Working Wednesday, August 7, 2019

~ Jenny

I knew I was feeling better when I started to crochet again; I’m almost done with the ginormous Secret Paths I started in July, done in Aran wool because who doesn’t want to work with heavy wool in a heat wave?  Then Krissie told me about the Gypsy Wife Quilt and I want to make that, so now I just have to decide if I want to start quilting again or do it in crochet.  And then she sent me pictures of the Bookcase Quilt, which has titles embroidered on strips of fabric to look like book spines.  She’s going to make one with all her titles–that’s gonna be a task, over 100 books–but mine would go faster because I’ve only written twenty.  And I’d definitely do that as a quilt.  Plus I have to turn her walking thing into a [deleted] caravan.  So I’m good on crafts, even before I get to hanging all the storage stuff in my kitchen.

What are you up to?

96 thoughts on “Working Wednesday, August 7, 2019”

  1. I’m making myself a new coat. I have a retro style pattern that I’ve used a few times because I love the fit, some gorgeous drill fabric in blue with gold peacocks, and a need to make myself something pretty.

    I’m also knee-deep in a fanfiction that’s actually cooperating with me at the moment.

    And there is just enough cardamom teacake left for morning tea tomorrow, so things aren’t too bad.

  2. I love the Bookcase Quilt! Maybe it’s time for me to start sewing. I am stalled on my newest project: a cute little textured cardigan (https://knitigatingcircumstances.com/2019/08/04/stalled-2/). I think there are too many armhole decreases, which will make the shoulders too narrow. I will have to rip all three pieces (back and two fronts) down to the armholes and re-knit. Ripping out mohair is really no fun.

  3. I’ve been distracted this week. We took Stanley the stray in for a dental procedure. Turns out he had several bad teeth that needed to be extracted. So, now, we’re a divided household. Stanley gets only wet food, with no possibility of kibble. The others are jealous and hungry because there’s no dry food for grazing. And 4 am is when this all comes to a head – literally my head, as several cats try to tell me they are the hungriest beings in the house. I’m hopeful that the recheck visit tomorrow will lift the cone of shame from Stanley, and allow him to nibble on kibble again.

    I came home from work last Friday lunch to make sure everyone had been fed. I got up from the couch to get myself a snack, and managed to trip and fall, right on my arthitic knee. I’ve got wonderful technicolor bruises, including one the perfect image of my kneecap. Needless to say, I’ve been working on healing.

    Yarn projects are hard with an alert cat in your lap. I’ve been plugging away at both the trio blanket and the knit-along sweater (I’m at least a week behind on that one). I hope to get more work done on them this weekend. I did post a series of status pictures – except of the bruises – so you’ll see Stanley, the sweater fronts and the trio blanket.
    https://www.instagram.com/p/B03MsD3hATB/
    The Trio looks much smaller in the photo than I thought it was when I was working on it. Meanwhile, I know I’ve got a lot to do to get the sweater fronts done.

    I’d definitely vote for the bookcase quilt. It looks pretty cool. But I also like the Gypsy Wife.

    1. I have a cat with no teeth–they were all rotten and had to come out. It took her about 2 weeks to go for the dry food the other cats were eating. Now she eats only dry kibble and has no problem with it. My vet said it’s common, because they have such a hard palate.
      This happened about 12 years ago.

  5. Not a stitch crocheted, sadly. I’ve been adulting. 401K transfer DONE. HSA beneficiary setup. Questions about HSA submitted. We bought a new bed, after much price comparison! Erhm….. cleaning… and cooking poorly. We discovered why you can’t just throw bbq sauce in the slow cooker. I don’t know what happened, but something icky did. And that’s been my week. Nothing fun, but I’m making headway on The List.

    Oh! Found a dry food packing event to help needy children in the valley – about the whole family is gonna go!

    1. I did something with orange sauce in the slow cooker that ended with me chipping rock hard sauce out. Still not sure what happened.

          1. So far this:

            “If you just throw ribs and bbq sauce in a slow cooker for 8 hours, you’ll get some fall-off-the-bone ribs, but they’ll be kind of funky and unappetizing. The bbq sauce won’t have caramelized at all, and the liquids in the meat will have produced a really runny bbq sauce liquid.”

            Ours wasn’t runny at all, but also not honey sweety. ….

