Color-block Afghan (finally!)

Posted on March 23, 2018 by Thistle

It is done! After about 20 months of work, I’ve finally completed this gargantuan project that I admittedly almost quit multiple times. But I made it. It’s done. Yay!

I could leave this post at that, but I won’t. This particular pattern comes from a book called Unexpected Afghans by Robyn Chachula, and the pattern, by Leigh Radford, is the Behrens Color-block Afghan. In the essentials, it’s easy: small, two-round double-crochet squares (a variant of the traditional granny square) sewn together with an overcast stitch (whipstitch) to make an afghan of giant color blocks. There are seven colors to block and you get to choose your own (yay!).

This is one of several aghans I marked from this book to make, and it became my first attempt because of a yarn sale I happened upon in the summer of 2016. A bunch of Lion Brand Heartland yarn skeins went on sale for $2 each in a clearance bin, which is a really awesome price. Colors were limited, but I got five different colors and multiple skeins of certain colors. Black became my default big block (plus connecting thread, plus edging) because five of those skeins were available, heh. Otherwise, I picked out a few other colors for the rest of the afghan, and created my design. Colors chosen in the Heartland yarn were Black Canyon, King’s Canyon, Glacier Bay, Sequoia, Great Smoky Mountain, Yellowstone, and Hot Springs (aka black, green, teal, blown, grey, yellow, and purple).

The square pattern was easy enough, but time-consuming. The basket above shows the full set of squares, all 414 of them, needed for this afghan. I began making them in July 2016 and finally finished the 414th in April 2017. That’s when I discovered my folly: this project was going to need a LOT of hand-sewing…and man, I hate hand-sewing. First, every square in an 18-square line had to be stitched together individually, the ends woven in and cut. (See picture below of a line before the ends were cut – looks like a messed up caterpillar!) Then each line had to be stitched to the previous line, a process that usually took me about an hour to complete, excluding the time it took to create the line in the first place. After my first line, I said hell-no and nearly threw the squares away. But this particular color-block pattern was so pretty, and so I kept them, and came back to the process every couple weeks. This is why it took me so long to finish! I really, really don’t like sewing!

Eventually, though, I got into a routine of doing about five lines per month. Slow, painstaking, and often causing my entire right arm to go numb from repetitive movement…but I got there. And the end-result is totally worth it. In the sunlight like below, it almost looks like a cloth-version of stained glass!

Honestly, I’m not sure I’ll ever make another afghan. I’ve cut back crocheting a lot due to the pain in my right shoulder (not just from this afghan but a long recurring problem). If I do decide to make another, it’ll be one that I don’t have to sew! This was just too much for me, and while I love the end result, I was not particularly thrilled with the process or the length of time it took to finish. Still, I’m glad I didn’t throw out my squares and that I persisted through a year of sewing to finish, because the colors are just gorgeous and I now have an afghan of my own to put on the back of one of our couches! I’m proud of myself for persisting and making it through, and now it’s time to put crochet on hold for a bit, haha!

Posted in Crochet | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Wellness Wednesday – Basics

Posted on March 21, 2018 by Thistle

Seven years ago, when I was on my first weight loss journey, I began with some very basic principles. My goal was to eat “healthy but reasonable,” a way I could eat for the rest of my life. I would cut back on excess junk and snacks, but not cut it out altogether. I would make myself eat more produce, a hard task for me. I would also follow intuitive eating cues, both by removing all distractions while I ate (no phone, no tv, no books, no computer, etc) and by eating until “no longer hungry” rather than “full.” On the exercise side, I planned to do 5-6 hours a week of primarily cardio with some strength training, mixing up higher- and lower-intensity workouts. Additionally, I restructured my life so that it included more balance, more interests, more sleep, and better habits. After two months, I added calorie-counting via Sparkpeople to my routine.

