1. It is finally actually autumnal here. The first freeze happened last week, and we’ve had proper sweater weather for the past week and a half. I am loving it. The days are cloudy, the leaves are as colorful as they get on the plains, and it’s raining. I’ve been roasting root vegetables for dinner most nights, and I got to properly wear my red knitted sweater for the first time. It was cozy, and I was happy. I love October so much, but it always runs by so quickly. I will do my best to make the most of what is left of it. 2. Last spring I discovered there was a wool mill in a little town about an hour from where I live. There aren’t many wool mills left in the US, so I was happy to see that one of them was so close. I wasn’t up for traveling very much last spring, so I told myself I would go in the fall. It’s fall now, so on a day off I got in the car, cued up The Fellowship of the Ring audiobook (narrated by Andy Serkis), and headed westward. It’s a lovely drive if you don’t take the interstate. I’ll joke about how flat the plains are, but the highways take you through some hilly country and through some lovely little towns. I might have stopped at a couple of prairie cemeteries except it was raining off and on again. After only getting turned around once, I made it to the little town and pulled up in front of the wool mill. Only to discover that it was closed. I’d done my due diligence and checked the hours on their website. It should have been open. But small town businesses don’t always keep to their hours. They probably figured they would have no customers on a rainy Wednesday morning and stayed home. Which is fair. If I could make my own hours in a little town I, too, would stay home on a very rainy morning. So I didn’t visit the wool mill and its adjoining yarn shop. I did visit a very nice little coffee shop/home goods store where I enjoyed a mocha and blueberry muffin and ended up buying a vintage blue glass jar for the dried flowers in my kitchen window, so all was not lost. I would have gone on a photo walk, but it started raining again. As I didn’t feel like visiting the insurance office or the hardware store, I decided to head home. Thus ended my wool mill adventure.
3. I have begun making a sock. It is going. I can’t tell yet if it is going well, or if I will have a mess at the end, but at least I’ve started it. I watched a couple of the YouTube videos I had saved to learn the process, but they ended up not being helpful. Note: if you are planning to make a how-to video for people just beginning to learn what you’re teaching, be sure you go very slowly through the steps and also explain why you are doing the thing. The first video I watched flew through the steps and didn’t say why they were doing the things, so I was even more confused than when I began. Fortunately, I found another YouTube knitter who explained the steps and walked through them slowly enough for me to actually see what she was doing. So I have begun making socks. I fear the first sock will not be wearable. I am trying to tell myself that it’s part of the learning process.
Some recent reads: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - I’m part of an active book-related Discord server where a bunch of us decided to read Frankenstein together before the premier of Guillermo del Toro’s film adaptation of it. I’d read it a few times before, either for a college class or just because, but there are always parts of it I forget. I tend to forget just how thoughtless Victor Frankenstein actually is– he spends all his time studying these sciences but then never gives a thought as to why he seeks this knowledge, and ultimately power, over nature. We largely concluded that he needed to read more novels and poetry to have a better grasp of human nature and maybe think about the consequences of his actions instead of plunging into experiments and creating a whole person that he promptly abandons because that person is not immediately beautiful or spouting poetry at him. As it doesn’t seem like the movie will be showing anywhere near me, a few friends and I are planning to get together to watch it when it premiers on Netflix. The Second Death of Locke by V.L. Bovalino- There’s been a surge of lady knight books this year, and The Second Death of Locke was getting a bit of hype in certain corners of the bookish internet. There were mixed reviews in my reading circles, so I checked out a copy from the library to give it a shot. Grey Flynn has given her life to the service of her beloved mage, Kier. As a Well, Grey has access to magical power, but Kier has the actual power to use it. Together, they have been fighting in a war to defend Kier’s homeland from invaders. When they are given a dangerous mission to protect the child of the enemy, Grey and Kier’s abilities are put to the test– as are their greatest secrets, for Grey is not an average soldier. She is the last heir to a lost kingdom, and if she dies all of magic could die with her. This story had so much potential, but it wasted all of it. Instead of political intrigue, adventure, or any of the things you expect to see in an epic fantasy, we’re treated to Grey mooning over Kier every three seconds, and thinking about how pretty his eyes are or how nice his hair is or how tall he is or how well his clothes fit his body and on and on. When there is a bit of danger, Grey and Kier do something spectacular but Grey– the point of view character– falls unconscious so you never really know how the fight ends. You also don’t know how the big, climactic scene at the end works out because, once again, Grey falls unconscious and wakes up to discover that her problems are mostly ever. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and they all get to live their best cottage core life. This was a tedious mess of a book where nothing really happened, so if you’re interested in a lady knight story where the lady knight actually goes out as a knight errant, try Spear by Nicola Griffith instead. The Silmarillion by J.R.R Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien - The tales of the First Age of Middle-earth are brought to life in J.R.R. Tolkien’s posthumously published Silmarillion, a work he spent much of his life on but had never quite put together to his satisfaction. His son Christopher (with help from Guy Gavriel Kay) finally put the stories together in a form that provided a narrative of the great events of the First Age and summarized the general events of the Second and Third Ages of Middle-earth. I’ve read this several times before, but the stories are so dense and so full of names that it’s difficult to parse everything in one go, so I return to it now and then to soak in the brilliance of Tolkien’s stories and try to sort out the deeds of all the F-Elves. Seriously. There are so many Elves whose names start with the letter F. It’s taken me years to sort them out. I think I have it all down now, but I don’t think I would do well at an F-Elves pub quiz. But there’s a solid answer that applies to pretty much any F-Elves situation: “Fëanor, no!” Traveling in Books is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Traveling in Books that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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Sunday, October 26, 2025
Three Things #8
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