Shall I Cross-Stitch You a Bookmark? Because I I Can Cross-Stitch Bookmarks Now!

These bookmarks are going into the kids' Valentine's Day care packages. Each one matches its recipient's school color!

Lit Stitch: 25 Cross-Stitch Patterns for Book Lovers by Book Riot
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The thing about cross-stitch that I’m still not sure about is its focus on decoration. I mostly sew, and any sewing book, even one confined to quilting, will always have a variety of projects, some decorative, but most useful in some way. You’ll get instructions for the odd wall hanging, sure, but you’ll also get pillow covers and zippered bags and pot holders and clothing items and everything else practical and impractical under the sun. So I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that a cross-stitch book seems to generally just show you the actual cross-stitch pattern, and it’s up to you to figure out what to do with it. I feel like you absolutely CAN do a ton of things with a finished cross-stitch, especially something like those pillow covers and zippered bags, maybe even ornaments and patches and embellishments, but it adds more mental work to the process, especially when all I want to do when I see a pattern I like is to literally just stitch it, not try to imagine what its actual purpose in my life will be.

So that’s part of the reason why I ended up stitching multiples of the BOOKS! bookmark pattern. For one thing, I really like the font. And for another, I know what to do with a bookmark!

I didn’t love the book’s instructions for finishing the bookmark, but tbh I didn’t love the way I decided to finish the bookmarks, either. The two bookmarks that I stitched onto Aida I backed with felt and blanket stitched with embroidery floss around the perimeter. The bookmark that I stitched onto burlap I backstitched to the felt and frayed the excess. Neither method looked as tidy as I wanted it to, especially compared to how precise cross-stitching looks to the eye. So if you’ve got a sure-fire, go-to way to finish a cross-stitch bookmark, please let me know!

Backed with felt and midway through its blanket-stitching. I feel like the knots are SO visible!

I loved the font used for the BOOKS! bookmark so much that I was super bummed to see that the book does not contain a complete alphabet in that font. I feel like every craft book that contains a word art project should have to also publish a full alphabet in that font, just in case you like it so much you want to make your own words with it… which in this case I did! Fortunately, with graph paper and plenty of erasing, I did figure out how to make the other letters I needed look like the BOOKS! font. The “A” is maybe a little wonky, but whatever.

Despite the wonky knots, I am so pleased with how this bookmark turned out! I drew F, I, and A patterns to match the font, calculated how to divide seven colors by five letters, and matched the rainbow in the blanket-stitching. I then mailed it to my niece in a box also containing two Eyewitness books and two size 6 T-shirts... and the USPS lost it. I'm waiting to hear from you, Mail Recovery Center!

After reading this book, here are the things that I now know how to do:
* Figure out how many strands of floss to use, within a limited range. I can definitely now eyeball when I need two strands vs. three strands, at least.
* Substitute colors. When I had the revelation that I did not have to purchase the exact color of DMC floss the pattern calls for if I have a similar color already in my stash, it BLEW MY MIND, lol.

Things that I still do not know how to do:
* Figure out what size the project will be. Should I count all the little squares on the pattern and then count all the little squares on my fabric? Measure the number of squares per inch and multiply?
* Finish a project. Do I bind the edges or anything? Glue them? Put it in a frame or something? The blanket stitching that I used to finish two of my bookmarks was particularly irritating to me, since I couldn’t find an invisible, or even tidy-looking, way to knot the ends of the floss. So all my knots are basically either the biggest, most visible knots ever created… or already falling out. Sigh!

In related news, I both own more bookmarks than I’ll ever need in this lifetime and am obsessed with how quickly cross-stitch bookmarks stitch up and how cute they are. Raise your hand if you want me to cross-stitch you a bookmark, I guess!

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I Ate a Pineapple Pork Bun in New York City and I Think I Will Never Be The Same Again

If you thought that bad weather would keep the tourists inside, you would be wrong. We will see all the sights in New York City no matter how cold it is!

We got so turned around attempting to find the right subway line to get us to Brooklyn that we ended up near Rockefeller Plaza, so we figured that we might as well walk over and see if the tree was still up.

It was!

And then the big kid saw the line to get into FAO Schwartz and was all, "Toys?!? TOYS!!!", so somehow we ended up doing that, too.

