Summer reading progress and a new crafty project.

I said I would post about my IU Summer Reading Challenge progress last Sunday, but I lied. I went out of town last weekend, and the preceding week got away from me. So that's what's on tap for this post. 

By skipping last week, I also missed out on mentioning that here in the northern hemisphere, the summer solstice was last Sunday. So blessed Litha and happy solstice to everyone! 

Yurumi | Deposit Photos

From here on out, the days will get warmer, but the amount of daylight will be decreasing a little bit each day. (The news is better for folks down under, of course; last Sunday was their shortest day of the year.)

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Reading Challenge news: In our last episode, I reported on the first two books I had finished. Since then, I have read three more:

• For a book set in Indiana, I picked Annie's Quilt, the first book in the Amish Quilts of Indiana series, by Sarah Price. It's a romance, which is fairly far out of my typical wheelhouse, but I liked it. Annie is a young Amish woman who lives in Shipshewana, IN, in the northeastern part of the state near the Michigan border. Her life revolves around church, friends, family, chores on the family's dairy farm, and her job at a fabric shop in town. She dreams of marrying a fine Amish man who's not a farmer because she knows how much hard work is involved in farming and she wants to keep her job in town. You can guess where this is going: a handsome young man, a cousin of one of her friends, comes to town; they fall in love; she thinks he's aiming for a trade; it turns out he's a farmer (oh no!); but it all comes right in the end. I found it well-written and an easy read.
• For a travel memoir, I waffled. I started with Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon on a friend's recommendation, but found it too slow paced for me right now. (I might be a little anxious to get this challenge over with.) So I fell back on my original goal of a travel memoir written by a woman and picked Let's Not Play Small: A Memoir of Divorce, Healing, and Reinvention Through Solo Travel by Dawn Ritter Fischer. And I had problems with it. For starters, I'm not the right audience for this book; the author describes it as a "book to inspire women to travel solo. An invitation to step into the unknown and uncover the extraordinary within themselves. A summons to absorb the life lessons and embrace the self-discovery that arrives when we dare to do the uncommon." Unfortunately, this mission statement doesn't show up until page 272. I've already done a fair bit of solo travel, including some international trips, although I haven't chucked it all and gone full-tilt nomad as she has, so her exhortations to not "play small" throughout had me sighing in resignation. Also, the book could use better editing, including cropping out her repeated use of "little did I know" foreshadowing. Full disclosure: I skipped the bonus section with tips for the nomad life. When she actually wrote about her travel experiences, it was a decent read, but otherwise the book wasn't for me.
• For a slow-burn romance, I read This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews, the pseudonym of a husband-and-wife team. This is a terrific book, y'all. It's a portal fantasy. A woman named Maggie is yanked out of our world and dumped in the world of an unfinished fantasy trilogy, the first two books of which she has read and re-read to the point of being able to quote large chunks of them from memory. She immediately knows where in the story she has arrived, and she's able to rise in society by "prophesying" what's going to happen next. Of course she gets involved with a duke in disguise; eventually she figures out who he really is, and then you get into the typical "I'm super attracted to you but you lied to me so I can't love you except I do" slow-burn dance. But it's all very well done. This is the first of Andrews' books that I've read; apparently there are Easter eggs galore for their fans. It's also the first book in a series, and I'm already jonesing for the next one. (Here's hoping they don't leave the series unfinished...)

Since my goal to complete the challenge was six books, I only have to read one more. It needs to be a book that I meant to read last summer -- which I'm translating as "anything sitting unread on my Kindle that I didn't buy this year". I'm still mulling over that choice. But the winner may be Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters, published in 2016. I recently saw it mentioned on some listicle or other, and it turns out it's been sitting on my Kindle for who knows how long. (Amazon knows how long; I bought it at the tail end of 2016.) The genre is alternative US history. The premise is that President Lincoln was assassinated before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War never occurred, and slavery is still legal in four Southern states. It got a lot of praise when it was released, as well as some criticism because the author is white and is describing Black experiences. I'll let you know what I think.

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Besides traveling and reading more than I have in several years, I've also hatched a plan for a new craft project. 

I have finally admitted to myself that the window shades in the bedroom and office/craft room drive me crazy. They are honeycomb shades, but not the nicer kind; the shade material feels kind of like cardboard, and the giant metal strip at the bottom bangs loudly against the window frame in a breeze. They do open at the top and bottom (which I didn't discover until about a month ago), but honestly it's not a feature that's a dealbreaker for me (evidenced by the fact that I didn't discover they could do it until about a month ago). 

Nice honeycomb shades are spendy, as I learned when I replaced the blinds on the fabulous wall o' windows last year. I thought maybe I would prefer Roman blinds for these rooms instead; if nothing else, there would be less hardware to clank against the window. Of course my windows are not a standard size, so they would have to be custom. So I did a little looking around online. Even at sale prices, custom Roman blinds are almost as spendy as honeycomb shades.

But they're just big fabric rectangles and some dowel rods, I thought. How hard would it be to make them?

Long story short: we are going to find out. 

I've already ordered all the fabric. For the office/craft room, I'm getting a William Morris willow print in a performance linen that will match the Ruggable rug I use as a chair pad at my desk. For the bedroom, I'm going with a midnight blue swirl pattern in a sateen finish. The lining fabric is also on the way, as is the hardware for pulling the shades up. And I've been looking at videos for assembly directions. (I've been laughing at the ones where they're drawing lines on the fabric and cutting the pieces out with scissors. Have these people never heard of rotary cutters?)

Anyway, stay tuned.

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These moments of reading and crafty blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay cool!

A big week in the skies above.

Cue the fanfare: We have a launch date (kinda sorta) for Kindle Vella. It will debut sometime in mid to late July -- next month, in other words -- and The Atherton Vampire will be available for your reading pleasure on your iOS device (or from Amazon's website) then. 

Once you've raced through the first ten episodes, there will be three new episodes per week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

I'm so excited. I can't wait for y'all to meet Jerry and the gang.

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Yurumi | Deposit Photos

There I was, scrolling through the Father's Day posts on Facebook earlier today and noticing that several folks had posted about the summer solstice. "Y'all are a day early," I said aloud. "Litha is tomorrow." I knew that, see, because every year when I get a new wall calendar, I mark the dates for the solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days. And my calendar clearly says the solstice is tomorrow. 

But then I looked up the time the solstice actually occurs, and guess what? For North America, it's tonight. Time zones are stupid.

I'm doubly annoyed because I've booked a session in a salt cave, and I set it up for tomorrow because I thought it was the solstice. I've never done halotherapy before. To be honest, I'd never heard of it until I picked up a flyer about our local salt cave. Here's how it works: a machine pulverizes salt and aerosolizes it in a very dry room; then you sit in the room and breathe in the salt air for a certain period of time. It's supposed to be good for everything from chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder to allergies to depression. I don't really expect it to improve my allergies and I don't have any of those other things, but I figure sitting for forty-five minutes in a room in the dark ought to be good for something, salty air or no. I'll report back.

The equinox isn't the only big celestial event this week; the full moon is Thursday and Mercury retrograde ends Tuesday. I will be very glad to see Mercury go direct -- I've been champing at the bit for the past several weeks, itching to make some changes here at home and waiting for things to get moving so those changes could happen. I'm not saying Mercury retrograde has caused the delays, but I'm pretty sure it hasn't helped.

In any case, it feels like things are breaking free here, including in relation to the virus. Our governor announced Friday that New Mexico has fully vaccinated 60 percent of the population, ages 16 and up, and that means all COVID-related restrictions will be lifted July 1st. Some businesses may still require people to mask up indoors, and of course the CDC guidelines haven't changed. Variants are still a concern. And for unvaccinated folks, infection rates are still as awful as they have been all along. But to this fully vaccinated individual, it feels like liberation.

Here's hoping the rest of the world will soon feel the same way.

Happy solstice! Blessed Litha!

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These moments of anticipatory blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed!

It's Kupala Night.

Kupala Night - Simon Kozhin | CC 3.0

Tomorrow is the summer solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere, and many Neopagans call it Litha, or simply Midsummer. But in Slavic countries, it's known by another name: Kupala, after the pagan goddess of the same name.

The name Kupala is a cognate of the verb "to bathe" in the various Slavic languages. So as you might expect, Kupala is the goddess of water -- but She also has a fire aspect. Both elements can be used for cleansing and purification. And interestingly, some of the observances remind me very much of the Celts' Beltane practices.

For example, the Slavs would kindle a bonfire, and young couples would jump over it, hand in hand. If they made it to the other side of the fire still holding hands -- or if the fire shot out a spark as they jumped over it -- then they were destined to wed. If, however, their hands came apart, their relationship supposedly would, too.

But how to pick the fellow to jump the fire with? Kupala has that covered, too. Young women would weave flower wreaths for their hair, stick candles in them, and then lay them on a pool of water and light the candles. Supposedly each wreath would float to the young man who was to be that young lady's husband.

According to author Patricia Monaghan, flowers, herbs, ferns, and birch trees are sacred to Kupala. Supposedly the only time you could find a flowering fern was on Kupala Night, and young people would go searching in the woods to find one. Ferns don't flower, of course; they propagate by spores. So one can only imagine what those young people were really up to in the forest. (I told you it sounded like Beltane.)

As Christianity overspread the Slavic lands, Kupala became associated with St. John the Baptist, a.k.a. Ivan Kupalo, and the celebration was moved to St. John's Day on June 24th -- but as with so many holidays the Christian Church appropriated, its pagan roots remain.

These days, some Slavic Neopagans celebrate Kupala by going swimming. So today, I took a dip in our apartment complex's pool. At last -- a Kupala tradition I can get behind.

Blessed Midsummer!

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These moments of Midsummery blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

The signs say....

Sometimes you just need to trust your gut.

I didn't get the job in Denver. Actually, there were three jobs available at our Denver office, and I didn't get any of them. I don't want to go into too much detail here, but I will tell you that I found out for sure last Monday, after I had already arrived for my third stint of helping out. Since April, two other secretaries from the DC office and I had been tag-teaming out there, helping to get the office up and running while permanent secretaries were hired. I was the only one of the three of us who applied for one of the permanent gigs.

My gut had been telling me for weeks that I wasn't going to be chosen. I pretty much knew the score when I learned they were interviewing candidates from outside the firm. But I kept listening to my manager, and the attorneys out there, who were telling me that I was doing a terrific job and no final decision had been made -- so "just keep doing what you're doing."

Back when I was in radio, I heard a story -- which may be an urban legend -- about a radio station general manager who'd had one of his disc jockeys quit on him. For whatever reason, the GM didn't hire a permanent replacement right away. What he did instead was put out an ad. And when a reasonably qualified candidate showed up, he offered the guy an on-air audition. I forget how long he would let the "candidate" work -- maybe a day, maybe a week -- but then he'd let the guy go, claiming it wasn't working out. Then he'd bring in the next interested candidate and give him an on-air audition, and then not hire him, either. I forget how long it supposedly went on, but it was several weeks, at least. Now, I don't mean to say that my situation is completely analogous to that of those auditioning DJs. But I will say that I sympathize.

Speaking of signs: Even as late as Monday night, after I'd gotten the news, I was getting glowing responses from my divination tools of choice: "It's done! You succeeded!" Succeeded at what, I have yet to figure out. The only thing I can think of is that something big must have changed between my first week out there and this past week. Maybe I've dodged a bullet. Who knows?

Anyway, our Denver office is continuing to grow, and so I may still end up transferring out there at some point down the road. Just not right now. Right now, I'm going to go back to my job here in DC -- both the day job and the writing job. Dragon's Web didn't really get the sendoff it deserved, thanks to my dithering over Denver, and Firebird's Snare is on deck for release, oh, probably later this week. I'll send out a newsletter when it's ready to go. And you can expect some promotional stuff tied into that, as soon as I can figure out what it is. If you're not on my mailing list, now would be an excellent time to remedy that. Just click here to sign up. Thanks!

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Today is the summer solstice -- the longest day of the year. It's considered in the US to be the first day of summer, even though it's been pretty steamy here in DC (and it's been hot in Denver, too) for the past several weeks. On this day, Neopagans observe Litha, one of the eight sabbats, even though historical evidence for ancient pagan celebrations of the day is thin. Still, people back then enjoyed summer the same way we do now: getting outdoors, swimming, enjoying summer fruits and vegetables, and sitting around an evening bonfire.

I hope you've had an opportunity to get outside and enjoy the day -- maybe with your dad. Happy Father's Day and blessed Litha!

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These moments of gut-punched blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.