Step Into My Thimble

I’m doing it. I might even come back to this post and make a list of who I have written to and when I sent it. Do I have your address? If not you can send it to me through my contact form.

This year I was remarkably faithful in my use of Daytum to track a few routine things. At my current job, having a coffee break is a standard daily occurrence, and I watched myself shift a bit from tea to coffee over the year, though that’s not obvious from the main graph. You can see consumption drop way off in the summer, when I went back to the US for a vacation and fell out of the routine for a while. The category “Random Black Tea” (which I usually only drink when it’s all there is because Lipton Yellow Label = scourge) took a huge jump at the end of the year too, thanks to a trip to Turkey where I drank about five cups a day.

More statistics & interpretation beyond…
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At the risk of starting a trend among my American crafting friends (ahahaha nobody reads this anymore especially now that Google Reader sucked the life out of RSS feeds)…

Here is a picture of some Three Cats original Shwe Shwe cotton my mom brought me from Pretoria this week. It’s somewhere around a light canvas weight, 36″ wide, and will be great for making bags.

My child has reached a new level of threatening talk, a la her parents who have to offer consequences for things she isn’t supposed to do. Like this: “I’m going to cut off your toe and you will be all bloody. Is that what you want me to do? Is it? If you say yes I’m going to do it, and if you say no I’m going to do it anyway!”

The real subject of this post is yet another long overdue catch-up on the 12 Books 12 Months thing. I have not forgotten this but my capacity to plow through books I’m only half-interested in has been small lately.

Currently I’m on my sixth book, Evening is the Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan. The one I finished before this was Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. Both of these came from the faculty book exchange at work, which has lately been an even more poor source for somewhat interesting reading material–I haven’t added anything to the 12B12M queue from it in a while.

Here’s my (very brief) review posted on Goodreads:

This is contemporary mainstream fiction that I would describe as “fine.” No obnoxious language, the romance is not cheesy, the text conjures up lovely images of the Pacific Northwest. Making all the Japanese characters stone-faced and kind of dull did not thrill me.

In related news the movie based on this is awful.

I think I gave it four out of five stars but it would really be more of a 3.5 to me.

In only five days the other two people in my family are going back to Michigan without me for a month (I get to go too, at the end of July). Plus we go to shortened work hours as of this week. That means no more bloody toe threats, but it also means possibly more time to focus on reading in the midst of all the other distractions.