          2. What I’m finding is that it’s easier to turn on the oven or crank up a burner than is it to mess with the slow cooker. If I was gone all day, I could see it, maybe, but everything starts to taste the same (feel the same?) in a slow cooker. Plus stove-top sears and stir frys are instant gratification.

          3. Yeah, we usually start cooking after we get home, but we had pork and a slow cooker and bbq sauce… it seemed like a good idea at the time. Dangit.

    2. My first and only thought is sugar in both BBQ sauce and orange sauce when they cooked down.

        1. I have done bad things with bbq sauce in slow cooker, because the sugar can carmelize (sp?). It happened to me when my slow cooker’s thermostat was off, and it was pretty foul. In places there was solid gunk stuck to the sides and it seemed like most of the sweetness was gone. Now the slow cooker is reserved for posole and green chili and baked potatoes for many.

          If I can’t make it on the stovetop (I can’t get stuff in and out of the oven), I use a sous vide (which I love wildly – the 90 minute softboiled egg is the best softboiled egg) or the instant pot (I live at altitude and I am impatient, it makes great stock).

          1. I forgot but also my understanding (or misunderstanding) is that beet sugar can react and caramelize very differently than cane sugar (which shouldn’t happen because sucrose = sucrose, but probably allowable minute impurities from manufacture) and so you should know which you are using and monitor accordingly.

            And never never make hummingbird syrup from beet sugar or corn sweeteners.

        2. See, and the last time we did it, we followed an online recipe and it had us adding things like vinegar. It came out more palatable, but not very inspiring, like GOOD bbq. So we thought maybe all the vinegar and stuff messed with it. I think it needs it, I just don’t know why…

          1. So I grew up on NC bbq, where the sauce is often just plain pepper vinegar, or vinegar based, and so I cannot stand commercial sauce – too much sugar. Most of the bbq sauces I use now are more balanced but I have found that without an acidic note (tamarind, OJ, tomato, limes, jolt/rc, vinegar), it’s a lot like pouring spices and karo syrup over meat which is kind of gross.

            Most of the meat that I have had as/regularly consume as bbq is pretty fatty (ribs, brisket, shoulder), and even though smoking or grilling or even sous vide or instapotting melts the fat and breaks down the connective tissue, if the sauce doesn’t have a little bite, it tends to be bland and sort of spoil the mouthfeel of the meat.

            I don’t have a smoker, so when I make ribs or shoulder, it’s either a long slow haul in the oven or sous vide or wicked quick in the instapot and then finished in the oven so it gets all barky and lush.

            I would suggest checking out serious eats or even Steven Raichlen for future bbq projects. I am inherently a geek, so I find the whole serious eats approach and esp Kenji Lopez-Alt’s explanations extremely helpful. Smitten Kitchen has some good oven ribs and sauce stuff and Melissa Clark has an excellent recipe for tamarind baby backs.

    3. I used to be assistant volunteer coordinator at the local food bank and I can tell you that a 2 hour repack session can make you feel enormously powerful. When they tell you at the end of the session how many pounds of food you packed (thousands!) it can give you a tremendous rush. I have never volunteered any where that gave me such an immediate sense of accomplishment as working a repack line. I hope your whole family has a wonderful time.

  6. Babysat dog with kennel cough, cleaned the storage room, rearranged the sewing room/guest room, cleaned 2 closets, rearranged the living room upstairs, finished reconstructing the deconstructed flower bed and planted it, hauled stuff to the dump and the recycling place, and gave the house a general cleaning. My week was busy! I’m so glad I got the storage room cleaned and organized, that was a big annoyance for me.

    Today it’s back to the day job.

  7. I just took all the recycling out. Tomorrow is trash day so that has to go out tonight except for the kitchen garbage (bears) which goes out at 6AM tomorrow because while the recycling people come in late afternoon, the trash guys get here at 7. I’m also catching up on cooking: something called Sticky Chicken Thighs which I screwed up and don’t think I’ll make again, and Lemon Chicken Scampi which is always good. Today is Chicken Au Jus and something else–my grocery only sells Chicken Thighs in the Ginormour Pack–and a lot of things going into the freezer. But mostly there’s cutting the last three acts of Nita, although Act Four is pretty much done, so it’s just cutting about 100 pages out of the middle. Thank god I have plenty of Diet Coke.

