Another week draws to a close with its own set of hiccups. I had hoped to have found more nuggets of time to feed my Acorn Obsession, but I think the diversion is one I would not trade for anything. And while I cannot share photos, I can tell you that I have a new granddaughter – Olivia Margaret and she is hale and healthy. Mother and baby are settling in just fine.
Yesterday I started the palest pink BSJ for her and managed to get a good start on it. I am making my way through the decreases and hope to find LOTS of knitting time this weekend so it can be finished next week and on its way to her!
My acorn bowl is sitting on the dining room table and I am eager to return to filling it. I love how I am using up the left over bits from Winston’s sweater. And, with luck, there might even be a pale pink acorn joining soon!
It felt so good to slam the door shut on September, whew… it was a rough month. I am debating with myself about even doing a September Look Back… and the don’t do it voice is winning right now. Thank you all for your kind thoughts regarding my struggle.
This morning I am trying to figure out how best to work on my budding phrenology chart as the days progress. It took me so long to get it set up… lots of erasing, lots of *hard* math because of course October has 31 days, thankyouverymuch. I have been thinking and thinking of how best to make this work in the flow of my days… and honestly, I don’t think a “circle” is the answer. I am toying with ideas… stay tuned.
In the “best Tweet of the Day” Category: @iamKimRL won hands down. This tweet… (and of course she did!)
Looks like RBG successfully argued her first case before God.
Because we are all still in the Stay at Home Boat, I really appreciated this Fall TV Preview from NPR. There are lots of interesting things there… something for everyone!
Gudrun Johnston’s Shetland Trader hit my email-box this week with a gorgeous sweater! (Rav Link). There is a woman’s and a unisex version (you get both with pattern purchase!) This green version made me stop, wow! And you can see a Plethora of Porty Pullover’s here on IG!
And my “informed delivery” email from the Post Office tells me that TODAY our mail in ballots arrive! Wahooo! By the end of the day I will have cast my ballot and will be hand delivering it to the drop-off site in Carnegie. Have you planned your vote? There is still time!
That is all I have for this week! Have a fantastic weekend everyone and I will see you all back here next week!
This week’s making is back to Sleeve Island. Slowly, round by round, I am moving towards the cuff…of the first sleeve! lol
In voting news, we got an email that our ballots were mailed 8 days ago but we have yet to receive them. Mail at our house has become something of a running joke… as in we *rarely* get mail these days even though bills should arrive, etc. We get nothing most days. So I needed a distraction… enter Hunter Hammersen with the perfect distraction!
Look, everyone has their own coping mechanisms. I’m apparently dealing with the collapse of society and the triumph of evil with, checks notes, tiny knitted acorn caps.
I have started my acorn knitting and boy are they fun! I’d love a bowl full of these little beauties to adorn my table for the fall! (The pattern is here… sorry it is a Ravelry link, and Hunter is adding the knit acorn caps in a week or so)
The reading this week has been varied. I think The Yellow House suffered a bit from being sandwiched between Hamnet and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And I should be reading The Women of Brewster Place but I am struggling to get into the story. When I saw that 10 Minutes 38 seconds in This Strange World was available from my library, I jumped at the chance. I have only started but I have been pulled in and can’t wait to see where this book will take me.
I had high hopes for this book, and while it was good… I did not think it was great. And it is long, perhaps too long… and I like to read long books. At times, it felt like it needed a bit of editing.
This book is a mix between a memoir and the painful history of the New Orleans East (part of the 9th Ward, I believe). But, how do you tell a story without knowing all the parts? This book is Broom’s journey to discover the unsaid. The one thing that most fascinated me was how all the history revolved around the yellow shotgun house.
Simply said, I did not want this book to end. I wanted to stay with Francie and never leave. And this writing will be some of the best I have read all year. And A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is now easily the best book I have read this year (yes, it has unseated Apeirogon).
