Since Mother Eve in the Garden long ago

I really need to figure out what to do for my Garbage Situation, which is that I bought a regular kitchen/restaurant-bathroom garbage can with a domed top and a swinging door ... and it is way too big. I don't throw a lot of food away, but I generate so little garbage that it's decomposing and horribly rank when it's still empty enough that I feel wasteful getting rid of the bag. (I still do it, though, of course.) They didn't have anything smaller at Big Lots!

Watching Mad Men from the beginning. They're so young, it's ridiculous. And Sal, oh, Sal.

Oh my god, Don's face when Betty's giving the scar monologue, I'm a horrible person.

Okay, right now I am putting in the sleeves to the dress, and if it still looks terrible I'm seriously thinking of just taking it apart, possibly not even keeping the skirt (because the gathered point in the skirt isn't working well in this fabric either). Ugh, I'm so disappointed - this print is really cute and I was really looking forward to the dress.

ETA: Hmm, I put the right sleeve in and it all looks a lot better.

Tomorrow I am absolutely doing some more Victorian sewing. And I've decided, in the wake of realizing this '40s dress is not to be made in heavy cotton, to use the stuff I bought for the short-sleeved version - a check with florals - will instead be this dress (center version, obvs). I would like to make a blouse, a buttony one not a jersey one, but I have a very bad track record when it comes to finishing those. :/ Also I have so many dress and skirt patterns, and the blouses I like are so 'spensive.

The thing that always gets me with Mad Men - and a lot of historical fiction - is thinking about the everyday differences between the characters' childhoods and the present of the show. From the end of WWII to now there's obviously been a lot of social and technological change, but I cannot even imagine going from the '20s and '30s to the '50s. Completely different worlds and standards of living.

Especially with the older characters. Like Burt Cooper says about Ida Blankenship when she dies - "She was born in 1898 in a barn. She died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper. She was an astronaut." CANNOT IMAGINE.

It's interesting to read the comments to this NYT review of Mad Men, many of which say that they don't want to watch it because they lived it (and really I have no problem with people who don't want to watch something because the -isms portrayed bother them too much, but a lot of them seem to think the -isms are endorsed by the show and it's all about nostalgia for a ~better time~, which definitely makes me think they didn't even watch a preview of it on YouTube) - and then contrast them with the top comment on this interview, which (misuses the word "tokenism" and) says Mad Men is sexist for making the female characters tend to be better people. Also funny how so many commenters on the NYT review assert that it was a horrible time and they have no desire to relive it while the top commenter on the other is "curious why we’re convinced that men in the sixties were a bunch of objectifying bastards. As far as I can tell whenever I interact with a man who was in his ‘prime’ during the sixties… He’s usually horrified by the attitude of young men towards women today. I don’t think there ever was a time where this kind of boorish sexual behaviour by men was acceptable."

Unrelated, but Charity Wakefield is going to be in The Munsters reboot along with Eddie Izzard. I know nothing about the original show but I am now very interested in the reboot.

Read Catching Fire in 24 hrs. I had to order Mockingjay because it's out of nearly every library in the system, even the ones with twelve copies. I would have liked to get it on the Kindle Because I Can but there is an 18 person waiting list. Ten for Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? which I have had on order for WEEKS, even though there are several copies not checked out in the system, what is that? For a bit afterward I was reading an ebook of Diane Duane short stories I bought when she did that sale, but then I switched over to my scanned-PDF of The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, which is thoroughly 18th century. Published in 1751, written by Eliza Haywood - read the wiki entry, her books/life sound fantastic, she also wrote a satire of Pamela, I hope she showed up in that "Shakespeare's Sister" exhibition - it is supposed to be "the first novel of female development in English".

I got to do all of this reading because my shoulder has been in agony all day. I have no idea what I did to it but it was bad. Icing it didn't do much and aspirin only helped for a little bit. It's bad because I really really was going to sew a case for my Kindle, but otoh I did use the Kindle quite a bit.