Feel Good Friday

I've been in a funk lately. I mean, the news is always horrible, so it's not surprising, but I'm not sure that's the only reason. I also wouldn't say that I'm feeling down or depressed, just kind of ... indifferent to everything. Nothing really excites me, every day feels the same, and it's all kind of a grind, y'know? I'm sure it'll pass eventually, but in the meantime I thought I'd focus on some good things to round out the week -- and I'd love it if you have some good things in your life you can share with me in the comments! So here are three good things this first day of May.

1. Today is my youngest nephew's third birthday.
Appropriately for the son of a labor lawyer, he was born on International Workers' Day. We will be celebrating with a Snoopy-themed party tomorrow. Kids at this age can be pretty fickle, so the last time I saw him, I asked him what he wanted for his birthday, and his answer was perfect: He wants CAKE. And cake there shall be (plus other gifts). I can't wait to hear what comes out of his mouth.

This was his reaction to the hibachi when we went out for dinner back in December.

2. I learned earlier this week that I'm a Canadian citizen.
According to a change that Canada made to its laws regarding citizenship by decent at the end of last year, I am eligible to claim Canadian citizen ship through my paternal grandmother (she was born in Toronto and never became a U.S. citizen after moving here). You can be a dual U.S./Canadian citizen, too. Now, this is good for reasons that I'm sure you can guess, but I've also always had an affinity for Canada and loved visiting there when I was growing up. I'm sure it's a process (and not a free one) to get documentation of citizenship and a passport, but I'm going to look into it.

3. Speaking of Canada, I learned they always sing "O Canada" before hockey games in Buffalo, even if the Sabres aren't playing a Canadian team.
Earlier this week, before a playoff game with the Boston Bruins, the anthem singer had to deal with a microphone malfunction that kept dropping the sound. Fortunately, the crowd was there to back her up. I'd encourage you to take a minute to listen to the story I heard on NPR.

Those are my feel good things for this week! We'll be eating cake tomorrow and cheering on the runners in the Pittsburgh Marathon on Sunday. Hope you have a great weekend with lots of reasons to feel good!

National Poetry Month Lightning Round

Greetings, friends! I know you're not used to hearing from me on a Thursday, but it's the last day of National Poetry Month and I didn't want it to pass by entirely unnoticed. You may have noticed that I haven't shared any poetry this month, and that has been intentional. In preparation for this month, a group of us who regularly post to celebrate it were conferring about it in light of the realization that we were actually violating the copyright of the poets whose work we'd shared in past years. While we tried to come up with some creative and interesting ways of celebrating poetry without sharing poetry, we didn't come up with anything much -- at least until Kym came to the rescue earlier this month with a series of quick questions related to poetry and our enjoyment of it. I don't know that everyone will participate, but I thought it was a fun activity for an otherwise non-blog day.

This photo has nothing to do with poetry,
but I thought it was too pretty not to share.

When was the first time you remember being moved by a poem? Bonus points if you remember which poem.

When I was little, I had a beautiful illustrated version of Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." To this day, it's still one of my favorites because of the feeling of calm and quiet that washes over me when I read it.

Favorite nursery rhyme?

I'd have to say "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod" (technically a poem!) because we performed it in kindergarten -- I was the moon!

Favorite Mary Oliver poem? (Just one…)

I don't have one -- simply because I haven't read them all yet!

Song lyrics: Poetry? Or something else?

Definitely poetry!

Favorite Dr. Seuss book?

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish -- it's the first one I remember owning.

A poetry collection you’ve read recently? 

I'm ashamed to say I can't remember! I had intentions of reading several collections this month, but life got in the way. But I'm hoping to read through Billy Collins's Dog Show collection soon because I have a lovely signed copy that was sent to me as a gift.

When do find yourself reaching for poetry most often?

I find I need poetry most often when I'm in need of soothing or calming, but in my opinion, there's no bad time for poetry.

How do you keep track of poems you especially like?

Post-its, bookmarks, or folded-down corners of books

Favorite movie having to do with poetry?

Possession (the book wasn't bad, either!)

Which poem are you keeping in your pocket today?

Probably the next one I read!

Unraveled, Week 17/2026

It's Wednesday again -- and it's a wet one here. I'm not sure if I'll be able to run this morning (I dislike running in the rain, but I'll do it if it's not too heavy), but for sure I'll be walking with Ruthie later and making good use of my raincoat.