Of course, as soon as we got into the store and she realized that it was essentially just a mass of wall-to-wall people she wanted to immediately bail, but I said, "Come on, we're already in. Might as well power through."

The first week in January is actually a terrible time to visit FAO Schwartz regardless of the crowds--they were so picked over from holiday shopping, I guess, that although all the shelves were full, they were full with just, like, one or two products per brand, basically. Great if you want a goat cheese Jellycat or a Schleich brachiosaurus painted to look like it works there (which, okay, is kind of cute...)--

--but I kind of wanted to look at *all* the Jellycats, you know? Not just 1,000 copies of the worst one.

Whatever. At least it was warm inside, and it turned out that the subway station we wanted was right near there, after all!

On to DUMBO!

Technically, all people actually wanted to do on this day was walk around Chinatown and eat stuff. But I tacked on first walking across the Brooklyn Bridge TO Chinatown because, come on, it's RIGHT THERE!, and then, well, I tacked on first finding that one perfect photo spot that everybody goes to in DUMBO because if you're at the Brooklyn Bridge, well, then... I mean come on, it's RIGHT THERE!

Just us and 1,000 other tourists seeing the sights!

If you look veeeery closely at the photo below, you can even see a tiny Statue of Liberty. We really saw everything on this trip!

There she is again! 

Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge probably isn't something I need to do again, although I would like to catch a sunrise there, but it was a super easy and pleasant walk that puts you right into an interesting part of Lower Manhattan, a short walk from Wall Street on one side and Chinatown on the other.

We chose Chinatown!

And yes, I did force us a few blocks out of our way just so I could embody that Lumineers song.

It is SO hard for me to narrow down all the places I want to see when I visit somewhere:

But we did our best!

We bought buns and milk tea from Mei Lai Wah--

--and I need to tell you that this pineapple pork bun is the best thing that I have ever eaten in my life:

How do they make that crunchy pineapple topping? It was super crunchy, but it wasn't super sweet so it's not sugar. It was SO good, and I am devastated that I'm not eating it again right now.

We had no organized plan for what little shops and restaurants from my map we actually hit and in what order, so we got a lot of sightseeing done simply by wandering back and forth and around and around doing and seeing everything in the most inefficient manner possible:

Jin Mei Dumplings, cash only and window service only, but you get 15 delicious dumplings for $5!!!

I didn't see a tenth of what I wanted to see by the time we absolutely had to head out, which is always the way, sigh, and I guess it leaves plenty of reasons to come back one day.

Another place I'm coming back to: Madison Square Garden, where I once again managed to score the absolute worst seats in the house!

This game ended up being kind of heartbreaking, because I had to watch Shesterkin get injured (and he's still not back!), and then go on to watch the Rangers flat-out lose to the Mammoth, but at least they scored a couple of points in the meantime--

Here's a spot that I haven't yet made it to even once: the Empire State Building! I just like to look at it from the outside and imagine King Kong climbing it:

Fun fact: the best part of our trip is yet to come!

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Day 1 for the Most Touristy Tourist Who Ever Toured Around New York City

Because I'm a tourist, so why wouldn't I visit the tourist amenities that were created for me?

Such as...

Times Square!

Like yes, obviously, Times Square is not any tourist's *favorite* place, but eh. I've never been hassled or hustled there, it's got places to sit so you can contemplate your next move and/or your life in general, everyone else is also a tourist so I'm not in anybody's way when I stand and gawk gormlessly at a huge ad, you don't have to watch out for traffic, we saw some people attempting to film a music video in the middle of all the chaos and that was pretty entertaining, and while my partner and I stood in line at the TKTS booth the kids wandered in and out of the big touristy stores and kept bringing us little Hershey bars they said the store gave out for free but honestly I wouldn't be surprised to learn they'd simply nabbed them. 

This day on Times Square was especially cool because the detritus of New Year's Eve was still apparent:

Did you know that the Times Square New Year's Eve ball is a legacy of the same type of time ball that we saw in Greenwich? So cool!

The ball is a LOT smaller than it looks on TV...

