Sunshine and Rain

Happy Friday, friends. It's been quite an exhausting week, full of ups and downs. We've quite literally had sunshine and rain, and it's been a mix of the good and the bad. The bad has been how busy I've been this week, but that is coming to an end. My in-laws are also down with COVID right now, which is a bit scary because they're both high risk (my father-in-law is a cancer survivor and my mother-in-law has asthma and other health issues). It sounds like they're both pretty miserable but not too seriously ill, and any good thoughts you can send their way would be appreciated.

Since the world turned upside-down three years ago, I've been trying really hard to focus on the good to combat my innate pessimism, so today's post is going to focus on happier things. For one thing, yesterday's long day (a full day of work followed by two synagogue-related Zooms) let to a completed baby sweater:

This is the Flax Light sweater from Tin Can Knits, knit in the smallest size (0-6 months). I omitted the garter stitch detail on the sleeves, mainly because I thought it would be much faster to just do them in stockinette. I did try to make the sleeves match as much as possible, which involved winding off yarn to get to the same point in the stripe sequence (and, before that, rewinding my second skein of Felici because it was reversed in the order of the colors compared to the first). I did a tubular cast-on for the collar but regular bind-offs for the body and sleeves. I've already woven in the ends but not yet blocked it, and if you embiggen the photo, you'll see there's a little white spot right on the chest where the dye didn't cover a small section of yarn that I may duplicate-stitch over. Funny story about this: Our rabbi (who is also a knitter) was on one of the Zooms last night and messaged me to ask if this sweater was for another member of the board, because if it was, she wanted to make sure I knew the recipient is being induced on the 20th and won't be at our next meeting. So now I know I will have to mail this rather than delivering it in person!

In other good news, earlier in the week I found that our Butternut squash vines have produced a baby!

I purposefully planted them next to the fence that divides our driveway from our next-door neighbors' so that I can use the fence as a support, and in fact I've lifted up this section and draped it over the fence to keep the squash away from our insatiable bunnies. A bonus of this arrangement is that I can now see the squash from my bedroom window!

My final bit of good news comes after some drama last weekend. You may remember that when I was at Parnassus Books last month, I preordered Tom Lake so that I could get a personalized signed copy. Based on what I was seeing on Instagram, everyone else seemed to be getting their copies, so I had a feeling mine would be showing up soon. Last Friday, I finally got an email from the USPS saying that it was out for delivery. While we were at my parents' for dinner, I got notification that it was delivered -- but when I got home, nothing was there. I took another look at the email, and it turns out that it wasn't delivered at my house but rather (according to the tracking) to a PO box. Except that I don't have a PO box. I spent more than an hour at two different post offices on Saturday morning trying to figure out where it was, and no one was able to tell me anything other than that it was probably incorrectly scanned. I was given a supervisor's number to call on Monday if it hadn't showed up, and I was convinced that it had gotten lost in the system somewhere. Then, on Saturday night, a minor miracle happened:

Tonight some cousins are coming to visit and are staying overnight with us on their way back to Chicago from vacationing in Virginia. We'll have a full house, so that means cleaning is on the agenda for later this afternoon!

I hope you all have more sunshine than rain to end this week!