Books and craft wisps of fog

I’ve lost the oomph this week. And I shouldn’t have even come to work today, because I’ve had a weird cough all week (but nothing else to go with it) and got up at 3:30 am this morning and wandered about the house because I was dying coughing in bed. But now I am here and have a headache – boo hoo!

So, what to post about. Books. I abandoned reading Romola by George Eliot recently because a section in my book is misprinted, so it goes something like 186, 347, 348, 189 … then does it again, in the middle of a crucial revelatory chapter, which is so frustrating! I can’t find a docket but might take it back to the shop and see what I can do. I was also reading a two volume hardcover version, which looked all very aesthetic but had no footnotes translating all the Italian etc, so I was thinking of getting a Penguin Classics version anyway because I like the extra information they give you and my curiousity doesn't cope with untranslated foreign language sections.

I’ve started reading Future Grace by John Piper, because I never did when it came out. An old friend who has been struggling for a number of years recently wrote me a lovely eight-page letter in which they were telling me how much they’d been blessed and helped by the book Battling Unbelief. Battling Unbelief is basically an extract from Future Grace, and so never one to read the short version of books I got the whole thing. I seem to have slowed up in my reading of Christian books of late, and I’m not sure why (blame it on the crochet perhaps), because I always find it a good thing to do. I’m still plugging through the bible chronologically (well, I know it’s not actually chronologically, but you know what I mean) with the ESV study notes. I seem to be going slowly with this too. I’m finding it really useful, but also that I do need to supplement it occasionally with other things when I’m in long chunks of OT narrative or history.

As for Eli’s crocheted rug, I took it to Brisbane with me last weekend and left it there, thinking I would finish it off at Christmas during all the sitting around chatting. That rug is so much work joining it all together! - but I am well under way and then the border is easy. I’d actually like to try to make a few other things between now and Christmas if I get around to it. I am thinking about some of these for the Melbourne family and the little people in Toowoomba love owls, and owls live in trees, so I think some owl tree ornaments are in order.

And that’s about all for books and craft.