Back To Work

Having off two weeks with no travel plans was a nice preview of what I hope retirement is like.

Don't Get Me Wrong
We ate at lots of great restaurants and took a number of interesting day-trips, went to the gym a lot and went shopping for stuff. I can't imagine I could keep up that kind of pace during retirement, but it was a wonderful way to spend two weeks.

Of course, I also knitted, spun and quilted, in addition to filing my Federal, State (2 states for me), and local taxes for Thaddeus and I. Actually, I also had to file my 2004 local taxes, because I never did it last year...so it was a lot of tax filing.

Current Knitting
Despite working on the Accidental Shawl quite a bit, I haven't made a lot of visible progress.



I'm hoping to finish this project by Friday of this week, so I need to put a little muscle into it.

Fiber Distractions
In addition to all the fiber-related activities during vacation, I also did a bit of reading. I finished A Million Little Pieces by James Frey.



I knew all about his lying in the book and as a result, to Oprah, about his criminal record, but I didn't care, as I was enjoying the book a lot (and I usually DESPISE Oprah Book Club books...I think her choices in books suck). But ended up hating the book quite a bit by the end. I'm convinced that his description of beating a priest was a complete lie, or at least the circumstances around it, and I found it offensive that his most shameful act during his addiction seemed to be written as a self-aggrandizing, homophobic, hate-filled ploy to get readers on his side.

For anyone that knows anything about addiction and recovery, this is just another author describing his experiences while still in "self-will run riot" mode.

Highly NOT recommended.

Readers' Questions/Comments
Regarding the pattern stitch for the Accidental Shawl, Marcia asks, "Should there be a k3/p3 within asterisks somewhere?".

Yes, she's exactly right, my pattern instructions were wrong. They should have been:

Cast on a multiple of 9 sts plus 3 (e.g. 12, 21, 30, etc.)
Row 1: * K3, (YO, K2Tog) 3 times, rep from * to last three sts, K3
Row 2: * P3, (YO, P2Tog) 3 times, rep from * to last three sts, P3

Thanks for checking my pattern stitch.