A Professional Dilettante

I have a rather odd Christmas tradition.  Almost all of the folks I’m
related to live far away, and I’m not big on going to other people’s
houses for Christmas, anyway (I always felt rather like a sort of
superannuated college student when I did), so what I’ve been doing ever since I moved to western Washington, on the Christmases I haven’t gone elsewhere and when the weather cooperates (which it has been this year, far more than it should be), is to drive to Westport, on the coast, and walk their wonderful three-mile dune-top
promenade.  I always take a special picnic, since nothing’s open on
Christmas Day, and I always have a wonderful time.

Anyway, I just got back, and here are some photos I took:

After I left Westport, I drove south towards Willapa Bay, where I turned  east and drove along its northern shore.

Raymond is a small town at the head of Willapa Bay.  Otherwise
pretty much like any other logging/fishing town in the Pacific Northwest, it has distinguished itself in a very special way.  Local artists (according to the sign, which doesn’t name names) created many beautiful and whimsical mostly two-dimensional metal
sculptures twenty years ago, and installed them all over town.

Another interesting thing about these sculptures is that they’re
mostly people in the center of town, and as you go out into the
countryside they change over to animals.

Anyway, I think they’re nifty.

After I left Raymond, I drove east on state route 6, which is a lovely, winding country road, fifty miles to Chehalis and I-5, and north on home.

It was a lovely day, and a Merry Christmas.  Everyone I met on the dunes promenade, and there were a number of us, had holiday
greetings for each other, which was the icing on the cake.

I hope everyone has had a good holiday, and I hope we all have a good 2014!

(some rain would be nice — we have had a very dry winter so far)

Mirrored from Repeating History.

I just finished a quilt on Saturday.  This is not what I plan to blog about usually, but it was a good excuse to see if all my mirroring thingamajigs work on my blog.  So you get to see a quilt.

I’ve been calling it Autumn Throw, for obvious reasons.  It’s not bed-sized, just 50″ square.  The eight leaf/berry blocks are cut from a panel I picked up a while back.  The five textured tan-colored squares each has a quilted motif in it, which unfortunately doesn’t show up in the photo (the texture you do see is the fabric print).  The whole thing is hand-quilted, which is usual for me (I enjoy hand quilting — I do not enjoy wrestling elephants through keyholes, which is how I describe machine quilting).

I’ve had a falling out with the person I originally intended to give it to when I began piecing it (and, no, I’m not sure why I went ahead and finished it, but there you are), so I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it now.  I’d like to give it to charity — to an organization that would auction it or otherwise use it to raise money.  I have a couple of leads, but we’ll see.  I’m not giving it away right away.

Mirrored from Repeating History.

Such gorgeous Japanese embroidered balls:

http://twistedsifter.com/2013/12/grandma-shares-30-years-of-embroidered-temari-balls/

I'm not sure these are spoilers. I'm only mentioning one specific thing about The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. But I am going to gripe a lot. Consider yourselves warned.

Now, don't get me wrong. Being true to source material only bothers me for some things (like Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books -- do not get me started on the TV series -- just don't). Being slavish to the source material has never been crucial to me for the Jackson movies of Tolkien's work. I enjoyed the LotR movies for what they were, not as purportedly faithful translations of the books.

And I'm here to say that it's been literally decades since I've read The Hobbit, so I really couldn't tell you precisely when things ran off the rails in the two Hobbit movies, anyway -- maybe possibly for the change in the quality of the writing. Except for the things that the Internet's been howling about for weeks, which if you weren't under a rock you'd already know about, anyway.

However. I was expecting a good popcorn movie. I did not get this, in any way, shape, or form. The pacing was slow, and the interminable battle scenes slowed said pacing even more than it would have been without them. The plot felt like it was stitched together from a piece of this, and a piece of that, with no continuity whatsoever. And there's something seriously wrong when I'm walking out of the theater with my friend the Tolkien buff saying, this was as bad as submarines in the canals of Venice (a reference to the truly awful The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen -- the scene referred to is my standard for hurricane-force winds shredding the guywires of my disbelief).

