clothes, mostly in bigger sizes that are more comfortable now. The weight started to come on in my last two years of work. At first, I resisted buying new because I assumed I would lose the weight as quickly as I gained it. Alas, no. But then I was within spitting distance of retirement and I resisted buying good clothes knowing I wouldn’t need them all. In fact, I had a knee operation six months before I retired, and used that as an excuse to start wearing yoga pants to work. I kept that up until the end, supplemented with dresses that would work for a wider range of weights than my tailored pants.

So, paradoxically, I have too many clothes but not much in the way of good clothes that fit right now. I need a plan (having a plan makes me feel just about as good as actually doing something). How about this: save doing anything about it for a stretch of bad weather. And in the meantime, buy nothing. Maybe do laundry more often to get by.

On Vacation

How can I be on vacation? Vacation from what? But I feel like last week was indeed a vacation, at least from my [normal] life. My boat partner and her husband, J and J, had their vacation to the Azores aborted at nearly the last minute. We have been in essence podded together this summer, sailing without masks but seeing no-one else but family and store clerks. They live in rural Pennsylvania, beautiful but not so cultured. And so, J and J came and stayed in my lovely basement instead of the Azores, which is almost as nice. It certainly was nice for me!

J had done her homework, and gotten timed tickets to open museums in DC. The African-American History Museum, the newest and everyone’s first choice, was not available. But they got the Portrait Gallery (my favorite) and the American Indian Museum, which I had never been to, and for the day I wasn’t available, the Spy Museum. The best weather day of the week J and I went sailing, while husband J did a major gardening chore for me and worked on his novel and played with my dog. The whole week was the best of fall weather, warm enough to be outside, bright bright sun, not too hot, rated 10-out-of-10 every single day by the Capital Weather Gang in the Washington Post.

It was so nice to be out and about! We spent hours inside the museums, which were not at all crowded and thus felt safe. Husband J had been a middle school teacher and had been on several field trips to the museums, but there was enough change to keep him going, reading every sign on every display. We had drinks and nibbles at a sidewalk cafe one day, deli sandwiches dining outside at the new Eisenhower memorial with J & J’s lovely DC-suburban resident daughter another. Most of the food at home was takeout, where they delighted in our easily available Central American, Ethiopian, and Vietnamese cuisines. I was also pleased to be enjoying so many different flavors not cooked by me.

But I am used to being alone, and I was not displeased to have a day of isolation and solo recovery, before plunging back into my [normal] life. Which is, tbh, isolation most of the time too, and it suits me.