I'm Brave!

I'm not sure that's true, but I was brave enough to get my flu and covid shots at the same time last week. I was admiring all the cute stickers that CVS had for kids, and the pharmacist gave me a bunch of them. 

So if a turtle, unicorn, owl, and narwhal have all documented my bravery, then maybe I really am. 

If I was really brave I would get my pneumonia, RSV, and shingles shots, but I think I'll be brave for those shots another day. 

Are You Resilient?

 I'm not, or I think I could be more resilient, so I took some action after reading this on NPR. 

NPR is doing a series of newsletters over five weeks that they say will provide "powerful tools and strategies that have been shown to help people reduce anxiety and improve feelings of well-being". I've only received the first newsletter, and it has the usual advice that we've all probably read (and maybe practiced) before, like breathing exercises.

More interesting (to me, anyway) is this: NPR is collaborating with Northwestern University to bring an online stress-reduction course and research study to their audience. This free course is based on the work of Judith Moskowitz, a research psychologist at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine. It teaches eight skills to boost positive feelings.

The course is based on her 20-plus years of research studying people who have experienced difficult situations, such as being diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer and people who are caregivers for loved ones with Alzheimer's. Her peer-reviewed studies point to benefits. They are recruiting 20,000 participants for an online, self-guided, positive emotions study. The course will teach eight science-backed stress reduction skills over 5 weeks, with the 6th week being a practice and review period (the entire length of the study will be 12 weeks).

I signed up for the course/study and I can see how this may be beneficial. I'm only in the first week, but there are readings about the skills (Positive Events, Savoring, and Gratitude this week) and home practice (basically just writing about positive events and gratitude on a discussion board like many of you already do in a gratitude journal). I've failed at journaling and documenting things plenty of times before but this format works better for me with everything all in one place and a personal "Dashboard" so I can see what I've done and what I still have to do. It's not overwhelming and I think consistency and practice are important for me. Other skills that will be covered include:

• Daily Mindfulness
• Positive Reappraisal 
• Self-Compassion
• Personal Strength 
• Attainable Goals

If any of this sounds like it might be useful to you or just something you'd like to try, here are the sign-up links:

NPR Stress Less newsletter sign up here.

The Resilience Challenge Course/Study registration information sign up here. 

Here's to being more resilient!

Unraveled Wednesday: 10/9/24

I'm joining Kat and the Unravelers today with the same hat, still in progress, and just one book. 

I may be too used to knitting Hitchhikers somewhat mindlessly as I find myself making careless mistakes on the hat and having to tink back. But it's a good lesson in paying attention to what I'm doing, like crossing cables correctly and actually counting the numbers of knits and purls correctly. Things go better when I do that and don't try to do something else that takes some of my attention (such as answering John's questions about how many bags of mulch he should get or what Medicare Part D program I have). Those questions can wait but he seems to only ask me things when I'm counting.

I requested The Ideological Brain from NetGalley because it sounded like it might help me better understand how people become radicalized and believe in rigid ideologies, especially during this polarized political season in the US. In a combination of psychology, politics, and philosophy, the author argues that some people are biologically predisposed to rigid ways of thinking. Belief in strict ideologies has long been attributed to social forces but Zmigrod's research looks at this in terms of neural and cognitive principles. The book is written in a scholarly manner and can honestly be a little dry to this non-academic reader, but it has at least shown me that there may be reasons for political beliefs that I see as bordering on crazy. She also describes what an open and flexible thinker looks like. Three and a half stars rounded up.

Thank you to Henry Holt and Co. for providing me with a copy of this book. It will be published on April 25, 2025.

I do have two new ARCs that I'm reading now. Three Days in June is a new novel from Anne Tyler and Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan. I loved Kat's review of the latter so much last week that I wanted to read it (and I'm not even a big fan of dystopian novels)!

What are you making and reading this week?

Read With Us: It's A New Book

Our leaves here are mainly dry and brown and if John saw me sitting in them reading he would probably yell that it was time to get back to raking, but never mind that. It's time to announce our Fall Read With Us book. 

Simply put, it is a novel about two Irish-Slovak brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, who are grieving the death of their father. It explores grief and the ways it is manifested at different times in different people, sibling relationships, and love, familial and otherwise. When I was searching for themes in this book, I especially loved this one: "The novel explores themes such as the fear of being seen as ridiculous." Haven't we all experienced that? (I know I have!)

Our new book is Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. 

The word intermezzo means a short connecting instrumental movement in an opera or other musical work, or a light dramatic, musical, or other performance inserted between the acts of a play. It has a special meaning in chess, where it is also known as a zwischenzug or "in-between move". It's a chess tactic where a player makes an unexpected move in the middle of a combination to disrupt their opponent's plans. I've only read a few chapters so far but something tells me that this may be the more appropriate meaning. 

