New Year, Sort Of

Here we are, several days into 2025. I hope everyone is doing well. There are so many new year opportunities that the calendar new year is kind of anti-climactic for me. When I was a kid it was great. My family would stay up until midnight to watch the ball drop on TV. We’d get pizza and make nachos, and all sorts of other snacks to get us through the night and the marathon game of Monopoly that my dad won every single year. When James and I were still ballroom dancing, we’d go to the party at our dance studio but always left around 11 because we were tired and we wanted to drive home before all the drunk drivers got out on the roads. These days, we’re in bed by 9. 

This is the burger I had. It was amazing.

James did stop at our favorite plant based cafe on the way home from work New Year’s Eve and brought us some burgers. That was a delicious treat. And I did make sure we had black-eyed peas on January 1st, mainly to remember my Granny and honor her and my southern ancestors (my mom’s family is from Oklahoma). Granny always had to have black-eyed peas on New Year’s day for good luck. She was superstitious about many things, and while she would cringe and let some things go—we had a black cat when I was a kid and this sometimes made for fraught visits at my house—black-eyed peas are something she never budged on. 

She had a major stroke on my 13th birthday, and after that she lived in a nursing home, partially paralyzed and unable to walk, for ten years. Even then, she made sure my mom brought her a can of black-eyed peas. This was an annual source of frustration for my mom, who thought her mother’s superstitions ridiculous, but nonetheless, always got a can of black-eyed peas at the grocery store sometime between Christmas and New Year’s Day, and would take it to Granny, usually on the afternoon of the 1st since we all slept in at my house due to that Monopoly game and junk food binge.

But I feel like the new year already started with the Winter Solstice. I also think of my birthday in April as a kind of personal New Year. And then the beginning of February is also a kind of New Year with indoor seed starting getting underway for the garden. Then there is Rosh Hashanah that usually happens in September. We don’t celebrate it, but James always needs to remember to call his parents to wish them Shanah Tovah.

You will not be surprised to hear I don’t make resolutions of any sort. However, if you do, I wish you success in your endeavors!

An arctic cold has slowly crept in and looks like it will be hanging around for a little while. Just in time for me to go back to work after my glorious two weeks of vacation. The chill arrived Wednesday, and I knew it was cold because the chickens didn’t come out of the run and into the garden the entire day. After that we have just been leaving the run door closed to help them stay warm and we’ve been turning on the heat in the coop for them at night. 

I always feel bad for the chickens when the temperature drops like this. I worry about them being cold and bored. But whenever I visit them to either bring them a treat or make sure they are doing okay, they rarely fail to give me the impression that I have interrupted some grand scheming. It’s like when you catch a child doing something they know they shouldn’t be and they quickly try and hide whatever that is and look at you innocent and nonchalant. Or perhaps it’s more like a Jedi mind trick.

Ethel never fails to look lost and discombobulated. Sia goes frenetic—oh hey hi it’s you watch my white bouffant bobbing around do you have a treat? Watch my head oh hey hi I have no idea what is going on. And Mrs. Dashwood turns a beady eye and looks at me: what? Times like this I miss Elinor who would add a dash of danger and thuggery to it all since she would usually be in the coop and I always had a slight fear that when I bent over to look in the door she’d be right there and peck my face. She never did, but I suspect she was aware of the threat she projected, no doubt taking pleasure in it, and remained satisfied with the vicious pecks to the back of my knees just above the top of my wellies that served as a constant intimidation tactic.

My Zwift avatar looking cool and collected while the person powering it is sweating and huffing and puffing

I finished up my 500 km Rapha Challenge with an easy Zwift group ride on Tuesday morning. I only had 16 kms to go and it took about 20 minutes. I kept going anyway for some icing on the cake. It was fun. If I have the time next year, I will definitely do it again. 

One of my vacation projects has been to begin ripping out the old, gross carpet from the attic. Like many midwest houses, we have a half attic space that’s finished  in a room that goes the length of the house at the peak. The ceiling isn’t high enough for it to be called a bedroom, nor is it high enough for it to be useful for much since the ceiling slants down on either side and if you are tall, you probably won’t be able to stand upright. As a person of the shorter variety, I have plenty of headspace until I get next to the wall. 