This basic plan worked for me for quite some time. To get an idea of a typical day’s diet for me, you can look at my review of Around the World in 80 Diets. That was an actual day’s food around the time of that review, and is more or less representative of what I was eating at the time: a healthy-but-reasonable diet. After nine months and a lot of weight lost, however, I ran into a bit of a wall. Insomnia struck in a major way, and my weight loss rate cut in half no matter what I did. And what does any self-respecting data-nerd do in this situation? They tinker. And I did. I changed up my exercise routines and plans, my macro-nutrient ratios, my number of calories, all sorts of things. Through the tinkering, I managed to continue to lose, albeit slowly, until around when I hit my original goal (Feb 2013). After that, my body just stopped.

I wanted to lose another 20 lbs, so stopping was frustrating. No matter how much I tinkered, nothing happened. That made me desperate, so I began trying out crazier and crazier things. Cutting all processed foods: good but unsustainable. Shakeology: Ugh. Weight Watchers: way too little food! Heavy weight lifting: major PCOS-related inflammation and gain. Gluten-free due to a medicine issue: no change. Whole 30: excellent, but not sustainable, and caused massive regains with the slightest deviation from the plan. A less-strict Paleo: caused massive dehydration within five days. And so on.

I’ve tried so many things over the last few years, and nothing has helped. Even cutting out sugar to minimums only helped for about two weeks! I’m 70-80 lbs over where I’d like to be and that’s not really changing. Sometimes it feels that I’m simultaneously standing in my own shadow and blocking my own path. You’d think it would be easy to forget everything I’ve learned over the last few years and just go back to those very simple “healthy but reasonable” basic goals: Eat moderately, increase produce, exercise often but not overly much, and pay attention to your body’s cues. It’s not simple, though. It’s not simple to follow these rules and watch how slow the scale crawls when you’ve seen how it races while doing Paleo. It’s not simple to keep going as your body resists because it’s trying to protect you from the famine of losing. It’s not simple to eat well when you’ve suffered from nearly seven years of constant insomnia that no doctor has been able to diagnose or help.

(meal from late 2012)

Still, I’m trying. Trying to stop standing in my own way with all the extraneous information and baggage I’ve picked up since 2013. Trying for basics. I need to remember the things I learned in the beginning: I’m more likely to eat a salad if I throw a couple croutons in it. Having some frozen chicken nuggets in the freezer as a back-up emergency meal is better than needing to grab fast food. If a sprinkle of sugar helps me eat a bowl of berries, that’s better than not eating the berries at all. It doesn’t matter if the boys don’t like the vegetables we prepare for dinner, we need to prepare them anyway.

Reasonable macro-nutrients and calories. Reasonable amounts of sugar or junk food. Reasonable amounts of exercise. Reasonable attempts to sleep. Reasonable amounts of screen time. Just…reasonable. Sustainable. And hopefully, in the long run, productive.

Posted in Wellness | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

Top Ten Books on my Spring TBR

Posted on March 20, 2018 by Thistle

I’ve said before that I don’t have a huge list of books coming out this year that I’m highly anticipating, and I’m not the kind of person to keep a mile-long TBR list. I do have a few that I hope to get to (either to read or cull) this spring, though. In no particular order:

  1. Markswoman – Mati Rehmotra
  2. White Sand vol 2 – Brandon Sanderson
  3. The Invasion – Peadar O’Guillin
  4. A Quiet Kind of Thunder – Sara Barnard
  5. I’ll Be Your Blue Sky – Marissa de los Santos
  6. The One – John Marrs
  7. Reign the Earth – AC Gaughen
  8. Tess of the Road – Rachel Hartman
  9. The Midnight Dance – Nikki Katz
  10. The Broken Girls – Simone St. James

I imagine 75% of this list will be tried-and-culled, but my to-investigate list is getting too large, so I’m hoping to knock some of these from it this spring!

topten

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged | 3 Comments

Sunday Coffee – The Joys of Home Ownership

Posted on March 18, 2018 by Thistle

Back in mid-2014, when we were selling our house in preparation to move to Boston, I made a declaration that I never wanted to own a house again. The amount of work we’d done on that house in nine years had me frustrated – replacing the roof, siding, and windows; digging up the entire front yard to deal with a broken pipe; repairing floors and bathrooms; painting and re-texturing and replacing appliances and digging up dead trees and who knows what else. It felt like we’d put a ton of money into that house and had nothing to show for it when we sold, and it had been much the same at our previous house when we lived in Wisconsin in the early 2000s. We found a large apartment that allowed pets in Boston, and went back to renting for the first time since 2002.

