I jogged about 300 miles in 2011. Even though that’s more than I jogged in the first 29 years, cumulatively, it just doesn’t seem like enough.

I also drank more wine in 2011 than in the first 29 years.

Best compliment: You’re a bigass yucca plant
you’re like a good jar of Ragu or Pace salsa

Even though I’m older now there are still firsts. It was the year of my first funeral.

All in a year’s sewing: No quilt this year, unless Charlie’s dogseat counts. I got a new used Bernina, though, so now I’m one of those gross people with more than one machine, but I have almost no stash so that’s got to count for something.

I gave up fat-free anything. Does it show? Another year without caffeine, and with the adult supplements of iron and calcium.

Best Song: Barenaked Ladies, “Brian Wilson”

Best Movie: there were 75 to choose from. Persona, or Woman of the Dunes (watched in 2010, but still). Honorable mention: Animal Kingdom, An Education, Whit Stillman’s trilogy, Sex, Lies, & Videotape, and Blood Simple.

Best dog: duh. The money pit.

Best book: The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. Snippets:

Oxen should have very small foreheads

     When a woman lives alone, her house should be extremely dilapidated, the mud wall should be falling to pieces, and if there is a pond, it should be overgrown with water-plants. It is not essential that the garden be covered with sage-brush, but weeds should be growing through the sand in patches, for this gives the place a poignantly desolate look.
     I greatly dislike a woman’s house when it is clear that she has scurried about with a knowing look on her face, arranging everything just as it should be, and when the gate is kept tightly shut.

Best quotes: I mean, we’re tropical kids
why take us to snow

Are you sponsored by Dr. Pepper?

Best Romance: The Office (US). I would’ve followed everyone’s recommendations and started watching this much earlier if anybody had told me it’s the best love story of the past ten years.

Heartening advice: The PE was easy!

Best discovery, two years too late: All it takes to get the squeak out of my boots is cornstarch underneath the insoles.

I would say the year was fine but I had two intense outbursts of eczema, both work related. These things come on in days and then take six weeks to disappear.

Plans for 2012: Finish two quilts, go to Marfa, turn 30, buy lots of new clothes, spend more time alone, develop and maintain better routines. Gotta be productive. Love you,

Catherine

Sooner or later you will see a new address pop up here. I’d put my money on later.

I love having a puppy but I am looking forward to having a dog. We went up to the cemetery Sunday and approaching my house Charlie knew exactly where he was and jiggled up my steps. He has routines and opinions that I am glad to know, if I can’t agree. I now have somebody at the other end of my leash.

What are we selling here guys? Entertaining enough interviews and a nice nostalgia kick, but the story is moot. People who got rich making advertising like advertising.

Blood Simple

Frighteningly good. I can’t believe the same people who made this ode to Frances McDormand’s milky complexion could have made the ignorant parade of True Grit.

For an artifact of the 80s, nothing really dates Blood Simple, not even the ceramic swirl lamp Abby gets for her post-divorce apartment. It’s not far from the kind of thrift-store lamp you’d get if you were doing the same thing today. The apartment, the cars, and the clothes all fall into the sort of universal that is of a type but nothing predictable. Loren wears a leisure suit, somewhat vainly, and carries a personalized lighter, vainly, and yet drives a Bug. The car wedges in perfectly between what Loren fancies himself and who he is.

That you don’t know why any of the characters do what they do makes you part of the joke. What are they doing?! They are asking themselves the same thing, all except for Abby. “The psychiatrist told me I was the healthiest person he’d ever met!”

It’s six old t-shirts, baby-blanket binding, velcro to hold the bottom down to the base of the car seat, buttonholes that the head rest poles go through to secure it, and elastic to hug it around the back of the seat. A pretty comprehensive setup, but the Achilles heel is the opening above the seat where the door opens. It’s floppy.

I bought myself a walking foot, finally, and it made machine quilting this a dream. The walking foot is really fun! The back of this blanket is poly fleece and there’s no batting. I sort of wanted a waterproof backing but this will have to do.

Now that I’m back to real life, I expect my eczema to subside. I celebrated early by dining out every night with my right hand man’s mom and her bf, last seen in a Copenhagen hallway. Luxury is so easy to get used to but leaves such a hangover. With a one-week delay I expect all my clothes to stop fitting by midweek.

The summer I expect for myself involves a lot of cutting. I’d better start my next quilt now if I want to be quilting it this winter, which is always the plan. For the first time I’m using a kit, which I’m not proud of, but I’ve always wanted to make a double wedding ring and I don’t know how else to get the curved pieces so easily.

We dogsat for the sister of Charlie last Saturday, and never again for me! I realize that we have done a pretty good job making Sir Charles, as Princess Karen calls him, the dog we want him to be. The goal this week is for him to unlearn the bad manners he learned from her, and to start Pup 4. Like my dad said when he saw his papers, this dog has a better pedigree than me! And a pretty fancy education, too.

I had wanted to see this movie since the first previews, probably for the promise of melodrama and Kim Basinger, but after seeing Winter’s Bone I was glad The Burning Plain also features Jennifer Lawrence. I’m not a huge fan of these disjointed-plot-actually-we-are-all-connected movies, which I find twee, but it’s less cloying and ambitious here than in some other offenders, such as Babel (fell asleep) or Amores Perros (blah).

Overall the movie abuses some of the usual cliches but in a pleasing enough way. Basinger and Lawrence deliver. Charlize Theron I have a grudge against since her insipid role in the last season of Arrested Development, but I admire her for producing this.

Antichrist

Women are the antichrist? Wow, Lars, bad breakup? Charlotte Gainsbourg won a best actress nod at Cannes for this, but for what, really. Why did she do it? Nothing redeeming here.

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Babies doesn’t have a plot or any dialogue, and yet it’s interesting to watch. Mostly because babies are funny, but also because while two affluent families in developed countries are shown (yes, we have flocks of maclaren-pushing women in SF, don’t know why they needed to include both SF and Tokyo) two babies in what wikipedia calls the least-densely populated countries in the world steal the show.

The Namibian baby is by far the most entertaining, probably because she’s unflaggingly surrounded by two women and a pack of kids. She seems the most coordinated and the most stimulated, in contrast to the little Mongolian butterball who is tethered to the bed with only a stray roll of toilet paper for a toy.

Namibia has no men and Mongolia nobody at all. Everyone has a cat or a dog, and the sparse countries have herds. In fact, the cat-baby interactions may be some of the best scenes in the movie. I am waiting for a movie called Kittens.

I suppose I passed this test, because she came over to talk with me. He kept telling her to stop talking to customers, but she put the hand holding her cigarette on my sweater and told me about the Federal Agents. Specifically to deny them if they asked for my help because I could do it alone. She ended with “they are illegal, you are not.”

Before I could remember what campaign that phrase came from she introduced herself with all four of her names, shaking my hand and asking me questions. A man came out from the office to escort her back, while she assured him he wasn’t going to lose any customers on her account. Apparently she wanted to talk to me because I remind her of Valerie Bertinelli, one of her favorite actresses.

Walking with Charlie has prepared me pretty well for addled strangers. Everyone wants to pet the dog, unless they see him as a threat first he’s a pretty good neutralizer. He keeps me safe not just because he’s big but because he’s so cute.

To be fair, I’m sure this was a difficult book for her to write, because it reads like it. There is none of the facility that would make you trust Horowitz or the book. If you are going to write about your own dog in a book about all dogs, the snippets better be good. Likewise for the doodles—no one is interested in your drawings, lady.