    1. If you’re into chicken recipes, one of my favourites is something we call orange chicken. It makes enough for about 5 but is good leftover, too.

      1 cup Catalina salad dressing
      1 cup apricot jam/jelly
      1 package dry onion soup mix.

      Mix well, pour over 10 to 12 chicken pieces (bone in). Cook covered for 1 hour at 350, uncovered for additional half hour at 300. I usually stir it when I take the cover off to make sure everything is soaked in the juice.

      Now I’m hungry….

      1. I’m supposed to watch salt for the heart thing so Catalina dressing and onion soup mix are out. But you can do a pretty good orange chicken by squeezing an orange into chicken broth and adding apricot preserves (no salt) along with some ginger. Your sounds a lot more savory, though.

  8. Cleaned out the closet, gave away shoes, cleaned drawers of mint sweaters and a couple of dresses, one a vintage polka dot dress ala Pretty Woman. Loved that dress, buttons up one side. Ah well it will look fab on my young friend.

    Vacuumed upstairs now to finish downstairs. Clean out more closets and weed the gardens. Weeds are overwhelming this year even in the heat. Some creeping weed plant is overtaking the garden. I will be out there for hours early morning.

    1. “Mint sweaters!” Autocorrect nonsense. Mint as in green or very gently or new sweaters? Sheesh.

      1. I wondered. I recently bought online a mint hoodie and when it came it was eye-searing green. Krissie looks great in bright colors (my head disappears because I am pale and ashy) so she got a new hoodie.

        1. I can’t remember what I typed, hit send and up popped “mint” sweaters. I meant very gently worn and new sweaters – bought way too many sweaters. Jamie looks great in the stuff.

          Find I am wearing a shirt and black or blue pants every day, now I have a whack load of shirts. Switched from sweaters to shirts. Ha, ha.

  9. My local fresh veg market is selling boxes of over-ripe tomatoes at a discount so I’m hip deep in canning and saucing. Love this time of year! Love the Gypsy Wife Quilt, seriously it’s gorgeous—but I gotta ask, how would you crochet it instead of quilt it?

      2. Due to my slow cooker woes, I absolutely read that as crockpot the pieces and sew them together. Took me two tries to get that right. Shaking my head…

        1. You may be too focused on the crockpot.
          Although I’m obsessing on mine, too. I can decide whether to give it away (except nobody wants it) or just stash it in. case something interesting comes up to do in it.

          1. I have three, one six quart (or maybe five) and two one quart pots. I’d give the two little ones away, but… maybe I should donate them to Goodwill.

            I don’t crochet.

  10. I just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s “Alias Grace” for the first time. The main character mentions quilts a lot – all the different styles and patterns. I had no idea there are so many complex ideas and meanings behind them!

    1. Tracy Chevalier’s The Last Runaway sort of does the same. Fantastic on audio, too!

  11. So… cat-hugging never happened because we didn’t go to Sweden because of reasons. 🙁 Some things have higher priority than other things sometimes. This was one of those times. Possibly this means a turning point for things but it has been some heavy last days.

    Maybe we will go and cuddle the new kittens of family friends’ later this week, as a sort of cathuggingchancemissed-cosolation.

    So all I am working on (trying…TRYING!) is staying in one piece, trying to eat despite bouts of nausea, trying NOT to give up and stay in bed instead. Forcing myself out of bed every morning is a real challenge. I’m trying to push myself by thinking that it’ll only get worse if I don’t get out of bed. So I crawl out and make tea and read to keep my head busy. And fight down the urge to eat all Snickers I bought last week in one go, because I would only feel worse and I have never been a comfort eater anyway so it’d only be counter productive…

    While I was reading the other day it struck me that it’d be fun to create a playlist of songs I come across in books I read and like/love (on Spotify, in this case…might create one on youtube later for the non-spotifiers). Like, the songs from Jenny’s books, songs mentioned in contemporary YA/romance, Urban fantasy and so on. Now adding mentioned/sung/played/heard songs from the “Trials of Apollo”-books by Rick Riordan as I go. Also trying to remember the song titles Jenny mentions, but sometimes I can’t remember the title, forget a song mentioned or don’t know the artist* and thus haven’t added it yet. Sooo I guess I have an excellent reason to reread all Jenny’s books. It’s slow going but it keeps me busy and it’ll be an interesting mix of music. I like it.
    If there is a song mentioned in a book you(!) love, or a book you(!) have written, I’d gladly add it. Just tell me song title, artist and in which book it’s sung/played/heard/mentioned/plays a role and it’ll join Elvis P and Elvis C, Tiny Tim, The Beatles, The Pokémon Theme, Josie and the Pussycats and all the other various stuff I’ve come across so far.

