Weekly update: more flowers, more churn dashes, and one you've got to read

 On Saturday afternoon we combined a trip to Half Price Books with a forest preserve walk -- saving time and gas.  I didn't get much for the books but they are out of my house. (I know all about library and AAUW book sales, which I've managed, set up, purchased from, and cleaned up after. I chose HPB this time.)  

Upper left: a tangle of garter snakes (two here; a third slithered away (perhaps establishing dominance before mating?).   Downy pagoda plant (blephilia ciliata -- a new one). Cow parsnip.  Middle: common cinquefoil. Columbine/aquilegia (there are blue ones in our flower bed).  Cleaver (galium aparine), also catchweed bedstraw.  Bottom: cranesbill (end of its season). Birdsfoot trefoil. Virginia waterleaf or Shawnee salad (hydrophyllum virginiamun).  

There's a paracourse along the trail. The various exercises are pretty challenging -- I'll stick to walking, which is getting easier for me the more I do it.

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It's been a week of deaccessioning.  Not only did I sell books to HPB but I also took a box of books to the AAUW luncheon on Tuesday.   I bought a map at an estate sale a few weeks ago and sold it (for more than I paid but a lot less than a comparable listing on eBay).  

AND I sent a half dozen flimsies to a quilting friend.  As I explained, I enjoyed making them but I don't feel compelled to quilt them.  And now they won't be grumbling at me from the still-pretty-full Box o' Flimsies. 

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Christmas Churn Dash is quilted and bound.  

I used three near-vintage Cranston prints for the back. (Those Cranston reds and greens are the epitome of Christmas fabric in my opinion.)

The next churn dash project involves a few batiks.  :)   These are the FQ-and-pieces bins. There's a lot more yardage.

The blocks are 9-1/2" unfinished.  I'm aiming for 56 blocks for 63 x 72. 

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Put this book on your TBR list RIGHT NOW.  It is wonderful.   

Elizabeth Zott aspires to be a research chemist. She's doing the work at a lab in southern California but she's not getting the credit. It's the 1950's and misogyny is rife. She and Calvin Evans, the lab's brilliant Nobel-nominated senior fellow, fall in love and defy social norms by moving in together. Both had unconventional upbringings (her parents were crooks, he was an orphan in a boys' home) that they constantly work to overcome through their passion for scientific discovery. Elizabeth endures tragedy, office politics, and an unplanned pregnancy that results in a daughter as bright as her parents (and a lot more perspicacious). Fired from the lab, Elizabeth becomes the host of a television cooking show that she approaches as a chemistry experiment. The show becomes a national hit.

"Chemistry is change," she tells her audience of stuck-at-home wives and mothers. "Whenever you start doubting yourself, whenever you feel afraid, you remember., Courage is the root of change--and change is what we're chemically designed to do. So when you wake up tomorrow, make the pledge....No more allowing anyone to pigeonhole you into useless categories of sex, race, economic status, and religion...Design your own future...Ask yourself what *you* will change. and then get started." (p.360).

Serious but very funny. Funny but very serious. It's as though Carl Hiassen meets the proto-women's movement.  

Linking up with Oh Scrap!   Design Wall Monday  Monday Making

P.S. The red rambler rose is in bloom. (It took last year off.)