OK, this is it! The last of my Photography favorites for 2025. As I’ve noted before, all of my photography ends up on Flickr, where I really try to organize things into albums for convenience. (I also use Flickr for image hosting on this site, so there’s a lot of stuff there scattered throughout that isn’t mine. These are always noted in the image descriptions.) In terms of photographic gear, all photos are currently taken either on my Lumix FZ1000ii (“Miranda”), or my phone, a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra (“Ophelia”). Now, the photos…and at the end, my six favorite self-portraits from 2025.
Chocolate cake is always lovely. So is vanilla cake. Cake is generally lovely…but my favorite? Carrot cake, with tons of cream cheese frosting. My favorite carrot cakes have golden raisins in them. And if I’m not sharing the cake with The Wife? Walnuts! (She hates walnuts and pecans. I do not understand this.)
2. Think of the best party you’ve ever attended. Were you a host or a guest?
Huh. I don’t think I’ve been to a non-work related party since my college years. I remember some lovely parties back then…well, parts of lovely parties, I suppose…but as far as I can recall, we were never the host, though. Always guests.
3. When you choose a greeting card, do you pay more attention to the words or the pictures?
Pictures. The fewer words, the better. I’m going to write something myself. (Unless it’s a genuinely funny card.)
4. What’s your favorite holiday?
They all have their charms…but in my head Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years all pile together into a five-to-six week long festival. I love the entire time of year.
Also Halloween. Halloween is cool.
5. Who is your favorite character on your favorite TV show?
Hoo-boy…I’m not sure what my “favorite teevee show” even is! I mean, all-time, Star Trek (original series) is probably in that mix, in which case obviously my answer is Captain James T. Kirk. But if I limit myself just to shows we’re watching right now (several of which have already ended), I’ll go with Asta from Resident Alien. If you haven’t watched that show (which is now complete and ended after four seasons), an alien crashes to Earth near a small town in Colorado, where he kills and assumes the identity of a reclusive doctor named Harry Vanderspiegel. Hilarity ensues. (And lest you feel sorry for the reclusive doctor, the show quickly establishes that he wasn’t a good guy at all!) Anyway, our alien hero becomes the town’s doctor, even though he’s really an alien (disguised as human, obviously), and he forms a friendship with the nurse at the small practice, a Native American woman named Asta Twelvetrees. Their relationship informs the show, and actress Sara Tomko plays Asta wonderfully as a woman with real emotional issues to deal with and a complex inner life, into which suddenly arrives this very strange man who is really an alien. The show is a terrific balance of real emotion and comic absurdity arising from very weird situations, and I love when good actors convincingly play a person who is trying to navigate a really strange situation. Tomko’s Asta is the straight woman to Alan Tudyk’s Harry, and they’re a delight.
And in a bonus, the second season expands Asta’s wardrobe to include overalls!
This video is fourteen years old, and the YouTube algorithm only decided to show it to me…today.
This is the same algorithm where if I hear the words “how to use hearts of palm in cooking” in a dream, the next day I’ll see a dozen videos on that subject.
Because it was wonderfully crisp and cool out all weekend, I decided to fully embrace my favorite look, poofy shirts paired with overalls, during both days. And that’s probably a big reason why it was a really good weekend indeed. When you’re at maximum comfort, both in terms of just physical comfort but also just plain looking the way you want to look, it’s hard to have a bad day. And I had two pretty good days: trips to the farmer’s market and our favorite bakery and a different library branch where I checked out too many books (in terms of “will I get through them before they’re due”, because really, that’s the only actual context in which “too many books” is a concept that makes any sense at all). Then the next morning it was off to the Outer Harbor for some photography, and then it was off to Knox Farm for a little more photography (and some video footage shooting) because it was just too darn cold at the Outer Harbor! When those winds come off the lake on a cool fall morning, it can be downright chilly.
Let’s see, what else…there was cheese for dinner Saturday, and pork chops with corn on the cob last night. Yeah, not a bad weekend at all. I mean, sure, the weekend ended with the Buffalo Bills getting clobbered at home by the Baltimore Ravens. Bummer, but it happens. I went to bed when the score was 40-25, and, well, sometimes you don’t win…[listens to voice in earpiece]…OK, I have some new information here.
Anyway, here are the weekend’s outfits! Yes, this is two different poofy white shirts. Saturday’s overalls were dark blue Levi’s. Sunday’s overalls were vintage Lee Hickory-striped.
There’s something to be said for how life improves when you finally figure out what your real “look” actually is….
I saw, a while back, a content creator I follow on social media wearing this shirt in one of her videos:
I saw that shirt and immediately thought, “I want one of those shirts!” Of course, I quickly surmised that I wouldn’t be able to get that shirt, exactly. For one thing, it’s a woman’s shirt. Is that necessarily a deal-breaker for me? You know, maybe not. I’ve always wondered why it is that women-wearing-stuff-made-for-men was a thing while the other direction is generally not. But the other problem with that isn’t so much the potential weirdness, perceived or real, about me wearing a women’s shirt; the problem is that the shirt is honestly unlikely to be cut in such a way to really work on my body. Oh well. (And for another thing? I found the shirt online and it’s $150, roughly. Yeah, nope. Not at this point in my life, anyway.)
(Oh, I’m not naming that creator because I don’t want to make things weird.)
