Book Review: The Signature of All Things

Title: The Signature of All Things
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert
Format: Kindle
Reading Dates: 17 Feb 2015 - 18 Mar 2015
Rating: **1/2

Hmmm...This is one of those books with beautiful prose that draws you in, but with a storyline that makes you go "what the heck was that all about?"

It is about a woman with a fine scientific mind who can tell you everything about every kind of moss, but who is never able to attract the romantic attention of a man--that is until she reaches middle age. So that's the first third of the book.

And then she does attract the attentions of a man, but that is just a painfully awkward story that results in a painfully awkward situation. So that's the second third of the book.

And then she takes off on a ship for the other side of the world where she discovers. Well, I'm not sure exactly what she figured out there. And that was the last third of the book.

And then it was over and I said "what the heck was that all about?"

Go Big!

Last week we celebrated the lovely Miss Holly's birthday with some southwestern fare in downtown Dallas and...

...iris folding!

Holly had requested an iris folded U.S. map several months ago with a special ask--she wanted it big! This took a little thinking on my part. I needed to find a frame the right size and then I needed to figure out how I was going to cut out a map that big.

How big, you ask? Well, if this is the size of the original iris fold map I did...

...THIS is the size of Holly's map.

I eventually ended up using my Silhouette Cameo to make the map out of two 12" x 12" pieces of cardstock and pieced them together.

Then came the fun part.

I used paper from two different atlases. 

This one...

...and this one.

And two different dictionaries, too. 

A mat and a frame later, and Holly got her big map.

Interested in a giant iris fold for your house? Give me a shout. I have lots of atlases waiting to be swirled.

Book Review: Salvador

Title: Salvador
Author: Joan Didion
Format: Audible
Reading Dates: 27 Mar 2015 - 01 Apr 2015
Rating: **1/2

On one hand I kept thinking this book was really dated and would have made much more of an impression on me if I had read it years ago, closer to when it was published. Salvador is filled with a litany of terror perpetrated by one side then another in the bloody Salvadoran civil war. Thirty years ago those horrors were the stuff of every day headlines, and I'm sure I would have wanted this book to help explain--if it could--what it all meant and who were the good guys.

These many years later, the politics don't seem to matter as much anymore, but that litany--the description of one horrific act after another--seems only to prove that inhumanity knows no decade.