The attic with its manky carpet used to be my sewing room. Then James decided he wanted a man cave and my sewing table moved down to my book/study room where it has taken up a large part of the room ever since. James had his man cave for a few years and then abandoned it, leaving it disorganized. And then it just became the place things went that we didn’t know what to do with.

We have talked about ripping out the carpet and re-doing the attic for years. Years! But it’s never been a priority and if you own a house you know all about those sorts of projects. However, since I took a weaving class a year ago and bought a loom and realized there is no space in my little book room for my desk, books, a sewing table, a loom, and my off-season bike storage, I decided it was time for the attic project to happen. I began sorting through the piles and bins and making sense of what was up there a few months ago. And I started thinking about what I wanted instead of the gross carpet.

The floor needs to be a hard surface so I can find dropped pins and spread out projects for cutting or assembling. I thought about ceramic tile but decided no, slippery and kind of boring. Then I thought it might be fun to have a kind of collage floor of bits and pieces gleaned through my Buy Nothing group. Eventually I decided that while it would be kind of cool, trying to fit together various types of material into a unified and useable floor was more work than I wanted to do. Eventually I decided the floor will be painted.

Under the carpet is plywood, good plywood, at least from what I have uncovered so far. I’ve picked out and ordered the primer and the floor paint and the paint for the walls, a nontoxic, no VOC paint that should be arriving soon. I’ve spent the last three days ripping the carpet off the stairs up to the attic. It was taped and stapled down and not easy to get up. The attic floor will be much easier since the little I have done of that so far has not had any staples. Along with the carpet there is still some decluttering to do, but I feel good about finally making progress on this project. I am taking photos as I go, something I always forget to do, and will eventually share it once I have some before and afters and we can all say oooh and aaah.

While I have been ripping carpet I’ve been listening to book podcasts. The most dangerous one was the Meal of Thorns (science fiction and fantasy) year-end wrap up that added a bunch of books to my TBR list. But it is always fun to be excited about new and old books.

I had a very good year of reading. I left Good Reads at the end of 2023 and have been keeping track of all my reading on LibraryThing. It turns out they have annual “stats” of a sort. You can see mine if you feel so inclined. They aren’t perfect but make for an interesting snapshot. I don’t know how they determine genre. Poetry seems to be lumped into something instead of being on its own. And I wish clicking on the genre in the pie chart listed out the books, but it sadly does not.

The books added information is not accurate because it appears to include my wishlist. Also, until this year, I haven’t updated LibraryThing in, well I can’t remember it’s been so long. In the summer I began working on going through our bookshelves. There are lots of books to add and plenty of books to remove as well. It’s slow going, but pawing through books is always fun. In addition, since I am keeping track of books I read but don’t own, these also appear in the books added stats. These books I categorize as “read but not owned” to keep them separate from the ones I do, but they still appear as books added. The system has a few flaws, but this one is working well enough for me, and it is not owned by Amazon, nor does it constantly pester me to create a number goal for the year.

Tomorrow morning it’s back to wage work. These two weeks have been relaxing and I am lucky to be able to take the time. I’m going to miss having a cup of chai tea and reading in the afternoon. At least the long Martin Luther King holiday weekend isn’t that far away.

