Thursday, October 18, 2012

Most Grievous Neglect

Oh dear.  I haven't paid any attention to blogging in a great while. I had several months of pet tribulations with my poor sweet childhood doggie, Honey, and we finally had to put her down before an inoperable tumor made her miserable. She was very elderly, and had cancerous tumors removed before, so it wasn't like this was wholly unexpected, but I still can't believe the grieving period and depression has been so intense. I genuinely feel like I lost a family member...maybe because other than my parents, she was the one consistent link to good memories with my brother, who is in a very hazardous part of Afghanistan right now and whom I worry about constantly.

SO. All the stress and vet visits and bills have kept me too busy for much sewing, but in the past week I have made significant progress on the striped en fourreau, which is not going to be a very attractive dress in my opinion. The fit should be fine, I just feel like the fabric is too coarse to be anything but a work-dress. I'm having to abandon my wishful pagoda sleeve and serpentine trim dreams, because they'd just look silly on this thing, sigh.  I'm trying to do actual robings for the first time (they're just tacked onto my yellow linen gown) and it's fiddly trying to decide how wide to make them. Don't think I will bother with a matching stomacher because I have some matelasse fabric that looks almost like some of the white corded/quilted stomachers in a few books.

OH SPEAKING OF BOOKS. I'm pretty sure I'm the last one to know about this since I haven't even been reading blogs, but, MetPublications put so.much.stuff online for free pdf download.  American Portraits in Miniature, Eighteenth Century French Drawings in New York Collections, John Singleton Copley in America, Period Rooms in the Metropolitain Museum, The Eighteenth Century Woman, and...I swooned with happiness... Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century. I am going to abuse the daylights out of my free printing privileges here at work. Yes.

Last but not least, the lovely Choll at Thread-Headed Snippet awarded me a "Versatile Blogger" award...I was so darn busy being versatile that I didn't get around to mentioning it! Thank you, dearest blogger of snark and awesome! Right now I can't do the requisite pasting and referring and so-forth (in fact I'm not sure there's much point in referring because everyone I would recommend has already been awarded, drat) but I am most honored, if unforgivably absent.

4 comments:

  1. I'm so sorry about Honey. My family's dog went into continual intense seizures this time last year and had to be put to sleep, and I'm still grieving. I still cry, thinking of him at random times.

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  2. My heart belongs to "Jeffy," a golden retriever who happily colored my world during my late adolescence and early 20s. Some of those years were bad years. He was a sweet, furry constant in my changing world and I loved him dearly. He unexpectedly died in his sleep the summer I turned 23. I still cry when I tell people about him. I am so sorry for your loss.

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  3. Thank you both for sharing about the loss of your sweet furry friends...it is a relief to know that it's not abnormal to grieve this much. Everyone else seems to think it's time for me to get over this and stop being so emotional and I can't find the words to express to them what a huge vacancy Honey left in my heart. I think people who don't bond with dogs just won't ever understand how incredible it is to be unconditionally loved even when you're crabby, slovenly in sweatpants, and feel like the ugliest, most boring person alive. Dogs don't care. They always think you are amazing and would give anything to be near you. I'm going to miss that so much.

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  4. Grief is grief my dear, a foreign country we go to when we lose a loved one whether they are human or other. I grieved everytime one of my sick cockatoos died. They were wild but I fed them because they lost all their feathers and couldn't fly anymore and would come and live in the trees around our house. I couldn't stand to see something die of starvation ( can't fly, can't feed very well) so I fed them each day and they became my friends. In fact they gave me a reason to get up in the morning after I lost my Dad. Had to feed the birds - they'd be so raucous I HAD to get up. So never mind the people who are uncomfortable with your grief. That speaks volumes about them! You do what you need to do for you! Your Honey is free of pain now. Just take things day at a time.

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