December Favorites: Miss Marple, a Crow Who Thinks He's a MoFo, and a LOT of Jukebox Musicals

So, this might have been the best Winter Break of my life to date. 

It's been long enough since pandemic lockdown stuff ended that our two-week mostly staycation felt AWESOME. For a while, I was kicking myself that we didn't go on a quick pre-Christmas trip like last year's super fun New York City adventure, but you know, I think the extra downtime was worth it. No packing, no figuring out pet sitters, no travel stress, no sightseeing must-dos... just plenty of relaxation and plenty of time with each other. We tried a couple of new-to-us restaurants, Syd played the best Cards Against Humanity combo that I have EVER seen, we watched a ton of movies, I read so many books, the kids and I got a lot of work done on our respective farms over in Stardew Valley, and we just did absolutely nothing notable or interesting, and it was perfect.

Here's a few of my favorite things that I read, watched, or listened to in December:

READ

A few months ago, I complained on my Craft Knife Facebook page that I'd read a couple of Poirot novels but didn't like them, didn't like the character of Poirot, and couldn't figure out what the big deal was. A very kind and gracious reader commented that what I should be reading was Agatha Christie's Miss Marple books, as she's far superior to Poirot and has a much better knowledge of poisons.

Y'all. Miss Marple is EVERYTHING to me now. She is FAR superior to Poirot. She has a MUCH better knowledge of poisons. She is SO good at all the machinations involved in figuring out murders and luring the murderers into revealing themselves. One time, she pretended to be choking to death just so a murderer would stand over her in just the right spot that someone whom she'd already machinated out of the room on an unrelated errand could enter the room at exactly the right moment to be presented with a tableau so similar to a murder she'd fleetingly seen that she recognized the hitherto-unrevealed murderer and he was arrested. 

Also, she has the best garden in the village.

I've taken to bringing a Miss Marple with me when I sub once a week for teachers in the local high schools. They're easy to follow and pick up and put down, easy to jump right back into, and they're short enough that I can often, if the classes aren't completely feral (which sometimes they are...), finish the book before the final bell rings. 

Here are my favorite Miss Marple books so far:

• A Murder is Announced
• Murder at the Vicarage
  
• 4.50 from Paddington
• At Bertram's Hotel
• A Caribbean Mystery

I'm stoked that I still have a few more novels that I haven't read yet, as well as all of her short stories. And the same delightful commenter told me that I should also try Tommy and Tuppence, so hopefully that will keep me in Agatha Christie until the end of the school year!

BookTok is my jam, and a few weeks ago, a single TikTok gave me a whole list of new TBRs that I requested from the library and read over Winter Break. They were all good, but OMG I could not put Hollow Kingdom down until I finished it, and then when I did finish it I I immediately found Will, put it into her hands, and said, "Read it right now so we can talk about it!". We have spoken of nothing but that and the running of our Stardew Valley farm since:

I love myself a good zombie apocalypse, so that was my original draw to the book, but wow it's so much more than that. It's tender and beautiful, and has a lot to say about how precious and valued we are, to ourselves and to others, even when we're absolutely only average and definitely not that special. Trigger warning for pet death, but even then it's not pet death the way it's usually used just to make us sad so we feel like the book has emotional impact, but pet death that's treated with all the love and respect and grief that it obviously ought to have.

And while double-checking the author's name, I just now discovered that there. Is. A. SEQUEL!!! I emergency requested it so hopefully Will and I have time to read it together before we move her into her out-of-state college dorm.

I languished in my public library's Holds queue for I'm Glad My Mom Died for MONTHS before I finally received it a few weeks ago. I wasn't even that excited to read it, but, you know, the hype! And also I felt obligated to read it as fast as possible because the line behind me was just as long (I just checked, and my library currently has 15 copies of the book, with 49 people still in line to read it). 

I can't say that I enjoyed the book, because the author is very forthright about some really tough stuff, but I was absolutely fascinated by it. I highly disapprove of the use of child actors, especially the ones who seem to spend their entire childhoods working instead of being children, so I'm generally up for any memoir by a former child actor trashing the experience. But this book is also really well-written, and I know I already said that McCurdy is very forthright, but she's SO forthright about her experiences that I had a knot in my stomach reading her vivid depictions of abuse and trauma, but also, I'm super proud of her for how she powered through and the way that she hopefully seems to be doing a lot better now. The only thing I was left wishing was that we could get even a brief recap of the hours and years and types of therapies that she's surely undergone to be as healed as she is.

