Now is the time to panic?

FWP, I know, especially given all the mayhem that Sandy caused yesterday for friends all along the east coast. But I have a midterm tonight, and I meant to study some more today, and I managed to misplace my textbook! ARGH. I'm pretty sure it's in the back of my car though, so I'll be able to study in the time between dropping the kids off at their dad's and the exam starting.

The panorama outside my window has been pretty impressive today... Have you ever seen a time-lapse film of clouds moving across the sky over several hours or days? It's been like a constant stream of that all day. Gorgeous, but very distracting :)

I'm at a point on the Tempting sweater where I'm not comfortable moving on without supervision, if not outright assistance, so I've been working on Rob's kitchen curtain (remember the kitchen curtain? I'm still working on the kitchen curtain). I finally finished the patterned part, so now I'm just doing the garter-stitch border at the top, which has to be long enough to fold over and seam, because he wants the curtain rod to be covered (I was tempted to just thread it through eyelets, but it's his curtain, right? He's the one who's going to have to look at it every day). Which means miles of garter stitch. :) Which means finding new movies to watch to distract my brain while I knit endless miles of garter stitch!

The Fiber Festival of New England is this coming weekend and there was a brief moment when I thought, "Hey, Massachusetts isn't all that far away, I bet I could convince the girls to drive down." That was just before common sense smacked me across the face and said, "Hey stupid, you're still high off Rhinebeck fumes if you think any of you wants another road trip this soon, or that you can afford more yarn!" That common sense bitch is on my list now, let me tell you. As IF there can ever be enough yarn! I mean, the kids' bedrooms aren't even filled yet!

Yes, I admit that I have far too much yarn. I admit that I desperately need to go on a yarn diet, or else my family will no longer have space to sleep, bathe or eat. I admit it, I'm a yarn hoarder.

It's simply incentive to knit all the things! (a bit more quickly, perhaps).

Shamelessly stolen from someone who stole it from Allie at Hyperbole and a Half (linked in sidebar).

*ahem* Midterm first!

Rhinebeck insanity!!! :D

So on Friday afternoon, the four of us (Kari, Sue, Sarah and I) left for Rhinebeck, NY to attend the New York Sheep and Wool Festival (aka "Rhinebeck" in knitting circles). It was AWESOME!!!! For everyone else's take on Rhinebeck, visit Two Tangled Skeins, Sue and Kari's podcast!

We stopped for dinner in Herkimer, NY at a sweet little 50s style diner called Crazy Otto's Empire Diner. If you're ever driving through upstate New York and have the opportunity to stop in, you will not regret it! The food was fantastic, the prices were reasonable, and so much memorabilia!! Sue was thrilled because there was a Marilyn poster on the ceiling just behind our table. License plates, movie posters, old tole signs.... just amazing! And the staff were super-friendly too. I plan on taking Rob and the kids there, maybe in the spring, because he'll love it!

There may have possibly been an incident regarding someone's forgotten luggage and a midnight trip to Walmart, but other than that, the first night was relatively uneventful :D Saturday morning dawned bright and early, and we fed ourselves and headed for the fair. SO MANY CARS. The fun started immediately inside the gates, as we ran into Ysolda Teague, freaked out, and took Sue and Kari's picture with her! I may have developed a slight addiction to sock yarn, because that's pretty much all I bought on Saturday. I got a calendar from Sheep Incognito, which I had signed by the lovely artist, Conni Tögel.

Then we wandered a bit and I got a skein of Gale's Art sock yarn in the Mars colourway which is going to be my Falling Leaves socks for the KAL in November, three skeins of Blue Moon Fiber Arts' Socks That Rock at The Fold's booth (the owner is hilarious and a really nice guy!) in "The Winter Blues", "Jasper" and "Ochroid" colourways. I also grabbed a sock pattern by the very talented Adrienne Zu at The Fold - It was called "Lynn"... I had to. And last, but certainly not least - because this stuff is amazing and you have to experience holding it to believe how freaking awesome it is - I stopped by Bittersweet Woolery to talk to the lovely Miss Tina for a while, and I ended up finding a skein of her Guilty Pleasures yarn in the "Ash On My Tongue" colourway that is so soft, so pretty, so MINE. I loved it so much, I went back the next day for more, but I'll talk about that in a second.

Saturday evening, we ended up eating at a Friendly's in Saugerties. Food was good, cheap and plentiful, and other than being seated near a family with FAR too many children for the amount of supervision the adults were providing, it was pretty good. Then we got a 12-pack of vodka coolers and things got silly. And that's all I'm gonna say about that :D (For the record, I don't drink at all. Sue remained almost entirely sober and Kari didn't.)