This Unraveled Wednesday finds me at a pretty exciting place in my sweater WIP: the ribbing at the bottom of the body!

Now, don't get too excited -- it's still fingering weight yarn that's now being knit in ribbing on a US 2.5/3 mm needle, so it's not like this is particularly quick knitting. But at least the body is nearly done, and though I know many people hate knitting sleeves, I don't mind them as much because they're smaller in circumference and get even smaller as the decreases are worked.

My reading has been keeping up a good pace thanks to audiobooks -- I'm listening to more this year than I ever have before! Here are the four books I finished this week:

Sweet Pea by Kit de Waal

4 stars

Paulette believes she's about to have everything she wants -- a life and family with the man she loves -- when that man is killed in a car crash. What's more, she finds out that he was married with children. Grieving for the love and imagined future she lost, she takes up with the dead lover's friend and ends up having a child with him. Though she doesn't love her son's father, motherhood transforms her, and she is determined to give her son the best life possible. In a twist of fate, she meets the man who was driving the car that killed her lover. When she discovers that he is raising his grandson (but doing a poor job of it because of his own struggles related to the accident), she steps in to help. In the years that follow, these two broken families' lives are intertwined, with the two boys, Bird and Nellie, growing up together and Paulette serving as a surrogate mother of sorts to Nellie. As in any family, of course, there are challenges and struggles. Both boys go through periods of rebellion, and Bird increasing spends time with his father and his new family, leaving Paulette alone. Paulette finds she still isn't over her dead love and struggles to forgive Nellie's grandfather, even as she pities him. And through it all she regularly finds herself alone, missing the grandmother who raised her in St. Kitts and grieving the life she thought she'd have. But Paulette eventually realizes that she's not truly alone; through her love and care, she has created her own family, strange though it may be. This is a beautiful novel about the power of found family, of forgiveness, and of the power of love. Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for providing me with a digital ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published November 3, 2026.

Sisters in the Wind by Angeline Boulley

3 stars

As was the case with Boulley's two previous novels, this one draws attention to an important issue in the Indigenous community. This time, it's the treatment (or mistreatment) of Indigenous children in the foster care system and the disregard of the Indian Child Welfare Act. Lucy, the main character, ended up in the system after her mother left when she was an infant and her father died when she was a young teen. Though many people suspected she was at least partly Indigenous, her father had always denied it. After a couple of troubling foster placements, she's finally aged out of the system -- but she's not completely free of it because she's being followed because of something that happened at one of them (which we don't find out about until very close to the end of the book). A lawyer and his friend Daunis (a character from Boulley's debut) want to help her and reveal to her that her mother was in fact Indigenous, but she isn't ready to trust them. I thought the attention paid to ICWA and the foster care system were worthwhile, but I found the plot to be a bit unbelievable. I still think Firekeeper's Daughter is Boulley's best work.

Eddie Winston Is Looking for Love by Marianne Cronin

4 stars
I was delighted to find this on Libby with no wait after hearing about it on last week's episode of the What Should I Read Next podcast. Eddie Winston is 90 years old and has never been kissed. He keeps busy by working in a charity shop, and his special talent is sorting through donations and finding items that he knows the donors will regret giving away and come back for. That's what happens when Bella, a 20-something woman grieving the death of her boyfriend, drops off a bag of his things; Eddie knows she'll be back for his shoes and notebook. The two of them begin having lunch together in the park and soon form a friendship, and when Bella learns about Eddie's failed romantic history, she decides she has to help him. But as she helps him set up an online dating profile and coaches him, she also learns that he fell in love many years ago with a married woman. Slowly that story is revealed and Eddie and Bella help each other to move on. This is a sweet, heartfelt book about grief, lost love, and found family, and it's lovely on audio with three British narrators.

The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot by Marianne Cronin

4 stars

I enjoyed Eddie so much that I immediately borrowed Cronin's debut novel. Lenni is 17 years old and Margot is 83 when they meet in an Edinburgh hospital art therapy room, both of them facing terminal illnesses. They realize that together they have lived 100 years and set out to create 100 works of art, each one commemorating their favorite memory from each year of their lives. As they tell their stories to each other, we learn about their early years, their heartbreaks, and their most precious memories. Both of them are fairly alone in the world as they face death and they become each other's family. While it seems like this would be a sad novel, and in many ways it is, it's also inspiring and touching to see how a teenager and octogenarian support each other and provide the love they both need.

I'm still working my way through two long books and am getting caught up on some podcasts. What are you making and reading this week?

