April Madness

I haven't added anything new here in a while. Mostly due to being busy fixing my lower back pain (strain) and carpal tunnel symptoms brought on and exacerbated by my Graves disease. The physical therapy has been challenging, but oh so worth it as I now have improved abdominal strength and improved flexibility in my hands again. For the first time in over a month and a half I can hand quilt and embroider without numbness, pain or tingling in my fingers. Yeah! One other benefit of the PT has been a renewed interest in my part on becoming more physically fit/active. I must admit that I am rather a couch potato by nature, but I really have enjoyed seeing the progress I've made over four weeks of regular exercises to improve my core muscles and want to continue to improve my fitness in general. The activity is helping to balance out some of the depression and low energy I still have as I work on getting my Thyroid hormone levels up to where they should be.
In the mean time, I have been busy reading some rather good books. One that I loved is by Eva Ibbotson called Island of the Aunts which had my attention from the first line. To quote "Kidnapping children is not a good idea. All the same, sometimes it has to be done." The Island of the Aunts is a great tale of a special island and the sisters who with their elderly father have settled there and take care of the rather special creatures who come to the island as a refuge and home. The Aunts worried about who will continue their work once they are gone set out to find children who would be the right sort of people to take over for them once they are gone and hence the need for kidnapping. It is a very funny book, and is a bit easier of a read than say the Harry Potter books, but great for kid in you or a kid you know. On a entirely different wavelength is Jonathan Lethem's rather stark young adult novel Girl in Landscape in which fourteen year old Pella Marsh must cope with her mother's death, and relocation from a post apocalyptic Brooklyn to alien planet where her father is taking the family to start a new life as colonists. What I found most interesting about this science fiction novel is that while Pella is very perceptive about understanding some of the actions of the adults around her, she is not at all clear about her own motivations/actions as she moves from being regarded as a "girl" to being a woman in her own right. Also, the alien inhabitants of the planet, called the Archbuilders, are really interesting in their own right. Anyway, that's all the news for now. I'm planning on getting some more photos of my dolls done in the next couple of weeks and once I finish quilting the top I'm working on, will get some pictures of it up.

Enjoy your spring.

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