Leisure Time

 I've been doing a lot of reading lately ... trying to get away from so much time on the computer.  I mentioned this book - The Time In Between - the other day.  Like I said then, I rarely read fiction, but this book drew me in - first with the cover, then with every page.  I finished it over a week and a half ago and still wish the story would go on so I could read more.

 Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch has been my next read.  This is a non-fiction account of how the author used reading a book a day for an entire year as a way to deal with her sister's death.  Interesting concept but I disagreed with a lot of what she said.  I felt sorry for her to have no hope of life after death, which caused her great confusion and grief, with no hope of seeing her sister again, and no way of coping with future deaths.  I also thought it was selfish of her, even though this was a way of moving on in her grief.  She has four sons and a husband, and her commitment was to read an entire book every day and to blog about it.  She never says she missed a single reading, but does mention very briefly times when life made it difficult to accomplish the goal.  I think it was a great accomplishment to be able to succeed at her goal, but in living through books, she missed the connections with the people who were living around her.  I couldn't help but wonder how she would have felt if she had lost one of those children or her husband that year - when she wasn't giving her attention to them.  She spends a lot of time thinking back on memories she made with her sister, but misses being able to make memories with her sons.  Sure she goes along with them, but always with a book in hand.  Anyway, enough of my opinion.  Let's just say I won't be attempting this.  In a way, that's what is keeping me from sewing as much as I would like.  Sure, I'd love to indulge in sewing every single day, and I could set a lofty goal for myself and say it's important for my emotional well-being or whatever, but lets get real.  I would have to neglect my family in order to do it, and that's just plain selfish.

So back to reality.  To prove that I haven't just been reading all day, here's the latest round of baby food.  I figured out that packaging the food in snack sized zip lock bags makes it easy to store, reheat and serve, and I also figured out that the flatter they sit when they freeze, the more compactly they store, so I pressed them flat on a cookie sheet and left them to freeze (which also reminds me that I recently sorted and re-organized the chest freezer as part of my Spring cleaning - not sure I mentioned that before.)

Once they were frozen I put each type of food into it's own gallon sized bag, so it would be easier to contain them and they would be less likely to create a disaster in my freezer.  Also this helps me see how many of each thing I have left.

Then yesterday afternoon, my daughter wanted to watch My Fair Lady - with Audrey Hepburn.  We know all the songs because we listen to that sort of thing (show tunes) on Pandora all the time, but we had never seen the musical.  It was a fun afternoon.  Now I just have to figure out what to read next...