What is a finish?

Summer is winding down, and I've been asking myself, "Have I finished with finishes?"  No finishes since when?  I can't even remember when the last one was - April?  May?  Last month - which feels so long ago - I took out my Tour de France poster and worked on it.  Actually made some progress.  But the piece still has so much work left to do.  The race ended, and I put the project aside.  Since then, I've been busy with other things and no significant stitching on anything has taken place.

Instead, I've been working on a couple of smaller, very portable projects - a piece of sashiko and some bookmarks for my EGA chapter's outreach.  No pictures yet.

Hopefully, some cooler weather will revive my stitching mojo, and I'll get back to work on the ufos.  I haven't been reading as much either, but I loved The Man in the High Castle and bought a collection of Philip K Dick's short stories.  The collection includes Minority Report and Total Recall, which I'm looking forward to reading.  What I like about his work are the unexpected humor and optimism despite the desperate circumstances that the characters face.  The Man in the High Castle has a novel within the novel itself, a fictional novel banned by the government but read secretly by many.  This idea of novels that don't actually exist led me to another really great novel, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.  This is a gothic novel set in Barcelona in the years after the Civil War and WWII.  It is about a boy who reads a novel.  He loves it so much that he wants to find the author's other books, but what he finds is that someone has been destroying every copy of every novel by this man.  His search for the reason why leads him to many mysterious corners of Barcelona where he uncovers many secrets.  There are two sequels to this book which I plan to read.