Monday, Monday

Happy Birthday, Carie!





Is that not an adorable puppy, or what? And one of these days I'm going to figure out how to print out the pictures and give them to her mom. (Even though she's told me how, at least twice.)


See those seven stitches on the dpn? What idiot reads the directions and adds two stitches in the middle of those seven? Even if "pick up two stitches at the underside of the thumb" is too hard, you would think that, I don't know, glancing at my thumb would have told me the underside of your thumb is on the topside. Opposable, and all that.

In my defense. Mittens. Who wears them? We've had snow here, twice, in the last forty years and I bet you couldn't scrape a decent snowball from both of those snowstorms. And I'm an idiot. Give me lace.



But a pair! And they're almost the same size and everything! Woot! Woot!


The Summer Reading Challenge is coming to an end this Thursday. (As is Kat's Summer Reading Program.) Amanda, who hosted the Challenge, asks about it on her Sunday Book Talk post.

Read Falls the Shadow by Sharon Kay Penman this weekend (Edit: Argh! (580 pages). Marji sent it to me in the beginning of the summer. What a great book! It's a little before and after my period (it features Eleanor of Aquitaine's granddaughter, Nell, Eleanor of Aquitaine being one of my favorite historical women) and her husband, Simon de Montfort, the Earl of Leicester, pre-dating (by a few hundred years) my favorite Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley. No relation between the two, just the title, but it was a fascinating look into a period of history I'm not that familiar with.

Weak kings, brutal battles between relatives, treachery, honor, love, family. I can't wait to read The Reckoning, part three in this trilogy. I can't believe I've never read Sharon Kay Penman's books before, she's much more historically accurate than most of the historical novels I've read, and furthermore, she explained at the end where she took poetic license and why.