In Which Jetlag Kicks My Butt

If I've been a bit out of touch these last few weeks it's because we got back Tuesday from 18 days vacation in England.  It was a terrific trip.  We had great weather, did lots of walking and sightseeing.  In fact we pretty much rolled out of bed early, spent the day on the move, and got back to the hotel at 10 pm and fell into bed.  Every day.

I brought socks to knit- and got a sock and a half done.   Despite knitting on trains, buses and in restaurants, we were on the move *a lot*.   Actually most of the half-sock was knit on the flight home.  Here's the completed one:

A nice simple pattern, something I could pick up and put down without losing track of what I was doing.  

Naturally, the cats stayed home while we were away.  The boys had a sitter who came in every day, as well as several of our friends who dropped by to visit the cats and play with them.   I swear, Biscuit and Cookie have a more active social life than we do!  They were pretty laid back about our being gone, not anxious or upset when we came back, which was good.  Though since we came back I have noticed an increased propensity on Biscuit's part to follow me around and settle wherever I am, keeping an eye on things.  Kind of like this:

Clearly, he thinks I need supervision.  Who knows what I might get up to without it?

Actually, what I'm likely to do is fall asleep.  We got in at nearly midnight Tuesday, and both went back to work on Wednesday morning.  Our theory was that the time change going west is easier, which is certainly true.  However, this is the longest vacation we've ever taken anywhere, let alone overseas, and we underestimated the extent to which we had adapted to the different time zone.  Our bodies remain stubbornly convinced that it's five hours later than the clock says, despite us keeping appropriate hours in eastern standard time.   We've been home five days, and today's the first day I haven't woken at 5 am, convinced I'd overslept!

At any rate, the next little while on the blog is going to be consumed by travelogue, a whopping 18 days worth.  Don't worry, I'll be editing the nearly 1000 photos we took down to something more reasonable.   And if you're not a fan of vicarious travel, check back in a week or so- when we'll be getting back to our regularly scheduled crafting and cat picture content. 

Now That's More Like It

Thanks to a lot of running around that forced me to be monogamous with the Herringbone Socks, I am finally done, finished, kaput and see- evidence!

I was particularly pleased with these, since I had to modify the pattern from six pattern repeats to seven in order for them to fit.  (With socks, I really hate going up in needle size because I prefer a dense fabric, so I nearly always stick to my size 0 needles and add stitches to make them bigger.)  Of course seven repeats is not an even number, so when I changed half the pattern to stockinette for the instep, I had to work out a six stitch version of the herringbone pattern to make the numbers come out right.  I considered just doing three repeats on the instep, but I didn't like the idea of the partial repeat just cutting off at the heel.  So:

The herringbone pattern is a multiple of three, plus three stitches.  So from a 12 stitch repeat I went down to  for the single little herringbone column along the foot.  I'm very pleased with them.  They fit well, they're very comfortable, they look great...and I am so never knitting this pattern again.  It's a lovely pattern, but with slipped stitches and passed stiches in every row...it's very, very, very slow.  

Mysteries of the Universe

Foremost among these mysteries is where the time goes.  It seems like just yesterday that warm days were rare, and I was waiting impatiently for the first flowers to bloom, and then I turned around and -

These all grew from one bulb, which I received many years ago as a favor at a baby shower.  I planted the bulb after it finished blooming, and every year it's put out more blossoms.  (The same cannot be said of the friends for whom the shower was given.  They stopped after two lovely girls.)

And Cookie and Biscuit have been able to observe the always fascinating Out on a near daily basis:

I'm rather puzzled as to why there isn't more knitting.  Thinking back, there has been some.  For example:

• I think there may be some mittens that didn't get photographed.   
• The Wasabi hat was completed and gifted without pictures.  
• There have been bits of sweater knit, but it's not done.  
• The Herringbone socks are now officially the world's slowest socks (I'm on the second one, but glaciers may cover North America again before they're done, or at least that's what it seems like.)    
• There was a baby sweater that I got in a bin of free yarn that has been seamed up and had buttons and button loops put on it.  It needs some decoration, I think, but I haven't decided what. 

In an effort to figure out what else has been going on, I looked at the camera memory (though I have managed to leave it at home so often that's not an accurate record by any means).  But there have been various hiking excursions, part of my husband's and my annual quest to be less pathetically unfit.  A couple of weeks ago we climbed in the Holyoke range in western MA.   It was gorgeous day, and the tender new leaves were such a vivid green they practically glowed.

And of course my favorite thing about climbing is the views.

And as if that wasn't enough (which it clearly wasn't!), last weekend we hiked up on Mt. Monadnock in southern NH.  Another very nice hike, though I discovered some additional muscles that I somehow had missed recalling earlier.   I had once again forgotten the camera, but my husband took some pictures with his phone:

And I also liked this one- very dramatic:

Aside from that...well, there's been rather a lot of pool maintenance, and running around visiting people. and work, and.... dang it, I still think that I must have misplaced a week or so somewhere.  Like maybe it's under a pile of magazines up in the sewing room or something.  Hey, it could happen!