Author: MezzoSherri

Where were you a year ago?

On By MezzoSherriIn Life-Long Learning, Memoir, Pop Goes the Culture, The Voices in My Head1 Comment

A couple posts ago, I mentioned my theory about humans being wired for anniversaries. I still haven’t taken the time to consult with Professor Google to see if there is any science bearing out that theory—for tonight’s sake, I’ve decided that whether or not I’m right about humans in general being wired this way, I know from my own lived experience that I sure as shit am wired that way.

I think it started with all the moving around we did when I was growing up. A lot of my memories of growing up are organized on the internal string of beads I keep in my head tracking what town and house we lived in for what years, what school I was at, and what my classroom looked like at different ages.

The internal recollection of where I was when such-and-such a memory took place is one of my most vivid ways of being able to place when something happened and how that memory exists in the sequence of events that have made up my life.

A picture of several beaded bracelets in different shades of red and maroon.

So I expect I’ll be spending the next month or so being a little bit haunted by the recollection of “where I was a year ago.”

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American Cozy by Stephanie Pedersen

On By MezzoSherriIn Books Books Books, Self-Acceptance, Stuff about StuffLeave a comment

So back when I shared my 2021 Reading Challenge list and showed off my “jar o’ prompts,” I mentioned that there were 2 categories I’d exempted from my randomizing system: the very first category (“In the beginning…”) and the category about “a book that you associate with a particular season”—the latter because I had chosen a book that went along with my ongoing love for hygge and things hygge-ish, and I was determined to read that book while we had snow on the ground.

Well, our recent end-of-January/early-February snowfalls created the perfect atmosphere for cozy, cuddly, hygge-reading. So here I am with a book review!

The front cover of a book: American Cozy Hygge-Inspired Ways to Create Comfort & Happiness Stephanie Pedersen

I feel a little bit bad, though: I really wish I’d liked this book more than I did. ‘Cos I have every faith in Pedersen’s good intentions.

It’s just that her flavor of hygge really doesn’t do it for me.

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I hate to move it move it

On By MezzoSherriIn Be Your Own Beautiful, Don't you want to be thin?, Fat is Just an Adjective, Health at Every Size, Memoir, The Pressure to Fix Myself, The Voices in My Head1 Comment

So I mentioned that I had a less-than-wonderful endocrinologist appointment near the end of January. Basically, my A1C level is elevated after however-long of being stable.

And it could be a post-2020 dumpster fire kind of anomaly. After all, my stress has been through the roof since last fall, what with a very COVID Christmas, the presidential transition (and insurrection) and coming up on the first anniversary of this COVID life.* And to be honest, I paid just about ZERO attention to monitoring my carbs or sugar intake during the latter months of the year. Plus the fact that I’ve been sedentary as fuck since this COVID thing started. Most of my activity in recent years has been of the “functional fitness” variety: walking from the parking garage to the office building, being on my feet at work, airport and city walking during my almost-monthly business trips, plus the recreational activities of play rehearsals and dance choreography. And none of that has been happening for the last 11 months.

Two potatoes with cartoon faces drawn on them, sitting side by side on a dollhouse-sized couch.

So, the spike in my A1C level could be temporary. Or it could be a progression in whatever level of pre-diabetes/insulin resistance/whatever ethical doctors really call it I currently have.

Jury’s still out on that—more observation and follow-up testing over the next few months to see what’s what.

But regardless of what the diagnostic outcome is, feels like a good time to get my butt off the couch.

Which, alas, isn’t anywhere near as easy a task as that sounds.

Because this past week, I’ve come face to face with the depths of how diet culture has completely destroyed my relationship with healthful bodily movement.**

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The bookish life: January recap

On By MezzoSherriIn Books Books Books, Life-Long LearningLeave a comment

I am starting very late this evening, so how’s about an easy topic?

As in: the reading recap of my first month working towards my 2021 reading challenge!

Black & white photo of mystery author Mary Roberts Rinehart reading a book in what appears to be a home library or study.

As a reminder: I’m focusing on categories for the Around the Year challenge, choosing titles as they are randomly drawn from my “jar of prompts.”

I also have a fair percentage of titles chosen for the PopSugar and Book Riot challenges—a fact which became pertinent quicker than I planned it to.

And anyone who desires can see the full list of categories & planned titles on this spreadsheet.*

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Precious real estate

On By MezzoSherriIn Books Books Books, Flagrantly Feminist, Pop Goes the Culture, Stuff about StuffLeave a comment

It all started Sunday night when I decided it was finally time to update JALC’s header image.

Strike that: it all started almost 2 years ago, when I recommitted to my blogging and decided to use my collection of “badass lady Pops” as a recurring motif in the pictures accompanying some of my posts. (One and two.)*

The first trumpeting of that motif was an attempt to use the full collection as the banner image here on JALC.

A row of Funko Pop! figures.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t properly thought through the actual proportions of the banner image in this particular WordPress template, so the banner image ended up being less the panoramic wonder I’d imagined and more of an awkward, semi-pixellated closeup of approximately half of my early-2019 lineup.

To wit:

A row of Funko Pop! figures in front of book spines: Captain Peggy Carter; Judy Hopps; Furiosa; General Leia; Wonder Woman; Hermione; Peggy Carter

Now I was kind of annoyed about it, but I’m also super-lazy, and I didn’t have a quick and easy way to rearrange the collection in two rows, especially since they were all arrayed at the very front edge of an overstuffed bookshelf. So that banner image continued to appear on JALC for all the intervening months between then and now.