WATCHED

Okay, I know I'm the last person on Earth to see Everything Everywhere All At Once, but I also had to wait for it to be my turn to check it out from the library (current count: the library has eight copies and 31 people in line!). I'm not super into movies in general so I wasn't anticipating it, but Matt is a bigger movie buff and requested it, waited patiently for it, checked it out as soon as it was his turn, and wheedled me into watching it that night.

And, um? It's WONDERFUL! He didn't tell me it was sci-fi, or I'd have been moderately more enthusiastic about the prospect. But if you don't like sci-fi, it's not sci-fi enough to turn you off. But I am in just the right place right now to watch an emotional but not syrupy movie about mothering your grown daughter and worrying that you're doing a terrible job at it. Also, there was a tiny little moment early in the film that I laughed out loud in delight about. And then later, they took it a little further and I was again delighted. And then later, it happened again. And then it became part of the tangled plot, every time getting more ridiculous and wild, and I was so there for it I can't even tell you. 

In other news, I'm usually militantly vigilant about avoiding lifestyle creep (as befits a middle-aged, underemployed woman with not nearly enough retirement savings, sigh), but December was a perfect storm of lifestyle creep. First, the teenager who will shortly be attending college out-of-state needed her first very own cell phone, which means that we finally had to upgrade the crazy-cheap, crazy-old AT&T account that we'd been grandfathered into a billion years ago and managed to keep this entire time because we rarely upgrade our phones. But y'all. Have y'all ALL had unlimited data ALL THIS TIME?!? If you'd told me this, I might have upgraded our phone plan years ago!

Okay, I wouldn't have, but I would have been very, very, very jealous of you!

Around the same time, we went to renew my ESPN+ subscription, a piece of lifestyle creep from last year that I cannot bear to give up because that's where the hockey games live, and ugh, you guys, it only cost another forty bucks for the entire year to add Hulu and Disney+ to our subscription. Do we *need* a full year of Hulu and Disney+? No, no we do not. But do I *want* to watch that latest season of The Handmaid's Tale? Yes, yes I do. Do I want to watch Moana every time I'm feeling sad? Why yes, yes I do! Was I thrilled beyond measure to sit down to the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special? Also yes! 

And then. Y'all, and then! We're near the end, and I've been having a marvelous time because the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special is for some reason WAY better than it needs to be, when Kevin Bacon takes the microphone to sing with the alien band that had made a brief appearance earlier. He starts to sing, and I'm all, "OMG he's singing an Old 97s song!!!", and Matt, who has not said a word about this the entire time even though he knew this information already and also knows that the Old 97s are one of my favorite bands and he, himself, has seen them with me twice at a local bar and witnessed me freak out with excitement both times, just casually throws out, "Yeah, I think that alien band is the Old 97s." 

And that, my friends, is how you subject yourself to watching the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special twice in a row with me, because obviously I have to watch the entire thing again right away to make sure I don't miss a single scene that the Old 97s appear in. 

It was, like, two scenes. I was nevertheless vibrating with high-key excitement the entire time.

LISTENED TO

Did anyone else spend a huge amount of their teen years vibing to The Joshua Tree, or was that only a Gen X thing? I spent a HUGE amount of my teen years vibing to The Joshua Tree, something that I had forgotten about completely until a teenager asked if we could watch Sing 2, which prompted an emergency visit to the public library's online catalog (a site that I literally have bookmarked on my phone, because you would be surprised how often emergency visits to the library catalog are called for around here!), and then just a couple of days later (the library currently has six copies of Sing 2, with two of those copies on the shelves) a Sing movie marathon. I don't normally love jukebox musicals, but for some reason I do like Sing, and at the climax of Sing 2, I had the exact middle-aged mom HOLY SHIT WOW moment that the producers hoped I would have, when the reclusive lion finally comes out of hiding to sing his song with the porcupine, Scarlet Johansson, and halfway into his first verse I was all, "HOLY SHIT WOW DID THEY ACTUALLY GET BONO?!?!?" 

