Earworm update: I went to bed singing Journey’s Wheel in the Sky and woke up with Bonnie Tyler singing Total Eclipse of the Heart. Could be worse…

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Joining Kat and friends. Go see what the others are up to.

Knitting.

I thought I would run that photo through the “remove background” website. Here is the result.

The baby blanket is coming along famously, where “famously” means that I have learned to check the garter stitch knitting every couple rows. It is much easier to fix wonky garter stitch when it only requires dropping back three or four rows. Fixing an error three inches ago is not fun.

I finished the first color section last night. My plan is to have alternating narrow stripes at the junction between the four solid sections. Next week I should be able to show you how that is working.

Reading.

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The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau. Winner of a 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, this is the August choice for the book group I haven’t been to since the start of the pandemic. (Library director’s choices on how to keep safe were inadequate, imo.) Years ago I listened to the audiobook, but I don’t remember anything about it except that I found it kinda dull. Reading the book old-style is much better, but not enough better to keep me interested. I quit halfway through because of the dozen or so library books on my nightstand.

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Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting / Clare Pooley. This was a totally delightful book. If you like stories about Women Of A Certain Age who live their own lives as though they were 25, like Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine or How the Penguins Saved Veronica, you will enjoy this. And you will probably enjoy it even if the genre is new to you. A group of regular train commuters become acquainted after one chokes on a grape; a nurse performs the Heimlich maneuver and saves his life. A sweet story. 4★

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Squeeze Me by Carl Hiaasen. If you have never read any of Hiaasen’s books, which are all hilarious satires on Florida life, you are missing some great reading. I have read most of his books and had kinda forgotten about him. My book group wanted to read something light this summer, and this was the choice. Besides being about the eminently satire-demanding Florida stuff, this book takes on t***p (Secret Service name: Mastadon) and Melania (Mockingbird). The only difference between the real t***p and his depiction in this book is that Mastadon drinks many, many cans of Dr Pepper instead of Diet Coke. 4★

Listening.

The Damage / Caitlin Wahrer. I am not quite half way through this audiobook, but I find myself wondering how the author will fill the remaining 6+ hours. Nick, a college-age gay man, meets an older man at a bar and goes with him for a one-night stand, only to wake up in the emergency room, beaten and raped. His older brother, Tony, has always looked out for him and wants to do the same here. But Tony may go too far. Tony’s wife, Julia, is an attorney and familiar with police procedure and the legal process, and she is worried, not just about Nick but also about Tony. I assume Tony will do something violent to Josh/Robert, the rapist, and the rest of the book will be about the fallout from that. Stay tuned; maybe I will have finished it by next week. Too soon to rate it.

Watching.

Watching season four five of Suits. Amazon Prime Video was on the fritz over the weekend ::boo! hiss!:: so I had to find something else to watch (see below).

I have a query. As a Midwesterner who grew up in a small town, my ideas of proper business wear may be, shall we say, on the conservative side. However, in this show all the women, from the managing partner of the law firm to the female clients to the administration assistants, are all stunningly slender and wear very, very, very tight clothing with often more cleavage than seems appropriate to me. Also, they all seem to wear 5″ stiletto heels as they march down the halls or hail a cab. Question: is all this simply to attract and keep male viewers, or is this actually how the people at a white-shoe New York law firm dress? Inquiring minds want to know.

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While Amazon was unavailable, I watched Seven Seconds, a Netflix miniseries about a hit-and-run accident wherein a Black teenager was hit by a White, off-duty cop in Jersey City. 4★ (after watching one episode)

* The blog helped establish the circumstantial evidence. Back in July 2016 Hannibal came home sick and vomiting. Vet’s opinion was that he  “…must have eaten something nasty…” A week or two later both cats didn’t come home and we never saw them again. Our neighbor has an intense dislike for us since we had a boundary dispute with him. We think he vented his spleen on our cats. Writing this reminded me of another unfortunate feline mishap. We found Junior, a black-and-white cat whose mother and litter we fostered, lying in the wood between our house, than a summer cabin, and the neighbor. She was obviously in pain and unable to walk. We loaded her onto a board into the car and took her to the vet. They did surgery to repair her ruptured diaphragm, but she passed a day or two later, still at the vet. We suspect either the neighbor or one of his adult sons kicked our kitty.