kmkat and her kneedles

Ten on Tuesday, the after-vacation edition.

Ten Good Things About Coming Home After A Vacation.

1. Sleeping in my own bed again. It may not be perfect (memory foam is not as great as it was proclaimed to be), but I love my bed. It is an adjustable one that we inherited from Smokey's parents and provides the only way I can comfortably read in bed. Given how much I like to read in bed, that is HUGE. I love my comforter, too, and my Very Own Special Down Pillows (although I now take those pillows with me on vacation).
    
2. Having my kittehs around again. This is HUGE as well. Hannibal The Fluffball of Doom is the best kitteh I have ever had, and I have had cats since before I can remember. He is awesome -- super friendly, completely pliable (how many kittehs will let you move them to where YOU want them to be, in the position YOU want them to be in, and not protest nor run away), a most excellent purr, and only sheds black hair, which is way less noticeable than orange or gray tabby fur. Even En Esch The Stoopid is preferable to no kitteh -- he is dependably snuggly and tends to scoot outside at bedtime far less than his brother and so is available for snuggling while I am reading in bed (see above).
   
   
    
3. Using my own computer again. Admittedly, the new iPad may make this less important, but there is something to be said for the computer with the perfect keyboard (yay, Mac!) and good speakers and all my music and a largish monitor and the perfect chair. And not having to make it to a library somewhere when they are open. (We tend to start the day around 3 pm. Or later.)
    

Really, those first two are the main things. I cannot come up with anything else. I used to sort of welcome getting back to a more productive routine, but ever since that 4-week vacation a couple years ago I am perfectly happy to be on vacation.. forever. 

That rumored side trip to NYC.

My husband loves our summer camping vacation in the mountains. He starts talking about the next one about a week after we get home from the last. He studies the calendar, calculates his work schedule, pesters me about what dates I absolutely positively have to attend to county or accounting business, and hops on the internet the instant one can book a campsite at our favorite national forest campground. Thus, this vacation has been planned since last July and the dates have been set since December.

Imagine my dismay when I got an email in early May that I had qualified for [another] Jeopardy audition -- to be held in New York City on June 28, smack in the middle of our vacation. I had taken the online test back in early March; when I hadn't heard anything from them after a month I figured I had not done well enough to qualify.

[Background] This is the fourth time I have qualified to do the audition. 1999, 2005, 2008, 2011. I blogged about the last one with lots of photos. This one was very similar. [/background]

Consternation quickly gave way to plotting and studying airline schedules. I could fly from Cheyenne, WY through Denver to La Guardia for 30,000 air miles (I had accumulated over 40,000 on my Visa card) and #1 Son said that I could stay with him for the two nights I would be there. A quick, cheap trip; a visit with Andrew; and a good story FTW!

The flight from Cheyenne to Denver was in a 19-passenger puddle-jumper.

 

There was one  bit of the 20-minute flight that was so bumpy that a ball of yarn jumped out of my knitting bag and rolled all the way to the other end of the plane. Happily, I am not a nervous flyer so I just sighed and had the flight attendent/copilot -- small crew! -- retrieve it for me when we landed.

The flight from Denver to New York was on Griz's plane.

 

 

We had to get up at 4:45 a.m. to start the drive from the Big Horns, in north central WY, to Cheyenne, in southeastern WY. I got to La Guardia at about 10 p.m. -- the time change accounts for two of those hours.

 

Next came a bus ride to Grand Central Station in Manhattan and a subway ride to the Upper East Side and a three-block walk to #1's dorm, but my back protested strongly after about half a block of that short walk. I called and asked him to come carry my [very small] suitcase and tote bag for me. I was waiting for him, sitting in the median in the middle of Park Avenue at 96th Street. For him, no problem at age 26; for me, no way at age 60+.

The audition was at a Sheraton hotel in mid-town the next afternoon. The group was small, only 23 of us.

The auditioners arrived. We waited.

 

Killing time while waiting is always such a problem for me.

 

The audition crew never tells the auditioners how we did on the 50-question test or if our interview and mock-game-playing skills were impressive enough to land us a spot on the show. There were 100,000 people who took the online test back in March; 2,000 were invited to audition; there will be roughly 400 spots available on the show over the 18-month period in which we are all eligible.

Time to wait for that phone call/email/letter. Keep your fingers crossed for me, m'kay?

