We’ve got an itinerant cheese-selling woman who comes into town every Friday morning to sell the cheeses she purchases from local farms, and I like this old-fashioned way of buying cheese (other people, like the mayor, find it mortifying that our village is too small to support its own cheese shop). She stations herself in the plaza and likes to share news about the farms and villages she’s visited this week (at the moment we get a lot of baby animal news, like new calf announcements.) She has the unfortunate habit of denigrating her own cheeses without meaning to because she is a cheese perfectionist. You ask for a bleu, she grimaces hesitantly and says “Ah, poor choice, it doesn’t look quite right to me today”; or you tell her “I really liked the brie I picked last time, so creamy!” and she shakes her head and goes “Ah, you got lucky, often that farmer gives me such shitty brie with a chaulky texture—” then she suddenly looks frustrated with herself, you can tell she’s thinking “why am I giving this information to a client?? I’m the worst cheese saleswoman ever.” It’s very endearing.
She also sells eggs, and always writes the name of the farmer she got it from on each carton so you can make sure to buy your friends’ eggs and avoid your enemies’ eggs. You’ve got to be like “Six Gilbert eggs please” and publicly announce where your loyalty lies, it’s a whole Thing. If one day you decide to go rogue and ask for Agnès eggs instead you can be sure people will notice, and they will talk. Getting my own chickens is the only way I have found to avoid pledging egg allegiance.
I am OBSESSED with this egg based clique culture
Some things are just extremely French
Gotta say that “…the mayor [finds] it mortifying that our village is too small to support its own cheese shop…” is The Most French sentiment I have ever heard in my life.
the way ivan aivazovskylooks at the sea…i think…i think that’s what love looks like.
love is surrounding yourself with people who see you this clearly
Still the freakiest fact about him is that despite being as tall as a person or more, he banged out these beauties in a day or two at most (and smaller ones ina matter of hours). The longest he spent on a painting, at age 81, to make his largest ever painting, was TEN DAYS:
It is 2.9×4.3 meters large. That’s 9'4"×14'1" for people in other measurement systems. It’s HUGE. There are artists out there that spend years on paintings much smaller than this. He was not one of them.
He also didn’t only paint the sea, but he MOSTLY painted the sea. Very few people could draw light filtering through waves the way this guy did and apparently it was tied into his layering technique that allowed him to paint so goddamn fast.
Unpopular opinion but an adult still living at home with their birth family doesn’t owe you an explanation for why they’re living there.
It could be an illness/disability they have that’s not fully visible. Maybe they want to be around to care for their aging parents. Maybe the rents in their area are so disgustingly, astronomically high that it really doesn’t make sense for them to move out. Maybe they just don’t trust strangers enough to move into shared accommodation. No matter what it is, it’s not your business.
There are loads of valid reasons for an adult to be reliant - partially or completely - on their parents. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it. As a parent myself, I WANT my kids to come to me if they need anything, for as long as I live. Parenting means supporting your children. There’s no time limit on that love.
‘I Take Issue’ project- wrote my first graphic novelette! Not something I’d normally say, but I’m super proud of this.
(please excuse the weird layout, it’s formatted for printing rather than internet)
I had to reblog this. Because it’s not only beautifully painted, its idea is something that needs to be shared, again and again, so that more people will take their bloody buckets off.
“I don’t do math because I’m gay” “the gays can’t do math” “If I explain math on tumblr I’ll lose my gay card” all of you apologize to Alan Turing right now
My husband knew that my favorite meal was my mother’s breaded and panfried chicken breast, known in my family as “Becca Chicken”. He apparently got her to teach him to cook it for our first anniversary, and every now and then he will surprise me with it as dinner. He makes it even better than I can.
love is a chicken cutlet indeed
get yourself a significant other who will make you perfectly breaded and fried chicken cutlets
Also? Speaking of Audiobooks, I have the following to say: 1. Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” series has an absolutely amazing audiobook version of it. 2. Sadly, it is primarily available through Audible, which is owned by Amazon, which I refuse to buy from and/or give my details to if I can at all avoid it. 3. Now… Gaiman’s a great author, and I normally wouldn’t advocate pirating his stuff - but he’s also successful enough for me to argue that losing the revenue of those few leftist fans in his audience that ideologically refuse to buy from Amazon probably wouldn’t make a dent in his finances. As such, I will also make note of the fact that you totally shouldn’t google “sandman audiobook free” or similar terms, in order to find a variety of pirated versions of said audiobook. (Similarly, the Sandman comics are also available for free, for those that can’t afford to buy the series and would otherwise be unable to read them)
It won’t make a dent in my income, no. My income on the Sandman audiobooks is a percentage of what DC comics makes licensing the material, and another payment for being the narrator. (Not a huge amount of money. We can’t afford to pay Michael Sheen or James McAvoy or Kat Dennings or any of the other amazing starry people who take part in this what they get as film and tv stars. They do it for “I love Sandman and want to be part of it” rates.)
On the other hand, the Sandman audiobooks are really expensive to make. They have a huge cast, and an amazing backstage group of sound designers. Audible will make them as long as they make money. If the listening figures drop because people are listening to them through other sources Audible might well stop making them. And then a lot of people take cuts in their incomes and that would actually, in the case of the not-famous hardworking voice actors (for example) would mean a real loss of money for the people who do need it.
If you don’t want to listen on Audible, why not buy (or better yet, get from your library) the CD or the MP3 CD version, and transfer the files?
