Rays of Sunshine: Year-End 2020

My husband remarked sometime this fall that future historians of our era will have to microspecialize in 2020, as in, "I'm an expert on October 8, 2020."  It has been a year in which we lived a century.  Here are some (not-so) quick takes from an epic year.

1. We survived Covid in the early days of the pandemic.  My infection was brutal (but not hospital-inducing); the rest of my family less so.  

2. My kids learned to get along with each other during the six-month lockdown in this tiny house, and continue to develop their relationships with each other in unexpected ways.  Yes, they still fight, still annoy each other, still know how to push each other's buttons, but on the whole, the four of them can rub along okay, which is something I never thought I'd be able to say.  We did many puzzles and played lots of Scrabble and other word games this year.

3. The kitchen garden was a source of delight to me all summer and fall, and I'm looking forward to digging in the dirt in the late spring.

4. While I wrote less this year, my final Slezkine essay remains my favorite, although my latest Crawford tribute comes close.

 

5. I'm pleased to announce that my novel, All This Without You, will be published in mid-February.  I'm working through the final formatting and galley proofs now.  Pre-order will be available in a few days.  My first novel, Deliverance, finally got the cover I wanted from the start.

6. The kids discovered shchi, kuleyabaka, and pirog this year, and my fasting menus got a bit easier as a result (if more labor-intensive).  

 

At the same time, I crossed some kind of culinary Rubicon this year, and have enjoyed making some nice-looking meat, fish, and cabbage pies (with pre-made crust; I'm not that invested).  

 

The food shortages of the spring put my long-neglected bread maker to work. 

After 8 months of heavy use, it went to the Great Appliance Store in the Sky.  RIP, you served us well.

 

7. I fell down a few crafting rabbit holes this summer and fall, including jewelry-making, which I completely enjoy, and dyeing, which I do not. 

 

 

I also returned to making art this spring and summer, and am holding these new creative endeavors under the broad umbrella of This Living Hand Designs. 

 8. After stalking various listings for used pairs, I finally found a pair of Blundstones on ebay for a great bargain, and they are pretty much the best things ever. My transitional shoe crisis solved! So stompy.  

9. With hair salons closed for months, I learned how to cut both boys' hair, and have continued the practice since.  My husband had me trim his hair once in May in desperation, but has since returned to his barber, much to my relief.  I trimmed the girls' and my own hair once, since we don't need regular cuts.  It's not perfect, but it will do!

 

10. My sewing stalled out this year, but I made a few things I really loved, including my cropped linen Emerald tops, and a laundry cycle's worth of underwear.  

11. I dipped my toes into more challenging knitting, including lacework and colorwork, and find I have a an appetite for charted work. 

I also discovered some new-to-me designers and have enjoyed some new patterns.

12.  I discovered some truly enjoyable book series this year, including the All Souls Triology, The Court of Thorns and Roses series, and the Throne of Glass series.  The Throne of Glass series was an unexpected delight, and I binged all seven (rather large) books in about a month's time this fall.  I dipped back into the Court of Thorns and Roses series again this week in anticipation of the next book's release in February.  I guess I'm into supernatural fantasy now?

Wherever this year has taken you, and whatever difficulties you've experienced, I wish you peace and joy in the year ahead.

 

Happy New Year!

See ya on the flip side.

Yarn Along: April

~knitting~

I have three projects on needles right now (why just have one when you can have three?)  

The first is the emerald Stoker cowl sweater I started last month.  I'm about half way through the second sleeve and the body is finished and seamed at the shoulders.  I'll have a ton of seaming to do quite soon!  It's been a relatively quick knit, but I probably won't get to wear it this season.

The second is my very-slow-going Lightweight Pullover.  Honestly, all this stockinette in the round on small needles is very boring to me.  I'm thinking of pulling it out and starting something else, except I really like the pattern, and I'm pretty sure the finished sweater will be a useful one for me.

The final project is a gray beret that I'm making with some Swish yarn I bought a couple of years ago for no particular purpose.  I'm hoping to get the sizing right on this one.