Like, I'm not quick on the uptake, because they'd been doing U2 songs the whole movie and saying they belonged to the lion, but whatever. Now I'm listening to The Joshua Tree on constant rotation again and it is just as incredible as it was when I was fifteen:

We obviously couldn't have a sing marathon without also marathoning our other favorite jukebox musical series, Pitch Perfect! Will is even less into movies than I am, and I think Pitch Perfect is the very first live-action feature that she actually genuinely loved. It hasn't aged well, because we spent most of the first film marvelling over how just plain mean the main character is and why does everybody even like her at all oh it's because she's nOtLiKeOtHeRgIrLs right? BUT the first movie also has a beautiful scene in which Ben Platt (back when he was genuinely amazing and soulful and hadn't ruined his reputation by cramming himself into a movie in a role that should have been played by someone a decade younger, and also we've come to realize that character is actually a sociopath and we just didn't notice earlier because his songs are so great) achieves his dream and it's so sweet and well-acted. 

If, as soon as the credits to Pitch Perfect roll, you're not switching to YouTube to check out the actual competitors in the actual International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella, you're nerding incorrectly and you should let me help you. Just... the music! The choreography! The punny names of every single group!

Here's Pitches and Notes:

The Nor'easters have the best outfits, though:

And just like that, we're somehow practically halfway through January! I'm currently still binging The Joshua Tree, I finished a new Miss Marple while subbing yesterday, I can hardly stand to put down Will's latest fantasy rec, and speaking of Will... well. I left a big part of my heart in Ohio this week and now I'm watching Moana and crying.

Bleach-Painted T-shirts: A Tutorial

 

Twice in the past few months, I've wanted to make some kind of custom fan apparel, but I didn't want to devote a ton of time, energy, or money to it. The first was for a Mother Mother concert, and the second was a present for all of the children dancing the (kind of shitty, because you have to wear a fat suit and giant mascot head that's apparently hot, smelly, and hard to see out of) role of Mouse in our local university's production of The Nutcracker. 

You can do this project a lot more nicely than I did it, with super clean lines and really even tones, but here's how you can ALSO do it quick and dirty-like, whether it's for a concert tomorrow or you've got to make six in a row and you're already bored.

To bleach paint T-shirts, you will need:

• black 100% cotton T-shirt. The best shirt is obviously a thrifted shirt, and for my Mother Mother shirt I did find the perfect black T-shirt at Goodwill. Speaking of... y'all have the Goodwill prices gotten absolutely RIDICULOUS in your area, or is my town the only one in which the local Goodwills have decided that not only do they no longer need to offer any sales or discounts on the crap they're literally given for free, but they've also just absolutely jacked up their prices to Jesus? I'd long more-or-less abandoned the little indie thrift shops around me for more than just the occasional browse-through, because their selection is the pits compared to Goodwill, but 2023 is the year that I rededicate myself to their cause. Anyway, I picked up the six Medium Team Mouse shirts that I needed via a Black Friday Doorbuster from one of the big-box craft stores. I feel like those shirts have a reputation for being cheap in quality as well as price, but 100% cotton shirts are nothing to sneeze about these days, when pretty much every shirt and its dog is infused with polyester!
• backing material. This will need to be thick enough to keep the bleach from bleeding through to the back of the T-shirt. I used a brown paper grocery bag.
• bleach. Get the cheapest, and don't get it on you.
• cotton swabs.
• glass dish.
• paper stencil.
• glue stick (optional). 

Step 1: Prepare the stencil.

Both of the stencils I wanted to make were word art, so I just did them in Google Docs. Because I am basic.

But at least I printed them as outlines to save ink!

Cut out the stencils and save the widows, since you'll need to place them back on the shirt before you paint.

My Team Mouse stencil took up two pages, so I taped them together with the spacing that I wanted.

Step 2: Paint!

Place your backing material inside the shirt, making absolutely sure it will cover where you'll be bleach painting. 

You can either just set your stencil on the shirt, if it's fairly short and simple--

--or you can tape it down with more masking tape.

I even took the glue stick to the back of those fiddly M and U sticky-outy bits to make sure they stayed put, and I also glued down the widows. I was able to reuse this same stencil for all six Team Mouse shirts, gluing the bits and the widows each time and pulling them up afterwards.

Then, put on a podcast and start painting within the lines!

I found it easiest to first draw the outline of each letter, then color in the center. It made them look wonky as I went, since the bleach activates right away--

--but I think it evens out pretty well by the end:

I'm disappointed in how much the edges bled, but none of the recipients of these shirts seemed to notice, and you also can't really tell when you're standing a normal distance from the human wearing it.

Below is the first shirt I did, though, and for that one I just painted away and it also looks fine:

Step 3: Rinse and Wash.

After I finished painting, I gave the bleach a few more minutes to even out the last couple of letters, then I rinsed each shirt very, very well under cool water and then tossed it into the wash. I washed each individually so nothing else would accidentally get bleach stained, but fortunately my washing machine has an eco-friendly quick wash, so I'm not the cause of the nation's water shortage.