Of course, I re-discovered quickly that I dislike renting more than owning. We had three more moves after Boston, and in each one, bought the house that we eventually moved into. Part of that was space necessity – it’s difficult to get apartments bigger than two bedrooms – and part was because of our cats. Then there’s the fact that everywhere we’ve lived, except Boston, it was cheaper to buy a house than rent something. Even now, when we had to pay more than twice the price of our original San Antonio house because the market exploded here in the last three years, it’s cheaper by several hundred dollars per month to own. But that does mean that all repair expenses land squarely on our shoulders.

We bought this house in August. It’s a little over 20 years old and in fairly good condition. We had to replace the water heater because it was leaking, and we chose to replace the dishwasher because it was old and didn’t work well. Recently we had to replace the roof (sigh), which was something we’d hoped to avoid for another five years, and due to the same leak issue, we still have to replace part of the kitchen ceiling. (At least insurance covers that last one.) The kitchen lights are partially replaced, and eventually we have to replace the tile in the master bathroom. All that in under seven months. And now we’ve started on the front yard.

Our property slopes from the road all the way down to the back fence. It should be terraced into tiers to prevent erosion, but no one ever did any major work on it. We have a tree in the front yard whose roots were showing on one side because of the erosion, so Jason and I have been working on how to landscape in a permanent but cost-efficient way. We drew up plans (he found an app to do this, which made the nice drawing above) and the boys started digging this week (woohoo spring break!). We already have a lot of rocks around our yards, so hopefully we won’t have to buy too much to get this work done. Just like the last two times we did a bunch of construction on our house, I might be writing a few progress posts as we go along, and posting pictures on my Instagram. Hopefully we can get the bulk of the front yard done before it gets too hot, which will be quite soon here in south Texas!

Posted in Personal | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Wires and Nerve: Gone Rogue, by Marissa Meyer

Posted on March 15, 2018 by Thistle

This is the second (and I believe final) volume of this short graphic novel series that takes place after the Lunar Chronicles. Iko is the primary narrator, and she’s on earth fighting rogue wolf-soldiers who are intent on revenge against the Lunar government. This particular volume brings up some philosophical stuff, like how much of Iko’s personality is programmed into her android software and how much is true emotion and loyalty. That whole nature vs nurture thing, only in android form instead of human. The question becomes, what actually gives a person – or creature – humanity? Their personhood, or their actions? It was a good book, and like I said about the previous volume, a nice way to see former favorite characters and learn about the post-series world. I’ve enjoyed these graphic novels and am glad to have them on my shelf for many future comfort-rereads.

Posted in 2018, Visual, Young Adult | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Happy Birthday Laurence!

Posted on March 13, 2018 by Thistle

I know I just said that on Sunday, but I had to say it again. To my kind, gregarious, sporty, theatre-loving youngest son, happy 14th!

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment

Sunday Coffee – More Birthday!

Posted on March 11, 2018 by Thistle

I said it before and I’ll say it again – it’s birthday month in our house! Laurence’s birthday is coming up this Tuesday. He’ll be fourteen. The boy is taller than me now at 5’8 and nearing the end of middle school. He had his party yesterday, with just family and one close friend over, and he chose a “fancy” theme. This meant that guests had the option to dress up for the party (it was about 50/50 who did this), and we made fancy snack foods (like baked brie and bacon-wrapped-stuffed-dates). Laurence likes his parties to be very low-key, so he usually keeps the guest list very small (he considered asking no one to come this year) and the games to a minimum.