~reading~

Lenten reading, mostly.

Father Stephen Freeman's book, Everywhere Present, which is a wonderfully deep little book on re-enchanting our world.  It is a more down-to-earth book about some of the things Charles Taylor and Matthew B. Crawford have written (and about which I have written at length).  I enjoy Fr. Stephen's writing style very much, as well as his very down-to-earth approach.  I'm very interested in spiritual writing that speaks to me where I live, and Fr. Freeman's book certainly does.

I also picked up An Inner Step Toward God again, after having abandoned the book half-way through two Lents ago.  It is wonderful as well.  The late Father Alexander Men is clearly in the weeds with people in their spiritual lives, and I appreciate that.  His personal prayers (reprinted in the middle of the book) are so beautiful.

I'm also reading (in small bites) St. John of Kronstadt's My Life in Christ, but it is slow going because of how the book is formatted.  Every little piece is small and digestible, but the book has no chapter breaks, so it feels like you never get anywhere with it.

I have some other books on marriage and family waiting in the wings, as well as a boat-load of research on the Saxon period to start combing through to develop the next book.

~watching~

BBC history documentaries on YouTube.  I've watched one on pre-historic Britain (in four parts), one on the Plantagenet family of Britain (in three parts), and a brilliant series with Lucy Worsley on domestic history (in four parts) that dovetails very nicely with my earlier reading of Judith Flanders and Elizabeth Wayland Babour.  Dr. Worsley's documentaries are fun and informative--I really enjoy her!  (Fair warning: there is a bit of inaccurate information about personal hygiene in the Tudor/Stuart period; Ruth Goodman has discussed the topic at length, as well as done period experiments on it.  But it was a minor quibble).  Plus an older documentary on the Saxon period.

I also saw the Oscar-nominated Darkest Hour this week and enjoyed it very much.  All the performances were stellar, and Gary Oldman deserved every nomination he got.  I'm planning to show it to the kids soon, since they are so interested in Churchill and this period of time.

Boo is also really into Richard III right now, so I showed him the documentary about the King in the Carpark (how they found his body) and he is working his way through the same documentary series I saw on the Plantagenets.  Piglet is playing the Dauphin in a scaled down production of Henry V at school later this spring and so we've been talking a bit about that period of time too.

~book news~

I'm sending out queries to agents now (almost no publishers accept direct submissions these days) and have received three rejections so far.  I'm sanguine about the process and expect a lot of rejections, so that is okay.  I sent out another round of queries this morning, and am starting to hear back from beta readers, so that is all to the good!

And a reminder for anyone who likes a historical story, my first book, Deliverance, is available through Amazon, both in paperback and kindle format.

Linking with Ginny for Yarn Along!

Yarn Along: March

~knitting~

I already blogged my latest Carbeth, but I also finished the hat I started in February, as well as the Isla shrug.  Unfortunately, the hat came out too big, and my attempts to felt it smaller didn't really work.

 My first make with this hat pattern was in super wash wool, and putting it through the dryer did the trick, but the Wool of the Andes yarn on this version didn't really seem to change size at all.  I guess if I'm going to keep making this pattern, I'd better stick with super wash wool to get the fit I want.  How perfect is that color, though?  I'm tempted to unravel and start again except now the yarn is felted, so I think it would end up being a Job, and I don't need that right now.

The Isla shrug is also just okay.  I can't quite figure out how to style it with separates, but I think I will like it with a dress when it is not quite as cold as it is right now.

I also cast on a Stokey cowl pullover because I liked how my first one fit, but didn't love some things about the yarn.  So far it is going quickly--I knit a good chunk of the back over two days' time.

~reading~

I finished Sarah Ruden's Paul Among the People in one big gulp and highly recommend it.  She is a classicist who takes on the Pauline epistles in order to properly contextualize them in their polytheistic pagan context, and the results are remarkable.  She parses a lot of words that we view through a distorting lens of Puritan thinking about such things and really tries to understand what Paul meant and how the intended audience would have understood when he was writing.  

