The yarn is very soft - which seems "different" to me- it's all synthetic yarn (and generally I prefer wool, but this was a yarn I wanted to try out). It's one of those ombre yarns or "cake" yarns, where there are gradual color changes. I chose the sky blue one; the color changes in that are more subtle than some of the other yarns in the line, and I don't have a shawl in that color. (the color is designated NL6; I find it harder to remember color names when it's not actually, you know, a NAME).
* Apparently "Fire in the Thatch" was a random gift from either a blogreader or a Ravelry friend; my mom told me last night that my brother's (and his family's) present was still en route to me; it's supposed to arrive tomorrow. (That's fine - it's actually more fun to have stuff to open over several days). She talked about how much I'd like it and I'm wondering if it's either some stained-glass thing he made for me (he does stained-glass work as one way of trying to earn a little money - he is a stay at home dad and does some freelance writing and is also going to teach physics and biology at the local homeschool cooperative) or if it's something from the yarn shop that opened in their town (My Christmas gift was a couple different skeins of yarn from the shop).
* Went back to reading "Scarweather" (another vintage British mystery). This one is very well written; the person who wrote a short introduction for it noted that the author (someone with whom I am not familiar) was more of a "literary" writer than many of the "potboiler" type mystery writers and yes, it shows.
But also - I find of late when I'm having a bad day (or a string of bad days), particularly when I'm frustrated at human nature, I find reading anything sad or even mildly violent upsetting, and have to put it aside. Scarweather...well, this is a bit of a spoiler, but the death in it is a fairly well-liked young man, and the cousin of the young man who winds up investigating the death (because the police don't seem to want to; they'd rather write it off as "death by misadventure").
More commonly in those vintage British mysteries, the "victim" is someone that, it's implied, the world is better off without: a grasping, greedy sort of person, or someone with a violent temper, or someone who has abused people in their life. Here, the victim *may* have been involved with a married woman (the wife of his professor) but also maybe not...that seems to have been possibly his main fault. (Though there is also a subplot going on that I suspect is going to involve smuggling or espionage of some sort, and maybe he was just an unlucky witness to something he should not have seen)
I'm also still struggling with "Père Goriot." I *want* to read it, but then I get into the middle of one of Vautrin's speeches or read about how Eugene is basically requesting all the money his family has to try to set himself up as the lover of a (married) aristocratic woman, and I just kind of sigh with frustration. (I don't know. Maybe I'm a bit of an inverted snob but a lot of what I read about the aristocracy paints them as very hollow and very tiresome: most of them don't really DO anything useful, and a lot of them seem pretty corrupt)
I'm still working on "The Silver Branch," which is a bit more bracing as books go: the "good" characters are pretty clearly good, and they are trying to do something that will avenge a death and probably will ultimately be good for their countrymen and women. And maybe I really am a Bear of Very Little Brain, but I do enjoy stories where there is a character I can clearly root for, and who is doing something hard but important, and who is trying to make others' lots better (as well as his own, or even sometimes, making his lot worse to improve others'). Or maybe it's more like what Madeline L'Engle wrote in one of her essays: people don't like anti-heroes. (Oh, I guess some do, or else there wouldn't be so many books/movies/shows/etc. featuring them. But I don't like them). I think perhaps part of it for me is that I would LIKE to do something big and good and helpful, though my life circumstances make that unlikely, and I have to content myself with doing the little bits of good that I can - but it is cheering to read about, for example, two young Roman men who are going to avenge the death of a well-liked leader and try to get the usurper out.
*A happy little story: The Museum of English Rural Life (which I started following on Twitter after the whole "Absolute Unit" thing; they are a fun account and I follow a couple other museums/libraries now). Anyway, they found a bat in their rare books room. Instead of doing what many people might do with a bat, they humanely captured it, it turned out it was a somewhat uncommon species (A Nathusius' Pipistrelle). The bat was eventually released, unharmed (it seemed a bit thin so a bat keeper apparently kept it for a few days and fed it up). The bat had been dubbed "Merlin" (because of course: the MERL) and people even made it a little library card:
I don't know. Stuff like this just makes me happy because it's sweet and silly and fun, and it diverts a person's mind from the sad things going on in the world.
(And yes, the bat was successfully released to the wild, so a happy ending all around).
I think maybe I need to look through my accumulated patterns - I am quite sure I have a knitted one - and make myself a toy bat I can name Merlin.
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