A while ago my older sister noted that my two little nephews would love a puppet theater. And since my dad likes puttering around in his workshop playing with wood and tools, and since my mom had been wanting to ‘steal’ the boys for a grandparents-and-grandsons-only day, they decided that my dad would build them a theater, and then the boys would come down to help grandpa and grandma paint it. That was on Saturday.

Richard and I had a pile of errands to run and chores to do around the house on Saturday, and then there was also a birthday party he needed to go to, so I did not make it over to my parents’ house until the evening, for dinner. While we were at Costco, I saw a pile of plush hand puppets for sale for an unbelievable price and dithered a little before picking out a set of four sea creature puppets to bring them, for their new theater, so I brought that over to the house with me when I came.

The theater is fairly large – a three panel contraption where the two side panels act as the supports, with the middle panel having a cut-out at the top where the puppets could go. It was rather obvious that the boys had done most of the painting, because there was a lot of abstract blue and green and brown, meant to be trees and trunk and sky, and I had to be told that the black smudges were birds and the red speckled things were lady bugs and, and, and. It amuses me because with both the boys there are times when they will just begin to talk and then they continue to talk and talk and talk and sometimes you have to stuff their mouths with food to get them to stop. The younger one still talks mostly in incomprehensible babble, but the older one is quite clear (he’s in first grade, after all) and he has a lot to say.

We ate dinner and the boys chattered. We’d discovered earlier that they are *very* into knock-knock jokes, and can happily go through far more of those than any adult can possibly stomach, all in one sitting. They were very happy to point out where and how they had ‘helped’ with dinner. And after dinner we got them to put on a puppet show; or rather, first the oldest and grandpa put on a puppet show with the batch of puppets they’d brought with them. I think it was supposed to be Sleeping Beauty, but it was a little abbreviated and there was a dragon in there who occasionally showed up, and perhaps what was far more amusing than the actual puppets themselves was that there was a lot of whispering behind the scenes where my dad and my nephew were hashing out just what the heck was supposed to happen next. Then they pulled out the sea creature puppets – the two boys did, at this point, since we adults decided we wanted to watch while they performed, and my older nephew started singing ‘There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea’. Except that he kept forgetting the order in which all the things happen in this song – which is very long and repetitive to begin with, but which is made even more long and repetitive when the singer keeps starting over from the beginning, again, and again, and again. Oh, to be as oblivious as seven. It was hysterical to watch, although I pity my older sister and her husband, since it is likely they will have to endure far more verses of that particular song than we did once the puppet theater and the boys returned home.

Mom and Dad took the boys to church with them yesterday, but I was the pianist that morning so could not go along to see how they did. But I hear they had fun there too, and only asked a few humorous questions during the children’s time, and there were no more recitations of The Hole in the Bottom of the Sea, at least not while they were still with my grandparents.

This afternoon I went back to Costco and bought the other four sets of plush hand puppets they had on sale. It’s early yet, but these will keep perfectly fine until Christmas. An aunt is all about being an enabler, after all, and I am nothing if not determined to be a very good aunt.

A month or two ago I received an email from the sister of someone I used to know back in high school. The director for the high school band was finishing up his 25th year there as a band director, and so some of the old band members were throwing a little reunion party, and she was trying to track down any old band members she could think of. I’m registered with the various school reunion sites (mainly as a way to hopefully track down some still-missing old friends) so that’s how she found me, years ago, for an earlier reunion party more than ten years ago, and so I wasn’t too hard to find again.

I forwarded it to the few band members I knew and still had contact with – mainly my best friend from high school, and my older sister. The old friend’s in Utah these days, her hands rather full with taking care of three very active young kids, but my older sister lives close enough that going to this thing might be feasible. She thought it sounded like fun and we made very tentative plans, but then I never heard anything more from her about it and somehow assumed that meant she didn’t want to go (it would be a very long drive for her). And as I’m not good in social situations where I don’t know anyone, and I wasn’t sure who all would be there or if there would even be anyone there I knew, I didn’t really want to go by myself.

