Wow, is it Friday already? Where did the week go? What did I do all week? Well, mostly I tried to stay warm. We had a couple of almost nice warm days but most of the week it’s been cold and cloudy. We have run out of dry firewood so it’s really hard to get a good fire going and our central furnace just doesn’t quite do the job by itself. Right now it’s snowing just a little bit but I don’t think there will be much and it’s supposed to be above freezing later.

Blog pet peeve: You know something that really annoys me? Well, lots of things. I suppose I’m easily annoyed though you probably wouldn’t realize it. But specifically, what’s bugging me at the moment is bloggers who don’t know how to post links and instead post URLs as text, like this: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/02/evolution-wins.html (That’s the link from the last post just for an example) I can sort of understand when people do that in the comments or someone who’s new to blogging but if you’re going to stick with this blogging thing, you really should learn to post links. Most blog platforms have a button for that but even if you’re using something so primitive that it doesn’t have a button it’s still not difficult at all. In fact, it’s so easy I don’t even bother to use the button.

Reading: Monday I finally finished reading Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. It was pretty good overall. It was mainly about the political aspects of building a new world with the terraforming in the background but that’s okay; politics can be interesting though it’s not one of my favorite subjects for a novel. I got impatient with parts of the book – whole chapters, one of after another, of almost nothing but one character’s thoughts. I like books that let you see inside the characters’ heads but after a few pages, at most, I expect to get on with the story. Although there were moments when I thought, “Somebody please put me away where I won’t hurt myself if I ever pick up another book by Kim Stanley Robinson,” I will read Blue Mars and likely some of Robinson’s other books. I can hardly wait, in fact. Maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment.

Right now I’m reading Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement. Quite a difference in style and at first it’s a bit of an effort to switch mental gears. I’ve been shopping for my next batch of books. I want to get more books by Vernor Vinge and by China Mieville. Problem I’m having with that is that several of the books I want to read are not yet available in “mass market paperback”. It seems like I’ve been waiting forever for Iron Council. Now, it may sound like I’m just being a cheapskate, waiting for the paperback and maybe that’s part of it but the main reason is that the standard paperback is the perfect size. It’s comfortable to hold. Last year (or maybe the year before; it’s been a while) I accidentally bought The Scar in the large size paperback. At the time it did occur to me that the price was a little high for a paperback but prices are always going up so I didn’t think much about it. Then I get this near phone book size paperback. I felt like I needed to be a weightlifter to read it. On the positive side, it’s a better quality binding than most paperbacks and I really wish standard size paperbacks were made better. I have many that have lasted for years but I’ve gotten a few that start falling apart before I’m halfway through the first reading and those poor quality bindings seem to be getting more common.

Craftiness: I’ve started another quilt. I had a lot of really old scraps, some from the 80s left over from making kids clothes so they’re very colorful. I decided to put those together in a sort of semi-random design. Not all of the scraps are from the 80s; a few are more recent but they’re all colorful, mostly abstract, and sort of go together. Or not. Maybe it’s just a mess. But anyway, it’s all put together now and I’m into the fun part: the actual quilting. There’s something about hand quilting. I hate when people throw around the word “zen” but that’s the only way I can think of to describe the feeling. Quilting is very zen.