A glorious Monday...

[fajrdrako]

Tai Chi was a small class, but rather magnificent. I'm enjoying it more and more. Beulah was at this one, which was good, because only about one-third of the class showed up. Are we the keeners? I still get lost, but... not as badly as before.

Got home, made a vegetable stir-fry with fish in accordance with my new dietary principles, and shared it with maaseru.

I'm too tired to watch TV: I'm going to bed.

Comments

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

I've been so tired each day after returning home that... well, nothing gets done apart from feeding the cats and going to bed. Sigh. I hope you caught up on your rest. Glad that the class feels good!

I had a happy experience at work today. Sorting catalogs on the machine. I saw the cover of one: fur coats. I picked it up to look more closely: "shearling lined with lynx," it said, and I got angry. I turned to the first inside page, looking for more data... and found that it was all faux fur. Donna Seybring, or some such name, with "Fabulous-Fur" -- all of it most definitely NOT taken from animals. She described driving to buy a mink coat, about twenty years ago, and hearing radio personality Paul Harvey tell a story about a company that used the skins of euthanized unwanted animals (I'm doing major self-editing, here, as the plain words would needlessly upset you, as they did me when I read them) to make "mink" teddy bears, and that changed her mind for good. Twenty years later, her company has been featured in the Miss America Pageant (all the finalists showed up in her faux-fur coats last year, for instance) and her stock is selling steadily. More power to her, I say, and I'm glad I did look farther than just the photos on the back cover! Yes, there is good in the world, here and there.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

This sounds very cool, though I'm not sure I understand why people want the look of fur if they don't like the concept of wearing fur. I don't like the idea of killing things for profit, but I don't see fur coats as being better/worse than wearing leather, and I like leather. I had a fur coat at one time - I inherited it from my mother - and though it was cosy and warm, I got rid of it because it was so heavy in weight. So now I wear down.

I don't much like artificial fibres; maybe that's why the idea of artificial fur doesn't appeal to me much.

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

I think the allure of fur is its look/feel combination. Looking at it, you just know it's utterly soft; when you finally touch it, you enjoy doing so. I also dislike artificial fibers, and refuse to have them near me. Do you know about the "fleece" articles (we used to call them sweatshirts and sweatpants, back in the barbaric Seventies!!) made out of recycled plastic drink bottles? No, I am not kidding. I shudder at the very idea, but at the same time am weirdly fascinated.

My elder sister inherited our mother's mink coat. It was one of her prized possessions, which in my memory she never wore. I think she had it as a token of affection for her own mother, who grew up at the turn of the century and was very poor, but still longed for the beautiful Victorian stuff that people with more money could have in their homes....

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Yes, I like the feel of fur.

Plastic clothes are an interesting though unpalatable idea. I suppose it's a use for old bottles. Remember paper clothes? Paper seems such a valuable (and in my mind, cherished) substance that this now seems a little sacrilegious to me: a bad use of paper.

Who never wore the mink coat - your mother or your sister?

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

My mother never wore it. She wore her fox stole a few times, to weddings, when I was very young. She liked it a lot. I think the mink coat made her feel too sad, though, to wear it... reminding her so strongly of her mother, whom she never stopped grieving, as far as I know. My mother passed away the year that both her parents would have turned 100. She didn't realize this until I mentioned it to her, that year...but I pay attention to things like that, they are important. My mother lost her mother to heart disease in 1951, eight years before I was born, and could not speak of her without bittersweet sadness. So, I think that was why she never wore the coat. Come to think of it, I think it was her mother's to begin with. So, also, a mink coat was just not my mother's style! [g]

My sister once borrowed it to use in a play -- Born Yesterday, do you know it? The coat had a big scene [g]. My sister was the director, summer stock somewhere right after she graduated with her bachelor's degree.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I really like Born Yesterday - though I haven't seen the play, only the (remade) movie.\

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

Our production was wacky. The female lead was very good -- such a put-on "dumb blond" act she did! She was very like the woman in the Doctor Who episode set in Depression Era New York City, same kind of voice. I enjoyed it because of how period it was.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I wish I could have seen it! Sounds terrific.