Valerean

My third and final blind date with a book was with The Goddesses by Swan (really, Swan?) Huntley, which I finished. Which I'm not sure if I'm regretting yet or not. I'm not sure about 99.9% of this experience. I'm not even on a fence. I'm just confused, pissed off, offended, and a little headachey here. What I liked about this blind date: technically speaking the writing is actually very good, very readable, which is probably why I stuck with it. The author obviously went to college for writing but it didn't ruin her natural ability. Or maybe she skipped college a lot. What I didn't like about this blind date: Oh, boy. This is going to be a laundry list of epic proportions. Let me say upfront that if you write well I'll forgive a lot, but despite the talent there was a lot of unforgiveable crap in this book. At the number one position, the mysogyny that runs through it like an icy river. All of the female characters in this book are unifo...

In 16 episodes the superhero k-drama Strong Woman Do Bong-Soon runs the gamut from silly/goofy comedy to serious thriller, all with an unlikely romance between the lead actors that slowly builds into a surprisingly and quite wrenching love triangle, so I never knew what to expect -- and I liked that. Thanks to a secret family legacy, aspiring game developer Do Bong-Soon (Park Bo Young) is blessed from birth with Hulk-like superhuman strength. She's so strong she can basically swat a truck out of her way with one hand, but her gift is also a curse. She has trouble controlling it, and tries to hide it so she can seem more attractive to her schoolgirl crush, police detective In Guk-Doo (Ji Soo). Through a series of mishaps she's hired as a personal bodyguard by Ahn Min-Hyuk (Park Hyung-sik), the extremely attractive yet slightly crazy CEO of a successful gaming company, who has been receiving threats from an unknown assailant. Meanwhile, a masked man begins attacking ...

I'm probably not going to finish another project before the end of December, so I thought I'd take a look back at my year in sewing and quilting. I can't say I set any speed records this year; I made only a few projects and did a lot more slow stitching. But despite the lack of quantity I'm happier with the quality, and how my handwork has made this year better for me. I kicked off 2021 by making this strip-pieced top that I sewed together as my political statement on Election Night into a quilt. Finishing this tote helped me get through losing Mom back in April. My summer art quilt helped me cope when Kat left in May to work in the Pacific Northwest. I rescued and recycled this beautiful vintage patchwork, and made my first successful lettering stencil for the embroidery. Recycling was constantly on my mind. Making this art quilt piece into a sunglass case was fun and practical. I tried an experiment with bargello piecing, which gave me more c...

I am not a fan of pandemic or zombie movies, but I've gotten hooked on the apocalyptic thriller Happiness , which depicts a post-Covid Korea in which an experimental pneumonia treatment drug turns people into crazy blood-drinking zombies. At the end of the last episode the two cop lead characters are now quarantined in a massive apartment complex in which most of the rich residents have been taking the illegal drug which they believe will help them with weight loss. It's currently airing in real time in Korea, so I can only watch an episode after a couple of days when the subtitles have been added on Viki.com, but holy cow, it's really good.

To read my new short story First Sight , click here. Image Credit: Gloria Nelli from Pixabay

Happy Thanksgiving from Valerean. Image Credit: Jill Wellington on Pixabay

Katherine accepted a very nice permanent job offer out west, but she has to start December 1st, so she won't be home for the holidays. I'm overjoyed for her, and sad for me. Yet I always knew this day was coming, and I am glad she's living her life the way she wants. I need to wallow again in memories today. This was a pic I took at one of her band concerts in high school. At her brother's graduation, teaching a little boy how to play a video game. A Homecoming outfit. Sixteen years old, at our favorite tea room. I've tried to be a good mother, and I think I've mostly succeeded. I could not imagine a better daughter.

For my Jane Eyre slow stitch project I needed to figure out a way to transfer an image onto cloth without using chalk, pencils or any sort marking. My solution was to laser print the image onto gift tissue paper and sew through it. To see if it would work, I made a trial run of the idea using scrap muslin and some silk thread. It worked. The paper was thin enough to stitch through easily, and following the lines of the image worked well, too. I used a variety of stitches to get a feel for what would happen to them when I tore away the tissue at the end. To my surprise the bigger stitches stayed in place, while the smaller did get yanked up a bit (I was able to tug them back into place by carefully prodding the thread from the back.) This will save me a lot of time that I'd usually spend tracing, and give me a crisper, more accurate image transfer.