Intermezzo is available in hardcover, on Kindle, and in audiobook format from Amazon or better yet, your local bookstore. You can place a hold at your library, and I know the hold queues are long, but hopefully, your library will acquire enough copies to keep the line moving. 

Kym, Carole, and I will be talking about the book, giving additional information, and doing promotional posts throughout November. Discussion day for Intermezzo is scheduled for Tuesday, January 7, 2025, at 7:00 pm Eastern time, so mark your calendars. We'll ask questions on our blogs that day and then host the always fun, educational, and entertaining Zoom discussion.

I do hope you'll Read With Us. Intermezzo may have messy and imperfect relationships, an unlikeable character or two, and sometimes questionable prose, but there is also love of all sorts. 

Quilts and Dreams

One of the things we did when we were visiting my SiL was go to the Quilt Show put together by the Mountain Laurel Quilt Guild. I've been once before and this one was just as impressive. There were small decorative quilts, like the one below,

and Challenge quilts, like these.

The challenge involved turning to page 25 in any magazine and interpreting what was on page 25 into a small quilt. 

There were large quilts,

and medium quilts. 

This one was made of tiny triangles

and this one was inspired by a photograph of the maker's father.

This one was made from selvedges,

this one was made from the maker's father's ties,

and this one was inspired by the Pokey Little Puppy. 

I was entranced by these small quilts for some reason, maybe the tininess of the pieces? Whatever the reason, I stood in front of them for quite a while and even dreamed about cutting out tiny blue pieces that night. 

The only quilting I've done is making some place mats so it would be nice if I could get further inspired by these quilts with tiny pieces and maybe even make one of my own. 

Unraveled Wednesday: 10/2/24

I'm joining Kat and the Unravelers today with a new hat on the needles (for the second time) and a book or two.

After taking a closer look at the hat I showed you last week, I thought that the circumference around the bottom looked a bit large and the ribbing seemed floppy. When I measured it, it was 28 inches. My kids have big heads but not that big! Then I took a closer look at the needle I was using and after squinting at it in bright light, found that I was using a size 8 instead of a 6. It was a rookie mistake, and there was nothing to do but unravel and start over again. I worked on the ribbing while spending time in the car and even managed to do a few cables in the car. So the hat is moving forward, albeit slowly. But the yarn is so nice I'm knitting it twice. 

Last week Sarah reviewed Happening, and I decided to give it a try. It is a non-fiction recounting of the author's abortion in France when she was 23 years old. There is evidence of Ernaux's relative immaturity at age 23 (alternately worrying about getting rid of her pregnancy and almost ignoring it) but since abortion was illegal in France at the time it is also horrifying. The author states that she is recreating this event decades later based on her diaries and she has trouble recalling feelings and moods. Reconstructing material procedures was awful enough but I wish the author could have included more of what she thought and felt at the time. Three and a half stars rounded up.

I also read Small Rain by Garth Greenwell. Brilliant, evocative, and vivid are words that come to me when trying to describe Small Rain. This is a novel about a poet who experiences sudden debilitating pain and eventually ends up in the ICU. It is about medicine and the dysfunctional American healthcare system but also much more - meditations on art, beauty, memory, poetry, and introducing his literature students to a poem by George Oppen. His poem "Westyrn Wynds" gives the novel its title. Greenwell's narrator has quite a bit of time to muse while in his hospital bed, and his thoughts veer off into interesting tangents like his childhood, his life with L., and their disastrous home renovations. I appreciated the contrast between the narrator's literary mind and the clinical logic of medicine. The author narrated the audiobook and his voice added to this marvelous book. Four and a half stars rounded up.

“My ignorance was an indictment of something, me, my education, the public schools where I was raised, that I could be so helpless when it came to anything useful, that the only technologies I knew anything about were antiquated, unnecessary technologies: iambic pentameter, functional harmony, the ablative absolute. They were the embellishments of life, accoutrements of civilization, never the necessary core—though they were necessary to me.”

What are you making and reading this week?

One Vote and Counting ...

I got my Vote by Mail ballot on Monday and I returned it on Tuesday. 

I thought about taking it to the Board of Elections and handing it directly to a person, but there are twelve of these special drop boxes located throughout our county, so I walked a block to the nearest one and dropped it off there. 

The ballots are collected every day and the drop boxes are under video surveillance so I made sure to wave to whoever might be checking the video. I think the black or white thing on the wall might house the video? I live in NJ so I don't worry too much about my vote not being counted; I'm pretty sure that Harris will get our 14 electoral votes as NJ has voted Democratic since 1992. It's those other swing states (like PA, MI, GA, NC, WI, and AZ) that are my biggest cause for concern. 

I'm on my way to visit my SiL so I'll be back here next week. See you then!