I have my own action figure

I almost peed my pants when I saw this--I have an action figure! For those who don't know, I spent a year at the south pole. I'm pretty sure that's a face mask/gaiter, not a beard, so that this toy can be either gender.


The bag is coming along--I put the side stitches on holders so they can become the straps, and bound off the front with icord, and I'm halfway through the flap. I would have preferred to do it all in purple but I realized I don't have enough yarn. Oops. This bag is getting really heavy--it's used a lot of yarn. Good thing it will be felted and thus able to bear its own weight....




I'm reading several books, as always.

• Fruit of the Lemon by Andrea Levy. This is in-bed reading, which I've limited to novels only as otherwise I lose chunks of information when I read past fully-awakeness. I've read 2 others by this author, both of which I enjoyed, this one is not grabbing me so much. She writes about the Jamaican immigrants/children of immigrants in England. I'm very into immigrant experience right now, since I'm struggling through my own expat, temporary immigrant experience...
  
• When They Severed the Earth From the Sky by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. This was the last non-fiction I tried to read in bed (bad move), so now I've started it over in the light of day. It's about how our cognitive process, especially the language pathways, frame our experience and thus how we encode myths. Or, its about decoding myths into the historical events behind them, which is aided by understanding how we process language itself.
  
• How to Get a Job You'll Love by John Lees. Self explanatory. The latest of many in this vein, indicating I still haven't come to grips with this issue. Sigh. The author is British and this book is very ... british. I actually threw it across the room yesterday in frustration. Not understanding plain english is very frustrating. Did I mention my blood sugar was a bit low at the time?
  
• Stalin's Peasants by Sheila Fitzpatrick, about the forced collectivization of farming in the 1930s. I read a book 2 years ago about the gulags (Gulag by Anne Applebaum) which was riveting. This book is a bit more academic and slower going. I read the gulag book right when I started working with a bunch of historic Soviet data at school--kind of gave me some bad juju. Of course, the Nazi data I was working with took the juju cake. It's meteorological data, FYI. It's data, it's good data, but I still feel creeped out using it.
  
• Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler, also a bit academic and thus slow going. These last two books are also physically quite heavy, so I'm not so keen to carry them around. I do a lot of reading on the tram, apparently.