    * Who’s the artist of “It Had To Be You” mentioned in Bet Me? I was looking for a music box version, but couldn’t find one. So who’s recorded the original?

    1. That’s a classic from 1934, and damn near everybody has recorded it. In the book, it’s the music in her snow globe, so not a recording.

    3. I guess I could technically add any version then… Because a musicbox/snowglobe version is nowhere to find. Well, what counts is that it’s in there with the rest of the bookfound songs. 🙂

  12. I remember Betty Hutton singing “it had to be you” in a movie musical years ago. Can’t remember the movie now.

      1. It’s from the 20s. I thought so and I googled it: Isham Jones, 1924

  13. I messed with the quantities on my second try of Andie’s banana bread because *reasons* and it came out ok. Better than last time.

    Last time I didn’t put in chocolate or nuts. This time I used Lindt 70% Dark and the nuts were roasted and salted cashews. Turns out it not just Alice who doesn’t like it if you leave them out. The dark really cuts through the sweet in a good contrast.
    https://www.instagram.com/p/B02V0kzAKGa/

    1. My Mom always put chocolate frosting on her banana cake. Bananas and chocolate are such a classic combination that I think she would have been lynched if she tried a different frosting on that cake.

  14. I’ve been missing for a while. Doing a quick read but no comments. We are deep into construction. Demo was quite exciting. All sections have passed inspection so far. Full steam ahead.

    They’ve framed both the back and front extensions (my unit will be front) changed the pitch in the roof. Ripped off siding. Plumbing and electrical will be next. Of course that means another inspection. Front doors go in next week.
    If all goes to plan it should be about six more weeks, then it will be opening kitchen and den and doing a great room, plus laundry room and powder room. No clue how long that will take.
    Max (the wonder dog) has been amazing. I keep him calm with back to back Hallmark movies, “wink.” Figure I could write one now.

    1. Over Christmas we greatly enjoyed playing Hallmark movie bingo. Many cards available online.

  15. I helped Tony-the-handyman install the water butt, after realizing my first idea wouldn’t work – it stood right in the middle of my view of the garden from the living room. So it’s now on the rear wall of the kitchen extension, where it’s not visible from the house, and hopefully will eventually be part-screened by plants.

    I’ve started typing up my garden design research, and am pretty confused: all the experts contradict each other about what will grow in deep shade – apart from ivy and Virginia creeper, which I’m determined not to have. I keep seeing a solution, then reading that it won’t work.

    Today my editing job arrived (re-Anglicizing a book by a British author which the US publisher insisted on Americanizing and copy-editing. It’s a bizarre situation), which was great – except that when I woke my iMac it refused to link with its trackpad, which took half an hour to sort and has made me nervous that the trackpad’s failing; and then after a couple of hours I had to ask Penguin what they want me to do about the OTT American edit of the notes and bibliography, which will determine which of four versions of the book I should work on. So I’m stuck again.

    But hopefully this next week I’ll be editing, gardening and moving forward with my design projects.

    1. Mostly I have shade, in all variations of intensity.

      Full shade: various ferns, particularly Japanese painted fern, Athyrium niponicum which I have grown forever. It does appreciate at least some dappled light. Also in the anthurium fern family is ghost fern which is a gorgeous silvery color and goes well with painted fern. Autumn fern, dryopteris erythrosora, is a peachy orange when the fronds first appear then goes to dark green. I have to cut the old fronds off to keep it looking orangy.

      Another good shade plant is hardy begonia, begonia grandis, which really is hardy and if it is happy, seeds freely. Its advantage is that it blooms. Its leaves are a good color combination with autumn fern. In one area I planted black mondo grass near the japanese painted fern and that was another good combination. In full shade black mondo grass grows very slowly. Celandine poppy is the mainstay of my yellow and white shade garden. I also like to grow varigated Bishop’s weed, aegopodium podagraria ‘Variegatum’. Mine is predominantly cream and light green and absolutely glows in full shade, as though there were dappled sunlight. Tricyrtis formosans prefers not to be grown in complete shade but otherwise does well for me.

