I live! We have family coming in to stay for a month so we have been cleaning and organizing the house for the last two weeks. Now that things are as clean as they are going to get, I have some more free time.
Most of the free time not spent cleaning was spent working on crochet and knitting projects, but I did manage to get some work done on the map. I’ve managed to get a good 2/3rds of the green done for the corner of the map and I am already getting ready to pick the new color I’ll be using. I believe we’re getting close to the point where I won’t have large blocks of color to work on and we’ll get into the weeds of three squares of color sprinkled through the pattern here and there. It’s always the most frustrating part, since theres a lot more starting and stopping, binding off and double checking that the colors are all in the right spot. I may have to consider to have multiple colors going at the same time to get the pattern done but I really don’t want to as that is asking for trouble.
As for audiobooks, I have returned to non-fiction and I am currently listening to “The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis” by Jason M. Baxter. I liked the way they descried the focus of the book in the introduction as a look at the “third Lewis”; not the apologist or fictional writer but the Oxford-then-Cambridge professor who devoted his life to medieval literature. Specifically the book is referring to the way Lewis tried to bring the imagery and world view of the medieval period into his literature, both academic and fictional. The book makes me think of another work I’ve read before called “Planet Narnia” by Michael Ward, which looked at the Chronicles of Narnia through the lens of the Medieval astronomy. I think the idea of Lewis as a medievalist is an interesting thing to consider, as someone who also enjoys writing. A lot of time you think of the author as just an author, especially when there are so many people who make their living by writing books. It can be easy to forget, especially when writing can take so much time and energy, that for some the writing was a secondary outcome of another passion or focus. So far I’ve really liked what Baxter has said about the use of medieval world view and the connection between how Lewis viewed himself and Boethius, but the book is just getting started. I hope to have it finished by the next update and will give a more complete opinion then.