Settle in to Brooklyn in the early 1900’s with the Nolan family… a place of struggles but so full of love and hope. The struggles were at times almost unbearable, yet Kate Nolan never once gives up, and she does not let her despair drag her children down. Her desire for her children to have more opportunities than she did are her driving force. This is a story of resilience and believing that things will get better, which was just exactly what I need these days…
I highly recommend this book!
That is all I have for today, what about you? What is distracting you? I am dying to know!
As always, if you wrote a post to share, please leave your link below and thank you!
I am joining Honoré again this month to share an update on my word.
Live with intention. Walk to the edge. Listen Hard. Practice wellness. Play with abandon. Laugh. Choose with no regret. Appreciate your friends. Continue to learn. Do what you love. Live as if this is all there is. — Mary Anne Radmacher
September was such a hard month. And that sentence is such a damned understatement, but I honestly have no words for how hard it was for me – even with a weekend away!
I thought that I was a pretty good manager of stress… oh boy. September showed me how I am managing nothing, and it is managing me, and it has been all along, if I am being completely honest with myself. Maybe I was just better at ignoring it.
One would think that 8 months into this insanity, I would be used to the mind-numbing sameness of the days. However, the reality is that 8 months in to this pandemic the “fake it till you make it” well has finally run dry. Instead September woke me to the malady known as cabin fever. Foolishly, I would have sworn I had experienced it before being snowed in a time or two, but no… being snowed in for a day or two, or maybe even a week ain’t got nothin’ on Pandemic Cabin Fever.
The things I can choose these days are not the things I want to choose, that is for damned sure! And so in September I chose to be absent from lots of things. Which, in light of my very bad attitude, is probably the smartest decision I made all month.
I would love to share with you that while I wallowed in the Sea of Self-Pity that I had some epiphanal moments resulting in a dramatic change of attitude. Nope, but what I did learn was that it was okay to not feel good. To not feel happy.
I know, I said I was not going to be back until tomorrow, but what can I say. Ha!
Do you ever feel in a rut? Well, I can tell you we sure do! Steve and I have been talking about how we are always doing/eating/listening to the same.things.every.week.
So this week, we changed things up a bit!
Happy hour was Thursday night, sans music, just quiet, some *different* food, and conversation.
Friday we did not have a happy hour, but rather we got take out (Pierogi Pie and beer FTW!) and we caught up on the Big Brother episodes we missed during the week. In hindsight, we probably would have been okay to eat there… it was a gorgeous day and we could have easily sat outside. It was surprisingly not busy, but of course, if we went with the idea of eating there it would have been packed, right? lol
Saturday, we tried to have an “impromptu” micro-happy hour out on the porch, as you can see above. However, we had to bail and head indoors because the mosquitos almost ate us alive! Which is very curious to me, especially since we have had virtually NO RAIN, as you can see from a tweet our local news station shared yesterday…
WEATHER: Today will be the fourteenth day in a row with no rain for our area. Find out when some much-needed rain could be on the way with the latest forecast from meteorologist @MaryOursWx! https://t.co/Qd85YxRkXD
Sunday morning Steve ran to Dunkin’ and brought home a pumpkin donut or two… oh man, are they so good!
The rest of the day was filled with Steve watching Steeler football while I finished the second sock for Winston! And they will be off in the mail today! Hopefully they will fit for at least a minute, lol.
And before we knew it, poof! the weekend was over and now we are looking Monday in the face. I have a substantial list of things to accomplish today, but I have a bright spot for this Monday morning… Pádraig Ó Tuama is back with a new season of Poetry Unbound!
I hope your Monday full of all kinds of good things!
I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. — Theodore Parker, Sermon on Justice and the Conscience
In a week where any understanding of the “moral universe” is incomprehensible and I am absolutely not seeing it bend at all towards justice for BIPOC in any way at all, (although if your bullets randomly enter the homes of white people, police get indicted) it is hard not to feel beaten down and defeated. I cannot even begin to imagine how the Black community must feel, and yet they continue to make their voices heard. They are inspiring and so I will add my voice to theirs, hoping that with more voices joining that change will eventually happen.
