Split Three Ways

Our vacation is quickly drawing to an end. Tomorrow is our last full day here, and we'll be home by mid-afternoon on Saturday. I'm not complaining, mind you -- as nice as it has been to have the week off and to get some extra sleep, I do miss my own bed (and, of course, my husband), and it will be not that bad to get back into a normal routine.

That said, I've been trying to keep busy while we've been here. I've been exercising a fair amount (though I've only managed to run once, as either a cold or a very bad allergy attack has left me very congested and with some difficulty in taking a deep breath or being able to go more than about 10 minutes without blowing my nose) and reading quite a bit for pleasure. And it goes without saying that I have been knitting quite a lot.

My knitting time has been divided into three projects. First are the self-patterning socks that I started the day before we arrived. They've been good for working on in the car when we drive to restaurants or the beach, and I'm probably between an inch and a half and two inches from starting the toe on the first sock. I'd like to get this one done before Saturday so I can have the second sock in progress for the flight home.

I'm still working on my Quill sweater as well, though it doesn't look much different from the last time you saw it. I've got two inches of body left to knit before I'm ready to start the armhole shaping, and I'm hoping to get that done tonight. Here's a close-up of the feathers:

Finally, there's the shawl I started on Tuesday. It doesn't look like much at this point because it's just garter stitch in cream-colored handspun.

This is the first time I've designed a top-down crescent shawl -- though not the first time I've knit one -- and I love how quickly it's getting big. It will look a lot more exciting once I start working in the blue handspun. If it looks half as good as the swatch I worked up last week (as I was experimenting with numbers and techniques to get it looking as I'd imagined), I'll be very pleased.

When I have been knitting this week, I've been reading up a storm, and I've actually finished some books! On the flight down, I finished reading The Girl with All the Gifts on my iPad (though that sounds more impressive than it actually was; I only had about two chapters left to read, and I think it only took me about 10 to 15 minutes to finish it off). I have to say that I did not much enjoy the book, and I only read it because I kept seeing it being mentioned by a bunch of friends who had read it on Goodreads. The blurb sounded intriguing, so I'd marked it as "want to read" and (thanks to the magic of technology) had gotten an e-mail from Amazon when the Kindle version was on sale. I'm thankful I did not pay very much for it. If you've been considering it, let me caution you by telling you (and this isn't really a spoiler, because it's revealed in the first chapter) that this book involves zombies -- a lot of them. I do not care for zombie-related stuff at all, and had I known, I wouldn't have read the book. Of course, once I started, I had to finish to find out how it ended.

The second book I read, which was infinitely better, was Hidden Figures. I have not yet seen the movie but had heard that the book was really phenomenal, and it did not disappoint. I don't real a ton of nonfiction because sometimes all the facts and figures and whens and whys cause me to lose interest, but this one kept me focused the whole time. It's a very good blend of the historical context of the time and the stories of the women who are at the center of the story. I highly recommend it.

When I finished that, I picked up A Man Called Ove from the small collection my parents have down here, and I finished it this afternoon. It was an easy and entertaining read, and the beginning reminded me very much of something else, though I haven't been able to put my finger on just what.

I'm now reading Orange Is the New Black on my iPad (Kindle app), but that's mainly when I'm putting Rainbow to bed, so I need to find a new physical book to read for the last day and a half we're here. There are some to choose from, but I suppose I could always stick with the Kindle book and wait until we get home to read whatever is atop my bedside stack of books. I have to say, it's nice to be able to sit down and read for a good length of time -- and finish up a book in a couple of days. I guess that is what I'm going to miss most about vacation.