Covid-19 Life: Books, Quilts & Vaccinations

On Friday, my husband received his first Covid-19 vaccination. And next Thursday I will get my first vaccination. It is a great feeling, nearly euphoric, after a year in retreat, to know this is the beginning of the end of a very scary time.

I understand that I will be wearing masks and still being careful, but we can schedule our missed eye exams and dental checks without feeling so vulnerable.

My spring reading list has gotten grown to massive proportions! 

I have Finding Freedom by Erin French from BookishFirst. It arrived on bread making day.

I have had numerous books offered to me by publishers and my NetGalley shelf is overfull!

New on my NetGalley shelf:

• The Man He Became: Roosevelt's Rise from Polio to the Presidency, James Tobin's The Man He Became written for middle school readers. (Tobin is married to the daughter of a couple we knew some years ago. We were given autographed copies of his previous books, Ernie Pyle's War and To Conquer the Air.)
• The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine by Clan McMahon
• Highway Blue by Alisa McFarlane, a novel about 'being lost and found'
• That Summer by Jennifer Weiner, whose Big Summer I read last year
• Lincoln in Private: What His Most Personal Reflections Tell Us About Our Greatest President by Ronald C. White
• The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live by Danielle Drelinger
• Thief of Souls by Brian Klingborg, a mystery
• The Remnants of Summer by Dawn Newton, a coming of age novel set in Michigan

These books join the others already on my shelves. Which, to remind you, include

• The Bookseller of Florence by Ross King
• Astrid Sees All by Natalie Standford
• The Sound Between the Notes by Barbara Linn Probst
• Eleanor in the Village: Eleanor Roosevelt's Search for Freedom and Identity in New York's Greenwich Village by Jan Jarboe Russell 
• Light Perpetual by Frances Spufford
• The Ride of her Life by Elizabeth Letts
• Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America by Scott Borchert
• The Reason for the Darkness: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John Tresch
• Infinite Country by Patricia Engel
• Blind Spots: Why Students Fail and the Science that Can Save Them by Kimberly Nix Berens

This is daunting!

Still, I sew on.

I finished the Nancy apron.

And I machine quilted the mushroom embroidery and vintage fabric quilt.

I have the backing for the Water Lily quilt and the Rebel Girl quilt! I am going to be a machine quilting machine.

We grew basil by seed and they are finally looking like they will survive! They are in a metal box that I painted some years ago.

This week I Zoomed to hear Diane Rehm talk about her new book through the National Writer Series. Next month I will join them again to see Imbolo Mbue, whose Behold the Dreamers and  How Beautiful We Were  I have read.

Our March library book is Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney--who will join us on Zoom!

Gus the cat got very curious when our son racked the snow off the roof.

But Sunny was chill.

I have to also have a pic of Ellie. This is from last winter when she was obsessed with squirrels.

That's all the news from The Literate Quilter.

Stay safe. Find your bliss. Spring will come and so will the end of the pandemic.

News, TBR, WIP

It's been another busy month. 

I have read 27 books so far in 2020. I finished a wall hanging this month and my yellow roses sampler quilt top is ready to be sent to the machine quilter. I finally started on an Emily Dickinson quilt.

The Wednesday Afternoon Book Club at our local library read The Marsh King's Daughter, a psychological suspense story set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Author Karen Dionne lives in Metro Detroit and we were thrilled to have her at our meeting to tell us about the book and her writing.

Before book club, my husband and I took Karen to Frittata, Clawson's wonderful breakfast and brunch restaurant.

We had a great turn out. Karen was an engaging speaker. Our meeting lasted twice as long as usual with a question and answer time and book signing after Karen's talk.

The Marsh King's Daughter has been translated into many languages; some of the foreign editions are shown below.

The next book club pick is Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I haven't read it since I was a teenager. 

I was thrilled to get a different kind of 'book mail' when Lenore Riegel, author Jerome Charyn's partner, sent me the DVD My Letter to the World about Emily Dickinson. Charyn is interviewed in the film. More about it later.

Lenore also sent me Charyn's novel Johnny One-Eye set during the American Revolution!

I used a Christmas gift card to purchase the newest book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. I read the introduction to Tightrope at the library and was hooked. The story of Kristof's hometown peers whose lives ended in poverty and tragedy is moving and offers deep insight into the conditions that have created today's political landscape.

A LibraryThing giveaway arrived, Simon The Fiddler by Paulette Jiles. I read her Stormy Weather some years ago and have News of the World on my Kindle TBR pile.

