Last week I left you with half the vines sewn to my Bramble Blooms 2 borders. I did, in fact, go up to my sewing room and make the remainder and pin them down.
Then I worked to get them sewn down.
Until Lily plopped in the middle of what I was doing and decided to take a bath. I tried to work around her. I tried to pet her.
NO PETS!
So I took a break and read for a bit.
(She is currently goblining her way around the house - whatever I'm doing, she must be in the center of it. I sure hope that wears off by the time I'm ready to do any sewing!)
Eventually I got all the vines and little flower stems sewn down. It took less time than I anticipated, but I got on a roll and just kept sewing.
As you can see, Lily is in the middle of things. I put this on the floor for the photo just a few minutes ago, but before I even had my phone ready for a photo, she was taking a litlle bath. FInney came along to inspect, too, but he's usually pretty chill. Salem is over to the left, trying to avoid the goblin.
(And as I'm typing now, she's testing gravity near the desk...)
My plan for later today is to make some final decisions on the flowers that are the next step and then get them cut. Fingers crossed the fabrics in the BB stash are enough. And then I'll work on it while ignoring the big football game happening this evening. (But there will be pizza, so I'll attend - in my living room.)
Earlier this week, I had some bananas that were too far gone to eat, but they make the best bread. In true goblin fashion, I had help...
She was actually afraid of them. They've been sitting on my counter for a week or more, just not on the stove, so I have no idea why she was afraid of them. (And yes, she gets on counters. I wiped them all down after I got her to leave me and the bananas alone - before I started actually making the bread. I always wipe counters down before cooking, no matter how clean they seem, because I KNOW they're up there exploring when I'm not around. And aside from living in my kitchen, making them get/stay down, I'm not going to get them to stay down. They're cats and this one is a goblin variety cat. She's extra stubborn. I miss the first year when she thought she couldn't get up there.)
Anyways, banana bread was made.
And I finished just one book. I kept expecting it to become something. It was awful.
Characters that were there for hundreds of pages (it's 600+ pages) would disappear never to be heard from again. And not like they died or moved away or whatever. They just were never heard about again. A whole village of people that the first 200+ pages developed was destroyed and they moved away to another village, the end.
So, because this book was a disaster and I can't even begin to figure out what the heck was going on half the time (I just kept reading, hoping it would all come together at the end - spoiler alert, it didn't), I'm going to copy the blurb from the back of the book.
"Set in an unnamed Persian Gulf kingdom in the 1930's, this remarkable novel tells the story of the disruption and diaspora of a poor oasis community following the discovery of oil there. The meeting of Arabs and the Americans who, in essence, colonized the remote region is a cultural confrontation in which religion, history, superstition, and mutual incomprehension all play a part."
So oil was not mentioned until maybe page 500. Big construction machines were mentioned. Water being pumped into the ground was mentioned. Trees being cut down and the village being flattened was mentioned. Getting rich was repeatedly mentioned to the village people by the strangers (who became Americans hundreds of pages later), but never clearly happened (if it even did).
Very little was made of religion, other than the native Arabs being aghast at the behaviors of the Americans, once we moved to the third village that became what sounds more like a resort town than anything else.
No real history either. Which is what I would have liked and probably what made me choose this book. I like to learn about other cultures and historical fiction is often great for that.
I had high hopes for this book. I did get that the foreigners took advantage of the poor, uneducated-by-western-standards natives and that was aggravating. But in general? It was people doing people things - eating, complaining, working, living.
Why did I keep reading, you ask? Because I had hopes things would all come together in the end. The lost characters would turn up again, having been lost for a reason. Nope.
They can't all be winners. This one was clearly a good one to some, as it has been translated from Arabic and banned in some countries. Just not a winner to me.
Enough complaining!
I started another book yesterday (my streak of days reading at least one page is nearly 800!) and read about half of it already. It's much better.
Time to go find some lunch (the hubby is napping through lunch - probably so he can stay up late to watch football tonight) and then make some flowers.
Happy quilting!
Katie
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