A Free Friday

Happy Friday, friends! I'm off from work again, though the only thing I'll really be free from is my work laptop. In every other way, it's going to be a normal Friday. As long as the weather cooperates, I'll go for a run this morning, then clean bathrooms and wash the towels. I've got a couple of returns to drop off with UPS and will need to go to Trader Joe's to get ingredients for the Father's Day make-up dinner. But after all of that, I'll be able to relax all afternoon while Ruthie naps. Considering that the past several days I've been buried in work, that alone is worth having the day off.

What I am really looking forward to doing this long weekend is focusing a bit more on my knitting. Here's where things stand with my current WIPs:

I've reached the heel flap of the second sock of my current pair and finished the decreases on the BSJ. As these socks for for my small-footed sister-in-law, it's possible they'll be finished this weekend. The BSJ will take a bit longer, but there's no rush. I'm hoping to find some time to dig through my stash this weekend to find something suitable for a sweater or summer top of some sort -- I'm thinking ahead to when we're on vacation (we'll be away for most of the week after July 4) and I'll have more free time to work on a bigger project.

Once again Molly has much more going on this weekend than I, with another driving lesson and a graduation party to attend. I’ll be walking, weather permitting, and I'll be bracing myself for a predicted heat wave that's coming at the beginning of next week -- temps are supposed to get up into the 90s, ick! 

Whatever the last weekend in June holds in store for you, I hope you can enjoy it. See you back here on Monday!

Unraveled, Week 25/2026

It's Wednesday, so I'm joining in with Kat and the Unravelers as per usual, but first I have a cautionary tale to share. This all happened on Sunday after I got Monday's post ready to go, and I was too tired afterward to go back and edit, hence my sharing today.

The Mister had requested chicken piccata for dinner on Father's Day, so I was pan-frying the chicken breasts on the stove. I'd made a bit of a mess on the counter getting the chicken breaded, so I had the baking sheet with parchment paper and paper towels (to absorb the extra oil) sitting next to the pan on the stove. Molly was in the kitchen with me, mixing up a batch of brownies for dessert. I think you can likely guess what happened next: The baking sheet got just a little too close to the burner that was lit, and the next thing I knew, there were flames. Thankfully, we have always had a small fire extinguisher in the kitchen for just this sort of emergency and it did the job well. But it also made quite a mess.

Needless to say, we did not have chicken for dinner. The Mister was very understanding (I told him I'd make the dinner on Friday) and we were able to go out to get dinner at a place in the neighborhood -- and the brownies were already in the oven, so we still had a good dessert! Cleanup took quite a while, but I'm fairly certain the kitchen and especially the stove haven't been so clean in a long time! And yes, we did immediately order a replacement fire extinguisher (and an extra) right away, though I'm hoping I'll never need it -- for the record, the one I used was in the kitchen in the townhouse where before we moved into this house back in 2008, and it was the only one I've ever had to use.

PSA done, let's talk knitting. Not a ton has gotten done in the last couple of days -- I feel like I barely sat down on Monday between my run, going to donate blood, and walking Ruthie -- but I've at least made forward progress, which is better than having to unravel or tink. I've nearly finished the first sock in this pair (just a handful of rounds left on the toe!):

Reading hasn't been as plentiful in the past week either, at least if you go by the number of books I've finished -- only two, and audiobooks at that. But the two books I'm reading with my eyes are on the longer side, and that pesky job thing keeps taking up prime reading hours.

The first book I finished this year was by Jess Walter, so I thought I'd try a title from his backlist. Beautiful Ruins came out back in 2012 and is one of those books where there are multiple storylines taking place at different times that seem entirely unrelated but somehow all come together. There's one in 1962 in Italy that takes place during the filming of Cleopatra. There's one in the '90s at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. And there's one in "recent" past in Hollywood. It takes a while to get to the connection and bring all these strands together, but it's an enjoyable trip. I also enjoyed all the Italian (it's translated, but I understood a fair amount!) and the excellent narration. I gave it 4 stars.

I read a second title by an author I'd enjoyed earlier this year in Underland. After enjoying my journey into rivers with Robert Macfarlane, so I thought I'd take a trip underground with him. This work focuses on spaces inside the earth, both natural and human made, and explores all the reasons why humans have sought out those spaces -- to live in, to inter remains, to bury toxic materials, etc. -- as well as our fascination with what lies beneath our feet and our urge to explore it. It's highly possible the issue this time was me, but I had trouble staying focused and engaged with this one. I have a feeling I would have gotten more out of it had I read with my eyes. I gave it 3 stars.

I've got another long weekend coming up (I'm taking my last personal day on Friday), so I'm hoping I can get some good reading time in all three days. I want to finish at least one of those long books!

