The Long Winter

Who knows when I wrote this? Last week sometime? Before Christmas, certainly.
 

Omicron is starting to make its way across the state. Dave and I are being more careful than ever. The last thing we want to do is get this latest version of Covid. More people are dying this month from Covid than at this time last year, but people are thinking that the pandemic is over. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I worked throughout the day on my tedious red-and-white quilt. It's made in a quilt-as-you-go variation, with the strips of fabric applied to the batting squares. I finished that step a couple of weeks ago. Now I'm backing it and quilting over the strips themselves. I've started to join the blocks together using a modified sashing method (though I haven't started the sashing part yet). I have to cut and iron the sashing. That's after I finish backing and quilting the squares. (I have ten of the forty-two left.) After I sash them all together into rows, I'll sash together the rows. Then I will have to bind it. 

I finished my Halloween quilt in early November. I expect I'll finish this, my Christmassy quilt sometime early next year.

On Friday I went to the GI clinic and was set up for more testing. There's always more testing, isn't there? 

Dave made soup for dinner tonight, one for me using some chicken and one for himself using tofu and kimchee. My digestive system can't handle kimchee at the moment, though I would love to have a big bowl of it. Someday.

I'm still making my way through Never Eat Your Heart Out by Judith Moore. It's a depressing book at the end of the day. I skipped a whole chapter in which she describes killing and eating rabbits. Don't get me wrong, when I was a child we raised rabbits and some were pets and some were food, but I don't relish the idea of reading about killing and skinning and cooking and eating them. 

We ate a lot of things when I was a kid that aren't part of my diet anymore. Like I said, we raised and ate rabbits. We also raised and ate chickens. We raised ducks, though I don't recall eating them. My family bought sheep and goats and butchered them from time to time. Same with pigs. We also fished and ate our catch, sometimes trout, sometimes catfish. We kids fished crawdads out of the irrigation ditches and my grandmother cooked then and we ate those, too. My father would occasionally buy beef and make jerky, hanging it on string in the impromptu greenhouse he built. We ate currants (I think they were currants) from a bush in my grandmother's yard. We ate apricots from her tree and quince and sour cherries from our trees. We stole apples from the neighbor's tree and ate those. My mother had a garden and we ate whatever came out of the garden. I'm not squeamish about food that comes out of the ground or that was alive and kicking one minute and having the blood drained out of it the next. 

But reading about it is...depressing somehow. Or maybe that's just me. Maybe it's just the ongoing winter blahs.

December 29, 2021

So.

Christmas came and went. The day before Christmas we drove out along the valley and saw a bunch of cranes, ducks and geese. After dark, we could look at all the lights and decorations that the people who live in the expensive houses, the ones with more money than taste, put up. 

In the end, we had a quiet Christmas at home. Dave went out to see his mother for an hour or so and came home. My ongoing health stuff meant that we couldn't even have a decent Christmas meal. I think we had soup? I don't remember. We did have some chocolate, so that was good.

We had luminarias, though. Kelly and Kevin ordered three dozen and we added our two dozen to them. We braved the cold to light them at dusk. We haven't had luminarias in a few years, so that was nice.

I'm still reading lots. I finished Christmas Tales by William McInnes on Chrismtas. He's writing about Christmas in Australia, which means beaches and BBQ, not the white Christmases that we have in this part of the world. (It wasn't a white Christmas this year, by the way. But it was quite a gray day, so that was good.) I also re-read A Girl Called Zippy by Haven Kimmel, which was originally recommended to me by Kelly a handful of years ago and which is a delight. After that, I read America's Boy by Wade Rouse, Why I'm Like This by Cynthia Kaplan, and The Quilter's Apprentice by Jennifer Chiaverini. I just started a book called People Are Unappealing: Even Me by Sarah Barron. It's only okay.

I've got a bunch of other books on the way, including Jaques Pepin's autobiography, a book about undertakers, more memoirs from LGBTQ writers, a book of quilt blocks. Lots of stuff. (I buy online from Thriftbooks, so they're all used and very cheap and that, plus free shipping, alleviates the guilt of buying so many books.) My new plan is to outread the pandemic.

I've also recently gotten into crossword puzzles. I exhausted all the ones in my back issues of The New Yorker, so I ordered a book of New York Times crossword puzzles, the easy ones. I'm all about an easy win these days.

What else? I think that's about it. 

The days are getting longer. That's good.