I decided to try making homemade crackers the other day. Reasons: a) the ones I can buy have too much artificial crap in them; b) any box I buy goes stale or expires before I can eat them all and c) I didn't think it would be that difficult. I'm still pretty good with a rolling pin. I tried this vegan recipe with just pepper and salt as a trial run. They came out okay; a little like pie crust chips. I need to roll the dough out much thinner and add some rosemary next time.

Although the county quilt show is being held again this year, with Delta still raging here and people not taking it seriously I decided not to go. Instead I started looking through the many years of pics I've taken at the shows in the past. I remember how blown away I was by this paper-pieced swan. So many tiny bits of fabric. The box lunches they sold in the little outdoor cafe were wonderful, too. I've always been impressed by what little old ladies in this area can do with fabric and thread. This was the quilt that made me determined to learn how to do bargello piecing -- and I taught myself, too. Mostly I just miss being able to walk around an enormous room filled with so much creativity. Ah, well. Maybe next year.

I have to do a trial run before I start my Jane Eyre slow stitch project; for this I need to transfer this image onto cloth without using chalk, pencils or any sort marking. The technique involves tracing the image onto the tissue paper, and then pinning it to the fabric and stitching through it. I hauled out my gift tissue paper, but then I got an idea. Instead of tracing I taped a piece of tissue paper to some card stock and printed the image on it with my laser jet printer. Once I cut the tissue paper off the card stock (removing the tape tears the tissue paper) I had the perfect image transfer. I'm going to test this on muslin first to see how it will look, embroidery-wise, but I think it's going to work. Stay tuned to see the results.

As I'm a masochist I decided to try my hand at a bully romance, just to see if I could make it work on the page. The result is my new short story Yours , which you can read if you click here . Image credit: Wokandapix from Pixabay

In my eternal quest to find a fun, holiday-themed recipe to make as food gifts for our neighbors I tried this gingerbread coffee cake recipe . I happen to love gingerbread, and it definitely would be an interesting gift. I sampled a small sliver to test the results, which were a mixed bag. As promised in the recipe notes the cake itself isn't that sweet, and does taste like gingerbread. But for me it didn't partner well with the icing drizzle and chopped crystalized ginger topping (and on the latter, whew. That stuff is very gingery-spicy.) The icing was far too sweet and had no real flavor to it, while the chopped ginger had too much bite. Part of the problem is me. My grandmother always made real gingerbread (like cake, not cookies) with a lemon-flavored topping that sits in the back of my head and to which I compare everything I try to make. Anyway, I might try and tweak this recipe in the future, but for now I'm back to square one.

Taking a day off to refill the well. See you tomorrow. Image Credit: Larisa K

My second blind date with a book went much better than my first; I read all of Paula Hawkins' novel The Girl on the Train in one day. What I liked about this blind date: the writing, which was spare, elegant and cleverly executed; the snowballing pacing, the three points of view presented with dates, which helped me keep the convoluted timeline straight in my head, and the mystery itself, which aside from one barely noticeable slip was quite deft. What I didn't like about this blind date: I'm not a fan of unreliable narrators, alcoholics or endless self-pity parties, all of which saturate this book, so I skimmed a lot. I knew who the killer was going to be almost from the beginning because of that authorial slip (which I will be nice and keep to myself.) Most of the characters were artificially rather than convincingly flawed. The references to sex had these odd amnesiac-style time gaps, i.e. I turned as he put his arms around me, warm and aroused. Afterward we...

The Korean drama series Twenty-Twenty might seem like a typical college romance story, but it surprised me in a lot of ways. While the romance is understated and elegantly slow, it is woven through with weighty issues like bullying, Tiger moms and familial disintegration, and how that affects those who experience it as they cross the threshold into adulthood. New college freshman Chae Da Hee (Han Sung Min) has a very strained relationship with her mother (Bae Hae Sun), whose strict rules and demanding expectations have made her perpetually miserable since middle school. Mom, who is unmarried, doesn't allow Da Hee to date, socialize or even think for herself. While she exhausts herself trying to please her mother, by the time she begins college Da Hee is on the brink of emotional collapse. She tries to fit in with the other twenty-year-olds, but Mom won't even allow that and barges in trying to control everything. Da Hee also has two other problems: Jung Ha Joon...

