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?