Knitting, reading, and cookies

[mousme]

KK spent most of today industriously doing All of the Baking. She made biscotti (a personal favourite of mine among her creations), chocolate chip cookies, and brownies. I am going to be eating baked goods for the rest of my life at this rate! Not that I'm complaining too hard.

After Quaker Meeting I spent most of the day working on the Hubris Shawl and listening to the first audiobook I obtained this year on Audible, a historical fiction mystery called The Frozen River, which takes place in Massachussets just after the Revolutionary War, and is very loosely based on events in the life of Martha Ballard, who was a midwife there at the time. It's a good read, as they say, well researched and grounded in enough fact to make the entire thing very plausible, although I was quite interested in the author's note at the end, in which she listed all the liberties she'd taken with the actual history. The narrative choices all made sense to me, and didn't in any way detract from my enjoyment of the book itself. It was a bit of a hard listen, as it dealt with a fair bit of sexual assault, but unlike many books it didn't linger on the act itself, which was a mercy. I've found lately that a lot of fiction goes into unnecessarily lurid detail and/or focuses so much on the act that it feels like borderline torture porn, and that is very much not my jam. (When I say "lately," I mean the last 15-20 years, because I haven't been doing much reading in the past decade due to my brain refusing to work. I've also noticed the trend in television a fair bit.)

In unrelated news, both my parents have come down with the flu this past week. My mother had an emergency prescription for an antibiotic and a steroid from her pulmonologist for just such an occasion, so she's doing reasonably well, but my father is very under the weather. They have promised/pinky sworn that they will go to a walk-in clinic first thing tomorrow and also to call if they're worse/not any better by Tuesday, or just to provide an update. They "don't want to worry [me]" so of course they just don't tell me things, and I have been railing at them for fifteen years about this ridiculous habit, so I don't expect they will change that habit anytime soon. I am trying not to worry too much yet, but I hate being so far away from them when things like this happen. :/

Tomorrow I plan to sleep in a bit in preparation for my week of night shifts, and then putter around and get myself organized for the rest of the day. We'll see how things go, I guess.