TChem informed me (via e-mail) that Blogger sometimes won't do comments. (Perhaps that's for people who don't have Blogger accounts? I've had no problem commenting here or on other Blogger blogs...)

I don't know how to make it easier absent removing the word verification, and I'm leery of doing that because my blog is not a free billboard for viamagara or ciamalas or home reamafinancing.

(I think I'm just going to Homer-fy words I don't want to write out in their original form, by adding a "-ma-" syllable somewhere in the middle).

Speaking of Homer, I found these at Target on Saturday:



Little magnets of Homer and some of his famous sayings! (They were on the $1 aisle. I suppose they are part of the marketing blitz leading up to the Simpsons movie, which I'm frankly apprehensive about - so many movies based on half-hour stories have been very, very bad. (Or shorter than half-hour, if you consider some of the movies based on Saturday Night Live skits. I exempt "Wayne's World," which was actually really funny and a pretty enjoyable movie))

But I love Homer. I especially like the one off to the left where he is saying "Pockets are comfy." Huh? All the other magnets show Angry Homer or Foolish Homer, but that one is more like Philosophical Homer.

I also bought a set of these and mailed them to my dad; he's a Simpsons fan too and I think he'll get a kick out of them.

I've been working some on the longer-term projects.

I've added a few more rows to the crochet blanket


I have to watch how much I work on this - I do think it's crochet that bugs my shoulder.

It's interesting, going around and seeing other bloggers' finished blankets (I think Brainylady's was the one I saw most recently - each person's blanket is dominated by a different color family, I suppose if you're using scraps it's the colors you knit with most.

Mine's not big enough yet to show a dominant color (I think). It will probably be brown, because I have lots of balls of different browns, and I tend to use brown as a "spacer color" (like: I've used bright turquoise and I don't want the next color to fight with it, so I'll use brown...)

I've also been hand-quilting more on the quilt in the frame



You can just barely see my stitches there. They're not perfect...they don't totally go in a straight line where I'd ideally want a straight line, but I find that tape stuff you can use kind of annoying and I don't like drawing on my quilt more than I have to. So I accept that my "straight" lines may be a bit wonky in places. (If I had something like a Hera marker - which presses a temporary crease in - I could probably use that).

I also started reading (well, really, re-started reading) a new book last night



Except it's not a new book. It's one from the used bookstore - Time Reading Program, copyright date on this edition, 1962 (From that cover, I would have guessed 1968 - it seems very Sergeant Pepper-inspired). It's about the Crimean War and particularly about Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan and Lord Raglan (Yes. Lord Cardigan and Lord Raglan. I suspect I'm going to have a hard time keeping them separate in my mind. I can tell Lucan and Cardigan apart because Lucan's real name is Bingham - which is two syllables, like his title, Lucan, and Cardigan's real name is Brudenell, which is three syllables, like HIS title. I have to do tricks like that to keep historical names - especially names to which titles have been appended - separate).

One of the things I've picked up thus far is that in the 1830s or so, a lot of the British aristocracy was either seriously debauched, violent, or stupid. I remember writing in an e-mail to a friend about modern American "aristocracy" (e.g., a certain spoiled heiress whose name I will not name on this blog. Or maybe whom I'll refer to as Paramais) and how it seems like those we would consider our "betters" in the sense of a sort of modern aristocracy really aren't "better." And you know...considering Lord Lucan's violent temper, and Lord Cardigan's dandified, clueless stupidity, I think had I lived in that era, I'd probably have thrown my lot in with the peasant farmers of the day.

So I guess those we considered our "betters" were never necessarily so.

Anyway. I'm reading the book because I was intrigued enough by the cover to buy it (and I do love that cover) and because the Crimean War is an era I know next to nothing about (there are some references made to the earlier, Napoleonic wars - particlarly the "Peninsular Campaign" and now I'm all, "Oh, I know what that's about! That's where Jonathan Strange conjured things up to baffle the French army!" [except he didn't, at least not in the reality we inhabit. Maybe in some alternate dimension, which is just next door to the dimension where Thursday Next lives. {I like to imagine that the "infinite dimensions of the universe" proposed by some of the quantum physicists and string-theory enthusiasts are actually where the characters that we know from books reside. And perhaps, reciprocally, in Thursday Next's dimension, there's a book on the shelf somewhere, featuring MY life.}}).