I’ll be honest, I’ve been a little down recently. I’m not sure what the cause is, since it predates my grandmother’s fall, the loss of evening daylight, and the cool weather, so it’s probably just cyclical, rather than situational this time. But the net result is less reading and less knitting.

However, there’s nothing like the need for blog fodder to inspire picking a new book (I finally finished Flight Behavior last night), and I have a bunch out from the library to choose among. I settled on Deborah Wiles’ Countdown, the first book in her Sixties trilogy. The second book, Revolution, is a National Book Award finalist in this year’s young adult category. Set in 1962 here in D.C., I’m planning to read Countdown while listening to several of the compilations of music from that year that my dad has curated, which seems fitting for a book with a 45 on its cover.

The socks are for Rudi. The yarn is Wild Hare Studio’s Pinnacle Sock in I Want My Zombie, the 8th and final skein of yarn bought at Maryland Sheep & Wool this year. It is, at his request, a 2×2 rib, which is the most boring knitting ever, if you ask me. It’s not totally mindless, like stockinette would be, but it’s also not something that requires focus, so I often find myself floating away and with the wrong number of stitches at the end of a needle. That said, the spiraling stripe, which looks like a zombie’s wrappings (do zombies have wrappings or is that just mummies?), is a lot of fun, and they’re Rudi’s favorite colors, which means he’ll wear them lots when I’m done with them. And it is good knitting for the dark, so I got a lot done by the campfire when we were on vacation, and it’ll also work well for concerts and car rides, should either of those materialize in our future soon.