Here is the top of Cricket/ette's quilt.
Recently the prescription for my reading glasses had to be tweaked, so now I have nice new specs. Choosing new glasses is a very fraught exercise, yes? Staring at oneself in a mirror, trying not to look at the blemishes but just to focus on "how do these look". Thank goodness the fashion for glasses with narrow rectangular lenses has gone, I looked so silly in them, but now many frames are thick and heavy which do nothing for my face either. My last glasses had frames with sharp corners and arms made in two pieces, and I was never happy with them because my hair caught on them so many times. The new ones are much smoother, black half-frames with touches of gold on the side arms........and they haven't pulled at my hair once.
Sadly the optometrist had no nice green frames for me. They did have thick heavy frames in a particularly virulent shade of poison uranium green, which I couldn't even bring myself to try on. It would be so nice to have lovely rich deep emerald green not-too-chunky frames........dream on, Jennifer.......
Following Linda's recent recommendation I reserved "Astor Place Vintage" at the library, collected it yesterday morning, and finished it last night. Thank you, Linda - it was such a good read, I really enjoyed it. The setting is New York in 1907-08, a time and place about which I know very little but which is brought so well to life in this book, and in 2007.
Mind you, not much else was done here yesterday.
When I was a child I was called a bookworm and was never sure if was a compliment. "She's always got her head in a book" - I can still hear it being said. The implication was "she's a day-dreamer, never does anything practical" which is (and was then too) not true. My parents didn't know where my love of reading came from; not from either of them, for sure. My mother, like many girls of the time, finished her education at high school level and was never a reader. My father, not a reader either, won a scholarship to study architecture after high school but was not allowed to take it up; his father and uncle were builders, and he was expected to join them in the business. War intervened, he enlisted when he was 20, and he never did get to follow his dream.
The bookworm didn't finish high school either, but that's a story for another day.
"It is frequently the case, that a girl's education ends just as her mind is beginning to mature and her faculties are beginning to develop. Her education ends when it ought properly to begin. She enters upon marriage entirely unprepared, and, perchance, by some misfortune, she is thrown penniless upon the world with no means of obtaining a livelihood, for her education has never fitted her for any vocation. Not having been properly taught herself, she is not able to teach, and she finds no avenue of employment open to her."
Perhaps true in 1885 when that was written, but not so much in my experience many years later - the only times I was out of work was when I wanted to be, and I had no desire to become a teacher although much of my working life was spent in the education system.
Enjoy your days!