I haven't tried it, but this TikTok recommends a hydrogen peroxide rinse to deactivate the bleach:

Might be worth a try!

Step 4: Show off your beautiful work.

Here's what happens when you ask your husband to photograph you in your beautiful shirt in front of the theater where Mother Mother is about to play:

Seriously, it's a cell phone camera. You have to really try if you want to get your thumb in the way of a cell phone camera.

And here's one particular member of Team Mouse, coincidentally the one who walked by as I was finishing up and asked if she could use the rest of the dish of bleach to customize her own shirt. Since "her own" shirt is inevitably the shirt that I messed up on (can't give a flawed shirt to someone else's child, gasp!), I happily let her also make her shirt the most elaborately cutest:

It's very likely that I'll do this project a few more times this year, because it's SUCH a quick, easy, and cheap way to customize a T-shirt. I would like to get smoother edges, though, so next time I'm going to play around with thickening the bleach first so it can't run away from me.

A Weekend Trip Was Planned in Community By Many Teenagers, and It Went Great!

The rule is that when you see your name in the wild, you take your picture together.

I have a folder where I keep TikToks that remind me of myself, and this is one of them:

To be fair, I can make a 17-page Google Doc for a weekend trip, but travel planning IS a lot! Budgeting, transportation, reservations, lodging, food, parking, wi-fi access, juggling the preferences of various travelers... yikes! 

Travel planning is a skill that my Girl Scout troop practices regularly, and it's been wonderful to watch how they've grown in this ability. Complicating the planning is the requirement that they also plan in community, taking into consideration each of their preferences, working through disappointment, developing their willingness to compromise. It's also really fun to see the kinds of things that they plan, because it's often stuff that wouldn't occur to me. Axe-throwing as an activity was an idea only very narrowly defeated when they planned a recent weekend trip, and only then because we can apparently throw axes more cheaply in our hometown--who knew?

So we didn't throw axes, but we DID do just about everything else that's fun to do on this recent holiday weekend trip.

FRIDAY

My Girl Scout troop has done our fair share of camping, but somehow we've never gone cabin camping... and it turns out that I LOVE it! Indoor toilets and showers! Hot water! Central heating! A refrigerator! A stove! Long tables to spread out across! There were something like 36 mattresses awaiting my six campers upon our arrival, so the kids immediately occupied themselves with creating an elaborate fort wonderland with elevated platforms to lounge on and private sleeping cubbies for each person. 

Seriously, it was epic. I NEVER sleep during troop camping trips, and yet this trip I slept all night, every night! Turns out all I needed was a mattress on the floor in a warehouse-looking group cabin.

The only downside to cabin camping is that I. Packed. EVERYTHING. I packed the crockpot. I packed the electric kettle. I packed cutting boards and knives and mixing bowls and measuring cups and parchment paper. I packed the beeswax crockpot and five pounds of beeswax and a jar of coconut oil and the teacups in case kids wanted to make more teacup candles (they did), and the rolled beeswax sheets and x-acto knives and cutting mat and heat gun in case they wanted to make taper candles (they didn't), and all the Model Magic and Sculpey clay in case they wanted to make clay pendants (they did), and watercolors (nope), and greeting card blanks and markers (yep), and the woodburner and wooden spoon blanks (also yep), and the hot glue gun and paracord and large-format drawing paper. I packed so much in the car that I could barely transport actual Girl Scouts--I MISS our giant minivan that could seemingly hold an infinite number of kids!

For Friday night dinner, I pre-made a double batch of my favorite pizza dough, then divided it into plastic baggies so each person could make their own personal pizza on site. The kids were supposed to each bring a favorite pizza topping to share but most of them forgot, so it was cheese and/or pepperoni pizzas for everyone!

In the evening, the kids worked on the Outdoor Art badge at their level (Theme: Christmas crafts!), while we listened to music and chatted. They prepped a breakfast casserole for the morning and put it in my crock pot, then hung out, gossiped, played games, and just generally had themselves a lovely evening together. 

SATURDAY

We were up and at 'em early on this morning, eating crock pot breakfast casserole and packing up for a day out and about. 

First up: a glassblowing workshop!

Each kid and both chaperones got to make a blown glass ornament from scratch:

I took OMG SO MANY photos of each kid making their ornament--because come on, how many times in your life are you going to go glassblowing? You need a full record of the occasion!--so then when it was my turn, my kid took my phone and made a full record of me, too!

