Got a new name nearly eight months ago now and made it driver's license official just last week, and so it follows my little internet space should do the same. New name, new year, new month, etc.

www.erhondeaumorgan.com

Hope to see you there!

                        xx

#dontbedead

SERIES THREE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You guys I don't even like exclamation points okay this is for serious frenzy-feels only and if TWO YEARS' PATIENCE doesn't deserve a little extra punctuation then really I don't know what does. ALIVE SHERLOCK!!!!!!!! NOT-BACHELOR JOHN!!!!!!! ANSWERS!!!!!!!

Um. Anyway. My (student) Dr. John did some research at Bart's over the summer, and way back in February while interviewing with the lab we wandered around the corner to see if a little street-side study of our own might offer new insight to our, uh, occasional theorizing. And maybe we weren't entirely successful on that front, but we totally weren't disappointed.

Post-its, full-on letters, a dozen different languages, hashtags, QR codes, entire comics. And one favourite touch? On top of the telephone someone had left a full supply of loose paper, pens, and scotch tape for the unprepared. Fandom people are my favorite people.

With filming begun in March, the next time I stopped by the booth had been scrubbed clean and repainted. But one last visit just at summer's end proved that resurrection isn't just Reichenbach business — the shrine was in full swing, papered anew.

just a little experiential research here, don't mind us.

an oak crown for october.

I learned a few years ago but not quickly that when it comes to museums, you can't do it all. It feels necessary, I know: millennia of world history! masterpieces of impossible import! the actual bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln! For a good half of my life so far I entered every museum with an endless To Do list, determined to see and love and appreciate (this is terribly important) every. last. thing., all in the name of Knowledge & Culture. 

But here's the thing. When was the last time I ever cared about pottery? I mean, maybe you do, and that's great! But I don't. So why am I wasting museum-time on whole rooms of the stuff? Do I really wish deeply to understand ever inner working of 18th century weaponry mechanisms? Then why am I reading all about them?! There is absolutely merit to learning for learning's sake, but also when was the last time you really remembered all that stuff you learned about something you don't actually like? Case in point: me, math. 

Basically what I'm trying to say is I have always loved museums, but I love museums now especially because I have learned to take them at the leisure of my loves. Give me the miniature opera set designs! Show me the Blaschka radiolarians! Bring me the Byzantine angels! Leave me to the tall ships! You get the point. But of all these, take me first and immediately to the Ancient Greek and Roman metalwork, jewelry especially, rings most of all. This one is strange because in real life I don't actually like jewelry much, or am at least very picky about it, but it also makes sense because these ancient empires could DO NO WRONG. At least where gold things are concerned. Which is why if for some reason I only have fifteen minutes in a museum, this is where I will start. And why whenever I am at the Met or in the British Museum, I pay pilgrimage to these ancient oak wreaths:

Metropolitan Museum, NYC

British Museum, taken upon my last afternoon in London, where I found this and only this room closed to the public for that afternoon only. a sad day, compounded.

There is hardly any description for either, other than that they both originate from the Dardanelles region around 350 B.C. up to the 1st c. A.D., noting that Egyptian mummy portraits often depict something similar worn by the deceased. In the case of the British Museum's object, curators think the crown might be of some Zeus offering, as oak, bees, and cicada all have significance to the ultimate deity, but the connection to life and death is unclear despite the fact that every golden crown similarly styled has been found in a tomb. Maybe they are part of passage to the next life, perhaps they eulogize accomplishments long past. Whatever they mean, they are my very favorite of all favorites.  

But they are very much not for sale, which I have languished about on occasion. Happily, however, John had the afternoon free a few weeks ago and we ended up hiking through whole hillsides of brush oak and I had a tiny thought. I will make my own. Commence a half-hike's worth of gathering, in which I filled both pockets with oak leaves and more oak leaves, plus stuck a few extras in my top-knot. It wasn't until our return trip down the mountain that I began to think of any true meaning behind the act; I loved the crowns, and that was reason enough to imitate them. But also here I was amidst the season's last great glory, and that is a funeral, too, and this crown an immortality. October has long been a favorite month of mine, and as I sit here typing I realize that my own modern artifact has taken on its ancient ambiguities. At the ends of autumn, a crown to commemorate all it has been, and a tribute to the turning of a new time.

