Zatera Ul

In some ways, summer is harder than winter for me. The days are longer, the prairie sun is too fiercely bright to be outside much, and MFH’s home-from-work time runs late and too close to bedtimes to take an evening walk usually. I start to slow down when the temperature rises above 70 degrees. Last week when it was around ninety I was hardly moving at all.

Today I did get out for a walk. I went to the thrift store and looked at all the shiny statusy things that I had absolutely no interest in buying. They had some size 11 shoes, but too narrow–where am I supposed to put the outer half of each foot?! They even had one pair of “12W” shoes; placed with the men’s shoes because of course no woman would be caught dead with feet that large. Worse, the 12W shoes were only a cruel imitation of a wide width shoe. As in: If that was a wide shoe, then a 12N in their sizing couldn’t have run more than two inches wide…ruler feet. I’m definitely going to have to just make myself some shoes.

My city recently was commended as one of the most livable cities in the U.S., partly for all the walking and biking trails. I found that part ironic because almost no one actually walks for the sake of walking here. Most of the trail use is for Exercise, capital E most definitely intended. A few people go out to walk their dogs. Rarely someone can be seen with a stroller. Very awful rarely, a poorer or younger person will walk to work. Just walking is very gauche around here; everyone drives everywhere. Except us, and we don’t actually walk all that often. So all the nice trails and crosswalks and underpasses and bridges see rather light use.

I also don’t consider a town centered around a big mall (as the surrogate downtown), and a definite lack of antique and surplus stores to be particularly livable. And where are the detached starter homes??

I did notice, last week when I went to pick up the farm share during rush hour, that all the traffic was going from the suburbs into the city; people living in southern Minneapolis driving home from their workplaces in the outer suburbs. Very little traffic going in the other direction.

I’ve been making some definite progress on my fiddle kit lately, and it’s been fun. I’m almost ready to glue the neck on, which is one of the more finicky tasks. My physics machine shop classes paid off; I got the neck to fit into the mortise very nicely. Someday I need to learn how to sharpen chisels properly…I ended up using my detail knife and my “crooked knife” to cut the whole mortise for the neck.