or the emboss of the whole

I’ve joined in with the Embroidered Digital Commons project, I’m in Mr X Stitch’s Fractal group and this was my bit of the phrase to stitch. I’m quite pleased with how it’s turned out, I think the ‘emboss’ looks almost embossed and I had my bit of the phrase repeating within the letters of emboss because when you look at fractals the further you look into them the more you find that the pattern is repeating over and over again.

I have so many completed or almost completed embroidery pieces that need sewing into their new homes right now, that it was a joy to do something that didn’t need sewing into something and I like how it is a piece of embroidery that just ‘is’.

-

In other news I am mostly better, for the moment anyway, I suspect at least one maybe two more wisdom teeth will need to come out but my mouth, right now only feels slightly strange (although my jaw still twinges if I open it too wide, something went quite wrong with it I think with all the dental stuff I had done the week before last and it is still mending). I am also largely over the cough / cold / fluey thing I had and I’m finally getting some sleep, although I could do with lots, lots more of it. My first decent night’s sleep in over two weeks came on Sunday night and consequently I had the energy on Monday to spend all day completely blitzing the flat (which so needed it) but as a consequence to that I was completely wiped out again on Tuesday. Today has not been too bad, although I had to traipse over to Surbiton (two buses there, two buses back) with Boy Lacer for an audiology appointment which turned out to have been double booked (thanks NHS centralised appointment system!), which was very frustrating, as although Surbiton is probably only half an hour away by car, if that, because I don’t drive it takes an hour to get there and it can be quite a tricky hour because Boy Lacer is quite slow to walk between the bus stops and he’s got quite phobic about buses again, thanks to some idiotic bus drivers who screech off from the bus stop before all their passengers get to sit down, throwing them along the bus, which terrifies him, as he’s not the most steady thing on his feet. Anyway not that even if I could drive would it be more comfortable for Boy Lacer, as he’s even more phobic about cars . . .

Oh well, ballet in a minute and then work straight after, as you can imagine, right now my poor allotment is getting very neglected, but at least it’s raining a bit more now.

Our Tragic Universe

I am so very partial to a spot of Scarlett Thomas, like my recent misadventure with Iain Banks, I think Scarlett Thomas books have to be read with a certain mindset and although I tried and mostly failed with Iain Banks Transition, after a little bit of effort I absolutely loved Thomas’ latest offering, Our Tragic Universe.

Once again this is another Scarlett Thomas book where the main character Meg is a frustrated creative (this time another writer). She lives in Dartmouth in a damp house with a bit of a waste of space boyfriend scraping a living writing genre novels and the odd  review for a newspaper, whilst constantly deleting words from her literary novel she’s been writing for years. As the story opens she is reviewing a particularly bizarre book about how to survive the end of time itself and through doing this events begin that well, if I told you what happened to her, you wouldn’t read the book would you? Anyway as you will often find in a Scarlett Thomas book there is lots of philosophical angst, flower remedies and very possibly a little touch of magic. There is also in this one, knitting and lots of talk about the differences between the three act structure and the storyless story and how these can be applied to life, it’s that sort of book. I read this (actually I listened to it as an audiobook) thinking for most of it, that Our Tragic Universe, whilst good, is not her best book (I really like Pop Co. and am very fond of The End of Mr. Y) but actually by the end of this book I think this may actually be one of her best books after all, in my opinion anyway, it really grew on me and I found it’s message quite affirming.