Unraveled, Week 5/2021

Good morning from a chilly Western Pennsylvania! We did not receive as much snow as some of you from the most recent storm, but we did get enough for Rainbow to have a snow day on Monday (I was expecting they'd do a remote learning day, as they're already well set up for that, but I think they decided that everyone could do with the mental health benefits of the day off!). We did get a bit of sun yesterday that started to melt some of the snow and ice, but everything froze again overnight. One good thing about the snow is that I've been wearing my snow boots for my daily walk instead of my sneakers, and underneath I've been wearing wool socks that have kept my feet warm.

I'm joining Kat and the Unravelers today to talk about WIPs and reading. In addition to the long-suffering WIPs (the crochet blanket you saw yesterday and a two-color shawl from last summer), I have a new project on the needles that I started Monday evening. I found out in a work meeting on Monday that one of my coworkers had a baby over the weekend. This might seem like unexciting information, but we have been working remotely so long that I didn't even know this coworker was pregnant! Her baby boy arrived a bit early and is pretty tiny (4 pounds-something), but is doing well. He'll need some wool to keep him warm, though, so I cast on what I hope will be an appropriately sized Baby Surprise Jacket using yarns from the giant scrap bag.

I picked out the green and the blue yarns (Knit Picks Stroll Tonal and Little House in the Big Wool House Sock, respectively), and Rainbow dug through the bag to pick out the other two (the yellow is Dale Baby Ull and the red is Malabrigo Sock). As you can see, I've begun working garter stripes with the first two colors, and that's what I plan to do for the rest of the garment. I always think that a BSJ is going to be a quick knit and am almost always proved wrong, but in this case I'm hoping I can really plow through it so that I can get it to the recipient while it still fits him. I'm using a US 3 (3.25 mm) needle; when I knit the BSJ that was Rainbow's coming-home-from-the-hospital sweater, I used heavy fingering weight yarn and a US 5 (3.75 mm) needle and it was on the large side, so I thought I'd go down a bit so that this preemie doesn't swim in his sweater. Fingers crossed!

The past week was a very good reading week for me, with two 5-star finishes!

My parents and I have been reading and sharing Fredrik Backman's books for the past several years, so when my mother told me that she loved his most recent book, Anxious People, I immediately put it on hold at the library. If you're a fan of Backman's books, you'll love this one (and, similarly, if his books annoy you, stay away from this one). As usual, his characters all have unusual quirks and idiosyncrasies that make them both slightly irritating and endearing. The plot of this book is a bit hard to explain (click over to the Goodreads page to see what I mean), but the story is told in a circular fashion that shows how all the characters are connected in a way that makes the plot really ingenious. I tore through this book in two days and loved those interconnections and the way that Backman plays with our assumptions about gender and professions.

My other finish for the week was a very different sort of book but one that was also very well worth reading. I'd been meaning to read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness for some time, I think since watching the documentary 13th sometime last year. It's an utterly devastating read but a necessary one, in my opinion, especially if you don't have any inside knowledge of the criminal justice system. If you're someone, like me, who is committed to racial justice and anti-racism, I'd highly recommend reading it (and watching the documentary as well). I will caution you that the book lays bare the problem without giving solutions, but I think having the knowledge of just how broken the system is is critical if we're ever going to fix it.

I'm currently reading a long-awaited library book, The Once and Future Witches, which I'd had to delay delivery of last week when all my holds seemed to come up at the same time. I'm about a third of the way through it and enjoying it, though perhaps not as much as the last book I read by the same author.

Looking forward to hearing what you're all working on and reading this week!