Anyway, our hotel was actually just a couple of blocks from Times Square, so we wandered through there a LOT:

I'd never done the TKTS booth before, and I was pretty amused to discover that reps from the different shows work the line while you wait, talking up their various productions. I was dithering between The Outsiders and Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), but even though I know people have been loooooving The Outsiders I'm partial to original shows so I chose Two Strangers. And omg I am SO glad that I did!

But first, bagels!

Then, a bookstore!

The Drama Book Shop was on my want-to-visit list just because of this amazing sculptural piece that was even more impressive in person, but I also found the script for Ada and the Engine and a book about the making of Jesus Christ Superstar. Jesus Christ Superstar was my first musical, if you count watching the movie version on cable a billion times (which I do!), and now I'm obsessed with musicals, so there you go. Ada and the Engine is a play that I dragged both kids to a few years ago after we'd done a unit on the history of computers, and it also has a surprising and shockingly touching musical component. 

This trip to New York City has a theme, it seems!

Would you even be in New York City if you didn't spend some time each day wandering around lost?

Also see: wandering around looking for a drugstore because one of you might have just come down with that adenovirus that's been all over the news, and then sitting in the middle of Times Square and dosing yourself up on Mucinex and Robitussin and a cough drop in each cheek. 

Fortunately, I also packed plenty of masks. I *have* been to New York City in winter before!

Hadestown is the musical I'm most obsessed with, and honestly, it was KILLING me not to be in this line:

But it's okay, because I was across the street in THIS line!

I walked into this musical completely cold--I hadn't even paid attention to the promoters working the TKTS line. All I knew was that it was 1) indeed a musical, and 2) comedic. 

This is the set:

Dudes, this musical was AWESOME! It was hilarious, which serves to distract you so they can also sneak a bunch of feelings up on you, and the songs were great, and the actors were amazing. 

And if you sit in the first two rows they throw movie props at you!

One night my partner ran out to a shop, and he swears that they had one of these props taped up behind the cash register with a sign telling the cashiers to watch out for "counterfeit bills," lol. 

SUCH a good play.

Afterwards, the big kid and I stayed to stagedoor Two Strangers, while the little kid and my partner ran back to the hotel for her copy of Six of Crows, then hopped across the street to stagedoor Hadestown, because IYKYK!

Alas, Jack Wolfe didn't appear (although they did get to see Kurt Elling!)--

--but both Sam Tutty and Phoenix Best came out to the Two Strangers stagedoor, so the big kid and I got signed playbills. I told Sam Tutty that this was the big kid's first Broadway show, and he told her that this was his first Broadway show, too, which was pretty adorable.

Also VERY modest, because he's genuinely West End famous and this is simply his first time on this side of the Atlantic.

I wonder if he ever hangs out with the other genuinely West End famous actor who works across the street?

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That Time You Saw Bigfoot Is Like That Time That I Definitely Met The Real Santa Claus

Bigfoot probably doesn't live in my woods, but anything is spooky when you photograph it in black and white!

The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster by John O'Connor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I believe the people who say that they saw Bigfoot, even though I also think that Bigfoot is not real. I get the cognitive dissonance of having an encounter completely unexplainable except by an impossible reason. This is the only thing that explains your encounter. And yet this thing is not real.

Because when I was twenty, I definitely met Santa Claus.

At the time, I was a Senior in college. Everyone I knew was a college student, a professor, or one of the few townies also into punk rock and also too young to get into the good clubs to hear our favorite bands play. I spent a lot of time loitering downtown outside of said clubs, in class, or at house parties.

I hit the books a LOT less than my own children do, but don’t tell them that. I work very hard on my “I want you to have fun at college, but remember that you’re there to study” face.

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One afternoon in early December, when I should have been studying for finals, my boyfriend and I instead found ourselves wandering around the local mall. I needed to buy Christmas presents, ideally for less than five bucks a person, and if some pretzel bites also happened to find their way into my possession, well then so be it. My boyfriend was keeping me company because hey, any excuse not to study!

The Santa Claus spot at this mall was set up like an ice castle, with the line snaking towards the castle and Santa himself inside it. There were open windows all around the castle so that you could look in and see the kids sitting on Santa’s lap, but I imagine that when you were inside it you felt sort of cozy and private and like you had Santa all to yourself.