I'm nearly done with Handywoman by Kate Davies.  It is wonderful.  Kate Davies is the pattern designer of the Carbeth, and many other wonderful knitting patterns, but she also writes books, and this one is about her experience of having a stroke at age 36 (ten years ago) and how she's worked through it all.  It is a marvelous book.  

The book brought up a lot for me, since I had a stroke-like neurologic event in January 1999 that affected my whole left side. The whole thing was terrifying because I didn't know what was going on--just that my body was out of my control, and no one could tell me why.  It was two years before I could walk without my left leg visibly dragging and I could grip things normally with my left hand.  I had new and scary symptoms crop up over the following months and no one could tell me what was happening.  

After reading Kate's book, I realized that the debilitating fatigue that dogged me for a number of years after was probably neurologic fatigue, which is just a whole separate beast from the sort of tired you get from not sleeping well.  I think too, that a number of falls I took in the couple years after were directly related, although I didn't realize it at the time.  

Mostly, I can't believe it has been 20 years since it happened. I'm still kind of upset about how indifferently I was treated by the medical community (my family doctor not included--he was the one who advocated for an MRI and other diagnostic tests, but I was in college eight hours away at the time, and it was far far too late by the time any testing was done).  

There was the small town ER doctor who was annoyed at being called to duty at 11 p.m. on a Friday night when I showed up, scared out of my mind and unable to use my limbs properly.  He did no tests, called for no consults, gave me no medicines, just a pat on the head and sent me back to the dorms with a mutter about flu.  There were the people at the clinic in town that gave me antibiotics two days later but also declined to test me for anything else.  

When I had a scary resurgence of symptoms in January 2016, almost certainly brought on by chronic stress and sleep deprivation due to Birdie's health problems, the neurologist I saw only shrugged and suggested not very gently that I get psychological help.  Thankfully, the symptoms resolved themselves a few months later, and I'm more or less back to what my own neurologic baseline is now.  

I'm trying very hard to forgive these people, as Kate forgave the doctor who shockingly misdiagnosed her at first, and almost certainly made her recovery more difficult.  

I also made good headway into The Power of Silence, and while it is good, it isn't really a whole book's worth of material.  It probably should have been edited down to a long pamphlet or article, as so much of it is repetitive.  That said, I've dog-earred a couple pages to return to for later contemplation.

In other book news, I quietly re-released my first novel with Amazon Kindle last week.  The book has been lightly edited and the cover updated.  It is available in paperback as well.  I wrote it ten years ago, and while I've learned a lot as a writer, it was still a fun story to write. It is an historical thriller set in Holland during WW2.

~sewing~

Another Washi dress, what else?  I realized that my green Washi dress from the fall goes perfectly with my Jade Carbeth, and wanted something to wear with my newest teal Carbeth too.  

So off I trundled to the latest Cotton+Steel offerings, and found this lovely teal number.  The colors are absolutely my jam, and I'm super happy with it.  

Apologies for rubbish photos--it is super cold today, and I was short on time this morning when the light is okay.  So you get indoor photos taken at my kids' school.  Take my word for it that the bodice is exactly the same as my other two Washis from the fall.

~watching~

I've been rewatching stuff lately, because not much appeals to me, but I must write about two movies that I cannot stop thinking about: Silver Linings Playbook and A Star is Born. 

The latter film seriously blew me away.  It is just that good.  Bradley Cooper amazes me.  His singing voice is really wonderful, and the story line is so beautifully wrought.  

I am not a Lady Gaga musical fan, but she was so good in this film, and her singing as Ally is soulful and lovely.  I bought the soundtrack too.  My only question about the story is this: when Ally begins to be managed by a professional, her sound changes a lot and becomes a lot more manufactured ("pop" if you will).  I wondered whether that was a deliberate choice/commentary on what it takes to succeed in the music business: that you have to give up your sound and what makes you unique as a vocal artist in order to "make it" or whether that was just not on the radar.

Lent starts for us on Monday, so we are having our Cheesefare Week now.  Bring on the butter and pancakes!

Linking with Ginny for Yarn Along!