Unraveled, Week 50/2023

I'm still feeling a little wobbly this morning. Many of you noted that you didn't have any side effects from the latest COVID booster, but I've been achy and chilled the past 24 hours and have not slept well the past two nights (someone woke me up repeatedly with his snoring). I'm hoping some coffee and some Tylenol will do the trick to get me feeling back to normal.

It's Wednesday, which means it's time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers! Today finds me trying to ply 24 mini skeins:

I will share the colors at some point, but I don't want to inadvertently spoil someone's surprise. I wound off the singles from each fiber mini so that I can ply it back on itself. I managed to do four skeins last night and am hoping I can do the rest before we leave, but I've got actual work to do and tons of other things on my to-do list to get ready for the trip, so something might have to wait until we return.

I have decided that I'm going to take my Birch sweater with me so I can get as much as possible done on it. As a reminder, here's where things stand -- I literally have not touched it since the day we flew home from our spring break visit:

Because my skeins are all a little different, I'm blending the old and the new each time one skein starts to run out. But that gets a little more complicated when you're dealing with body and sleeves, so I had to do a little math and make an estimate of how much yarn will be used on sleeves versus body. Before we leave, I will need to get out my scale and ball winder and wind off about a third of each skein for the sleeves and then split each of the smaller skeins in half. It shouldn't take too long, but finding the time to do it is the hard part.

Reading has been a mixed bag this past week. Last week I was prioritizing finishing a big book that I'd been reading for far too long, and I'm happy to say I finished it before the weekend was over.

I picked up Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone when we were in Florida last winter break and started it on the flight back down there for spring break. I think I got about 200 pages in while we were there and then, like my sweater, I put it down as soon as we got back. I did not want to leave a book unfinished so long, and I definitely didn't want to schlep the book with me on our trip, so it became my focus. It had been a while since I read the previous Outlander book, so there were a lot of details I had forgotten and I needed to read some summaries online to refresh my memory. There is a lot going on in this book and I know plenty of people will complain that it's much longer than it needs to be (fair!), but I enjoyed it once I got reacquainted with all of the characters. It's also clear that Gabaldon isn't done with this series, because this book ends with a major storyline unresolved, so I suppose I'll have to get ready for the next one! I gave this installment 4 stars.

I needed a need audiobook to listen to over the weekend, so I decided to finally give The Book of Goose a try, as I know many of you have read it and enjoyed it. Unfortunately this one wasn't for me. I did finish it, because it was a relatively short audiobook and I was hoping my opinion of it would improve, but that did not end up being the case. I didn't really understand the point of the book, to be honest. I've heard it described as a beautiful portrait of a friendship, but I found it instead to be more the story of a girl who is manipulated by her so-called friend and then by various adults. Really it was only the writing that had any redeeming quality for me. I gave it 2 stars.

I'm currently reading another book that I don't have high hopes for, but I'm looking ahead to much more reading time in the next two weeks.

What are you making and reading this week?