Weekending, Late April

Can you believe this is the last week of April? It's been such a strange month of weather; we've had to keep alternating between air conditioning and heat in a way I can't remember doing before. After several glorious days of sun to end last week, it was rainy for most of Saturday and then much cooler on Sunday, making for two days I was happy to be inside curled up next to a snoozing pup.

We truly didn't do much over the weekend, in part because it had been such a busy week. The Mister worked from home Thursday and Friday (his office is right near where the NFL Draft was happening, and he didn't want to deal with all that craziness). I picked Molly and her friend up early on Friday so they could go down to Point State Park and hand out flower seeds to visitors. Her friend's father picked them up and then we all went out to dinner. Molly was so worn out from the week that she fell asleep on top of her bed shortly after taking her shower, with her hair still up in a towel! We all stayed home pretty much all day on Saturday (I went for a walk and took Ruthie out, obviously), and we got takeout and had my in-laws over for dinner. Yesterday Molly worked, I did a Costco run, and we had a lazy afternoon. I may have taken a little snooze as well, as some-puppy decided to wake me up at 5:45 (but I wasn't too upset because I slept until almost 7 on Saturday!).

My big accomplishment of the weekend was finishing the last of the Mother's Day socks:

I essentially used my regular sock recipe for these, though upsized to 80 stitches rather than my usual 68. This sister-in-law has feet that are the same length as mine but at least an inch wider. Usually I make her ankle socks, but as this yarn was more of a light fingering, I though I'd make them a little taller. I'm hoping they fit!

Because those socks were my knitting for while Ruthie naps, I obviously needed to cast on something else right away, so I wound a skein of DK and started a hat for my brother:

This is one of the skeins that came in my recent Fibernymph Dye Works grab bag; the colorway is called Gnome Place Like Home. A gnome-themed color naturally made me think of my brother, so a hat for him it had to be. I'm using the Two by Two pattern (Ravelry link), which I've knit a couple of times before, and at this stage it's pretty mindless -- just 2x2 ribbing. I do that for something like 9 inches and then work decreases, so this should keep me occupied for a while.

This week things should be pretty normal: the Mister is in town, Molly has her last week of school with new content in her classes (next week they'll start reviewing for finals), and the city will resume normal operation now that the draft is over. The weather isn't looking so great -- cooler highs and lots of rain -- but I'll take that over sweating like it's the middle of summer. It's also the final week before commencement, so I'll be keeping my fingers crossed that we have no last-minute shenanigans to deal with! I hope it's a calm week for you as well.

Eye Candy Friday

Even though we started off the week with a return to near-freezing temperatures, it wasn't cold enough to stop our lilacs from blooming:

Wish you could smell them through the screen!

I hope April flowers are blooming in your neck of the woods. Happy weekend!

Unraveled, Week 16/2026

We've made it to the midpoint of the week -- it feels like it's been a long one, even though things have been relatively calm. There is no official link-up this week because Kat is taking a break from blogging for a bit, but I like a routine, so here I am with an Unraveled Wednesday post.

While slow and steady progress continues on my sweater, there has been much more made on my sister-in-law's socks:

All that's left between me and another finished pair of socks is a foot and a toe. Even with a larger-than-normal stitch count, shortie socks are pretty darn fast, especially when you have a good book to read and a cute puppy curled up next to you. I'm fairly confident that these will be done by the end of the week, well ahead of my self-imposed deadline to have them done by Mother's Day. 

Speaking of reading, it's been another good week of it.

I got lucky on the draw when my library (via Libby) notified me that it now had Kate Bowler's newest book, Joyful Anyway, available and was the first person to borrow the audio version. I'd enjoyed listening to her read her memoir the previous week and was looking forward to spending more time with her in my ears. This new work is a bit different; though parts of it do draw on her own experiences, it's a bit more academic in looking at joy and how it can exist at the same time as sadness or grief or other negative emotions. Given the author's experience with Stage 4 cancer (she's now in remission), it makes sense as a topic she'd be interested in exploring. I loved listening to her but found the narrative to be a bit harder to follow than the previous book. I gave it 3 stars.