I enjoy laughing with a movie. I desperately did not want to laugh at this one. But I couldn't help it. It was just too ridiculous for words.

Sigh. We finally walked out about twenty minutes (give or take) before it ended, after we caught each other looking at our watches for the third time. What a disappointment.

I will say that the guy who plays Bard is a very handsome fellow. And Tauriel was the only non-Tolkien part I did like. But I'm not sure I'm ever going to forgive Jackson what he did to Legolas.

The phrase, is, of course, from an old UPS ad campaign...

You know, I really am hard put to think of anything more disgusting than mouse guts all over the doormat (the outside doormat, but still).

In other news, I've figured out how to change the fonts and colors in the WordPress theme Twenty Thirteen. Or, rather, the WordPress support people steered me towards the appropriate plug-in, which is working nicely. Wow, there's a lot of places to change colors and fonts on even a simple site. Still, it's gradually starting to look like my old site [wry g], which, while not old-timey, is at least in rustic-looking colors and fonts.

So I'll have a new site that looks almost exactly like the old one, only classier and with more functionality. I think I can live with that.

Repeating History, the first Time in Yellowstone novel, is being featured Monday, December 16th at The Fussy Librarian, a new website that offers personalized ebook recommendations, in the historical fiction category. You can read the first chapter here for free: http://mmjustus.com/fictionRepeatingHistory.html.

In honor of that listing, I have dropped the price of Repeating History's e-version from $5.99 to $2.99 for the week starting tomorrow Saturday the 14th, to run till the 21st, at Amazon and Smashwords.

I'm really excited about being part of this service. I hope you'll find many interesting books there. I've already found a few myself.

1) Another 1000+ word day on the Much Ado homage! Yay!

2) Making progress on the new version of the website. All the page content is done. Now I've just got to figure out the widgets and plugins thing, then tackle the theme thing. Eep. I am going to have this done by Christmas or else. I've also decided to leave my museum curator pages hand-coded. They're just fine as they are, and I don't need the WordPress capabilities for them.

3) It got above freezing today!!! For the first time in over a week!!!

Oh, and I guess I've got four. I got out this afternoon for a little while and went to Watsons Nursery to buy this year's new Christmas ornament (I buy a new ornament every year, and Watson's has a huge selection -- about thirty fully-decorated trees' worth). Here's a picture. Isn't he cute? His back is as pretty as his front.





I also bought a wine-red cyclamen, which is beautiful. It is now living in my kitchen window, safe from the cats. The flash makes the red look lighter than it really is, though.

I am proud to announce the publication of my new book, a non-fiction travel narrative entitled Cross-Country: Adventures Alone Across America and Back.




Here's the back cover copy:

"After a childhood of summers spent in the back seat of a car, and four months before the turn of the millenium, M.M. Justus decided to follow in the footsteps of her heroes John Steinbeck and William Least-Heat Moon, not to mention Bill Bryson, and drive alone across America’s backroads for three months. Like the bear going over the mountain, she wanted to see what she could see.

The places she visited ranged from the homely to the exotic, from the Little Town on the Prairie to Scotty's Castle, from New York's Twin Towers to an 'alien' landing site in Wyoming. From snow in Vermont to the tropical heat of New Orleans.

After over 14,000 miles, history both public and personal, and one life-changing event, she finally arrived back where she’d started from, only to discover it wasn’t the same place she’d left behind at all."

It is available in print through Amazon and CreateSpace, and through other retailers coming soon, and as digital editions through Amazon and Smashwords, with other retailers coming soon:

Amazon

CreateSpace

Smashwords

You can read the first chapter for free here.

Thank you for your time!

So much for the Christmas tree. The first time I turned my back on the cats for more than five minutes, half a dozen ornaments were on the floor and one of them was broken (one of the dozen bells that my parents bought for their first tree almost seventy years ago, which I thought I'd put up out of reach).

So I took the full-sized tree back down and will put the little tree up on the armoire. Again.

If I had a way to keep the cats out of the room with the tree, I would, but I don't.

Sigh. Maybe next year.