* * * * *

That evening #1 and I went out for dinner at DBGB, a restaurant that was recommended to him by a friend in training to be a chef. If you go to the linked site, watch the slide show. We were seated just past the pillar in the center of the restaurant, and my view was of the wall with lots of cubbies and an assortment of copper cooking implements.

 

 
#1 studies the menu.

We had steak tartare with quail's egg (raw), grilled chibatta, cornichons, and some bitter greens to start. Andrew had never had steak tartare so wanted to try it; I am a big fan of extremely rare beef so it was a go. My entree was the chop salad with lobster, his was a burger with barbecue pulled pork and jalapeño mayonnaise. We drank beers we had never heard of before and I had an excellent glass of pinot gris. 

No photos of the food; I felt enough like a country mouse without pulling out my camera to photograph a raw quail's egg atop a neatly shaped patty of raw beefsteak.

The only fly in the ointment was that I had lost my wallet the first night we had left Wisconsin; I was able to locate it by phone at an Applebee's in Forest Lake, MN and they mailed it to me in Buffalo, WY -- complete with all the cash and credit cards!* -- but I had already cancelled my Visa card before I thought to call the Applebee's. So there I was in NYC, without a credit card and relying only on the cash that Smokey had given me.

The tab in at DBGB took almost all the cash I had, but I eventually made it back to Cheyenne with five dollars in my [new] wallet.

And that is how I made a side trip to NYC whilst camping in the mountains.

* I was so impressed with the honesty of the young man whom I dealt with that I sent him part of that cash as a reward. Sometimes I get lucky, even when I don't really deserve it.

Wyoming bullets.

Yes, we are in Wyoming on vacation. Bullet post seems appropriate.

• We got a late start. Mechanic didn't deliver mini-mini-motorhome (Rebuild transmission! Make a/c work!) until the day we were supposed to leave.
  .
• A number of things remained for Smokey to do to the m-m-mh. He worked on them. Days passed.
  
• Eventually we left. Can I get a huzzah!
  .
• Thank you.
  .
• Bed in back of m-m-mh is extremely comfortable, made more so by addition of 4" memory foam mattress on top of existing cushions.
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• Comfortable sleeping is essential to a good vacation.
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• The green chili at Tom's Diner in Buffalo is so good I could eat it every day.
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• Tragically, it was only on the specials board for one day.
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• The french fries at the Bozeman Trail Steak House are still the best in world.
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• Parts of Wyoming are very empty.
   
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• Unlike parts of New York City.
  
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• Although Grand Central Station is not exactly teeming with people at 10:30 on a Monday night.
   
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• Yes, I took a short side trip to NYC. More on that later.
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• It can be very hot in Wyoming in July.
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• It can also be comfortably chilly.
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• The correct wardrobe is essential: shorts, jeans, lightweight sweats, heavy sweats, a fleece jacket, short-sleeved t-shirts, long-sleeved t-shirts, a denim shirt, lightweight wool socks, heavy wool socks. That about covers it.
  .
• Except for the dressy black pants, white tank top, short-sleeve sweater, and silk scarf I wore in NYC. More on that later.
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• No moose sightings so far. Several deer, many cattle and horses, no antelope. Where are the moose? We came to see the moose, and we shall find them. They can run but they cannot hide.
  .
• Actually, they CAN hide, and remarkably well at that.
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• The stream next to the campsite has been running high, apparently due to melting of the 300%-of-normal snowpack in the mountains last winter.
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• Businesses next to Clear Creek, which flows through the center of downtown Buffalo, had sandbags lying around.
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• No flooding right now.
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• This is a good thing. Occasionally I remember the flash flood in the Black Hills in 1972 that killed 238 people, including 11 campers in creekside sites.
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• Our campground is in a canyon.
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• I remember, and then I force myself to forget.
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• Moving on...
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• Much knitting and napping and reading and audiobook consumption have been accomplished.
• Life is good, much better here than at home. More on that later, too.
  .
• That's the report from Wyoming. Knitting report to follow.

Vacation, part 6: fails.

Note: I wrote this last summer after we got back from vacation in an effort to gove complete and unbiased reportage. I wouldn't want you to think our life is all unicorns and pixie dust ;-)  Somehow I never managed to publish the post, but I want to get it out there before we leave again so here you go. I gave you a paraphrased version of part of it last week -- feel free to skip over that bit if you want.

In every adventure, there are bits that... fail.

Here is their story.