That was pretty much the run of it this year. I got some good pictures – cutting the cake, Laurence in his new Ravens’ chef hat next to his grandmother (who wore a party hat like in Go Dogs Go), Laurence making the “serene yoga woman” face that came on the packaging of his new yoga mat…ha! We actually pulled out the yoga dice gift that I got for my birthday last week and spun to see what moves everyone had to do. My half-sister (who is only eight months older than Laurence) did awesome on them all! And she almost never does yoga!

Laurence got some good presents too, including a basketball and hoop from his Wisconsin grandparents, a bunch of stuff for his X-Wing games, and a ton of Ravens merchandise. (Can you tell he’s the sporty one of the family?) After everyone left the party and we got the house cleaned up, we went out for dinner at a local favorite restaurant. He’ll have his special dinner (General Tso chicken) on Tuesday for his actual birthday. Happy birthday, Laurence!

Tomorrow is the start of spring break for us. Wish me luck as the boys are home 24/7 for the next week!

Posted in Personal | Tagged | 9 Comments

Killman Creek, by Rachel Caine (audio)

Posted on March 9, 2018 by Thistle

To avoid spoiling the first book in this series (Stillhouse Lake, which I read last month), I’ll just say that in this book, the Proctor family is still on the run. Only now, Gwen has decided to go proactively hunting for the enemy rather than running, and the web of deception around her is growing well beyond what she expected to find.

Man oh man why didn’t I leave this series at the first book? Killman Creek was a disappointment, y’all. The things I loved about the first book? The characterization and psychology? Yeah…that was kind of a mess here. This very much felt like second-book-in-a-series rut to me. The characters changed their minds about what they thought was the truth so many times and so abruptly that it didn’t feel real. Instead, it felt like every minute change was geared toward making the plot more suspenseful. I nearly quit around the halfway point, and then again around the 3/4 point. The only reason I kept going was because I’d gotten the book via Audible and it felt like I should get my credit’s worth. (I know, I know.) It’s frustrating, because I felt like so much of the book was good and that it could have been even better if the characters weren’t going from friendly to ragingly violent to “I believe you again” in the course of two minutes.

I had some other issues with the book (particularly the dubious near-magical use of technology) but it was really the characterization that did me in. There’s a third book in the series that comes out this December, but the story is pretty much wrapped up right now and I’m not sure I’ll continue on. Certainly it’ll be with more wariness if I do.

As for the audiobook, the production was okay. There were four point of view characters each read by different readers, and I liked some of them better than others, as one would expect. Nothing really stood out to comment on.

Posted in 2018, Adult, Prose | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Wellness Wednesday – Support System

Posted on March 7, 2018 by Thistle

One of the big reasons my health has suffered so much the last four years has had to do with a lack of a support system. I’m a social creature at heart, and I don’t do well going it alone for things like weight loss and fitness. Take, for instance, the beginning of my weight loss journey in November 2009 compared to when I actually began losing weight in 2011. In 2009, I had a spark of motivation and a couple things I worked on. For about four months, I lost a little weight and felt good, but eventually I just stopped. It was too hard doing everything on my own, and I went back to maintaining the small loss (20 lbs) that I’d managed. Then I began again in 2011. It likely would have been the same, except for two things: For a month, a group of friends and I had a weight loss team competition, and after that, I discovered Sparkpeople, a social network for weight loss.

(Spark Jump Rally – Sept ’11)

That first competition helped me to have constant contact with seven other people trying to lose weight, including my husband. Then, once that was over, I immediately met a whole new group of people, both online and in person, and gained access to a lot of weight-related information I hadn’t had before. I had a platform to tell my story (long before I ever shared via this blog!), and I had people to support and who could support me. We participated in 5Ks, attended dinners and fitness events, trained for a walked half-marathon together, had online challenges, joined fitness classes, and more. All of the constant support and reaching out helped me to stay on track until my food and fitness habits were so well-ingrained and my weight loss journey so far in that I could keep going on my own if necessary.

