Here it Comes

 Here comes winter! We have had many very frosty mornings here on Whidbey Island, and I am excited to think that snow is not far away. I've lived in snowy places for about 17 tears -- Ithaca, New York when I was in law school, and the Concord, New Hampshire area for about 14 years after that. And I never tired of it. Google tells me that my area of the island only gets a few inches a year but I remain hopeful. You can be sure that I will enjoy every snowflake that falls. 

Meanwhile, big things are coming. Yes, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, too, but I am talking something more exciting than that. My longarm quilting machine is being set up tomorrow! I had it disassembled about a year ago in preparation for selling my house and moving, and I have sorely missed it. 

If you promise not to tell anyone, I will show you the very messy state of my sewing room. (I have put away about half of that mess, and today's project is to deal with the rest.) But those long poles are the poles for my quilting frame, padded and wrapped in a creative combination of pool noodles, batting, and garbage bags. I really wanted to make sure they weren't dinged or dented in the move. I have unwrapped about half of that pile and will do the other in a bit. 

It has been a bit tricky estimating the space that the longarm will take. Before I bought my machine and frame, a Bernina dealer gave me a big plastic mat that rolls out and shows you exactly how much floor space is needed. It is inevitably  a bigger space than I think. So, having rolled out the mat a bunch of times, I'm sure that the frame will fit, sort of along that right-hand wall, but I may need to get rid of the loveseat and table down there under the window. I'll see how things go. The dogs sure do love hanging out on the love seat while I am sewing, so they can keep an eye on me and on goings-on in front of the house.

In my excitement about the longarm's arrival, I have been sewing a very easy quilt top that looks quite complex. Look, it's really all half-square triangles (the navy and white squares) and whole patterned squares. Super fast, actually. The pattern is called Skip to My Lou by Busy Hands Quilts. I got it all sewn together yesterday, so it may be the first "real" quilt that goes on the longarm after I do a bit of practice. 

I am also contemplating making a cover for the longarm machine. Up until now, I have simply draped a vintage table cloth over it.

Someone on the Bernina Longarm group posted one she'd made and I've been studying it. Looks doable, I think. I have a bag of miscellaneous orphan blocks and component parts so I'm thinking I will try to put them together and make something similar.

 These chilly nights have proven excellent for retreating to bed early with my book. I just finished "The Christie Affair" by Nina de Gramont, and it was just as excellent as Nancy Pearl said it would be. Nancy Pearl's interview with the author was an interesting complement to the novel. 

I'm going to go make breakfast now. My current breakfast delight is my version of "toad in the hole." Basically, you butter a slice of bread, cut a hole in it, put it in a hot pan, and then crack an egg into the hole. I flip it over at the last minute to make sure the egg white is fully cooked but I'm not sure if that is an official step or not. I can highly recommend this as a breakfast to enjoy while reading a novel set in England. 

 

Always More to Read

You might remember that a while ago I came upon a flyer announcing that Nancy Pearl was going to speaking in Langley. I got all of my work done and sent off, so I was free to trot off on Thursday morning to see her talk.

Nancy Pearl is a retired librarian from Seattle. She has become known for her love of reading and her talent and at recommending books to others. You can read all about her here on Wikipedia. I didn't know that she started the concept of having a whole city read the same book -- "Seattle Reads" -- which has been adopted by any cities around the country. I knew her from her interviews on Public Radio, and from a few books she has published with lists of book recommendations.

Beforehand, I got my official Sno-Isle library card, giving me access to the Snohomish and Island County libraries. Isn't that a great name? Sno-Isle sounds like a magical wintry island where you can snuggle in, drink hot chocolate and read all day. 

Nancy Pearl's talk was held at the local arts center, and the place was packed. It was wonderful to be in a big room full of avid readers. It looked to me like a lot of book club groups had come together. As a newcomer to Whidbey Island, it was heartening to look around and see people who love books and reading. Will one of them become a friend, some day? This talk was Nancy's 25th talk in Langley, and the woman next to me had been to every one. 

