2023, Go!

Ugh.  Back from the vanishing act again!

We spent December in the UK with Wonderful Husband's family, which was lovely on so many levels!  But it did mean that not much sewing got done.  Well.  I took a few baggies of 2" squares with, and borrowed a sewing machine for a couple of sessions, so I'm up to 150 of the 210 strips I need for a project.  But mainly it meant that I still haven't finished Squiddle and Niecelet's Christmas quilts!  And Family Christmas 2.0 happened this last Saturday.  So I need to get cracking!

At the local quilt show in October, Squiddle saw this quilt and fell in love with it:

It was even titled "Reds for [Squiddle's real name]", so clearly it was meant to be!  I plotted it out bigger (bed sized) and started work.  Here's how far I've gotten:

So clearly more work has to be done!

Things I did get accomplished while in the UK, however, was starting to read books again!  I took five with me, and finished all of them.  They were: The Lightning Thief (375pp), The Sea of Monsters (279pp), and The Titan's Curse (312pp), all by Rick Riordan; A Deadly Education (313pp) by Naomi Novik; and A Brightness Long Ago (416pp) by Guy Gavriel Kay.  The Rick Riordan books were written for middle schoolers, and so are like potato chips: easy and fast to read.  A Deadly Education took a while for me to get into it, between the main character's hostility and the world-building, but I'm looking forward to reading its two sequels.  And Guy Gavriel Kay's books are always dense reading but well worth it.  They're also referential to other books in the series, and make me want to reread them.  After getting home, I immediately started the next book in the series, which I think helped.

Which brings me to January's reading.  Thus far it consists of: All the Seas of the World (496pp) by Guy Gavriel Kay, the direct sequel to the above; Nick and Charlie (153pp) by Alice Oseman; Torn (436pp) by Rowena Miller; and The Battle of the Labyrinth (361pp), The Last Olympian (381pp), The Lost Hero (553pp), The Son of Neptune (513pp), The Mark of Athena (574pp), and The House of Hades (583pp + 42pp short story), all by Rick Riordan.  Yes, I'm reading my way through the entire Percy Jackson oeuvre.  The only reason I'm paused is because I'm still waiting for the next book to arrive in the mail.  Regardless, nine books (4092pp) in one month seems pretty decent to me.  And, I need to purchase the two sequels to Torn, now that I've finally gotten through it.  I started trying to read it during the height of the pandemic, but I just didn't have the headspace to explore new worlds at that point; now I do, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  (Thank you, Morag!)