a new year, but nothing much new

I'm not one to buy into all the hype of the changing of the calendar...I see it and sometimes catch myself starting to lean into it, but then realize how silly it is.  I rarely make a year-long goal stick and I'd rather just keep plugging along with whatever I like to do, as time permits.

(Yes, yes, sometimes I do jump in.  Often I regret it.)

But I do like to look back at the year and see all I've accomplished also.  Last week I shared with you a photo-version of my best book of the year.  Because printing those is costly (and it seems my printer is ALWAYS out of colored ink), I did a physical bracket in my book journal - something I started just before the end of 2024 and did manage to keep up with all year.

As I said, the end result was the same as the shorter one, but a few things did get shifted here - I started with the best two each month and went from there.  If you look close, you can see how I really messed things up - I should have drafted in pencil first!

In general, I read quite a few really good books last year, but I can say that for any year.  When you read 76 books in a year, it's hard for ALL of them to be bad!

I mentioned that perhaps I'd do a bracket for the worst, but then started reading this disaster:

And it won hands-down.

If you've heard of the movie "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy", the face on the cover might be familiar.  It's the fictional story of a news anchor in about the 1980's and it's ridiculous, as you'd expect from lead actor Will Ferrell.  The movie is funny, often in an uncomfortable way, but my hubby and I laughed through it, so when this book came out, I got it for him.

He claims to have read it.  He who rarely reads anything not on his phone from a social media app.  I doubt he finished it.  I nearly didn't.

The book is exactly like the pompous, ignorant man of the movie.  Random thoughts, sexist comments and outrageous boasting make for a difficult read.  It was a waste of paper.

I had hoped it would be more coherent.  I had hoped it would be funny.

I know it was meant to be comedy, but I'll take Calvin and Hobbes any day over this absolute piece of garbage.

It is by far the worst thing I have read in my life.  And I've read a lot of chemistry textbooks.

The best I can say for it is that I finished it.  It was my last book of 2025.  I started a new one on the first and am nearly through it.  I'm trying to be better about reading and not scrolling on my phone, but that's not a resolution for the new year, it's just something I periodically do because I realize I'm spending too much time on my phone.

With my book journal (which I started because I have two bookcases of books and cannot for the life of me remember what half of them are about, though I'm sure I actually read them - and the blurbs are useless - thinking this might help me later determine what a book was about with more accuracy than a blurb written by someone who often seems to have not actually read the book) I decided to keep track of where the authors are from and where the story takes place.  So I printed some maps.

This was kind of fun, but I got tired of it.  Sometimes figuring out where the author is from was difficult because they lived a lot of places or it wasn't readily available.  Sometimes deciding where the story was set was hard because it moved around a lot or was in a country that no longer exists.

So this is not something I'll continue, though it was fun to get to color in new places every so often!  (As I was doing it, I debated new ways of keeping track of multiple books that take place in the same state/country, but it just wasn't fun enough overall to put the effort into doing it again.)

So I purchased a new composition book (that has 20 fewer pages than the one I got last year - thanks shrinkflation!) and wrote in all the books I currently have on my cart.  But first...I pulled the books from my shelves - the ones that sounded interesting, that I think I may have read, and so didn't go in the purge of last year - and added them onto my cart, complete with numbers to be selected.  I haven't decided what I'll do if I figure out I'm sure I've read a book from that category, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

I debated about a new composition book versus just continuing this one until it's gone, but decided a fresh book with a new listing of my books at the front (I added to the list in the first one, with tabs to help me find them faster when the spilled onto pages midway through - and will again) would be a nice way to start the year.

The book journal itself sometimes was a little tough to get myself to do, but I made it through the year and do like the idea of having a little summary of my own going forward.

As for quilting, of course I'm going to keep doing that!  And this weekend (4 days off in a row - we've hit slow season at work, which means more days off for me...less pay, too, but I knew it was coming) I managed to find time to sew!

I'm making the second half of the flying geese for the quilt for my nephew.  I'd sewn the first sets of squares onto the larger squares, but wanted to cut just one and make sure the geese were going to come out right.  It looked a little sketchy and I'd rather rip seams for 72 blocks than go buy more fabric.  And that's where I stalled out.  Somehow getting out the iron and scissors and sitting down to actually check it was too much for my holiday-nearly-full-time-working-candy-making-present-shopping brain to handle.

I had planned sewing for Friday, but by the time I got chores done and delivered a last-minute pallet of bedding pellets to the cat rescue (they were running out and could we go today please?!?), my day had totally gotten away from me.  But Saturday?

Sew like the wind.

Salem helped.  Here she is snoozervising, complete with her adorable little snores.  (She's not overweight, but does snore...so I keep that in mind and maybe later in life we'll have some extra health issues to deal with.  Maybe she just sleeps in weird positions.  It doesn't matter.  She's my princess forever and we'll take care of her no matter what.)

Anyways, after quite a few hours of sewing and then a few more ironing (whose idea was it to make this quilt with so many long stretches of doing the same thing over and over again?!), I had all the geese made - just in time to go make dinner last night!

Today these geese will unite as one and become quarters of blocks.  Of course, I need to stop typing and go take a shower and then it will probably be about lunchtime, so later today, but I still have one more day off after today!!!

(I also have to convince myself that this needs to be done and not go read more of my book!)

And with that, I should get going.  I want to revamp my blog list (you can see it on the desktop site, but it's not on the mobile version thanks to blogger), but that may not look any different to any of you, just me!  And THEN I can go sew.

Happy quilting (FINALLY!),

Katie

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.