REALLY tired of this....

The whole waking up in the morning and devoting the first hour to expectoration. You'd think it would all be gone by now after more than two weeks, but my sinuses and lungs are still gunky. At least my ears feel clear this morning.

Sewing machine is plugged in. I am going down to Town Centre to pick up some extra bobbins and maybe something of the baked sort at Panera - heck, maybe I'll even be able to taste it -  before getting to work on JAF's commission pieces today.

EDIT:  Nothing in Panera appealed - they were completely out of breakfast souffles and and they don't have chai (!!!!), so I decided to try the Beanery on Park Street. I don't do the coffee thing all that often myself and if I do it's usually the Peets inside the supermarket. However, Dad found the Beanery on a previous visit and liked it.  The apple muffin was the size of a small planet, cakey, lots of fruit and less sugary than the similar offering from Panera. The chai seemed decent - remember, my taste and smell are kind of wonky with this blasted cold. Numi, probably. They had both Numi and Stash teas.

I'm about halfway done with a black linen hitatare top and taking a short break from peering at all that black on black. I figured I'd start with that before I got too eye-tired, but there was a little tension foo I had to fix and I didn't realize I needed to load a new bobbin right away at one point, so I had to re-do most of one side. Surely the red outfit will be easier to see what I'm doing on it.

I am getting deafer with age or the recent shop visit has made the amount of white noise the sewing machine puts out less annoying than I remember. I have the laptop plugged in close by with the volume cranked and I can actually HEAR the music I'm playing.

When I went the all-handsewing-all-the-time route, I forgot what a workhorse this machine is. I have the original instruction book and the date inside says 1971, as if the faded yet still garish cover wasn't a clue.  It's a Singer 717 and the guys at A-1 waxed enthusiastic about it being a great school machine* when I brought it in for repairs.  Mine looks like this one except it doesn't have the black model plate on the right bottom. Yellowed off-white with aqua. *Never had a case, it looks like it was meant to be inset into a sewing table.

Scott (my old trainer) picked it up at a garage sale or something so we could use it for mending horse blankets. As chief mending elf, I ended up taking it home with me a lot. Eventually it stayed. Eventually I kept it. It's like an anvil with moving parts. I think the only plastic parts are the exterior knobs and dials and that groovy aqua side plate. 

Time to get back to work, I think.

The most manic version of "Old Man River" I've ever heard

Animated version of a favorite ghost story.

The subtitles are a bit idiosyncratic, but I like the animation.

In other news, I'm halfway through reading "Something Like an Autobiography," by Akira Kurosawa. Although it stops in 1950 because he didn't feel it was right to dish dirt about film makers and actors who were still alive, it does talk about his early career as an assistant director at the fledgling company that would become Toho Film The page and a half footnote about movies he saw as a kid was also pretty amazing. Prewar Tokyo got everything from Charlie Chaplin to Luis Bunuel, apparently.

He describes editing a sequence in Kajiro Yamamoto's "Uma" (Horses), which makes me want to see it, however, I can't find any evidence it's been released on video. Not surprising. Criterion has only just started releasing the works of Kenji Mizoguchi on DVD in the past couple of years.