      I grow lamium “pink pewter” and “white nancy” in semi-shade as a ground cover and it really does do well. It is an excellent ground cover if you need it in semi-shade and sunlight both. Also for semi-shade to sunlight I grow a variety of geraniums. G. oxonianum does great in all types of shade but is almost invasive. There are other geraniums which are also happy in light shade.

      Commelina coelestis and C. dianthifolia both did well for me in light shade, although C. coelestis had larger blue flowers. Neither had large flowers. If money is no object, blue corydalis is wonderful in the shade. All corydalis do well in the shade although some are a little too enthusiastic. Not true of the blue corydalis, I have a hard time keeping my garden thugs from wiping it out.

      As I said, mostly I garden in the shade.

      1. Thanks, Jessie: I’ll save your suggestions for the herbaceous stage. I should have been clearer: it’s really the 18 ft long, 6 ft tall NW facing fence immediately behind the house, which gets no sun at all, that’s the challenge. Most sources are, like you, thinking of shade from trees rather than permanent shade from buildings. It’s not that it’s dark – the walls are cream – it’s the lack of direct sun. I daresay I’ll have to experiment; I’d just like to avoid expensive mistakes.

          1. Climbers and wall shrubs. I don’t want to reintroduce self-clinging things like the ivy that brought down the old fence, and there’s the house wall six feet away in the narrowest bit. I really want to give myself something more interesting to look at than bare fence. I’m hoping some clematis, honeysuckle and Japanese quince would grow fairly happily, even if they didn’t flower as much as they would with some sun. But I don’t want to torture the poor things and make them poorly.

            There are already handsome ferns at the base of the fence, some of which I’ll move into pots to make room for the climbers.

        2. Actually, these are mostly against an east facing wall that goes up 25 feet and has shrubs which block the light. But they are herbaceous. The Bishops weed is in a location that gets no direct light. I also have hardy cyclamen that get no direct light. Both are on the north side of the house. The north of my house and the neighbor’s house go up over 30 feet and are only 10 feet apart, so there is no direct sunlight. I have some rhododendrons but they bloom very poorly without direct light although the foliage is lush. I also have vine maples (understory tree or shrub) in that spot. The vine maples produce a nice japonaiserie effect with trunks and stems and are showcased against the neighbor’s wall, a very minimalist look. The painted ferns are also in that area. The maples would grow tall enough to get above the fence and pick up some light that way plus be deciduous so they wouldn’t add extra shade in the winter. Varigated boxwood can also survive no direct light but can be a very slow grower and it is not going to do anything about covering that area in your lifetime.

        3. Another thing you could do with that is paint it. If you painted the fence in interesting colours and patterns, with some hanging artwork, it could look really good.

        4. I made good progress on the get-fitter front. I went for a 3 hour walk up and down hill on Sunday, and today my physio said my back’s strong enough to start carrying a proper pack. I’ll have it almost empty at first, but it’s still more than I’ve been able to do for years. Yippee!!

          My long-term goal is being able to do multi-day hikes carrying an 18kg pack, which I haven’t been able to do for more than 15 years. I’m starting to feel like it might be possible.

  16. So beautiful, I still have to learn to crochet, I am at the lumpy beginner stage.

    I did managed to knit 5 innocent hats for Age UK’s fundraiser. My fox looks like a squirrel, but you can’t have everything:)

    With me, it’s reading, when I stop reading, I’m not happy.

    Knitting helps me progress, I’ll just do one stitch, one row… finish this UFO. Then I am able to actually tackle something else

  17. I’ve been wanting to do a bookcase quilt for a while but just never got around to it. I have plenty of fabric. I could probably start my own store.

    People have been telling me I should sue the school for offering me a job and then giving it to someone else. But what would that get me? A job with people who don’t want to work with me? I don’t know.

    I’m working on mysteries again for the ghostwriting and that makes me a tad happier. I’m so much better at them than the other stuff. Or maybe it’s just they are more fun to write and I’m not any less crap. Don’t care. I’m happy with it and that’s what counts.