This week though I did find some amazing things!
First up are some excellent finds from my new favorite newsletter: Biracial BookwormsBethany M. Edwards shares the best books each week in her newsletter and this week was no exception!
It has been hard to “get back into reality” even with just a few days away. But going anywhere in these Pandemic Times is a challenge, right? Our trip to Erie was no exception, we both worried about staying *any* place…even with the “enhanced cleaning” Airbnb suggests… So we brought pillows from home, and I “cleaned” the clean house when we arrived. I also got out all the dishes we might use over the weekend and washed them all before we used anything. Silly? Probably, but it allayed the fears a little. I also worried for the cleaning people who would come to clean after we left, so we cleaned the house again before we left on Sunday. The one bonus about going to an Airbnb is that there are no “tchotchke’s” on every flat surface, so it was not such a onerous task! Ha!
Knitting though, took an absolute back seat! I knit a bit in the car going to Erie and coming home but outside of that I did not pick up my knitting once so I don’t have much progress to show for the week! I was going to start a pair of socks for Winston, but I have yet to cast them on and there has been zero sleeve knitting either. My hope is today that I will find some knitting time. Wish me luck!
However, I do have a completed Avery 2.0 Vest… and gosh, it is just so stinking cute! I can hardly wait to see Win in it!
The reading this week included two powerful but unbelievably different books! Each excellent in their own way. The first will not be for everyone, and that is fine. But Hamnet. Yeah… get this book and read it. This book is exactly what your autumn reading list needs!
I have read several faith-style books this year about how to be a better person/ally, but this is the first book I have read that addresses the “elephant in the room” in a frank, and at times, brutally honest way. Duncan’s perspective might be uncomfortable, but it is so necessary.
The church is political. Feeding the homeless is radical. Marriage is radical when it’s offered to everyone and blessed by clergy. God’s justice is radical. Centering the oppressed is radical. Our task is not so much to reject politicism as it is to reject evil. The message of Jesus is radical and political.
This book will not be for everyone, but if you are looking for someone to tell you hard truths, this is the book for you!
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I have read rave reviews of this book, and every one of them is absolutely right… this is a phenomenal book! The writing is just so damned excellent! The story is so incredibly engaging! This was a book that was easy to lose myself in and each chapter was better than the one before! The ending though, oh my gosh, wow! This is a book you cannot read without a tissue box near by…trust me on this!
Is this the best book I have read all year? While I absolutely loved this book, it did not unseat Apeirogon for me, but it is a very close second!
I urge you to get this book today and start reading!
On a more urgent note, I got an email from Allegheny County letting me know my ballot is on its way! But, are you registered to vote? Are all your friends and family registered to vote? Have you made your plan to vote? I have! I will be filling out my ballot and hand delivering it to a drop off location! We need to vote like our lives depend on it because, sadly, I think they do! And the clock is ticking, we are just 41 days away!!
That is all I have for this week, as always if you wrote a post to share, please leave your link below.
And the 1 minute 20 second video mash up of an amazing (yet distanced weekend)
And while I’d love to while away the day lost in weekend thoughts…a mountain of laundry is screaming at me. But fortunately it is a task that allows for contemplative thinking, so maybe I can stay immersed in my weekend thoughts a bit longer while being productive! I hope your day allows for some of the same!
This week’s knitting was a brief interlude from sleeve knitting, because I finally got some Winston Measurements from my daughter! So before he grows any more, I picked up his Avery 2.0 Vest! The front is done, and the back is almost done! Which means I will just have to join the shoulders, seam the sides, and add a wee bit of sleeve/neck edging and it can be on its way to Michigan so it can get some wear this fall/winter! And once that is done, it will be all sleeves, all the time, promise! Ha!
This week, I am sharing my top five books of the summer… and picking just five has been so.hard! I read so many good books! And although SAH Bingo started way back on April 1st, my time frame starts June 1st and ends August 31st. All books here got a 5-star rating and they are books I have not stopped thinking about since I read them because the best books stay with you…amirite?
