Joining Kat and friends. Go see what the others are up to.

Knitting.

This hat took me roughly forever to knit. Anyone who has knit a Sockhead knows whereof I speak. 4 inches of 2×2 ribbing, then 9 miles inches of stockinette, all on US#2.5 (3mm) needles.

But now this yarn has finally found a use. I would never buy it myself, I got it in a swap. It has haunted my brain for years: what to do with it? Those vivid colors — red, green, purple, turquoise — might fight each other. But in this hat they formed nice tidy stripes. The could just as easily have pooled or flashed as these did. Calling this a win. 

When I went to put that hat away in the donations box, I found several hats that never made it to the blog. Behold!

Made for the Blue Hat Project. The first two are knit with various blues of worsted weight, the last two are double-stranded. Hat three is Cascade Heritage in gray-blue stranded with some Knit Picks Felici that never made it onto my stash page. Hat four is that same Cascade Heritage stranded with some Zauberball Crazy that was left over from this hat.

Another hat, this one of Berroco vintage, that lovely soft yarn.

Berroco Vintage DK. I have a metric sh!tload of both worsted weight and DK in this yarn. The dark green worsted is because I didn’t read the Carbeth pattern carefully, so I ordered worsted; oops, pattern called for DK. Return? Nah, I’ll use it…someday. The gold is a random skein I bought with the vague thought that I might put a stripe somewhere in Carbeth.

Well, as you might guess, I still have plenty of that Vintage, both DK and worsted. Apparently, someday has not yet arrived…

Somewhere there is another hat, double-stranded gray and beige. Perhaps it will appear in a subsequent post? No way to be sure…

Reading.

The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn. This book was as good as I had hoped. It is based on the true story of Lyudmila Pavlichlenko, a Ukranian/Soviet sniper in WWII. Mila was a single mother, student, historian, and librarian. But she had taken a sharpshooting course a few years before and discovered that she had amazing accuracy. In 1941 when Stalin called for volunteers to join the army to repel the German invasion, aka Operation Barbarossa, she immediately joined up. Women volunteers were being shunted to the medical corps, not combat troops, but she persevered and became the [in]famous sniper with 309 official kills (actually more than 400, but to be official the kill must be witnessed by others). 4.5★

jk

sd

Say Her Name by Dreda Say Mitchell & Ryan Carter. Another freebie from Amazon. A biracial woman who was adopted seeks out her biological parents. She uncovers long-ago crimes never investigated because they “only” involved Black women. 2.5★

sd

sd

sd

sd

sd

The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage. We watched the Netflix movie based on this book, mainly because it starred Benedict Cumberbatch, and I thought I would read the book to get more insight into the characters. Although the writing is excellent, I was not enthralled by the book. 2.5★ but YMMV.

dsf

sd

sd

df

df

The Premonition by Michael Lewis. I read the synopsis on the front cover flap and thought This seems familiar, so I read the first few pages. Yup, Goodreads tells me I read this last July. It was so good I almost want to read it again. There is a blurb on the cover saying that the blurb-er “…would read an 800-page history of the stapler if it were written by Michael Lewis.” That is my feeling exactly — Lewis is a wonderful researcher who writes about his findings in superlative prose. 4.5★

df

df

vv

The Ballerinas by Rachel Kapelke-Dale. As a would-have-been-a-ballerina-in-another-life, I will read or watch anything about ballet or dance. I only got a little bit into reading this when I got distracted by some other shiny thing and I never finished it. No rating, but perhaps I will read it someday.

df

df

df

df

sd

Still Life by Sarah Winman. Boy howdy, I really had a hard time finishing books lately. I started this one but, again, got distracted by another book. Reading the synopsis on Goodreads makes me want to read it. It is available for borrowing when I decide I want it.

sd

sd

sd

sd

df

The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson. Obviously, the draw of this book is the authors. It was a decent thriller, not great, but definitely worth the time to read it. One of the women in my book group said that State of Terror by Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny is better; “smarter” was her word. So I put that one on hold, too. 3.5★

sd

sd

sd

State of Terror by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny. Let’s deal with the elephant in the room first: This book is head and shoulders above Bill’s book. The plot is tighter, and it never lapses into a multi-page soliloquy of the author’s thoughts about the office s/he held or the state of the world or anything that does not put the plot forward. I started reading this ~500-page tome at 5pm and finished a few minutes before midnight, with only a couple brief interruptions for dinner, bathroom, something to drink. t***p is clearly the previous president, and the authors spare nothing in depicting him as an incompetent dumbass, put forward and supported by right-wing titans of industry to undermine our democracy in favor of something else and poisoning our relationship with our allies in the process. 5★

Watching.

Doc Martin, series 6-9. Number 9 is the last series that has aired. According to the Internet, series 10 has been filmed but not aired yet. (spoiler alert) At the end of series 9, the Doc has been struck off; in American terms, he has lost his license to practice medicine. Never mind that he is a brilliant diagnostician and surgeon, his rudeness to patients and absolute inability to be tactful could not be ignored by the powers that be.

The character was developed in a couple movies. I watched one, Saving Grace, and found it meh. Another one was included with the series 9 DVDs; we started watching it and quickly decided we would rather go to bed and read.

ui

Suits on Amazon Prime. This is my go-to thing to watch when Smokey is not around. (He would absolutely HATE this series.) But I find it amusing enough to be the background for knitting. It reminds me of working in the fairly conservative world of accounting and also that that was not nearly as cutthroat as the world portrayed in this series. Of course, I was not a partner, just a lowly staff person, and I was in Minneapolis, not New York; my view was definitely limited. But from what I observed in a couple business trips to the Big Apple, it seems accurate. 4★