yarn tootin'

Back in the Heart of Texas

     I arrived in San Antonio late last night after a quick, but fun visit to Buffalo.  I was not allowed to bring bottled water on any of my flights.  I actually probably could have smuggled it on, but I didn't.  I did accidentally bring lotion, eye drops, and hand sanitizer on the plane.  In fact, all of those items when right through security and no one said a thing.  I wasn't trying to be naughty.  I'd forgotten that I even had those things in my purse.  It wasn't until I went to put on some hand lotion on the plane that I realized that I was traveling with contraband.  I'm very much against this ban on the water.  I can understand why I can't bring a Nalgene full of lord knows what from home, but a bottle I've purchased after going through security?  Banning "secure" water seems a little hysterical.  If they're going to do that, I think that they have to offer a bottle of water (a real bottle, not the 8 oz. Dasani they give you from the drink cart) to everyone as they board.  Planes dehydrate and I, for one, need my ounces. 

    While in Buffalo, the ladies and I did a little bit of knitting, ate some delicious things, and visited a couple of yarn stores, but we may have actually spent even more time taking pictures of ourselves using the photo booth program on Kitty's new iBook or macBook or whatever it's called.  This is one of my favorites...

     Kitty and Ashley like this one where they look more or less normal and I look a little bit special...

I do have some knitting progress to report, but I have to relearn the viola before rehearsal in Austin tonight.  Pictures to follow... 

Next Stop, Buffalo

     It's 9:45, I have to leave for the airport in one hour, I haven't packed a single stitch of clothing, and here I am I'm sitting in front of the computer attempting to blog when I really should be getting ready to go.  I have however, carefully chosen several skeins of yarn and two (only two!) works in progress to bring with me on my impromptu trip to Kitty's house in Buffalo, NY.  I'm going to Buffalo today to visit with my BFFs, Kitty and Ashley.  Since Ashley, who lives on the west coast, was already going to be on the east coast for two weeks, and the three of us rarely get to be in the same place at the same time, we hatched this plan late last week.  I don't have to work until Friday, and I have quite a few frequent flier miles, so away I go.  I'm very worried about flying because I think they are still restricting bottled water.  I never go anywhere without my water and I'm dreading two flights senza Nalgene.  I guess I'll just have to make it work. 

A Kitten in Britches

     My friend Ashley called me this morning after she read my last post to serenade me with Light My Candle from RENT.  I'm glad to know I'm not the only fan.  Ashley has seen the Broadway production more than once.  We also had to chat about the new Knitty.  The new Knitty is up today which makes today a good day.  My favorite thing about it is that the first pattern is called Kate and the first sentence in the pattern description is "Kate is a kitten in britches."  The third member of the merry trio that makes up the Pepto Ladies is Kate, but we pretty much only call her Kitty or sometimes Kitten.  For this reason, we were amused by "Kate is a kitten in britches."

    Yesterday it was 62 degrees outside and I took some pictures of my knitting on the picnic table in the backyard.  This is what the table looks like today.  This amount of snow would be no big deal back in the motherland, but here in the South it's a crisis.  I've got Oprah on right now and the screen is divided so that the people of Richmond can be informed of all of the school closings and late starts etc.  I was kind of hoping that I might get out of playing the Messiah tonight.  No such luck.  I'm sure that if it weren't a sold out show, it would have been canceled by now.  As far as concerts go, the Messiah isn't too bad.  It's a long song for sure, but it's catchy.  I'm still working on the Mohair scarf so I have little magenta mohairs all over my concert black.  I think I'll leave them there.  I think they're festive.

Rowan Asher

    One of the Mollys had her baby!  Rowan Asher Haywood O'Neill was born yesterday at 11:28 A.M., weighing in at an impressive ten and a half pounds.  Molly had said child with no drugs, and this along with so many other things makes her a rock star.  Mama Molly and Mama Ash are both knitters and they say that this had no bearing on their choice of a name for their son, but I'm not sure I believe them.  In any case, a baby named Rowan must be featured on a blog about knitting.  For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, Rowan is a fancy brand of yarn made in Holmfirth, England.

    While the my girls in Portland were welcoming Rowan, I was in Perryville, MD over the weekend visiting my Oberlin roommate, Megan.  We were roommates in the dorm both freshperson and sophomore years and then we shared a house with Ashley and two other gals junior year.  We are very different, yet we managed to get along swimmingly for all of that time.  We still do.  She is a real grownup now with a big house and a husband and she can cook a whole delicious meal without screwing it up.  I forgot to take a picture of us, but maybe Megan come to the confederacy to visit me one of these days and I can get a picture then.  Her husband, Dave introduced me to a new beer called Purple Haze.  It's a raspberry wheat brew made by the Abita Beer company in Abita Springs, Louisiana.  It's got a mild raspberry flavor which I usually don't care for, but this one is very tasty.  The best thing about it is that it's distributed in Richmond and you can get it at Kroger. 

