Today’s Daily Stoic writing prompt:  What evil comes from my own choices?

I’m not sure if any actual evil comes from my own choices.  But certainly it’s not all universally good.  I have made bad choices from time to time (although not what I would call morally bad–just not completely well thought-out.)  Most of them involve buying things I didn’t really need or failing to prioritize things that really matter.  I’ve mentioned this before:  I have a tendency to believe that things will fix themselves.  Sometimes they do.  But sometimes they don’t, and sometimes I lack the courage to do something about it in situations where I could make a difference.  That’s not always true, but I am very conflict adverse, and that can bite me sometimes.  I’ll try to figure out a way to solve things without direct confrontation–again, sometimes that does work, but often it does not, and I’ll end up with a bigger mess on my hand than I would have had.

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The MEDATS conference this morning was outstanding and just the perfect length (four hours of papers) for a Saturday morning.  J. did an outstanding job on their dog armour paper.  I particularly enjoyed the papers on animals on the Bacton Altar Cloth and the Bayeaux tapestry (the latter by Gail Owen-Crocker).  One thing it did remind me is that I really should catch up on volumes of Medieval Clothing and Textiles. The only problem with that is that there are now eleven of them I do not have. I’m going to have to see if I can find an index and start prioritizing them.

I spent most of the afternoon working on my embroidery (very close to having the first figure complete), doing a full proof of the first chapter of the CWH book,  then spent half an hour listening to my composer friend’s latest symphony (which had a movement I quite liked with a lot of 5/4 and 5/8 rhythms) before attending Rising Waters court.   Today was Lady Mary, which was done virtually this year.  I got out the garb I made for the event back three years ago, the blue-on-blue Rus’ with pearls, a set of clothing which has an additional meaning known only to me, one that makes me smile.

I’m looking to get this update completed early so I can shut down the computer and go upstairs and maybe watch either more Clone Wars, or perhaps the first episode of Chernobyl, or both.    Speaking of Chernobyl, I’m getting inspired to give doing a piece based on the mosaics I posted a couple of days ago a try—specifically starting with that detail with the four-pointed stars in blue.  I’m thinking it would work beautifully using the padded stitch techniques with beads I learned for Russian embroidery a couple of years ago.  If that works out, I might consider eventually doing a larger piece.   I’ll have to order beads, likely from BeadFx (Japanese delicas).  But it’s really jumping out at me, so it just may need to happen.