A Summer Long Weekend

I'm starting a new week fairly well rested and also convinced that every weekend should last more than two days! It may not have been the most productive long weekend on record, but it was an enjoyable one. We spent a lot of time with family -- dinner with my parents on Friday night to celebrate my mother's birthday, dinner with the Mister's side of the family on Saturday to celebrate my mother-in-law's birthday, and breakfast with my side of the family yesterday morning for Father's Day. Other than a sudden deluge last Saturday afternoon/early evening that never showed up on the radar, we had beautiful weather, too. I even managed to run 8 miles on Friday morning!

And of course there was knitting. I've made progress on my sister-in-law's sock, finishing the gusset decreases and moving on to the foot:

Again, it's not a great photo, but at least the colors are more accurate in this one.

I also took my bin of sock yarn out of the closet and moved it into my bedroom in the hope that looking at it would inspire me, and indeed it did. I heard late last week that Tina Newton, the dyer behind Blue Moon Fiber Arts, had passed away, and that encouraged me to dig out a long-stashed skein of Socks That Rock Mediumweight from back when I was in the Rockin' Sock Club (we're talking before Molly was born, so in the 2007/2008 time frame) and cast on a Baby Surprise Jacket to go with the baby pants:

I've only managed a couple of brief sessions with this since it was cast on, so obviously I haven't gotten too far yet, but I've knit enough of these over the years that I know what to do and won't have to puzzle over the instructions.

I've got another shorter workweek ahead because I'm taking Friday off again, and today I'm scheduled to donate blood (hemoglobin level permitting). We're supposed to get more rain today, which is of course one of the most inconvenient days because I'll be walking to my appointment, but I'm trying to focus on the fact that rain means I don't have to drag out the hose or lug the watering can to water all the plants. Here's hoping the rain lets up when I have to be inside and the short week moves quickly!

Garden Update

We pause our usually scheduled programming of knitting and reading for this update on the state of my garden.

I got a late start this year because we kept having cold snaps and late frosts, so the garden isn't as full as it has been at this time of the year in previous summers. But things are growing! First, let's take a peek at the raised beds:

On the far left is a bell pepper plant and the rest of the green things are zucchini. The pepper came from the plant sale, but the zucchini were grown from seed directly in the planter.

The other planter holds the tomatoes -- full size on the left and cherry on the right. I've had huge success with tomatoes here for several years because the front of the house gets full sun for at least half the day. These plants went from having a few flowers a couple of days ago to having a bunch of small green fruits on them yesterday, so clearly things are going well again.

For a number of years I've planted impatiens in the beds just above the lawn in front, but this year Molly convinced me to give "chaos gardening" a try. The idea behind this method is that you mix up whatever seeds you have, throw them into the ground, and see what grows. We had about a dozen packets of seeds, some mixed, some type specific, so we mixed them up and scattered them across the beds about a week ago. Now we've got a bunch of little green leaves coming up. Let's hope that the bunnies don't eat them before they turn into flowers!

Here you see some sunflowers (the janky mesh around them is to keep the bunnies from eating all the leaves, as they did last year). These were actually volunteers -- I had a sunflower in a pot last year, and I just left it there to dry out at the end of the summer. Some of the seeds from the dried-out head found their way into the dirt and sprouted, and when they were large enough that I thought they'd survive, I transplanted them to this space along the driveway where we had a damaged shrub removed.

Finally, the herb pot:

I bought the (purple) basil and rosemary from the plant sale, and the tiny green basil plant was a gift from my next-door neighbor.

Still to come: I'm hoping to start some squash (butternut and spaghetti) seeds to plant in the strip between the driveway and the fence. We used to have rose bushes there, but all but one of them died over the past few years and we have a lot of empty space. Eventually we'll plant something else there, but for now that spot is great for growing vining plants because the vines can be draped over the fence.

I know my garden isn't very impressive compared to what some of you have, but it's a work in progress! Over the years, we've removed a number of plants that were here when we moved in and that I didn't like, and as they've been replaced, I'm getting a better idea of what I want the spaces to look like going forward. Please keep your fingers crossed that I have some flowers to share the next time I have a garden update!

Unraveled, Week 24/2026

It's Wednesday today, but it's also kind of Friday for me, given that it's my last workday of the week. How nice to get to use it to talk about what I'm making and reading! As usual, I'm linking up with Kat and the Unravelers.

I've got another hat off the needles, though it still needs a good bath to get the stitches to settle down.

This photo, taken in natural light, is a better representation of the color. I added an extra half inch of length to this one before starting the decreases, and I was worried I was going to play another round of yarn chicken because the ball was getting pretty skimpy toward the end. The finished hat weighed in at 88 g and the remaining yarn at 6 g, so once again I had a pretty underweight skein. Thankfully it was enough to finish, but I'm really starting to wonder if this was a regular problem and part of the reason why the yarn was discontinued! This was the last of it in my stash, though, so I won't have to worry about running short again.

