still no sewing, but...

I looked at my sewing stuff this week.  I was in my sewing room some this week.  Does that count?

Probably not.

But this week was another busy one.  Christmas with family as well as shifts at work and a few days of just relaxing with a book and kitties took my time.  (But the down time with kitties was needed to balance out everything else!)

First I'll share some of the gifts from Christmas.

Remember how last year I gave my sister-in-law the "Ho Ho Ho" quilt?  Well, this year she paid me back with some chicken socks.  A set of five of them.  Guess I've got a year to figure out what she'll get next?

A quilty friend got me this t-shirt (sorry, I cropped out the part that makes it look like a shirt) and was somehow able to get my kitty Toby into Starry Night.  How cool is that?  I want to wear it, but it's too cold for just a t-shirt, so it might wait till spring.

She also got me these super cool bookmarks (they're like clips, but have a rubbery extension to flip into your pages) that Gabby seems enamored with.  But really, she LOVES paper and is trying to figure out how to get the paper away from this "junk" so she can chew it up like the gerbil she thinks she is.

Speaking of clothing, my brother and his wife got me this cool space cats sweatshirt.  Clearly, this has already been worn (and I'm no good at selfies, so forgive the slight blurriness and crappy overall quality of the photo).  I'm not sure if these kitties are something I should know about, or just a cool design.

And a bunch of other goodies - some I asked for (the books, the rotating mat), some I did not (the mug, the sewing machine mat) - but all good stuff.  There were a few other things, but, well, my photo can only cram so much in there!

While I was arranging this photo, Lily alerted me to the fact that the mug did, indeed, come with a straw.  Well...hopefully she didn't chew all the way through it.  But you can buy new of those, I guess.  (Little brat!)

Overall, it was a good holiday.  I got to see most of the family (my one brother's family has always struggled with us and often opts to just stay home...it's sad, but I get it, too) and eat some good food and have a few days off and give a number of gifts I thought were cool!

Now we're rolling towards that arbitrary marker of a new year and the snow is flying and the wind is whipping and I really wish I didn't have to go to work later today!  But hopefully with all the festivities and obligations done as well as hours at work being reduced, I can finally get back to sewing?

I DID finish two books in the last week!  One I had already started at my last post...

And holy cow was it good!  I've read a few of her other books (I have "A Handmaid's Tale" in my TBR pile, but its number hasn't come up yet) and liked them okay, but this one?  I'm probably going to order the other two in this trilogy today.

This is the second book in the trilogy, but I don't feel like I lost much in not reading the first one.  The characters felt developed enough and the story wasn't constantly referring to something I didn't know about.

Set in a near future or alternate present, it flips between before and after the "waterless flood" - a pandemic that took most of humanity.  Two characters are the storytellers - they knew each other before, but were separated before the event and (spoiler alert) they find their way back to each other in the after.

We get their stories in the before, their stories in the present (how they're surviving alone), and then a little of them after they reunite.  (It is not a romantic pairing in any way.)

They were a part of a cult-like, somewhat religious group in the before - a group that shunned animal consumption and lived in what we would call "off the grid" manner.  They were oddballs in the normal society (they were in a rough part of town as well, but maybe society in this scenario is rougher to begin with), but somehow many of them survived the pandemic, though by the time it happened, their group had disbanded and scattered.

I want to read the other two books to find out the actual nature of the pandemic (if it is described, but the little of it mentioned reminds me of "The Stand") and how the group fares in the after, as they're all finding each other.  I'm not sure how the other two books deal with this - if book one is all before this and book three is all after?

I need to stop adding and editing this because there is SO much going on and it all fits and doesn't feel rushed or truncated in the book and I'm just not going to do enough justice with a summary.  Just read it.

And then I moved on...

This one was pretty good also, but it reminded me a lot of a book I read on vacation, "Same Kind of Different as Me."  And the review blurbs in the front compare it to "The Blind Side."

It's a true story of a middle-aged white woman who, when walking through the streets of New York one day, took notice of a young boy panhandling and befriended him.  Over the years she did simple things for him (buying him lunches every Monday, a new coat in winter, etc.), but also showed him a better way of life and he was the kind of person who took it all in and found a way out of the cycle of drug-use that his family was a part of.

It's a very feel-good book, but I did cringe some because in todays world, I'm not sure if this would work as well.  (This started in the 80's.)  People are a lot less willing to believe in the kindness of a stranger being just that and relationships with kids are also scrutinized more.

But I enjoyed it and it was a quick read.

I've moved on to another and it might be one of the worst, but I'll talk about it when I'm done.  (I kinda suspected it would be a train wreck, but it's starting out worse than I imagined!  I promise, it will all make sense!)

And then, since it's the end of the year, everyone is doing these wrap-up things where you look at how many hours you listened to your favorite artist on music apps and how many books you read on book tracking apps and such.  Last year I made my own book bracket in my reading journal, but this year I found a pretty graphic that I though I could paste into.  Easier said than done (both technology-wise and selection-wise), and some months it was really hard to pick just one book, but here you go.  I'll do an extended one on paper officially at the end of the year (and perhaps a worst of the worst also?), but for now...

(Sorry if it's a little blurry.  Technology doesn't want to make this easy today.)

I predicted the "The Year of the Flood" might be the best of the year, but I can honestly say that every single one of those in the monthly boxes was a good read.  Some were better than others, but if you have any interest in any of them, I wouldn't hesitate to tell you to read them.

And then I decided to make my own honorable mention list for the few that I really didn't want to leave off.

These I would also tell you to read.  They were hard to remove from the list - they were second best to the books that made it into the bracket, but given another day, might have been first just as easily.

The worst-of-the-worst is gonna have to wait because I might be reading a prize-winner right now!

Time for lunch and maybe a nap.  Work tonight is likely going to be super slow, as we're in the middle of a pretty spectacular blizzard - winds are whipping, snow is blowing, roads are awful - but it's winter, so it's not like it's a surprise...

Happy quilting and reading and napping!

Katie