Unraveled, Week 26/2025

Happy hump day, friends! Kat is on vacation this week, so there's no official link-up, but you know I can't skip an Unraveled Wednesday!

Because Monday was One Little Word update day, I didn't get a chance to tell you about our weekend. It was rainy and gloomy on Saturday, so we didn't do a whole lot (in fact, the Mister seemed to be napping the whole afternoon). But on Sunday the sun came out and warmed us up again, and Ruthie got to take her first trip in the car since coming home with us. We went over to my brother's house to have dinner with my side of the family and so Ruthie could meet her "cousin" Leo. I could tell she was nervous because she was shaking in the car and for a while when we got there, but she did a great job overall. Leo (who looks positively enormous to me now that I've gotten used to having a little dog) was gentle with her, and she seemed to like him even if she was a little apprehensive. She's now met quite a few dogs in the neighborhood and is getting better at calming down around them. We're still working on her reaction to people!

The other excitement over the weekend is that I finished my first project since she came home! It's nothing terribly exciting because it was already halfway done, but given how limited my knitting time is these days, I'll take it.

These look wonky because they still have to be blocked, but you can at least get a sense for the overall look. These are a new design that I did for Amy of Ross Farm using her Funky dyed-in-the-wool Cheviot. The skein looked to be about half red dominant and half blue dominant, so after I finished the first one (red), I rewound the skein so I could work from the other end. Now that the sample is done, I need to block them and do some mathing for the pattern. We'll see if my brain is up to the challenge.

It was a so-so week of reading for me -- but I have been reading, thanks to getting a better sense of when Ruthie is likely to nap. I finished two books.

I borrowed Whale Fall (after a perplexingly long wait, given how short it is) from the library based upon Katie's recommendation. This book is set on a remote (and fictional) Welsh island in the late 1930s when the population is dwindling and two events have a huge impact: First, a whale washes up on the shore and becomes a source of interest for some and a bad omen for others. Next, two scholars from England arrive to study the island's inhabitants. Manod, the novel's 18-year-old narrator, begins to work for them as a translator and interpreter and hopes they'll take her with them when they leave, but she soon realizes that the island life these ethnographers want to depict isn't quite how things are and that their reasons for being there are more exploitative than academic. This book reminded me of several others I've read in recent years -- The Colony, This Other Eden, and Clear among them -- that have strong messages about colonization and othering. Ultimately I felt like I didn't get enough of the bigger picture in this one, and I was left with a lot of questions when it ended. I gave it 3 stars.

Next was a title for the small group of us focusing on women in translation. Time of the Flies follows Ines after she is released from prison after serving 15 years for killing her then-husband's lover. Though she is now estranged from her daughter and on her own, she is trying to build a new life, taking a new name and starting a joint extermination/private investigation company with a fellow former inmate. Things seem to be going well until one of her clients offers her a large amount of money to obtain a poison. If she does, she risks being sent back to prison, but the money could be used to help her business partner and friend get treatment for breast cancer. And then she discovers that her daughter knows the client and things get even more complicated. Amid all of this, there's a Greek tragedy-style chorus commenting on the events and moral dilemmas. I thought it was an interesting story, but it didn't really grab me, and I also predicted the twist at the end (and spotted quite a few typos, which irked me). I gave it 3 stars as well.

I'm currently reading an ARC of a book about Jane Austen digitally, though I haven't gotten very far because I've mainly gotten it out to read during Ruthie's afternoon naps, when I also sometimes snooze a little.

I'll leave you with a puppy picture. Did you know that you can get a rating for your own dog on WeRateDogs.com if you submit a photo? You saw this one last week, but now Ruthie's officially got a rating!