On my first blind date with a book I read 68 pages of Erica Ferencik's Into the Jungle before I threw in the towel. It took me four tries to get that far along in the story, and was probably 67 pages more than I should have read, but I wanted to give the story a chance. Things I liked about this blind date: not a single thing. Things I disliked about this blind date: Everything. I'm not kidding, everything. From the cover art with its blinding yellow accents (I should have taken that as a Do Not Enter warning) to the over-wrought, thesaurusitis writing and a collection of characters so juvenile, unrealistic and (admittedly, artfully) repulsive I had zero sympathy for all of them. This book is a steaming pile of crap dressed up like a story -- and yes, I would say that to the author's face. My overriding thought every time I turned a page was Can I stop now? Please? I know I should not feel this way; the novel got a starred review from Publishers Weekly, too...

This was our little Thanksgiving dinner last year, when it was just the three of us. Time keeps whittling down my favorite holiday; this year it will be just me and my guy, and we likely won't even have a turkey.* That will be a first in 35 years. I feel about Thanksgiving the way other people do about Christmas, and while it's a lot of work it's my favorite holiday. Of all the Thanksgivings I've had in the past sixty years, only three were truly terrible: one when I was a kid that I don't talk about (#1 most miserable); the time I roasted two turkeys together and hosted fifteen people whom I cooked for and served with zero help (the largest and #2 most miserable); and the one I spent in basic training (the #3 most miserable.) I have no pictures of any of those, thank heavens. In addition to doing all the cooking I'm the one who takes all the pictures, washes all the dishes and puts away all the leftovers. I suppose no one else cares because to them it...

To read my short story Paths , click here.

Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds is an epic, dazzling film that hurls you into the Korean version of the afterlife while showcasing some of the most impressive special effects I've ever seen in any movie. The story begins with the death of firefighter Kim Ja-Hong (Cha Tae-hyun) who jumps out of a burning building with a child in his arms. The kid lives, but he dies at the scene. Two strangers inform him that he has passed away right on schedule, and toss him into a vortex that takes him to the world of the afterlife, where he meets his three guardians: Gang-rim (Ha Jung-woo), Haewonmak (Ju Ji-hoon) and Lee Deok-choon (Kim Hyang-gi). At the gates of the afterlife Ja-Hong learns that he is considered a paragon (an exemplary person who lived a noble and self-sacrificing life) and is eligible to be reincarnated -- but there's a catch. First he has 49 days to make it through seven hells in which he will be judged on his sins. His three guardians will help and defend...

Now that the puppies are a little older and house-trained I have a bit more time for leisure reading. I decided to try something different and ordered a "blind date with a book" box that came with these three titles: Into the Jungle by Erica Ferencik, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, and The Goddesses by Swan Huntley. On the plus side these are all used books, and I haven't read any of them or their authors. I've already started Into the Jungle , which may be one I put aside fairly quickly (my life is still too short to waste on books that don't engage me at all) but I'm giving the author another couple of chapters to win me over, so we'll see. I've never gone on a blind date with anyone or anything, but I'm fairly sure walking out after a few minutes is bad manners. I know the Hawkins book was a monster bestseller and ended up being a movie, too, I believe. Probably why I never read it. The Huntley book (Swan? Really?) looks l...

Twice now I've seen what looks like a finger sticking out of the ground in the yard near our woodpile. It's almost always got flies on it Turns out it's a mushroom, probably some variety of mutinus elegans, aka the elegant stinkhorn (it looks just like them minus the icky top.) Although it's not poisonous, it creeps me out.

I'm probably going to do one more slow-stitched project before I think about doing anything for the holidays; I want to do an homage piece to Jane Eyre, one of my favorite books. I started with a rummage through this basket of all the hand-dyed and vintage fabics I've saved. I narrowed down the choices for the background fabric to these two hand-dyed pieces. To audition them, I simply put my project elements on top of the fabric to see how everything works together. This fabric, which is an organically dyed old Kitchen Aid linen towel, seems at first glance to me to be a bit too light for my theme. My other choice is very Gothic; the organically dyed synthetic. A bit too dark, though, as it seemed to swallow up the colors of my elements. The contrast between both of my background fabric choices made me think, too. Is Jane Eyre really that dark of a story to me? Mostly of it is pretty dismal and dreary. But when I first read the novel as a girl I felt a strong ...