More of the Same

I can't leave it alone.  The Bay Lakes Knitting Guild newsletter, I mean.  I worked on it last night.  I've spent almost all day today working on it--and I think I'm closing in on being done.  Of course, as I scrolled through the pages before closing the program for the night I realized that I'll need to re-do the "in this issue" column because I've moved stuff around.  I'm not going to show you a picture of my paper-strewn bed again, partly because I've already cleared it off so that I can crawl under the covers soon-ish and partly because it didn't look much different than it did on Thursday night when I posted a picture.  Use your imagination.  It's probably more reliable than mine is right now.


Last night at Friday Night Knitting I got a lot of sleeve rounds knitted on the second, and last, sleeve of the Black & Blue Shrug.  I'm within 12 rounds of being done with it--except for weaving in all the ends and digging out a button to sew onto it.  Maybe I'll get it finished tomorrow, after I finish the newsletter, that is.

My friend, MW, came to knitting with a bag of kids' books he'd just bought off the Goodwill clearance shelves, cool science-y books that I wished I had seen first.  I made him walk me back up to the book department and show me what he'd left behind.  I bought the four he'd left although I think he might have gotten the best one, the one about trees.  I scanned the other shelves and found a toddler book about colors with flaps to open.  OJ is quite taken with books with flaps right now.  I hear from a reliable source that he's prone to tearing them out if the glue comes unglued even if it's re-glued.  Evidently to someone not quite 2 years old, once something comes unglued it stays unglued.  The coolest book I found is a eighty-ninth printing of the original Mother Goose rhymes.  OJ is at the perfect age for those little rhymes and I love the old-timey illustrations.  Not a bad haul for seventy-nine cents a book.

I'm semi-horrified and more than a little embarrassed to show you what else I bought at

Goodwill--a skein of Red Heart yarn that's about as soft as barbed wire in Packers colors.  DIL1 mentioned that she thought OJ might like a Packers hat and there that skein of yarn was for only $1.99 so I bought it.  Others at knitting assured me that the yarn will soften up after a few washings.  It had better because I am not going to waste valuable knitting time making something that's scratchy and ends up shoved in the back of the hat bin.

January 27--Janice Huckaby, Blue Tangs.  They overlap each other as if put there by a layout artist.  They swim at the same pace, turn as one, like they are each a part of a whole, not individual fishes.  The tangs are just about every shade of blue from powder to cobalt and a few shade toward blue-violet.  They seem innocuous but I've seen them descend on the algae patch of a damselfish and strip it bare as the damselfish works frantically to drive them away.

This afternoon I cashed in the first twelfth of my Christmas gift from DS and DIL1.  They gave me a blank calendar and a note saying it was good for one coffee, cocktail, or chat with DS every month for the year, so this afternoon while DIL1 worked (lunch for 400), LC napped, and OJ was in his crib but didn't nap, DS and I got to spend an hour just visiting, talking about this and that with no more interruptions than their dog Porter coming by for a pat now and then.  It was lovely.
--Barbara