Unraveled, Week 23/2024

After a cooler weekend, summer weather has arrived with a vengeance here in SW PA! It's been hot and humid, and it looks like we may get some thunderstorms this afternoon (I'm keeping my fingers crossed I can get my run in between raindrops this morning!). It's Wednesday, which means it's time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers. Here's the current state of my WIPs:

My Rift tee is just about ready to split into front and back after adding a couple extra inches of length to the body. And I picked up the Felici socks again yesterday when I went in to work, something that continues to feel pointless to me. I'm going in on Tuesdays and Thursdays for my 9 a.m. team meeting, and then I sit alone in an office until about 11:30, when I leave to go home. I genuinely don't see the point of it, particularly as we're often on Microsoft Teams for the meeting as well (because we have a coworker who doesn't live here and joins remotely all the time, and not everyone is always in both days). Annual review time is coming up, and I will of course be bringing up this new hybrid schedule, though I realize there's not much my direct supervisor can do about. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that someone who has some say-so comes to the realization that my being physically present doesn't change anything.

In any case, the sock is getting some occasional attention. I'm not in a rush to finish the pair (the recipient's birthday isn't for three more months), but I also don't want it to linger on the needles for too long.

Not shown in the WIP photo is my current spin, which is approaching its end. I've got a length of fiber about a yard long left to spin into singles, and then I will get started on the third and final blue.

I have only finished one book in the past week, but that's mainly because I've been doing a lot of reading on a Big Book!

I'd had The Cloisters tagged in Libby as "to read" (a list I keep of books I'm interested in reading, eventually, that I'll go back to and check the availability when I need something new) since hearing about it on a podcast a while back, and the audio was available when I needed something to listen to late last week. I'd call this a work of "dark academia," a story set in an academic setting with something slightly sinister in the background, though perhaps not the best example of the genre I've read. Ann Stilwell, having just graduated from a small college in Washington State and seeking distance from her life there, finds herself in NYC ready to work as a curatorial intern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When she learns that her position is no longer available, she falls into another one at the Met's Cloisters museum, known for its Medieval art and gardens containing deadly plants. She soon becomes part of a team working to research the history of the use of tarot cards -- and becomes enmeshed in the lives of the people she works with. I found the book to be entertaining, and I certainly enjoyed the art history piece of it (have I ever mentioned that I minored in art history in college?), but there was a bit of a twist at the end that left me not liking the main character very much. I gave it 3 stars.

My Big Book will, I expect, be with me most of the summer: A Suitable Boy. I'm into Part Four, of nineteen total, so I'm moving right along. I'm also reading Small Island (it's been coming to work with me for when I don't have anything to do) for our next backlist Women's Prize discussion. That's going a bit faster. I expect I'll be ready for another audiobook soon, too.

This afternoon I'm going in for my annual mammogram, so I'll close this out by reminding those of you to whom it applies to get your girls squished!