yarn along: june 2019

I'm still chipping away at the pair of socks I started at the beginning of April.  I stand by my two-at-a-time sock preference.  This second sock is such a slog.

I have made much more progress on my shawl.  There's one more row to go before I bind off and then puzzle through how to keep the dye from bleeding all over.  With summer break here, there will be a little more time to figure it out. 

After the shawl, I have two sweaters to start, one for Little M and one for a gift, and a hat for charity.  And then some more gift knitting.  

The New Media Epidemic and Quo Vadis occupy my current nightstand reading pile.  I read Quo Vadis during the spring that I was engaged to my husband, that very cat chewed copy in the picture.  I'm also listening to it on Audible, which has been good for keeping me off social media and youtube podcasts while I should be doing something else.  I am late to the Audible game, as I am with most techy things, but I already prefer it to our library and the Librivox audiobook apps.  Our library's choices are terrible, and Librivox's narrators aren't always easy to understand.  For now, I am willing to pay a little more to have good quality and better choices.

I read about The New Media Epidemic on Instagram, ironically.  Larchet discusses media, not just social media, sometimes in a new way, sometimes repeating information I've heard before.  I'm not even half way through the book, so I am interested to see what direction the rest of it takes.  If anything, it has solidified my hesitancy to allow my kids to engage in social media, and also to turn off all screens.  

Those books in the background of the first picture I got primarily for my boys. The reader on top was free at our library, but I purchased The Book of Courage, after reading an excerpt of it in the reader.  It's not just about men, but I hope that it will appeal to my boys.  I'm hoping to read it aloud to them at some point, but it has been challenging to find the time.

Finally, and I know this is supposed to be about knitting and reading, I wanted to share a series that my husband and I have been watching after the kids head to bed.  It's set in Russia during the First World War, and in Russian with English subtitles.  So far it's pretty tame, which I appreciate, although we're only three episodes in.