Last week, I showed you that I’d gone astray with my knitting. Now you can see that I fixed it and am back on track. If I didn’t hate this slipped-stitch ribbing (I’m struggling with tension), I’d be further along, but we’ll take three rows of progress at a time over none.

I’m three quarters of the way through Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff’s Aurora Burning, the middle book of their second snarky YA space trilogy, but fell asleep tonight instead of reading the final 150 pages. But I did listen to some of SJ Bennett’s The Windsor Knot, a mystery starring HRH Queen Elizabeth as a sleuth solving a murder at Windsor Castle, while I was out and about earlier, so all is not lost.

If you look closely at my knitting, you will see that the rows on the left, tucked under my book, do not match the earlier ribbing section on the right. That’s because I didn’t do it correctly, so the ripping out of a couple rows is imminent. I just need to grab a small needle to facilitate picking the stitches back up. That’s what happens when you get cocky and don’t look at your pattern quite closely enough.

I told Rudi when we got to the beach on Monday that if I didn’t finish Gods of Jade and Shadow while we were there, we’d need to come back at least once more. It has been my beach book this summer, and I don’t want to start reading it not at the beach. While I’m nearly halfway done and enjoying it, the action hasn’t gotten so intense that I feel bad leaving Casiopea and the God of Death on their own in between trips.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what others are crafting and reading.

Contrary to what you might understandably think, this is not an identical shot to last week’s post. I have made progress on both the shawl and the book, but it’s slow-going. The shawl more so than the book at this point, in part because it requires more thought. I’ll likely be done with the book by this weekend, but the shawl will drag on. The problem is that it just doesn’t match where my head is right now. I can’t even tell you why it’s hard; really it’s just one row out of four where I need to pay attention, and then every sixth row, there’s also a make-one increase tucked in at the end just to make sure I’m not getting too comfortable.

But I do have a pair of socks that have just needed a toe for months now, so maybe I’ll take a time-out on the shawl, finish the socks, and give myself some kind of Ravellenic Games win. It feels like that might be the kindest thing I can do in the next couple days.

I finished listening to Becoming Duchess Goldblatt while walking home from Safeway tonight. I hadn’t brought headphones, so everyone along the route got a snippet of the final three chapters. The Duchess would likely approve. I have Did You Hear What Happened to Lacey? queued up, but I also checked out a couple mysteries this evening as well. One of them is a collection of Poirot stories read by Christopher Lee and the actor who played Colonel Hastings on the David Suchet series.

Head to As Kat Knits to see what others are crafting and reading this week.

There was some actual unraveling a few seconds ago, as I went to take a picture of my knitting and realized I’d dozed off before finishing the row. I wasn’t at the end of the row, as I’d expected, but a couple dozen stitches before it, and I lost a handful of stitches in my handling of it. But I got it all righted, so phew!

I also lost the equivalent of a few stitches in listening to the audiobook of Becoming Duchess Goldblatt. I’ll wait until tomorrow to pick up those threads and figure out where I’d stopped being awake in the telling of the tale.

I’ve started Incense and Sensibility by Sonali Dev in paper. Her Austen-inspired series always start a little slow, but getting to follow the breadcrumbs she lays down (India and China’s last name is Dashwood, for instance) is always enjoyable, although I did eventually have to give in and look up what Marianne and Elinor’s youngest sister’s name is in the original, since it was distracting me from the book (Margaret, in case it’s now bugging you, too).

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what others are reading and crafting.

This evening, I took my book out with me, rather than my knitting, and sat on the local Greek restaurant’s patio with a cup of tea. (Bars might have reopened, but few of the coffeehouses near me have resumed evening hours. Even the Starbucks on the Circle closes at 8 these days.)

I’m far enough into the book at this point to be invested in the characters, so I expect it to go quickly from here on.

The Olympics kick off the evening after tomorrow, so I expect that’s when knitting will begin again in earnest. After all, I should be able to finish a smallish project within two multi-week sporting events, right?

The shawl is not nearly done. But it is nearly the width of the recliner, which is something.