There and Back Again

or, what I did on my summer vacation.

My vacation began Sunday. Since my flight was leaving Minneapolis at 7 PM, I ended up going to church in the morning, staying for a picnic, and heading straight up. This gave me some extra knitting time in the terminal, and time for a sock picture. Isn't the Rhapsody beautiful? Thanks, Becca!

The flight was overbooked, but otherwise uneventful. Security gave me no problems with 10 double pointed needles (5 metal, 5 wooden) in my bags, and the stewardesses had no problem with my knitting during the flight. I finished Rhapsody Sock #2 and started Tofutsies Sock #1.

I found the shuttle to the hotel with no problems, and called Lene to tell her I was on my way. She, too, was on her way, in annoyingly heavy traffic. In keeping with 'slow and steady wins the race' she beat me to the hotel, but not by so much that I didn't catch up with her before the elevator doors opened. (That's an amazing feat, you know ... rushing to catch up with someone you've never met when you can only see her from the back. I'm glad I had the right person.)

We talked and talked and talked some more, then caught some shut eye early Monday morning so we could get up a bit later and head off to the conference. I was the Book Table Lady, and so had to get a picture of the Book Table with Sock. (The sock pictured was finished before lunch was.)

Then, it was off to the airport to come home. All went well until I checked in. You know those delightful e-ticket machines? It didn't like me. It made me go see a ticketing agent. I thanked God that I was in Terminal 2 and not Terminal 1 (where Lene stood in line over an hour to check her bags). Terminal 2 had only one clerk at the Northwest desks. But there were also only 3 people on the other side of the desks. And two of them were self-checking their bags. The clerk informed me that my 8:00 flight had been cancelled. (rats) She put me on the 6:45 flight instead (hooray!). I didn't quite knit my way home, since my hands were considering staging a protest about 12 hours of knitting with only short breaks, but I still landed with only 4" of the post-lunch sock to do.

The next day, it was time to find my desk so I could get to work. Reading 295 e-mails, sweeping, unpacking, laundering ... never a dull moment. And reinstalling everything on Filia's computer. Her hard drive died, but was able to revive itself to factory specs with the touch of a button The data was unrecoverable :( and taking the hard drive out killed the touch pad (?) but the shop gave us a free mouse (computer, not mammalian) so she's set. Then came cherry picking time. Filius and I picked for 20 minutes and brought in 3 quarts of cherries. Then I 'computed' while they took turns pitting. One entire cherry pie disappeared into them at suppertime, and there's many more pie-worth of cherries on the tree.

The Tofutsie socks are lovely, but I could have done without the three knots between the heel and ribbing of sock #2.

Speaking of which ... you've heard of Second Sock Syndrome? I don't have it. I have Weaving In Those Ends Syndrome. I have 3 pair of socks waiting to have ends woven in right now. I shall have to buckle down and do it one of these days. I wasn't about to take my beloved hand forged silver yarn needle on the airplane, though, so I have some small excuse for 1 1/2 of those socks.

And on the needles now is the first Stash Sock for Micah. On the desk is Clement and Diogenes. I'm at the Answer Key generation point, which is the most time-consuming and fun part. There's another book waiting in the wings for editing, and more to come. "Of the making of books, there is no end," Solomon said, and he was right.