Tomorrow is the First Day of Fall!

Can you believe it? We’ve nearly made it. The leaves have been turning here for a little while but mostly because of the terrible drought we’re having. We’re planning a trip to the West side of the state today because the highways to our usual adventures will be clogged with Nascar fans and people going to the annual Highland Games in the mountains. We do our best to avoid crowds at all costs so I’m looking forward to exploring somewhere new a little later this morning.

This week I’ve been waking up very early to squeeze in my Thinking Hour and have been diligent about the personal curriculum I’ve shared, have done a tiny bit of knitting, and was able to finish three books. Keep reading for a few more details:

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Home Stuff:

This week simply flew by. If I didn’t keep a notebook, I’d hardly remember any of it. I was feeling extra tired this week and can feel myself moving into hibernation mode, which I’d like to avoid. So I’m taking my vitamins and doing my best not to sit down anywhere comfortable unless I’m prepared to fall asleep for a little while. Because I absolutely will just fall asleep at the drop of a hat in the car (luckily I don’t have to drive very much) or on the couch. Earlier this week I even fell asleep sitting at the table while watching a YouTube video. It’s not very helpful.

Despite all of that, we had a great week of school and tried to keep Dawsey as busy as we could manage. I am 7 lessons into the Spirit Dog Reactive Training and the first few lessons worked on baseline stuff like beginner sniffing practice and included lots of tips for activities to help keep dogs calm throughout the day, which sets them up for success out in the world. I’ll keep you posted about how it’s going.

Independent Learning:

I got started on my independent learning plan on Monday morning! I’m extra pleased that I took the time to put these books in chronological order because it’s already paying off — I found myself nodding along to White Trash thanks to what I read in These Truths earlier in the week. There are have been several obscure names that have occurred in both, like Virginia Dare and Richard Hakluyt – names that I’d never heard before have now come up twice in one week. How perfect is that?!

I was intimidated by These Truths because it’s over 900 pages., but please trust me when I say that it’s totally approachable. It’s obvious by reading the introduction and first chapter that Jill Lepore is a fantastic writer and a passionate historian. (Also, she had a new book published on September 16th about the history of the US Constitution called We The People and has the cover story in the October edition of The Atlantic.)

So many of you raved about The Warmth of Other Suns in last week’s post and I’m looking forward to reading it. Based on the pace I’ve set this week, I hope to get to the 1900s in December which is when (it seems) most of that book is set. It looked fascinating while I was flipping through it to get an understanding of its structure to see how it fit into my other reading. Knowing it’s waiting for me will help propel me forward!

I feel like I could write 20 more paragraphs about what I’ve been reading and how it’s been going, but I’ll stop here. I’m brainstorming ways to write about it all to reinforce what I’ve been learning and to take an audit of the strategies that help me stay focused and move forward. I doubt much of it will show up here at The Cozy Burrow but stay tuned: I’ll let you know if I start writing about it anywhere else.

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Knitting:

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Last Sunday I shared that I started a sock with this yarn. I worked on it a little more this week and then made the decision to unravel it and move on to something else. The reason: I dropped a stitch and got frustrated because the yarn was too dark and I couldn’t see the stitches. And then I started thinking about what it was going to be like to pick up the stitches for the gusset and decided, nope. On to the next!

Would any of you like this yarn? I’d be very happy to send it along to a new home if you’re a fan of Claudia’s Hand Painted yarns!

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And this Fiber Stash Dyeworks yarn was in the bag I put aside for May. I don’t think I’m going to have any problems seeing this one, ha! Those color specks are practically neon. I bought this at the NH Sheep and Wool Festival before Bronwyn was born, probably in 2016. I wound it up yesterday and might be able to cast on in the car this morning?

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And still no progress on my current sweater. Here’s the last picture I shared back in July. Every.single.day I think, tonight’s the night! Once the kids get into bed, I’ll settle on the couch with an audiobook, my knitting, and a cup of tea. And every.single.night I basically go to bed right after they do. And as I’m typing this right now, I’m thinking tonight’s the night!

Wish me luck.

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Reading:

King of Ashes by S. A. Cosby
(Amazon | Bookshop.org)

“For all his faults, Dante was a good person.

Roman thought he was a good person too.

Maybe he was wrong. But did it make you a bad person if you did a horrific thing for a good reason? Like saving your brother?” page 78

This was my first book by Cosby and I found myself unable to put it down. It’s a contemporary novel set mostly in an impoverished town in Virginia called Jefferson Run. It’s about three siblings who have had difficult lives despite their relative wealth in the area. The youngest brother, Dante, gets caught up in a drug-related situation and the oldest, Roman, cooks up a scheme to save him. And before you know it, Roman is doing things he never thought he’d do.

Woven throughout this contemporary story, we learn more about the heartbreaking disappearance of their mother about a decade earlier. Friends, it’s a brutal one but a real page turner!

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Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa
(Amazon | Bookshop.org)

“Able-bodied Japanese people have likely never even imagined a hunchbacked monster struggling to read a physical book. Here I am, feeling my spine being crushed a little more with every book that I read, while all those ebook-hating abled-bodied people who went on and on about how they loved the smell of physical books, or the feel of the turning pages beneath their fingers, persisted in their state of happy oblivion.” page 36

This short novel (level than 100 pages) made it onto both the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award nonfiction longlists this year. It was an incredible representation of the life of a young woman with a severe physical disability who longs for what’s perceived as normalcy. The author also has a physical disability and she’s done a phenomenal job of showing what life is like when you have to consider something as basic as how to sit in a chair when your body is built differently. It was eye-opening, that’s for sure.

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The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obrecht
(Amazon | Bookshop.org)

This novel won the Women’s Prize in 2011 and I’m trying to sort through why. As I was listening, I was trying to pin down the setting and time period, but really struggled to understand when and where I was throughout this book. It seemed like the main storyline, a young doctor named Natalia, was set mostly in a Balkan country in the early 2000s as the area was recovering from the Bosnian War. I could be completely wrong. The alternate timeline was about her grandfather who was also a doctor and told her fantastical stories about his childhood and early days in the profession.

I was fascinated by the Balkan setting and the description of the villages recovering after the war but struggled to put all of the pieces together. Perhaps it’s because I listened on audio? Have you read this one? What did you think about it?

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I’m currently reading Hot Wax, the newest by M. L. Rio. I read If We Were Villains a couple of years ago while on a dark academia kick and really enjoyed it, so I was excited when I saw that she was publishing something new. It has a fun structure, vivid imagery, and is mostly set in the late 90s, so there’s some amazing nostalgia tucked into story.

I’m also listening to The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine. This one was on the National Book Award longlist that was released a couple of weeks ago. I enjoyed an earlier book by this author (The Wrong End of the Telescope) and was excited to see him on this year’s list. Raja is very funny so far and I’ve laughed out loud several times. I don’t know where Alameddine is going to take this story!

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Okay, that’s my week in a nutshell. How was your week? Did you read anything good? Do you have any plans for today?

I hope your week gets off to a great start and that you find time for things that matter to you. Take good care!