Back from the hiatus!

I could come up with a variety of excuses, but basically life happened, so sorry about not updating for a while. I hope the last year and a half has treated you well. I’m back hopefully for the long haul now, and I’m looking forward to sharing my findings and adventures with all of  you!

The same forces that kept me away from here kept me from participating in a lot of my normal hobbies, so I hadn’t been doing much reading, knitting, baking, or many of the other things that tend to keep me occupied. It’s been pretty exciting to get back into them; to see my “Books Read 2019” double from four to eight in the space of roughly a month for example. I still can sail through the pages when I get the chance! Who knows, maybe I’ll even put together a review or three on the ones just now finished.

I’m knitting again too; the first thing I threw together was simply a large-ish rectangle in basketweave stitch. I have no current idea what it will be used for, but it’s already served its two main purposes — getting me re-familiarized with the needles, and using up a random ball of yarn that didn’t match any other yarns that I have.

I’m now working on what amounts to an extended swatch, a piece that is just repetitions of the same thing over and over with slight tweaks as I try to re-create a pattern that my grandmother used to use in a good number of afghans. It’s a really fun process, and it’s definitely been inspiring to see the pattern develop closer and closer to what she had been doing. I’ll publish it here once I have it figured out! It’s this beautiful openwork pattern that looks perhaps like a tree branching or a vine crawling.

I’ve also gotten back into cooking and baking, partly thanks to this board games group I’ve been going to that encourages everyone to bring snacks to share. My mother taught me how to make deviled eggs for one week of the gathering, and more recently I’ve unearthed those recipes for Apple Spice Bread and Brown Sugar Banana Nut Bread that I previously shared on here — hard to believe it was three years ago that I originally did that bread baking project. I’ll probably turn away from the sweet breads and try to come up with less-sugary snacks to put together though, because the snacks are supposed to be on the healthier side. Challenge accepted!

Because coffee