Coffeeneuring #9: Sugar Shack Donuts (804 N. Henry St., Alexandria, VA)

Saturday, Nov. 19; 12.1 miles
Apple cake doughnut and caramel apple cider

I’d planned to get up and moving earlier than I did on Saturday, which meant that when I did finally walk out the door, dressed for the early afternoon’s sun and temperatures, that I was in for a surprise within minutes. We live below ground, which means that our view of the sky is rather a small one and can give false impressions, as it did then. Only half the sky was still blue when I emerged on the street and by the time I pedaled down to the river and across the Potomac, barely a sliver remained free of clouds. The wind picked up, which did not make the ride an enjoyable one. The gusts were particularly bad near the airport, where a lack of ground cover gave the wind a running start. By the time I reached the edge of Old Town, I was glad to encounter a bus shelter where I could seek refuge while checking my directions and putting on the measly warm layers I’d brought with me.

I stopped in at Fibre Space (nothing on their side of the street to lock the bike to) for a while to see if they had something in stock, but they were out, so I continued on to my destination: Sugar Shack Donuts (bike racks right out front). I’d bought a Groupon for a half dozen doughnuts earlier in the season, imagining Rudi and I would have more opportunities to ride together, but his unavailability wasn’t going to stop me from visiting. The selection was diminished, but there were enough to put together a box to bring home with me. I added their drink of the day, a hot caramel apple cider, and parked myself at a table in the back of the shop. This marked my only Coffeeneur stop that necessitated sitting indoors, but the waning daylight and impending rain and plummeting temperatures did not make me think that I needed to make myself miserable in order to be consistent.

Knowing that rain was possible, I’d packed a slender personal collection of comics, Young Avengers, Vol. 1: Style > Substance, rather than a library book that might be ruined by the weather, and my Christmas mitts. I read my book and started working on a thumb and ate my very tasty apple doughnut and nursed my cider. I texted Rudi to say I’d decided to catch Metro back to the District, rather than ride back in dim, damp, blustery conditions. This wise decision was reinforced when I emerged from the shop to discover that the rain had indeed begun and that my main headlight was dead. I got off at GW and pedaled home from there, being extra-cautious since I was down to my tadpole light in front.

I’d planned to go out one more time, on Sunday, but it was such a miserably windy day that I made the executive decision to make Saturday’s my final Coffeeneuring stop of the season.

So, with that, over my nine rides over seven weeks, I covered 63.2 miles, just shy of my personal Coffeeneuring best from two years ago.

My theme was reading and knitting. I’d hoped it’d be finished objects, but not a single knit item was completed, although I did get closer on the eight projects I worked on. Of the nine books I was reading at my stops, I had better luck, finishing six of them so far. (Not Your Sidekick, Magic in Manhattan, and The Girl Who Drank the Moon are all still in progress.)

Thanks, once again, to MG for hosting such a fun event!

The rest of this year’s rides: 1-4, 5, and 6-8.

I have been working on these fingerless mitts for three years nearly to the day. (Please note, of the three projects shown, only one is done.) I refuse to think another Christmas season will come without my getting to wear them, so I’m saying here that they will be done and on my hands by next Friday.

I bound off the first one (on the right) last Christmas using a sewn picot bind-off that I wasn’t happy with. It felt bunchy and rolled outward, and I may have misjudged the evenness of the rows, because the picots didn’t really pop or look pretty, which would seem to thwart the point of having them in the first place. So a couple weeks ago, when looking for a project to take Coffeeneuring, I pulled these out and decided to see what other options I had for creating a pretty top edging. While this still rolls outward (anyone have a solution for that?), it solves the other problems, so I can probably live with it.

Thanks to knitting (and washing dishes), I’m into the final chapters of the audiobook of The Heist, by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg. The book I want to be reading is in the center of the photo, Kelly Barnhill’s The Girl Who Drank the Moon, which I’m enjoying quite a bit. The books I should be reading, Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies, both need to be back in the library by Sunday to avoid fines. Nonfiction is just slower. And requires thinking. And just feel exhausting this month. But the hold list for both is months long (even when someone doesn’t keep them out late). We’ll see…

I always read more in the summer, so I’ll break up the reading from those months into a couple posts, because no one has the patience to read my thoughts on nine books in one go. (Or, more accurately, I don’t have the patience to post them all at once.)

