Fall in love with as many things as possible

I plan to pull one card from the Ceccoli Tarot each day in November.

Today's card: VI The Lovers. "A choice is offered to you that could change everything. Listen to your heart's guidance. Follow the path of love."

Key concepts: Sacred or profane love, moral choices, soul mates.

(From the Ceccoli Tarot LWB.)

Generally, The Lovers card is not about romantic love per se, but about choices, or it could be about being in love with some*thing* rather than someone.

My theme for the holiday season is "Fall in love with as many things as possible," so it is apropos for the first card of the month.

This year has been really hard, starting with Bob's hospitalization in January, and since then it's just been one thing after another. This time of year is hard for me at the best of times, but lately it's seemed worse than usual. So I'm going to make a real effort to enjoy the holiday season, starting right now, with my birthday month. I'm going to take a lot of pictures, and hopefully blog every day. I guess we'll see. I've got a good start!

And I'm definitely in love with this deck. I had heard about it months ago, but since it wasn't out yet, I had forgotten about it. Then I saw someone else post something about it, and immediately went to Amazon and ordered one. There is a mini deck coming out in February, and I have already pre-ordered it. I prefer the mini decks, they're easier for me to shuffle and carry, but in this case, I will want both.

Sock Yarn Addict

With enough sock yarn in my Ravelry stash to make sixty pairs of socks--enough to knit a pair a month for five years--I should probably just give up and say that I have a Sock Yarn Collection instead. (Click for larger version if you're curious.)

The current plan(ner)

I was reading a "mommy blog" post the other night about buying school supplies. I would post the link, but I can't remember where it was. It was about spending a fortune on school supplies, not being able to find leftover ones from the year before, having to conform to school lists, etc., but, as is often the case, the comments were as interesting as the article. One of them struck me so much that I took a screen capture so I could copy it. It said:

"Mostly, I just think about how with every pen or notebook I've purchased (or that has been purchased for me) I have also consumed hope. Hope for organization, for uniqueness, for a clean slate, for the ability to be ready when the world (surely) imparts some knowledge upon me. And should that knowledge require a protractor or gel pen to understand, I will (by god I swear) be ready."

I have purchased SO many notebooks and pens over the years. So many different configurations, Franklin Planners, Levenger Circa, Moleskine, Piccadilly, and on and on. I might be a little OCD about it . . .

And planners. I've failed so many times to keep up with a planner. The closest I've come is the Franklin Planner binder with a Daytimer filler that I just happened to have started in January before Bob went into the hospital. It was great then, and as I've said before, I think it saved my life, because I wrote down everything that happened, everyone I met, everyone that visited, all the doctors and nurses and all the test results, and while I would never have been able to remember all of that information, I had it written down and could access it easily.

I kept it up for awhile, but it's so big and heavy, I started leaving it at work, and now it resides in a drawer there. It's just too big and bulky to carry around every day. So I downsized within the Daytimer universe. Many years ago I went to work for a commercial real estate company. When they hired someone new, they routinely ordered a monogrammed Daytimer wallet of your choice, which thrilled me! I got a burgundy leather one, and it's stayed beautiful for about twenty years.




I decided to try it again, and ordered a years' worth of monthly filler books. I've discovered that one of the reasons I love, and tend to stick with, monthly planners with either loose leaf pages or separate monthly books, is that if I mess something up, I get a new chance, a new start, every month. I choose the two-page per day kind, with the left-hand page dedicated to to do lists, expenses, and appointments, and the right-hand page is blank for notes.




So that's the current plan(ner).

What I'm reading now

I was reading this article today: The End of the Ambitious Summer Reading List, and it started me thinking about the books that I've read throughout my life.

There were the school libraries, of course. I read my way through the Dick & Jane books, working up to Dr. Seuss. I particularly loved "Harold and the Purple Crayon."

When I was growing up, we lived within walking distance of the public library, which was huge for me. You could check out ten books at a time, and I spent the summer walking the couple of blocks to the library, getting my stack of new books and bringing them home to read, reading them, and going back for a new stack. I remember sitting on a lawn chair in the garage, watching over a garage sale on the driveway, reading hard-boiled crime -- Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain. When I got my weekly allowance I walked to the drugstore and agonized over which Agatha Christie novel to buy next, until I owned them all (or at least the ones the drugstore had in stock). I read James Michener ("Hawaii"), and Arthur Hailey's "Airport" and "Hotel" honed my love of stories set in discrete, confined spaces.