I am very proud of my beautiful handblown glass ornament!

After glassblowing, we took the amazing opportunity of most of the troop being in the same place at the same time to get most of the shopping done for the four children we'd adopted for Christmas. The kids paired up and did the shopping for each of the older three children, while my co-chaperone and I had an absolute blast shopping for the baby. We consulted with the patrols pretty often to help them stay on track and make sure everything was about even for the recipients, but the kids did an awesome job with the shopping. Each child received a warm blanket, a complete outfit including socks, shoes, and undies, several toys, including some of the things they'd specifically requested, a book, and some snacks. The next week, another Girl Scout shopped for a car seat for the baby and I made each kid a personalized stocking. 

It was a whirlwind and not gonna lie, my nerves were a little frayed by the time we sat down in the ramen and crepes restaurant that the kids had chosen for lunch, but OMG was it a huge relief to have that HUGE task mostly taken care of! 

The Indianapolis Zoo has a yearly display of Christmas lights, so after our very late lunch, we spent the rest of the afternoon and evening at the zoo:

We left the zoo late, then went back to the cabin to have snacks/second dinner. The kids wrapped all of the presents they'd bought, discovered that we still needed to buy batteries for a toy and shoes for one child, did some more crafts, listened to more music, played more games, and had, I hope, as lovely a time as I did reading my book and hanging out peacefully.

SUNDAY

We got to have a leisurely morning on this day, and that meant waffles! Because yes, I did pack three waffle makers... The kids were also supposed to bring a favorite waffle topping to share, but again, most of them forgot. But fortunately, everyone likes blueberries and/or chocolate chips, and waffles are also delicious as-is, so it was fine.

The Girl Scout camp where we were staying has an old historic cemetery on site, with an accompanying fun patch program. You KNOW how I feel about old cemeteries, so indeed, I dragged all the kids on a hike to see this one, while the kids who were there the last time I dragged us to an old cemetery told everyone else horror stories of cemeteries under the lake and how long it takes bodies to decompose and the absolute lie that is "moving" a cemetery.

Gravestone rubbing is somewhat controversial, but this Girl Scout camp encourages it here, so my large-format drawing paper and my block crayons came in handy:

I think this was each kid's first time trying this activity, and they all seemed to enjoy it!

The other downside about cabin camping is that thanks to all the crap I brought, packing and loading the cars and cleaning the cabin took a LONG time. It wasn't hard, though, with so many hands to make the labor light. 

And once everything was squeaky clean and everyone had eaten their second and third lunches of sandwiches and chips and fruit (teenagers eat pretty much constantly, I don't know if you know), we were off to our reservation at a nearby cat cafe!

I REALLY want another cat, you guys. Can you each just please text me and tell me that I don't need another cat?

There had been a bit of controversy about our destination after the cat cafe. We knew we'd have about an hour-ish to kill before our dinner reservations, and I was a little reluctant to encourage the kids to plan another money-spending activity, but the kids couldn't seem to agree on what they wanted to do. Some kids thought it would be fun to wander around the art museum's outdoor campus, but other kids thought that would NOT be fun, ahem. Fortunately, that need for batteries and one more pair of shoes saved the day, because the bougiest Target I've ever seen was located just a couple of minutes from the dinner theater. So we went to Target, the kids finished their shopping, and then my co-chaperone and I let them wander around however they wanted for a while. Some kids finished up their personal Christmas shopping. Some kids hit up the in-store Starbucks. I, personally, browsed all the toys, because toys are amazing.

Our final event of the weekend was a genuine, honest-to-god dinner theater! This was another brand-new activity for some kids, and some kids even got to sit at their own table without chaperones, an activity some of them were well used to thanks to our troop trip to Mexico. Will and her personal bestie deigned to sit with me and my co-chaperone so we wouldn't be lonely, and for me it was a very precious chance to spend one last occasion with these two sweet kids together before Will leaves for college. 

Is there anything more exhausting than a weekend spent with teenagers? Probably not, but it was also an incredible amount of fun. And look what a wonderful job everyone did shopping for and wrapping all those gifts!

I was VERY excited to get all of that porch-dropped to their recipients so we could walk across the floor again!

