Weekend Wrap-up

I thought it was going to be a relaxing weekend, but somehow I managed to fill almost every minute of it, so I'm actually looking forward to the relative calm of a working Monday to reset now! Fall arrived in earnest this morning. After we had one last day of warmth and sun on Friday, we woke up on Saturday to downright chilly temps. It made for good running weather for the race first thing Saturday morning, though because I'd promised to stick with Mo for the whole thing and she does not have much experience running, we walked most of it and finished ahead of exactly two people (at least according to the official results). We did sprint the last stretch to the finish line, though, and finished under 40 minutes, which isn't bad for Mo's first time out! We're planning to do some training runs ahead of the Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving, but there are many more participants in that race, so I'm pretty confident we'll have a better showing.

Waiting at the start line

On Saturday afternoon, after I'd cleaned bathrooms and done laundry, I sat down at my wheel to ply the singles I finished on Friday. I decided to chain-ply to preserve the brilliant colors, and I'm delighted with the results:

The finished yarn is a light fingering and approximately 420 yards. I wish I could show in a photo how much drape it has and how soft it is! I am tempted to just wear the skein around my neck, but I'm sure it'll find some worth project at some point. This was also my last remaining fiber club shipment from 2022, which means this status photo I took at the beginning of the year can finally be deleted:

The total count for the year is now at 28, and even more impressive is that according to my counter in the sidebar over there -> I've now spun more than 10,000 yards of yarn this year.

My other crafting time this weekend was spent working on two pairs of socks, the colorwork ones I shared last week and a new pair for my sister-in-law (the one on the Mister's side) using yarn that just arrived from the Fibernymph Dye Works Lepidoptera club -- the colorway is Luna Moth.

I'm really enjoying how the colorwork is going so far, even if it means slower progress. As to the new socks, I've only done the picot hem so far; this sister-in-law has fairly wide feet, so to ensure I have enough yarn for the pair, she'll be getting ankle socks.

In not-so-happy news, we've been watching what's happening in Israel with dismay. It has been hard to support Israel in recent years because I do not at all approve of the government or how it has treated the Palestinians, but it's a special place for me and I will always support its right to exist and the right of Israelis to live in peace. While there's a lot of blame to go around, I think everyone can agree that kidnapping civilians, especially women, children, and the elderly, is abhorrent. We do have some distant family there (cousins we've never met but who my aunt has connected with in her genealogy work), and Mo has been in contact with her cousin -- my aunt introduced them over email because they were born the same day. They are far enough away from the conflict that they are safe for the moment, but everyone is terrified. The conflicts in the Middle East go back so far that I doubt we'll ever seen a resolution, and I fear what is happening there will spread to more instances of anti-Semitism here. It's all so heartbreaking, and I'm feeling very much at a loss for what to do. I just wish we lived in a world where people were able to see the humanity in each other more, even and perhaps especially when they have different points of view.

I'm sorry to end this post on such a downer, but such is life! I hope your Monday is the best that it can be. See you back here on Wednesday.