Unraveled, Week 14/2022

We're home! We didn't get back until about 6 yesterday evening, but our flight was on time and actually made it off the ground this time. We had a little turbulence as we flew over the storms moving through the South, but we landed more or less on time (we were due in at 4:10 and landed at 4:12 -- quite an appropriate time!). Of course, that meant that once we got our bags from luggage claim and met up with our car service to get home, it was smack in the middle of rush hour, but I was so happy to be back home that I didn't care. We spent the evening doing a quick unpack of our bags, finding something to eat, and trying to settle down enough to sleep.

Now that it's Wednesday, I'm playing a lot of catch-up at home given that I expected to have at least half a weekend to do stuff around the house, but here's where working from home has its perks. I've got two loads of laundry in right now! And though it's later in the morning than I'd usually blog, I'm finally getting around to linking up with Kat and the Unravelers to catch you up on my crafting and my reading.

I did indeed finish the body of my sweater on Monday afternoon -- it took a good couple of hours to graft the tubular bind off! It's a bit wrinkly from being shoved in a bag in my suitcase and obviously needs a good blocking but you can see that the fit is good and has an appropriate amount of positive ease this time around:

Kindly ignore the mess behind me and the fact that I clearly don't know where to look to make it look like I'm actually looking at the camera!

I planned to wait until I was home to start the sleeves so that I could measure another sweater and do some basic calculations (I'm once again going off-piste on the sleeves), so I figured I might as well make it worth it to have dragged a third project with me to Florida and started a Hitchhiker with the leftovers from my handspun Shifty pullover. I haven't gotten very far (I added another tooth last night), but I do like how it's working up already and am delighted to have found a way to use up all this beautiful yarn instead of letting it sit in the leftovers bag.

Finally, I'm trying to finish up Rainbow's socks. The second one was my travel knitting yesterday; I placed the sparkly progress keeper when we got in the car to go to the airport in Florida, and all the knitting above that was completed before we got home. 

It looks like I have about 3-4 inches of foot left to knit before I start the toe, and I expect this will see some attention during work meetings during the rest of the week and might even get finished this weekend. (And Rainbow might even get a chance to wear them if I do -- I saw snow in the forecast for Sunday!)

I finished two books this last week, both very good reads!

A number of people I know were reading (or rereading) Middlemarch along with the Novel Pairings podcast for their discussion last month, but rather than rereading it myself, I listened to My Life in Middlemarch, which is sort of a mixture of memoir, biography, and literary criticism. The author considers Middlemarch to be among her favorite books and one that's meant different things to her at different points in her life. But she also does a very thorough job of covering the really fascinating life of George Eliot and the writing of and possible influences on the novel. I listened to this while walking and quite enjoyed it. I gave it 4 stars.

Though A Constellation of Vital Phenomena came out in 2014, I never heard about it at the time, and I have to thank Mary for getting it on my radar. In a way, I'm very glad to have come to it at this point in time because there are so many echoes in this book of what is currently happening in Ukraine, even though it's set in Chechnya in the '90s and early 2000s. I'll admit that while I did hear about vague atrocities in Chechnya at the time, I was quite ignorant of the truth and the enormity of the political situation, and I am glad to have read this book for that reason alone, but the writing is also gorgeous and powerful. It's not an easy book to read, as it deals with war, torture, and ethnic cleansing, but it's an excellent one. I gave it 4.5 stars.


I'm still savoring my way through Braiding Sweetgrass on paper, and on Monday I had just started the next Read With Us selection, Young Mungo, when I got a notice that my hold on The Books of Jacob was ready from the library. This is a Big Book that's going to take a while to get through; I'm currently on page 829, which sounds like I'm ready far through it except for the fact that the book starts on page 965 and works its way down to page 1, so in reality I'm not very far into it at all -- about 15%, according to the Kindle app. I'll be prioritizing it in order to finish it before the library yanks it back.

What are you making and reading this week?