Christmas was a rather quiet affair with just my parents, The Husband, and myself. My sister was upset about not coming home for the holidays, but they went to spend it with her husband’s family in Ohio.

My dad left early Boxing Day morning to head down to Phoenix to help go through my grandfather’s things. I told him about wanting the violin, and also told him that I understood very well that I most likely wouldn’t get it, so I asked for old photos and letters and such.

Wednesday, The Husband and I drove up to Mendocino to spend a couple of nice quiet days on the foggy wet coast. Unfortunately, because there was not really any snow in Tahoe everyone decided to go to Mendocino as well. The place was full of people, so we stuck to our hotel room and those places we knew would be empty like the Botanical Gardens in Ft. Bragg (We hiked out on their ocean trail… the waves were wicked, heralding the storm to come). We had a delicious meal at the Rendevous Inn in Ft. Bragg. The foie gras starter was decadent and made me realize what all the fuss is about.

I stopped in at the Mendocino Yarn Store, which was having a yarn sale — all the yarn was 20% off. I picked up 10 balls of Rowan Felted Tweed in a purple color and 2 skeins of Manos.

Friday was the day we headed home, but first we stopped in at Lark in the Morning. I had half a mind to see what they had in the way of used violins. I’m still slightly uncertain as to how it is that I left with a harp — a 29 string floor harp with levers on the Cs and Fs to be exact.

The topic of harps came up while talking with the store lady (whose name I seemed to have missed), and she said they had some down in the back. I went and found them, and as I usually do when I find harps in musics stores, I began plucking at them. The nice store lady offered to play a tune on them if I wanted to hear what they sounded like. She started with the floor harp. The first note cause a gut reaction in me… it was beautiful. She went to help another customer, and I sat down to play with the lap harp. When she came back she told me that because the floor harp had been there awhile and had a couple dings she could give me a discount. I found myself unable to refuse. After everything was settled and we were on our way out the door with the harp, she told us that someone almost bought it just the day before. Now I have to see about finding a teacher. My LYS owner told me she knows a couple people in the area that teach Celtic harp, I just need to get the names and numbers from her.

The drive back down was crazy; we were right in the middle of the storm the slammed into Northern California last week. There were a couple times when the car in front of me disappeared in waves of rain. The Husband and I traded off driving duty a couple times to give the other a rest. It was good to get home.

That was definitely close. I finished the Clapotis for my mother-in-law last Friday with 2.5 yards left to spare. It felt like a race to the finish… thankfully, I won. It would have been a royal pain in the ass to have to rip back to reclaim yarn in order to finish. I spent a good deal of time during the decrease section glaring at the Clapotis then trying to gauge how much yarn I had left. There were even a few times when I tried to weight the increase section from the beginning against what was left of my yarn ball… one in each hand… doing that balancing scale hand action… geez, I must have looked like a freak.

This shot is just to show you the colors. The yarn was Laurel from Schaefer Yarns in their Empress Wu Zhao colorway. I still need to soak it and lay it out to get rid of the curling and to straighten out the dropped stitches a little. The advice I got at my LYS was to just add a glug of vinegar along with the wool wash stuff. (Rebecca, I have no idea if lemon juice would work… definitely acidic… something to look into.) I’m probably going to go with the vinegar since that’s what I have on hand at the moment. No way am I going out for a lemon tonight… it’s dark, wet, the day before a holiday in the San Francisco Bay Area, which means that people are wandering around in moronic hazes in their large SUVs. Nope, not going out tonight.

The Husband is beginning to set the table for dinner… he’s made crab and corn bisque… mmmm… crab. I helped pick the meat out of the two crabs we picked up earlier today. I love Dungeness crab season. Yum!

Public Service Announcement
I’m going to be switching the name I use to comment on other people’s blogs because there are a few other Lizs… Lizes… (what the hell is the plural of Liz?) out there in knitting blog land. So, if you see a Zardra posting comments there’s no need to wonder who the hell that is, for it is I! (Do you think that last bit needs a sword for added florish?) Um… yeah….

In other news
My grandfather died on Saturday. My dad is heading down to Arizona next week to help my uncle down there get things straightened out and generally get in the way (his words not mine). The funeral probably won’t be until after the new year because my grandmother is buried in South Dakota, so they need to arrange for transport as well as burial. So, I’m waiting to find out if I will be expected to go to South Dakota in a couple weeks.