At 6,000 feet, the weather in June in northern Wyoming can be problematic for camping.

 

Later that same afternoon...

 

That is not snow on the picnic table. That is hail.

 

When it rained, we discovered that the seals around the roof windows had shrunk a bit in 22 years. The leaks could be fixed easily with a tube of silicone rubber... which we didn't happen to have with us.

This worked just fine, however.

 

The scenery in Glacier NP is spectacular.

 

 

The *guard rails* along the edge of the road? Rather less so.

 

That rock wall is perhaps 16" high, just tall enough to ensure that your vehicle flips as it goes over the side of the precipice.

This is actually not a particularly unnerving view out my window. Although I was always edgy when our lane was on the outside of the road rather than next to the cliff wall, it was less frightening if I could see something -- anything! -- between the so-called guard rail and the bottom of the canyon. In this case, the trees and brush on the side of the mountain were just visible over the guard rail Vehicle Tripping Device. When there was nothing but air showing? I found I could not even look out the windows. At all. I had to turn 90˚ in my seat, away from the edge, and knit.

 

EZ's famous quote ("Knit on, with confidence & hope, through all crises") had never meant as much to me as it did on that road.

Happily, Smokey kept our vehicle on the road where it belonged. On another day when we were exploring a deserted back road that had a similar drop-off next to it, he drove in the middle just so I wouldn't be so nervous. Yes, he is a sweetie.

This is what happens when one's US#5 Addi Turbo gets caught under the van seat and one is too impatient to free it carefully, instead yanking it loose with careless abandon.

 

The good news is that the needle still works just fine. I don't know if it affected my gauge, but I'm pretending that it didn't. Note: I am still using that needle, no problem, mon.

In other broken news, we brought along a back scratcher because we both find it inutterably satisfying to scratch that out-of-reach spot in the middle of the back.

 

Some white glue and this one was good to go again.

And then there was the day that a chipmunk in the woods was taunting Lucy, who was inside the screen house with me. The dog, of course, attempted to launch herself through the screen.

I managed to fix that one.

 

One day Smokey was working on the van and had to open a blister pack of something when the scissors slipped. I will spare you any pictures of the gouge he took out of his little finger. You will have to be satisfied with this.

 

That night he woke up to discover that the bandaid had slipped off and he was bleeding. In order not to bleed all over the bedding he improvised with a paper towel and some packing tape.

The finger has since healed fine, probably due to the fact that he had to wash dishes a few times during the trip. Nothing cleans out a wound better than soaking it in dishwater for ten minutes or so.

Souvenir yarn.

 The interior of Knitty City, LYS of Kay Gardiner.

   
Not only do they have lots of yummy yarn, they give great bag.

In my bag were the following delights:

 Two skeins of Koigu KPPPM in the imaginatively named 720, destined to become a Baktus for me. When I did a pattern search for Baktus, though, I found that there are a number of scarves that would be fun to make with this. Stay tuned.

 
One skein, 700 yards of Schaeffer Audrey laceweight, 50/50 merino/silk, in the rather more imaginatively named Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. This stuff is to die for and will become some sort of scarfy-shawly thing for me.

 
Two skeins of Alchemy Silk Purse in copper. Also to die for and also destined for some sort of scarfy thing for me.

 

 

So, yeah, we went to New York.

It was raining when we left Minneapolis.

But not in New York. On Friday we met up with Andrew when he got off work.

Andrew is eating pizza we brought him, left over from our own snack.
He actually looks vaguely like a doctor.

Mt. Sinai stands right across Fifth Avenue from Central Park. The green area behind the wall, Andrew told us, used to be called The Sandpit because that is essentially what it was. Earlier this year, or maybe last year, the city landscaped the area and re-sodded it and now it is a lovely place. 

Friday night, Ramblin' Jack Elliot at the Rubin Museum, a museum of Himalayan art. Yeah, now there's a connection. No photos, not allowed. Concert was a little shy of 1.5 hours; he sang six songs and talked a lot. Jack is 79 years old and has 79 years worth of stories to tell. That's why he is called Ramblin' Jack. A little online research before the concert informed us that, although he is a folk/western/country singer, he is a surgeon's son from Brooklyn who ran away from home at 15 to join the rodeo.

On Saturday we saw where Andrew lives.