I've just cast on a pair of socks for my sister-in-law (either for her birthday in September or Christmas), and I pulled my bin of fingering skeins out to see if I could get inspired about what to knit next.

It's been another productive week of reading, with five books finished.

Ann Patchett is one of my favorite writers, so naturally I preordered her newest, Whistler, from her bookstore, Parnassus Books. (I like to support my local indie bookstore whenever I can, but ordering from Parnassus means I get a signed copy on the day it comes out!) If you're already an Ann Patchett fan, then this book is already on your radar and I don't have to tell you what it's about, but I will tell you that I loved it. It's beautifully written but also easy to read. The relationships between the characters are the focus, and you can feel their emotions and want to hug them all. And if you know about Ann Patchett's own life story, then you'll see a lot of her in the book, too. This is one of those books that, although it contains sad moments, just makes you want to smile the whole time you're reading it. Highly recommend -- 5 stars!

I had bookmarked Uncultured on Hoopla when I read the description and saw it was compared to Educated and The Glass Castle. Daniella Mestyanek Young was raised in a cult in which physical, emotional, and sexual abuse ran rampant and education of the world outside was severely restricted. She always knew that what was happening to her wasn't right and finally left the group as a teenager to go to high school and college in the United States. After college, she entered the military, only to discover that it had some eerie similarities to the life she left behind. This was a hard book to read in many instances, but I always find it inspirational to read about people, especially women, who are able to stand up for themselves and leave situations in which they are victims. I gave it 4 stars.

I adored A Ghost in the Throat, so when I learned via Katie's blog that the author has a work of fiction coming out later this year, I immediately requested it on NetGalley. Said the Dead is one of those books that's nearly impossible to categorize. Is it fiction? Is it memoir? History? Fantasy? All of the above? The person telling the story (at times described using the first person and at times called simply "the Reader") comes across a former mental hospital being redeveloped into condos. Exploring some of the grounds and buildings, she feels a strange connection, which leads her to seek out the archives of the institution. There she comes across the unusual history of Lucia Strangman, one of the first female doctors to work with the mentally ill, and becomes obsessed with her case notes. The Reader becomes so immersed in the stories of the women who Lucia treated -- so often committed to the hospital not because they were truly ill but because they were at the mercy of men in their life or because they didn't fit in with the society of the time or simply due to extreme poverty -- that she often neglects her own life and family. The narrative is interspersed with haunting images of Lucia, her family, and some of her patients, and throughout there is a mysterious commentary to one side that suggests that as the Reader is somehow watching the lives of these patients unfold, someone is watching her. There is a dreamlike quality to the book, and there's never a clear sense of what is real and what is fiction, but overall there's an immense respect for the many women whose names and lives were utterly forgotten in time. As soon as I finished the book, I wanted to go back to the beginning and read it again, certain there was so much I missed. I gave it 4.5 stars, rounded up. Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with a digital ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published September 22, 2026.

One of the challenges I'm signed up for on the StoryGraph is winners of what is now the Women's Prize for Fiction, so I decided to see what was available without a wait on audio on Libby from that list late last year. The Tiger's Wife came out 15 years ago, but as I had a 1-year-old then, it wasn't on my radar. This is a weird one to describe. It's set in an unnamed country in the Balkans and frequently refers to "the war," though it's never completely clear which war. Natalia is a doctor, on a trip with a friend to deliver medicine and vaccines to an orphanage, when she learns that her beloved grandfather, also a doctor has died. Over the next several days, she remembers the stories he told her of his childhood, where a deaf woman was believed to have had a relationship with an escaped tiger and was referred to as the tiger's wife, and of his encounters with "the deathless man," who appears when people are close to death to help ease their transition. I thought the writing was good but the story was bizarre, and I wasn't entirely sure what the point of it was. The lack of specificity also got a little on my nerves. I gave it 3 stars.

Finally, Molly had asked me to read The Memory Police, which she read for school toward the end of the year and wanted me to read so we could discuss it. This book was published in Japan in 1994 but was only translated into English in 2020. An unnamed narrator is a writer of novels who lives on a remote unnamed island where things are disappearing. When something disappears, so do the island residents' memory of that thing. But there are some people who still remember, and if they are discovered, the Memory Police take them away. When the writer discovers that her editor is one of those people, she decides to hide him in a secret room in her house, and he tries to help her recover her lost memories even as more and more things disappear. In the novel she is writing, a woman becomes romantically involved with her typing teacher, but one day she discovers that she no longer has a voice and has become his captive. The book gets really, really strange, but on a metaphorical level, it's an interesting illustration of how authoritarian governments can maintain control through fear and how easy it can be to acclimate to the loss of things that were once thought necessities. I gave it 3 stars.

