Always Be

 I've been doing a lot of reading recently. In the past week or so, I've finished Neither Here Nor There (Bill Bryson) Love at First (Kate Clayborn), Beautiful Stranger (Christina Lauren), Kiss Me Like a Stranger (Gene Wilder) and I went back to Alan Alda's autobiography Never Have Your Dog Stuffed. (I had put it down because his descriptions of his bipolar mother's behavior were making me anxious.) I want to order some new books (well, used books), but I also have a not small stack of books that have been sitting on the shelf waiting to be read, including two volumes of Hayao Murakami's autobiography and this last, boring Bill Bryson (Made in America). 

The Clayborn and Lauren novels are romance novels. After reading a couple of them, I'm not sure how to feel about romance novels. They are certainly easy reads, and completely forgettable. Is that a good quality for a book to have? They remind me of the endless young adult fiction I read growing up. There was a lot of Judy Blume in there (can't stand her now, though I did go through a very short phase a couple of years ago when I picked up a handful of her books), some Paul Zindel, but most of it was just putting words through a grinder. 

Still, I am enjoying being a reader again, a real reader who reads books, I mean, not a rapid skimmer of internet articles and tweets. So I'm rewarding myself with new used books.

What else have I been doing? 

Let's see. I signed up for a year of the kanji studying app I've been using (wanikani). It's kind of like a brain exercise for me right now, something to keep my brain in the game while we all wait out this pandemic. But it's also interesting. So I study kanji every day for a short time and I've learned about 100 so far. 

I am still working on my 365 quilt, one five-inch square a day. September has been written squares (August was largely illustrated), but October will be mostly drawn. (I like to draw October-y stuff, pumpkins and so on.) So that's ongoing.

I'm still doing therapy weekly.

I have another idea for a new quilt--or at least an idea to reboot a stalled quilt project and turn it into a quilt-as-you-go project which will hopefully mean it gets done. I'd like to finish at least one more quilt before the year is up. 

Fall is here, proper. The weather is cooler now and the leaves are starting to turn and fall from the trees. Yesterday on our way to pick up a grocery order, we saw Canada geese in one of the fields along the road, so the hummingbirds will be moving on soon and the geese and cranes will come through.

Fall is an uncomfortably nostalgic time for me. Can that be turned or will it always be that way?