No photos of the interior or his apartment. Imagine a 15'x18' kitchen/living room/dining room with two tiny bedrooms and a bath on either side. Now imagine that there are always four 20-something males living there and that none of them has a minute to spare on domesticity because they are either studying or working about 26 hours a day. Not squalor but not neatnik heaven, either.

We trucked on down to Chinatown to do a little touristy sight-seeing with one stop along the way. Andrew wanted to show us something but wouldn't tell us what it was.

I may have mentioned my favorite movie here once or twice. This shop is in the Village about a block south of Washington Square.

I got myself a t-shirt, which I cannot show you because it is in the wash. But you can see it here.

While in Chinatown we got a little hungry and found a likely spot to refresh ourselves.

Happily, they also had English menus.

LIke his parents, Andrew is an adventurous eater and likes to order something he has never had before. On this occasion he ordered an appetizer of jellyfish and pigs' knuckles. The waiter, a tiny Chinese man, looked at him sternly and waggled his hands in a "No, no!" gesture. Jellyfish no good, he said. Andrew had fried won tons instead.

Saturday night we ate dinner in an Italian restaurant with six of Andrew's friends from medical school. I suffered a tragic case of camnesia so that event must remain unrecorded.

Sunday was the gospel brunch at Sylvia's Soul Food Restaurant, which you have already seen. We all took long naps after that adventure.

Monday was spent finding breakfast, packing, getting to the airport, and flying home via Washington, DC.

We toured the Capitol and the Washington Monument. From the plane.

 

So, yeah, that was the trip. Lots of fun, good to see the kid young man, good food, yada yada.

Oh, you want to see the yarn?

Okay.

Tomorrow.

Sunday brunch.

 

Sylvia's Soul Food Restaurant, 126th and Lenox Avenue, Harlem.

For the record, I had the catfish, eggs, and grits breakfast, including a mimosa; Smokey and Andrew had barbecued ribs with sides of macaroni and cheese (both of them), garlic mashed potatoes (Andrew) and pickled beets (Smokey). Food and service were very good, no complaints.

A better photo of the painting in the background:

Andrew said Obama had a $1,000 a plate fund-raiser there earler this year. There was also a large photo on the wall above our table of Bill Clinton with Sylvia herself. Lest you think the place was not busy -- it was VERY busy -- that empty table was part of a set-up for a party of 40-50 people that was seated shortly after us.

Good times!

Sunday in New York.

Gospel brunch @ Sylvia's Soul Food.

There is no point in traveling if one doesn't take advantage of that which one cannot find at home. And you better believe that soul food restaurants are extremely rare in Polk County, Wisconsin.

NYC, Day 2: tourist attraction.

No Kay Gardiner sighting ::sigh::

Purchased: 2 skeins Alchemy silk, 2 skeins Koigu, 1 large skein Schaefer Audrey laceweight (700 yds, 50/50 merino/silk). One Addi Turbo US#0 circ. Pictures of that when I get home.

 

 

I know you all need to know this.

From the TSA website.

Guess where we are going for a long weekend?

 

Going to visit #1 Son. Lucy The Wonder Dog will stay with #2 Son and Best Girlfriend. Flying into JFK Thursday afternoon on Mesaba Airlines (yes, you read that right), coming home Monday. Staying at a brand-new fancy-schmancy hotel a block from the Apollo Theatre (Smokey got a deal). Gonna see Ramblin' Jack Elliot at the Rubin Museum of Art on Friday night, gonna go to the Union Square Greenmarket on Saturday afternoon to look for the yarn that Clara Parkes talked about and showed us at Yarnover, gonna go out to dinner Saturday night with #1 Son and some of his friends from med school, and gonna kick back on Sunday. Might fit in a trip to MoMA or the Guggenheim somewhere in there. I've got a NYC transit app on my iPod and I'm ready to go. Except I haven't packed my suitcase yet.

Catch ya on the flip side!

Ten on Tuesday, the vacation edition.

Ten Dream Vacations.

1. Tahiti or pretty much any other South Sea island.
2. Camping in the Florida Keys in February.
3. Cruise from Seattle to Alaska.
4. Europe, with a concentration on the Louvre and the Uffizi and Rome and Florence and perhaps the Prado; I have a degree in art history but have never been to any of them. (This vacation would have to involve a personal attendent to wait on me and push my wheel chair :) b/c it would be too exhausting otherwise.)
5. Washington DC (can you believe it? I have never been there).
6. Provence or Tuscany for the food and wine.

