Real Life Things

 It's been sunny and hot again recently. Yesterday it got up to 94F and today is supposed to be the same. The hummingbirds are starting to move on. This is a sad time. But the cranes and the geese will be back soon. And Dave told me that he saw a praying mantis egg case high up under the eaves of the casita. So we have praying mantis babies to look forward to in spring. Just got to make it through fall and winter, I guess.

There's our little errant kitty, up on the wall next to the gate. He used to get up there to watch the sunset every night, but now he's getting a bit old. A couple of times in the last few weeks he's come home limping and I suspect that he's trying to jump down from places that he used to be able to jump down from but now that he's old and has arthritis, it's too much for him. He despises being kept inside though, so we do let him out still and keep him in when he needs to rest and heal. Poor guy. (FYI: He's got a stile--a wire shelf with a brick platform--to jump down onto on the other side of the gate, so he's not trying to jump down five feet or so. And on this side of the gate, he can jump down onto the garden wall.)

I finally finished Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson and I thought I'd start something non-Bill-Bryson-y but of course I went right back Bill Bryson. I'm reading his book Made in America, which is basically about how America became America and how Americans became Americans. He's starting out with how American English began to differentiate from British English. As he brings in various influences on the language, he also covers bits of history, like how some words come from Native American tribes that early settlers encountered and how those tribes fared after the encounter with white people (hint: not great) or how Lewis and Clark named almost 1,000 plants, animals, rivers and other bits of nature as they traveled for a couple of years across the land that fell under that acquired in the Louisiana Purchase and how Lewis ended his life (hint: not happily). So it's an interesting read, if a bit dry in that special way that history can be dry.

But I swear on my own grave that the next book I read is not going to be a Bill Bryson book. I mean, yes, when I ordered books yesterday, I did order another book from Bill Bryson (Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe), but I also got an autobiography (Dark at the Roots: A Memoir by Sarah Thyre) and a romance novel (Love Lettering by Kate Clayborn), so I have choices. Those are all used copies, by the way, coming from ThriftBooks online. I also ordered a kanji workbook from Amazon, though, because Jeff Bezos is not rich enough yet. I'm using kanji to keep my brain limber since Covid malaise has paired up with perimenopause and the internet to try to make me dumb. Got to fight against the dumb or else the next thing you know I'll be taking horse dewormer to try to cure Covid.

I've also been sewing. I started a new quilt using crumb blocks that I'm turning into eight-inch half-square triangles with some moody grayish purple fabric. I decided that I'm going to make a really bad quilt, like visually bad, in an effort to get my sewing mojo back. (You can laugh, but sewing, just sewing anything and not expecting it to be the greatest thing I've ever sewn is one way to coax the mojo into returning. Expectations kill creativity, man, let me tell you.) So this morning, I'm bordering the large blocks I made with a green and pink patterned fabric that has been sitting in my fabric stash for a few years now. (It's from a bunch of really cheap fabric that I bought at Walmart of all places when I began sewing several years ago. Say what you like about that apocalyptic nightmare of a garbage store, but they do sell cheap fabric. I think I paid either $1.97 or $2.97 per yard (quilting fabric usually runs between $10 and $14 per yard, with most in the $11 to $13 range), so I bought maybe 3 yards (?) of the green and pink stuff (along with a bunch of other cheap yardage) because I wanted cheap fabric to mess up when I was just starting sewing.)

Okay, enough talking. Got to get off the computer and go do some real life things.