No clue where the year has gone, let alone the month. November was insanely busy and full of major happenings that I’ll be reeling from it for quite a while.
The month started out with a visit to the Fiber Festival of New England where I got up close and personal with the animals that produce the fiber I work with when I knit. It was really cool and a lot of fun and I didn’t go too overboard with buying stuff 😀 More photos at the end!
We spent Thanksgiving in Texas with Tim’s family and it was wonderful and loud and so filling (seriously I’m like juts now not hungry and it’s the night of December 1 as I’m writing this. I got to meet and snuggle all the new babies (CeCe, Liam and Riley) all under 13 months who I hadn’t met yet. Tim went out in October for a bit and spent some time with them. And we go to see a good chunk of his family. Now we’re on to NC for Christmas to see mine!
Books and Bookish Things
I read more than I thought I did this month, but didn’t quite get as far as I was hoping. I leaned fully into the MM Holiday Romances (sorry, not sorry) and enjoyed quite a few of them and was very disappointed in two of them (Zoelle and Montreux) especially because they were back-to-back.
- Mr. Naughty List (Home for the Holidays #2) – Leta Blake
- Mr. Jingle Bells (Home for the Holidays #3) – Leta Blake*
- The Geek Who Saved Christmas – Annabeth Albert*
- The Best Gift – Eli Easton*
- Snowbody Like You – Ariella Zoelle
- New Year Not You – Edie Montreux*
- The Holiday Hoax – Skylar M. Cates
I didn’t purchase any books; all my hobby money went to yarn this month. So. Much. Yarn. However, I did go overboard on galleys:
- Sink or Swim (Shore Leave #2) – Annabeth Albert
- The Best Gift – Eli Easton
- If You Love Something – Jayce Ellis
- Khabaar – Madhushree Ghosh
- A Handful of Joy – Pat Henshaw
- Portrait of a Thief – Grace D. Li
- New Year Not You – Edie Montreaux
- A Dashwood of Sense and Sensibility (Love, Austen #6) – Anyta Sunday
The good part about this is that three of them (Albert, Ghosh and Li) aren’t published until Spring 2022 so at least I’m not pushing myself too hard this last month to clear my Galley TBR list.
On the social media front these two things from Colossal (always on point) were great:
Artist Rima Day stitches and knots systems of red thread that dangle from fabric books and letters https://t.co/2cRkLJWhlK pic.twitter.com/vKLpGUw03B
— Colossal (@Colossal) November 3, 2021
‘A Library of Misremembered Books,’ published by @ChronicleBooks, is a witty, illustrated compendium of mistaken titles https://t.co/WQbC6LEXRY pic.twitter.com/eDc8E605DX
— Colossal (@Colossal) November 5, 2021
And this, SO MUCH this:
This is a before and after shot of what a single shelving unit in the library’s Teen Space would look like if we removed every book with content that could offend someone. Out of 159 books, there are ten left on the shelves. pic.twitter.com/66meLdZFy4
— Pflugerville Library (@PflugervilleLib) November 11, 2021
I love how sassy it is, but also how accurate it is.
Unrelated, but the big to-do in the middle of the month was more astounding in that I was part of the group that was swept up in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness wipeout, so no more student loans. I’ve spent the last 12 years diligently paying off my student loans at a level I could afford and all of a sudden, they’re all gone. I was projecting March of 2023 because of the horrible system they had at the beginning and my first 3-4 years not counting, but they counted them and wiped them out and didn’t even tell me for a few days! It became real when I saw it on the Fed Student Aid website this past week. So yeah wow.
What’s Next?
I have A LOT of knitting to do so my reading will probably suffer. When you add in that I have two weeks left of my last class toward a marketing certificate, I’m just crossing all my fingers I can finish reading Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and a few of the ARCs I have lined up. Joyce is a slog and this short novel is no different!
Hope you have a a happy winter! And as promised more photos from the festival:
Love it, spending more on yarn than books, we’ll expect to see some images of the final masterpieces on here too! Love that you got up close and personal with the animals whose fibre you use. Happy knitting.
I really should get better about posting the final pictures to here AND to instagram. I’m the worst about it, especially as most of them I make for gifts and just wrap them up and send them away as soon as I’m done.