For Want of a Sleeve

I thought I was setting myself a rather lofty goal when I decided to try to finish Rainbow's Little Boxy before she got back from camp. As it turns out, I had much less left to knit on it than I'd realized, and thanks to several evening of undivided knitting time, it's now nearly done -- all that's left to do is the second sleeve.

I knit all of the first one last night, after I had finished weaving in the remaining ends from the body and the neckline. Sadly, I then had only about 10 minutes left before my usual bedtime, so I didn't even attempt to start the second (picking up a precise number of stitches is never a fast process because I usually have to do it three or more times before I get it right). I'll at least get a start on it tonight -- I'll be out looking at bridesmaid dresses with my future sister-in-law for part of the evening, so I won't get as much time as normal. Even so, I'm pretty confident that this sweater will be done before I go to bed tomorrow night, and I am thrilled about that.

After my last reading post, I did indeed finish the Inspector Gamache book (and gave it five stars). I also read a short but powerful book around the same time: When Breath Becomes Air. It had been on my want to read list for a while, and I saw that there was no wait for it at the library. In the end, I read the entire thing in a day. It's a very moving and sad memoir; I cried at the end, mainly at the thought of what Kalanithi could have done had he lived a full life. And it made me think a lot about life and death and how to make the most of our time on earth. It's a heavy book, to be sure, but one that's worth reading. And it fills the "Originally Published Posthumously" square on my bingo card.

My current read is The Goldfinch, which I've been wanting to read for some time. My mother had it in hardback when we were in Florida a few years ago and was reading it, and she said she'd lend it to me when she was done and then apparently lent to it a friend first. But I found it from the library with no wait, so now I just need to try to finish it before the loan is up -- it is more than 700 pages long! It'll fill my More than 500 Pages square on my bingo card, and I'm finding the writing quite good (though I'm finding the story to be quite depressing). I'm about 40% through it and hope to make a decent dent in it this weekend.

We've got a relatively quiet weekend ahead, the only one we'll have with Rainbow away. We have  a nice dinner out planned for Saturday evening, but other than that we don't have anything on the schedule. The weather is supposed to be nice on Saturday, so I'm hoping to get out for a run and generally be outside after a week when it's been rainy and gloomy pretty much nonstop. The rain has been good for all the plants, though, so I expect at least some of my time will be spent in the garden, pulling weeds!