Hello friends! I can’t say that I’m definitely going back to the monthly reviews but since it’s my first month back at the blog (time has gone by quickly and also it feels like I never left), I thought I’d do a small rambling recap.

So I chose a good time to come back to blogging – I started after a vacation (when I was in a pretty relaxed mood) and just before a fairly long public holiday. So I was feeling good about blogging and even wrote a small piece on Ghibli during the week.

But then… work hit hard and I was reminded once again how much effort it takes to be consistent. I really do wonder how I used to do it last year. I’ve got quite a few drafts that I’ve not posted, so I think for May, I’ll focus on posting those drafts and then I may take the rest of the month (maybe two weeks?) off to just focus on reading and hopefully some writing.

On the reader front, I just wanted to mention a book that I decided to DNF. I normally just DNF books and forget about them, but given that I requested my library to get an e-copy and was on a waitlist for a long time… I actually felt guilty about not enjoying this. The book is Christmas: A Biography by Judith Flanders and while I should like the book (fun subject matter and all that), I just wasn’t feeling the festive spirit. I thought the book jumped about the place too much – I’m all for an exploratory style but it would be nice to have the each chapter focus on one aspect of Christmas, even if the chapters aren’t structured in a more linear format. As it is, I felt like I was being dragged through a mountain of facts with nothing to guide my way.

I’m also excited to say that I received two Kickstarter books/zines! Well… actually I missed the Kickstarter for the second Gwelf book but I enjoyed the first one so much that I put myself on a waitlist for the second. It’s arrived and I’m enjoying slowly going through the book!

The second Kickstarter item is a zine about owls! It’s very beautifully illustrated and a good primer on these beautiful birds. It’s short and perfectly suited to the format.

Oh yes, I also received Botany, which is a game I backed on Kickstarter. I’ve not played it yet but it’s beautiful and it makes me happy just to look at the pictures!

Speaking of objects, I also went on a bit of a crafting binge the last two weeks and made two new things! The first was a crochet bag; it’s not very big but was perfect for storing the materials for a second craft: an embroidered bookmark. The bookmark was a lot more challenging because I forgot that it’s meant to be double-sided so I had to take care when starting and ending threads. But it’s done and already in use!

I still have loads of extra thread from the crochet bag, though, so I’m trying to think of small objects I can make! If you have beginner-friendly ideas (this is literally the first time I’ve crocheted), please let me know!

For me, these crafts are as relaxing as baking and have the additional benefit of being easy to fit into a day. I finally baked after months today and even though I chose something relatively simple (chocolate chip and matcha chocolate chip cookies), the amount of time I needed to dedicate to baking meant that I can’t do it on days where I’m planning to go out. But for crocheting and embroidery, it’s easy to just pick it up for ten minutes at a time. (That said, the downside of crafts is that the finished product is around for a very long time, unlike baking where I’d eat everything/others will eat the end product and if this crafting continues I might run out of space.)

Finally, I want to end this post by asking: how is everyone feeling about WordPress? I have definitely been tempted to move to a shiny new platform (cough cough substack cough cough) these past few months BUT I’ve always liked that using WordPress means you “own” the site. But it also costs money and seeing things like WordPress.com trying to be sneaky with using user’s content (thanks Briana for writing about this!), Jetpack turning off stats with what I think is a very strict definition of non-commercial (understandable but I’m already paying for my domain and hosting and I don’t make money off this blog – asking for ko-fi and receiving it is different), and also encountering my own tech issues (tried to solve the “nonce failed” issue, turned off comments in WordPress reader somehow – thank you lovely people who still commented!), means that outsourcing all this to a third party platform starts to look good. But I’m still here for the community so unless a good number of people are migrating, I doubt I will do (so erm… let me know?)

I think this is all I wanted to write in my round-up post. It’s not really a month-in-review, more like “all the things I forgot to make into individual posts in April” so let’s see what May brings!