Weekly update: small projects, construction begins, and two books

 

I made hamantaschen for Purim but the dough lost the triangle shape during baking. In essence I made shortbread cookies topped with jam.  Though they weren't pretty, they were tasty.

The St. Patrick's Day soda bread turned out better.   We're still enjoying it and leftover crock-pot corned beef.  . 

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Spring Comes First to the Willows is a young adult novel from the time I was a young adult.  I think of that phrase every spring when the willows green up.   I don't remember anything about the book other than its title so I've put in an ILL request.  

Photo at Illinois Beach State Park -- the willow left and bottom right, and a red dogwood.  

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I made four daisy-print mug rugs for my P.E.O. chapter's project. 

I made a tote bag on behalf of the Zion Woman's Club as a door prize for the GFWC-Illinois convention in May.  The hardcover books are new this season, donated by HarperCollins publishers.   The geranium print is Italia by P&B. I've had it for ages. And I still have 3/4 of a yard.    

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Construction on the bird house quilt has begun.  The pattern calls for 15 FQs for 15 bird house.  I finally settled on the prints -- cheerful, contemporary -- and cut all the pieces. The roofs are done. The rest will be a matter of mixing prints (my rule is "no two same touching").  

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We recently watched a documentary about horses in North America on NOVA (PBS).  There was a segment about Morgans, an American breed with a well-documented history. I immediately thought of Marguerite Henry's book and checked it out.  I hadn't read it since I was a kid.  (It's ages 8-12.)   I now appreciate the colloquialisms ("I reckon he liked the track tol'able well," "The horse may be stronger'n a ox, but good pullers be slow runners") and the good research.  It was a delight. 

We contemporary humans are conditioned from infancy to acquire knowledge from reading, and that reading comes largely from books. The format of the bound codex with printed words (made up of letters) is our paradigm. We know that it wasn't always so -- cuneiform, hieroglyph, parchment scrolls, vellum manuscripts all came before moveable type on paper. But, still we think in terms of books that have pages, chapters, tables of contents, and indexes. Those features were not always so, either, and Dennis Duncan tells us how all of those came to be. He shows us how indexes became political weapons because of the entries an indexer chose. He bridges the past -- the printed format -- to the ever-increasing electronic format. Does Google index webpages, data, and more, or does it create massive concordances and what is the difference? This is a fascinating and extremely readable history of something we take for granted.

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