Books I read in 2021

I still scan my books into Goodreads when I take them back to the library so I can see what I've read - it is only a partial picture this year because the library has been closed for most of the sitting weeks, so I've read a lot of books that were borrowed, second-hand, bought from shops or even (gasp) books I already own and just haven't read yet. I'll put the list in here for anybody who cares, it is the usual very random mix. A bit more science fiction / fantasy than usual, and some of them were very good. I loved the Tamsyn Muir books (final in the trilogy due out next year I think) - brilliant world building but also there is something about her humour that I just clicked with - turns out she's from HOWICK so that explains it. It's a kiwi thing. I also loved the book by Susanna Clarke, and John Burnside was an absolute find, as you can see I think I read everything the library had. 

Other than that the books by Benjamin Wood, Charlotte Wood, Ian Pears and Benjamin Markovits are still memorable. This is my test, if I can't remember anything about the book at this point then it probably was good not great - and if a book isn't even good then I don't finish it and it doesn't go on this list. With the exception of the book by Inga Simpson - I used to work with Inga and I kind of hate-finished it because she was a bit high-maintenance and it comes through quite clearly in this memoir. And I don't know if I'll bother reading anything else by Sally Rooney. But other than that I can say that all the books on my list were worth finishing, which is quite a compliment in a lockdown year of very limited focus. 

Shards of Earth (The Final Architects Trilogy, #1)	Adrian Tchaikovsky
How to Be Both	Ali Smith
Rules of Civility	Amor Towles
Autonomous	Annalee Newitz
Christmas in Austin	Benjamin Markovits
The Ecliptic	Benjamin Wood
The Reader	Bernhard Schlink
Life after Truth	Ceridwen Dovey
The Weekend	Charlotte Wood
The Word Ghost	Christine Paice
You Think It, I'll Say It	Curtis Sittenfeld
The Song of the Orphans (Silvers, #2)	Daniel Price
Influx	Daniel Suarez
Slade House	David Mitchell
Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002	David Sedaris
Square Haunting	Francesca Wade
The Amazing Mrs Livesey	Freda Marnie Nicholls
The Golem And The Djinni	Helene Wecker
Arcadia	Iain Pears
Understory: a life with trees	Inga Simpson
Killing Adonis	J.M. Donellan
Ashland & Vine	John Burnside
Havergey	John Burnside
A Summer of Drowning	John Burnside
The Secrets of Wishtide	Kate Saunders
Single, Carefree, Mellow	Katherine Heiny
The Quick	Lauren Owen
Inscape	Louise Carey
The Guest List	Lucy Foley
The Midnight Library	Matt Haig
Star-Crossed	Minnie Darke
How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation	N.J. Enfield
Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life	Nina Stibbe
My Life with Bob	Pamela Paul
Coventry: Essays	Rachel Cusk
The Sunlit Night	Rebecca Knight
Between Them: Remembering My Parents	Richard Ford
City of Blades  (The Divine Cities, #2)	Robert Jackson Bennett
Normal People	Sally Rooney
Oligarchy	Scarlett Thomas
The Choke	Sofie Laguna
Piranesi	Susanna Clarke
Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)	Tamsyn Muir
Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1)	Tamsyn Muir
I Shall Wear Midnight	Terry Pratchett
The Master Bedroom	Tessa Hadley
Agency	William Gibson

A quieter week

Last week was not at all quiet - four lunches, two morning teas and a dinner out for the recent graduate! And that is the end of school, how peculiar. They limited the graduation to one guest per child so I dropped him off and then my husband sat through the ceremony and dropped him in at work after. I watched it over the wonders of the internet, so no photos, sadly.

He got top of the class in beginners Spanish and also got a principal's award, not academic, just for being awesome, which I think is pretty cool (the principal gives out two a year). He was the student rep on the school board for both years, and the principal said some lovely things about him. Now we just wait for results, which are out in January, but he has been accepted into his uni course (theatre! could definitely see that one coming) via audition so the actual score isn't important any more. Well, not for university, I am still quite curious.

This is a photo from the cafe at the front of the building - the only one still open for my afternoon coffee, out in the public area with the tourists. Not that there are many of them! But even a few is lovely, after the building being shut off for so long. Generally this week we are being much quieter, both at work and at home. Omicron is gathering steam in Australia so I will get my booster shot tomorrow but otherwise what can you do. I am already trying to stay away from people and have no plans for travelling anywhere other than the beach ... I can't see anyone being interested in a lockdown over the holidays. 

More unrealistic fish

Sorry Dad, my failures to accurately render fish fins continue on. This was a course by Felix Scheinberger who probably has one of my favourite styles of all the artists so far. It is loose and interesting and includes people scenes and city scenes which I prefer to landscapes, or abstract things. But they are harder to do, and he makes it look so easy! Anyway we did do fish, soft-edged fish in washes and hard-edged fish in pen.

We copied paintings of people for a while, trying to use different styles, I tortured a Rita Angus self-portrait for an evening. These are the best ones, you don't want to see the mutant colour pencil versions. 

And then a building with a wild-haired lady in front of it. With typography.

I had a longer look through all of his work, and I love so much of it! To capture a city scene  with buildings and people ... I had a go at creating a couple of my own but they were pretty appalling. In the end I just copied one of his of an old house line for line - it's still not very good but better than when I try to make it up myself. 

Most of the time I am just cross with how shit I am. I don't remember feeling this with quilting or weaving but maybe I did at the beginning and I've forgotten. But hey ho, on we go....

