Thursday, April 24, 2014

Mother's Day

Is it too early to claim these pillowcases are a Mother's Day present? Fourteen more this week, and a dozen last week, and that's it until the next good coupon comes up. Somehow I managed to make a lot more band pieces and could do 12-15 more if I hadn't used up all the "body" pieces. In the meantime, I'll sew the tags on all these extra bands.


Now that I'm caught up on pillowcases and the house projects I'd been waiting for winter to end to do, I need to get back on one of my "couture" projects this weekend. Last thing I remember, I was screwing up on the Yui dress, so I guess first thing on the list is to cut out some new muslin pieces.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Nee...

Nandaka marude yuki mitai ja nai?

It's supposed to rain all day tomorrow and that will probably be the end already of most of the blooms. Well, I guess that's why it's a theme, but one more sunny day of them would have been nice.


Friday, April 11, 2014

The Garden of Words, the Novel

Yesterday, going to work in the morning, I thought the trees would be blossoming any day now. By the late afternoon, I could hardly see the cars parked under the row of trees outside my office window. It seems like the flowering trees around here, now all in bloom, are not as well filled-out as previous years, and I wonder if it is due to the "over-achieving" winter that finally just ended. Good enough, though!


The Garden of Words novel came today, and I neglected to notice that it is a hardcover. Since I was ordering them from Japan, I got three copies. One for reading, one for "the archives" and one more cause it's easier to get one more now in case anything happens to the other two.


The cover is nice, with the foil leaf details. I didn't get a picture, but the book has green and pink leaves on the cover under the dust jacket.


One copy came with this card tucked into the little band.


Speaking of "the archives", I immediately picked the nicest copy and put it along with the card into this waterproof plastic tub I got to consolidate all my "good copies" of books, CDs, DVDs, blu-rays and everything else. In case of fire, this is the first thing that gets saved!


Tuesday, April 8, 2014

The Garden of Words - Coming Soon

The Garden of Words novelization is out this weekend and I'm hoping to see it next week. Normally, I would have ordered it from Yesasia, but they didn't list it til just recently. So I made my first order on Amazon.jp since I didn't want to risk missing it, like I did when I was trying to get the individual chapters in DaVinci. Amazon.jp seems to have updated their website so you can see a lot more in English, plus I could read more of it than I used to be able to.


While I was paying the shipping anyway, I also added a reading copy of Place Promised and another copy of Voices of a Distant Star. I've been (trying) to read Voices of a Distant Star and only had the small version, so I got the larger one to save my eyesight.


Even though I selected the "as few shipments as possible" option, and the new book is coming out in a week, they shipped these two books already. I got a shipment notice late Sunday night and they were delivered today (Tuesday). Hopefully that's not just a lucky case and The Garden of Words will show up that fast too!

Compared to Yesasia, I paid more in shipping (Yesasia having free shipping at $40) but the books were cheaper so overall it was close enough to get me to try it. Looking at some other things I might order, price+shipping works out better for Amazon in some cases and for Yesasia in others. Other considerations between the two would be that Amazon won't ship some items to the US (eg- some soundtrack CDs) while Yesasia sometimes doesn't have or has some items for only a limited time (eg - She and Her Cat novel), so I guess I'll keep an eye on both. It must be time for news on Shinkai's next movie, and I'm enjoying all these books more now that I have some idea what they say.