#cottage core

[gracecoquette]

playground love 🎀

[homedifferently]

The Basin

The bathroom people got back to me. Fifty percent off the Thomas Crapper sink makes it five hundred and sixty pounds. The taps are dummies — decorative, non-functional, which is a thing I did not know taps could be until this moment — and new ones at a discount would be six hundred and seventy. Twelve hundred and thirty-eight pounds for a basin and taps, which I cannot evaluate because I have never bought a basin or taps before and have no reference point for what a basin and taps should cost. I know it is heritage. I know it is made in the UK. I know it is beautiful in the way that the bannister in the ugliest house on the block was beautiful — the wrong house, the house that was wrong in every room, except the stairs, except that one thing that made you want to stay anyway.

I told him I'd speak to my husband.

I chased the plumber who was supposed to call Monday and didn't, which is the ongoing administrative labour of owning a fifteenth-century cottage, the following up, the chasing, the waiting for people to do the things they said they would do on the day they said they would do them.

Someone on AOTY didn't like my metal review and told me I was a special kind of loser. If only they knew about the punk band. The album. The singles on Spotify. The forty thousand listeners the defunct band still quietly accumulates while I am here in Essex being called a loser on a music website by someone whose opinion I did not ask for.

Maddie said if I think Hamilton is a seventy-seven she doesn't trust my opinion. Hamilton is my second favourite musical. Les Misérables is first. I stand by seventy-seven.

Then someone said AI profile picture, laughing emoji, which is what people say now when they see art that looks considered, which is what the internet does with anything that took effort and doesn't fit the template of what effort is supposed to look like. I spent my lunch break taking a photograph of myself and updating every profile. Fine arts and photography Associate's Degree, 2008. I drew the picture myself. You cannot make things anymore without someone assuming a machine made them, which is its own quiet grief, the grief of craft being mistaken for automation.

The curtains came. The bedroom will be dark now when it should be dark.

The basin is beautiful. The bannister was beautiful. Some things are worth the price even when you don't know if the price is right.

I will show my husband when he gets home.

[trashracoon95]

When you wanna dress like this, but also like this

[halees-comet]

[sarah-vendetta]

🥩 🫀

[zhandubbi]

Here are some more grainy pictures of my neighborhood Eastern Cotten tail rabbit. I think he was eating bread my neighbor threw out for the birds to have.

[homedifferently]

Poutine

The rain came briefly this morning and then left, which meant the 3D printed resin prints went outside and came back in and went outside again in the particular tennis match of English summer, which is never fully committed to anything for long enough to plan around. Out. In. Out again. The sky doing what it likes.

I washed my hair. Tomorrow I commute. I am ready in the way you are ready when you have laid out what you need and charged what needs charging and confirmed the trains are running and done the mental preparation of a person who has been working from a sloping study and a sittable couch for long enough that the outside world requires a certain amount of readying for.

Poutine for dinner, which is chips and gravy and cheese curds and the kind of meal that asks nothing of you except to eat it, which is the correct ask on a Tuesday in a heatwave that has briefly relented into rain.

France plays tonight. I hope they win. I have no particular reason to support France except that I do, the way you support things without needing a reason, the way you pick a side and stay with it.

The resin prints are outside again.

I am watching the sky.