Sorry, I couldn't come up with a full ten. I could name other places that could be fun if I had to, but, really, any trip that involves a lot of downtime in a nice climate is my dream vacation.

Tuque!

We have had our share of car troubles this year. I won't bore you with all of them right now, just the one that led to some knitting.

When Smokey and I were driving home from our Temperance River camping trip in August, we had a slight problem when he was turning the mini-mini-motorhome around in a driveway on a side road off Highway 61 a bit north of Duluth. It was dusk and too dim for me to get a photo, so I'll have to paint you a word picture.

Imagine the mini-etc. backed into a driveway just a leetle bit too far, so that the left back wheel is off the edge of the driveway. This driveway spans a ditch and the edges of it drop off quickly. With that wheel over the edge there was no way we could drive out of the predicament.

We walked down the driveway through the woods to find the house and see if we could use their phone to call a tow truck (cell phone = dead battery; car charger = broken).  We found the homeowner working on an outboard motor in his pole shed/workshop/garage. When Smokey asked about using the phone and described our plight, the guy, name of Harley, said he could pull us out, no problem.

"Which would be better to pull you out, do you think?" he asked. "My tractor or my dump truck?"

Moral: if you are going to get your car into a non-drivable state, do so in the driveway of a man with a tractor AND a dump truck.

Harley pulled us back up onto the road with his dump truck and refused any sort of payment.

We continued on our way.

But I had noted his head and foot sizes, thinking idly that I could knit him a pair of socks or a hat in gratitude. Socks seemed to have too many variables -- size, fit, fiber, color, preferred thickness -- so I went for the hat. Because he lives on the North Shore, land of the voyageur, I thought a tuque would be the thing.

Dale-Harriet came to my aid with an authentic tuque pattern, plus some history. I used the DK superwash wool left over from my multicolor striped raglan.

 

Yarn: Phildar Pure Laine 3-1/2 (apparently discontinued), DK weight, colorway 'Corsair', 3+ skeins (350 - 400 yds.).
Needles: Addi Turbo US#6 (I think; might have been 5s).
Pattern: (I'm not telling; Dale-Harriet said she is veeerrrrryyyy particular about who she shares her patterns with.)

Here's what I told Harley about the hat in the note we enclosed with it.

p.s. The hat pattern is from a friend in Madison who is a re-enactor in French fur trading-era stuff. Here is what she told me about it:

Regarding the Toque Pattern (as I sees it)

A sailing vessel, the Machaud, went down in the mid-18^th century in icy Canadian waters. Among the artifacts found on her (and we have a book with photos of the lot) they found a toque precisely the same construction as mine. We re-enactors call that “provenance” and it makes my toques valuable to the voyageurs!  Now, in those days most knitting was done on steel “knitting pins” – but a dear friend examined the original and said that he thought it looked like it was done on what we’d call maybe #7 DPNs!  (His wife knits; he knows whereof he’s looking). The voyageurs (being French or Canuck and therefore vain) generally go for “rouge” – I use something between a brick or burgundy or darker red, or something with an orange off-cast. The other favorite is “French bleu”, a sort of grey-blue. [like yours!]

But you’re not bound by Authenticity Hounds and so can use whatever strikes your fancy.

Milwaukee.

Last week I attended a conference in Milwaukee for a couple days. Mostly my camera lived in my purse, but on the last morning I found some worthy subjects.

Lest we forget the frontier heritage and wisdom of the Midwest:

When I turned 180˚ I was confronted by a quasi-tropical scene:

The hotel was connected to the convention center by a skyway, which contained an escalator.

See that little black sign? Here's a close-up to reassure us all that we were, in fact, in Milwaukee.

Yes, the button did start the polka music. And not just a single polka over and over, either, but a random polka from an assortment!

Dogs on vacation.

Dogs don't talk much, so this post is mostly pictures. And smells.

"That is one funny-lookin' dog, guys."

There were dogs everywhere in Buffalo, Wyoming, mostly in the backs of pickup trucks. We spotted these two in the parking lot of the diner where we had breakfast one day.

They spotted us, too.

And then they spotted our dogs in our van.

"Hey, you two dogs in the van there? This is our parking lot!
You can stay, though... for a price."

* * * * *

We met a couple of sweetheart dogs at the private campground where we stayed near Glacier. They belonged to the campground owner, who was a sweetheart of the human kind.

