{Books and Yarn} Smoke Get in Your Eyes

The picture shows the subtle grey and black stripes and the lace and garter stitch texture...but it doesn't show how huge and unwieldy that skein of yarn is. Not having a bunch of ends to weave in once the shawl is done will be a nice perk, but wrestling with the yarn while I knit may cancel that out. 

I've been going back and forth about whether to write here about Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty. The title alone is going to let you know if you want to read this one (and if you want to skip it, you can also skip the rest of this post without fear of missing anything about quilts or yarn or happy crafty stuff.) I probably would have shied away from the book myself if I hadn't already watched almost every video on the author's YouTube channel, Ask a Mortician. Most of it isn't as gruesome as you'd think...and the video titles usually warn you about the ones you might want to skip.

As for the book, it was entertaining and thought provoking. It turns out that a lot of what I'd always heard about what you can and can't do regarding a funeral is just plain wrong, at least in California where the author runs her funeral home. I'm not planning to move, but I'm definitely going to do more fact checking here where I live. Not that I plan on dying soon, but I've got some strong feelings about funerals.

There are parts of the book that are going to stick with me for a long time, but they're not nearly as awful as some of the stuff I heard back in my answering service days when I was dispatching removal crews. (Apparently if something really bad happens at 2am, the only one to tell about it is your answering service.) I highly recommend this one, unless you don't want to read about death and the funeral industry.