 

The talk was about some of the best books that Nancy has read over the last year. Conveniently, the program included the list of titles and authors Nancy would be discussing, and people (including me) took notes to remember the ones that sounded most appealing. It was a delightful talk, and Nancy seemed like someone you'd want to just sit and talk books with for hours. 

She talked some about paper books vs audio books vs e-readers. Nancy has no prejudices against any of the formats. There was a bit of discussion about how a book/ebook is a dialogue between book and reader, and an audiobook becomes a conversation between author, reader and narrator. It is certainly true that audio book narrators can make or break a listening experience. (I recall one I tried to listen to awhile back where the narrator kept pausing or changing her intonation as if the sentence had ended...but it had not. It was very disconcerting and I stopped listening because it was just too distracting.)

And speaking of stopping, Nancy Pearl has become known for her "Rule of 50" which she has now adapted. Her view is that life is to short, and there are too many great things to read, to waste time on something you are not enjoying. Hear, hear! So her rule is this: You should read 50 pages and if you are still not involved or enjoying it, stop. (Her exception was if you are reading for a book club, keep going...  because then you have made a commitment to the other club members.) She also added: you are reading a mystery, not enjoying it much but reading only because you want to know who did it, for pete's sake go look at the end, and then walk away. Her new amendments are: if you are over 51 years old, subtract your age from 100 and that is how many pages you should read. For example, if you are 65, subtract 65 from 100 and you need only read 35 pages. And, she added, if you are 100 then you can judge a book by its cover and read however much or however little you choose.

Isn't it funny how we need permission to stop reading a book? For the longest time, I felt like I had to read to the end if I started it, and felt horribly guilty if I stopped midway. Some years back I let go of that, but I appreciate having a librarian's permission to abandon ship at will. 

Some of Nancy Pearl's previous Langley talks are posted on Youtube, so you can listen, get a flavor for her, and get some past book recommendations.  She's done a Ted Talk, which you can watch here. And she has done a bunch of "Book Lust with Nancy Pearl" author interviews on Seattle Channel, which you can find on Youtube also.

You want to know what Nancy Pearl recommended, don't you? Here are a few of the ones I noted:

  What Just Happened: Notes on a Long Year by Charles Finch

        A non-fiction diary of one man's experience of 2020 and Covid lockdown. Nancy said she didn't want to relive 2020 but the book was wonderful. You can see her interview with the author here. 

Revenge of the Librarians by Tom Gauld

    A collection of cartoons about books, writing, editing, reading. You might recognize his style from his New Yorker contributions. I went straight to the bookstore afterwards and bought this. I need more cartoons in my life. And it's delightful. 

 The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot by Marianne Cronin

    I had read this and really enjoyed it. It's the story of Lenni, a 17 year old terminal cancer patient, and Margo, an 83 year old woman, who are both hospitalized and meet in the craft room. They realize that their ages total 100 years, and they decide to paint images of their lives, one for each year, so when they are done they will have a collection of 100 paintings. I thought it was lovely, poignant, and not (surprisingly) not depressing.

 Thank You, Mr. Nixon by Gish Jen  

    I really want to read this. It is a series of linked short stories, about different generations from the same family. The publisher's blurb says: "Beginning with a cheery letter penned by a Chinese girl in heaven to “poor Mr. Nixon” in hell, Gish Jen embarks on a fictional journey through U.S.-China relations, capturing the excitement of a world on the brink of tectonic change."  This especially interests me. Caroline was born in and adopted from China, and our beloved guide when we were in China, Chen, was the (then very young) Chinese diplomat responsible for coordinating Nixon's travels through China. There is a Nancy Pearl interview with Gish Jen on Youtube.

The Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont 

    I have seen this book in a lot of places, and figured it was one of the many sort of derivative historical fiction pieces that seem popular right now. Nancy Pearl's comments about it made me want to read it, and I just got it from the library. If you're an Agatha Christie fan, you probably know that there is a real mystery about Christie's life about an 11 day period where she simply disappeared. To this day, no one really know what happened, and there is much speculation. Christie's husband was having a very public affair, and when Christie disappeared it was feared that she had killed herself. She was subsequently discovered, alive, checked into an inn under the name of the mistress. This is a take on that 11 days, told from the perspective of the mistress. Nancy recommended it highly, so I'm giving it a go. But before I start I'll watch Nancy's interview with the author, here.

 

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin 

    This was on my "to read" list so I am looking forward tot his even more. You might know Gabrielle Zevin from her delightful novel, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow traces the lives of two friends from their meeting as young students, to their decision to create a computer game together, to what happens after that. According to the publisher, "two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality." Nancy raved about this and said you do not have to know about or like computer games to really enjoy this book.  

Still Life by Sarah Winman  

    I'd not heard of this but it sounds intriguing. Based on Nancy's recommendation, I've added this to my To Read list. Here is the publisher's description:

"Tuscany, 1944: As Allied troops advance and bombs fall around deserted villages, a young English soldier, Ulysses Temper, finds himself in the wine cellar of a deserted villa. There, he has a chance encounter with Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian who has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the ruins and recall long-forgotten memories of her own youth. In each other, Ulysses and Evelyn find a kindred spirit amidst the rubble of war-torn Italy, and set off on a course of events that will shape Ulysses's life for the next four decades."

After the talk, I wandered over to Langley's charming independent bookstore, Moonraker Books. I bought the Tom Gauld book of cartoons there, wandered a bit  -- so many tempting books! 

 

I ended my outing at Crabby Coffee, where I sat next to the fireplace, sipped a latte, and perused Tom Gauld's bookish cartoons. 

It was a wonderful way to spend the morning. And now I will appreciate Whidbey's rainy and chilly weather even more, because it is the perfect weather for snuggling in and reading.
 

 

Another Island Adventure

 I knew that Whidbey Island is prone to power outages as a result of frequent stormy and windy weather in Winter. I knew that it's important to have a generator. So, this fall I started talking with electricians so I could get ready. This house has generator-ready wiring installed so a generator can be hooked up to automatically come on and power most of the house when the power goes out, but the previous owners had taken their generator with them and I was interviewing electricians and researching generators. It is a significant expense and process and I know nothing about it, really, so I needed advice.

Then, Friday night a huge windstorm blew through during the night. And I mean BLEW. There was a lot of crashing and banging as branches and debris from trees in the area got flung far and wide. There are two small decks on the back of my house that are covered with a sort of corrugated fiberglass, and boy, did it sound loud when bits of tree debris fell on that. 

And of course, the power went out. 

No surprise, really. But the amount of cedar tree debris all over my yard and driveway (and the street, and my neighbors' yards) really surprised me. Stuff was really blowing. Apparently a lot of roads around the island were totally blocked by downed trees.

That photo of the downed power lines up there is at the entrance to my little neighborhood. Yikes.

 Puget Sound Electric has an outage on map on their website, and after very slow cell service loading, I saw that power was out over most of the island. See that red splodge up there? That's Whidbey Island. I knew my friends in Seattle and Port Townsend had lost power for a few hours on Friday night, but it went back on quickly. 

No so on the island. So many trees! So many downed lines! 

I cleaned up debris in my yard and driveway, incredibly grateful that nothing had fallen on and damaged my car in the driveway. There was a big tree branch on the ground right next to my car. Phew. (Note to self: Time to get the unpacked boxes out of the garage so I can keep the car inside.) 

The outage would have not have been that problematic -- aside from the inconveniences of no electricity, no heat, no hot water -- but of course I had a major work deadline this week and had counted on working all weekend. Oh dear. 

 

It turns out that living this close to the Clinton-Mukilteo ferry is really convenient. After getting the critters settled, Caroline and I headed to Mukilteo with our electronics and charging cords to find a cozy place to spend a few hours. We landed at a Panera restaurant which was mobbed. Power was out in spots in Mukilteo, too, and people were looking for hot coffee and breakfast and electrical outlets. We had a very cozy time there, actually. I got work done, Caroline read and charged her electronics, and we savored the very hot and comforting soup. 

