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

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