Purple Haze in Stages, Falling Leaves, Exercise and Books!

 

Purple Haze.  Hubby mentioned this name, so I went with it .  Does it remind you of Jimmy Hendrix?  Here it's laid out to dry.

Here it is in stage 2, I've edged the squares to even up sizes, and tied the squares together to begin joining them.

Here it is before anything was done.  It changed quite a bit, and I did move a few squares around after edging.

Waiting in the wings is Falling Leaves.  This is most unusual in that I had enough donated squares to make a pattern.  The green squares aren't quite the same size of the orange and variegated, and the yellow aren't granny squares; but this one should require less work to size things up to join.

February was a pretty good month in terms of activity.  My mileage went from 115.48 miles in January to 127.83.  I went for 10 actual purposeful walks in January and 15 in February.  Hubby fixed up the bike from Goodwill so I managed to get 6 bike rides in afterwards.  Planks are both up and down.  They're up in that I increased from 45 seconds x 4 to 50 seconds x 4 partway through the month; but my total repeats are less.  I did planks 17 days in January and 15 days in February.  Sadly I neglected to document 2 days in February...so don't know what I did those days.

Help Me to Find My People.  I returned this to the library only partially read.  I tried several times to get into it; but found it bland, and very repetitive.  Lots of stats and references to other books and authors exploring how slaves felt being sold, being separated from the families.  They felt bad.......I don't think you need stats to know that.  They felt fearful, they felt useless.  It's not rocket science.  Everything about slavery was horrible.  Most people know that, except for White Supremists. 

Hush Harbor was frightening, thought provoking and difficult.  An uprising because cops killed a Black American who was un-armed.  Sadly, we've witness this is the news far too often.  This book shows a group of people fed up and fighting back.  I found it chilling, but highly recommend this book.

Kinfolk........small town life in Alabama, a dysfunctional family. An un-educated girl finds a family can be more than blood.  It's a heartwarming story with some dark undertones of what people live with.  It's read by the author which made it even more enjoyable.  Highly recommend this book.

Another Finish, Ta Dah, and Starts, Jimmy Carter AND.....

 

School Days/Daze is being blocked here at it's drying.  The rectangles with the mixed colors were a bit of a challenge size wise.  Had to edge them differently.  ANd as you can see some are turned horizontally and others vertically. in order to fit right.  In part, because they were very stretchy.  Not sure what stitch was used when they were made, but in some cases I needed to mix stitches when edging to not leave holes, as the side stitches were fairly loose; but am pleased with the end result.  It measures 51 x 61, and was made with 30 squares.

Here's the before picture, though it's not oriented the same way as the finished picture above.  I had to stand on the side to get the best shot for the completed picture.  This is the 3rd afghan I've made while we're here on the island from pieces parts.

And this is the next one I'm working on.  I've begun edging some of the squares, but this picture is before I started edging.  These are all crocheted squares and rectangles.  This one is called Purple Haze..

I finally got around to grabbing my calendar and adding things up for January and added stats to my exercise tab across the top of the blog.  In Jan I did 35 second planks with 10 seconds rest x 4 repeats and did that 4 days, then upped the time again to 40 seconds and did that 4 times, then upped again to 45 seconds and did that 9 days, so in total did 17 planks during January which is an increase I'm happy to say.  

My mileage is up by 6 miles over December, at 115.48 miles.  I did 10 purposeful walks which is also up a bit from December.  I started doing leg lifts to a count of 40 (occasionally 50) and did that 9 times in January..

February is coming along, and since I got my Goodwill bike (see previous blog post), I'm adding some bike rides to my exercise.

A very good read, thought provoking about being Black through the history of one primary family in the south, Jim Crow laws and more.  Add this to your list.

If you've been a frequent visitor to my blog, you know how many WWII historical books I've read/listened to.  So, I consider myself fairly well versed on The War, and how vastly different horrors there were; but I did not know about the plot to kill Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill.  All these years later after documents have been unsealed, much is still being learned.

History might not show Jimmy Carter to be one of our best Presidents, but, it will show him to be a great man.  A truly involved and caring man.  The work he did after his Presidency is incredible, even without his work with Habitat for Humanity.  He worked so hard for peace in the middle east, and had such a profound understanding of the needs and wants of people.  I found this to be an important read given the sad situation we're in today.  Please read this book.

Another round of beautiful roses, this time gorgeous yellow which is my personal favorite over red..  I always consider yellow to be such a happy color.