Reading

• Essay: Voices from the Dead Letter Office by Cynthia Ozick. An essay that begins with Ozick declaring letter writing to be dead, fountains pens to be art objects, and typewriters as extinct as longhand writing. And then she goes on to detail all the various purposes letters have served from letter as play, plot, and confession to letter as love, loss, and history. She herself leads an epistolary life, though it sounds like some of it has turned into long email letters, which are still letters. But even as she pursues letter writing, she declares it dead–there must be a word for when people do this sort of thing, but it escapes me. Hyperbole maybe? Of course I disagree with her. I have several email and longhand through the post correspondents. However, while letters aren’t dead, I know they are uncommon because my mail carrier once told me that he loves delivering mail to my house. The letters come as postcards or in envelopes made from paper that was not originally an envelope, or decorated with stamps and stickers. I was surprised when he told me this, but then when I thought about it, I understood that most of what he delivers is junk mail, flyers, bills, and sometimes greeting cards. I suppose that does get rather boring. I wonder whether he reads the postcards he delivers to my house and what he thinks about them? If you would like to contribute to the happiness of my mail carrier and get some happiness in your own mailbox, let me know!
• Poetry: The Ocean in the Next Room by Sarah V. Schweig. It took me half the collection before I finally was able to find my way into her poems. The long poem about the COVID pandemic in New York where she lives had me saying “oh, oh, oh” repeatedly. And when I got to the end of the book, I went back to some of the poems I struggled with at the beginning and reread them and found them much to my liking.
• Essays: The Language of the Night by Ursula K. Le Guin. I’m on a slow read of all of Le Guin’s work. I’ve been mainly reading her novels and short stories up until now. This was her first collection of essays published originally in 1979. Then published in the UK in 1989 with a preface and some footnote comments by Le Guin. My copy, with a new introduction by Ken Liu, was published in May of 2024. I’ve read some of the essays and several of the book introductions before (while reading the actual book they are introducing), but having it all collected and talking with each other is fantastic. Le Guin thinks deeply about science fiction and art, her work and the work of others, and the world in general. She’s funny, has an opinion, and is not afraid to say she was wrong about something. This collection is a real treasure.

Quote

“When art shows only how and what, it is trivial entertainment, whether optimistic or despairing. When it asks why, it rises from mere emotional response to real statement, and to intelligent ethical choice. It becomes, not a passive reflection, but an act.

And that is when all the censors, of governments and of the marketplace, become afraid of it.

But our censors are not just the publishers and editors and distributors and publicists and book clubs and syndicated reviewers. They are the writers, and the readers. They are you and me. We censor ourselves. We writers fail to write seriously because we’re afraid—for good cause—that is won’t sell. And as readers we fail to discriminate; we accept passively what is for sale in the marketplace; we buy it, read it, and forget it. We are mere ‘viewers’ and ‘consumers,’ not readers at all.”

~Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Stalin in the Soul” in The Language of the Night

Listening

• Podcast: Between the Covers: Rodrigo Fresán: Melvill. Melvill was already on my TBR list, and after listening to this podcast I want to read it even more. Not only because it sounds like it is doing something really interesting, but because Fresán himself was so funny and such a pleasure to listen to.
• Podcast: Planet Critical: Language and Violence: Sunil Amrith. Amrith is a historian at Yale University and this conversation is about language and violence—how language obfuscates, distracts, and denies violence. Violence is systemic and present at every level of society. It might seem like this would be depressing, but it was really interesting and makes me think about all the ways I use violent language and accept hearing violent language from others.
• Podcast: Big Books & Bold Ideas: Why some college students aren’t reading books. Keri Miller is a local Minnesota Public Radio reporter who is MPR’s book person and does a regular in-person program for MPR called Talking Volumes, among other things. I just discovered this podcast and this is the first episode I listened to. You may recall the November 2024 Atlantic cover story about how a significant number of elite college students can’t read books. In the podcast Miller talks with Karen Swallow Prior, an English professor and author of the book On Reading Well, as well as Taiyon Coleman, the dean of liberal arts at a local community college who used to be an English professor. They were an interesting pairing, but sadly interviewed separately, because it would have been really interesting to hear them talking to each other. Prior, a white woman, was pretty much in complete agreement with the Atlantic article and insisted on the importance of learning to read critically, especially great books like Jane Eyre. Coleman, a woman of color, added all sorts of complications and questions into the mix, including what sorts of books we think students should read (if English is not your first language and you come from some place like Somalia, Jane Eyre is not likely to be attractive to you), and whether we actually value reading and critical thinking as much as we say we do. If our educational system is not teaching students to read and think, what sort of person do they become and who benefits from that? A most excellent point, because a society that doesn’t know how to read or think critically is a great benefit for authoritarians and fascists.

Watching

Nothing this week.

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

The black-eyed peas (grown in the garden) we had on New Year’s Day happened in the from a black-eyed pea and sweet potato vegan quesadilla recipe at the Washington Post. We chose to use pumpkin (also grown in the garden) instead of sweet potato. It was soooo good! It is likely to become our regular New Year’s recipe.