But the Friday of the party my older sister called me on my cell phone to ask how we should proceed. Which meant that we were going after all, and luckily she was caught in traffic on the way down so I could go home first and we carpooled up to Roseville together to try to find the house where the party was being held. They told us to just go in since it was likely no one would hear the door bell, but we knocked, and as we opened the door, the very first face I saw, I recognized right away. He waved us toward the rest of the house and as we turned a corner another familiar face, and then another one, and there, over there, more and more. We’re all of us older and wider, some with a little more grey; some with a little (or a lot) less hair, but the faces underneath everything that nearly 20 years of age brings, they were still the same.

And oh, it was a wonderful night. People I hadn’t seen or heard from since we graduated nearly twenty years ago came up to me and we hugged as if it hadn’t been any time at all. The band director was there, with a lot less hair, but still that same Miami Dolphins hat and the same grin, and his wife was there, just as bouncy and bubbly as ever, and their daughter, thirteen years old and how could it have possibly been that long since we had seen them last? People had brought pictures, so we milled between rooms and paused by the table where they were all laid out, trying to dredge names for the faces of people we hadn’t seen in so very, very long. Remember her? She changed her name and she works as a photographer down in Southern California now. Remember him? He works in computers and has four kids. And him? He’s a band director at a nearby high school. A band director! How can he be that old? How can any of us be that old? Somehow someone had a copy of a video tape of some of our parade and field show performances from 1984, and we all crowded into one overheated room and watched it together, groaning with laughter, trying to put names to all the blurry faces, amazed at how small we were back then, how young.

It was a strange little nearly-a-family reunion that evening. I was in his third year of teaching and my older sister was in his second, and he’d come to our school fresh out of college, full of energy and enthusiasm and still with a lot to learn and a lot of growing up to do. He turned that little high school band from a lackluster group of nothing into a band over 100 strong by the time I graduated. We competed against the bigger, better schools and won awards. We played non-traditional music on the field like Dance Bachanale and Carmina Berana. He kept us all dedicated, willing to come to school and hour earlier than anyone else for marching practice in the fall, and then jazz band practice in the winter. He kept us after school for woodwind ensemble rehearsals, and asked us to give up part of our summers for band camp; and to live in buses and sleep on hard, noisy high school gymnasium floors to travel for band tour, sometimes even out of the country. During those first few years we were all still so close in age to him that I think sometimes it made it hard for some to separate students and teachers from friends, but we were so young and he was so gung-ho and he got us to learn and to march and to play. And through it all we became a family – a bunch of odd little outsiders, some of us, who came to the band because it was at least something we could do, but where we made our friends and forged connections that sometimes have lasted decades after the last bell of classes ended, and all of it, all because of what he and his wife brought when they came to that school, full of hopes and dreams and high aspirations that none of us ever questioned could be done.

We stayed far too late; by the time my older sister dropped me off it was nearly 11 and she had still another ninety minutes to drive home, but it was worth it. There was a sign up sheet for names and addresses and contact information. There were hugs and pictures and suggestions to do this again sometime, and maybe sooner than thirteen years and my older sister and I drove home, still playing the remember game. Remember when we went to there? Remember that girl, who was going out with that guy? Remember when?

Earlier this week the Roomba arrived. I dragged the huge box inside and tore it open immediately, to check it out. It�s a lot bigger than I�d imagined � for some reason I had it in my head it was going to be this cute dinner plate sized contraption. It�s still cute, but much larger than a dinner plate.

The cats were a little startled the first time we started it up. It�s a little on the noisy side, but that�s to be expected from any vacuum cleaner, robotic or not. The fact that it moves around all by itself seemed to be a bit disconcerting to the cats at first, but after the initial moment of skittery panic, they reached a general consensus that it wasn�t really going to try to eat them, and settled back down again to do their best to nap and ignore it. In fact, Sebastian is making such a concerted effort to demonstrate how much he does not care about it that he will sprawl on the floor even when it is puttering around in the same room, and will only get up and move when it is actively approaching him and has come close enough that he has no choice. The only exception to the rule of nonchalant cats is Rosie, who has apparently decided that the Roomba is quite fascinating. When it runs, she occasionally must follow it around and watch it, whiskers fully forward and an expression of avid curiosity on her face, and when it is dormant in its docking station, she sometimes comes dashing downstairs and slides to a halt directly in front of it, then sits there, expectantly, as if waiting for it to do something. We have not felt the need to start it up just to entertain the cat, however, even though the thought has crossed my mind once or twice, just to see what she would do