A bit tired

We are all getting a bit end-of-the-year tired ... or maybe it's just me. I did some christmas shopping on Sunday and I am NOT crowd-fit at all. It was exhausting and overwhelming and so many people! I mostly just bought stocking stuffers for the kids and various chocolate-related items for work, nothing particularly difficult ... but I still had to have a little lie down at home afterwards. Pathetic.

We put the christmas tree up as well - not that the children were interested - my husband and I did it. Left to myself I wouldn't bother, but it is pretty with the lights, and it was quite nice just to be able to put the ornaments wherever without worrying about pets or children. 

I went for a walk Saturday morning but had to do a slightly shorter version, so walked past where I used to work twenty years ago and they were knocking it down! And, the strangest thing, see where they are knocking over exactly as I walked past, was where I used to sit - up on the fourth floor. How is that for a coincidence, I haven't been down that street for years, and I got the grand finale. It was when I worked for the Audit Office and I HATED it. Soooooooo boring - I think performance auditors are born, not made - and some very odd people. I stopped my walk and watched it all smash into the ground, with much delight. 

Saturday afternoon we went and looked at a house for sale out in the countryside around Canberra. We are thinking that instead of waiting until retirement to get onto acreage we could do it now and buy something close rather than down the coast; we could bear a half hour commute into work for a few years until we retire, and the kids would cope. And then we would still be able to have beach holidays, when we need a break. From our retirement. Anyway the location was absolutely beautiful but the house was unnecessarily fancy and will be well beyond our (pensioner) budget. But there are more modest houses out in that part of the world and we will keep an eye out .... 

Best Domestika so far

I think this course is my favourite Domestika so far - Creative Watercolor Sketching for Beginners by Laura McKendry. It went into a bit more depth and got a bit more creative than some of the others - which are good but you just really do one thing. This was way more interesting and she had us doing some different things. The results aren't fabulous but the process was great fun and a bit mind-stretching, which is probably the point. 

This is where we used watercolour to make random patterns on paper, then cut it into shapes and glued up a collage. 

This is where we used monochrome to do light and dark to show planes (as in faces) and planes (as in ... planes). It was quite enlightening.

This is make blobs on the paper and turn it into things, then tell a story with those things. With some glued up collage bits too. Why not.

This is draw an ordinary item close to hand with lines and outlines. I had a reel of cotton, how surprising.

This is a favourite and I would love to be able to replicate this more broadly - for this I just copied what she had done - how to take blocks of colour and create objects. The colours in this are put down as just rectangles or blocks but the finished product is most clearly birds. I love the look of this, and have tried to do it on other things, but can't figure it out. Yet. 

Random unrealistic fish in random unrealistic colours. The idea was to use 'un-complementary' colours for deliberate ugliness. I succeeded. 

Random unrealistic fish in monochrome. With splatter. As you can see, nothing particularly fabulous resulted but heaps of fun to do and I can say I learned something with each technique. I have another course of hers in the queue which I am looking forward to.

La Nina

We are officially in for a La Nina summer - cool and damp. Normally this would be a bad thing, but we are still scarred by the Black Summer ... cool and damp sounds perfect. Long may it last. So my weekend at the beach which should have been full summer (it's December already!) was more like a winter break.

I went for a nice long walk but didn't take my jacket off the whole time. There were a few surfers but not many swimmers and the water did not look inviting. I was not tempted at all. It was also windy. 

I brought my loom down, warped it up and did some weaving. I had to look up how to do it, it's been so long, but it was a nice change to work with yarn again. I didn't do much though, in fact I didn't do much of anything, it had been a long parliamentary week with some extra late nights and a lot of shouting. And also with one covid case  ... we were all looking forward to meeting back up in person but no, back to videoconferencing until they've done all the contact tracing.

I bought an advent calendar of coffee capsules from the grocery store, which gave me possibly the most thrilling moments of the weekend. What will it be? Can I tell if they taste any different? (generally no). Other than that it is end of year stuff; we seem to have finished the school formals - there were three different schools this year. My children have friends and they all like to go to each other's formals ... luckily they also are happy to wear thrifted or borrowed clothes, so no major expense involved. Graduation next week and then that will be school! Done!

Lights!

The lights we ordered back in July eventually wound their way by container ship from Denmark and the electrician put them up today! We were a bit nervous because spaces and sizes can be very deceptive, and did we like them after all when we got them out of the box ... but they are great and we are very happy. It is hard to see but they have a slightly textured pearlised finish. They came with a set of white cotton gloves to wear when you are putting them in, at which our electrician (that does all the work in our very very dodgy house and has for many years) laughed and laughed and did NOT wear the pristine white cotton gloves. I don't know what goes on in Denmark but Australian tradies take a more robust approach to fixtures and fittings.

They are LEDs and really quite bright. We removed the dimmer switch because it didn't work with LEDs and we never use it - does anyone use dimmer switches? That is what lamps are for. 

This is them turned off. They are quite low (although still seven foot off the ground, no-one is going to be banging their heads) but we can live with it for a while and decide later if we want to raise them. We also got extra big fluorescent lighting in the shed which is amazing and we should have done it ten years ago. BUT you can now see the level of shit we keep in the shed. It is reasonably clean but I think a good 80% can be chucked.

Here is the shot from the kitchen - it makes that room so much warmer and more welcoming than the gloomy broken track lighting. See the nutribullet air fryer on the bench? Absolutely legendary, we are still learning all the things you can do in an air fryer.

In painting news I did some more Ana Victoria copies, outlining with a darker paint instead of the white gouache. It looks good, although the problems with brush control and line thickness remain. 

She did a poster with different effects in circles, which is kind of cool so I copied it, but I don't know how much further you could take this.