It's a Beautiful Day: Unraveled, Week 3/2021

Good morning, friends! I don't know about you but I have been waiting for this day for a very long four years. I kept waking up super early this morning -- I can't remember the last time I actually looked forward to my alarm going off! I was able to get Rainbow up fairly quickly this morning, too, I think because she couldn't wait to get into our matching outfits:

We're even wearing the same pants! I've discovered that I can fit into a teen size of the joggers she really likes from Target, so now we can really do twinning right. She was planning on wearing her shirt under her uniform polo shirt to school today, but she came home all excited yesterday because they were told today would be a dress-down day. They didn't say that the girls would be able to watch the inauguration at school, though, so we're recording it so we can watch together tonight.

It's Wednesday, so I'm joining up with Kat and the Unravelers to talk about crafting and reading.

My projects haven't changed much since yesterday, although I did spend a good amount of time on Rainbow's socks yesterday and just have to finish up a toe to have a finished pair. Once that is done, I've decided to do a little charity knitting in honor of the incoming administration, so I've pulled out the big bag of fingering weight scraps to do some scrappy hats. When I say big bag, this is what I mean:

It's hard to get a true sense of scale but I can tell you that this bag is about 18 inches tall and was stuffed to the gills. I plan on holding two strands of fingering weight together (to make roughly a DK) and adding an additional strand every time one runs out.

Reading has been excellent this past week. I've finished three books since my Unraveled post last week, and they were all 4-star reads for me:

James McBride's The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother

I read three of McBride's novels last year and was amazed and impressed by his ability to create such vibrant and unusual characters. Now I understand that his unusual childhood was a large reason why. He was raised as one of 12 children by his mother and step-father, having never met his biological father (his mother was pregnant with him when his father died). His mother always said she was "light skinned," but it wasn't until McBride was older that he discovered she was raised as an Orthodox Jew, the daughter of a rabbi and a Polish immigrant. I listened to the audiobook, which alternates chapters "read" by McBride and his mother telling their respective stories.

Erik Larson's The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance during the Blitz

I know many of you read and loved this book, so I won't be telling you anything new, but it is a wonderful read and I learned so much by reading it. Books about history have a tendency to be slow and dull, but this one is neither. It took me a while to read it, but only because it is long and I wanted to read slowly enough to take it all in. I'm definitely going to be reading more of Larson's books in the future!

Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind is the next Read With Us selection, and I was lucky enough to not have to wait too long to get it from the library. It's a very strange book, but strange in a way that invites a lot of thought and is great for a discussion. I'd encourage you to read the synopsis but don't write it off completely if it doesn't sound like something you'd normally read. It wasn't really what I thought of as "my" kind of book, but I really enjoyed it, despite how unsettled it made me feel. I'm really looking forward to discussing it with the group!

I am starting to suspect that the library/Libby app knows when you're a reader who typically returns books early and rewards you by shortening your wait time, because despite the app telling me I had three more weeks to wait, I was surprised by a notification that Transcendent Kingdom was available for me to borrow yesterday morning! I started reading it last night and am already something like 22% through it, so I expect I'll be able to finish it up before the end of the week. It's really good so far.

It looks like things are about to get started on the Capitol, so I am signing off for the day. I wish you a good day today, hope for things to improve, and (as always) projects and books that make you happy!