Covid-19 Life: Books, Quilts, Insurrection, Health

Nine days into the new year. There is nothing 'normal' about this January.

Insurrection and violence. Highest number of Covid deaths in one day. Bitter cold but no snow here. 

We were watching Congress on television and had got to Arizona and were about to turn it off when the camera switched to the scene outside the Capitol. We watched for hours. We did not eat dinner that night, our appetite gone. The only reason I got to sleep was because I spent an hour in the quilt room and had a happy book to read before bedtime.

We were thrilled to receive a letter from our health provider about signing up to be called for a Covid vaccination. It will take some weeks, but still! By spring perhaps we will return to a store and feel more comfortable visiting family, with masks, but actually visiting.

We have had our car for two years now, and have reached 6,000 miles! We took it out for a spin yesterday, going nowhere, hoping the battery won't die this winter. As did our son's truck battery. (He works from home.) It's been so cold, I have not gone for a walk. Perhaps today, as the sun is shining and that will trick me into thinking it is warmer than the 30 degrees the thermometer reads.

The quilters Zoom and try to show off our work, holding it up to the computer camera. I am hand quilting still, but have finished my machine quilted project which is ready for binding. And I started--finally--the Michigan Lighthouse quilt. I bought the first Aunt Mary's pattern almost twenty years ago!!!

I have twelve blocks fused. Next, I need to ink in details and then machine applique the raw edges.

Books in the mail include At the Edge of the Haight by Katherine Seligman from Algonquin Books. 

And The Great Indoors by Emily Anthes, a Goodreads win.

New to my NetGalley shelf is 

• The 12 Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White.

Along with my books for review, I am reading Barack Obama's book A Promised Land, a Christmas present. And just before bed, Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. I had heard people talking about as a favorite book and picked up a 1948 edition at a library book sale. 

Reading a fun, happy, book before sleep really helps! I have been reading Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature by Angus Fletcher which talks about the impact of literature on the chemical stimulus in the brain. And in The Great Indoors, I just read the chapter about the importance of hospital patients seeing nature as part of their healing.

Literature, creativity, nature. It's all so important during these stressful times.

My brother lives on a canal to a lake and the deer have been bedding in his yard outside his family room window. The also eat his plants and the bird feed scattered by the birds, squirrels, raccoons and other critters who feed there.

Recently, my brother was at the Elk Park in Gaylord, MI. 

And, walking at Kensington Metro Park, he and his girlfriend encountered Sandhill Crane and a hungry Titmouse.

My brother built a covered bridge over his cabin's tiny stream. A very scenic sight in winter! Here, the grass is just beginning to lose it's green and we have not had enough snow to actually shovel. Yet.

Stay safe.