Look! I finished my Smock Madness gusset, so now I just have to knit a foot! Simple! It’s practically a full sock! (Well, maybe not. I wear size 11 shoes, so the foot is just as long as the leg. But still! More than halfway on the second sock!)

I shared with you last night my audiobooks, so tonight I figured I’d show you what I’m reading in print: Virginia Kantra’s Meg & Jo, a modern retelling of Little Women.

In this version, Marmee runs a goat farm in North Carolina. Mr. March is a former army chaplain who now runs support groups for returning soldiers. Meg is a former bank loan manager who now stays home with her toddlers, Daisy and D.J., while her husband John works at a car dealership for the Laurences.

Jo is in New York City, where she’s anonymously writing a food blog and making ends meet with a job as a prep cook in Chef Bhaer’s restaurant after having been downsized from her newspaper job.

But when Marmee gets sick, her two eldest children are going to have to take hard looks at what’s most important to them.

I’m halfway through and really enjoying it so far. All the key scenes are there, but altered, but our heroes remain themselves even though they communicate via text instead of post box in the hedge. But as we all know, the first half of Little Women is the easy part, so I’m steeling myself for a weepy weekend ahead.

Want to see what others are reading and crafting? Head over to As Kat Knits for her weekly Unraveled roundup.

I finished an audiobook last night, which means a new one was started while I was doing the dishes tonight. I’ve ended up with too many out at once, all of which expire in less than a week. I decided I’d start several of them to get a sense of which ones I like enough to want to keep going with, rather than either letting them expire untried or just requesting them again in the hopes of more opportune timing.

Tonight’s audiobook sample came from Field Notes on Love by Jennifer E. Smith, who specializes in y.a. romances told from both perspectives.

Also checked out to me in audio format are The Bride Test by Helen Hoang (which had reached a cringey moment the last time I had it out), Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (which Rudi and I are listening to intermittently after having enjoyed the small screen adaptation), Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert (a British romance I was enjoying that expired before I could listen to the last several chapters), How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi (which I should probably just give up on in audio format in favor of print, since that tends to be my preferred way of processing non-memoir nonfiction), and The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi (which will be what I sample during tomorrow night’s chores).

What are you listening to these days?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share the top ten book events or festivals we’d love to attend someday.

Who knew back when Jana set this topic that we’d all still be wishing to go anywhere?

Anyway, mine are all real:

1. BookExpo (I used to take part in a virtual version — Armchair BEA.)
2. Hay Festival (I have been to Hay on Wye on a normal day; I can’t begin to imagine it during a festival.)
3. Edinburgh International Book Festival (Scotland is on my list of places to visit, and this event coincides with the Edinburgh Festival and Edinburgh Fringe Festival.)
4. The Fforde Fiesta (The intermittent festival celebrating Jasper Fforde’s works held in Swindon, the real-world home of the fictitious Thursday Next.)
5. Shakespeare in the Park (this seems the easiest one to cross off my list once we’re allowed to gather in groups again)
6. YallFest/YallWest (I partook of YallStayHomeFest this spring and loved it.)
7. International Quidditch World Cup (Because don’t you just wonder…?)
8. Utah Shakespeare Festival (Oregon’s would also be great.)
9. Miami Book Fair (It’s the oldest book festival in the U.S. apparently. Who knew?)
10. The Youth Media Awards (Presented annually at the American Library Association’s Midwinter Meeting, this breakfast is where you hear who’s won the biggest and most prestigious prizes in children’s and young adult literature. I went to several Midwinter meetings, but never managed to get to the YMA breakfast.)

How about you? Are there real-world or fictitious book events you’d like to be able to visit?

Today was National Ice Cream Day, which seemed the perfect opportunity to make some homemade ice cream.

I froze the bowl this morning and washed all the other parts of the ice cream maker. (It had been a while since we last used ours.) I bought cream. I read through the manual and recipe.

I remembered that in past occasions the ice cream maker has overflowed and set out a cookie sheet on the stove (outlets are at a premium in my kitchen, so things that need to be plugged in are often used on the stovetop) to hold the contraption and catch any overflow from seeping down into my burners.

I plugged in the base, pulled the bowl out of the freezer, added the blade and lid, and poured in milk, cream, and sugar. I turned it on, and the lid started to click past its stopping point. This was a problem.

With the lid off, I attempted to shift the blade and realized I’d made a tactical error: it was frozen in place. The liquids had already started to freeze, locking the blade where I’d put it. (I should have turned it on and then added the ingredients.) I rocked the blade out slowly (it’s plastic, so there was a good chance of breaking it in the process), and started to scrape down the sides of the bowl with a plastic scraper.

Eventually I got it to a point where I could get the blade back in, but couldn’t get the lid all the way down. Would that work? No — if the lid isn’t locked in place, the entire thing spins together, and the cream doesn’t churn.

More scraping, and eventually I got it to a spot where the lid nearly latched in place. No problem, I thought to myself, I’ll just hold it in place until it spins down enough to get it down that extra quarter inch.

This is the point in a sitcom where you at home in your comfy chair shake your head. Mishaps are about to ensue. An outside observer can see where things are about to go off the rails. The unwitting actor does not have the benefit of your wisdom.

I flipped the switch and pressed down on the lid.

The ice cream started to spin, but I was holding it down from above. Physics still exist, though, so the only thing not being held down started to spin — the cookie sheet the whole thing was sitting on. It crashed into the pepper mill and the milk pitcher and the tea kettle in quick succession. Realizing my mistake, I reached for the off button. But to do that, I let up slightly on the lid, and the base started to spin with the cookie sheet — and the off switch went out of sight.

In this moment, the only obvious thing that occurred to me was to pick up the entire contraption off the cookie sheet in an effort to find the switch.

“Help! Help!” I shrieked.

Rudi, who’d been taking a nap, stumbled in to find me holding this Exorcist device, and I, the cookie sheet, the stove, and everything in the vicinity (which he’d literally just scrubbed down earlier in the day) covered in cream.

We had very thin milkshakes to celebrate National Ice Cream Day instead.

It was a stressful workweek, with lots of deadlines and quick turnarounds and making sure the people who work for me were doing a better job with self-care than my boss and I were doing. But there is no way through such weeks but through…

And we did get through it and the organization didn’t burn to the ground and people did herculean amounts of work with my thanks and we all made it to Friday night relatively unscathed. Rudi and I toasted five o’clock with Filipino doughnuts that I’d ridden my bike through the midday heat to pick up. (Thank you, past me for ordering them!)

I marked the start of the weekend by picking up some holds from the library. Rudi and I went to the garden, sighed over the tomatoes that had disappeared from our plot (and the one that didn’t, but that now has a very large bite gone from it). We picked a foot-long cucumber and gave everything a good dousing.

We ate pizza and ice cream for dinner and watched episodes of The Librarians and Parks and Recreation.

Since I didn’t do a good job of it during the week, I’m going to continue this evening’s focus on self-care through the weekend. I’ll attempt to refind my living room, which is currently buried under my kitchen — which admittedly looks amazingly spacious with only the bare minimum in it from the fridge move yesterday.

I’ll order some more masks in fun designs and cute motifs, because these are the new universal fashion accessories and I’ve had to hand wash mine twice this week. I’ll go outside in the evening when it’s cooler and sit in the park. And maybe I will give making pasta a shot (in the kitchen, not in the park). It was on my list of things to work on while social distancing way back in March — a list that looks so painfully naive and optimistic all these months later.

But whatever I do, I will not be doing work.