So here are the first couple books I read during June (it was supposed to be four, but I’ve been stuck on the latter two for a month now, so it’s time to just get something up):

The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, by Vaseem Khan

On the day Inspector Chopra retires from the Mumbai police force, he discovers his favorite uncle has died, leaving him the titular bequest, which turns out to be a baby elephant. But before we can get to the pachyderm (which is going to be a problem since he and his wife live in a middle-class high-rise with a rather ornery woman heading up the condo board), we must first deal with the workplace farewell. Middle-aged Inspector Chopra loves his job. He’s very good at his job. He doesn’t want to leave his job. But he’s had some heart trouble, and between pressures from his wife and the Indian bureaucracy, he’s been forced to leave the force early. He has instructions his final day is meant to be strictly a formality; his jurisdiction as head of his station has already passed onto another, who’ll arrive the following day. But when a young man from a lower-class section of town dies and his mother comes in to complain that it’s been dismissed as suicide when her son couldn’t possibly have been suicidal, Chopra doesn’t have the heart to show her the door. He quietly orders some extra tests to be conducted on the body, with the plan he’ll return later in the week to pass on the information to his successor. But when that man turns out to be a drunk and when the autopsy turns up some abnormalities and when sitting around the apartment with his wife and mother-in-law turns out not to be any fun, Chopra decides to split his time between unofficially investigating the young man’s death and figuring out what to do with a baby elephant who is literally wasting away while chained up on the common lawn of his building. He’ll spend his time consulting vets and zookeepers and low-lifes alike while trying to keep all his activities from his loving wife.

Written by an Englishman who spent ten years working in India, the story is a little slower than I would have liked, but still ultimately was an enjoyable tale. Chopra and his wife (from whose perspective we get about a third of the story) are good characters, and the end of the book suggests this could become an ongoing series. If you like Tarquin Hall’s Vish Puri detective series, I’d suggest giving this a try, as well. If anyone has any recommendations for contemporary Indian detective series written by actual Indians, I’d be eager to check them out.

Pages: 314. Library copy.

Baba Yaga’s Assistant, by Marika McCoola with illustrations by Emily Carroll

In this graphic novel, a motherless teenager whose father is getting remarried to a woman with an obnoxious little girl of her own decides to answer the help wanted ad Baba Yaga places in the newspaper seeking a new assistant. Having grown up on her grandmother’s detailed stories about Baba Yaga and how the witch could be outsmarted, Masha is prepared to move to the woods and use her wits to gain access to the witch’s walking home. But when one of Baba Yaga’s instructions involves cooking and children and one of those kids turns out to be her new step-sister, well, Masha is going to have to get even more creative.

I wanted to like this book more, although I can’t pinpoint where, exactly, it fell flat for me. Aimed at a middle-grade audience, it’ll likely appeal to anyone with an interest in Russian/Slavic lore.

Pages: 132. Library copy.

Stay tuned for the next installment of June’s reads, hopefully coming soon to a blog near you!

I started this last night, so I’m finishing it up tonight. The political situation is not looking good…

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic asks bloggers about books they’ve recently added to their to-be-read list. Please note this is not my to-be read pile of books on-hand, except where detailed, but a lot of books that have shown up on the year-end best-of lists that have started appearing:

1. Dust Bowl Girls: A Team’s Quest for Basketball Glory, by Lydia Reeder

I’m hoping for something like the basketball version of A League of Their Own.

2. Fever at Dawn, by Péter Gárdos

I feel bad about not having read any Hungarian books in preparation for our trip there two years ago. Plus, I saw a copy at the library (although I didn’t add it to the books I was checking out).

3. Bittersweet, by Susan Wittig Albert

This one actually did come home. I was looking for a book with a Thanksgiving setting and found a mystery by an author with whom I was familiar.

4. The Smell of Other People’s Houses, by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock

Enthusiastically recommended by the Unshelved comics reader crew.

5. Your Presidential Fantasy Dream Team, by Daniel O’Brien

Also recommended by Unshelved. Plus, in their categories from which to choose your presidents, they have a Roosevelt category.

