Rayen

Back at the end of September I picked up a bag of fourteen used books at Hello Again Books in Cocoa Village. I've been trying to read for pleasure more often, and set myself a challenge to try and read all of them before the end of the year. I've been keeping track of what I've read or did not finish in an online album here , along with some thoughts. I plan to do a write up at the end of 2026 about how many I get read. So far Linda Howard's Ice was the fastest read for me -- I devoured it in two days, delighted to revisit my reading past. Disclaimer: I did read this the first time when it was published back in 2008, but had since forgotten the story. There have been two DNFs -- a very artistically written horror book that contained a child abuse theme I found too triggering for me personally, and this likely self-published title with too many exclamation points in the text, and which stopped me cold at the first historical error. I'm now working ...

This could be the story of my Sheltie Shadow's life. :)

It's time to get working on the November tote for my calendar project, and my idea was to repurpose things I thrifted into a tote. The foundation for it is going to be this tote I picked up last month at a new-to-us thrift store. I also thrifted back in August some patchwork I intended to use for the totes. I then decided to clean out the sewing room, things got shuffled off to the storage room, and now I can't find most of it. That will teach me for getting everything done early. This is what I have so far. I'm going back into the storage room to look again today, but if I can't find the patchwork I wanted I'll use something else. Stay tuned to see if I get myself out of this mess!

While out thrifting I picked up three pairs of pajama pants to wear this winter, as my ancient pajama pants have worn out and are basically rags (I'm going to reuse some of them for a quilt.) I got these 50% off for the color of the week at Goodwill, so they were $2.99 each. I also found a couple of books for .90 each with my senior discount. How are books a necessity? Because I say so. :) I donated .44 to round up, which made my total twelve bucks.

Back in October my guy and I were driving home just before dusk, and the sky was putting on a beautiful color show for us. I tried to take a photo from inside the car, but you can see how well that went. Still, those colors stayed with me until I decided to build a palette for no reason other than I wanted to remember them. I think the reason the color combination struck me was what looks like light orange on the horizon in the picture -- that was actually light green. It's super rare to catch the sky turning that color. Anyway, I saved the terrible pic and later went and picked through colors on the internet until I built my own palette. I went on to Adobe and used their palette creation tool to recreate the colors of the sky from that evening based on my cobbled together palette: a light green horizon, then pale lavender and crystal blue. The navy and dark gray are the clouds. What will I do with this? No idea. I was thinking it would make an interesting cro...

Last month my guy and I drove down to Tables Beach across from Patrick AFB, and had it all to ourselves for about an hour. It was like we were kids in South Florida again, way before it became trendy to live there. No people, no noise, just beach. If you'd like to experience that through pics (no comments on them), check out my album of quiet and calm beach views here .