Thank goodness that's over

"That" meaning either the Kavanaugh confirmation circus, the 5 weeks of feeling too sick to write, or the 6 weeks of cloudy-and-rainy... all together left me with nothing to say that anybody would want to hear.

On the bright side, all that rain has inspired the basil to burst forth gloriously; I'm feeling well enough to take advantage of it and fix pesto for dinner; and an exhaustive (and exhausting) series of medical tests, while failing to account for the long miserable spell, have found that I am clinically perfectly healthy. And now I actually feel well enough to take advantage of that theoretical health!

So: pesto, as I mentioned; walking up and down the house to remind my muscles that they're not retired yet; and getting back to the unfortunate characters whom I abandoned at a particularly difficult moment (one of them just caught fire.)

And having read and/or rejected a vast number of lightweight genre novels (constant reading was a way not to think about the unpleasant aspects of illness) I'm in dire need of more fluff. And, in general, I need to discover some new writers. Anybody have any recommendations?

The Horror! The Horror!

I've been reading a series of "cozy" English mysteries by Veronica Heley. "Cozy" I generally take to mean quiet, domestic mystery stories without anything that's going to give me nightmares.

These books fill the bill, and I'm quite enjoying them... but every so often the protagonist decides to cook something, and the writer gives us the details. As, for instance:

Ellie sauteed some onions, threw in some chicken drumsticks, a tin of chopped tomatoes,some herbs, half a chicken stock cube, and topped off with hot water. There, that could go in the oven on medium until they were ready to eat.

And people keep telling me English cooking has improved.

Finally, a passable arrangement

So, I dyed all this fabric and screen printed it and discharged it with silkscreens of ancient texts (Irish, runes, and cuneiform) with a vague idea of doing a second shrine-inspired composition. (Shrine Composition #1 is on the shelf under the coffee table at the moment, being hand quilted; I'll pin it up and take a shapshot once the Great Purple Monstrosity is off the board.)

The idea for the Great Purple Monstrosity, aka Shrine Composition 2, is to go back to the origins of the word. "Shrine" comes from Latin "scrinium," meaning a thingie to hold books. I want the incomplete and overlapping layers of text to reference ancient writings; then I'm going to make a scroll to put in each of the "niche" areas. The niche idea is taking off from the niche full of fabric-wrapped books I saw at the Jama Masjid in Delhi a few years ago. I don't know why the "niches" here are half-window blocks. I tried some full-window blocks and didn't like the way they looked. I kind of like it this way, with some openness and some confusion about perspective.

Anyway, I've been pinning this thing up and fiddling with it and discarding "window" fabrics for quite a while, and today I finally don't feel compelled to move anything. I'll give it a couple of days and then start sewing - umm, well, with packages to wrap and stockings to stuff and Christmas dinner and both my girls in Austin for Christmas, it will probably stay on the design board more than a couple of days. We'll see. In the interim, if anybody has any suggestions for improving the composition, I'm all ears. (Try to ignore the fact that the strips aren't pinned exactly straight. I got awfully tired of positioning strips during the last week of the design phase.)

Now that I'm looking at the snapshot, I'm beginning to feel that the big windows should be below the smaller windows. Dither, dither, dither.