As my boyfriend and I walked past, I peeped through one of the windows and saw that Santa was sitting there all alone, nobody on his lap, so I impulsively called out, “Hi, Santa!”

He looked up, smiled, and I swear he gave a jolly, “Well, hello, Julie!”

I don’t think I even replied or responded in any way, because my flabbers were too ghasted. My boyfriend heard our exchange, but he didn’t respond either, because he said later that he just assumed that random guy and I knew each other from somewhere and that’s why I’d called out to him in the first place. But Y’ALL. I did not know that old guy with the white whiskers sitting on Santa’s throne! None of my professors were at all Santa-like, and this college I went to was the kind of place where the professors weren’t moonlighting as Mall Santas. My college friends were very much college-aged, and my three or four local friends were around that age, as well, with the addition of lip piercings and neck tattoos, etc. I did not know a single other soul in the entirety of Texas.

I've told this story dozens of times, to friends and acquaintances, to kids who believe in Santa Claus and to kids who don't, and I always tell it about the same (occasionally leaving out the punk scene and or my lack of studiousness, depending on my audience), and I'm always all, "I dunno, guys. The only rational explanation is that it was Santa."

Like, yes, I recognize that logically it wasn't Santa. Logically, the person wearing the Santa suit in that mall on that afternoon did randomly know my name, or he said something else and I just thought I heard my name. It obviously wasn't actually Santa, because Santa isn't real. But also: I dunno, guys. The only rational explanation is that it was Santa.

So that's what I think a lot of these Bigfoot hunters are feeling. Logically, they know Bigfoot isn't real. But they have an encounter that is best explained by Bigfoot being real, so now they're all "I dunno, guys"ing around reddit and maybe going on the odd Bigfoot hunt and attending the occasional meet-up with other people who've had encounters best explained by Bigfoot being real. And then other Bigfoot hunters are more woo about it and have psychic links to Bigfoot and use crystals to communicate with it, etc.

And then other Bigfoot hunters… Honestly, based on O’Connor’s book, other Bigfoot hunters just seem like they want something where they can be right and everyone else is wrong, where they’ve got the truth that’s out there and everyone else is a sheeple. O’Connor compares them to Trumpers, which many of them already are, in an interesting and alarming and kind of obvious-when-you-really-think-about-it way.

Ultimately, I think that O’Connor did the work of writing an ethnography of the search for Bigfoot in a world in which Bigfoot is not real. It does mean that the book feels like a lot of… well… nothing, but that’s because ultimately, there’s nothing to tell. Bigfoot isn’t real, and the search for Bigfoot is just a bunch of people poking around the woods, finding out that Bigfoot isn’t real, and ignoring that in favor of continuing to wonder if maybe Bigfoot is real. I think O’Connor could have made the storytelling more dramatic, but likely only at the expense of the individuals who I think he was trying his best to treat respectfully. It reminds me of The Cold Vanish, in which the author has more dramatic stories to tell, but those stories often involve tearing apart some extremely vulnerable moments in the lives of vulnerable people, in ways in which he ought to be ashamed. This book, on the other hand, toyed with being boring, but nobody was victimized by the telling.

I think O’Connor’s most interesting and most important point is this:

“The ties that bound together flesh-and-blooders with the woo’ers and idly curious had everything to do with pursuit of the extraordinary and in turn with a desire to understand the world. A commonality, it seemed to me, that hitched them to the rest of us and to the great folkloric heroes and heroines of the past. And even, in a sense, to scientific tradition.”

In O’Connor’s worldview--and mine!--everyone wants, or should want, a meaningful life. A life that understands, perhaps, its place in the world. A life, perhaps, that understands the world itself. Personally, I’d love it if the world and everything that happened in it made sense and had a greater purpose to it! It doesn’t, and I find my meaning elsewhere, in my husband and children, in the pursuit of knowledge, in writing and in creating, but I’d love it if it did. Is it those who cannot find their meaning elsewhere, and who cannot take comfort in the meaningful fiction of organized religion, who find it in conspiracy theories and tempting untruths like these? Are they the ones wearing Trump hats and protesting floridated water and insisting that Forrest Fenn’s treasure is still out there and searching for Bigfoot?

