Late to the PJ Party!

Despite the racket you are all making at Karen's Pyjama Party I managed to sleep until almost noon--in my defense, I as up when the party started still wrestling my PJs into being. But I'm here now enjoying the festivities and trying to catch up. Thanks for inviting me, Karen!

1. The jammies as of this time yesterday:


I'm using Butterick 6837 because I own it, OK? The fabric is quilting cotton that must have been $1.99/yard at FabricMart, otherwise I can't account for it being in my stash. Close up it's fairly pretty but back up a few feet and it's a kind of muddy brown. A dead simple make, complicated only by my propensity to pick up essential tools (scissors, tweezers, elastic) and drop them into some other dimension where they hide for hours at a time then reappear when I've given up looking for them. Oh, and I took Karen's advice to achieve crotch awesomeness by stitching from the seam intersection, but failed to give any thought to how this might work on a serger. But here they are, already broken in with a night's (and morning's) sleep.



Pay no attention to the hobbity woman in the middle of the picture--look at my beautiful bougainvillea and plumbago!

As for reading material, my bedside is littered with crossword puzzles, sewing books, London Reviews of Books, Ulysses (still and probably forever), and law school textbooks. Plus this:

My history with Dorothy Dunnett goes way, way back--I read the first three (of six) books of The Lymond Chronicles while Dorothy Dunnett was still working on the fourth and had to wait, haunting bookstores and libraries through high school and college, for her to finish the story in 1975. Now Lady Dunnett has a huge international following, but then I was all alone in my obsession. I waited impatiently for her to write some more historical fiction but after several years I gave up. I graduated from law school and had my second child in 1986 and was far to preoccupied to notice that The House of Niccoló, a prequel to my beloved Lymond Chronicles, had begun to appear. I didn't learn about this series until all eight volumes were published, Lady Dunnett had died, and an idle search on the World Wide Web brought it all back to me. These books are wonderful but extremely dense with historical detail and literary allusion, complicated plots tightly woven into fifteenth-century politics and trade, demanding (and rewarding) intense concentration that I seem to have in much shorter supply today than I did forty years ago.

What was the question?