my apologies

Another busy-but-not-in-the-sewing-room week.

I did finish the terrible book I was reading last week.

Lots of battles and killing.  Not what I expected from the blurb.  I'll just share that because I don't want to think about this any more than I need to.

(Sorry it's a bit blurry, but I think you can still read it.)

Okay, okay, a little.  It started in the middle and ended in the middle and nothing much really happened.  I know it's part of a series, but it felt more like reading the middle of a book.  A lot of people died.  I wish I knew more about some of them.

I started another a few days ago and it's MUCH better.  Might be one of the best I've read this year, but I'll do my nerdy little bracket to see who wins once the year is over.

Holidays are in full force.  Work shifts are plentiful.  And I'm tired.

Maybe I'll take advantage of my day off and take a nap?

Happy quilting and reading and napping!
Katie

PS I promise to share all about the Christmas next week!

a nothing week

I don't have much to say for myself except that I must have been busy this past week because I haven't been in my sewing room at all.

And I haven't even finished the book I started last week!

(The usual suspects are taking up my time, plus making goodies for the hubby's people.)

So here are some old photos of the cats playing in the Christmas tree...

In this last photo, you can see the hole in the middle of the cat tree - that's where the base of the tree goes in.  But shenanigans happen and the tree topples (it's not a very sturdy base) and I think the cats have more fun this way anyways.

It's up like this again - currently standing, but I'm sure they'll fix that again in the coming days.  (And if it comes down, maybe I'll manage to get a few new photos?)

Happy...quilting?

Katie

PS  Also old photos - the cats still hate the hat.

sewing and sewing and sewing (and reading)

Three days in a row off and I took advantage!

First, I pressed all the "hard" geese.  Maybe it's difficult to see, but that stack is 5 inches tall!  Lots and lots of geese!

Then I moved on to cutting pieces for the "easy" geese.

I stalled out here a bit because the hubby was around (he worked third shift last week) and he wanted to spend one of my days off Christmas shopping.  It needed to be done, but it got a lot of eyerolls, too!

I picked up again the next day and got all the first seams on the 4-at-a-time geese in before it was time to do other things.

You can see it was getting late - the fabrics read much darker without daylight helping my photos!

In addition to this quilty sewing, I patched a hole on my favorite sheets:

There is a small L-shaped tear in this bottom, fitted sheet, and if I make the bed correctly, it is down by the foot of the bed on the side the cats use.  If I'm not careful, it ends up about where my shoulder is on the side of the bed the cats let me use.  Hopefully this will help extend the life of the sheets - they're so expensive!

And I made the pillowcases!

I actually abandoned the quilt for my nephew to get these done - they need to be done for Christmas and while I'd like the quilt to also be done, I'm not holding my breath (maybe if I wasn't working, but even then it's getting close!) and these are definitely do-able in time.  Obviously.

I also ran out and got more fabric, realizing that the great nephews would probably also like to join in the tradition, so the two on the bottom are the same fabric, just different cuffs.  I hope this cuts down on any sibling rivalries!

Lily would like you to see her Spiderman abilities to get into bags hanging from hooks on doors...

It's quite goofy looking if you click on it to make it bigger, but since I was sitting across the room when she did it, I had to zoom.  She also Spidermanned her way back out.  She's a goof.

I finished two books this week, but first a nerdy graph.  The Storygraph, the app I prefer when tracking my reading, has nerdy graphs I've shared before.  Recently, the graph that plots publication year versus reading year was updated.  Many people were excited, so I thought I'd go see what mine looks like...

Well...if your oldest book was published in 1592, apparently things remain squished.  (It's cool because you can hover over/click on a dot and see what book it is.  The next oldest is Huck Finn.)

Oh well.  It's still a cool graph to have.

(Also, I didn't start tracking books till 2013 because before that I was either better able to remember what I'd already read, or wasn't reading much.  Or both.  This app didn't come out that long ago, but I imported old data - yay!)

Okay, onto the actual books:

This one was interesting.

Originally published in Japan (in Japanese), this is a translation, but I don't believe that translations take much away from the books, so that's not a complaint.

It was just different.  I've never read Japanese literature before, so maybe that's part of it.  But it was good, also.

The Great Passage is the name of a dictionary that the characters are working on.  It is going to be the most epic dictionary ever.  Every publishing house creates a dictionary - it's their one staple that is used as a benchmark, I guess - and this group really wants to knock it out of the park.

A younger-ish man is the main character and is recruited at the beginning by two older guys who start the project.  He works on it for about 15 years before they are able to publish it, but it gets put aside for other projects many times over all these years, but also making sure every relevant, important, used word is included is hard.  You need to make sure old words are decommissioned, but not at the expense of other words referring to them in their definitions.  You need to make sure new words are added as they pop up.  And definitions cannot be circular.  And on and on...

