Creative
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Postcard Art | 1
Winter means that my studio is too chilly for me to work in usually, and so I have been making do with watercolors inside the house. I keep several sketchbooks and now some watercolor postcard paper on my desk and have been working away these last few weeks on small art pieces that I am mailing out to folks. I’m trying to do monthly themes, January’s was orchids, as you can see. February is currently abstract and I think March will be native plants or spring. All of these are taken but when I have others in the future I will share them here and if you want a little…
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Top 5 Books I Read in 2021
Last year I read 60+ books (not counting the ones I read with Forest) and I keep tabs of it over on Goodreads. Feel free to friend me over there if you’d like! By far the heavy lifting of my reading last year was audiobooks and I have significantly replaced podcast listening with audiobooks over the last two years. If you keep your audiobooks to 10 hours and under and listen at 1.5-2x speeds then you can easily read an audiobook every few days or so. I listen while I work most often but I have tasks that don’t allow me to focus on two things at once so I…
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Winning at Writing
On a whim at the end of October I decided to actually participate in Nanowrimo. Back in the mid 2000s I gave it a half-hearted go and quit pretty early, enough that I didn’t even have any of it documented in my Nano account. I hadn’t logged in there in years and saw the last time I gave it a real whirl was in 2011, when I was writing my FT hiking memoir. I made it to something like 26K words, I believe, at that time. I accidentally deleted that after I logged in and tried to set up my new book. Oh well. The only way I was going…
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Forest’s Rainbow Afghan
Saturday evening I finally finished Forest’s rainbow afghan that he requested last fall. His original request was for a rainbow blanket with red and blue on the ends. My original thought was to use the yarn I already had but then thinking about having to switch yarn every couple of rows didn’t sound appealing. Forest and I ended up finding and agreeing on the self striping Lion Brand Mandala Yarn in Gnome, Cupid, and Spirit colorways. And I LOVE IT! Honestly, I want it for myself which means I’m going to borrow it as much as possible! Hah! I started on it sometime last November but royally screwed up the…
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Best Books of 2019
Overall I read 139 books this year. That includes books I read with Forest—because even though they are kid books, I’m still reading! That doesn’t include books on our own shelves at home or books I’ve re-read again and again with him, mostly just library books throughout this year. I started logging his books last year so I could easily figure out what we’re reading but also books he likes and we might want to revisit later. He often finds books we’ve checked out before and grabs them again so he has a good memory for that anyway. As for “my” books, I read 45 books out of a goal…
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Adventure Reads Part II
One post over the years that seems to have done well was my Adventure Reads post. So, I thought that it was high time to have an Adventures Reads Part II. Thirst: 2600 Miles to Home by Heather ‘Anish’ Anderson I’ve never had a burning desire to hike the PCT. The CDT was always what I wanted to hike next in the compendium of ultimate long distance trails. Even reading Wild didn’t really cement the desire to hike the PCT into my brain like it did to so many people who wanted to traipse in Cheryl’s footsteps. But Thirst fleshed out more of the details of the PCT for me,…
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Amma Granny Square Top — Completed!
I finished up the top early Sunday morning as Forest and I were chilling in the west end Best Western in Galveston while Chris was out getting some fishing done at San Luis Pass. I’d worked on some of the finishing touches a few days before but only had to finish the sleeves and bottom edging. Yesterday I washed it out in the sink with some special yarn soap I’ve had for years and out came a lot of dirt and dingyness from being stored for eons—this was my grandmother’s yarn. I’d washed out a lot of the yarn in containers when I got them after she moved into the…
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Sunday Things
For the first time in two years I’m crocheting again. The last time I crocheted I was attempting to make a cardigan type thing but it ended up going south about halfway through. Someday I’ll frog all of that yarn. After that I lost interest in crochet. But with the change in seasons I’m becoming interested in one of my favorite hobbies once again. This time I dug into my grandmother’s yarn stash and dug out some crochet thread to make the Amma Granny Square Top. I’ve since finished one granny square and almost halfway through the second. After that it should be fairly easy in joining and finishing with…
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February & March 2019 Book Report
It feels as if I’d read more than I have over the last two months because I’m in the middle of so many books or started and put some on hold. Here’s what I actually finished: Royally Screwed & Royally Matched by Emma Chase: Both of these are absolute fluff romance novels that came by way of recommendation of Abby on the Friendlier Podcast. I listened to them as audiobooks and they were very easy listens and I finished in about two days each. I’m not a huge romance novel fan but these were perfect. Thirst: 2600 Miles to Home by Heather ‘Anish’ Anderson: One of the best hiking books…
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January 2019 Book Report
It’s been a bit since I’ve done one of these but the reading groove has returned and so my book reports are back! Trespassing Across America: One Man’s Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland by Ken Ilgunas: I’ve had this flagged to read on Hoopla Digital for a long time now and had been in the mood for an audio book one day and it sounded enticing at only around 7 or so hours. I sped it up to 1.5x and after a few minutes my brain caught up and I was able to handle the pacing change. The author has several books out that are…