Woolen 2/2023

I took a picture of myself but it’s absolutely horrible. I don’t have a full length mirror in my home and am reliant on my phone and watch syncing and me finding the best pose for the moment. During the 100 day challenge last year, I had both the location and pose down outside. But it’s winter now. Although a warm day, so maybe I should head on out and retake the picture. (Update: I managed to take the photo, obviously, and upload it. What an exercise in humility this will prove to be!)

In any case, I am wearing my gray Sierra, with a pink Ann Taylor factory outlet shirt over it, and a pair of cheap leggings I bought from Macy’s at the beginning of last summer. I really like the shirt with a skirt, but with the Sierra, it hits at exactly the wrong spot and does no favors for my Christmas waistline. Christmas cookies or no, the shirt doesn’t look right. I will need to find a way to wear it with my dresses, or it will need to move on to the give away bag.

I’m enjoying Baudelaire, I have read some biographical information about him on the web and I find it amusing those who hold him a hero. His father was a Catholic, though, a former priest in fact (he gave up the priesthood during the Reign of Terror) and one has to assume that it is this Catholicism that has stayed with him throughout his life. The Church, we Catholics are apt to say, do not leave men when they leave the Church. Baptism marks the soul and any further conversation about a man’s belief in God presumes to know the state of his soul when he crosses into that great abyss. Railing against sin, despondent in that same sin, even denying that sin exists; none of these mean that a man has shaken his Catholic faith. On the contrary, that Hound of Heaven is relentless!

So yes, Baudelaire is exactly the poet I enjoy reading. And what a joy that I can learn to read French while learning to read Baudelaire. I’ve pittered my day away, though, and still need to crack the French books open, finish a craft that I am half-way angry with myself for starting, and also to read some more of Nunnery’s translation of Master of Hestviken. But more on that at a later time.