Richard�s been working from home most of this week, so he�s been able to play with it more than I have so far. I get occasional email updates about what the Roomba is up to throughout the day � things like the fact that yes, its cliff sensors really do work (and it is in no danger of driving merrily off the edge and falling down the stairs when we run it on the second floor), and what happens when it tries to vacuum up one of the cats� toys. We still have the cleaning elves coming in every two weeks to beat the house into submission, but this will certainly come in handy in between cleanings.

We�ve got no carpets at all in the house save for a few small area rugs, so it does a pretty good job of sucking up all the random dust bunnies and cat hair drifts. We�ve discovered that it does not mix well with the smaller cat toys, so before we run it, we do a quick floor check to pick up anything small enough to confuse it. I find it more than a little amusing that when it backs itself out of its docking station to start cleaning, it makes little backing up beeps, much like a large van pulling out of a driveway. I�m not sure what it�s supposed to be warning to get out of its way (and quite frankly I don�t think I want to know), but it makes me giggle every time I hear it. I also find quite amusing the way the little �charging� light slowly flashes when it�s in its docking station, almost as if it has attached itself to the nipple of a bottle filled with electricity and is slowly sucking down nourishment to fill its empty batteries.

So the general consensus, in this house at least, is that the Roomba is quite possibly one of the coolest gadgets we have ever purchased, especially for a house with six cats, no carpets, and two people who really cannot stand to vacuum.

This week I feel as if I just keep going and going and there hasn’t been any time to breathe. Or, for that matter, sleep. There was the extremely long meeting on Tuesday night, and the tool tutorial on Wednesday night. Friday night was craft night, so even if it was another late night out, at least it was something that was a lot of fun, and that was even above and beyond the fact that the woman who hosts craft night had another batch of foster kittens to play with. We all alternated between working on our various projects (I managed to nearly finish the first of my socks for the secret pal sock exchange) and poking at kittens, because when one has kittens climbing on one’s lap and trying to eat one’s craft, it’s hard to ignore them. And with kittens is is always easier to just pretend that you were taking a break in your work to pet something fuzzy and see if you can get it to settle down and purr, then to try to continue with tiny teeth and claws and bottle brush tails getting all in the way.

I tried to sleep in on Saturday, but there really was no hope for it. The heat has been unbearable and shows no sign of abating any time soon, which means sleeping with the windows open, like we prefer doing in the summer, is out. And I cannot seem to get any sort of decent, restful sleep when the air conditioning is running, so I usually just give up and get up early and spend my days bleary-eyed and yawning as a result.

This weekend is Lambtown, which means there are people from all over the country flocking to our little rural town. This is a fact which continually amazes me, because the festival itself seems so very small and insignificant. But one must not underestimate the allure of sheep, I suppose.

Someone I knew back from when I worked for the Big Fish and was on assignment up in Roseville emailed me to say she was going to be coming down, so we arranged to try to meet for lunch. So we eyed the time and tossed on some clothes and sneakers and decided we might as well walk over to the fairgrounds because finding parking was going to be a nightmare, and oh, was it muggy and hot. There was just no escape from it. We wandered around the grounds and signed petition letters against the stupid racetrack. We headed into the indoor markets, but if they had any sort of cooling systems going, they were remarkably ineffective against the heat. It was hard to work up any enthusiasm for purchasing anything, even though there was one building dedicated entirely to fleece and yarn and all things fiber related. After the TKGA show in Oakland earlier this month, however, I have put a personal moratorium on buying any more yarn unless it is directly related to a specific project, so I was able to resist the allure of pretty, pretty fiber. Also, the mere thought of having anything to do with wool when one is sweating and dying slowly from heat was likely the more powerful deterrent.

