getting ripped

I finally experienced the rite of passage for female weightlifters: I popped a shoulder seam on my shirt.

Women’s shirts are not make for significant upper body muscle. Once we start to develop muscle in our pecs, lats, delts, biceps, and triceps, the women's cut shirts with the cute capped sleeves get tight, and then it give way at the weakest seam.

So I carefully deployed a seam ripper… wait, no, couldn’t find mine. So I grabbed the lovely hand-forged damascus knife that was an anniversary present from Calmer Half several years ago, and used it as a seam ripper to remove the sleeves to make a tank top.

Fittingly, the shirt has a line drawing of a feline all curled up, with:

I don’t want to adult today.
I don’t even want to human.
Today, I want to cat.

Sounds about perfect for someone who works swing shift lifting heavy things too bloody early in the morning, eh?

May you all find time to cat, and your own sunbeam.

Shopping, not Buying

The Farmer's Market in Itchy Paw Falls recently had a large number of vendors split ways with its old location, so this morning I met up with two friends to check out who decided to move to the new location. 

Some days, you go shopping with Serious Intentions and a list to buy. 

Some days, there's mochas and strawberry lemonade popsicles and salsa and a sticker of an armed kewpie doll (glock in a shoulder holster) and a little ceramic whistle that sounds like a song bird...

One of the candle vendors had been next to CV Walter when she was selling her books at the art walk. When we checked out his booth (first time he & CV had seen each other since then), he had a new candle based on her books. Cross-pollination happens in the arts! How cool is that?

We also met a friend's kid, who is now an adult and an artist in her own right, holding down her own table. Which was another layer of fun, because first, we weren't expecting to see her there - we'd been referred by another vendor as "you've got to check her art out" and "She's cool." Second, because this meant four artists could stand there and talk shop about table rents and intellectual property and markets... And walk away having bought stickers she made, because we really liked them! (And now I have an easy and clear identification mark on my new laptop.)

We briefly lost Cedar Sanderson when we hit a table selling botanical things... It wasn't the dried flower wreaths, the floral bath bombs, or even hibiscus sugar, which I found really intriguing (I've seen vanilla-doped caster sugar for dusting the tops of pastries and cocktails, but never hibiscus-doped caster sugar before.) No, it was the vintage botanical being used as a prop for the goods. Next thing you know, she and the vendor are geeking out about old herbals and other antique botanical books and where they've found them... 

Given that I had stopped to have a conversation about what blooms at what time of the year and how much you had to hold back in the supers for overwintering a hive in TX vs. North Carolina with one of the local apiaries, I just stood back and grinned. Okay, and egged CV Walter into getting a little ceramic whistle that sounds like a songbird. 

Because cat harassment!