High school saw me reading Anya Seaton's historical novels, and I still remember the thrill of discovering J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy on the library shelf. The first Stephen King story I read was "'Salem's Lot," serialized in Cosmopolitan Magazine, as I recall, of all places. And I eventually read my way through all of them. Ray Bradbury and Clifford D. Simak introduced me to science fiction.

I'm not really sure how I became such a voracious reader. My parents didn't read novels. They both read the newspapers, and my mother read some health-based nonfiction. We had a complete set of the "Happy Hollisters" books, and when I didn't have anything else to read I would pick a volume of the encyclopedia off the shelf.

I have always read purely for enjoyment, but I think my attention span has gotten a little shorter than it was when I was in high school. My interests have changed, certainly. I do occasionally think it would be fun to re-read The Lord of the Rings, but I no longer find historical romance interesting. In order for me to read romance, it has to involve some sort of paranormal element--vampires or werewolves or dragons--and even then, I have a fairly small interest range. I tend not to read anything set in the past; the setting needs to be present day or future.

I love discovering a new author, and will sometimes read my way through a whole series, one after the other. I read Thea Harrison's "Elder Races" series that way, immersing myself in her world of shapeshifters. I actually got the first book in the series, "Dragon Bound," quite awhile ago, either for free or for $.99. It didn't really interest me--a book about a man who can shift into a dragon?--but for some reason I started it, and absolutely loved it. I ended up reading all 8 novels, plus several novellas and shorts, and then listening to the whole series in audiobook form.

Lately I've been reading a lot of "cozy" mysteries; currently it's a series called "Maternal Instincts" by Diana Orgain about a new mother who gets involved in solving mysteries. Like most cozies, it's not really based too much in reality, but if I can suspend disbelief in order to read about men turning into dragons, I guess I can read about a mother with a newborn solving murders.

What I've been up to

I know that I haven't written in a LONG time. I had two people contact me this week to say that they missed hearing from me, so I thought I would at least jump on here and post an update.

We're doing fine. Bob spent four weeks in the hospital, two of those in an induced coma, and then two weeks in a rehab facility to get his strength and mobility back. In the middle of February, he came home, and a few weeks later when the doctor said it was okay, he went back to work, part time at first, then full time after a couple of weeks of that.

In June he had some more surgery to repair two additional aneurysms that the surgeon had noted during the original emergency surgery, but didn't deem serious enough to do at that time. This time, he only spent two days in the hospital, and about a week off work.

He's now back to work full time, and pretty much back to normal. He still has some pain, but he's working through it. He's had a lot of appointments with the surgeon and the cardiologist, and a couple of CT scans to be sure that everything is still in place, and it seems to be.

I've been busy at work; I used up all my paid time off while Bob was in the hospital. I wouldn't have wanted it any other way -- I felt like I needed to be there so I could talk to as many doctors as I could, and, of course, to be there for Bob, even (or even more so) during the time when he was unconscious.

We moved our offices in May, and I was pretty involved in that. We're now a few blocks farther south, in the Crossroads Arts District rather than the River Market. There is construction going on down here, too, but I've been happy to get away from the streetcar construction! I have to walk farther to get to work now--the parking lot is a couple of blocks away--so I've been working out various strategies to carry what I need to. Right now it's a combination of a medium-size crossbody bag (a Vera Bradley On the Go Crossbody) and a small tote back to hold my Kindle, my current knitting project, and my lunch.

In an effort to pare down, I bought a new Kindle, so I don't carry my iPad every day anymore. And I got a new desktop computer at work, so I no longer have to carry a laptop back and forth. I've also been experimenting with various configurations using a (Vera Bradley, of course) backpack. One of these days I'll have it all figured out, or maybe I'll keep changing it up. It's fun, anyway.

I bought some crazy new Sketchers, and we bought Bob a new recliner. I made some jewelry, and a made a couple of new websites for people, and I'm working on a couple others. I've been test-knitting a sock pattern for a designer, which has been fun.

I've just kind of gotten out of the habit of posting here, but I'm going to try to start doing it again, at least occasionally. In the meantime, I'm on Instagram quite a bit, as evidenced by: