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it is done
Feb. 15th, 2019 11:39 amI have an embarrassment of riches on my Kindle, currently-- things I've downloaded for free from Tor.com or snagged during Kindle promotions, things I've seen on sale, things I've impulse-purchased. I figured out how to transfer things to the Kindle via email (they hide it, but there's a way to do it from within your Amazon account), and so I got a bunch of fics I'd long ago downloaded up on there, including some ones I know are gone off AO3 now, so that's nice.
I took it with me when I took Dude to the doctor, and so I was quite sucked in during my time in the waiting room. I read Witchmark, by CL Polk, and reviewed it on Tumblr so that should crosspost here-- it might still be free on tor.com, you have to give them your email address but they only seem to email you a couple of times a month, and one time each month is to offer you a new free novella to download. That's how I got The Only Harmless Great Thing, which is really a staggering work of heartbreak and genius and I know that phrase is from a cliche, but it's true in this case. After reading it, I bought the other novella Bolander has for sale on Amazon, No Flight Without The Shatter, and haven't yet had the courage to read it.
Her shit is intense, ok.
Dude is recuperating in bed, held there by the cat, and I am dutifully bringing him an ice back every 20 minutes, then taking it away after another 20 minutes, to the letter of the doctor's instructions. Ironically enough, he seems to be in no discomfort, and I meanwhile have been suddenly saddled with a terrible headache that I think is due to a sudden shift in the weather-- it was sunny, but now it is very blustery and cloudy, and I can barely see straight. I'm typing with my glasses off, so I can't really see the screen, but i can see the shape of it and that seems to be enough.
Last night at banjo lessons, we came in and stood awkwardly in the kitchen, as usual, while he finished the lesson ahead of ours, and the banjo teacher's wife has a little table in a kind of nook off the kitchen where the basement steps come up into a landing, and there's a microwave tucked in there, and this little table-- well, today she had sewing supplies spread out across it, and was clearly working on a quilt, entirely by hand, made out of small hexagons. I asked her about it, and she pulled it all out to show us-- it's based on the hexagon thing from Catan, but she's discovered that hexagons are perfect for hand-piecing because the surfaces all interlock perfectly. Sometimes with squares, she said, you wind up getting a little off, then a little off, then a little off, and it compounds-- but with hexagons, you have such short surfaces, they have to keep each other honest.
And she was right-- it's brilliant! And you can do repeating little patterns easily, and use up oddball scraps easily, and...
Maybe since none of my fucking sewing machines will properly work for shit, maybe I'll just take to carrying piles of hexagons around with me and hand-sewing them together any which-way. Sigh.
I am trying to think of how to tell the banjo teacher that his wife is super awesome. (Last time we were there, she appeared suddenly from the basement steps, brandishing an antique power outlet clearly wrested recently from its fittings, and explained to us how hard it was to patch plaster walls. She's alarming and amazing, and possibly some sort of witch.)
ooogh my eyes kind of feel like they might explode, I'm such a wimp about headaches. Ibuprofen didn't work for this one, and it started like half an hour after I'd just had breakfast and coffee, so I'm gonna try not staring at a screen for a while and see how that does. I bet it's just the weather, though, and it's the warranty on this body expiring. Blech.
I took it with me when I took Dude to the doctor, and so I was quite sucked in during my time in the waiting room. I read Witchmark, by CL Polk, and reviewed it on Tumblr so that should crosspost here-- it might still be free on tor.com, you have to give them your email address but they only seem to email you a couple of times a month, and one time each month is to offer you a new free novella to download. That's how I got The Only Harmless Great Thing, which is really a staggering work of heartbreak and genius and I know that phrase is from a cliche, but it's true in this case. After reading it, I bought the other novella Bolander has for sale on Amazon, No Flight Without The Shatter, and haven't yet had the courage to read it.
Her shit is intense, ok.
Dude is recuperating in bed, held there by the cat, and I am dutifully bringing him an ice back every 20 minutes, then taking it away after another 20 minutes, to the letter of the doctor's instructions. Ironically enough, he seems to be in no discomfort, and I meanwhile have been suddenly saddled with a terrible headache that I think is due to a sudden shift in the weather-- it was sunny, but now it is very blustery and cloudy, and I can barely see straight. I'm typing with my glasses off, so I can't really see the screen, but i can see the shape of it and that seems to be enough.
Last night at banjo lessons, we came in and stood awkwardly in the kitchen, as usual, while he finished the lesson ahead of ours, and the banjo teacher's wife has a little table in a kind of nook off the kitchen where the basement steps come up into a landing, and there's a microwave tucked in there, and this little table-- well, today she had sewing supplies spread out across it, and was clearly working on a quilt, entirely by hand, made out of small hexagons. I asked her about it, and she pulled it all out to show us-- it's based on the hexagon thing from Catan, but she's discovered that hexagons are perfect for hand-piecing because the surfaces all interlock perfectly. Sometimes with squares, she said, you wind up getting a little off, then a little off, then a little off, and it compounds-- but with hexagons, you have such short surfaces, they have to keep each other honest.
And she was right-- it's brilliant! And you can do repeating little patterns easily, and use up oddball scraps easily, and...
Maybe since none of my fucking sewing machines will properly work for shit, maybe I'll just take to carrying piles of hexagons around with me and hand-sewing them together any which-way. Sigh.
I am trying to think of how to tell the banjo teacher that his wife is super awesome. (Last time we were there, she appeared suddenly from the basement steps, brandishing an antique power outlet clearly wrested recently from its fittings, and explained to us how hard it was to patch plaster walls. She's alarming and amazing, and possibly some sort of witch.)
ooogh my eyes kind of feel like they might explode, I'm such a wimp about headaches. Ibuprofen didn't work for this one, and it started like half an hour after I'd just had breakfast and coffee, so I'm gonna try not staring at a screen for a while and see how that does. I bet it's just the weather, though, and it's the warranty on this body expiring. Blech.