Currently Reading:

• Coming to Age: Growing Older with Poetry by Mary Ann Hoberman and Carolyn Hopley; the poems are hitting me in a personal way
• A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth: Stories by Daniel Mason whose novel The Winter Soldier I enjoyed
• Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade about the London square once home to poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and author and publisher Virginia Woolf 
• The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
• The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn

Books on my review shelf include:

• Simon the Fiddler by Paulette Jiles
• Country by Michael Hughes
• The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner
• Night. Sleep. Death. by Joyce Carol Oates
• How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue whose debut novel Behold the Dreamers I read
• The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts
• Bronte's Mistress by Finola Austin about Branwell Bronte
• American Follies by Norman Lock from his American Novel series which I have enjoyed (The Wreckage of Eden, The Feast Day of the Cannibals, A Boy in His Winter)

I made this wall hanging from Gingiber's Thicket prints for my son.

My husband celebrated his 70th birthday in February. His older brother gifted him a Charlie Harper signed print. It's been traveling through the family as another brother first owned it!

And just for fun, here is my intrepid brother with a new friend.

Shades of Karen Dionne's upcoming psychological suspense novel, The Wicked Sister! Bears are an important theme in the novel.

Quilts, TBR, News

I am busy working on quilts and reading my review books--but not preparing for Thanksgiving because our son and his girlfriend are hosting their families! 

Here is my quilt April Showers Brings May Flowers at my quilt group show and tell.

After six years, all my Wizard of Oz blocks are designed, embroidered, and set in a quilt top! I worked hard on the first designs, sketching, and resketching Dorothy and her friends and the witches. Then we moved, Seeing the Riley Blake Dorothy's Journey fabric spurred me to come up with some more blocks and finish this top! 

I have my Hospital Sketches blocks sewn together and am working on a border.

I made grand-pup Ellie a wardrobe of scarfs that slip over her collar. Also a fleece coat. We had an early snow before Halloween that lasted a week. Ellie loved it! Now we are scrambling to clean the gutters and mulch the leaves.

Ellie with her collar scarf in the October snow

We went to Orchestra Hall to hear a concert with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Maestro Leonard Slatkin directed Pictures At An Exhibition and a piece commissioned for his 75th birthday, Another Time composed by Mohammed Fairouz, based on poems by W. H. Auden and sung by Miles Mykkanen. We heard Fairouz's  Cello Concerto Desert Sorrows when it premiered with the DSO several years ago. The concert began with Rossini's Roman Carnival Overture and an encore of a Russian sailor's dance started and ended the concert.

We also bought tickets to see the Swingel Singers in a Christmas Concert.

*****

I was thrilled to notice that I am now an Amazon Top 1000 Reviewer! Whoo-hoo!

I found a note written to me by my grandfather dated right after I started college. "Write Write Write!" he advised.

I have been listening to the upcoming audiobook of Romalyn Tighlman's novel To The Stars Through Difficulties, which I reviewed here. I am so enjoying the audiobook and revisiting Romayln's wonderful story.

Several more egalleys have been added to my virtual shelf:

• Fannie Lou Hamer by Maegan Parker Brooks, a biography of the Civil Rights heroine
• The Cadottes: A Fur Trade Family on Lake Superior by Robert Silbernagel
• The Girl in White Gloves by Keri Maher, historical fiction about Grace Kelley
• Frida in America by Celia Stahr about Frida Kahol
• The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner
• Miss Austen by Gil Hornby

Still to be read are

• The Great Unknown by Peg Kingman
• A Good Neighborhood by Theresa Ann Fowler

Next up on my reading list is ARC

• Eden Mine by S. M. Hulse

Also coming is ARC

• Rachel Maddow: A Biography by Lisa Rogak

*****

Today begins a week of work in the house--we are replacing forty-year-old vinyl flooring in the entryways with porcelain tile and then installing new carpet!

Before grouting...

The carpet is fifteen years old--and maroon! We will replace it with a lighter, neutral "sand" color, as seen in the computer-generated visualizer pic below.

There will be a lot of rearranging of furniture to come. I already moved the piano from the living room into my office.

Up North and Back

This past week we took a trip 'Up North', which is an area in Michigan demarked by an invisible line but which is universally agreed (by Michiganders) to be where there is more wilderness than shopping malls. 

We traveled about four hours from Metro Detroit to Baldwin, in the middle of a state forest. We stayed overnight at the Red Moose Lodge on the Pere Marquette River, perhaps the only visitors not there for the Salmon fishing.

The Pere Marquette River in Baldwin, MI

We spent a few minutes sitting beside the river, from which a fish now and then jumped with a splash.

We dropped off the innards of my husband's Victrolia and Edison Disk Player with the only repairman in the state. I stopped at the Fabric Peddler quilt shop in Baldwin and picked up a panel and matching fabric. My sudden interest in panels is from reviewing Creating Art Quilts with Panels by Joyce Hughes. I can't wait to try her techniques out on these large flowers!

