Since Mother Eve in the Garden long ago

For the most part I think the immediate feels are coming from the fact that I had a full workday + evening activities on Friday and Saturday (work event and dance practice) and then today (rehearsal) and will be having it tomorrow as well (concert), and my feet hurt a lot but every year I've felt more and more befuddled and alienated about Christmastime.

( I'm not sure how much this makes sense )

I think part of my problem is that of the first batch of magazines I bought, only one shipment's arrived so far. So it feels like I really haven't ordered anything and should go on. But also I'm watching a couple of auctions and I think they have the potential to be much cheaper than the Buy It Nows, oddly enough. After this batch I am done for a while, though. I need to concentrate on Christmas presents, although so far I have two jellies for Dad (strawberry-rhubarb and some kind of fancifully named berry mixture), some handmade soap for grandmothers and step-grandmothers, a craft fair bracelet for Melissa, and the idea to get Mom to let me get her an art book signed by James Guerney (she wants to buy it herself used, and I'm like MOM NO LET ME). Owen and Bella are tough to buy for, Owen because he only ever wants one expensive thing and nothing else and Bella because she pretends to love everything she gets madly but abandons it after five minutes. For Bella I'm thinking of going with chocolate from Schuyler Sweets, a local shop, because while she's not super into candy (she likes to ask for it, because if you get her chocolate or ice cream when she wants it it's proof that you love her, but she's really not that into eating it) it's not something that will take up a lot of space and not get touched. Also, Schuyler Sweets has chocolate frogs, seriously, chocolate frogs! Owen I tend to go to Topatoco for, and get him something from a webcomic he likes, usually Dr. McNinja. Maybe I'll go with SMBC this year.

It's interesting, they play "Look for the Silver Lining" when Margaret reads Nucky's ledger of bribes, and in the second season when she gives away the tract of land she was holding onto for Nucky. Is this symbolic/meaningful? I am crap at this sort of thing. This episode had a couple other Jerome Kern songs - deliberate? Or is it just that he was super-popular during the 1920s and wrote some really excellent songs? Probably the latter. (Incidentally, IIRC "Look for the Silver Lining" is also the song Mary and Matthew were listening to when they got caught by Lavinia.)

I did my nails sea-green with a gold crackle overlay an they look quite good. The sea-green is not a very good polish, but the gold covers it and it just shows through the cracks, so it's all right. It's kind of reminiscent of the "Gold Rush" polish I got from Gap, which is gold in some lights and green in others. But cooler, because it has a crackle coat.

Mom called because she'd put her old, brokenish camera up on eBay for parts and such and it sold to a guy ... in Egypt. So now she's freaking out about postage, because she put a flat rate in. I told her clicking "calculate shipping" is better, but anyway I'm going to help her see if she can cancel it and refund the money or something.

Translating costume (rather than fashion) plates is kind of boring because they're not really that useful, but I have to do it for completion. It really bothers me that I only have two volumes of 18thc printed Galerie des Modes, because the reprint where I get the colored plates is very slightly abridged, especially when it comes to costumes.

I don't know if I'm expected to go to work tomorrow. I suspect I'm not, but I'm just so unused to jobs that keep normal hours that I have no instincts in that area.