But here’s the thing: this particular shelf is one of the bookshelves that gets cleared off annually so I can set up my Solstice Village. Which meant that I had a precise window of opportunity—after packing up the houses but before UNpacking the Shakespeare books—where I could jury-rig some display shelves and create a new banner image that better matched the template proportions.

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Bearing witness

On By MezzoSherriIn Life-Long Learning, Memoir, Politics and Policy, Pop Goes the Culture, The Voices in My HeadLeave a comment

[CN: the Holocaust, genocide]

There’s one more other thing that had me sufficiently preoccupied that it delayed my return to JALC by 4 or 5 days. It was a new project (or obsession), but it’s one that deserves a much more thoughtful exploration than last night’s joking reference to “shiny new objects.”

It started last Wednesday, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Someone on one of the lefty/liberal FB groups I belong to posted a link to the Arolsen Archives‘ #EveryNameCounts campaign, making the observation that the need to support this work is more pressing than it’s ever been, especially given the photos of those Capitol insurrectionists wearing anti-Semitic shirts with slogans like “Camp Auschwitz” and “6 Million was Not Enough.” (Also see this video from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum at around the 9 minute mark. Watch the whole thing if you can.)

A concentration camp prisoner intake card, slightly out of focus. Superimposed over are the words "#EveryNameCounts: An Initiative of the Arolsen Archives."
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Time passes

On By MezzoSherriIn Life-Long Learning, Memoir, Meta-Blogging2 Comments

It has been—

[Looking at calendar]

—3 weeks since I last write here on JALC.

[Allow me to pause one more moment to turn said calendar over to February.]

A calendar showing the first 2 weeks of February 2021.

Now there’s a few main reasons for my radio silence. First and most prominently, I was on deadline for a stretch. An inevitable part of life for the non-profit grants professional. Especially one as prone to procrastination and over-scheduling as I can sometimes be.

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Rites of passage

On By MezzoSherriIn Memoir, Politics and Policy, Pop Goes the Culture, SpiritualityLeave a comment

I’ve already talked about my tendency for doing it kind of big for Christmas/Yule decorating. Part of that embarrassment of riches is not one but two different Advent calendars.

One of these is the traditional “Advent tree,” where you hang a different ornament on days December 1 through 24. You will note that our ornaments do not so much get hung up as they are magnetically affixed to said tree….

Picture of an Advent calendar: a small Christmas tree with 24 ornaments hanging on it.

The other one works more like this perpetual calendars do. You know the ones that have the blocks you rotate around to show the day, date and months? Here’s an example:

A perpetual block calendar, with multicolored blocks showing the date Thursday, September 24. The blocks are photographed at an angle so you can see some of the other months and numbers on the un-used sides of the blocks.
DIY instructions to make your own available here.

Our is simpler: no months or days, just number blocks we can rotate and re-arrange to count down from 24 to 1 as we go through the month of December. It’s also cuter, since the numbered blocks are held by a dapper-looking penguin in a top hat and winter scarf.*

I haven’t touched the Advent tree since I (magnetically) hung its final ornaments December 24th. But once the calendar turned over to 2021, I put the “countdown penguin” back to work.

He’s counting down days till the Presidential Inauguration of Joe Biden.

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Book buffet

On By MezzoSherriIn Books Books Books, Life-Long Learning, Meta-Blogging, Pop Goes the CultureLeave a comment

I am falling way behind in my book reviews. There’s still one book left over from 2020, as well as the 3 I’ve finished this far for different 2021 challenge prompts. So that leaves 4 titles that “need” covering. Now that I’m back to work after my end-of-year vacation, I won’t be completing books quite as quickly as I was before, which means it is hypothetically possible for me to get caught up. If I keep posting 4 or 5 nights a week and make sure that every other post is a book review, I could probably have everything back in balance before the end of January.

A closeup of a small stone cairn sitting on an empty beach. The water line and sky are out-of-focus behind the cairn.

But here’s the unpleasant truth. I’m not sure I want to post all those book reviews. Thinking about that responsibility, the schedule and discipline needed to get caught up again—and then to stay caught up as I keep reading and blogging—it’s kinda giving this blogging hobby of mine an unpleasant taste of obligation and work.

Call me lazy, but that’s what I’m feeling.

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Permission to fail

On By MezzoSherriIn Make Epic Shit, Memoir, Practicing in the Heart, Self-Acceptance, The Voices in My HeadLeave a comment

With the weekend down-time, I’m probably gonna start my next puzzle tomorrow. It was a Christmas gift from my niece, and it ended up having a bit of a joke attached to it. You see, she’d also brought a puzzle to her parent’s house as a traditional Christmas project—yet another one of those shared traditions I’m looking forward to ALL of us enjoying together for Christmas 2021!*

Only the wintry scene on the puzzle itself was not a match for the wintry scene she’d chosen, as represented by the picture on the box.

A completed puzzle sitting in front of the puzzle box it was packaged in. The puzzle box shows a wintry scene with a gazebo among tress, with a single red cardinal ion the foreground. The completed puzzle shows a wintry scene of a snowman standing in front of a wooden fence, surrounded by more than a dozen birds.
It was the multiplicity of birds that gave it away

(I will pause for a quick sidebar to give mad props to anyone able to do a 1,000 piece puzzle without a guide photo…)

So, I was warned that the photo on the outside of my new Springbok puzzle box might or might not end up matching the puzzle inside.

A box for a 1,000-piece Springbok puzzle, showing a picture of a red-and-white striped lighthouse on a grassy bluff, in front of a pink and peach colored sunset sky.

It’s like a bonus mystery with my gift. Fun!

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