Hello! And welcome to the second Weekly Wrap Up!
Watching
I finished the current season of Call the Midwife. This is a BBC period drama about a group of nurse midwives who work in the East End of London, set in the 1950s-1960s. The midwives are based out of the St. Raymond of Nonnatus convent and the sisters and nurses work together in the community. This show is based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, although the show goes beyond the stories that are in her three books. I love this show. It's cozy although sometimes it makes me cry.
On YouTube this week Stephanie Canada made a video that really touched me. She's a vintage clothing person - does a lot of sewing and sells vintage patterns, fabrics and notions. I don't sew myself but I watch her channel because I like seeing the vintage looks and fabrics. So cool!
Anyway, she talked about being frustrated by not being able to find vintage clothing in her size so this is why she sews. But she also talks about why you don't find larger sized vintage items. It's not that fat people didn't exist in the past but rather what got saved were the "good clothes" from a time in life when a person was smaller (like a young woman's wedding dress or prom dress). As the years went by and people aged and wore larger sizes, those clothes ended up getting used - given away or worn until they were cut down into smaller pieces (to account for weakened seams or to be passed on to another person) and ultimately cut into scraps for rags or for use in something like a pillow or quilt (several people in the comments mentioned scraps being used like this). It wasn't the daily wear items that were saved - it was the "good clothes" which also happened to be from a time when a woman was wearing something much smaller. She's sad that the plus-sized items she remembers her grandmothers wearing weren't also saved because she thought both that the clothes were beautiful, as were the women who wore them.
What really touched me about this video was that, as a fat person, I FELT SEEN. It's hard being big today in this society, with everything that's thrown at us in the media. We are made to feel less than. I think being fat is just about one of the last "acceptable" things to judge about a person. I feel there is a sense sometimes that we are current day freaks, that fat people did not exist in the past since those larger sizes aren't easily found but really this is because of how vintage clothing is viewed through a "skewed lens of time."
I don't know - sometimes what I want to say sounds good in my head but when I try to speak (or type!) I feel like all that comes out is - "Video good!" If you are a plus size person, even if you aren't into the vintage scene, maybe take a look.
Reading
I finished the submarine novel I wrote about last week. It was fine. I enjoyed my time with it but ultimately it was a little bit of a let down. It was all action and very little character building. And maybe that's fine for some readers who want the action and feel personal details of the characters get in the way of the story. But it left me wondering things. Who is this sub captain? How did she get into the cargo sub business? And what about her first mate? He speaks eloquently and it leads me to believe there was some kind of unusual path to him being on the sub. And what about the other crew? There were 3 other male characters and they were pretty much all interchangable except one did all the cooking. There were 2 other female characters, the engineer and the sonar operator. They were slightly more fleshed out than the male characters but not by much.
When I picked up the sub book I had been in the middle of Perilous Seas, the 3rd book in Dave Duncan's A Man of His Word series. This is early 90s fantasy and it is keeping me entertained.
When I'm finished with that I do have the last book of that series or I could read a Mercedes Lackey book I was just gifted, Sword of Ice. There's a new Penric and Desdemona book by Lois McMaster Bujold that recently came out. Or, I have several books on my Kindle still to be read. So many books! There was a time that I had several books going at once. I have such a reading backlog, maybe I need to start doing that again - one book at the bedside, one in my backpack for work, one in the bathroom.
Other Stuff
Today I went to a video game/pinball convention, Zapcon. I love this con and go every year. It's held over a weekend and my game plan is always to buy a ticket on Sunday, thinking it won't be crowded because everyone else will be at church. HA! Not enough people are going to church these days. They are all also at the gaming convention on Sunday. But I have a fun time none the less.
I played a lot of my favorite arcade games: Burger Time, Frogger, Ms. Pac-Man, Kickman, Joust 2, Arkanoid, Tapper, Tutankham and Zoo Keeper. I like Moon Patrol and Tempest but ended up not playing them today. And I totally forgot about Marble Madness!
I always try to find one new-to-me game to play and this year it was QB-3, a vector game where you are a stick person and have to shoot things and then rotate to another side of the cube to complete the next wave. It was pretty cool!
Out of all of those games the ones I'm best at are Ms. Pac-Man (got a score of 120K) and Frogger. I really like playing Joust 2 with my son but this is a 2 player game with some co-op levels. I get too excited and often end up killing my coplayer, thereby nuking our chances of getting an end of level bonus for cooperation. I'm surprised he still plays with me because this always happens!
I did also play a handful of pinball tables but not as much as in years past. It seemed like this year they had a lot more of the newer tables, with bright LEDs and lots of flashing lights and complicated game play. My favorite types of tables are the older ones that are very noisy with lots of bells clanging and score cards ticking over.
All right, that's about it for this week's wrap-up. My birthday is tomorrow and I took most of the week off of work. I don't think I'll be doing anything exciting - just hanging at home with the cat.