How Do Americans Celebrate?

For the U.S. readers, do you celebrate Thanksgiving as a heartwarming time to be with friends and family? Do you take the day as an opportunity to give thanks for all you have? Or do you dread the day as one where you're forced to travel to get to family that you can't stand being with, sublimating feelings by stuffing your face with rich foods?

Anyone In The Middle?
Most folks I know either cherish this time of year, or dread it, but most don't have mediocre feelings about it.

I personally enjoy this time of year. I don't spend time with family, although that's not the reason I enjoy it so much (I actually enjoy being with both mine and Thaddeus' family). We go out to dinner with our friend Charles at a restaurant in an old stone building on the Delaware River. The main dining room has a large stone fireplace on either side of the long room, and the food is always predictably good. Other than that, we just relax at home and take long naps with the cat.

Now that's something to be thankful for.

Current Knitting/Crocheting
I started to do some more work on the alpaca herd jacket, but realized I didn't have my measuring tape with me, and I was getting close enough to the top of the back that I didn't want to risk overshooting the length before getting to the shoulder shaping.

Fortunately, I had the lace tablecloth with me, and I got a little more done on that.



With 80 stars finished and only 60 more to go (not to mention all the smaller/filler motifs), I'm feeling like I'm making good progress.

Kiwi Remnants
Marilyn mentioned on her blog that James had come bearing gifts. I don't know what possessed that boy to schlep a sack-full of New Zealand goodies, but he was extremely generous. In addition to Pineapple Lumps and other New Zealand candies, he also brought some lovely fiber all the way from his homeland.



I couldn't possibly insult him by not spinning at least some of it while he was there, so I started whipping off some singles with this beautiful colored wool.



If I end up having enough, I think this yarn would make outrageous socks to wear with jeans. We'll see how it goes, and even if I'm slightly short of fiber for socks, I could always do the toes and heals in a fuschia or phosphorescent orange. They would certainly look fine with one of the possum-fur gifts that James gave me. I will leave this gift up to the reader's imagination.

James' dad also does some very fine woodwork, and Thaddeus and I both got somethings that he made by hand.

Like I said, he was extremely generous.

New Blogs
Ravelry has exposed me to a number of interesting people and blogs, and my visit with Liza also introduced me to a blog I had never heard of, as well as an associated book.

The first blog is Tychoish. He's a knitter who has commented on this blog for a while and does some lovely stranded knitting sweaters. He also blogs about absolutely incoherent concepts in computer technology and writing that I find compellingly interesting, despite the fact that I don't understand a word.

Liza has been holding out on us, but not telling us about Jane Brocket's blog, Yarnstorm. It's about yarn, knitting, crocheting and food and the photography is spectacular. How could that be bad?

Jane also has a wonderful book that I will be getting directly from Amazon.co.uk, because it's not yet available in the states. The book is called Gentle Art of Domesticity, and it's a wonderful book...even better than her blog from what I can tell by the browsing of it I got at Liza's.