     I had a rare normal weekend this week (Saturday and Sunday off!) and after work on Friday afternoon I went to Unraveled and picked up Cat Bordhi's Socks Soar on Two Circular Needles.  I then went to Ben Franklin to get the circulars and some Lion Brand Magic Stripes.  Cat says to get Addi Turbos, but I didn't want to invest in the fancy needles before I knew if I liked the method so I picked up two pairs of #3 Takumi Bamboo needles and they are working just fine.  Maybe it's all of the time I spend in Target, or the fact that the most expensive pair of shoes I own are a pair of full priced ($109) Danskos, but I do not understand the obsession with fancy yarn and fancy needles.  I'm not advocating spending a lot of time with squeaky acrylic, but I love Lion Brand Magic Stripes.  The stripes are very pretty, it's 75% superwash wool, 25% nylon, and it's only $6.99.  You also only need one ball for a pair of socks, not two.  After my experience with the Koigu, I'm all for  Magic Stripes.  I'm also all for knitting socks on two circulars.  Like everyone says, it's much easier, much faster, and there are fewer spots where the stitches get all stretched out and weird.  I'm glad I started doing socks the old fashioned way because the two circular method would be hard to learn with out that frame of reference, but there really is no going back to DPN's.

Happy Birthday Ashley!

    First of all, my apologies to Ashley for this post being a day late.  Happy the day after your 30th Birthday Ashley!  Hooray Hooray, you turned 30 yesterday.  I had this whole great post all ready to go yesterday. I was just doing my final edit and when I clicked publish, I got that page cannot be found screen and my post was gone.  This was probably due to the fact that I was connecting to the internet in a Starbucks and the whole t-mobile thing can be tricky.  I'm in San Antonio this week visiting Bob and the internet will not be hooked up in his new apartment until Tuesday which, conveniently, is the day after I go back to Richmond.  Needless to say, I'll be spending quite a little bit of time at Starbucks for the next few days.  After a whole week with no connection, I discovered that life senza the internet doesn't really work for me.

     So I'm in San Antonio this week, but last week I was in Portland, Oregon having a lovely visit with the Pepto Ladies.  The Pepto Ladies are me, Kitty, and Ashley.  The three of us lived together in a pink house our senior year at Oberlin.  Early that year, Ashley decided that we should call the house Pepto.  Many of the student houses in Oberlin were named for their color; there was a yellow house called Banana House and another called simply, Blue House.  Kitty and I initially resisted this idea of calling our pink house Pepto, but Ashley is the sort of person who isn't easily resisted and here we are almost 10 years later referring to ourselves as the Pepto Ladies.  People always say that you meet the friends you'll have for life in college.  I think that part of the reason this seems to be true is that the people who knew you when you were young and fabulous make you feel young and fabulous.  This is certainly true for me.  We're only 30, so we're not exactly old yet, but I did spend half of my time in Oregon feeling like I was 19 without actually being 19 and that was pretty good. 

     Since Kitty, Ashley, and I are spread out all over the country, it takes a bit of planning for the three of us to find ourselves in the same place at the same time and it's always a treat.  We spent the week doing a lot of knitting.  Ashley and her partner Molly are the people who turned me on to knitting in the first place.  They have a huge basket of pretty yarn at their house and when I visited them in February I decided that I had to have yarn too. It's so great to have friends who are knitters!  First we knitted at Ashley and Molly's house and then we took the show on the road and spent Labor Day weekend at a little cabin in the woods next to the Zigzag river about an hour outside of Portland.  The cabin had a hot tub and Ashley decided to do some of her knitting while soaking.  This seemed risky to me because she was working with 100% wool, but no harm came to her Noro sweater.  Meanwhile, I got some good work done on my Koigu socks, but those teeny needles are a pain in the ass to work with.  Even Kitty who knows how to knit but isn't really all that knitty got into it and made a couple of huge scarves.

     We left the woods on Monday morning in order to get back to Portland in time for Ashley and Molly's baby shower.  They are expecting a baby (I think it's a boy) in a few weeks and Kitty and I were conveniently there for the shower.  It was a lot of fun to meet their friends, a few of whom brought their knitting to the shower.  My friends always give me a hard time when I knit at poker games or baseball games or when I knit in general, but Ashley and Molly have a big old knitty community and everyone also has a baby.  There were about four people aside from me and Kitty who didn't have babies or small children.  So many babies.  Soon there will be one more.

     While in Portland, we also visited a couple of yarn stores.  Ashley and Molly's favorite is Mabel's.  It's a cozy little shop with a cafe and a lot of placed to sit and knit.  It had great ambiance, but it didn't have a huge yarn selection.  What they had was nice, there just wasn't a lot of it.  The other store we went to was the Yarn Garden.  It had a huge selection of yarn and patterns and books and needles and all of that knitty stuff.  It also had a cafe.  I think that a cafe is a great thing to have in a yarn store.   The atmosphere in the Yarn Garden wasn't quite as welcoming as Mabel's but if you're looking for a big selection of yarn, it's the place to go.

     This week I hope to make it to the Yarn Barn here in San Antonio.  I'm going to have to learn to drive a shifter car first.  Bob's car has a standard transmission and I've never had to drive such a thing before.  I think we'll find an empty parking lot tonight for my first lesson.  It can't be that hard, can it?