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Fetishizing the Concept of "Hockey Player" Does Not Make a Book Hockey Smut. There Has to Actually BE Hockey In It!

Yes, I am also STILL slogging through A Court of Silver Flames! Not right this second, though, because my Heated Rivalry audiobook just came in...

Mister Hockey by Lia Riley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

If it’s supposed to be hockey smut, then why is there no hockey?

Like, yes, there *is* a hockey player in the book, but 1) he not only never plays hockey in the book, but he also never so much as puts on his uniform or steps out onto the ice, and 2) he’s pretty much already decided to retire by the time the book opens, so is he even really a hockey player in the official professional sense? That present tense is barely hanging in there!

Without any actual hockey, the book instead becomes smut that revolves around the simple fetishization of “hockey player” as object, which is fine but not what I thought I was going to be reading. Jed doesn’t do anything particularly hockey-forward, so he’s basically just embodying the concept of hockey player in this book. There was a second, when we learn that Breezy hid all her Jed merch before she let him in the door so he wouldn’t find out she was a superfan of him in particular, that I thought this idea of fetishizing the concept of hockey player would be an important topic in the book, perhaps one that the book ends up speaking to and complicating and making us think about what it is to both love hockey and to enact a fandom that makes sexy CapCuts of players and calls going to games “visiting the boy aquarium.” But no. Breezy doesn’t really spend any time thinking about the man vs. the myth and what it means to love one vs. the other, other than to mention in passing that this was easily resolved (in the right direction, of course!), and even when her previous lack of full disclosure causes her to be the one that Jed accuses of selling his private information to reporters, it’s not really about that, as Jed himself later said, and it’s solved with basically zero effort on either side.

@gasquatchmama Ladies, I think they're on to us...it's quite a show. #hockey #hockeywarmups #stretching #hockeystretches #fatherfigure ♬ Father Figure - George Michael

Or rather, Breezy puts forth a LOT of effort, but for some reason Riley decides to make Breezy’s actions irrelevant to the solution? And also, that podcast confession is the cringiest thing a romance character could possibly do, and if someone did that to me, I don’t care how blameless they were for whatever I’d accused them of, I’d never speak to them again. I’d burn their face out of photos and try to forget they’d ever existed, solely for my own sanity. Honestly, I might have to murder them and then invent time travel and go back in time and murder all their grandparents just to make sure I’d erased their entire timeline.

I do like that both Breezy and Jed are portrayed as kind of stupid, making basic jokes and inane puns and bad decisions and rolling way too hard on commitment without letting nearly enough time pass. There’s a lid for every pot! The strongest part of the book was their meet-cute through their first sex scene, when I could pretend that the stupid things they said or thought were just because of nerves and their awkward chemistry could be read as adorable rather than off-putting. It was only after that when I looked at my hoopla app, saw I was something like 70% through the entire book, and went, “Uh, oh…” There was plenty to flesh out to make the book longer, resolve some of these issues, and basically just carry its weight. The conflict with Breezy’s mom was just abandoned with an unrealistic insta-fix, the same with the mean library director but in the other direction, Jed’s brother remained mostly off-screen, and, oh, right… NOBODY PLAYED HOCKEY!!!

@more_than_parents Boy aquarium anyone? 🤣#boyaquarium #hockey #hockeyromance ♬ Pony - Ginuwine

I did appreciate the attention paid to the issue of concussions in sports, because as a fan of hockey I’m very concerned that the players stay safe (and I wish they’d wear their neck guards!), but I did NOT appreciate the way that the wider impact of Jed’s brother’s concussion injury is portrayed. Jed announces that he’s solved the problem of his SIL trying to sell his private information by… paying off her house? I get that money does solve problems, but not ONLY money! Can you not, like, talk to the SIL about, you know, your feelings and her feelings and your boundaries and what she needs for her family to thrive economically and emotionally and maybe have some therapy and commit to spending more time together so she’s not isolated and offer to take your nephews for a few weeks so they can have quality time with a male role model? No? Just… money? Okay…

Oh, and I'm not buying for a second that an independent bookstore focusing solely on children's titles is going to thrive in this day and age. Sorry, Breezy, but you're about to have a hobby business propped up by your boyfriend's professional hockey money.

