Lent, in the midst of death.

Well-written post on the experience of Lent after a death in the family, by my wonderful husband Jamey.  I hadn't yet articulated, or frankly even considered, why I wasn't participating in Lent this year.  But this is why.

We know we aren't the only ones.  In addition to our family who are sharing in grief over losing Julia, so many of our dearest friends have lost parents and grandparents in the last year.  It has been long, and hard, for so many.

In the midst of this, Mike Cope's recent blog series - "When a Child Dies" - is timely and honest.  Twelve posts and counting in the series.

Quatrefoil Painting

In the spirit of drawing out the purple in our livingroom, I decided to paint something to go above one of the couches.  Unfortunately, I don't have a "before" picture, but I had a 3'x4' canvas covered in a fabric with purple, green, turquoise, and orange.  It worked for a few months, to add some purple to the room.  But it also distracted from the "real" color scheme, which I thought was going to be brown, tan, purple, turquoise, and maroon (spoiler: I changed my mind).

First, I traced the quatrefoil pattern across the whole canvas (not a great picture):

Then I started painting the quatrefoils, one color at a time, starting with turquoise.  As you can see, I almost immediately realized that "all over" quatrefoil was going to be an overwhelming pattern, and decided to replace sets of four quatrefoils with large diamonds instead.

Here it is when I finished (the first time).  There are five colors: brown, tan, purple, maroon, and turquoise.  Precisely the color scheme!

Buuuuuuut I hated the "turquoise."  It was more blue than turquoise.  And after looking at it for about a day, I realized I didn't want to have turquoise in the living room at all because it seems to add a third "world" of color (brown/tan being the first, purple/maroon being the second).  So, I repainted all the turquoise parts, half in light purple and half in gold (not shiny) - narrowing it down to two "worlds."  Here's the end result:

Much better!

Toile Chair Cover

We've been looking for a chair for our living room for a long time.  We both like a big, comfy chair with arms.  I just pop by Craig's List every few days to see if there's anything good in the area.  After a few months of searching, this chair was $30, and was close (on Princeton's campus)!  It's hard to tell, but it's a deep purple (not brown), which is one of the colors I've been trying to draw out more in our livingroom. Perfect!

But, it was too hard to tell that it was purple.  And our couches are very similar style, monochromatic brown.  So I wanted to cover the back and seat with a patterned fabric that would draw out the purple without adding any new colors to our livingroom.  I couldn't find any fabric I liked at JoAnn's, so I went to Spoonflower and got a purple toile.  A little pinning, a little sewing, and now the chair looks like this:

Ta-da!

Once Upon a Time v. Grimm

I've been working on this post for the last two weeks, taking notes as I watched the two shows.  But, as with many of my blog posts, it was just sitting here in rambling-outline form, waiting for motivation to turn it into sentences.  Then my friend Eric sent me (and our friend Amy) a Facebook message, asking what I thought and - BAM - here it is.  So it bears mentioning that this post would not exist without them. :)

So, for the uninitiated, Once Upon a Time (ABC) and Grimm (NBC) are both TV shows that premiered this fall (two weeks ago, so you haven't missed much and could catch up on Hulu easily), and both have fairy tales as their background.

I have seen the first two episodes of both series so far. Before they premiered, the word around the interwebs was that Once Upon a Time (OUT, from now on)  is better than Grimm, so that affected my expectations.  Having watched them, I think that – although they have similar inspiration/source material – they are completely different shows.

OUT is from some of the writers who did Lost.  So it’s dealing with parallel universes (the fairy tale universe, and our world to which those fairy tale characters have been banished).  Some people know that there are different worlds, and some people don’t, and we’re not sure who is good and who is bad. Just like Lost, I assume the show will be about characters trying to get back.  And, just like Lost, it seems like they’ll spend the first few episodes (after the pilot) developing one character at a time.  There are a lot of flashbacks.  And it’s not really re-telling fairy tales at all.  It just has fairy tale folk as its characters.  Grimm, on the other hand, is from the writers of Buffy and Angel.  So the themes are similar – a global fight of good v evil, which has gone on since the beginning of time.  Just like Buffy, there’s a person with a calling/destiny/power that they just found out about.  And, just like Buffy (especially early Buffy), it has set itself up to be very serial:  a different baddie every week, all of which help the main character discover their legacy.  OUT is more family friendly.  Grimm is darker.