There was a lot of traffic coming into town, so my friend ended up being over an hour delayed. And by that time we didn’t have much time left to do more than find a booth that did not have a huge line, stake out a spot on the ground in the shade, listlessly eat our lamb gyros and inhale bottles of water, and then trudge wearily home to collapse.

Richard’s little sister’s birthday was yesterday so there was really no time to recuperate from being out in the heat. So instead we wrapped up his niece’s present (which we’ve had sitting on the counter for weeks now) to bring with us, and we drank copious amounts of water and tried to cool off, and then got into the car and turned the air conditioner to full blast and drove down to Campbell for the fun. I brought along my knitting and managed to sneak in a few rows while we waited for the Almost Twin and Richard’s niece to arrive, and then we all went out for Chinese food for her celebratory birthday dinner. Afterward there was the ritual opening of presents and the ritual throwing of the ball in a vain attempt to keep the still-mostly-puppy busy, and we ate cake and ice cream and drank coffee and Richard and I tried very hard to stay awake because we were so very tired, and then finally we came home.

Today there has been the usual assortment of things that must be done, like going to church and practicing the song I’m going to play while two of my friends sing next week, and rummaging around until I found the disk with the latest church newsletter that I now need to upload to the church website. At some point today I am hoping there will a nap, because if I do not get any sleep between now and Monday I will surely be dozing off at work, and for some reason, they really seem to frown on that.

I wrote, back in February, about attending a Ladies Night Out at a local hardware store where, among other things, we learned how to take apart, and put together a toilet. Last week I got a call from them, since I’d put my name on a list to be contacted. They were holding another one and was I interested in attending? Definitely. This time I heard about it enough in advance to let my mom know, so the two of us drove down together last night, meeting my knitting mom and one of her daughters there as well.

There was just about as large a crowd as last time, and it appeared they used the same caterer. Plus, when we had filled our plates and found our seats, it turned out they had some of the same demonstrations as last time as well. But that was actually okay. The guy who taught the session on how to put up crown molding touched on door and window casings this time, something I’d missed back in February, and that was actually pretty informative. Then he walked us all through how to cut and measure and bevel and level molding strips, all with a sense of humor and a grin.

They had two other sessions after the one on crown molding – one on compound miter saws, and one on fence building. While the compound miter saw certainly looked very cool, my mom and I both agreed that we didn’t really need to sit through an hour on something we’re not likely to ever use, so instead we headed off to where they’d built the beginnings of a mock fence, complete with huge wooden posts embedded in heavy buckets (since it was indoors). Then a guy who resembled Bob Newhart, both in physical appearance and in mannerisms and voice, talked about building fences, while a younger man quietly and efficiently began attaching joists and boards to the fence skeleton behind him. They talked about the pluses and minuses of using wider versus narrower fence boards. They talked about how to set the supporting posts, and how many cross beams you would need in our area (we need more, because of the wind). They showed us some really cool tips on how to keep the fence boards level, and went over the pros and cons of painting versus staining. They answered questions and the Bob Newhart look-alike made quiet, respectful little jokes and by the end I think we would have been hard pressed to not be ready to go out there and build our own fence.

One of our friends had to leave early, so she left me her raffle ticket, which then promptly won a really nice cordless drill. So I picked it up for her and passed it on to her mom, and I’ll admit there was a little part of me that was hoping maybe she would already have one (she’s got quite the selection of power tools), but alas, she did not. Several people asked me why I didn’t just keep it for myself, but you know, it was her ticket, not mine, and it just wouldn’t have felt right. Besides, I ended up winning a tool apron and a t-shirt later, and my mom got a hat and a t-shirt and a saw blade (which we figure my dad would be thrilled to have), and last time I won a very nice cutting board, so it all worked out nicely. The grand prize was a compound miter saw and the woman who won it was just flabbergasted about the whole thing. I think that is the coolest part about these events, however. The smaller door prizes are usually shirts and hats with vendor names on it, but there are also useful things like drills and sawsalls and hefty power tools and all with the expectation that we will definitely find a use for them because sharp objects that run on electricity and can do serious damage to even the sturdiest of walls are really cool toys to give to grown women.

