March was a particularly quiet month here on the blog — probably the least post-filled in its eight-year history.

There are a variety of reasons for that, but I won’t bother making excuses. Instead, I’ll just vow to resume writing here more often — and on broader topics than just the weekly notice of beautiful things in my life.

To begin, I offer you my two works in progress:

The book, Mrs Queen Takes the Train, I began months ago, and it’s now past the return date. D.C.’s generous policy means that it really needs to go back in the next week, so I’ve been working on wrapping it up. As my mother (who started the book after me and still finished long before I picked it back up) predicted, while the beginning is a bit slow, it picks up once Queen Elizabeth II finally exits the castle. The book is told from the perspective of more than half a dozen characters, which makes for a certain amount of story time shift and of retracing of plot. But generally I’m enjoying the novel.

The knitting is this year’s first pattern in the annual Sock Madness competition. This is my fifth year participating and the second time I haven’t advanced out of the opening round. (Interestingly, the other time also involved a trip to Salt Lake.) The pattern is called Sockdolager, and the yarn might be Trekking, but is definitely one of a trio of sock yarn purchased from A Tangled Skein before they went out of business earlier this year. (The other two skeins were Rudi’s picks.) My goal is to be done with this second sock before the winning knitter finishes her final pair — probably some time in late-May or early-June (giving me plenty of time to work on a belated shawl for my grandmother, just as soon as I find yarn for that project).