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In December, I started working on this, because that's adorable and squishy and I want one. And it's kind of an ideal project, because the individual pieces only take about 40 minutes to make and can come in whatever color of fingering weight yarn you happen to have around, so you can make one and then not work on it for a week and still feel accomplished because you finished that piece.

Today, I laid all of mine out (I have approximately 50, give or take a couple), just to see how they'd look. They aren't sewn together yet, but I'm pretty pleased with them and thus I post a picture:

( Someday, I will have a quilt! )

I need about 1000 little hexagons, so this is kind of a long term thing, but I'm enjoying it. And it gives me something low-stress to knit when I'm bored with other projects.

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Friends and neighbors, I have been listening to Dracula on audiobook. It is some new version that audible.com sent me an email about, and apparently has Tim Curry and Alan Cumming in it somewhere, so of course I had to download it. I am assuming that it's going to be like the weird Dune audiobooks where there's a narrator for the narration and different speakers for the dialogue...in some chapters. Though, we haven't actually had a chapter like that yet. I am only 2 chapters in, though, and so far it is all Simon Vance all the time. Which is okay, because Simon Vance is the audiobook reader that always makes me think, "Hey, it's the guy who sounds vaguely like David Collings!" and I like his Dracula voice.

You guys, I really do like this book immensely. I mean, I make fun of it a lot and the characters do a lot of stupid things (OMG, the journey of the Demeter - so scary and yet so dumb), but it's pretty awesome. Revisiting it is a lot of fun and I'm enjoying having an audio version. Maybe it will eventually become a bedtime audiobook.

Other vampire-related things I am enjoying: Dark Shadows! I think what I like most about it at this point is that it is old enough to be able to play its ridiculous vampires completely straight. Nowadays, if you want to make a story about vampires, it feels like you have to be ironic about it, you have to wink at the audience. And that's fun, a lot of the time, but I get tired of it too. It's nice to go back to something old enough where, by god, if we want an entranced woman in a flimsy white nightgown wandering out into the cemetery at night, we're going to have one. Let's have the doctor wonder if the marks on her neck could be from an accidental poke with a piece of costume jewelry. Let's have the at-home blood transfusion from her boyfriend. (Though, thank god, they did manage to check blood types first.) Let's surround her house with howling wolves dogs. That's awesome. Do it. It fills my heart with glee.

Old school vampires makes me so happy.