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TIL I Was Definitely Lead-Poisoned As A Child

Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve had a Special Interest in serial killers since the summer between my younger kid’s freshman and sophomore years of high school. Told that she could take any classes she wanted that summer at the local community college, she chose 1) Introduction to Food Safety, which enabled her to get her ServSafe certification and set her up to take a proper baking class at the college the next fall, and 2) Serial Killers and Their Victims. This latter was in some ways EXTREMELY inadvisable, considering it was WAAAAY more graphic than I stupidly thought it would be and thank goodness, I guess, that it was online so the professor never realized that one of his students was only fourteen years old, but it also encouraged the kid’s academic interest in Criminology, taught her the concept of “ethical true crime storytelling,” and made her probably the most safety-conscious of all her college peers. She told me once during her freshman year that several of her hallmates never locked their dorm room doors.

“I asked them,” she said, “if they had any idea how many serial killers there are currently active in the US, because it’s a lot!”

Whenever someone pisses her off she also speculates about how they fared on the MacDonald Triad as a kid, but that’s a different issue…

@horror_chronicles Replying to @Taylorkay #greenscreen #horror #horrortok #horrorcommunity #psychology #psychologyfacts #macdonaldtriad ♬ Suspense, horror, piano and music box - takaya

Because she was only fourteen during this class (oops!), I often helped her study, so I, too, read the entirety of Serial Killers and Their Victims, spent several months talking too loudly and too often about Jeffrey Dahmer, and, while I’m admittedly less married to my kid’s commitment to “ethical true crime storytelling,” I still seek it out.

Murderland doesn’t perfectly embody ethical true crime storytelling, but I think it comes about as close as you can when the subject of your book really is the criminals and not the victims. Like, yes, there’s a lot of blow-by-blow details of what victims endured, and that always skates the line of what is necessary to tell the story vs. what is simply lascivious, but I never felt like my gaze was inappropriate. And anyway, this was NOTHING compared to the level of graphic detail in Serial Killers and Their Victims! I also felt like there was a proper point to all the detail: making it very clear that these serial killers were as they were because they were also walking Superfund sites.

The universal lead poisoning of our older generations has become a cultural joke at this point, but it is genuinely horrifying how prevalent heavy metal contaminants and chromosome disruptors and just general poisons were. The constant smelter pollution of the Pacific Northwest is one thing, but apparently everyone who was in the vicinity of a car was actively lead poisoned? Like, DUDE, I was born in 1976, and have actual memories of the not one, but TWO Ford Pintos that my family owned! Thankfully nobody ever rear-ended us while I was riding in one, but I was absolutely being lead poisoned well into the 1980s.

When I asked my partner if he thought that he had been lead poisoned as a child, he said, "I spent much of my childhood in Europe." Well, la-dee-dah, Mr. I'm Too Good for Lead Poisoning! You've got to deal with it secondhand now, don't you?!?

Murderland had another personal-ish connection in its discussion of Israel Keyes, a sometimes suspect, at least among armchair investigators, for the disappearance of local college student Lauren Spierer. I'm pretty sure that all the real authorities have long dismissed him, but reading about all of ground that all of these serial killers covered, just driving back and forth and murdering people along the way, honestly makes me not want to rule him out. I mean, Ted Bundy's road trips often involved detours to seemingly random spots just to abduct and murder random people, so it feels possible, however unlikely, that Keyes or another active serial killer could have done the same. That's not my own personal conspiracy theory, though. Like everyone else in town, I've got my own pet conspiracy theories and, overall, just the wish that somehow somebody will figure out what happened to her so her loved ones can have closure.

Elaborating the full context for all the environmental poisoning people, especially the economically disenfranchised, were subject to was a LOT: the history of industrialization, the biographies of prominent corporate families, the geological history of the Pacific Northwest, the shoddy decision-making at every level that led to shoddy construction projects that further disenfranchised the vulnerable. That, combined with the elements of memoir, did cause me to get pretty lost in the weeds sometimes. What I really needed were maps and timelines and graphs; after a while, there was so much information I was trying to hold onto that the author simply jumping back and forth between serial killers confused me. I read a whole crime committed by BTK before I realized I wasn’t reading another Ted Bundy joint!

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