#270
Birthday times and other times
It might not officially be fall, y’all, but I am welcoming the change of season with open, sweater-clad arms. My birthday – which is, to me, the real official beginning of fall – was Saturday. We celebrated by seeing the Downton movie and having dinner, and it was all very nice. I wore a summer dress that Kim France told me to buy from Mango and a denim jacket, like the deeply basic bitch that I am, and enjoyed myself immensely.
I also looked alllll the way back in this newsletter to revisit my first pandemic birthday:
It’s funny that I thought I was bored with clothes at that moment in time because right now I am very much not bored by them at all. I know this is a distraction and a dopamine thing, in addition to the realization that several things I’ve used and worn for a long time simply need to be replaced, but also I was a little bit crazy saying it’s not worth making $4 selling an old LOFT cardigan??? These days, it gives me a real thrill when I get a Poshmark SOLD notification. I cannot imagine what my problem was (my guess: depression from not leaving the house for six months).
The Downton movie was good, by the way. If you’re a Downtonhead like me, you go into these things with little to no expectations. I really just want to see Mary in her finest finery, and Lord Grantham being a dyspeptic little baby, and Mrs. Hughes setting people straight. There really are no stakes here because you know everything is going to turn out right in the end. The only difference is that everyone fucking hates Henry Talbot now! Mary should have married Charles Blake, I said what I said.
What else did I do for my birthday? I finally bought my first pair of Doc Martens, a Chelsea boot style that makes me very happy. I went for Mexican food with my parents and my mom supplied my favorite cake in the world, a frozen Pepperidge Farms coconut layer cake. And I had a French lesson, in which my teacher asked me to please explain Florida to her. Reader, I do not know nearly enough French to have answered that question adequately, but I tried. I summed it up by telling her that due to humidity and d’énormes insectes, Florida is pas pour moi, though many personnes seem to like it just fine.
In addition to my birthday, I am still celebrating Secondhand September by combing Depop and eBay for old LL Bean and J. Crew sweaters. There are a lot of good ones on offer (Depop’s selection is better), though I am often let down by the note that there is “one small stain” (translation: someone spilled eight ounces of coffee and motor oil directly down the front of it) that, after 30 years of sitting in a box in someone’s basement, is probably not going to be able to be shifted. I’m confident I’ll find the right match eventually, ideally without crime scene evidence all over it.
I also scored a very good 90s-era Lands End rugby shirt. You can still get them new, but the 90s versions are, naturally, made better. There are many, many, many of these on eBay and Depop.
This time of year is also my favorite time to cook. I am getting ready to dive back into some old favorites like samosa pie, lasagna soup, and turkey meatloaf for skeptics, and to try some new things like this pasta with spicy sausages from Melissa Clark. I think this recipe’s claim that whole wheat pasta’s entire schtick is “earthy nuttiness” is doing a great deal of heavy lifting, and I will probably make it with whatever shape of pasta already lives in my pantry, but this is exactly the kind of thing I want to make on chilly weeknights.
Last week I made chicken pesto meatballs, with, GET THIS, chicken I ground myself in my KitchenAid meat grinder attachment. I’ve had this attachment for more than ten years and this was the first time I’ve ever used it. It went well enough, but I think it is probably just easier to buy the chicken already ground. In any case, it gave me a real homesteader thrill, even though the meat grinder makes a gross squelchy noise I don’t particularly care for.
Somewhat related: a couple of years ago, we were devastated when the schlubby grocery store down the street moved away. The space sat empty for a while as a debate raged on Nextdoor about what should take its place: Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, another outpost of a local chain, or, my favorite suggestion, a copy and print shop. The ultimate answer turned out to be none of those things; instead, we got a Grocery Outlet. If you aren’t familiar, Grocery Outlet is like Aldi and Marc’s had a baby. (And if you’re not from northeast Ohio, I have no real way to explain Marc’s to you other than: a garage sale, but food.)
As it turns out I sort of love Grocery Outlet? You could not really go there and do a regular shopping trip because the inventory is quite random, but I got very good deals on ground lamb, organic milk, and a huge jar of ghee last week. I am going to look at Grocery Outlet as a little food adventure I can have every few weeks this winter.
A favorite Substack thing from my wanderings this week:
Weird Things in the House is so precisely my shit! This is what brought me Spoon Bae, the gallery of weird/borderline inappropriate postcards in my half bathroom, and the wooden chair I painted silver and had upholstered with glittery, starry blue fabric. (My husband calls this the Elton John chair. He does not like it, so it lives in the guest room.) More weird things for everyone!
I’m still killing it in the Zillow Gone Wild comments! This is how I get through the day now. I actually do not even think this joke was all that clever but the people like what they like.
Finally, a housekeeping note: I hope that my newsletters full of dumb jokes don’t give the impression that I am unconcerned about the widening gyre in which we find ourselves. I am just completely unable to address it most days. I don’t have the words, or I do have the words but they are Inside Thoughts, or I have too many words and I suspect you already think most of them yourselves, anyway. I have many – many – drafts in which I have tried to eke out anything that makes any sense, but I am not sure there is sense to be made in this moment.
So dumb jokes it is, for the time being anyway.