This photo is misleading. I mean, sure, this shawl lives next to the couch for ease of tv knitting. And, yes, this book has been in my bag every day the past two weeks. And sometimes I pick up one or t’other. But I’m tired of both of them and want them both to be done so I can focus my attention on other, more fun ways to spend my time.

Andrea’s Shawl has been on the needles since July. I’ve done 20 sets of stripes thus far, and there still remain a bunch of stitches on my needles. Since I need to get it down to 7 (or so), I’ll just keep going. It has to end sooner or later, right?

It’s more obvious to me that Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World is creeping toward the end. I’ve got a mere 50 pages to go, which I could take care of in two hours, if I just cared enough to finish. But … it’s dragging. I keep losing track of what Middle Eastern country she’s talking about in each chapter, and I’m easily distracted by what seem to be the bunch of articles she adapted into a book, rather than a firm narrative illustrated by anecdotes. The book is two weeks overdue (our fines don’t kick in until a book is a month late) to the library, and as such I’m loathe to put the book down and pick up another print book. Instead, I’ve downloaded the second audiobook in the Fox and O’Hare series, The Heist, by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg. It’s a ridiculous caper series (he’s a world-famous thief, she’s the FBI agent who caught him; together they now travel the world recovering riches from bad people in an undercover government op), with eye-rollingly bad sex talk. Think To Catch a Thief and dial the cheesiness up by a factor of five. It’s probably really not helped by being read by a guy who reads with a wink-wink-nudge intonation. And, yet, it’s fun and it’s mindless and is exactly what I need right now, with less than a week to go until an election that’s still mind-blowingly close. I’m sure I’ll get back to the important reading any day now, but in the meantime, I’ll be following Kate and Nick’s adventures while I wash the dishes.

Yarning along with Ginny.