Greetings! It’s been a few weeks since you’ve seen any knitting in these here parts, since I went dark before the holidays as I was working on a Christmas present for my mom, who reads this blog. (Hi, Mum!)

As you can see here, I am still working on her Christmas present, despite this being the project (work or otherwise) that I most wanted to finish by year’s end. But the great thing about knitting is that it will be a great shawl when I do hand it over, hopefully the next time I see her — maybe next month? After all, it’s bigger than a babushka now!

I started a new book this evening, another Christmas romance. It’s overdue back at the Virginia library from which I borrowed it, but the 8 inches of snow we started the week with made it impossible to return it on Monday when I’d planned to, and then I had to get on a plane on Tuesday afternoon. So I figured if it was going to sit unread on my coffee table until I got back to town, it might as come with me and get read. Plus, I suppose I can always mail it back if need be.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what others are reading and crafting this first week of the new year!

The start to 2022 has been a little more distressing than we’d expected, which means that until I happened to check Twitter on Monday evening and discovered the Bout of Book Twitter chat going on, I’d neglected to see that we’d come back around to our thrice-a-year readalong.

I did follow up the Twitter chat by finishing two books — one in print and one audiobook — so whatever happens the rest of the week is icing on the cake.

Might you be interested in participating?

The Bout of Books readathon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It’s a weeklong readathon that begins 12:01am Monday, January 3rd, and runs through Sunday, January 9th, in YOUR time zone. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are reading sprints, Twitter chats, and exclusive Instagram challenges, but they’re all completely optional. For all Bout of Books 33 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. – From the Bout of Books team

Come join us!

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl’s Blog is Most Anticipated Books Releasing In the First Half of 2022:

1. Serendipity, edited by Marissa Meyer
2. An Impossible Impostor by Deanna Raybourn (the next book in the Veronica Speedwell series)
3. The Great Troll War by Jasper Fforde (at least one site says the final book in the Last Dragonslayer series will be published in May, although Fforde’s site says it has yet to be contracted for the U.S.)
4. The Unsinkable Greta James by Jennifer E. Smith
5. The Maid by Nita Prose
6. Reclaim the Stars, edited by Zoraida Córdova
7. The Ogress and the Orphans by Kelly Barnhill
8. Sense & Second-Degree Murder by Tirzah Price
9. The Emma Project by Sonali Dev
10. The Secret Princess by Margaret Stohl and Melissa de la Cruz (Have you ever thought, “What if there was a mash-up of The Secret Garden and A Little Princess? Me neither! But I’m still excited to learn someone has!)

What new releases are you looking forward to in the next six months?

I bought a shelf today.

Rudi has been saying for a while that he wants a tall shelf for the living room. We have too much stuff for the space we live in, which means the apartment is always a hot mess. Yes, we could purge things — and that would be how many people would handle it. But we are not those people.

A local shop is shuttering its business tomorrow and I stopped in today to see if they had any deals. Mostly they did not, but they were selling off some of their furniture, including a shelf that’s a little over six feet tall.

The shop disassembled it for me (it’s three boxes on four poles) and I walked it home in four trips (exercise plus furniture!). I have yet to reassemble it, but that’s a tomorrow problem, rather than a today problem.

Remember how I pulled out all my Christmas cards to send them off in mid-December?

Never happened.

Then I took them with me to Connecticut to get them out before Christmas — or, at the very least, before I came back to D.C.

Fail!

Did I at least get them out by the end of 2021?

Nope!

Am I giving up on the idea of sending physical cards this season?

No, I am not!

But I am running out of the twelve days of Christmas, so I’d better buckle down and get them out in the next couple days…