Here's a terrific exercise for the aging muscles of a gal's neck and chin. It's from page 66 of Reduce and Beautify your Figure (1954):

"Speak slowly the letters Q and X. Repeat 20 times. Make faces at yourself, twisting your mouth and chin, stretching your mouth and lips, using all the different muscles you can think of."

A Simple Cure for Dissatisfaction

I came across this bit of wisdom in Today's Clothing (J.B.Lippincott Co., 1949 page 292), one of my many vintage Home Economics textbooks. I especially love it that the image was originally published by Better Homes and Gardens, the people who are still bringing us, well, better homes and gardens.

But who knew? Here I've been trying meditation, psychotherapy, hot baths, positive thinking, gratitude, volunteering, visualization, somatic experiencing, behaviour modification, 85% dark chocolate, yoga, and kissing my dog on her lips when really, all I need to do to improve my satisfaction is take proper care of my hat.

Life was obviously simpler in 1949.

Finally a caloric explanation

I just found an interesting factoid in one of my vintage Home Economics Books, Family Meals and Hospitality from 1949. I mentioned in an earlier post, that I am hard at work on a second book - working title Dangerous Curves (my first was Storm Clouds Over Party Shoes, Etiquette Problems for the Ill-Bred Woman). As part of my research, I am obliged to scour my vast collection of old books aimed at women. It makes for some very interesting reading to say the least.
Anyways, in amongst the many chapters in Family Meals and Hospitality which cover such topics as entertaining on a post-war budget, feeding the convalescent, and preparing appetizing yeast breads, was a little chart showing how many calories are burned while engaged in various household chores. For example, mopping burns one and a half calories per pound of weight per hour. Scrubbing comes in somewhere between two and three. Hand sewing provides a tragic one half calorie per hour per pound of weight.
Now, without doing any math or running a white-gloved finger across my horizontal surfaces, you can safely surmise that there are very few of these type of calories being burned here in my home. My only hope against the ravages of menopausal weight re-distribution (unwanted chin hair alone must account for some of my gains in the past few years) is that typing rapidly burns one calorie.
I am working as fast as I can.

it's a jungle out here

I didn't mind so much the mouse making a nest in the engine compartment of my 1985 Toyota Tercel, a car so old that Windows 1.0 was still a glint in Microsoft's eye. My local mechanics discovered the nest when I brought the vehicle in for servicing. They of course would not disturb it, and recommended we summons a HAZMAT team. Mice droppings are the new black when it comes to disease, at least the droppings belonging to the deer mouse. The deer mouse, largely rural, is grayish to light brown on top, with a white belly, large ears, a furry tail and eyes that appear to “bug out.” Of course, I didn't actually see the droppings leaving the mouse in question, so I can't be sure of their pedigree. But I do live on a rural island and so it's safe to say that these droppings did indeed come from a deer mouse.
But I digress.
As I said, I didn't mind so much the nest being under the hood, but when she decided to take up residence in my favorite hat, it was a nest of a different colour. Imagine my surprise when I grabbed the hat from my glove compartment, flung it onto my head, and was promptly showered in a gentle rain of multicoloured fluff, flecked with the aforementioned dreaded droppings. The situation could only have been worse if the mouse had been home or -god forbid - entertaining at the time of the incident.
Where is the HAZHAT team when you need them?

Measuring Up

Every summer, my favorite art maven here on Gabriola, Kathy Ramsey who owns ARTWORKS, hands over the same item to an entire possee of artists, and asks us to create something from it. I love the challenge. One year, we were given a box of kleenex so - inspired by my years as a less than buxom teen - I found a vintage lethal weapon pointed bra, stuffed it full of every tissue in the box, and then mounted it on a wooden plaque with an engraved sign reading "Best rack 1963".
This year the object was a wooden ruler and I extracted head to toe criticisms about women's bodies from my collection of old books and assigned them to the corresponding body parts on an old photo. I realize you will not be able to read the text easily unless maybe you use a magnifying glass, but trust me, the comments are brutal. Here's the statement I wrote to go with it:

Women have been trying to measure up to some impossible ideal or other ever since Eve asked Adam if her fig leaf made her look fat. Primitive cave drawings have been discovered recently which clearly depict women using crude seaweed straps to cinch in their waists.
OK so I made that up.
What I didn't make up are the passages of text in my piece. They were lifted from my vintage charm, beauty, poise, and etiquette books.
According to the Canadian Women's Health Network, girls as young as 5 and 6 in this country, are engaging in weight control measures.
Post Feminism my foot.

practical palmistry for women

I found this odd little book the other day...all about palmistry, or chiromancy as it is also known; the art of characterization and foretelling the future through the study of the palm. And I thought to myself, wouldn't it be more useful if the interpretation of our palmar features helped women predict what trouble areas we might encounter down the road, say like, down the old age road. I mean, wouldn't it be great if we could know right now, what we might expect to encounter in our golden years so that we could target our current beauty intervention with more efficacy. I mean, what if your get too fat groove ran like an arctic pipeline clear across your hand. Wouldn't you want to see that now and make the requisite caloric adjustments?
So I took the liberty of altering the book cover and, well, you see the results above. Apparently the practice of chiromancy is generally regarded as a pseudoscience and I suppose I have only added to that tendency.

A little photoshop is a dangerous thing.

dog meets bird meets dog

I was working away at my computer the other day when I looked down to find my little dog Rosie, lying comfortably on the small brown mat near my feet. This is quite common, her lying on the mat. What was uncommon was the large wild turkey lurking a foot or so away and separated only by a sliding glass door. They seemed as mesmerized by each other as I was of them. Of course, I felt a distinct urge to wax anthropomorphic and so I did. In my mind, the conversation between them ran like this:

dog: where's your back legs?
bird: how do you preen that mess?