cimorene

Last spring during Project Runway Madness

thelionforreal tried to convince me to read

peter_and_fran (an epic-length multimedia LOTR RPS AU with the members of the fellowship as Belle & Sebastian), but in her charming missi way, I always got more of an impression of enthusiasm and SO GREAT. SERIOUSLY. than a clear portrait of what, exactly, it was. But I was at loose ends the other day and

buddleia mentioned it, so I went to read it, and I've been sampling it in between cleaning the house and shopping downtown for a few days now, and now I've just discovered that it has Eric Bana! Slashed with Ian and Orlando, not married to Jason Isaacs and adopting an Armless Russian Hermaphroditic Crackbaby™, granted, but still, ♥! His appearance is a mere cameo, and not actually one of the principal selling points. The story is engrossingly, quirkily charming, hilarious, well-written, moving, and really brilliant.

In other news, wax and I usually eat our dinner out of large bowls instead of from plates, which may be because we tend to eat it from our knees at the computer instead of at the table, but the result is high wear & tear on bowls. We've broken bunches of them in two years and were down from six to two, and my constant low-level whining finally prevailed upon wax to give up her preference for the staid plain white Arctica in favour of Teema in green and brown. So we bought

And then I had a

We got this silver polish which says small objects should just be dipped into it to make them shiny again, and that if necessary, they should stand in it until they "become clean", at which point you should take them out. Simple! So I dipped in two silver teaspoons and swished them around, and let one stand for about twenty seconds, and they became clean. Smashing. Then I dipped in a third slightly more tarnished teaspoon which looked approximately like this.

I swished it around and nothing happened. I let it stand for twenty seconds and it looked MORE tarnished. I figured that perhaps my eyes deceived me, and let it stand a while longer. I took it out and it looked more tarnished again. I still thought my eyes might be playing tricks on me. I rinsed it in warm water etc but it still looked tarnished; so I put it back in the polish, figuring perhaps what it needed was to be wiped vigorously when it was removed from the polish. After it stood for a little while longer in the polish, though, it looked like THIS.

Not only is it kind of blackened, but it's got these weird parallel scratch marks coming out which look to have been made with a wire brush or something. It's supposed to be sterling, mind you, not plate! Apparently it was just a Bad Batch of silver, or else, wax suggests, not actually silver at all (although I find it more likely that it's just impure). The new blackened look is wonderfully sordid, though. It seems like it should go in a display case somewhere.

Meanwhile, there is still angst in our household - 99.9% of it mine - about the proper art to hang over our couch. The problem is that our beautiful lovely Ikea couch is covered in a gigantic print of leaves and flowers in emerald and chartreuse and white, which looks rather trippily 60s, and it's hard to find a poster to go with it, because nothing seems to get the right mood. Yellow Kill Bill was too small, and also too clean-cut and slick; my mostly-green Rodney Matthews Jabberwocky poster was too busy, too muted, and not sufficiently abstract. I thought of something graphic-looking in black and white, or something dramatic and monochrome, but