As a whole, the weekend went great. The kids had a wonderful time together, a majority of kids loved each adventure, we had plenty of food, we didn't get snowed in, and there were absolutely no disasters. I barely had to get out my first aid kit! Next time, I seriously am going to print out that 17-page Shared Google planning doc, though, as even though most of the kids participated in planning the weekend, and some kids worked quite hard on the plans, nobody could seem to remember what came next on the itinerary. I was quickly so very over answering questions about what came next/what time some event was/when dinner was/what dinner was/where dinner was that I just kept the planning doc pulled up on my phone and anytime someone asked me a question whose answer was revealed within, I handed them the phone with the doc pulled up and let them research the answer themselves.

Next time I will print everything out and hand everyone their own folder with all pertinent information inside!

Obsessed with Adela Breton

Visiting Chichen Itza 130 years after Adela Breton's first trip to Mexico! To see it as she would have seen it, imagine this building half buried, half caved in, and covered in trees and vines.

My kid has a little community of fellow YouTube animators, and when they comment on each other's videos, the most popular comment (other than "uwu," of course), is to tell someone how "underrated" their channel is. It means that even though you as a YouTuber are but small and wee, the value of your work is vast, and if the general public had but access to it they'd tell you the same.

Adela Breton, then, is underrated. 

I first learned about Breton back when I was putting together a MesoAmerica unit study for my homeschooled high schoolers, and another Hispanic Heritage study for my Girl Scout troop, in preparation for our troop trip to Mexico. All of those kids in question wearily joke about my penchant for pointing out "strong female role models" to them wherever we go, as in "Oh, look! One of the dolphin trainers is a strong female role model!" and they don't even know that when I book a field trip or class for them I literally tell the organizer that we require a female firefighter or mechanic or glassblower, etc., to lead our tour. ANYWAY, obviously, then, when I was researching Mexico, I zeroed in on any positive female representation that I could find. That's how we ended up studying Frida Kahlo, and that's how I became obsessed with Adela Breton!

Adela Breton was my favorite type of Victorian female: the wealthy spinster intellectual. She was a stay-at-home daughter who cared for her parents until they died of old age, and then found herself released onto the world around the age of fifty, unmarried, child-free, and independently wealthy. 

As anyone would do if they found themselves in similar circumstances, Breton began traveling, taking years-long trips and returning to her home in England only sporadically to check in on her brother and his family and drop off her souvenirs.

It was on one of these trips that Breton first visited Mexico, and hired guides to take her to some of the many ancient sites that were then also underrated, undeveloped, and mostly unstudied. It wasn't a big deal back then to steal antiquities and make souvenirs of them, so she did a lot of that, sigh, but she also turned her prodigious art skills towards drawing and painting in watercolors the scenes she encountered, and in particular, the many murals still visible inside the buildings she visited. 

These buildings were, again, mostly unimproved, mostly untended, mostly unstudied, open to the weather and time and destruction of tourists. Breton worked off and on for the rest of her life on copying these paintings as exactly as it's possible to copy something with the human hand and eye, living for months in the wilderness with her guide and friend, Pablo. 

What Breton essentially did, in a time before cameras could do such work, was make snapshots of these sites and their features that show exactly what they looked like at that time. Not only can you see places like Chichen Itza overgrown and half-buried, but you can see perfect recreations of things that are long gone, most importantly these murals, most of which have since been destroyed, damaged, or just time-worn to the point that they're mere shadows of what they once were. 

So here's why Breton is mainly forgotten instead of lauded as a hero for saving these works for posterity: 1) she was female, so while her fellow archaeologists liked her work, they didn't appreciate it, didn't credit it, and didn't study it beyond her lifetime. 2) she was unaffiliated with a university or research organization, so approached all these sites and all professional encounters as an independent outsider. And 3) she lacked a staff or team that could have shared out the work that didn't require her professional touch, as well as keep her organized and purpose-driven. On her own, Breton did what interested her, but then got distracted with the requests of other researchers and archaeologists and wasted a ton of her precious time just copying out crap for them instead of further developing her own research. 

None of that really explains or forgives why she isn't posthumously appreciated more for her achievements. Breton left most of her artifacts and all of her art to Bristol Museum, which does not even have it on permanent display. The only record of most of a genre of historical Mexican art, and they don't even display it. Researchers barely use it or reference it. I'm planning a trip to England at some point in 2023, hopefully, and even if I go to this museum where all of her art lives, I can't even see it!

One of the very few books on the subject is Adela Breton: A Victorian Artist Amid Mexico's Ruins, which I read over winter break. It's good, but even the author admits that she couldn't access much of the Breton materials from the Bristol Museum, so imagine all the wonderful research and writing that there is to do!