Unraveled, Week 4/2026

Still here, still snowed in! I finally got out my yardstick yesterday afternoon to see if I could get a more accurate idea of how much snow we've gotten, and this is what it told me:

I have to say that it seemed like a lot more than that Monday morning when I went out to shovel! We've having some really bad luck with snow plows in the city, and even if we had all trucks active and they were all out on the streets, they wouldn't get to our dead end if at all for days. So I figured I should try to dig out some of the street so that we can get out of our driveway. An hour and a half later, here's what I'd gotten done:

The sidewalk only needed touching up after all the shoveling on Sunday.

I'm sure you won't be surprised that my arms and back were very sore yesterday! We've had a bit more snow since then, too, but luckily not enough that we've needed to go out and clear it. The bigger issue was the extreme cold, which kept all of us at home for another day. Today, though, the Mister has to go into the office, and Molly has a two-hour delay, which means I will need to drive her in for a 10 a.m. start. I'm hoping the roads are too horrible by then.

But enough about the storm! I know many of you are dealing with it as well, so you know my pain. It's Wednesday, which means it's time to join Kat and the Unravelers. I've been continuing to knit on my cowl, but it's not going to look much different until it's done and seamed, so I didn't bother to take a photo. Instead, I have an exciting finish -- I completed a skein of handspun!

I started spinning this non-superwash Shaniko wool from Cesium Yarn back in September(!) after buying it at SSK last year. I bought it partly because I wanted to try to the wool but mainly because the colorway was Neighborhood of Make Believe -- I felt like I had to, because reasons. I didn't do anything fancy with this spin, just spun the fiber from end to end, wound the singles into a center-pull ball, and plied it on itself so I used up every last bit.

The fiber was mostly white, so I'm not surprised that the finished yarn is so soft and pastel-y. It ended up fingering to sport weight, and it shrunk up a lot; I was expecting 400+ yards based upon the number of wraps when I skeined it up, but after washing and drying, it measured about 384 yards.

Reading has been good the past week, even if I had to sacrifice some reading time to shoveling. I finished three books.

The Small and the Mighty is a chronicle of U.S. history that looks at the lives of unknown or lesser-known Americans who played a critical role in the story of this country. I'd had this book on my Kindle shelf for several months, but given what has been happening lately, I wanted to be inspired by people who worked to make this country better, and it delivered. I was happy that I did recognize some of the names, but I got a more complete picture of even those. I will note that this book has a more conversational tone than a true textbook, but I think that makes it more approachable. Learning what I did, I could even overlook the handful of grammatical errors I came across (I figured the content was more important than the form). If you, too, are looking for reasons not to be ashamed to be an American, I'd recommend it. I gave it 4 stars.

I'd seen Best Offer Wins show up in a couple of places, so I put it on hold at the library on a whim. If I had to describe it, I'd say it's a thriller about a woman desperate to buy the perfect house in the D.C. suburbs. Yes, I said thriller. This book is, well, bonkers. I've heard about how competitive some housing markets are, and certainly when we were looking for a house, it was a stressful process, but this takes it to another level. I couldn't believe what the main character was willing to do to get her dream home, and then she went way beyond that -- and then beyond that! As a thriller, it definitely delivers, but a lot of the book made me feel icky (though I suspect that was kind of the point). I gave it 3 stars; I think it's well written, but I can't say I really liked it all that much.

My final finish was a book that my aunt gave me when I saw her in Florida in December. Florence Adler Swims Forever follows a Jewish family in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the mid-1930s. College student Florence loves nothing as much as she loves swimming and is training to swim the English Channel. Her married older sister, Fannie, is pregnant and on bed rest in the hospital after losing a baby following an early labor. When Florence drowns in an accident (not a spoiler -- it happens in the first chapter), their parents decide to hide the tragedy from Fannie, worried that the shock could lead her to lose another child. This decision impacts not just them but also Fannie's husband, Isaac, and young daughter, Gussie, as well as Anna, a friend of the family who has managed to get out of Germany on a student visa, and Stuart, Florence's friend and coach. This is a story of a family dealing with its grief but also dealing with the threat of Nazi Germany. It's not easy to tell a story from so many different points of view, but it's well done here, and I appreciated it all the more when I read the author's note and learned that the story came from her own family members. I gave it 4 stars.

I'm currently reading books in two series -- Emma Lion Vol. 8 and On the Calculation of Volume III -- and have finally started my buddy read of Anna Karenina with Katie. I expect that one will take me quite a while!

What are you making and reading this week?