Happy New Year!

Yeah, haven't posted since Thanksgiving, sorry about that. It's not that I was too busy, but I was preoccupied. I've been doing a lot of beading, spent time with my daughter and my family in southern California and am also trying to catch up on a backlog of books I've been wanting to read.

Just finished most of the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. I have a few more to go as I skipped the earliest ones and started with Mort, hopped over a few like Small Gods and Soul Music (even though I enjoy the story in that one about Susan).

The reason for this is that one of my favorite ways to go back through the Discworld books is to begin by re-reading the books featuring the Watch. Following the progress of Vimes and Carrot from Guards! Guards! through to Thud! always lifts my spirits. The newer books that have introduced new characters are fun as well - Moist von Lipwig (Going Postal and Making Money) is a great character and I hope there is at least one more book featuring him. Of course the news that Terry has been diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimers has me a bit down - I hope he overcomes all obstacles for many years to come.

I also skipped the Tiffany Aching books (Wee Free Men, Hat Full of Sky, and Wintersmith) so I'll be digging them out of wherever they're hiding, too. Speaking of which, I ordered some cool stuff from Paul Kidby's site that includes a Jock Mac Feegle statue and a White Horse Pendant like Tiffany wears since I love that design. I hope it arrives soon, I made the order back on the 12th of December.

I've been updating my LibraryThing list, too. Got a CueCat and it's been very handy. One of these day's I'll take my laptop out to the garage where I have my books stored and scan as many as I can. It'll be great to finally have an index of my books.

In other news I received a cool Christmas gift from my husband - a Portable Lighting Studio for Dummies kit! It's very nifty, came with two lamps and a fabric cube that diffuses the light. I'm waiting on a necklace display that's a bit shorter than the one I'm using now to get started taking new pictures of my beaded jewelry. Since I recently opened a shop on Etsy, I'm going to want to take some additional closeups since you can show your work in multiple images there.

We took the tree down yesterday so, aside from the new stuff that was under it, there are no lingering signs of the holidays, which is kind of sad. It went by so fast.

Well, I'll save some other ramblings and maybe put up a picture or two, for my next post - I'll try not to put it off so long this time.