But I still really liked the way that shirt looks! The color and pattern are terrific. Men’s shirts are, for the most part, really boring to look at. I really don’t know why this is, but to the extent that interesting patterns exist in men’s tops, you usually see them on golf shirts, which I really dislike wearing. Most men’s shirts are just boring patterns–simple stripes, if there’s any pattern at all, really–and visual flair in men’s clothes tends to come from accessories and things like ties. Since I refuse to wear ties, that’s out. When I was a kid, paisley shirts were a big thing, but I also can’t wear paisley. At least not in The Wife’s presence. A while back I saw some dude wearing a really neat paisley shirt and I pointed it out to her and her cocked eyebrow and disdainful “Really?” made me shelve that idea pretty quick. (And no, it doesn’t bother me to not wear something she hates…or let’s say I haven’t found anything to wear in which I am sufficiently invested to tempt fate in that way.) Point is, I have a ton of solid-colored shirts in my wardrobe, so a pattern here and there–something other than plaid!–would be nice to have as an option on occasion, is all I’m sayin’.
So I set up an eBay search under “Yellow Linen Shirt” (I’m also really loving linen, but we’ll discuss that another time), and checked the results every few days. Now, I have some things–specific brands or patterns of vintage overalls, mostly–that I’ve searched out for years. So it was to my high surprise and great pleasure that this turned up in my search results after just a few weeks:
Note to self: Look up how to hold up a shirt to display it.
Obviously I knew that I was unlikely to get super-close to the exact pattern of the women’s shirt modeled above, but I was hoping to get at least in the neighborhood–and this one is honestly a lot closer than I even expected to get! Into my shopping cart it went, and lo, it was mine.
After a wash and dry, it was time to wear it. I actually want to wear it with darker blue overalls, but once I had this shirt in hand it was getting quite hot in The 716, so I thus far have only paired it with a lighter pair that’s cooler to wear. I really loved the feel of the fabric (again, linen is a thing that is increasingly making me happy on a regular basis) and the worn, rumpled, and patterned look.
Yeah, I’m pretty happy with this one. Now, if we could get the temps to drop just a little, this shirt will get some serious use! We’re in a hot-and-humid stretch of the kind we haven’t had in what feels like several years, unfortunately. My relationship with heat and humidity has softened as I’ve aged, but I’m not on board with upper-80s and heat indices in the 90s, though. Even with a miracle fabric like linen!
Sometimes after an afternoon or evening at the cinema I’ve had to shake myself out. It’s not a great look, folks. (Now, you’d think I’d wise up and choose one of my many pairs that have bib pockets that actually close up, but who thinks about details like that?)
like the blue-and-white striped overalls paired with it
(Apologies to William Carlos Williams)
There used to be a store in the malls, back in the 1990s, called Britches Great Outdoors. I didn’t shop there often, which I kind of regret because the two things I own from that store, I like a great deal. One is a pair of overalls that is among my favorite pairs of overalls ever, and I periodically look on eBay to see if any are hitting the market (no dice so far, ever). The other is this red cableknit sweater.
Sweaters are always amazing and wonderful, and everyone should own a few, as far as I’m concerned. Sweaters are kind of a “workhorse” article of clothing, in that they serve multiple functions, being both warm and usually looking good. But an old cableknit sweater is a special pleasure. In truth it may not be so warm as it used to be, as the sweater ages and the knit starts to loosen ever-so-slightly, so more air gets through it than before. And maybe there are starting to be a few fraying spots, only really noticeable if you’re the one who has worn the sweater a lot and you know how it used to be. Maybe around the bottom it’s given way a bit and maybe the collar and the cuffs aren’t as tight and neat as they used to be. But that’s OK.
And maybe the sweater itself fits a little bit strangely on you now. Mine certainly does: let’s just say that I filled it out quite a bit more tightly back when I bought in the 1990s. I suppose, by definition, the sweater is “vintage”, and it feels it: there is certainly a lot more room in it, and when I wear it under a pair of overalls, it balloons out from beneath the denim more than it did years ago.
Come to think of it: there’s something to be said for your soft and aged cableknit sweater being a bit too large, too. After all, one of the under-remarked qualities of overalls is that they can give new life, through covering and restraint, to tops that might otherwise not work as well on their own anymore.
If you don’t have a slightly oversized and old cableknit sweater, get one. And if you have a cableknit sweater that you’ve been considering getting rid of because it’s not what it used to be, maybe wait out that instinct a bit. It might just age itself into a new life…especially if you’re inclined to wearing overalls.
(I wanted to take a photo for this post of me holding a poetry book open to William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow”, with the sweater and the bib of my overalls showing beyond, but it turns out that I only own one poetry book with that particular poem in it, and that book splits the poem between two pages. Alas! Betrayed by kerning!)
They call this fabric “duck”. I don’t know why, but they do. Duck is a canvas fabric made out of cotton, and the way it’s made it’s a lot tougher than, say, denim. And it can be a lot tougher. Apparently duck fabric has a grading system, with the lowest number indicating the heaviest and thickest duck cotton out there; that’s what you’d make sales for a yacht out of. At the upper end of the number scale is the lighter duck, for “light clothing”. Somewhere in the middle falls the duck used to make tough workwear like your Carhartt jackets and these Dickies overalls!
I just got these super-cheaply off eBay, and I like them a lot, even though they’re still really raw, which means they’re still really stiff and scratchy. They’re super comfortable, though (of course they are, they’re overalls!), and a new color in the palette is always nice.
Some more detail photos:
I only have three pairs in this shade of brown duck: these Dickies, a pair of Carhartts, and a pair by Berne. I also have a dark brown pair of duck Carhartts and a pair of black duck Carhartts.
Oh, and apparently it’s called “duck” from the original Dutch work doek, which refers to the fabric the Dutch sailors used for their clothes. The more you know!
I saw this video on TikTok the other day, and it amused me greatly. As the Official Self-Appointed Curator Of Internet Content Pertaining To Overalls, I am compelled to share it here.
Her name is Lani Baker Randol, and she is apparently a model and content creator from Texas. Personally, I think her outfit here is terrific–the overalls pair wonderfully with that striped button-up she’s wearing–but I would like to ask her husband, What trains is he riding?