Next, we stopped in Farwell at the Elm Creek craft and garden shop. We bought a patio set of two chairs and a table that fold up. Perfect for our front yard garden! I found another panel I had to get.

At the Surry Road quilt shop in Clare, I bought some fabric for a special project.

We then headed to West Branch where my brother has a log cabin, complete with Indian, outside of town.

The trees were coming into full color when we arrived.

 Every day we headed into town to the West Branch library for the WIFI.

The cozy sitting area in the West Branch library

And of course, we shopped at their fantastic used bookstore. I found some goodies. I had Armor Towle's Rules of Civility on ebook but prefer to read 'real' books. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann has been on my TBR list, and I have heard a lot about Elena Ferrante's My Brillant Friend, and I love Andrea Barrett's writing. The Val McDermid rewrite of Northanger Abbey just looked like fun. And the William Maxwell stories was on the FREE shelf!

I stopped at Aunt Effie's Craft Closet in downtown West Branch, where I found friendly service and terrific selections.

This wall was just the SALES fabrics! There are tables of fat quarters and precuts and walls of bolds of fabric. They offer machine quilting and classes. One group is working on the Bee-autiful quilt from MODA, which I made last year.

I saw the cutest fabric on sale. I snapped a pic and sent it to my Gamemaster son, who also loved it. So the next day I returned and bought fabric to make him a quilt.

 We also stopped at the wine store.

We had rainy days, and after our daily treks into town, we stayed in the cabin reading books. We ate out for lunch and then had soup for dinner.

At the Lumber Jack restaurant, we had the most delicious bread pudding after a pot roast. The decor is quite Up North, down to the vestibule greeter.

 We love the food at the China Inn.

We hit a few of the antique shops. In the Potato Barn Anqitue Store, I found sheet music for One Meat Ball, a song my mother used to sing! It came out when she was thirteen years old.
I did not know that it was sung by Josh White and was from Cafe Society.

The lyrics go like this:

A little man walked up and down

and found an eating place in town.

He looked the menu thru and thru

To see what fifteen cents could do.

One meat ball, one meat ball, 

He could afford by one mean ball.

He told a waiter near at hand

The simple dinner he had planned,

The folks were startled one and all

To hear that waiter loudly all,

One meat ball, one meat ball,

Hey! This here gent wants one met ball!

The little man felt ill at ease

And said, "Some bread, sir, if you please!"

The waiter's voice roared down the hall,

"You get no bread with one meat ball!

One meat ball, one meat ball,

You get no bread with one meat ball!

The little man felt very bad,

But one meat ball was all he had.

Now in his dreams he hears that call,

"You get no bread with one meat ball,

One meat ball, one meat ball,

You get no bread with one meat ball.

It was very quiet at the cabin, but one day deer ran through the yard. Every day the colors grew more intense.

We bought bread at the bakery in town, successfully avoiding the doughnuts and sticky buns and blueberry pie. Outside, we met the local vet.

South of town, coming off the expressway, one can see the water tower which is painted yellow with a Smiley face, the most popular tourist attraction seen on the road Up North.

The land is hilly with fields and farms and pockets of trees and open land.

While driving we listened to a book on tape, Siracusa by Delia Ephron.

When I got home I had two books waiting for me. One was Haruki Murakami's newest novel, Killing Commendatore-- a surprise package from A. A. Knopf! I must have won some giveaway.

 And Dover Publications sent me My First Book of Sewing, which I requested for review.

I read non-review books while away: Marlena by Julie Buntin while away (review to come!), Stephen Fried's book on restauranteer Fred Harvey, Appetite for America, and started Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann.

While away, NetGalley informed me that I was approved for In the Eye of the Hurricane by Nathaniel Philbrick! I have enjoyed all his books. Also on my NetGalley shelf are All the Lives I Never Lived by Anuradha Roy, The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King by Jerome Charyn, Big Bang by David Bowman, and Daughter of Molokai by Alan Brennert. I read Brennert's Honolulu years ago and have Molokai on my Kindle to read before the new book. From Edelweiss I have Learning to See by Elise Hooper.

Also, while away I got the good news that I had won a special Book Club win: A Skype visit with author Wiley Cash to discuss his novel The Last Ballad. My feet were hardly touching the ground for a whole day! WILEY CASH! You can read my reviews on The Last Ballad here, and A Land More Kind Than Home here.

Coming home we drove out of the clouds and into the sunshine! The trees had some color, but mostly we saw green. We stopped for lunch in my husband's hometown, driving by his childhood homes and school.

It was nice to be away for six days, but even nicer to be home again! I have some sewing to do!