Quilts and Books

Last spring I decided to re-read Nalini Singh's entire Psy-Changeling Series  when I discovered my public library owned it in downloadable audio format. Yesterday I finished Shards of Hope , the latest book in the series. All together it took me about 9 months to listen to 14 books (I did not attempt to re-read any of the novellas). It was an interesting experience. Last July, when I was part-way the series through I blogged  this: First, I'm extremely glad I decided to do this re-read. It's been almost nine years since the 1st book,  Slave to Sensation , was published and over the years I've forgotten as much as I've remembered. Some books have been more compelling, and thus more memorable than others. Some, like  Blaze of Memory  have not been so memorable. Case in point, with  BoM -- as I listened I knew I'd read it before, but honestly couldn't remember any of it until near the end. And this is kind of important because Singh has carefully ...

It's series catch-up month for the TBR Challenge and this month it was a pretty easy choice. I have several books from this series that I've been wanting to read, so it was time to get back to them. Badlands  by Jill Sorenson is the 3rd book in her romantic suspense series named after the first book, Aftershock . I loved Aftershock  and I also enjoyed the first book in her MC series, Riding Dirty . This book picks up with two of the characters from Aftershock  and uses some of the same settings in Riding Dirty , around the Salton Sea of southern California. Penny and Owen were trapped with several others in the earthquake described in Aftershock . In Badlands  it's now five years later. Thanks to his heroics in the aftermath of the earthquake, Owen, an ex-con, is now working as a bodyguard for Penny's father, a presidential candidate. For years the two of them have kept their feelings for one another to themselves. Penny is a single mother devoted to raising...

To those of you who offered me your condolences on the passing of my sister, I want to say thank you again for your kind words. It meant so much to me. It has really helped to finally talk about it. So now I want to brag on my sister just a little bit. She really was exceptionally creative with her quilting; she put a lot of thought into the quilting of the quilt. Rather than try to tell you about it in my words, I'll just let these pictures of her quilts speak about it. First up this is a little baby quilt. If you click to enlarge you'll see the pattern of flowers, leaves, and stems quilted in red and green. Here's the quilt she did for the QBFF paint chip challenge back in 2011. I currently have this one hanging in my kitchen nook. I love looking at it. The small sections quilted with the rainbow variegated thread are a great touch. The center section is quilted with metallic thread. This is not easy to do. It requires the right needle in your...

57 years. 3 months. 15 days. That's how old my sister was when she died on December 30, 2015. Char spent four and a half years in a tug of war with cancer. For a while there she seemed to be in total control. But that insidious disease came back and this time would not let up. Here's the kicker. She had uterine cancer, just like me. Only hers was Stage 4 when they found it. Mine barely qualified as Stage 1. Life is often unfair, but that seemed the cruelest irony of all. As I wept that she was dying, she wept because I was not. It's taken me a long time to process this and to be willing to talk openly about it. Some of you reading this have been very open with your own struggles with health, grief, death, and dying. I've wanted to be, but I think I needed for the worst of it to be over first. Every time I tried to write about it, I'd sit paralyzed at the keyboard. I just wasn't ready I guess. Char decided to suspend further treatment last August. It wa...