What are you making and reading this week?

Half and Half

As usual, the weekend did not last long enough. We had a gorgeous day on Saturday, with blue skies and slightly lower humidity. Ruthie was happy that the recent storms that had gone through the area left behind some great sticks for her to discover on our walks.

She was miffed that I made her leave this one behind.

I had a lovely afternoon of reading and knitting while she dozed, and we had a slightly later-than-usual dinner after Molly got back from her driving lesson (the instructor was impressed with her, so I guess we've been doing something right!).

Yesterday was cloudy for much of the day and we had some light rain in the morning and storms in the evening. Not as nice of a day, but the rain is welcome, not least because it's bringing much more comfortable weather to start off the week. And I didn't mind so much being inside because it helped me finish a book and make a lot of progress on my hat in the afternoon:

Thank you, gloom, for this bad photo.

This is going to be a short week for me: We already had Friday off for Juneteenth, so I decided to take one of my remaining personal days on Thursday and give myself a three-day week followed by a four-day weekend. I'm not going to do much that's different from my usual schedule other than not be on my computer all day, but sometimes even that is enough. I'm hoping that because I won't have to worry about my work inbox, Molly will spend some more time with me -- I am increasingly aware of just how little time we have left before she goes off to college, so I want to take advantage of all the days she's not in school!

TGIF, Really

I am a little later than usual in posting today because yesterday was A Day. Normally I get a post ready to go the afternoon or evening before it publishes, but yesterday I barely had a chance to sit down and have some time to myself until almost 9 p.m., and I didn't have the mental energy to do it them. So instead you're getting me in real time on Friday morning!

So why was yesterday so challenging? Well the first thing you have to know is that it was hot and extremely humid. And with the stage of life I'm in, it takes very little for me to start sweating. My first sweat of the day was taking Ruthie out for her first walk and then immediately going into the office for my biweekly team meeting. I was pretty much soaked when I got there. When I got home from my meeting, I changed into workout clothes and went for a walk (and got sweaty again). I didn't bother changing when I got home because I'd be taking Ruthie out for her midday walk after lunch and getting hot again anyway. After that walk, I did shower and change, again, to go to that recognition ceremony. I had to walk about a mile and a quarter to get to that event, at probably the hottest part of the day, so naturally I was a sweaty mess when I got there. Even though the event was inside, I was in a room with a bunch of people and sitting on a vinyl-covered chair, so I never fully cooled off. And then on the way home, when I was a mere three blocks from my street, I got caught in a thunderstorm, and though I had an umbrella, it did little to protect me from rain blowing sideways, so I was dripping by the time I got to my door and had to change yet again -- and there was still one more walk to take Ruthie on, though thankfully the rain cooled things down just a bit. If you're keeping track, that's four outfit changes over the course of the day. I also had to take a second shower before bed. And if that's not enough (and sorry if this is TMI), Aunt Flo arrived for her visit yesterday, so I was dealing with cramps as well. Can you see why I'm very glad it's the end of the week?

It's going to be another steamy day today, but the humidity is supposed to go down quite a bit tonight, so the weekend should be more comfortable. And I am thankful for the rain we've been getting after a dry week so that all the plants and flower seeds are getting watered. I'm really looking forward to having a typical afternoon today, a time to read and knit while Ruthie naps next to me. Thanks to afternoons like that earlier in the week, I've finished another charity hat:

It still needs to be blocked, but I'm pretty happy with it. I used my Spinning in Infinity pattern (Ravelry link) with US 5/3.75 mm needles for the body and US 3/3.25 mm needles for the ribbing. It used 90 g of the skein of Chroma Twist in Lupine; clearly my skein was underweight because I had only a few grams remaining and it was supposed to be 100 g.

Last night, in that little bit of time I had to myself, I cast on another hat -- a second attempt at that hat I wasn't sure about.

This is the last skein of Chroma Twist from my stash. It's now discontinued, which is why I think I bought a bunch of skeins of it a while back because it was likely heavily discounted. The black yarn you see is a provisional cast-on for a tubular edge and will be removed very soon. The consensus from those of you who commented here and from some friends on Ravelry was that the hat was cute, so I'm giving it a try with a more interesting yarn and seeing if I can make it pattern.

I'm hoping to have a quiet weekend; Molly has a bunch of stuff going on, including her first official driving lesson, but none of her activities will require me to do anything. I've not slept well this week, so I'm hoping I can get a little extra (though this time of year, it's tough to sleep in because the sun comes up so early!), and maybe I can sneak in an afternoon nap or two!

Have a great weekend, friends. Remember to stay hydrated, wear your sunblock, and enjoy the good things.