The dogs; meet Pork Chop (white) and Mattie (brown).

I think one was a bull mastiff (perhaps; this is all very hazy in my memory b/c it was (omg!) three months ago). The other was a breed I don't remember. Both of them were big softies, the following photos notwithstanding.

If you ever want to camp near Glacier NP, I cannot recommend this campground highly enough. Unlike nearly every other private campground on the planet, it has sufficient wooded space between and among the sites to afford a bit of privacy and nature. The owner seems to have created that impossibly tiny sweet spot between chaos and a place so highly regulated one feels as though it is 1984. There was an almost complete absence of signs telling the guests what they Could.Not.Do, yet when we complained about the people across the road from us who left their dog inside their RV ALL DAY WHILE THEY WERE GONE and it yapped for 12 HOURS STRAIGHT, the situation was remedied forthwith. If you follow the link to the website you can see the photo that convinced Smokey this was the place where he would be totally comfortable. (Yes, I mean the  photo of the dogs on the couch.)

* * * * *

Now, some more portraits of our dogs on vacation.

"You aren't going to eat all that yourself, are you?"

"I am sure there is a critter out there somewhere..."

All quiet on the Lucy front.

It's a dog's life.

"Look, my job is to worry about you. Don't bother me right now, I'm busy."

(at the rodeo) "Why do those big dogs have men on their back? What are they chasing?
Are those dogs gonna be okay? Can I help? Pleeeeaaassse?"

"You go ahead and nap, Dad. I'll keep watch..."

"...for a little while."

Here we are again.

Andrew requested that we go camping somewhere while  he is home for his four-week break, so here we are again on the North Shore. Yeah, it's a tough life.

Before we left I decided to be A Good Mom and bake some cookies to bring along. For the record, I hardly ever bake cookies; brownies, lemon bars, the occasional birthday cake, yes, but cookies are too putzy. This time I decided to go all out -- oatmeal chocolate chip (oatmeal = healthy, right?), and while I was at it, a double batch.

A double batch made a lot of dough.

Really a lot of dough.

In an unusual turn of events, this vacation did NOT start the day after Smokey had finished up a string of night shifts. This meant we could get up on Monday morning, pack the mini-mini-motorhome, and actually leave during daylight. What a concept!

On the road, Smokey driving, me riding shotgun and knitting, and Andrew riding in the back of the van and doing what he does best.

The weather forecast for this week on the North Shore was, in a word, chilly -- highest high was predicted to be 57°. Happily, that was way conservative. Tuesday was warm enough to sit reading and knitting in the sun in jeans and sweater. One of us was even foolhardy enough to venture into Lake Superior, although he did admit he came out pretty darned quickly. Wednesday had a 30% chance of showers but was also the day I needed to teleconference to the county finance committee meeting. So we spent the afternoon in Grand Marais.

The chipmunks are still populating the campground. The are still bold aand still highly annoyed at all the people in their campground.

I attempted to get a photo of the chipmunk that kept trying to climb my pants leg to get  at whatever I happened to be eating at a given moment.

But it didn't work.

Home again, home again, jig jig.

We took a mini-vacation last week, five days at Temperance River State Park on the North Shore of Lake Superior.

It is always a good thing to bring all one's knitting tools along on vacation...

...because one never knows when a delightful yarn shop -- or two! -- may appear on the horizon*.

 

Before we left I had read Erika's post about her Red Scarf. I had already decided that I was not going to participate in the Red Scarf Project this year (forgive me, Norma!) because I had declared 2010 to be The Year Of Knitting For Me.

But that post kept lurking in the back of my mind.

First, I ventured into That Little Red House, a lovely yarn shop in Grand Marais that does not have a website and of which I tragically did not take a photo. The owner was friendly and chatty and I found the perfect yarn for a red scarf.

 

The yarn is a 2-ply blend of wool, superkid mohair, and angora -- lovely cottony soft. How handy that I had brought along my nostepinne and all my needles! I immediately cast on for the scarf, using La Harlot's One-Row Scarf pattern (I knit two scarves and several afghan squares from that pattern last year, so it is pretty well embedded in my brain).

Tra la la, a day or two later we found another yarn shop! This is the one whose sign is pictured above and is in Tofte, right across Hwy. 61 (yes, that Hwy. 61) from Blue Fin Bay resort. Guess what, that shop had some very nice red yarn**, too!