In OUT, it seems like the “real world” and the “fairy tale world” are completely separate.  They don’t overlap at all. The “real world” is a fairy tale prison, a world without happy endings.  In Grimm, the two worlds exist together, overlap, intertwine, etc.  In fact, the fairy tale world has been a part of our world all along and we didn’t know it. This is more appealing to me.

OUT has a more discernible overarching plot, but I’m not sure how it will go past a season.  It seems to me that once the characters get out of the real world and back to fairy tale land, that’s it.  So they will either drag that out past a season, which is unsatisfying, or have to reinvent the wheel for season two. But it has amazing casting! (Ginnifer Goodwin, Jennifer Morrison, Raphael Sbarge, Robert Carlyle)  Grimm hasn’t found its groove yet, I don’t think, but has more potential to go on long term, since there are endless baddies. It seems to be truer to the original theme/tone of the Grimm Fairy Tales – fairy tales were metaphors for the real world, meant to warn children about real problems, and both of the first episodes have done that.  So that’s very Buffy – telling an exaggerated, supernatural version of a real story – which means I like it.

And the obligatory feminist criticism: OUT has two female protagonists, and a female antagonist.  The women are running the show.  But the characters are almost all white.  Grimm is all male. The protagonist, his cop partner, his “big bad wolf” partner, the leader of The Reapers (the organization that will be this season’s big bad): all male.  And beyond that, there are no interesting females in supporting roles.  So far, women have just needed to be rescued.  And the main character’s girlfriend’s screen time has served only to ask him questions that lead to character development. But at least his partner is black?

So I think I like Grimm more.  But I’m more stressed out when I watch it, because I want it to be so good, and I’m afraid it won’t be given enough time, especially at the cursed Friday-night timeslot.  OUT is pretty, and fun, and has already been given a whole season.  I don’t think it’ll ever change my world, but I enjoy watching it.

PS - I know it's not a Tuesday, and I tagged this as "TV Tuesday" - I didn't want to wait two days to post it.

Wildwood, by Colin Meloy

I just finished reading Wildwood, by Colin Meloy (of The Decemberists). Now, Jamey and I usually read books around the same time, and he almost always beats me to blogging about them (see The Hunger Games). I guess that’s because I’m at work all day, and – although he obviously works very hard as a doctoral student – he has more flexibility in his schedule. But he hasn’t read this one yet, so I finally get to write about something!

The Decemberists are one of my favorite bands, at least partially because of their ability to tell stories (and create worlds) in their music. So I had high expectations for this book, which were not fully met (neither were they disappointed). It was definitely good. It’s long (541 pages), and at times feels like it, but that doesn’t mean it’s unenjoyable.

Set in Portland (what better setting for a fantasy novel?), the book seems like a love story to that city. I’ve never been to Portland (or farther west than Texas, truth be told), but Meloy paints quite a picture. The descriptions of the setting are where he shines – the skills shown in the band’s lyrics are on full display here. I imagine this book started out as a song, and Meloy realized not even he could tell that story in one track, so he wrote a book instead.

The story takes place mostly in the woods, with talking animals, a power-hungry evil sorceress, and children who find out they belong (and matter) more in this world than their own…which brings to mind The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (there’s even a feisty rat!). I guess it would be hard to write a young adult, fantasy novel that didn’t borrow from those common tropes. Nonetheless, little about the novel seemed, well, novel to me. This would be problematic, except that I enjoyed all these “standard” elements in classics, like The Lion... and LotR, and I also enjoyed them here. Also, in its defense, the book is meant for ages 9-12, and that audience probably hasn’t read (and re-read) books about Narnia the way I have/did.

I guess I simultaneously hoped for both more and less detail about the world behind the story. On the one hand, the book is already long enough, and describes the world of the story well. On the other hand, there are a lot of unexplained plot points. And, unfortunately, these unexplained things are the elements that would be the most original, the things that could set this book apart from the classics from which it draws.

The obligatory plot summary: A girl named Prue is babysitting her baby brother when a murder of crows (this bird was chosen, I assume, solely because a group of crows is called a murder, and that’s eerie) swoops down and kidnaps him. She follows the crows into the woods, called the Impassable Wilderness, to rescue her brother.  There, she discovers a secret society in political upheaval. She and Curtis, her friend who followed her in, become involved in the conflict of this society and learn about their own pasts before returning to the outside world (again, C.S. Lewis seems to play heavily here).

The website calls Wildwood Book One of The Wildwood Chronicles, so I imagine there’s more to come. I liked this book enough to read the others. But I didn’t like it enough to reread it whenever the next book comes out, like I did with Harry Potter (rereading all previous books every time a new one came out).