Mortaine’s Blog

I finished a craft project last night!

5 years ago on my honeymoon, I made an open-weave crochet bag using white cotton yarn (Sugar n’ Spice) and a pattern some friends gave me at my bridal shower. I liked the bag, but decided it was too open-weave to really hold anything of weight (like, books– the #1 thing I like to put into bags).

So, I bought more cotton yarn and set about making a similar bag, but using all single crochets instead of the open-weave chains that the other bag used. I kind of did it “wrong” in that instead of chain2 and sc all the way around, I forgot about the chain 2s and ended up making it more spirally (so the crochet “pattern” lines are in a slight diagonal).

And then, of course, I set it aside for a while.

And a while.

And… a while.

Well, last weekend, after I got as far on the rainbow blanket as I could, I pulled out the cotton bag start (I’d gotten about 2 inches up from the bottom, so not very far) and started working on it again. I finished it last night– it’s a bookbag with a very wide strap. It’s all white except for a single crochet edge all along the top, which gives it a “finished” look that I really like. I’ll post pics later sometime, when I pull out the camera.

I also feel good because this has actually decluttered my life a little. I now have one small skein of red yarn left, which I’ll throw into the holiday wrapping paper box, and a small amount (maybe an ounce) of white cotton yarn, which will also go into the holiday wrapping box, since I often use yarn to tie up gifts in a decorative manner.

Oh, and yesterday I did my FlyLady decluttering for the bedroom– I had set myself the task of decluttering the top of my dresser. Well, I had about 3 things to put away– that was it. That made me very happy!

Today’s mission is to dust my bedroom, which is usually no big hardship with my FlyLady duster. Perhaps I will also zap some clothes out of the closet or drawers!

I should probably also do some cleaning in the bathroom, which is kind of joined with the Master Bedroom zone. The bathroom is…. ew.

Using ’s list as the jumping point

Philip K Dick
Neil Gaiman
CS Lewis
JRR Tolkien
Charles De Lint
Emily Dickinson
Brian Lumley
Anne Rice
Robert James Waller
John Grisham

Neil Gaiman
J.R.R. Tolkien
Anne McCaffrey
Ursula K. Le Guin
Toni Morrison
Jane Austen
Gwendolyn Brooks
Edgar Allen Poe
H.P. Lovecraft
The Pearl Poet

Note: I had to remove some from ’s list because, while their work graces my shelves, it does so in anthologies or magazines, and not as a standalone tribute to their efforts.

I have no idea what one would do with this information to make it at all useful for anything other than making their own list of 10 authors whose work is on their shelves.

Some asshat website that I went to looking for writing exercises launched 15 popups and changed my home page (in Internet Explorer) to their portal page.

And yes, I *did* tell it NO not to install or run any software from anybody ever.

I HATE MSIE!!!

I HATE MICROSOFT!!!!!!!

I wish I worked in a non-MS environment.

The first body was behind the door when we opened it.

The first body was behind the door when we opened it. Sarah shrugged and looked away, but I kept staring. Where had it come from? What was it doing here? How did it die?

There were obvious answers, of course; the body was just lying there. And where had it come from? Well, someone’s life had started somewhere (between the legs of a screaming woman to be precise), and well, it had ended here– or near enough as to not matter much.

Sarah didn’t go into the room, but I did. Those questions– yeah, I had surface answers, answers I could just shrug off in an existentialist way– but Sarah was the nihilist, not me.

The room was blue. All blue. Blue carpet (except the brown streaks where the blood had soaked in), light blue walls, a dark blue sofa. A small desk sat in the corner, a blue iMac perched atop it, humming softly.

The mouse dangled from its cord, halfway to the floor.

Which is how I saw the second body.