In my next life I want to be one of those people who can sleep late on weekends. This has nothing to do with the fact that I have cats who have developed such a fine sense of hearing that the sound of my eyes opening can make them come running. Nor does this have anything to do with the fact that as I have gotten older (sheesh, when did mid 30's become 'older'!), my bladder's capacity to last through the night has seriously diminished. No, this has everything to do with the fact that my brain is so wired to wake up at somewhere around 6 am (because that is when we wake up on work days) that even on days when we can sleep late, it simply cannot handle any change in the routine. Oh, I might sneak in an extra half hour here or there, but none of this sleeping in til the luxurious hour of, say, 8 or 9. Sigh.

On the other hand, being wide awake at o-dark thirty on a weekend morning means lots more knitting time before we have to go anywhere or do anything. So that's what I did this morning, when my internal clock decided that sleeping past 6:30 am just was not an option. I got up, fed the cats, and then went downstairs and did a full pattern repeat on the lace shawl.

Which leads me into noting that, oh, by the way, I have decided that I must now learn how to knit lace. I've mastered cables (did that early on with my very first knitting project, in fact - you long term readers may recall the adorable cable sweater I made for my nephew - the one that ended up not being able to fit over his head, sigh), I've mastered two-color slipstitching, and most recently I've mastered socks. Next up was either Fair Isle (those patterned bands of color you often see on sweaters, for the non-knitters among you. Think Scandanavian type designs, if that helps), which, while I fully intend to learn it one of these days, is not high on the priority list, intarsia (again, not high on the priority list), or lace. So even though I do not wear shawls, nor know anyone who wears shawls or ever *would* wear a shawl, especially a shawl made from yarn about the thickness of dental floss, I am making a lace shawl. It's this one, in case you're wondering (because I am sure you all were dying to know), and after the first few rows of dropping stitches and swearing (knitting is, after all, a ladylike art, so you know swearing has to be involved at *some* point), it all clicked. But it's the kind of thing where I still need a quiet room and very little distraction. So if I had to be up that early this morning at least it wasn't all for naught.

We've had a mostly quiet day. We went to church, mainly out of habit, and I sat in the back and made funny faces at a little four-month old baby with the most marvelous fuzzy patch of hair on her head that stood straight up and made her look perpetually astonished, and pretty much paid absolutely no attention to the sermon as a result. Afterwards, because I happen to be the chair of the Board of Trustees and therefore somewhat responsible for general building maintenance, I was handed a clipboard and a list of random maintenance and renovation tasks for the church and I and the two guys who know about construction and all that goes with it wandered through various rooms and even wandered outside for a brief moment, to discuss which items from the never-ending list we wanted to try to accomplish during the all church work week at the end of the month. Or rather, I made a few suggestions and then they would go off on tangents discussing how best to reroute electrical cables or something or other, and then I would interject 'so about the painting' to bring them back around, and somehow we got it all planned. Sort of. Or at the very least, we narrowed the list down to a more manageable number.

Afterwards, I sat in the sanctuary and worked on the lace shawl - which mainly entailed knitting one row and then quietly swearing as I undid the entire thing, timing it all so perfectly that I only had a few more stitches to unravel by the time Richard was done with his meeting. We pondered various lunch options, but then decided that the mature, adult thing to do would be to go to Costco and consume sustenance in the form of samples, and also see if there was anything there we could not live without. The theme of the samples today seemed to be all meat, all the time, but at least the trip was fruitful in that we scored a four-foot long folding table for me. I've been wanting a folding table to use as craft space for a while, and now that I've got the knitting machine (it finally arrived this week!), which requires a flat surface with square edges (and unfortunately both the dining room and breakfast nook tables have rounded edges), the need was a little more urgent. So now I have a lovely sturdy table, with perfectly square edges, which will fold up and store nicely into the closet with all my yarn and other crafting type paraphernalia (although if I keep this up we may have to revisit that random idea we once had about looking into expanding out over the garage - ha ha).

Richard went off to demo Linux to people at the Co-op in Davis and I stayed home and worked on the shawl a little more (this time without any swearing at all - yay!), and then he came home and made dinner because after he got those books yesterday he's been quite motivated to try out some of the new recipes. Tonight was chicken with a spice rub with just a little kick to it, and corn on the cob that he put directly over the coals until it was just perfect, and it was delicious. I am so very glad that he likes grilling, and doesn't mind being outside in the heat, standing over burning coals, dealing with the smoke and the occasional yellow jacket or other buzzy sort of critter, while I stay inside in blissful air conditioned comfort.