Busy weekend

Whew. After baring my soul in the last post (and thank you for your comments), today's post is going to seem a little bland. Ah well, there's always some yarn pr0n at the end to spice things up.

Today I'm recovering from an extremely eventful weekend. It began Friday evening, when the whole family had dinner with the judge for whom I clerked, many years ago. The judge is an amazing woman, one of the smartest and most capable people I know, with a finely-honed sense of justice and a remarkable ability to achieve consensus on a fractured appellate court. She's also quite a character. I had not seen her for a few years because of her schedule; however, she recently handed off most of her administrative duties to the next judge in line, and is getting a chance to do some things other than hearing appeals and wrangling disputes about the administration of the court. It was great to see her again and to catch up on the gossip.

The next morning, I drove up to my parents' house, with Elvis riding shotgun (and vibrating from excitement). My oldest kid has an extremely close relationship with his Nana and has been anticipating a sleepover there for a while. The drive is fairly quick -- Wilkes-Barre is ninety miles and fifty years away, as my husband likes to say -- and we had a jam-packed twenty-four hours there.

We began with a visit to my aunt, where we met the inimitable Minnie Mae:



She makes the weirdest sounds of any dog I have ever met: growls, yelps, a noise in throat that sounded like purring...I never knew a dog could make that many sounds.

After lunch, we took in my twelve-year-old nephew's basketball game:



It was very exciting and this was the final score:



(Mikey's team won.) Mikey is an excellent player and scored several baskets and foul shots.

My parents took us to dinner at 5:00 o'clock sharp like the good senior citizens they are. We hung out at the homestead after dinner, at which point I cast on for a new project. The next morning, we hit the dreaded Chuck E. Cheese. At nine o'clock on a Sunday morning, it was just us and a couple of athiests, so we had the Skee-Ball to ourselves.



You haven't lived until you have heard a bizarre six-foot-tall animatronic mouse singing a Patsy Cline song at nine in the morning. ("Crazy," if you must know.) I had a chance to knit a few rounds on my new project, which I will talk about in a future post, once I get more to show you, but it's from Veronik's book and it's in Classic Elite Wool Bam Boo, which I think may become one of my all-time favorite yarns.

We had a teary good-bye,


(Tom cracked up at the family resemblance he discerned in the above photo) but Nana promised to come visit in two weeks, so we drove back home. When we got back, I found that G. was wearing her new sweater that I finally sewed the buttons on. She looks adorable, as she usually does.



After kvelling, I began preparing today's Etsy update. It's a big one, with lots of superwash merino sock


and some more bamboo/merino sock



and even a couple of skeins of merino/silk sock that I found in the inventory, so if you're on-line around two p.m. EST, stop by Etsy.

For those of you who are strangely obsessed with knitting in public, I leave you with this souvenir, photographic proof that I did indeed knit my sweater in Chuck E. Cheese's.