I've just gotten finished emptying a utility cabinet where I used to store my beads. With 60 little drawers, there was some semblence of order, but some of the drawers were just too full to really work. Now they live in the second drawer-tower, with a "footprint" roughly the size of standard paper (so I can store flat pieces, if I like), but very shallow, so there's some room to work - the categories are larger, of course, because there aren't as many drawers, but it might be nice to see more varieties in a kind of survey.

Wild Swans by Jung Chang recently resurfaced during a book-reorganization, and I've settled down to re-read it. I'm managing to not lose her narrative thread quite so often in the early days of her grandmother and mother, which were during the downfall of the final imperial dynasty, republic, warlords era and, because they lived in the north, the Japanese invasion and even a turn of occupation by Soviet soldiers - really, you can't tell the players without a scorecard, but acquiring one takes a lot of patience that I usually don't have: I use books instead, and once again can heartily recommend The Search of Modern China by Jonathan Spence. Even if I can keep better track than before, the story she tells is just as compulsive reading as it was when I had read this the first time, possibly 6 years ago.

• Nothing like the thrill of returning to supermarket shopping, when you've been completely absorbed in something else. I've also done some meals, nothing terribly complicated, but even the simple stuff sure is nice to reconnect with. As is reconnecting with Mr Sweetie and his food planning - a couple of times, one of us would suggest something basic, the other would then go, "Ah, and I can to that to complete the meal." So, baked potatoes (what my UK friends call "jacket" potatoes) for the first time in an age. Or serving leftovers with corn-meal dumplings. Another meal that I had entirely in hand was just a simple fried fish, green beans, and roast potatoes - yum, yum! and many grateful thoughts to my British friend C. for her hand in teaching me how to make them, when she'd served them to me.
• Another use for the built-in camera on the mobile phone: taking a quick snap of the board in the kitchen on which we keep the shopping list. Mr Sweetie called me "lazy" but really, it was super quick and dead-handy.
• Finished reading The Gift of Fear, which I can heartily recommend; alas, I finished it on a rather timely day, as not far from us was the terrible murder of 2 babies and a nursery school employee by a young man with a knife. There is also another murder near to that event (I cannot lay the word "tragedy" on my tongue when what happened was so clearly of human agency) being laid at the same person's door, an old woman found dead in her home, of knife wounds. The manner of the telling via the various news broadcasters is practically out of the textbook, for all the wrong reasons.
• I'm getting to any number of small tasks that don't get done during the semester - haven't got around to the passport photos, alas, so my drivers' license is still Irish and not Belgian. But piles of clothes have made their way to the second-hand shop, small care parcels have been dispatched, that kind of thing.
• Sad news on a more personal level: the wife of the family friend I mentioned previously died a couple of days ago. We'll learn when the funeral is, and go to do our best to support our friend. In practical terms, that probably means just reminding him that if he needs to have a short change of scenery, to mourn away from his usual haunts or whatever, that our house is his.
• Yesterday couldn't have been more different from today, which was bright and sunny. Yesterday was not just gray, but nearly charcoal grey, with the sky a single featureless layer of wet, dark cotton; I felt as if I'd never been able to properly awaken - and Muggins here only remembered her light-therapy box at the end of the day. Hummph! At least aikido at the end of it didn't seem adversely affected, thank goodness.
• Poor Mr Sweetie is having to sleep in the guest-bed at the moment, because he's severely congested with a cold, and the breathing is so noisy it disturbs my sleep, which he's so loathe to do, that I can awaken at 4 a.m. and ask if he'd mind moving, and off he goes. Poor hon, I hope he gets better soon.