Last night was a City Council meeting, which normally we would have ignored. But they were going to be discussing the impending racetrack project (since having a new Walmart in town is not enough white trash for us, someone thought it would be just ducky if they built a huge horse racing track right off the freeway) the group that is opposing it wanted to gather a large crowd, and since Richard and I are, like any sane, rational person who would like to keep their town from sliding even further into the hell of dead-end, low-paying jobs, traffic, and pollution (because the 1200 horses they want to house there will produce one heck of a lot of poop), against the racetrack as well, we decided we ought to take a more active part. So we showed up, dutifully wearing yellow shirts (the only yellow shirts either of us owned, actually) since that’s the color of the protest group, and sat through an extremely long meeting, until they finally got to the part we actually cared about.

Small town politics are an interesting thing to watch. There is the vice mayor, who seemed to take things seriously, but also felt the need to make every comment a stump speech. There is the council member who was apparently voted for looks or something because he didn’t seem to have the remotest clue what the rest of the group was talking about most of the time, nor did he seem to have even a vague clue of how politics and running a city actually works. There is the guy who shows up to every single council meeting with a chip on his shoulder because he has been unable to get himself elected for any office (and I think by now he has run for every single possible office available), so takes it out on the council by issuing long lists of angry questions at the meetings, acting as if he is an expert in everything he rants abuot, and by writing angry diatribes in an extremely biased, right-wing newspaper that is delivered to everyone in town whether we want it or not (Richard likes it only because we don’t subscribe to a regular newspaper, so this provides fuel for his chimney starter for the barbecue grill). There are the slick lawyers presenting their cases to the city council, using big flowery words and smoothing over any rough edges in their arguments. There are the impassioned speeches by other city members who really ought to have at least made some effort to do some semblance of research before standing up and making it clear they really didn’t have a clue. And then there is the rest of us, the audience, sinking lower and lower into our chairs as the night progressed, wishing that they would just vote on the damn provision about whether you can keep a horse in your backyard in a rural area already and move on.

Due to timing we didn’t eat dinner before the meeting, and neither of us had had any idea it was going to run on so long. So once the race track issue had finally been discussed (and it’s not a done deal by a long shot – they’ve still to finalize the environmental impact report, and the number of people opposing it is growing daily, much to the racing corporation’s dismay) we staggered out to our car and headed for Denny’s because it was either that or IHOP as the only things open that late. They brought us our food and we ate it blearily, interrupted only by another pair of people who stopped by our table, having left the meeting a little bit after us, sporting their yellow t-shirts too.

It’s funny, this being an adult thing. You don’t think about it when you are young – all the responsibility. It’s not just that you have to have a job and own a house and mow the lawn and repair the leaking faucets and pay the bills. You also have to pay attention to the world around you, and as much as you might despise the dimwitted morons who are elected to the highest offices in the country, what happens in your own town is sometimes far more important, because that will have a far greater impact on your daily life than (nearly) anything the aforementioned dimwitted morons could ever do.

Yesterday was our fourth anniversary. It seems a little odd, when I think about it, that we�ve been married for four years, because for some reason it does not feel as if it has been that long. I can mark the date in April when we moved into this house and say �yes, we�ve been here four years�, and that feels right, but when it comes to other dates that indicate the passage of time, nope, it doesn�t work. It�s like my oldest nephew�s birthday, which was this past weekend. He turned seven. Seven! He�s starting second grade this fall. How can he possibly that old? Worse yet, the two little tow-headed twin boys who served as ring bearers at his mom and dad�s wedding (who were, now that I think about it, younger than him) graduated from high school in June and this fall are going off to college. How did this happen? I think sometimes time moves faster in pockets of space, and slower in others, and somehow we move through them without ever knowing it, until suddenly poof, toddlers are going to college and babies are going to second grade and newlyweds are having their fourth anniversary and so on. I feel old.

