More pictures from Pennsylvania Quiltfest. Entire quilt and detail.

Pictures from Pennsylvania Quilt Show

More pictures to come...

Life is too short to read anything that isn't interesting: Great Openers.

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
1881

The Ultimate Would-Have-Been Blogger

As I become just a bit obsessed with this blog it occurs to me that if Samuel Pepys were alive today he would have been a natural. With that thought in mind I turned to Goggle and sure enough! -- someone has turned his diaries into a blog! www.pepysdiary.com. Isn't that "most neat and fine!" And so to bed.

Reading

"Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere..." My new favorite first line from Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. I haven't felt compelled to read a serious book in quite a while. I do occasionally read a mystery or a sci fi work from the beginning all the way through to the end but, of late, it seems that I would rather be doing things other than reading. Books don't capture my attention the way they used to. Finding ones I want to read seems like work. At other times in my life I was always on the trail of a good book. I wonder what I'm on the trail of now...

But I did read this one and, like any well-written book, it has found it's way into my view of the world. Now when I see the sun setting hugh and orange I think about the images in Spin of the sun filling the sky, dangerously closer to us. When I drive through desolated areas of the City I speculate about what kind of a civilization would find ours worth going to some lengths to preserve. I also think about the optimism of the story. Its too smart to probably ever have wide appeal but it is richly complex and absorbing.

Surprised by Peaches

You wouldn't think that row houses could have gardens that look this green behind them but the world is full of surprises. Row houses especially are surprising. First, through some odd principle of context and private human scale vs public scale they can be quite spacious inside and yet seem to take up very little space on the street. Second, you often have no real idea of what is behind them. I was walking down a small street yesterday and noticed ripening peaches topping the high wooden palisade fence around someone's side yard. I stopped and peered a bit closer, craning up on my toes to see as far over the fence as I could. I think there are three fruit trees in that yard.
That started me thinking about how it might feel to be in there, among the trees with the solid row of parked cars and the fairly constant stream of foot traffic on the very narrow street outside. Was it quieter in there? Did the tree absorb some of the sound so that the yard felt more hushed than the rest of South Philadelphia? Could garden's keeper smell the peaches ripening in the warm June evening?

School's out. First day of summer.

My cat in the backyard of my house last summer.

I Begin...

I have a blog...who would have thought it?