The project hardly needs a full D.I.Y., but if you're following along, grab a few extra supplies: 

      ➝    one length of twined floral wire, 

      ➝    a hot glue gun
      ➝    hot glue sticks
      ➝    metallic gold paint
      ➝    paint brush

Dumping your autumn plunder to the table, sort into small, medium, and large leaves so that you have an easily accesible pile of each. Shape the wire into a wide horseshoe, so that the ends nearly meet. This can be adjusted later to fit your head more exactly, but do try it out in the beginning to make sure you're on track. 

Starting from one end with a large leaf, run a length of hot glue from the middle of the leaf down to the tip of the stem, and lay this glued edge along the wire. The un-glued half should extend beyond the crown base. Once the first leaf is secure, continue adding leaves in close-quartered groups of two fanning outwards until you reach the middle. When this first half is done, repeat process from the other end. For a tapering effect, attach leaves from large to medium to small until the tiniest versions meet in the middle, where you can play around with any sort of golden-acorn arrangement. Fully formed, readjust as needed to individual head size and secure with bobby pins for extra hold. Et voilà! Look at you, all B.C. beautiful! Troy and a whole legion of Helens could not compete! And . . . I'm not going to lie . . . I've maybe worn mine around the house for hours at a time.

A FEW TINY TIPS FOR THE FELLOW MAKER: 

Craft your crown within two or three hours of picking the oak leaves. Once dry they are much more fragile and harder to maneuver. On a related note, if you'd like less curl to your end result, lengthen the stripe of glue depending on how flat you'd like the leaves to lie. As they dry the oak leaves will curl inward and upward, so however much the leaf is tacked down will determine the volume of the finished crown. 

Konigsburg Collective: Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth

“All the way home I thought about my friend Jennifer the witch. I also thought that I had gone out an ordinary girl and had come back a witch's apprentice.”

_______________________

Mallory's back with all the details in this month's Konigsburg Collective — the title's a mouthful but the book's an afternoon's read: take advantage of this miserable cold front and spend a rainy hour curled up on the couch with Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, E.L. Konigsburg's very first book and a Newbery Honor winner (she lost to herself that year). xx E.

_______________________

It's Halloween and Elizabeth is dressed as a pilgrim. She meets Jennifer on her walk to school when she spots an oversized shoe on a bony foot hanging from a tree.  Elizabeth is terribly lonely, she's in the fifth grade, new in town and an only child. Her mother nudges her to befriend Cynthia, who lives in her same apartment building, which would be convenient and parent-pleasing but cannot be done because Elizabeth knows factually that Cynthia is mean and also two-faced. So it's Halloween, and Elizabeth is new in town, friendless and dressed in an itchy pilgrim costume, and there's Jennifer, also dressed up as a pilgrim but claiming wholeheartedly that she is in fact a witch. And somehow she knows Elizabeth's name and knows that Cynthia is mean and also two-faced, and she (Jennifer) may write with a quill, for she has colonial-like penmanship. So there's no question that Elizabeth must become an apprentice to Jennifer the witch. And there's no issue with the consumption of raw eggs and onions and the saving of fingernails and snowballs for flying ointment: the great goal of adolescent witchery. But working with a witch, especially when she's your only friend, can be a frustrating venture.  “Some days I really didn't like being her apprentice. But I was always a little bit worried that she would choose another apprentice.”  Still Jennifer, being a witch and all, was capable of admirable and noble things, like exposing a Cynthia lie to Mrs. Stuyvestant without being a tattle tale, and understanding Macbeth,  and casting successful tripping spells. The girls meet every Saturday at the library, perfecting their witchcraft  The crux of their friendship appears when their pet frog Hilary Ezra is named as the ultimate ingredient for their flying ointment; a dilemma, undoubtedly, and their greatest test of friendship.

 In true Konigsburg fashion, Elizabeth and Jennifer (like Claudia and Jamie and The Souls) though not always accordant, are passionately working toward a common goal. Jamie and Claudia had their mysterious statue, The Souls their academic bowl; for Elizabeth and Jennifer it is their flying ointment. And while the conjuring of their ointment leads to their biggest altercation followed by the sealing of their friendship, it is not the heart of the story. Ironically, the heart happens at Cynthia's very pink birthday party. As part of Elizabeth's promotion to journeyman witch she is restricted by a list of taboos, she cannot play musical chairs, or eat cake, or play pin the tail on the donkey,  and at first she is miserable but then she makes a choice. “... I tried hard to accidentally forget the taboos. I tried to make a slight mistake that couldn't possibly be my fault; but the harder I tried, the harder it was to forget that I was a journeyman witch ... So I decided instead to enjoy being odd. And I did.”

