Hats Off...

Yesterday, Veterans' Day, was my first outing since my surgery last week. Bud decided I needed an "airing out" and I agreed. I was feeling pretty grungy and pent up, so off we went for a little ride to scout out some antique stores that were new to us and some old favorites.

We made our way to Hebron IL, a farm village rediscovering its own charm with opening several antique stores on its Main Street. It was an early Tuesday morning, so we pretty much had the shops to ourselves. Lots of good stuff there to tickle our fancies, though we made no purchases. Then we took IL 173 over through Harvard IL (famous for their Milk Days) and on up to Walworth WI on Rte 14. In Walworth we stopped at an antique shop where I've found a few wonderful baskets in the past. However, I've pretty well run out of space for more baskets on top of the kitchen cabinets. Bud's threatening a basket addition to the house - but he should talk! Over a 1000 pieces of Occupied Japan porcelain and bisque fill four curio cabinets and spill out onto bedroom dressers! Of course, then there are my books... Maybe an addition might not be a bad idea...

Anyhow, we were meandering around the second floor of this shop when I suddenly felt like the air had been let out of me and I almost keeled over into a display of vintage hats. Bud was off hunting for OJ pieces someplace on the other side of the room behind the mountains of history's castoffs. I had a moment of hilarity as I thought of him discovering me passed out on the creaky oak floor with feathered and veiled pillboxes piled on top of me. He, however, would not have gotten the joke. (I hated wearing those blasted hats to church when I was a kid!) I bent myself over to get blood to my head and took some deep breaths. That helped some, but that's when I noticed a flat feeling. I still feel it and it's rather depressing.

Bud was all for hauling me straight home and tucking me in bed, and threatened that if I passed out on him he'd leave me there on the floor to fend for myself. Ever my chivalrous hero! No, by the look on his face, my face must have looked very less than blooming. He suggested a snack might revive me, so we headed over to a gas station for a quick infusion of sugar. That helped, but we headed on home anyway by way of a ride through Lake Geneva WI.

Thing is, I can't seem to get those blasted hats off my mind! Anybody remember those little things kind of shaped like butterfly wings that clutched your head, were likely made of wire and covered with velvet? They had short little veils attached that edged onto your forehead and itched? I abhored those things. I would rather have had a huge picture hat with a dramatic ostrich feather than those pesky things. I mean, if you have to wear a hat, wear a HAT, for pete's sake!

I have no idea where this hat obsession is coming from. Winter is approaching and I'll likely don my winter chappeau that looks like a black fuzzy bucket on my head. But that's about warmth and I am well over the age where I'd wear picture hats with ostrich feathers anyway.

So, I'm feeling flat and obsessing about hats. I dunno.

Gratitude . . .

I am grateful we do not own an X-box.

Figures. . .

Just when I'm all excited about NaNoWriMo, I get told that my gallbladder MUST come out. Surgery takes place on Tuesday. BUT! That gives me 10 days off from work to write! Now what I write may be pure shite, since I may be on painkillers. But I will write, dang it!

Autumn

We had a gorgeous autumn day on Sunday, so I took a couple pictures out front. I figure that I likely won't be paying much attention to the out-of-doors next month once I get started writing for NaNoWriMo, so it was wonderful to have such an outstanding day.

I love autumn. It is my favorite season for the fact of the remarkable beauty it shares with us.

Planning. . . .

A week to go before NaNo begins.

I'm not generally a "planner" per se. I'm more a chunk writer who lets things come as they will. However, with NaNo looming I'm finding the need to know the "whos" and "wheres" of this fantasy world I'm creating. So, I've been googling for images of some of my characters. And found out that Rupert Grint looks very much like my MC - the current Rupert (scroll to near the bottom of the link), not the younger Rupert. Who knew?

Today I am going to attempt map drawing. I've got to get my locations straight in this world I've created. I've got to know where folks are going, where they've come from and some of this world's history. A map should help. I think. Maybe.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery
Published by Europa Editions
Translated from the French by Allison Anderson

For some time now I've had an itching to take French lessons. I have no idea why. Long ago, in my ancient past, I took a semester of university French with Madame Maas and did not like the language. I think I felt it too simplistic and effete after the rigors of wrestling with German syntax and Russian verb aspects.

Perhaps, these 40 years later, I am more inclined to a search for elegance.

Muriel Barbery brings us two seemingly disparate characters - a fifty-something concierge for an elite apartment complex and a twelve-year-old daughter of one of the complex families. Both, however, are bitter, super-intelligent misfits who have built themselves into their own individual worlds of misery. They are both philosophical snobs, decrying the fallacies and foibles of those on the other sides of the invisible walls they've built around themselves.

I didn't like either of them much for the first 150 pages or so of their individual journals. I wanted to give them each a swift kick in the keister and wondered why I was even bothering to continue reading. But this is a book not just about redemption, but transformation. Barbery manages to weave a thin thread of hope of that transformation through her characters' misery. Just hints, but they held me through to the sad, but satisfying, ending.

I particularly enjoyed this passage on the joy of writing by Madame Michel, the concierge:
This is eminently true of many happy moments in life. Freed from the demands of decision and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence. What other reason might I have for writing this - ridiculous journal of an aging concierge - if the writing did not have something of the art of scything about it? The lines gradually become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know. This painless birth, like an unsolicited proof, gives me untold pleasure, and with neither toil nor certainty but the joy of frank astonishment I follow the pen that is guiding and supporting me.

Yup. I get that. Been there. Frequently.

And shortly after this passage twelve-year-old Paloma brings us this after a visit to her grandmother:
So, we mustn't forget any of this, absolutely not. We have to live with the certainty that we'll get old and that it won't look nice or be good or feel happy. And tell ourselves that it's now that matters: to build something, now, at any price, using all our strength. Always remember that there's a retirement home waiting somewhere and so we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity.

That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.

So, basically what Barbery tells us through Madame Michel and Paloma is get out of your heads, break down your invisible walls, find your passion, and live life like it will end tomorrow, because it might. Not an original premise certainly - we hear it from motivational speakers ad infinitum - but Barbery presents it in such a very elegant way.

NaNoWriMo

I'm stunned.

Okay.

It's official.

I have clearly lost my mind.

I've committed myself. . . .

to writing a 50,000 word novel in one month.

I've joined the thousands of other loonies who do this every November.

What have I done?

How can I possibly?

What will I write?

I'm stunned.