Meanwhile, I am worried about a violin. My dad’s side of the family has a Stradivarius that came to America with my great-great-(great?)-grandfather in 1850-something. The last time I saw it, my grandparents had it in a display case on the wall… across from a window. *shudder* All I can think of is it really needs to be taken out of that stupid case and put in a proper violin case away from the sunlight and humidity that display case has/will expose it to. Even better… it needs to be played. I’d even almost be willing to try my hand at playing violin again so that it could be taken care of properly. Of course, I don’t know if it’s even in playable condition or even how it is secured in the case (I can only pray that it was at least put in the case without harming the violin). *sigh*

Boy, are my priorities screwed up or what?

Oh yeah… knitting
Clapotis was finished on Friday night. I’m slogging my way through the afghan for my mom.

The Clapotis decreases were begun yesterday and are progressing. Of course, now I find myself in a race against the yarn for the finish. I either will run just short or will have exactly enough. Part of me is already anticipating having to rip back the decreases as well as at least one straight row repeat. This makes me shudder to think about it… I’m not really on too much of a deadline on this, but it is taking time away from the afghan. I had just decided to try to finish the Clapotis first since it was closer to completion.

Finishing the Clapotis will also present a new dilemma — how to wash it. I’m making it out of Schaefer Yarn‘s Laurel, which is their hand-dyed 100% mercerized pima cotton. I know I need to do at least one rinse with vinegar added for color-fastness. I’m just not sure what order to do everything in. Wash, then vinegar rinse? Vinegar rinse, then wash? Vinegar in both wash and rinse? I don’t want to send it off reeking of vinegar.

I recovered from my trip over the end of the semester rather ungracefully because I feel like I have promptly fallen into the deep hole that is December and all that it brings.

My last paper was turned in at 4 pm on Sunday. I found out that I got a B in my XML class… could have gotten an A- but I made a stupid mistake. I think I have received an A in my collection development plan… but I won’t know for sure till I hear from the prof, which should be in the next week or so.

Now that we are entering the second half of the month, it feels as if the insanity is building. But when I look at my schedule it seems relatively empty (which is a good thing as I do have Christmas knitting to finish).

Saturday is The Husband’s company’s Christmas party. We will be meeting up for dinner in the city at Firenze by Night. After dinner, we will adjourn to Beach Blanket Babylon.

Sunday, we go back up to the city to have dinner with The Husband’s brother and his wife before they get in their car and move back to Toronto.

Next Friday, begins vacation. My work is giving us Friday and Monday off for Christmas as well as the 2nd. So, I decided to just take the four days inbetween off and catch my breath away from both work and school. The Husband is also taking this time off, and we have reservations for a couple nights in Mendocino. Mmmmm… nothing quite like the cold, foggy coastline of NorCal to relax me.

As for Christmas knitting, I may be doing alright, but I’m not going to make that claim. I just have the decrease section of my mother-in-law’s Clapotis to do, then it will get mailed off to Canada and hopefully make it through customs without too much trouble. My mother’s afghan is another story as I haven’t been working on it. I’d guesstimate that I have about a quarter of it done. I’m trying desperately trying to avoid the vision of being up late on the 24th wishing it done.

I think that might have been thunder I just heard. Winter has certainly decided to make an entrance — it rained Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday was all grey and blowy, and today is even greyer, windier, and cold. Quite a change from the warm, blowy weather we had right before Thanksgiving. In about a week we’ve gone from Red Flag warnings (for fire conditions) to winter. Sadly, it seems that even with rain last Friday and the beginning of this week people are having a hard time adjusting to driving in the water falling from the sky.

Yup, that was lightening I just saw… cool.

I don’t want to be at work. I want to be cuddled up in warm blankets, drinking hot chocolate or tea in front of a fireplace reading or knitting. Not going to happen since I have to be here for another 4 hours. Don’t have a fireplace anyways.

My friend emailed me some pictures of her daughter wearing the stuff I knit for her. Too cute. 🙂 Unfortunately, it looks like I got it to her just in time. How fast do babies grow? I hope she’ll be able to wear it more than once. Maybe I’ll have to come up with something a little more permanent. Maybe a stuffed animal of some sort.

The “Registration Saga of 2005” entered its third act for me several days ago when it was announced that the professor whose cataloging class I had registered for was no longer going to be teaching that class. The email then cryptically said that they were trying to keep it an online only class. This sucks because I signed up for this particular section for the professor and for it only being online. Now it looks like they may have gotten a new professor, but no word on the status of the location of the class.

The Husband and I drove down to Monterey on Wednesday to spend Thanksgiving with my parents. They also had guests (Covent Players) staying with them, so The Husband was cooking Thanksgiving dinner for 8. Come Friday I was extremely ready to come home. Being around new people that I have nothing in common with tires me out physically and emotionally. So, it was either leave or start smacking people for being too up.