(Sparkathon Jan ’13)

And I did. Sparkpeople wasn’t always very active as members came and went, and there were times when my brain was focused elsewhere as well. But I still kept going, and eventually hit my goal weight, and continued to maintain that goal for a long time afterwards. Even when stress and adversity hit, I did fine- until we moved. Suddenly, my entire support structure – not just people, but familiar neighborhoods, routines, weather, etc – fell apart. I tried to reach out to the local Sparkpeople groups in Boston, but they were nonexistent at the time. I still had my San Antonio Sparkpeeps, but there were no more meetups, shopping trips, group walks, dinners, or coffee dates. My virtual world was still there, but in the physical world, I was alone.

(Riverwalk meetup Dec ’12)

I’ve been that way ever since. Sparkpeople has essentially disintegrated by now. Almost everyone I knew there is gone now. The local team is completely inactive. The focus of the site is now on a communal public thread somewhat similar to twitter, and I’m just not interested. My online yoga community was nice in January, but since the TRUE challenge finished, there’s almost no one there anymore. None of my family struggles with weight or health issues, so I’ve found they can’t really help me at home. I’m alone in this, beyond my virtual friends.

(Spark dinner, March ’13)

As a social creature, this is hard for me. I do still have friends in town, of course, but many live much further away now, or have moved away, or are wrapped up in situations that don’t allow for morning walks or weekend 5Ks or other gatherings. The Yoga With Cats weekly meetup is nice, but it’s not (as of yet) something that resembles a support group or a potential new set of friends. This all makes me feel a bit  hopeless, like I’m left to my own devices and I’m unsure if I have the strength to do this all alone. I know I need to find something, but I’m at a bit of a loss at the moment.

I do, however, want to thank the small group of online folks who are ever-supportive of me on this journey. Y’all are my lifeline at the moment, and I really appreciate you!

Posted in Wellness | Tagged | 12 Comments

The Boy on the Bridge, by MR Carey (audio)

Posted on March 5, 2018 by Thistle

As this is a prequel to The Girl with All the Gifts, I don’t want to say much about the story that might give away spoilers from either book. Scaled back to the bare bones, this book details the journey of the Rosalind Franklin and her crew in a world that is only ten years into the new world. If you haven’t read either book and that sentence makes no sense, I highly recommend reading the first book and/or hopping back to my review of it (see link above) to get a better sense sans spoilers.

The Girl with All the Gifts was one of my favorite reads of 2016. I didn’t know a prequel existed until last month, at which point I grabbed it on Audible. Notably, while I call this a prequel and it does take place in a time period before the first book, the story seems to operate on the assumption that the reader has already read the previous book and is familiar with this world. I’m not sure how it would read as a standalone or first book since I didn’t come in from that perspective, but I’d recommend starting with TGwAtG.

Setting that aside, I was unsure (despite my impulse grab) that I would enjoy the book, for two reasons. First, I tried another book by Carey last year and while it was interesting and well-written, it was so explicitly gruesome that I had to quit reading. Second, I saw a lot of reviews complaining that this book was nothing but a rehash of TGwAtG, nothing new, nothing to add, and unlikable characters. I’m happy to report that both of my concerns were pointless, as it was never too gruesome and definitely in no way a rehash of the original. This was an excellent book that broadened my understanding of an interesting world, brought up a lot of fraught ethical dilemmas, introduced many nuanced characters, and closed off with an epilogue that rounded off both books beautifully.

Honestly, there’s not much more I can say here without giving away plot points for either book. I can just say that if you had any questions left at the end of TGwAtG, this book should eventually round them out for you, and if the hopelessness of its ending chilled you, you might enjoy the threads of hope that go into this book. Additionally, if you’re an audiobook junkie like I am, Finty Williams does another spectacular job with this book, particularly the way she handled the stilted and oddly-shaped narration of a fifteen-year-old autistic savant on board the Rosalind Franklin. I highly recommend both book and audiobook.

Posted in 2018, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments