I'm at work on the last day of the year, which is still slightly odd. Thanks to my time in Japan, I'm more used to working Christmas than I am New Year's. There are more people here than I would have expected - my supervisor's updating all of our JIRA tickets with new components and a bunch of us are filing last minute reports (even though nobody "upstairs" will be checking their email until the shutdown is over) and testing the latest release. I accidentally got myself saddled with a flu vaccine report that has been riddled with gremlins for the last year, but I think I've got them all. It's not where it should be yet, but it's getting there.
CraftingMy knitting mojo remains at a low ebb. I finished a pair of mittens, a hat (with a pompom so big that I keep losing it to snagging tree branches, whoops), and a pair of slippers (which won a blue ribbon at the state fair). Back in February I went to a pop-up class on log-cabin construction at my local LYS during a snowstorm because I wanted to get out of my apartment. I started a blanket with scraps and ended up liking it enough to knit it out to lap blanket size. It won fourth place at the fair.
I made progress on my ginormous mitered square blanket - 207 2.5" squares, plus 7 7.5" squares. I hope to finish before I'm dead.
My cross-stitch has come a long ways. I finished my Pumpkin Passport kit in time for the fair, two years after I started it.
I completed three pieces for friends, have one started for myself, another two projects in the planning pipeline and a fourth hopeful friend.
ReadingI finished my 52 book challenge by the skin of my teeth. Reading mojo came in fits and spurts this year - sometimes I was reading seven books at a time and finishing one every three days and then months would go by while I read nothing but fan fiction. I discovered Vera Brosgol and Tillie Walden, both graphic artists. There's been an explosion of graphic novels for the middle grade and YA set and while some of them have been uneven, quality-wise, some of them have been excellent. Brosgol's 'Anya's Ghost' about a Russian immigrant teenager finding a helpful (?) ghost, and Walden's 'Spinning', about growing up as a synchronized skater, were some of my favorites this year.
I devoured Martin Walker's 'Bruno, Chief of Police' series until I abruptly got tired of him banging a different woman in every book, combined with the general misogyny. This is a series that was first published in 2008 and makes all the right moves with regard to immigration and religion and anti-semitism, that examines both climate change and climate change policies and how they affect individuals and small towns and villages...and is still kind of terrible about women and writing female characters. I could barely relate to any of them, and the ones I could? Bruno and his pals mock.
From my review of the second book:
Me: I really hope men don't automatically catalog the physical attributes of every women they encounter and decide whether or not they want to have sex with them then and there.
Walker: Oh no, we do.
Me: Whelp, I'm joining a convent. Also, Walker wanted desperately to write food/cooking porn and he hadn't gotten there even after four books. "Bruno put a spoonful of duck fat into the frying pan" definitely belongs in the drinking game for this series, however.
I also stumbled upon Connie Willis' 'Doomsday Book' and 'To Say Nothing of the Dog', decades late. I finally read all of
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
domarzione's Freezer Burn 'verse, that should count for a whole extra novel on its own.
WritingI literally wrote a drabble for every single episode of CSI (original flavor) and none of them will see the light of day, they're mineminemine. Same for the hundreds of pages of self-indulgent MCU fic.
Everything ElsePassed 4th-kyuu in aikido back in May. Decided to take a year to go for 3rd-kyuu, instead of cramming the days I need into 8 months. I don't like test prep, even test prep done as low-key as my dojo does it.
I bought a house because that 1) it was starting to look like I might get priced out of the metro area in the near future and 2) by 2020 my mortgage payment's going to be lower than rent for a one-bedroom apartment within striking distance of work.
