Long Time Gone

The last few months have been crazy, crazy, and as a result, it has been a very long time since I posted.  So here is the five minute catch-up:

Went to Colombia in February.  Got to work with these awesome people.

They took me salsa dancing (yes, I salsa dance, but only in the Carribean) and to hear Mariachis

And to a lunch literally on the river where these guys serenaded us.

Then on a quick trip to see Cartagena de Indes, where we saw cool stuff like this...

And this...

Along with some medieval implements of torture:

In March, my house flooded. A utility worker opened the wrong combination of valves, which resulted in large quantities of canal water flooding our lobby and several units, including mine.  All my stuff got wet (the downstairs stuff, at least)...

so now my walls look like this...

and I have no kitchen, because all my cabinets and appliances got wet. 

We are mid-renovation now, and I have been trying to balance travel to exotic places like Nashville, Woods Hole, and Durham with selecting new cabinets, countertops, appliances and flooring, all while having no kitchen or living room, and all the downstairs stuff piled in the upstairs while I sort through the wet stuff.

It was all going fairly well, until I remembered I had signed up for a sock swap and had to get something mailed by the end of April.  Sadly, I remembered this mid-April, decided I would try and do a quick, project that I narrowed down to these three yarn choices:



In the end, I chose neither and did something else entirely, but I did send one of these along as a swap goodie.

I love how the final socks turned out, and I think my partner will love them, but I did finish three days late :(   So for the first time, I am a bad swapper and I hope my partner is not too upset.

I ended up liking the swap socks so much, I decided to make a pair for myself while I still had the pattern memorized.

In the meantime, I will get back to the fabulously colorful thigh-high stockings I started for my niece, foolishly choosing a singles yarn in a light fingering weight, which means my row gauge is much smaller than I am used to, so there are many more rounds and it is taking forever.

She asked for the wildest colors I could find and the tallest knee-socks I could knit, so we will see how it all comes out.

I should also probably get back to my camino alpaca lace knee-highs at some point as well.  They came out quite wide following the pattern, so they don't reach the knees or stay up even on my wide calves. I am procrastinating picking out the lace so I can change the overall number of increases.

I will pause now for a small moment of sadness since this weekend is MD sheep and wool, and it is the first one I have missed in several years, but with my renovation nightmare plus conference earlier than usual, there was just no way to make it work.  Hopefully I will be back next year.

That's all for now, folks. At least until I upload my swap sock photos.