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A day of nothing much, augmented with a two hour nap. I am feeling much more cheerful.

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Worked on this one while at Aerin's Concert Band Concert. There was also a percussion ensemble, the members of which played everything from vibraphone to tom-toms, including tin cans and the jawbone of an ass. It was quite wonderful.

My current camera is having lens fault issues (whatever that means) so I'm back to the older camera. I think the pictures are fuzzier, but I can't decide if that is tiredness talking or actual difference.

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I'm still enjoying making my circle lounging on the end of the couch. There are advantages of hand work. I like working with fabric that help me stitch neatly, and I am pleased with the little extra circle on perched on the curve there.

Al says generally he can get a grip on what I am trying to do with my work, but this month's circles are mystifying him. Alice just smiles.

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Somebody commented yesterday's circle looked like the Death Star, which made me turn this one around until it was unmistakably NOT the Death Star. It is the extra gray circles with stitching around the edges that provoke this illusion, I think.

Today was a craft fair at a friend's house. Al was trying to figure out how this worked. The answer is that this is a connected and community aware woman with a ton of friends and a commitment to living locally. So she invites a bunch of friends who make things into her house (an enormous and fabulous Victorian era house) and invites friends and neighbors in to see what would make good presents for the season. I have more great conversations about everything there than I do in any other month of regular living!

But I have been standing and talking all afternoon. I realized one of the nice things about handwork for this month is that I can sit on the couch with my feet up and work with a meditative slowness that the sewing machine doesn't allow.

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Friday's circle, the last of November, cannot properly show the absurd joy I get from snow falling from the sky.

However I will cheerfully admit that snow has a downside. It hadn't even started snowing when I made it, it started over night, and produced a thin fine glaze of ice and packed snow on the roads between me and Ipswich. I worked on getting to the craft fair at the Ipswich Museum for an hour and a half, miserable and tense, and not even half way, and finally turned around and went home. The combination of nasty driving, and ominous forecasts convinced me I'd done the right thing. I still have craft fairs to go, one right in town tomorrow, and one in Pittsfield next weekend for two days. I hope the weather is easier for those.

And then there is the first circle for December and the last set for the year. I knew I wanted to use a lot of texture and a lot of white and overlapping pieces. I am working on hating handwork less. So I combined those ideas into hand stitched layers of white fabrics.

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For years I thought the name of this constellation was O'Brien, courtesy of my father's puckish sense of humor. But then he also told me the names of the stars that mattered: Rigel, Betelgeuse and Sirius at Orion's heel, the brightest star in the sky.

One of my favorite parts of the late fall is that Orion is up before I go to bed. Coming home in the dark and the cold it is nice to see him striding across the sky over the garage, Sirius at heel.

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I'm sure I've said before I feel lucky to see a crow, and then slightly foolish because it is easy to see a crow, and then pleased with myself for being easy to please. It is nice to have a feeling of friendship with an incredibly common bird, especially if they keep improving their reputation for intelligence.

I want to take space to wish my beloved friend Kate a happy birthday. She's known me since I was young and stupid, and she was merely young, and we've watched (and helped and sympathized and baked for) each other for decades now and each other's children too, and I am very much looking forward to celebrating many, many more birthdays of hers.

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Another fossil from the ones people gave me for Christmas last year.

The whirl of the spiral, and the shine of the shell are hypnotic.

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I studied geology as an undergraduate, lo these many many years ago. I liked life, but blood and guts made me queasy, so clearly what was required was ossified life! Fossils were the perfect form of life for me to study; not squishy, not smelly, mostly rock, and yet still retaining the flourishes that life is famous for. It all made me very happy, until I graduated into the Reagan budget cuts, and only oil companies were hiring geologists. So I went to grad school and studied maps instead, and had another, different happy life instead. But fossils still make me absurdly happy.

Trilobites are entirely extinct, even though pill bugs look like them. It was a great parenting moment when Alice looked at the scuttling pillbugs under the climbing thing in the backyard and asked if they were trilobites. Sadly, no, but good guess.

Yesterday's circle was made but flickr was misbehaving, so you'll have to look for it there.

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A wild turkey, for the day after Thanksgiving. I made a circle yesterday too, but it was small and silly, and if you want to see it you have to go find it on Flickr.