It was a nice anniversary, though. We went out to a fondue place and had cheese fondue with pesto, and chocolate fondue with caramel and pecans, and a whole lot of other food in between. And because we are both nerds and we love our gadgets, we decided that our joint anniversary present to each other would be a Roomba. So we put in our order and soon, oh yes, very soon, our very own little robotic vacuum cleaner will arrive. Maybe this isn�t everyone�s version of romance, but it works for us.

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They send us our vacation balance at work once every three months and when I got mine recently I was a little bowled over by how much I�ve got saved up. We�re both trying to be a little miserly with the vacation hours in preparation for the trip to Ireland (and we are actually, finally going to go next year � we�ve both talked to our respective bosses so maybe this might actually happen), but still, I realized if I didn�t start using up some of those accumulated hours I was going to lose them. So I decided to take today off from work and my knitting mom and I drove down to Oakland for the TKGA convention. Or rather, we drove down there because they were having a convention, which meant they also were sponsoring a great big room filled with vendors selling yarn and needles and pretty, pretty things to make all us fiber addicts very happy.

I bought yarn, because one of my favorite vendors was there and I simply could not just walk by without purchasing something. And this time I even bought yarn with a pattern and a specific purpose! Of course then I succumbed to the lure of 50% off sale at another booth, and in a weak moment bought every skein available of a gorgeous cotton slub yarn in beautiful shades of copper and silver and brown, and I did this knowing full well that knitting with cotton makes my hands hurt, but sometimes you just have to ignore common sense and indulge.

This morning, now that Richard has finally plowed his way through all six books and I could safely snag the Half-Blood Prince back again (and also finally *talk* about it because no one else I know has finished it yet either, for crying out loud!), I sat down at breakfast and proceeded to read through the last four chapters in more depth. The first time I read it, by the time I reached that point I was reading and skimming so fast because I was sure that somehow, what happened hadn’t really actually happened; that it was all just a big elaborate ruse put together by Dumbledore and Snape and that eventually everything would right itself and would be well. But it doesn’t, of course, as any of us who have read the book have discovered, and I found myself tearing up a little as I reached the ending. Earlier this week, watching the trailer for the Goblet of Fire, I choked up as Dumbledore uttered his fateful words about how there would come a time when everyone had to choose between what is easy and what is right. And even though I knew that what he said was true and that what happened was meant to happen, it didn’t make it any easier to hear.

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As I was settling on the couch this evening with the latest afghan-in-progress, a movement caught my attenton. Just at the edge of my line of vision I saw a tortoiseshell tail – the base where it hit the body a little ruffled and raggedy looking, and for the briefest moment I thought it was Rebecca. It wasn’t, of course, since she’s been buried in the flower bed for nearly a year, but sometimes it really hits me, how a creature so ornery and small can leave such a huge hole when she is gone.

I am not ashamed to admit that over the past week I have been counting down the days until the newest installment in the Harry Potter saga was released. We preordered our book back in November or December, pretty much the moment the release date was announced, and it made me positively giddy to receive the little announcement in my email earlier this week that the book was still on track to arrive at our house on Saturday, no later than 7pm. I will admit that I did begin to question our decision to preorder, since Saturday morning we went to CostCo to stock up on a few things, and greeting us at the door as we walked in were mammoth stacks of brand new Harry Potter books in their lovely green book jackets. But I told myself I would be strong, and once we returned from shopping, I spent the rest of the afternoon either downstairs, where I’d be sure to hear the doorbell, or at least the scuffling on the porch when the UPS delivery person dropped it off, or upstairs refreshing the UPS tracking site, muttering about how it didn’t show anything at all useful.

Because, it is important to point out here, they told me that they shipped it UPS. Which means that the package was supposed to show up on our *front porch*. So I was a little miffed when I went to check the regular mail at around 5-ish, and there it was, waiting for me, who knows how many precious reading hours wasted.