Sunday morning, we headed back over to Rhinebeck, I bought some lovely sheep milk cheese (so incredibly good!), bought more Guilty Pleasures from Miss Tina at Bittersweet, and picked up four skeins of a cotton blend that sadly has no tags or even the name of the store anywhere. *sigh* I honestly can't remember, since it's the second last thing we did before leaving. Kari wanted to visit a booth where some lovely older Welsh ladies were selling amazing laceweight and shawls, and who did we bump into but the Yarn Harlot herself! Of course, we accosted her, somewhat unconvincingly told her we REALLY weren't stalking her, and got her autograph for a friend at home. She laughed and told us that we were Canadian, therefore mostly harmless, so we couldn't really be stalkers ;)

Shortly thereafter, we all piled ourselves and our plethora of purchases back into Sue's jeep and headed for home. All in all, it was a fantastic weekend and I can't wait for the next roadtrip! Let it be noted that Sir Pugglesworth was so excited to see Kari when we got home that he ran around Sue's house in a mindless craze for a full ten minutes before calming down enough for Kari to clip his leash on!

And rest :)

Absenteeism...

I know I've been a terrible blogger... I haven't posted since my birthday (almost two weeks ago now). I've been in a very negative frame of mind, and I haven't wanted to pollute the blog with whining and bitching. So I've kept silent.

BUT OMG YOU GUYS.....

Sue and Sarah and Kari and I are heading to RHINEBECK this weekend!!!!! (That's the NYS Sheep and Wool Festival, for any non-knitters who actually bother reading my blog). There will be yarn, and sheeps and road trip and food and yarn, and OMG there will be so much yarn!!!! :D

I do have to be good though because my stashing down isn't going very well. I was so proud of myself for giving a garbage bag of yarn to Sue a few weeks ago. Then one day when I was at her place, she pulled out this bin. It was HER destash stuff, and she had Kari and I pick through it. Ugh. I brought home more than I'd left her with LOL Add to that a friend who was moving to Italy who destashed stuff she didn't want to move, and a lady who gave me an ENORMOUS garbage bag full of yarn for charity projects a few months ago, and I've acquired a LOT of yarn in the last few months. (We won't mention what I bought at Janie's closing sale.)

My plans are for a skein or two of sock yarn and beyond that, who knows? My entire packed baggage? My knitting bag LOL I managed to fit my clothes, camera, hair stuff, knitting, and everything else into my KNITTING BAG. (Exception being the "Rhinebeck sweater".... it's not finished, not by a long shot, nor is it being abandoned. It's coming with us, incomplete, in the hopes that I may come close to finishing it before we go home LOL) I have misplaced the hat I was knitting, so as a "backup" project, I brought the sock which is in time-out. I cast on way too many stitches (following the Yarn Harlot's "number" system, which apparently doesn't work over a certain size, and I'm over that certain size) and it'd fit both my feet if I stretched it. So I'm going to frog it and possibly start over.

And on that note, RHINEBECK!!!!!!! :D

Not mine... I borrowed it from here.

Nobody said it was easy....

This morning, Rob rallied the troops and had the kids wake me up with hand-drawn birthday cards. This is Zachary's:

It's simple and careful and so totally him :) He's always most comfortable working in monochrome, and although he sometimes experiments with micron pens and colours, this is his innate style and it's one of the things I love most about him.

This is Skye's:

I'm.... err.... a bit disturbed by this one. In fact, I think this particular portrait of me will figure heavily in nightmares for the next little while LOL I'm not sure who thought it was wise to hand a destructive eleven-year-old a set of coloured sharpies, but.. um.... I think maybe I'll encourage her art teacher to teach a few lessons on perspective and perhaps facial proportions :) That said, it's pink and frilly and totally Skye, so even though it's a bit horrifying, I love this one too :D

The last two weeks have been a bit of a blur. There was prepping for the trip to Washington, D.C. (which I got home from on Friday), there was school, there was work, there was swimming lessons for the kids, there were flights, there was a road trip to Montreal, there were funerals, there were babies, there was knitting, and there was insanity. Suffice to say, I'm exhausted and thrilled and sad and just looking forward to things slowing down a bit.

Rob flew in on Friday about an hour after I flew in from Washington, DC (awesome trip, btw, but it was a training course for work, so not much to tell - I did get to meet two friends I've known from the internet for over eight years). We had an awesome weekend, he got his extra Thanksgiving, we had a 90 minute hike in the woods with the kids on Sunday, and then we took him to the airport this evening and watched him walk away to get on a plane to go home. Which sucked balls. I can't complain too much though, because I already have my plane tickets to go see him for American Thanksgiving, but it still sucks to have to be contented with the odd weekend here or there. He's worth it though :) He made my birthday pretty awesome.

I turned the heel on my first sock after I kicked myself in the butt a bit. Ended up taking me no time at all and it turned out awesome! Then I worked on my Tempting sweater for a bit and tried it on. It's actually a bit loose, so I went down a needle size (I've reached the point just under the bust). I'm really liking the way it's turning out, and I'm about at the half-way point. I'm hoping to get a bit more work done on it during the day (lunch hours). Kari finished her Rhinebeck sweater and is working on Sue's, and Sarah finished hers, so I've got to come up with SOMETHING. So socks and sweaters for the near future :) Curtain is on hold until I finish the sweater.

And now I'm going to go crash and it's going to suck, because I haven't been in the bedroom since Rob left. :( Here's to the next ten years passing really quickly!