(no subject)

My local English Country Dance group sponsors a Playford Ball every year. This year's ball has sort of snuck up on me - it's coming up in less than a month. I need to start getting to dance practice more regularly.

I have a lovely ball dress that wcg made for me, an approximate copy of a 1770 English dress which is very comfortable to dance in. The problem is that my hair is resoundingly un-period. I'm not going to buy a period-style wig, so the alternative is some sort of hat or cap. It's hard to find something that will go with my ball dress, but will cover all of my hair - the classic mob cap was, I think, more lower-class than would ordinarily be worn at a ball.

I'm thinking of buying something like this pleated cap. Honestly, this is the only time all year that I wish I had long hair.

How the other 0.05% lives.

Saturday morning, curiousangel and I were invited to brunch at a neighbor's house, to welcome new families to the neighborhood. (No, we weren't on the list of new people to be welcomed, but at least we were invited to the brunch, right?)

I've posted pictures of our house before. It's a lovely, unassuming, down-at-heels, three-story brick rowhouse, and actually one of the smaller houses on the block. A lot of the larger houses, which were once mansions, have been broken up into apartments. We knew that some of them were still single-owner-occupied, but I think I sort of imagined that they were essentially larger versions of our own house.

Nope.

Our neighbors who hosted the brunch live in a mansion. An elaborately carved paneled, chandeliered, leaded-glassed, walk-in fireplaced, large walled courtyard and drivewayed, enormous added greatroom in the back with full-scale marble pillars and a vaulted roof-ed, mansion. Everything was exquisite and lovely and perfectly tasteful. Georgette Heyer characters would feel perfectly at home. John Jacob Astor would probably feel perfectly at home. And all of it four doors down from our comfortable shabby house.

We perched on oversized chairs in the greatroom and ate coffee cake and talked with our neighbors, mostly about houses and parking and neighborhood history and the car that drove up on the sidewalk and hit someone's house in a tragic parallel-parking accident. Everyone was very friendly. It felt a lot like talking with my parents' friends, except that it was taking place in something that looked, more than anything else, like a movie set.

I wonder whether, if we stay in the neighborhood, we'll become part of these people's social circle. It doesn't seem likely that we'd be close friends, but there certainly wasn't anything discordant about our presence at the brunch. We'd fit in all right as aquaintances... and that gives me the strangest sort of double-vision feeling. We fit in there, and we fit in at an alt.polycon, and at a gathering of Young Democrats, and at the Baltimore Folk Music Society, and that just feels a bit odd. The same people shouldn't know both pixel and Mr. and Mrs. Neighbor.

It's clarified something for me: I don't want that. I thought their home was lovely, but I prefer ours. Oh, I'd like to make improvements to ours - one of the people at the brunch had a wonderful idea about opening up more windows at the back of our house and building a deck - but I don't want to live in an elaborate mansion. The things I want, we'll be able to afford as soon as curiousangel is employed again. That's a nice thing to know.

(no subject)

We went shopping for hurricane supplies this evening. I still wasn't sure how much would be overkill, so I made my basic criterion "will I be embarrassed if I buy this and then the storm misses us?"

We bought: bottled water, a second flashlight, flashlight batteries, batteries for my Walkman (it has a radio), crackers, sharp cheddar cheese, peanut butter with preservatives so it doesn't need refrigeration, juice, canned fruit, canned soup, canned fish, candles, chocolate, and roasted peanuts. This we added to our stock of hurricane-appropriate supplies already in the cupboard, which includes more candles, more canned fruit and soup, dried fruit, canned beans, chips, cereal, breakfast bars, crackers, fresh vegetables, bleach, masking tape, the first flashlight, and plastic bags.

So of course we came home and found that Isabel had already been downgraded to a Cat 3.

Yay, first criterion! I am ashamed of buying nothing.