Crocheting, but not for me

This is the bolero that my friend HS likes very much and the pattern is obtained from a Taiwan Yahoo blog. So this crocheting is for her. I am using a Japan cotton fine yarn, like lace weighting, which is very soft and light. At before, I don't like to crochet with cotton yarn for some bad experience, but now my mind is totally changed. This is my first time to crochet a top-down bolero starting with a round yoke.

Since the gauge is not the same as the pattern, I have used much time to test the tension and all the calculation. What you see from the picture is my second trial, hope this size will fit her. I will get her to try it before I go ahead.

Reading - A Spot of Bother

A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon


At fifty-seven George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels, listening to a bit of light jazz. Then Katie, his tempestuous daughter, announces that she is getting remarried, to Ray. Her family is not pleased - as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has 'strangler's hands'. Katie can't decide if she loves Ray, or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning and arguing the wedding has occasioned, which get in the way of her quite fulfulling late-life affair with one of her husband's former colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tony to the dreaded nuptials.

Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hop, and quietly begins to lose his mind. Always worries that he get a cancer and will die soon.

Reading - Chicken Soup for the Soul "celebrates" Grandmothers

Chicken Soup for the Soul "celebrates" Grandmothers by Jack Canfield & Mark Victor Hansen



I thinks most of you must have read the series of Chicken Soup for the Soul. This captures the tender moments spent together with family. Through these stories grandmothers will be reminded of the invaluable contribution they make to their families and will celebrate the honored position they hold in their circle of loved ones.

Reading - Piranha To Scurfy and other stories

Piranha To Scurfy and other stories by Ruth Rendell



In the scary title tale, a solitary, arrogant, self-appointed fault-finder is haunted by memories of his dead mother, the mind of a lonely man whose inability to please his mother makes him vulnerable to self destruction.
Mythology and fairy tales come to life in "High Mysterious Union," a novella in which a man's increasing obsession with a young woman places him under a spell that almost leads to his death. Irony plays a strong role in most of the nine tales here.
In "Walter's Leg," the title character learns that people don't change, even over a lifetime.
In "The Professional" is about a young man who thinks he witnesses a murder, talks himself out of it, then too late realizes he was right.
In "Fair Exchange," a man's doubts about a healer who helps his sick wife are his undoing.

Reading - The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald


It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout.

Reading - Cock & Bull

Cock & Bull by Will Self


The first, Cock: A Novelette, concerns Carol, a passive young woman trapped in an unsatisfying marriage, who starts developing a penis. Personality changes soon follow, leading to unpleasant consequences for Dan, her loutish husband.

Bull: A Farce , meanwhile, involves a typical Englishman, archetypally named John Bull, who wakes up one day to discover a "wound" on his leg that turns out be a vagina. The doctor who examines him develops a more-than-professional interest in his new genitalia, and the two begin a confused affair.

While gender complications play an obvious role in these satiric tales, Self's real target is "the horror that shadows each and every aspect of the ordinary."

Reading - Black Betty

Referring to my non-received of IKsummer2007, I have emailed to IK and they replied that they will resent one to me. Hope that need not to wait a long period to receive it.

Another fiction is read recently.


Black Betty by Walter Mosley

Mosley's distinctive black investigator, Easy Rawlins must grab at the $400 he's offered to locate Elizabeth Eady, a missing housekeeper who several years and a few lifetimes away was "Black Betty," a sensual presence on the Houston streets where he grew up. Easy understands that Betty worked for is offering so much money to find her, or why her brother Marlon is also missing--and likely dead, given the spilled blood found in his place. Easy isn't always able to concentrate on the case. His pal Mouse, just out of the slammer, wants help finding the guy who sold him out to the cops; all the rage Mouse acts unthinkingly on, Easy feels too and struggles to contain. In measured, quietly emotive prose, Mosley moves his work away from conventional genre fiction, tinkering, abandoning and later returning to the mystery element. Nevertheless, the solution fully satisfies as Easy opts for smaller victories--not the white man's riches, but maybe a few bucks in his pocket.