        1. I missed something. They reneged on the job? Bastards (even if you only wanted it for the car payment)!

          1. Yes, OWC, I found out through a friend that they’d offered someone else the job after they’d offered it to me. Then they did a bunch of back peddling and lied a lot to make it look as if they hadn’t offered it to me first. Unfortunately for them, there are two women that may be willing to tell the truth. but, as Thea said, the hassle, bad blood and reputation, is probably not worth it. I live in a very small town.

        2. Also in most states employment is at will so they have the right to fire you at any time unless you have a written contract signed by both sides. There are protections if you are in a protected class and they did it for discriminatory reasons. But the likelihood is that you wouldn’t have a case.

    2. I missed the story of the job loss, too. And if you sued you would run the risk of ever getting a job in your town again. But not to worry you are after all a writer and you could turn this to your advantage and write a mystery about a divorcee of a certain age solving crimes in her community. Start with the school department.

  18. I am having a week of medical stuff, which is technically not work but feels so much like it that I would very much prefer to be working myself rather than being the job of many other people as I currently am.

    So mostly what I am doing is not letting myself weep out of sheer frustration and knitting hats and throws for folks who, like me, have a lot of trouble regulating their body temps. If anyone has ever made and donated lap quilts and throws to hospitals and wondered if the recipients appreciated them, I can tell you that I did and the folks here really do. And there is a nurse here I owe a purple throw quilt so the bookcase quilt pattern will be a very nice resource to have.

    Also, we made zucchini bread with coconut (milk, oil and some flakes) on the advice of a urologist and it was 1. Delicious and 2. Very soothing to the insides of a person.

    1. That’s good to know! I mostly donate chemo caps, but I was decluttering and donated about a dozen lap quilts last year that I’d made for no particular purpose, and I was happy to donate them, and the person at the volunteer services office was very nice, but I never really knew if anyone appreciated them. I try not to fret about it, but it’s nice to get some first-hand confirmation that the items are appreciated generally.

      1. Oh crikey- we love them. I feel total comfort saying that. Last night I was in a room of 20+ folks with spinal cord injuries and people were talking about their blankets

        “oh, I got this one right from the lady who made it when I first got hurt in 1986”

        “this one is from my third re-evaluation in 2004, and I wore it like a cape when I got up in the walker”

        “they gave me this one yesterday, they said I could have it or a heated blanket and I would alway rather have something made by a person not a machine”.

        Especially for folks who have a hard time regulating their body temperature (preemies, spinal cord injury, brain injury, chemo patients) those blankets are lifesavers. And usually facilities let you take them home. Prolonged hospitalization is horrid – often necessary, but horrid – and the environment is really impersonal, no matter how kind folks try to be and a lot of the time you don’t have anything that’s properly your own. Those hats and blankets help.

  19. Mostly I’ve been doing fiction-writing and related stuff. Book came out yesterday (I didn’t request an Argh Author slot, because it’s late in a series and doesn’t really stand alone, and I’m saving the slot for next spring and the garlic farm mystery!), and I’m coming up on the deadline for the second garlic farm mystery’s submission.

    In odd moments, I’ve been researching/daydreaming about buying a pre-fab house and getting it installed in my back yard next year. It’s not quite as crazy as it sounds! I have a huge back yard.

    If anyone’s interested, there’s a standalone bit of flash fiction featuring two secondary characters from yesterday’s book at drusbookmusing.com, “Who Let The Goats Out?” You don’t need to have read the series to understand the story. I’m really pleased, because at least one reader (in a review) liked the friendship of these two characters, which I worked really hard on in the book, and this short story is sort of riffing on the basis that began in the book.

  20. I was away Friday-Monday camping with friends (in cabins with flush toilets and beds, because) and going to the Ren Faire after an 8 years hiatus. It was lovely and did a great job of refilling my very empty well, but now I’m back and trying to catch up with All the Things.

    Naturally, the revision notes from my SMP editor for the goddess empowerment book came in as soon as I left town, so they’re on the top of the list. And they moved up the release date to my new Everyday Witch Oracle deck from September 8th to August 12th (next Monday!) so I am suddenly way behind on promo. Plus garden harvest, cleaning, and tending to the foster kittens and their mama. The kittens will be two weeks old tomorrow and they are SO adorable. Tiny furry therapy. I’ll try to remember to put pictures up on Instagram. (I don’t use a cell phone much–they don’t work at my house in the boonies–so the few pictures I put up are usually from my tablet.)

