The Spring is Springing
I've just had an uncommon pleasure: Mr Sweetie, modeling for me an ensemble he's put together, with an eye towards our attendance at a couple of Renaissance/Fantasy type faires this coming summer. It's not complete yet, but he put on for me a top hat, a bright white shirt with one of those tiny collars, a bow tie, and a "morning coat" of a shade of cranberry with very subtle stripes. And white gloves.

He's promised me a waistcoat ("vest" to us Americans) is on the way in the mail. Ah, the joys of Ebay.

I'm still so pleased, beyond just the notion of Mr Sweetie playing "the gentleman bookseller" at some of these costume faires. He picked this stuff out, entirely on his own initiative. Okay, not everything has been successful the very first time - I think he'll try for a smaller pair of gloves, and, if such exists, a(n even) slightly larger top hat. (I mean, it's not quite normal to show that much forehead,... is it? I've instructed him, only half in jest, that he must watch more BBC costume dramas.)

• The spring vacation has started, and oh my goodness am I taking a HUGE rest.
• Blast from the past, our traveller-to-Japan (thanks to his work) has shown up again at the dojo, something like 2 years after we'd last seen him. Poor guy, as soon as I realized who he was (and he remembered who I was) I nearly pounced with my eagerness to try some of the Japanese I've been studying. But he plead for mercy, saying that he'd been back in these parts long enough for the switch between Dutch and Japanese to be extremely difficult. Well, he's been let off... this time!
• W and E both took their examinations for 3rd kyu and passed! Hooray! W was a bit mischievous and tried to tease me that he'd "caught up" with me - I simply let one eyebrow lift and asked him if we were going to see him any time soon in a hakama. (For non-regular readers, those are the black trousers committed students to aikido will train in.) That shut him right up. But the following time he showed up at training, he wasn't too proud to ask for help in getting his hakama folded properly - the pleats are a bit of a nightmare, although I love the connection it gives me with a different notion of clothing.
• Some of the students at the university had a bit of whimsey in the week before the start of vacation - they reconfigured the garden near the lecture hall into a peddle cart speed-way. Fun!
• The spring visited for a couple of days (it's currently a wee bit chillier than that), and so I got out my favorite floaty sleeveless dress, paired it with a loosely flowing half jacket thing with very long and curly sleeves, and my straw hat. I was in a good mood, I didn't care if people gave my straw hat funny looks - I prefer that to having a sunburned scalp or having to smear myself in sun-screen goop.
• We watched (finally!) the film In Bruges. I know I read it somewhere, but I'd forgotten that the script is by Irish playwright Martin Macdonagh - but listening to the dialogue (liberally sprinkled with the F word, alas for my more puritan friends), I could have guessed if I had not known: his style is so blackly humorous that its verging on making one insane. A very enjoyable film, but you have to have the tolerance for your toes curling from the sheer painfulness of what the characters put themselves and one another through.

I guess that's enough for now, isn't it?