Back home that evening, things were dark and cold. I could see that some neighbors have the type of auto-on generators that I have been working on, as I heard their generators go on friday night and their houses were lit up with normal activity. But we made do with our candles (both real flame and battery-powered) and retreated to our respective beds to snuggle under our big piles of blankets. Good thing I have a lot of quilts around here! Caroline had her two cats to keep her warm, and I had Starlie and Rosie who were thrilled to be permitted onto the bed. It is a "special occasion only" sort of thing in my bedroom. 

We were reminded that our last long power outage had been a few years back, when major wildfires evacuated our whole town and we went to stay with a friend in Marin County. (Hi, Lainey!) Just after we got to her house, the power went out there and although there was no fire danger, the power stayed out for about four days. So intermittently retreating to the car to warm up and charge our phones was a familiar experience. 

I was dismayed to learn that the gas oven/cooktop unit in this house has a "safety feature" which prevents gas from flowing to the burners if the electricity is off. Really? So we could not use the gas stove or oven which was really, really irritating. On my list this week is to call around and see is that is a feature I can disable. On Saturday morning I made tea by heating water on the gas BBQ -- which, let me tell you, takes a bit of time. 

Sunday found me headed back to Mukilteo, where I camped out at a Starbucks for most of the day working. Boy, was the staff there was wonderful. They were totally happy to let me stay for the day, tucked into a corner with my laptop plugged in and hopping up for frequent coffee purchases. I didn't want to be too bad of a freeloader. The holiday cups cheered me up.

PSE was projecting that power would be restored around noon on Monday, so before heading home, I stopped by Target and got an inexpensive camping stove and some small propane canisters.

 

 Tea making was a lot easier. Just so you know, that was on my little covered deck. Propane stove use is not recommended indoors, although I was tempted.

Caroline had ramen for breakfast.

 

Then back to Mukilteo for me on Monday for more work. PSE had updated their restoration time to "11/8, 12:00 am" which led to some texts with a friend over whether that meant Monday night midnight or Tuesday night midnight. We thought (hoped!) Monday midnight. Apparently we were not the only ones confused, because not long after PSE changed the post to "11/8, 11:59 pm." 

At some point, while we were shivering inside with 40 degree weather outside, a friend in New Hampshire posted that he'd enjoyed a 72 degree day in Portsmouth by the water that same day. Somehow I did not anticipate that Whidbey Island would be colder than New Hampshire. Go figure. 

I can report that the bbq works really well for heating pizza that has cooled off on the ferry ride. Crust was wonderfully crispy!

The power came back on Tuesday morning sometime around 1 am. I was very happy to be awakened by my bedroom nightstand lamp coming on. 

So, we are getting back to normal around here. I will need to throw out a lot of stuff from the fridge and freezer that may be unsafe, so that is a project for this afternoon.

Meanwhile, here is my home office this morning. Some days it just feels good to hang out on the bed. Yes, the dogs are right up with me, snoozing happily. Work project is almost almost done - just a final review this morning. 

I'm told by long-time Whidbey Islanders that this storm was the worst in a number of years. Hopefully it will be our last without a generator to keep us functioning. 

Meanwhile, I have a Very Exciting Event to look forward to. After many months without my longarm, Bernina techs are coming a few days before Thanksgiving to get my Q24 set back up and running. I'd had to take it down last December to stage and show my house in Healdsburg (apparently buyers might think a big quilting machine in the primary bedroom is a bit odd) and it has been carefully packed and stored since I've been here. I can hardly wait to get back to longarm quilting again. I know what I'll be doing over Thanksgiving weekend! 

And speaking of Thanksgiving, I'm so grateful to be warm and cozy, living in a beautiful (if stormy) place, with friends who texted and called and kept me cheered.