6. They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement, by Wesley Lowery

Because I have hopes that the attention being played to the #BlackLivesMatter movement will help bring about meaningful change.

7. A Warrior of the People: How Susan La Flesche Overcame Racial and Gender Inequality to Become America’s First Indian Doctor, by Joe Starita

I was a women’s studies minor in college, so I have a special place in my heart for books like this.

8. The Inquisitor’s Tale: Or, The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog, by Adam Gidwitz
   I enjoyed his A Tale Dark and Grim, and thought its comparison to The Canterbury Tales seemed promising.

9. Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness, by Nathanael Johnson

I live in a city, but hadn’t heard about this book until I saw it was nominated for a Goodreads award.

10. Fields Where They Lay, by Timothy Hallinan

I haven’t read any of the Junior Bender mysteries, and they may prove to be too violent for me, but this one is Christmas-themed, which is hard for me to resist at least trying.

How about you? What books have you recently added to your TBR list?

This photo is misleading. I mean, sure, this shawl lives next to the couch for ease of tv knitting. And, yes, this book has been in my bag every day the past two weeks. And sometimes I pick up one or t’other. But I’m tired of both of them and want them both to be done so I can focus my attention on other, more fun ways to spend my time.

Andrea’s Shawl has been on the needles since July. I’ve done 20 sets of stripes thus far, and there still remain a bunch of stitches on my needles. Since I need to get it down to 7 (or so), I’ll just keep going. It has to end sooner or later, right?

It’s more obvious to me that Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World is creeping toward the end. I’ve got a mere 50 pages to go, which I could take care of in two hours, if I just cared enough to finish. But … it’s dragging. I keep losing track of what Middle Eastern country she’s talking about in each chapter, and I’m easily distracted by what seem to be the bunch of articles she adapted into a book, rather than a firm narrative illustrated by anecdotes. The book is two weeks overdue (our fines don’t kick in until a book is a month late) to the library, and as such I’m loathe to put the book down and pick up another print book. Instead, I’ve downloaded the second audiobook in the Fox and O’Hare series, The Heist, by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg. It’s a ridiculous caper series (he’s a world-famous thief, she’s the FBI agent who caught him; together they now travel the world recovering riches from bad people in an undercover government op), with eye-rollingly bad sex talk. Think To Catch a Thief and dial the cheesiness up by a factor of five. It’s probably really not helped by being read by a guy who reads with a wink-wink-nudge intonation. And, yet, it’s fun and it’s mindless and is exactly what I need right now, with less than a week to go until an election that’s still mind-blowingly close. I’m sure I’ll get back to the important reading any day now, but in the meantime, I’ll be following Kate and Nick’s adventures while I wash the dishes.

Yarning along with Ginny.

As you probably know, I love taking part in book/yarn swaps, but have scaled back my participation in them somewhat after being burned a couple of times by sending out packages and getting nothing in return. So I’m picky about what I’ll join and have to feel confident that the organizer knows what they’re doing. I’m really pleased to say that the Ninja Book Swap, run by Bex, is one of those.

At the end of last week, a box arrived at my apartment, just in time to mark the end of the workweek. It came from my awesome partner Laura, who blogs at Buttontapper Press. Check out all the goodies she sent me.

You know someone has it together when they create their own Halloween wrapping:

Opening a swap box is not unlike Christmas morning. You curl up on the sofa, often in your pj’s, and open fun package after fun package.

Check out all the books Laura sent me!

The three books along the top were on my “wish list,” and The Extraordinary Life of Buffy the Cat was one Laura picked out, thinking I’d enjoy it. I’m not sure what gave her that idea.

Posey said she was not going to model for me, but added that she thinks Laura is still pretty awesome for sending her this great box in which to hang out.

I have to agree. In addition to sending me four awesome looking books (Not Your Sidekick is going to be the first one I read, although I’ve already dipped into Buffy), Laura also sent me a mini clipboard, two journals (one of which is now covered with all of the Halloween stickers from the wrapping), stickers (I love holiday stickers!), and some chocolate!

Thank you once again, Laura, for a really lovely Ninja Book Swap box. I’m utterly delighted with what you sent!

And if you like sending and receiving bookish packages, keep an eye on the swap blog in early January, when the next one will be gearing up.