Late Dec. catch up

Now that things are basically back to normal at home (with the furnace fixed), I can take stock of where I am on a few projects.

I am basically on track with the quilt to be finished in early Jan. and then drop it off with the long-arm quilter.  I have put a quarter of the top together (or at least before any extensions to the top and sides).  In general it is coming together quite well -- much faster than the first one -- though the top edge is a little ragged, and I'll have to try to straighten it out a bit.

I'm starting to think about the border and wondering if perhaps it will be too dark (or at least too different from the rest, so I'll think about that a bit more in the next few weeks.  Perhaps I will end up making another trip to the fabric store.

In terms of reading, I'm quite behind from where I expected to be.  I had thought I would be 500 or 600 pages into Trollope's The Way We Live Now, but I am only about 150 pages in!  I'll definitely finish it, though it will take a bit of a push to get it done before 2018.  And I may not actually get through Reve's The Evenings in time either, though that isn't quite a serious if I miss the deadline.  (Actually, in neither case does it really matter if I miss the deadline.)  I did decide recently that I am not interested in seeing The Shape of Water after all (one of the trailers kind of turned me off), so I'll use the time saved to catch up on these novels.

I'm still waiting to hear back on one of the theatre festivals, but I am starting to have my doubts that my piece was chosen.  On the other hand, there is still a chance that my site-specific piece will be accepted by the Fringe (hope to hear by next week).  In preparation for that, I really need to finalize the script (I had a few more ideas after meeting the principal of Danforth), since I promised to share the script a bit more widely next week.  If it does get accepted, then I have a lot of work to do in terms of getting permits, recruiting actors and, ideally, a director, but I think it would be worth it overall.  I also have in mind a short piece about an older man (a bit of a crotchety technophobe) who somehow gets turned onto Youtube and K-Pop videos in particular.  Again, just a short sketch, but I might be able to pound that out and get it to SFYS for the Jan. show (presumably on Jan 8).  I think after these two pieces, I probably ought to finish Straying South, particularly as I have handwritten out much of the final scene, and it would be horrible to lose that.

Beyond that, there are some other posts and reviews I want to write, but nothing too terribly urgent.  All the Xmas shopping is done, though we haven't produced that holiday card, in part because we didn't put up the tree last weekend.  But we'll do that tonight or this weekend, and I guess we'll be back on top of things.