kmkat and her kneedles

Last weekend I was in Ashland.

(I have enough material (and photographs) for at least a dozen posts on various topics. Why have I not written them? Must remedy. Here goes...)

Last weekend I attended the annual meeting for the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin. Some others and I are in the process of starting a local chapter, and two others and I thought we could learn a lot by hanging with some established chapters for a couple days.

If you are not familiar with the economic history of northern MN and WI, here is a brief (and probably only vaguely accurate) summary. The heyday of Minnesota's and Upper Michigan's Iron Ranges was during WWII, when the government was building ships and armaments as fast as the miners could dig the ore and the steel mills could refine it and Rosie The Riveter could build them. The boom continued into the 1950s as the booming post-war economy allowed Americans to buy a new car every year or three. The ore had to be shipped from northern Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to the steel mills of Gary. Add to this the plentiful wheat harvest of the northern plains also being shipped by train to Lake Superior where it was loaded onto boats bound for Europe and Russia, and, thus, Duluth and Superior were booming ports.

But (as much as the Koch brothers certain WI politicians would like us to forget) any mineral is an exhaustible resource. The rich mineral deposits were soon depleted, the industry turned to taconite -- which requires far more ore to be refined in order to get the same amount of iron and is therefore more expensive to produce -- and the mines slowed w-a-y down. The ports slowed down, too.

Duluth, MN has rebranded itself as a tourist destination and appears, to me at least, to be much more prosperous than when my family drove through it on our way to vacation on the North Shore of Lake Superior in the 1950s. Superior, across the river in WI, not so much. There are vast empty areas that used to be home to business that served the shipping industry. The city has a slightly abandoned air to it even though there are refurbished buildings here and there.

Ashland, WI, on the south shore of The Lake, has suffered some of the same economic woes, but has managed to do better. Although there are more vacant areas than one sees in a more prosperous city, it has the air of one whose residents are still proud. There are murals everywhere in the  downtown area.

 

I arrived in Ashland about an hour before LWV things were going to start so I hung out at the library for awhile. Fun stuff there, too.

 

Then it was time for the introductory dinner meeting. Imagine ~80 smart, articulate, and energetic woman in a room. Fabulous, and not something that happens very often where I live.

Anyway, I DID learn a lot to bring back to my fellow LWVers. And I found that Ashland is beautiful place worth visiting again.

I'm baack!

We just returned from a two-week road trip to attend Elder Son's graduations from 1, UMich graduate school of public health in Ann Arbor, and B, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai in NYC*. Such a trip it was! Lots of driving, lots of eating, lots of celebrating, and -- last but definitely not least -- lots of knitting.

It will take several posts to cover all the highlights. For now, how about some bullet points?

