A little progress

 * The gift item for a friend has been finished, and packed up and sent off. She is supposed to get it Monday; I hope the mail is on time. Picture may come after she's received it.

* Because I got ahead enough, I didn't have to bring work home with me tonight, which was good, because for some reason I was extremely tired today, although I was able to do a lab kind of as normal (it was an outdoor lab so "distancing" was easy.  Still, all of this, all, it gets old.

* So I did a little work on a project for me - this is a scarf I started a while back, using a couple different herringbone-lace patterns (the Tailfeather Scarf - the idea is it looks like a bird's plumage). I finished the first section:

I ran out of energy to start the second section, which requires more concentration.

* Started reading Mary Beard's hugacious SPQR. It's a history of Rome (as you probably guessed) and she doesn't seem to sugar coat it the way some older historians did. (It's also interesting interspersing this with the - yes, ridiculous and highly fictionalized and probably full of anachronisms - Asterix and Obelix cartoons, which in a way is seeing Rome from another perspective, that of people dominated (on some level; of course Asterix' village was famously supposed to be a holdout from Roman rule). 

I also saw the new Folio Society books for fall and am contemplating if a big series (the Farseer Trilogy) is worth being my Christmas present to myself this year (it's very expensive but it's certainly a nice-looking set, and I've gotten a *bit* more into fantasy recently....or maybe I invest in a good set of the LOTR trilogy and give it a try again, though I do tend to bog down in the battle scenes - I like the more domestic side of things better, or the sort of things diplomats or magicians or scholars or monks would do, rather than warriors)

* Hoping I can maybe work ahead tomorrow afternoon/evening and buy myself some time this weekend to do what I want. I think I've been suffering lack of downtime.