I had never read George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss (you can read my review here) and after immersing myself in 19th century life in England, I am so very glad I picked up this book. It is a book that I continue to think about, especially Maggie and her life. And while I do not live in England, nor is it the 19th century…it is easy to draw parallels with life for women today in this book. Also, it was marvelous to “escape” to England and settle in to the community on the Floss for a few hours each day, because this book was a very good reminder of how books can take us on a journey, even when we cannot go anywhere! If you have not read Mill on the Floss, I highly recommend it!
I simply adore Louise Erdrich, and The Night Watchman (my review here) did not disappoint. It is based on her grandfather’s life and I love, love, love Louise’s characters so much. They are so interesting and memorable! I knew absolutely nothing about the 1953 Indian Emancipation Act, but Louise piqued my curiosity to learn more after reading her book. It is no surprise that, as a nation, we have a long history of taking advantage of just about everyone – including Native Americans. This was a book that I simply could not put down, and loved Louise reading to me! I highly recommend any of Louise’s books, but this one especially!
This summer I tried to “read outside of my comfort zone” and pick up books I might normally pass by for a mystery… I had never read anything by Zora Neale Hurston and that is a sad thing to confess. Their Eyes Were Watching God (my review here) was the perfect introduction to this prolific author! This book takes you back to the 30’s and immerses you in the life of Janie Crawford. Hurston does a magnificent job of clearly showing you Janie’s world and all its faults through her eyes. Her writing is lyrical, almost poetic, and listening to Ruby Dee read the story was exactly perfect! I highly recommend this book!
What would any summer be without reading any Ian McEwan? Boring, I think… horribly boring! The Innocent (my review here) is a quick read… only 242 pages, but those pages are just packed full of twists, turns, and all the unexpected! And don’t let the title fool you, the characters are absolutely not innocent at all! The story revolves around post-WWII Germany, with Berlin being newly divided. There is a bit of espionage and some highly dysfunctional characters! And the ending… oh boy!
Finally, with a book I just finished under the wire, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (my review here). Another book I am ashamed to admit I had never even considered reading. The nameless narrator – the invisible man – tells a story that could be about life today, although this book was written in the 50’s. It is a compelling story, and it felt so real. I truly could not stop listening – a key factor in my deciding how “good” a book is, well this one was even better. Again, I highly recommend this book… the audio version especially, Joe Morton’s narration is excellent!
So there you have it, five books you should absolutely consider reading this fall!
And that is all I have for this week! I will be back next week in time for Unraveled Wednesday. As always, if you wrote a post, please leave your link below and thank you!
Means a cooler start to the week! And the mornings are so dark now. The tables have turned and instead of the sun waiting for me to rise… I am waiting for the sun, which just might be the perfect way to ease into the week.
These words by Jericho Brown have lingered with me since I listened to them last week on The Slow Down and, like Jericho, “I am in a mood about America.”
Googling, I found this reading by Alfre Woodard to share with you all! Each time I hear the poem, something different speaks to me.
It’s been a week, again. A world on fire… literally.
So to maintain some semblance of sanity, I have avoided the internet…which means, I “found” nothing this week to share with you.
But… I reached Dreamy Sleeve Island! Which means nine million stitches were successfully picked up and bound off! The finish line is calling and I want to wear this cloud!! I mean this blasted heat and humidity has to end sometime, right?
But today is also for remembering…
“Even the smallest act of service, the simplest act of kindness, is a way to honor those we lost, a way to reclaim that spirit of unity that followed 9/11.” — Barack Obama
I had never read George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss (you can read my 
I simply adore Louise Erdrich, and The Night Watchman (my 
This summer I tried to “read outside of my comfort zone” and pick up books I might normally pass by for a mystery… I had never read anything by Zora Neale Hurston and that is a sad thing to confess. Their Eyes Were Watching God (my 
What would any summer be without reading any Ian McEwan? Boring, I think… horribly boring! The Innocent (my 
Finally, with a book I just finished under the wire, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (my 
