Category / Bunberry

by Sixer

First Snow



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“. . . a gleaming carpet of faery was springing up everywhere.”

– The Wind in the Willows

It’s the first snow in my new house. I love the affect of snow, although sadly it does not show off my pond as well as ice does, or the still calm days that make it a dark mirror full of grass and tress and sky – a sky so much closer and personable than it’s distant original. Snow is just like faerie dust, sprinkled over the world to hide the slumbering limbs of the trees and make the brown plants sparkle. From my garret window the world was still and gray, but when I opened my door to take pictures with The Camera, I found a world full of light. I tried to master the “manual” focus:

Branch in Semi-focus

But crouching on my doorstep trying to get the focus wheel to spin got cold fast. I closed the door on the new world and turned to toastier pursuits. Fifteen minuets later, when my hands were finally wrapped round a warm mug of oatmeal, the sun poked its head above the tree line opposite my house. I have great windows for dawn, and so I couldn’t resist trying to take a picture through the plastic and screen.

It’s a pretty dramatic beginning, isn’t it?

by Sixer

Blueberry Morning

There’s a cereal out there called  “Blueberry Morning,” or “Blueberry delight,” or  “Eat Me, I’m Healthy and Taste Like Artificially Natural Dried Blueberries!

The cereal is good, and I wouldn’t say no to a bowl of it right now,  but I mention it only as a way of excusing myself incase I’ve accidentally used a copyrighted name as my title.

For my own blueberry morning I woke earlier then I had too, a feat accomplished by bribing myself with Merlin episodes and, after that wore off, with a blueberry milkshake. The shake was really quite perfect – though I can’t promise it was the shake itself and not just the heady taste of huddling in a chair with a blanket, binging on TV before work. The base is blueberries (as promised) and almond milk, but it would not have been complete if I had not carelessly – rashly even – dumped two handfuls of oats into the blender, added a clump of flax seed,  and pulsed before pouring in the frozen berries and milk. You know those blue-box, blueberry muffin mixes? The ones with the little candied “blueberries”? It was like drinking that batter.

Only really, really, cold. At dawn. During the winter.

Somethings are worth suffering for.

Emboldened by this success,  I tried adding oats to a chocolate-avocado shake last night. The result was . . . edible, and probably fixable, but nothing I could actually serve to another person. Not even my mom. On days like these, when I take the time to play with my food a bit,  I just can’t fathom who would waste their lives on alchemy and turning one tasteless metal into another tasteless metal when, hello, there’s food to experiment with. Magic is all around us, but it’s in the near-and-daer things, not the lofty, far-off wonders.

by Sixer

Old as Dirt

The world is another year older now. It’s trees have shed leaves after leaves, lying down the components for a new layer of dirt even as the clouds atttempt to wash away the old. My house, young as it is, as already accumulated a quite unyeidling layer of Stuff and Things and General Mess, which sometimes I think I will never be able to budge. Thanks to my week of culinary excess{{1}} my kitchen looks something of a war zone, and I know I’ll have some scrubbing to do today if I’m ever going to get it clean between meals.

Becasue my kitchen is so dirty and I’m tired of washing pots I’ve suddenly developed a passion for cleaning my room. Now, my room has pretty much been untidy since the day I was born, except for a few remarkably well kept years at college. Lately I have been using my floors as an excuse for my “drop-it-and-leave-it” ways, the argument being that I can’t put in proper furniture until I have my carpet ripped out and the wood laid down. It’s a good excuse, but it has gone on too long. If I think my room is too messy, it sure-as-yolks is.

Part of my desire to clean is really just a desire to redo. My room plans are pretty ambitious and I want everything to be well thought out before they’ve been properly begun, so when I realized I might have found a flaw in the propsed layout of my sitting room area I just had to go and move my bed and desk to the ooposite side of the room. This meant shifting boxes, and paper, and what I must admit can really only be called junk, to new spots on the floor. So I woke up on a completely different side of the bed than I normally do, a nice change for a new year.

So far I like the new layout, but the best part is having to redo my whole design inside my head. I had just decided that I wanted a sunset with telephone wire painted just so there, and now I find that whole wall is likely to be hidden completely by shelves. Do I flip the painting to the opposing wall, or keep it out? What about the full length mirror?

[[1]] Soup and fish Satuday, stew and pretzels Monday, and soup again Wednesday [[1]]

by Sixer

As Daring as the Smoldering Dawn

I wish I could’ve shared the sky with you this morning, the way it loooked from the window of my garrett. Just before seven it began to pink-en, and it went on until there was a thick ribbon of deep, deep red-flamingo pink glowering over the tops of the trees and reaching up towards the retreating night. It was not anything at all like a proper blush. There was nothing sweet about it. It seems strange to say that the dawn was full of passion for the coming day, but that’s how things looked. A dawn like that is sure to make people talk.

I did finish that skirt, by the way. Right after I clicked “publish” I took myself dowstairs and asked my my flat-mate if I could borrow hers. With her kind permission, I then whipped through the construction of a channel for the elastic waist, pulled the stretchy thing through, and  zip-zip,done. Of course, the elastic is twisted, but I don’t really ever plan on wearing the waistband out, so that shouldn’t be too much of a problem.


Ah, Christmas is only a few days away. You know Dawn, I think I feel a little passionate about life myself.

by Sixer

Ripping – The creation of creating

It’s been awhile since I sat and did nothing simply because I could, and not just to defy the universe in a badly thought-out temper tantrum. Sitting and doing nothing is really unnatural, though, and so I find that on days where I propose to “go no where and do nothing” that the silent world begins to scream at me to get moving. I start to want to clean, to cook, to create.

Last week I went to my grandmother’s house and she helped me start on a skirt. Just a simple gathered skirt, in a really nice and drape-y fabric. I took it home to put the last touhces on it – the elastic for the waistband. Here it sits still, on the floor of my house, waiting for a sewing machine to appear so that  I can work some magic on it. I’ve been really feeling like sewing lately, so you would think that, today, when I have nothing else to do, I would jump on this project and finish it in seconds, right?

Well, guess who is missing the stitch-plate for her sewing machine.

In a typical moment of wasted foresight it was removed to “keep it safe” from the general chaos of moving. I can remember it quite clearly. The machine sitting on the floor of the family room, waiting beside a half-dozen other boxes to be taken to my bedroom. Everytime we moved it closer to the stairs the little metal plate under the needle would slide out. It’s going to fall and get lost in the shuffle eventually, I thought. And so I slid it out and placed it in the box closest to the machine. This was in July, when I was still moving in, and now, two or three re-packings into the un-packing process, I have no idea which box it’s in. I thought I put it in one of the tea boxes (“Treadewinds: real BREWED tea” ー curtesy of the grocery store), and so I’ve duly emptied those all out, but alas. No stitch-plate was uncovered. I’ve gone through most of the boxes that lie like unknown soldiers on the floor of my garret room, trying to shift through their layers for a thin business-card sized peice of metal without disturbing any of the other contents, but this hasn’t turned up anything.

“Looks like I can’t sew today.” I say to The World with a shrug.

“You’re right,” says The World in reply, “You’ve got a much bigger project to work on first.”