What’s a fritterer? Well, to fritter is to waste your time or money or resources on trivial matters — but really, who’s deciding what’s trivial and what’s not? And who’s telling me what constitutes a waste? I like to think of frittering as that delightful state where you know you are doing something frivolous, and you’re good with that.
Life is full of things that need to be done, and things that do not, and those are the things I like. I feed squirrels, opossums, deer, raccoons, field mice, a ground squirrel, and sundry birds. I harass the cat, make tea every afternoon at three, walk four miles a day, have perfected the margarita, embroider, knit, get bitten by spiders every so often, handwrite letters to people, and lie very poorly.
Books I am reading for research or for fun, in strict reverse order
- The Ladies’ Flower Calendar and Household Receipt Book.
- Okay, I am not going to list every book I read as part of the 1000 Books tag — probably just the books I keep, and certain other fun ones, like The Complete Short Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson.
- Sex Tips for Girls, from Cynthia Heimel.
- The Lutheran Handbook.
- Pantheon Library’s African American Tales.
- Bradshaw’s Illustrated Hand Book to London and Its Environs, 1862.
- Am I going to count all the 1000 books I am logging in my blog? Maybe, let’s find out. Deep Survival, Laurence Gonzales.
- A pile of Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee mysteries from the ’50s and ’60s: so many of them.
- The Collected Short Fiction of Ngiao Marsh (stories from 1948-1980, collected in 199)
- Maxims and Proverbs of Old Korea, Tae Hun Ha (Korean Cultural Series Vol. VII, 1970; since one of the maxims in the book is about cigarette-smoking, they can’t all be Old-old)
- Dr.Jekyll and Mister Hyde and Other Strange Tales, Robert Louis Stevenson (stories from 1886-1894)
- Lord Peter, Dorothy Sayers (short stories from the 20s into the 40s)
- Frog and Toad: The Complete Collection, by Arnold Lobel (2016, though the originals are from the 1970s)
- Amatka, Karin Tidbeck (2017). Wow!
- Sharps and Flats: A Complete Revelation of the Secrets of Cheating at Games of Chance and Skill by Sir John Maskelyne (1894)
- The Greater Trumps, by Charles Williams (1932)
- Spinsters in Jeopardy, Ngaio Marsh (1954)
- [starting from 10 September 2020]
Programs and movies, somewhat in order of watching
- Better Off Ted, in the world’s slowest binge
- Moana, for the 127th time, I think. I never saw it until this spring, so I am just catching up with the number of times I would have watched it otherwise
- Killjoys rewatch now that I have all five seasons available
- The Black Panther, again
- The Wild, Wild West Season 1, which looks like another promising binge, so silly [this didn’t quite catch despite the silliness, so the binge is called off until I have another huge handwork project I am trying to complete]
- The Good Place Seasons 1-4, bingeing it out!
- [starting from 10 September 2020]
Things that have caught my fancy lately, for one reason or another
wtf snow?, Mother’s Sausage, bardcore covers, raccoons are oddly graceful, Japanese pullsaws for the win, scooters, Ramen Bowls, good luck getting that outdoor space heater!, angry jays, drawing a map for the book, what’s a teenaged utahraptor’s bedroom look like?, my dry erase board, thrift stores, Saga Thing podcast, dancing around the house to old Peter Gabriel albums, Atlas Obscura, solenoids, French Breakfast tea, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote poetry?, NASA teeshirts, patio furniture, needlepoint backgammon boards, Dean Winchester’s Impala vs. Jake Doyle’s GTO, margaritas, Baltica Foulards, sweater weather, Elizabeth Bourne‘s opening in Svalbard tomorrow night, the shade garden at the Douglas County fairgrounds, the phrase palais de chance…