• It always -- ALWAYS! -- takes us a lot longer to get ready than we think. This time it was largely because the last three days before we left were cold, windy, and raining, definitely not the kind of weather in which one wants to be carrying stuff out to the motorhome and carefully packing it in.
• Happily, the day we were to leave was cold and a bit windy, but the rain held off until after we left.
• Tragically, that meant we arrived in Ann Arbor at precisely the time we were supposed to show up at a pre-graduation reception for the Graduate School of Public Health graduates.
• Since we had driven all night and were still in our jeans and flannel shirts, we required a short freshening-up stop at the motel first. 
• We still made it to the reception in time to eat and chat at length with one of ES's favorite professors.
• Said professor confirmed the rumor heard by ES that he (professor) had met John Lennon back in the day. 
• Not only met him, but chatted with him.
• Due to a user (me) map-reading error, we almost didn't get to the actual graduation ceremony. Who knew there were multiple buildings named Hill Xxxx on the UMich campus and that only one of the them was the actual Hill Auditorium?
• Poor Smokey couldn't walk the entire way (l-o-n-g way, according to my faulty map reading) and ended up cajoling a construction worker leaving a job site to drive us to the correct location. 
• Said construction worker had received a parking ticket a few days previously; we paid him enough to cover the ticket.
• The auditiorium was drop-dead gorgeous.
• Music was provided by the head of the UMich music department playing a pipe organ.
• Needless to say, the music was fabulous and chill-inspiring.
• ES wore a t-shirt and raggedy jeans under his graduation robe.
• At least it was a school of public health t-shirt and said Epidemiology on it.
• No actual diploma was received. "They will mail it later."
• We took ES and a friend to Slow's Bar-B-Q, chosen by ES, in inner-city Detroit.
• Entrees were just okay, but the sides were exquisite -- corn bread, sweet potato mash (and I am not usually a fan of sweet potatoes), mac 'n' cheese (I had never heard of mac 'n' cheese as a side; travel broadens one's horizons), baked beans, mashed potatoes and gravy, others I cannot remember. Every one was the tastiest thing I had ever had (until the next one).
• The place also had 50+ microbrews on tap. 
• Smokey goggled at trying to imagine the plumbing labyrinth in their basement that would accomodate 50+ tap beers.
• ES did his best to taste all 50+ -- "Not only is Dad paying, but he is also driving!" -- but I think he only made it to 5.
• The next day I took ES's Aveo to drive back west to see Kym in Kalamazoo. 
• Much knitting and laughter ensued.
• Whilst I was enjoying myself with Kym, Smokey and ES loaded the mini-mini-motorhome with ES's furniture and belongings.
• We left the crammed-to-the-roof m-m-m'home with Smokey's cousin in Lansing and boarded the dogs -- OF COURSE, WE HAD THE DOGS ALONG! -- at a vet/boarding facility practically next door to them.
• Smokey, ES, and I, none of us petite nor diminutive, drove from Lansing to Queens in ES's teeny-tiny Aveo.
• I discovered that my iPhone could be a mobile hot spot.
• I spent much of the time through Indiana and Ohio and Pennsylvania on Twitter and catching up on email on my iPad.
• Such activities make a long car trip a lot less boring.
• Lucky Smokey got to drive the part across Manhattan and the Bronx and Queens to our motel near JFK. I drove I-95 through the Bronx and Connecticut when we took ES to visit colleges in 2002, plus in 2005 I drove a Dodge conversion van into Lower Manhattan, where the streets are 8", wide to pick up ES after his sophomore year, so I felt okay about Smokey driving this time.
• Siri was a tremendous help in all this driving. We have never had a really good GPS, so this was a gigantic step up from a paper map.
• Smokey had mistakenly packed his diabetic syringes in the mini-mini-motorhome back in Lansing, so we had to the opportunity to see a couple VA facitilites in Queens to get him more.
• Once again, Siri was a great help.
• Yay, Siri!
• The med school gradution ceremony was in Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center.
• Yes, I was impressed when I learned that. 
• Two of ES's fellow UMich grads, Mike and Alí, also drove out to NYC to attend his gradution.
• Because of Smokey's limited walking range, the four of us got ourselves into the handicapped line at Lincoln Center, which allowed us to enter and be seated ahead of the rest of the crowd.
• Aisle seats, row 7 -- the first row behind the reserved seats.
• ::smirk::
• The med school caps and gowns were a lot nicer than the UMich public health ones.
• Go figger.
• ES still wore a t-shirt and raggedy jeans under it, though. 
• This was an Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai t-shirt, though.
• Yes, he matched his t-shirt to each ceremony.
• He is a fashion guru.
• Music was not as good at this ceremony, though. No pipe organ; only a brass quintet. Although for all I know, they may have been members of the New York Philharmonic.
• I videoed the administration of the Hippocratic Oath.
• Yes, I am a dork. Also a proud mom.
• After the ceremony the five of us went to Katz's Delicatessen on the Lower East Side.
• Katz's Deli was the site where That Scene from When Harry Met Sally was filmed.
• The pastrami is to die for.
• If it didn't cost more to ship it here than the pastrami actually costs, I would put in a standing order.
• That night the five of us and a couple more of ES's friends celebrated a late dinner at yet another barbecue place, this one in Brooklyn.
• ES does like his barbecue.
• And beer.
• Alí introduced me to my new favorite beer -- Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale.
• It was darkish and very malty and I think I tasted chocolate in it.
• Much internet searching has disclosed that I may actually be able to purchase it locally.
• More on that later, when I actually attempt it.
• The next night we had dinner at the apartment of ES's favorite attending physician, Dr. Estrada.
• The doc and his wife are both of Puerto Rican heritage, although both were born in the US.
• Mrs. Estrada cooked us arroz con pollo Puerto Rican style.
• Once again, the most delicious thing I have ever tasted. OMG, the subtle spices, etc.
• Much wine and beer were ingested, much laughter and merriment ensued.
• Dr. Estrada owns the building where his apartment is located.
• Other family members occupy the other apartments.
• All doors are open within the building, so there is a lot of back and forth among the children and grandchildren.
• We met one son, one daughter, two grandchildren, and a nephew.
• Marvelous.
• Next day, we packed ourselves back into the Aveo to trundle across (this time) the Verazanno-Narrows Bridge and Staten Island into New Jersey.
• I kept smelling the flowers blooming on Staten Island. With the occasional whiff of Newark thrown in for contrast.
• New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana (way too much of Indiana due to more navigational errors by me; Siri is no help if one doesn't pay attention), and on into Michigan.
• Picked up the dogs, visited with Smokey's cousins some more, ES took off in his Aveo to visit a friend in Madison, and we drove to Illinois to visit Smokey's brother.
• More visiting, not to mention more eating.
• We managed to lose the key to the mini-mini-motorhome while there, and Smokey's brother was looking up locksmiths when I came upon my spare keyring.
• Which against all odds had a key to the m-m-m'home. Yay!
• After all the driving we couldn't quite make it home in one day, although we have never had to stop before. Spent the night in Eau Claire and got home this afternoon.
• Whew!

* How did he manage to graduate from two different programs 1,000 miles apart in the same week? Back in 2012 when he was about to finish med school, he left a tiny bit undone, thus delaying his med school loans from coming due. A year and a half at UMich, 10 or 12 weeks back at Sinai, and voila! Two diplomas!

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.
  .
• Comfortable sleeping is essential to a good vacation.
  .
• The green chili at Tom's Diner in Buffalo is so good I could eat it every day.
  .
• Tragically, it was only on the specials board for one day.
  .
• The french fries at the Bozeman Trail Steak House are still the best in world.
  .
• Parts of Wyoming are very empty.
   
  .
• Unlike parts of New York City.
  
  . 
• 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.
  .
• It can be very hot in Wyoming in July.
  .
• It can also be comfortably chilly.
   .
• 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.
  .
• 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.
  .
• 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.
  .
• Businesses next to Clear Creek, which flows through the center of downtown Buffalo, had sandbags lying around.
  .
• No flooding right now.
  .
• 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.
  .
• Our campground is in a canyon.
  .
• I remember, and then I force myself to forget.
  .
• Moving on...
  .
• 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!