New to me

New book: The Moonstone. My favorite part is a cheeky slam of women's benevolence societies: "We had a meeting that evening of the Select Committee of the Mothers'-Small-Clothes-Conversion-Society. The object of this excellent Charity is--as all serious people know--to rescue unredeemed fathers' trousers from the pawnbroker, and to prevent their resumption, on the
part of the irreclaimable parent, by abridging them immediately to suit the proportions of the innocent son." It takes a huge dork to find this amusing. And I am that dork.
New music: XX. Stephan's favorite new album since adopted as my favorite new album.
New artist: Avercamp. I went to the Little Ice Age exhibit at the National Gallery of Art and fell in love. It turns out I love boring Flemish and Dutch paintings best. Then Spanish. Then the rest.

Easing back in

Sometimes I don't blog for a while 'cause I have nothing to blog. That has not been the case since I went missing a while ago. There's a ton of stuff I want to blog, and it added up and now it is overwhelming. So I am starting with something simple: a Russian animated folk tale. I found this video via Rare Bird who aptly calls it beautiful and strange.