Wandering Around Talking To Rainbows

 Life is, weirdly normal these days, for a given value of normal. Nonetheless, normal means starting a Wednesday reading post on Monday to be ready to post on Wednesday when you should have finished your current book as you only have half a chapter left and then forgetting that yoiu’ve neither finished book nor actually hit post because your parents have been visiting. So tenses in this post may be interesting as I may have missed things while attempting to update it. 

Last Saturday I met a friend for a walk and a coffee, as she was in town to put her car in the garage, and her highly gregarious teenage daughter had begged for an opportunity to catch up with a friend - conversation, with someone she wasn’t related to, in person! We went and saw some public art - a mural and installation that can be viewed from outside the still closed arts centre. On Sunday I went round to a colleague’s house to have lunch and to record some sound effects. On Monday I was waiting in for a delivery that I was certain wasn’t going to going to get here - if it was ‘dispatched’ from a amazon depot just outside Frankfurt at 4am this morning, chances were not high of it being in Inverness by the end of the day...it’s rescheduled for Thursday but in the meantime I enjoyed watching it’s slow chug around German Amazon depots.(It did turn up on Thursday though the power adapter is for the wrong region, if I need to charge it in the states I’m sorted...)

Since I started writing this post I’ve got older! It was my birthday on Friday, and my parents were visiting, so we had a day trip to Nairn, there were walks along the beach and a lovely lunch, all else I could have asked for was an ice cream, but the queues were massive - mostly because of adhering to social distancing rules - So we held off and had some when we got home instead!

What I’ve Finished Reading/ Listening to Lately

First up I accidentally read all the 2019 Caine Prize for Literature stories in three sittings across two days, they’re all excellent. I think I talked about Skinned last time, but I’ll also be looking out for more from the authors of The Wall and Sew My Mouth. After that I moved on to Sonic Wonderland by Trevor Cox, which was pretty much as interesting as I hoped it would be. I feel like I’d rather sit down and have a coffee and a natter, or perhaps go on a sound walk with him, I seem to have questions about what he writes about that are nerdier than the general popular science audience that the book is aimed at but not like, academic textbook level. On a slightly sideways note, I picked up Noam Chomsky’s On Anarchism in HMV a while back on a whim, and picked it up to read on Monday while waiting for my parcel not to arrive. It’s an odd sort of book, more a collection of several of his essays on the subject from across the years rather than a coherent whole, but it’s interesting and the essays are well written individually. He’s refreshingly practical in his assessments, more interested in trying new things and testing ideas than being wedded to ideological purity. 

On the radio I‘ve enjoyed a series from the late 90s on water supply issues across the world - the US, Egypt, Bangladesh and the Jordan Valley- called Watershed it’s both really interesting and really depressing as a lot of it’s more concerning predictions have been proved correct. The evidence was there twenty years ago and not enough was done. So frustrating. On a less frustrating note I’ve also been listening to Sounds of Japan which is presented by Nick Luscombe, who has worked across both music producing and field recording, in Japan and other places. The programme therefor is a mixture of field recordings he’s made himself over the years and all kinds of music from Japan - folk, classical, experimental, electronic, Ainu - that we don’t hear a great deal of in the West. I enjoyed it greatly even if I did have to relisten to one episode after it caused me to fall asleep on the sofa...

What I’m Currently Reading/Listening to

Listening wise I’m enjoying a series on gardening and plants more generally, called Growing Science it’s nice short episodes, interesting but not too complex subject, so ideal for a crafting accompaniment. There’s been a lot of picking up stitches lately.
 
On the reading front, I’ve been carrying Iraq: 100 around with me in my bag a lot lately and not making much progress on it. At home I’ve just started a new non-fiction, one of the last batch of academic books I picked up in the Manchester University Press sale - always a good time for the academic film nerd - Hispanic and Lusophone Women Filmmakers: Theory, Practice and Difference, edited by Parvati Nair and Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla. I’m hoping to get through more of my outstanding TBR of academic film theory now that I have Netflix to help me out, it’s definitely easier to do the reading when I’ve got half a chance of seeing the films in question!

What I’m Reading/Listening to Next

I managed to get my library books swapped out last week, so I now have chunky hardbacks by both Amitav Ghosh (Gun Island) and Ann Leckie (Provenance) out - I didn’t purposefully pick chunky hardbacks, I just picked a couple of authors I like and asked for whatever the library had in stock by them - so one or other of them I think. Listening wise I’m not sure that I’m really in the mood to tackle anything new. Perhaps I’ll grab one of my Big Finish audios to accompany my knitting. 

On the subject of knitting, I have in fact finished another knitted item. I’ve been making a waistcoat, and after much procrastinating on the picking up stitches, it’s now finished. I played yarn chicken and won! Mostly, I had to make the lapels smaller than they were supposed to be, but given they would have been massive if I’d knitted them to actual size, I don’t feel that’s a bad thing. I feel cute wearing it, so we’ll take that as a win. I’ve also re-started a project that I’d previously partly frogged and re-knitted and then frogged again. I think this is third time lucky? I may have radically amended the pattern in order to make it work with the wool I have - I will eventually knit it as written, it’s less the pattern that’s the problem than the yarn substitution that didn’t work (this is the project that taught me the importance of yarn yardage, something I’d never really been aware of previously, in yarn substitution) but now i know that I can actually get the right wool, I’ll order some once the stash is a bit more manageable. 

On the stash-busting front, I’ve been working on some cross-stitch projects, so now I have a some cross-stitch cacti on the bookshelf and some multi-coloured owls on the wall. It started with a need for an actually nice birthday card for my big cousin J’s 40th back when the only places open were supermarkets and kind of spiralled from there. I’ve now got three empty frames hanging in my kitchen awaiting a themed trio of cross-stitch city skylines that I have planned. It’s been really nice going through projects I’ve had bookmarked for ages - years and years in some cases - and making them, my only limitation is that projects must use supplies I already have, but my goodness I’ve collected a lot of stranded cotton over the years so this is fortunately not hard! (Also I inherited a pile of threads from both a clear out at a training centre years ago, and my gran’s inexplicable collection of thread too - she liked the idea of cross-stitch more than the actual doing of it, I think, up until now I’ve mostly been working through her abandoned project knits finishing them for her, now I’m on to the actual supplies.) The only problem is that while my project list says I’ve done a whole bunch of stash-busting my stash doesn’t look appreciably smaller, the problem with the individual skeins being so small, we’re currently in drop in the ocean territory! Realistically, I could spend the next ten years stitching projects just from my stash and only need to re-supply on Aida - and maybe some black thread for backstitch purposes!