I think I'm probably one of the last people in the world to read The Personal Librarian; it was everywhere a few years ago. I heard about it enough times on podcasts that I decided it was time to finally read. This is a fictionalized account of a very real person's story. Belle da Costa Green, who was for many years the personal librarian to financier J.P. Morgan and later directed the Pierpont Morgan Library, was famous in the art world in her time and was well known for her intellect and her boldness in matters of business. But what few people knew was that she was actually a Black woman, the daughter of the first Black man to graduate from Harvard, who was passing for white in order to avoid the rampant racism and discrimination in the country. She was a fascinating woman and I really enjoyed learning about her, but what I didn't much care for was the focus on her romantic relationships. I think I might have preferred a straight-up biography more than this fictionalized account, though I'll admit there was some value to me in getting what might have been her thoughts about passing and her precarious situation. I gave it 3 stars.

Rounding out the week's reading was the highlight: Enormous Wings by Laurie Frankel. Pepper Mills (all too aware of her unfortunate name) is a 77-year-old grandmother in Texas who finds herself newly unable to make her own decisions about her life and its course. After a minor fender bender, her children decide it's best if she moves into a retirement community, sans her driver's license. She doesn't like this much but tries to make the most of it, making new friends and even forming a new romantic relationship. But then things get even stranger and more out of control when improbably, impossibly, irrationally she finds herself pregnant. And because she's in Texas, she finds herself forced to carry the baby to term, even though no one knows if she'll be able to do so or what consequences it will have for her. Yes, you need to suspend your disbelief a bit to accept this state of affairs, and yes, the novel does take a pretty strong stance on the issue of abortion and choice, but it's about much more than that. What Pepper realizes throughout this journey is that there are so many ways in which our choices are taken away from us throughout our lives and that, in a sense, it's ridiculous to have any sort of standard for anything because everyone's circumstances are different and unique to them. What really shines in this novel is the characters. They are so incredibly well written, not to mention funny, that you can't help but love them. Pepper is especially wonderful. She's a sassy Jewish grandmother originally from Brooklyn. She's a retired English teacher who frequently corrects others' grammar. She's fiercely loyal to her kids and grandkids and works out her frustrations by washing cars. How could I not love her? The book is humorous and poignant and touching, and it's one that will make you think hard in a good way (and it's also excellent on audio!). I gave it 5 stars. Thank you to NetGalley and MacMillan Audio for providing me with an advanced audio copy of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published May 5, 2026.

What are you making and reading this week?

Sprinter Continues

It was another weird weather weekend here in Southwestern Pennsylvania. We've had regular rain showers throughout the past week, which is pretty typical for this time of year and has been great for the flowers and the grass we're trying to grow on the front lawn (we had a bunch die last summer due to drought). But we also went from a high of about 83ºF on Saturday to the low 40s on Sunday morning, and the meteorologists were predicting we might get some snow moving through early this morning (as I got this post ready on Sunday afternoon, I can't tell you yet whether or not that actually happened). So I guess we're not quite done with weather that can't decide if it's winter or spring. At least we got some sunshine both days, and both days I encountered some neighbors I don't often see while out walking:

I saw these two while I was out walking Ruthie after breakfast on Saturday; she was much more interested in the Golden Retriever ahead of us on the sidewalk to even notice them.

On Sunday, when I was out by myself, this one seemed to be enjoying the quiet of the yard where the kids from the nearby church preschool usually play:

I know seeing deer is no big deal for many of you, but you have to understand that I live in the middle of the city where there is a lot of traffic, so this is pretty unusual for me! I guess they've all gotten used to being around people because they barely seemed to register my presence, and I hope they all made it back home safely.

The cooler weather is certainly more conducive to sweater knitting, and I'm happy to say that I'm in the home stretch on the body of my Speculoos Sweater. I tried it on yesterday to make sure the fit was still good -- please excuse the poor mirror photo.

The bottom is obviously rolling up, so it's a bit longer than it looks -- probably around 8 inches below the underarms. I've got a good amount of positive ease so that I can comfortably wear a long-sleeved tee underneath, so I'm glad I decided to go for a slightly larger size. I hope that I can finish the body this week; that seems reasonable given how much I've knit in the past week.

We've got an interesting week ahead of us. The Mister has a quick work trip, Molly has her spring Glee Club concert on Tuesday evening, and the city is going to be a mess because the NFL Draft is happening here starting on Thursday. I'll note that while we do live in the city, we don't live in the downtown, so thankfully most of the mess won't be too close, but I expect traffic to be snarled most places. I only have to go into the office on Tuesday (everyone has been encouraged to work from home Thursday and Friday), so that's at least one good thing to come out of it. I'm hoping all the people coming for the draft spend lots of money while they're here to make it worth it!