We’d planned a 20’s and 30’s group potluck dinner for Saturday night and couldn’t really skip it due to Harry Potter (although don’t think the thought didn’t cross my mind at least once or twice). And it was a fun evening – a small group, but animated. We ate cajun food – red beans and rice, crawfish pie, shrimp etouffee. I made apple cinnamon sweet potato muffins because I was feeling extremely unadventerous, and besides, I figured since the recipe came from the Louisiana Sweet Potato website, it at least qualified as being from the region. There was decadently delicious chocolate cake, and some kind of pie whose filling was made primarily of sugar and butter and wow, and we chatted and played Flux, which is a marvelous card based game I urge everyone to go out and buy right now, and we didn’t get done until after 9:30, which meant we didn’t get home until around 10, and if it wasn’t for the fact that the brand new book was waiting for me, I would have just gone straight to bed because I had to be up rather early the next morning, seeing as how I was the accompanist for the 8am service at church. But I’d started the book the second I got it out of the mailbox (I literally was tearing open the box as I walked hastily back to the house), and managed to get about a third of the way through during the slightly-less-than-one-hour between when I found it and when we had to leave. So when we got home I dumped everything rather unceremoniously on the counter and picked up the book and did not stop until slightly less than 2 hours later, when I was finally done. If you were keeping track, yes that means it took me just about 3 hours to read it (which is better than for the last book, but the last book was over 800 pages and this one was only 600 and something, so it makes sense).

Normally I would have handed it to Richard and he would have read it immediately (or maybe, due to the late hour, he would have waited until the next day to read it), but on Saturday morning – yes the *day* it was released – he had the bright idea that he wanted to read through the first five books again, and so he is not going to be even touching this new one for several days. DAYS, people!

I am going nuts here. No one at work has read it because while I love my job and my coworkers are awesome and in every other way this is a great place to work, I am the only nerd there, I am also the only one who is interested in science fiction and fantasy and anything else like that. At The Company to Be Nicknamed Later, there was a little group of us who would all gather together the morning after a new episode of Star Trek: Enterprise (back when it first started and we didn’t realize how stupid it was going to become) and we would talk about what had happened. They were the sort of people I could have babbled excitedly to about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or the fact that I finally managed to do something really new and cool with SQL or VBA, and they would have *understood*. Here at this new job I get the distinct feeling that the rest of them sometimes look at me as if they want to pat me on the head and then give me a pepperoni pizza and a comic book and send me back to play with all the other little nerds (if there were any other nerds to play with. Sniffle). So there is no one I can talk to about the book, and about my speculations about how some people who appear evil really aren’t, and how I think the title of the book really had very little to do with the actual plot, and a million other things that I will not mention here for fear of spoiling it for the rest of you slackers who did not drop everything and read the whole book in one sitting (ha ha). Gah.

A while ago, when making plans for the next batch of gift knitting, Richard asked for an afghan. So I let him pick out the yarn he liked, and then I sat down and spent a few days hashing out a mix of likely candidates for patterns and designs. I cast on and ripped it out about five times before I finally got something I liked, and then spent about a month working on it (along with other knitting projects, of course, because one can never have only one thing on the needles).

I finally finished it this weekend, but didn’t get around to weaving in all the ends and tossing it into the washing machine to soften it up and let it ‘settle’ into its final size. The pictures are a little grainy, but you get the gist of it. I think I did a pretty good job – cables only look difficult, but they’re really just time consuming.

I suppose I shouldn’t make light of the amount of work that was involved in this. After all, this did entail me having to keep track of about six pages of typed notes and instructions and charts, including having to reverse the trees cable pattern so that it would be identical on both ends of the completed project. Considering that none of the cable motifs I chose had the same number of rows, this meant that I had to keep track of where I was in up to five different patterns at a time. All things considered, the fact that I only made one mistake in wrapping the cables (and it’s near the bottom so you can’t really tell anyway unless you know exactly what to look for) is pretty amazing.

Anyway, here are some pictures. Every single one of these cable patterns is available for free online somewhere (more info on yarn and where I got the designs available in my cross-post to Knit One, Purr Too, here).

The full length shot

Close-up of the center cable pattern, and the ‘filler’ section of tile stitch for the middle.

Close-up of the Twining Trees motif