I count Elizabeth the luckiest of girls to have had this epiphany in the fifth grade. 

Konigsburg is a master at portraying the conflict of the pre-teen psyche. It is true that friendship can be messy when you're 11, and loneliness at its deepest darkest in those years. But if you manage to figure out the tricky pursuit of acceptance while still maintaing your own sense of uniqueness, well you just won the coming-of-age lottery. And what's exceptionally beautiful about Elizabeth's newfound confidence is that she found it in Jennifer first — Not much unlike the interdependence of Claudia and Jamie, The Souls and Mrs. Olinski. Konigsburg again and again reminding us that through others we find the greatest parts of ourselves.

“Oh Jennifer,” I thought to myself, “how strong you are. Nerves of steel and the heart of a witch!” 

(three months.)

FREE THINGS!

Had some lonely leftovers from my last big design binge so I made iPhone wallpapers! Because this is what you do! When your dissertation is due in nine days! I am not going crazy!

Or at any rate the wee leopards lurking all dodgy-eyed between my apps made me happy, so I'm just here to share some joy. ¡Bonus! edelweiss for daring, courage, noble purity and the ability to thrive in hard places at high altitude. Visual cue to keep climbing every mountain.

— LEOPARD   |   EDELWEISS —

Files are sized to iPhone 5 height and a doubled width so you can play around with the positioning yourself and can also of course fit anything smaller, too. To download just open the above link on your phone, hold-click the image, and save to camera roll.

good old J.K.

Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple . . .

J U L Y — Between Edinburgh and the Isle of Skye we stayed a night at Fort William, which is mostly just the last outpost before the endless west but also home of The Jacobite — West Coast Railway's gorgeous old steam train and the Harry Potter films' Hogwarts Express. Never mind that the day's trip out to Mallaig and back is consistently rated the Top Rail Journey in the World. Yes?! Yes. Getting tickets was a whole mess of ridiculous (We bought the actual literal last ticket online. Ticket. Singular. There are two of us.) but John is a superhero (Got up early. Waited in the rain to be the very first in line for day-of sales. Let me sleep.) even despite most every other human at the station falling under the terrible, horrible, not very good at all spectrum (You know, the kind who call a mile an inch and black a clean white just to get what they want). We came away with two tickets in the end . . . in different carriages. At opposite ends of the train.

But because my husband is also impossibly personable and actual poster child for the Beatitudes' pure and righteous, we pulled away with the two of us comfy-cozy together on the only truly Harry Potter carriage of the whole train (Ha! Take that, you darkly Death Eaters in your karmic cattle cars!), sharing a fancy-pretty sliding-door compartment with a family John had met in the morning rain, brothers with their daughters on holiday — Scottish to every hair of a Highland thistle —and the two youngest tiny enough to count for one so as to make room for seven people across six seats. We shared seats, we shared sandwiches, the men argued football, us girls raced up and down the corridors sticking our heads out windows and coughing up steam ash and pointing at particular beauty and crying for magical joy, etc. Remembering it now is akin to all the light and softness I feel for childhood, a luminescent space outside of time.

Sure, the Harry Potter part was neato. We saw the famous viaduct from CoS and Dumbledore's island from HBP. The day was darkish and wet, which made the mingling steam and mist a thing of Tolkien-envy. But the very best bit was having our rather bad beginning (those mean people really lit up our Inner Despair for Humankind) met with such immediate and abiding antidote. Those gracious Glaswegians with their hearts and souls and nobleness. We made friends. We swapped life stories. We shared a small day of wonder. Which, come to think of it, was the most Harry Potter part of all. Good does triumph; love conquers all.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

OTHER THINGS: if The Jacobite's on your itinerary, brave the early morning and the horrid people! All tickets sold online fill up the basic carriages in the way back, whereas the very first from the 50 day-of sales put you in the Harry Was Here seats up front. 

Returning to Compartment D after our lunch hour in Mallaig, the littlest Scot presented John with a love-heart rock from the beach. Which was after all the wide-eyed admiration from across the table but before the parting postcard promising penpalship. Have I mentioned I may have married the Pied Piper? We were already essentially at the ends of the earth, but these girls would have followed him still.

Also does the other cousin not have a wee touch of the young Amy Pond about her? Or was it just the accent?