The rest of the weekend was recovery from Thankgiving. Saturday, we went to see Harry Potter. Sunday was originally intended to be a pajama day, but we decided to take the scooter out for a spin. The Husband, who took care of all his motorcycle license paperwork on Tuesday, had not been on the scooter since I got it in March. Apologies were made to the scooter for not being ridden in almost a month, tire pressure was adjusted, and I rode off towards my work while The Husband followed me in the car. He got to toodle around the parking lot, then ride it home.

I get to go to the DMV on Friday morning to turn in my safety course completion form and so they can take my picture for my license. This is of course why there is now a rather large pimple forming in the middle of my chin.

I took the Clapotis for my mother-in-law to my parents’ house. I got a lot of work done on it that I then got to rip out as I realised that instead of making it slightly smaller than the pattern, I had managed to do the exact number of repeats as instructed. So, I ripped back to the point where there’s only 5 repeats total and moved on to the straight rows. Thankfully, this is a rather easy pattern to memorize.

The afghan for my mother is being worked on at home in front of the nightly TV watching. It is going to take forever. And now I’m hoping that it will be wide enough… slightly hard to tell when the thing is wider than the circular needle you have it on. It’s a 40″ needle, and the pattern says it’s supposed to be 45″ wide. For some reason, 45″ on my measuring tape seems wider than on the afghan. I’ll just write it off as I’m not drinking enough while working on it.

Have you ever tripped and then, in trying to get up, tripped again? That’s how I’ve been feeling lately. I’m not entirely sure what’s causing it; I think I’ll just blame the fact there’s only something like 3 weeks left to school and only 2 major things left to turn in (my final XML project is due 12/8 and my final collection development paper is due 12/11).

Knitting amazingly enough has been occuring. I have moved off onto a couple of Christmas projects (go ahead laugh… it is funny cause I’ve never really been inclined to knit Christmas gifts before). One is the Homespun afghan I’m knitting for my mom; I work on it in front of the TV at night. The other is a Clapotis for my mother-in-law that I’ve only sort of worked on. It will be my Thanksgiving knitting since we’re going to be heading down to Monterey tomorrow to spend the holiday with my parents. It also shouldn’t take too long to make since I’m changing the dimensions to make it slightly smaller (my mother-in-law is 5 foot tall and I don’t have the yardage called for in the pattern).

Now, I have to go find my new nearby cube neighbor cause something in his cube makes a beeping noise about every five minutes, and it’s going to drive me batty.

I think this is a first for me… I uploaded pictures Wednesday night so I could post about them yesterday and then I promptly forgot about them.

I have a friend who had a baby in September, so I whipped up a cute baby set for her. I finally got the package in the mail yesterday… here’s hoping those 0-3 months booties will actually fit.

Knitting oragami
I did EZ’s Surprise Baby Jacket. I thought it was a wonderful pattern and spent a good deal of the time I was knitting it wondering why more patterns weren’t written like this. Then, due to other things going on in my life, I realized that it would require to people to actually comprehend what they are reading — something that seems to be woefully lacking these days (one of my favorite Nonsequitor strips is a park bench that has a sign on it reading “Warning: Dry Paint” with a tag line stating “Real Life Reading Comprehension Test”).

I thought the niftiest thing was the way the jacket went from an odd looking rectangle of knitted fabric to a baby jacket — presto chango!

Comments
Rabbitch said…

… This is one of the signs of the end times, isn’t it? The Apocalypso is nigh.

How ’bout making something boring, like a garter stitch scarf, and sending it off to the Dulaan project or giving it to a shelter? It’ll make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside and you don’t have to even think about it …

It’s either that or you have to go out and spend $500 on alpaca, and you know it.

I hope not, I’m not really a fan of calypso music. 🙂 That Banana Boat song just gets on my nerves something fierce.

While I’m not a big fan of acrylic because I don’t like the way it feels, I think it has a place. I mostly use it for the preemie charity knitting I do since that’s what the charity requests. Acrylic for afghans that need to be able to go in the washer and dryer for dog hair removal also makes sense (and cause I don’t think my mom was very happy with me for giving her socks that needed to be handwashed (although she liked how soft the alpaca was)… I don’t think she’d appreciate a handwash afghan). The Homespun pisses me off more for all the spliting it does than the fact that it’s acrylic.

I had briefly considered superwash wool, but I’d like it done in this lifetime; the Homespun is bulky, while all the superwash wools I like are sportweight.

The mention of spending $500 on alpaca is funny cause I just ordered 12 balls of Lana Gatto Feeling from my LYS. One of the employees convinced me that I would only need 12 balls not the 16 I thought… and I discovered that purchasing more than 10 balls gets me a discount… how could I resist? 🙂

A good weekend to everyone!