    Here’s the adorable cabin I was staying in, complete with bestie doing Sudoku. https://www.instagram.com/p/B0rXcfSAFWK/

  22. I love that book quilt. I’ll have to take up quilting just to make one.
    Easier week this week than last week-only one doctor thing as opposed to two, two meetings instead of one, but no dog and hair grooming.
    I did a cross stitch for the Tiny Pricks Project (tinypricksproject.com). People have been stitching 45’s quotes on vintage handkerchiefs, towels, etc. and posting them on instagram and sending them in to be exhibited.
    My quote was “Tell them not to come” on a baby bib. It was so much fun I’m doing another.

    1. Oh, I want kittens.
      My dogs are such jerks about cats, it wouldn’t work, but I would love to have two cats. So they could talk to each other. Because the dogs would just bitch at them.

    2. Your foster kittens look so warm and cute ! Reminds me of Leonardo da Vinci quote, “The smallest feline is a masterpiece.”

  24. I love that book quilt, too. Since the only person I knew who quilted is now happily divorced from my brother and I don’t even own a sewing machine, that picture will be as close as I’ll ever get to it. I think I’ll print a big picture of it and put it on my wall. I have a wall hanging, a bedspread and my parents’ bedspread that the Patchwork Queen (my former sister in law) made over the years, but this one just tickles my fancy.

    My big accomplishment this week is that I went exploring between my 2 appointments on Monday and found out a little about the suburb where my shrink has her new office. I found a library, the Village Hall, a post office and several other useful places for filling up the formerly wasted time while I wait for the infrequent bus. And one day when I have more expendable cash I will check out the not so casual restaurant I discovered on my walk.

  25. The cooking this week has been mostly from kits, sort of. Or from the convenience section of the grocery store. Like you, Jenny, I’m supposed to be watching my sodium closely. CHF is no fun at all.

    There’s a pot roast kit that’s intended for slow cookers. It’s great if you throw away the seasoning package and just use your own – that packet has salt as the first ingredient. Better is just to buy the beef, potatoes, carrots, celery, onions and then season. Garlic powder, pepper, whatever else you have handy. No salt. I used to use potassium chloride salt substitute, but the last visit said, “Your potassium is high!” Turns out those cramps I was taking potassium for were caused by high potassium.

    If I buy the stuff myself, sometimes I skip the potatoes and serve it on a bed of brown rice. Maybe even on a bed of konjac noodles. I can’t over do konjac, though – there are side defects.

    Work tonight included janitorial duties, since we have no janitorial staff. Someone (me) had to sweep and mop the offices. We used to have inmates (like trustees) to do that, but we trusted them, and they took advantage. Now we have no inmates. My cow-orker laughed at me because a) it was raining, and the next shift would track it in and b) we’re cleaning two boilers for inspection and that usually means soot tracked in from the other direction. I didn’t care. The floors looked good when I was done.

    I put some audio books on a thumb drive, and listened to them on the way in and on the way home. The Getaway Girl, so far, starting at chapter nine. Also on that thumb drive are Bet Me and The Sum of All Fears (abridged). I like my car’s entertainment system. 🙂

  26. a bunch of new words written for novel #12.
    phone interview for a possible job.
    got groceries.
    whacked back the grapevines again.
    had a word with the wisteria about which direction it should be growing.
    cleaned & refilled the hummingbird feeder.
    mostly domestic trivia, the word count was satisfying.

  27. A friend gave me a bookcase quilt she and her mum had made for me as a PhD graduation present last year, and I absolutely love it.

    1. Lucky you.
      I once saw one in a quilt exhibition in New Zealand I was blown away!! It had titles of classics mysteries etc. on a lot of the spines. It won a ribbon, but not the first prize, yet that’s the one I remember.

  28. I realized the plaster was about to fall off the closet ceiling in my study a few weeks ago, and got everything out of the closet and the ceiling repaired (not very well) before century-old plaster dust landed on all my yardage and WIPs and best clothes. Go me!

    It was a little unnerving how unpacking one funny-shaped closet filled half the room it’s attached to. Also unnerving how many WIPs I had. I store them neatly and densely and for far too long. Useful to see, though — and I managed to get it back into the dense closet pretty much with the things I would like to sew first nearest the door.

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