 

Now I have two red scarves OTN and my conscience is a happy camper.

I finished the pair of socks that was in progress when we left and wore them. That means they are currently in the laundry pile so I'm not gonna model them for you right now. As soon as that pair was done I cast on for another pair from a skein of Trekking I bought last year.

 

See that hole in the ground beyond my foot? That is a chipmunk burrow, and the chipmunks kept me constant company while I knit by the lake. Mostly they scurried about and scolded me for being in their territory. Eventually I had the clever idea of keeping a bag of trail mix handy and tossing them the occasional raisin. That kept them quiet.

* It may have helped that I did some serious googling for yarn shops in the area before we left. I even took screen shots of the Google maps showing the location of each one and loaded them onto my iPod. Always prepared, that's my motto!

** In case you cannot read the labels, this red yarn is Lamb's Pride Nature Spun worsted, and a more delightful and affordable 100% wool worsted I have never encountered. How come none of you told me about it? Keeping it all for yourself, eh? Well, now I know about it and it will be every knitter for herself. This yarn is soft and fluffy and knits wonderfully and was $6.95 (or $7.95, don't remember) for >200 yards. The skein on the right is a true bright red, the one on the left dark red. We all know how difficult it is to photograph anything red.

Drive-by posting.

We have left Wyoming and the Big Horns behind and are now camped just outside Glacier National Park in Montana. When Smokey fixes the computer that shot sparks (of course he has  all the parts he needs with him) I'll be able to catch you all up with photos. TTFN!

Two words.

ROAD TRIP!

Yes, indeedy, the day of our departure on the annual quasi-pseudo-camping vacation approaches. A couple weeks ago Our Man Lennie replaced the transmission in the $750 mini-motorhome, and last week one of Lennie's Minions painted it. (When you only pay $750 for a vehicle, you can justify putting another thou into it.)

On Sunday I started cleaning the inside, but ran out of energy right about even with the back edge of those side doors. There was stuff filling the empty space in the rest, and I didn't have the energy to move it. Yeah, sometimes I'm kinda... low energy.

Another view:

Big honker, isn't it? Especially sitting next to my minivan. If we get 12 mpg we will be thrilled.

Mea culpa for the massive carbon footprint we will leave.

Here is the cab, complete with Smokey's briefcase and trash. Note the curtains, which can be pulled all the way around the front to cover the windshield for privacy when we are parked. He put in a new oak drink holder rack in the center and showed me the new oak dashboard cover for the instrument cluster.

He is like a kid with a new toy, which, really, is exactly what he is right now. After 35 years of vacations in VW microbuses and conversion vans and a camping trailer, this will be perfect.

* * * * *

The itchy rash, while still present and ugly and itchy, seems to be slightly better. I will still see the dermatologist on Tuesday, but I am hopeful that our vacation will not be cursed with The Itch.

Sock projects,

I dug through my sock yarn stash to decide on sock projects to bring along on vacation.

(Photo taken after I had already plucked The Chosen Yarns.)

The first choice is some Mountain Colors Bearfoot, colorway Juniper, that I won in Lisa's snow melt contest last year. This yarn cried out to be knit concurrently with the Noro striped sweater for which you saw the yarn yesterday. Don't you agree that a pair of socks from this lovely stuff would be the perfect accessory for that sweater? Yes, I thought you would.

I wound it into a ball on Saturday, but decided I should swatch and throw the it into the laundry just to be sure it would stand up to my rather careless care of socks. (I don't refuse to hand wash socks.) If it proves to require more tender care than I can provide I'll save it for a lacy scarf, and instead bring along this, purchased here, which would also be great with that sweater and which I swatched and washed last year:

Both of those yarns are dark and thus suitable for daylight knitting. When the light is dim, say, in the car after dark when I am using my headlamp, these aging eyes prefer that I work with light-colored yarn.

Behold:

 

That is Opal Starken Zarkus, colorway 2006, bought somewhere in the past year. This yarn marks my efforts to purchase sock yarns that will produce socks whose colors blend in my wardrobe rather than scream COLOR! FUN! I love Opal yarn for socks; it feels like no nonsense, like it will last forever.

Just in case the Opal socks knit up so quickly that I need a second light-colored sock project, here we have Trekking XXL, colorway "Clown Barf" 156, purchased here and which color marks my inconsistent approach to the color theory mentioned above. Trekking has much the same feel to me as Opal. "This is sock yarn."