Saturday night was another Girls Night Out with Richard's family, so I drove down to meet his mom and sisters and we all went to see Chicago because by virtue of being a musical, it counts as sort of a chick flick.

I had absolutely no idea what the movie was about except that it was based on a play and thus there would be singing. Wow! It was a lot of fun! Murder, lies, betrayal, and all manner of singing and dancing by actors and actresses whom I'd never realized could sing and/or dance. Richard Gere. Can sing. Obviously this is just another one of those Jennifer is clueless moments, but hey.

I'm not sure the movie really classifies as a true chick flick, since there weren't any true emotional bonding moments that necessitated a hanky, and the presence of a lot of women in black lingerie isn't usually an ingredient. But it worked for us anyway. Plus we got to see Queen Latifa prove once again that any size woman can be incredibly hot as long as she's comfortable with who she is.

********

Okay, so maybe I won't burn it, since I'm sure that at some point, years and years down the road, I might be inclined to redecorate, and thus make new curtains. But it isn't going to be any time soon because I am already eying the prospect of hemming and pressing six more panels with more than a bit of dread.

I went to the fabric store today and managed to get enough fabric for three panels; the rest will hopefully arrive early next week, allowing me to get this chore out of the way before I go back on the road. It's actually going to be kind of pretty. The main panels are white with little white stars, and the tiebacks are a pale wedgewood blue with tiny blue stars. And I know that once I get started on these panels, they'll go fairly quickly, because after all the rest of them I've made, I can do these in my sleep.

Along with the curtain-fabric purchasing, I made a short detour down the yarn aisle because last night I had my second knitting lesson, and I now know how to purl! But after I purled up a foot-long length, I decided that I was getting awfully tired of this pale green I've been practicing on. So while I was at the fabric store I pondered a whole selection of really gorgeous yarns, including several that were multicolored. I ended up with a skein of dark green, however, mainly because I'm still trying to work on patterns of stitches and don't need patterns of color to distract me.

The woman who is teaching me traded my regular needles for a pair of circular needles, which have served as a source of great amusement because poor Allegra cannot figure out what to attack anymore when she sees me knitting. Plus they're easier for me to hold on to, because I'm still having a very hard time figuring out what to do with the needles, the yarn, and both hands while knitting. Coordination has never been a strong talent of mine, see. But I’m getting there. Slowly.

Last night she sent me home with a small stack of pattern books since I'm thinking that I might try making a baby sweater for the younger of my nephews. And in one of those books there is a pattern for making knitted blocks, created out of little sample squares. So this afternoon I have been happily knitting little sample squares of stockinette and different types of ribbing, and basketweave, and seed stitching. I haven't a clue what I'm going to do with the little squares since an entire set of blocks in dark green would probably be pretty darn boring to a little kid, but I'm not too concerned with their future use right now. Mainly I'm just happy that I'm starting to get the hang of how to knit and purl on the same row, and how to train my brain to not only count stitches, but also rows - which is more complicated than you might think.