It really made me appreciate my dictionary!

But the main character has a romance (which is oddly clinical-feeling - this may be Japanese literature?) and a few other characters come and go as more focal parts of the story and they also have some side stories that feel more like random details to flesh out a page rather than a character.

Or maybe the strangeness was just because of the real focus of the book being the dictionary itself?

It makes me want to seek out more Japanese literature and see how things are done.

And on to book two:

Set in a not-so-great-but-not-awful part of Detroit in the near past, a number of teenage boys (and girls, I guess, but the focus is on three guys who are friends, one in particular tells the story) who lose their fathers when they wander off in a fairly short period of time.

One says he's going to the moon, and the phrase sticks.

From the perspective of the narrator, the fathers don't seem to have an awful life that they're leaving behind or anything, just the normal troubles of being adults with kids and jobs, but too many of them leave at once (and don't keep in touch or come back) for it to be entirely a coincidence.

So the young men (high school) step into the roles of the fathers, going as far as drinking at the local bar evenings after school.  They get jobs, defend their mothers and younger siblings, and do minor repairs around the house.  But they never seem to see that's what they're doing.  The narrator kinda hints at it, but no one seems to outwardly comment on it.

And the young men grow up.  Some go to college, some get dead-end jobs, some get married, but they all step into actual adult-hood.   But in the backs of their minds, they worry that whatever pulled their fathers away will pull them away as well.

It was a quick read and pretty good.  I wish we'd learned where the fathers went, but (spoiler alert!) they never did come home.  (I thought maybe they would come back based on the title - I figured once the kids had moved on they had no use for the disappeared men, but nope.)

I've moved on to another book, but this one seems like it might be slow going.  Maybe it will pick up (I'm only about 25 pages in), but only time will tell!

Happy quilting and reading!
Katie

feeling better, sewing little

I'm back to normal again (health-wise), but the hubby is still coughing a lot from the ick.  Based on his symptoms, he got something different than I did, but since I didn't get that also, maybe our bodies just reacted differently to the same germs?

Oh well.  Moving on.

I did very little sewing this past week.  I worked a lot of shifts, did a lot of family stuff (this is birthday season in the hubby's family - I think 6 birthdays this month and at least two next month!), and tried to get some sleep in there between things!

The quilt for my nephew made a little progress...

I got the second "sky" pieces sewn on and the chain of pieces cut apart, but have yet to get to pressing them.  One of these days...I still have a few more days in a row to work and chores take up too much of the rest of my days!

But I'm making progress and hoping the second set of geese - the ones that I can do the 4-at-a-time method - will go faster.  (Probably, though, I'm delusional.)

We celebrated Thanksgiving twice on Thursday.  First with my family (lunch) and then again with the hubby's family (dinner).  Both have things that are unique, both have things they do better, and we've learned to pace ourselves and not be so stuffed we can't move the next day.  And since I didn't have to be to work till later on Friday (a first - usually I'm the 5am shift for Black Friday), we didn't feel like we had to eat and run this year.

I did find time to read.  Of course.  That takes less prep than quilting and the kitties love to join me and they're much less disruptive to reading then sewing!

I mentioned last week that this went into the bag just on the author's name.  I know his books are geared at a younger audience, but his writing is wonderful and I enjoy it.

This book did not disappoint.

Though the underlying story is sad, I enjoyed the characters and their interactions.  It's set at a high school boarding school, but I felt that a lot of the shenanigans were similar to college dorm life, so not unfamiliar to me.

At times, the story did seem to drag a little, but since I was in the dark about the event that was defining the before and after (how the book is divided), I think I was just impatient to find out what it was and the rest of the story got in the way.  So that's a me problem.

I don't want to say too much more because I feel like I'll start giving away too many hints and then the story will be spoiled.  But it's good.  And I'd recommend it.

(Oh, look, it has a big stupid permanent award sticker on it and I liked it.  I guess sometimes the people giving the awards DO like the same books as me!)

I've started the next, of course.  It's kinda different, but I'll share about that next week.  Assuming I finish it before then.  (I still have three more days of work before I get any time off and I'm counting the hours!)

Not a very productive week, but a lot of excitement.  Hoping this week is a little less crazy, but overall it's crazy season - holidays, weather, family, etc. - so we'll see!

Happy quilting!

Katie

PS The hubby also got a new car.  The old one was 10 years old and starting to cost more to repair than was reasonable, so instead of sinking our money into a failing car, we traded it in and he got a new one.  It's nice.  Not what I would have picked, but I'm not the one driving it!