Happy Birthday, Principessa

Today is our college girl's 19th birthday.

She got her grades a few days ago -- 3.5 GPA! Especially impressive with her list of extracurricular activities. Great job, princess! We're proud of you.

We've just returned from a family reunion in honor of my grandmother's 90th birthday. We had a total of 31 people at a lake resort in southwest Missouri for 5 days -- 3 of her 4 children, with spouses, 6 of her 7 grandchildren & spouses, and 11 or 12 great-grandchildren. (Tricky little devils -- they're hard to count.) They came from Oregon, California, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Illinois, and Missouri.

Vacation knitting was a making-it-up-as-I-go, hoping-I-have-enough-yarn tank top.

I bought the yarn last year from ebay seller Over the Rainbow Yarns; it is Handpainted Rainbow Cotton yarn; the color is called Skygarden.

Vacation yarn purchase -- just one skein of Colinette JitterBug, in Bright Charcoal. Not that the yarn store (Simply Fibers in Springfield, MO) didn't have anything else I wanted... I'd have gladly taken some of everything! Just trying to exercise a little restraint, here. Besides, I'll be going back -- my daughter goes to school in Springfield.

I think this is going to be a plain vanilla toe-up sock (pair of socks, of course!)

Snowflakes in May

These are the Snowflake eyelet socks, from Susan's Spinning Bunny. They were the January shipment for her Sock Hop sock club. I'm just a little behind ;-)

The yarn is a lovely soft angora/merino blend. The eye-of-partridge heel works well with this design.

I was fingerprinted yesterday, for my background check for the school district. I was surprised and relieved to find there was no ink involved -- instead, they use a scanner, like a small copy machine, and just place your fingers on the glass. They can even do the one where they roll each finger tip from one side to the other. Ain't technology amazing. The last time I was fingerprinted was for my bank teller job, 16 years ago, and it was done the old-fashioned, messy way.

Got a little catching up to do

Why is it so hard to keep this up to date? Maybe I need to have a certain time each day that I do a blog post.

Absorba has been done since about 2 weeks ago. I immediately put it to use, and the family seems to like it. It's very thick and soft underfoot. I've even washed & dried it -- I think it took 3 dryer cycles to get it dry! (I dry everything on low heat, so maybe it wouldn't have taken as long on higher heat.)

The pattern is in Mason-Dixon Knitting. I really didn't have the problems I thought I might with hand pain. Once I got it onto the KnitPicks needles, I took off & finished it rather quickly. It weighs about 2 1/4 pounds, according to my kitchen scale. I suppose you could make 4 of these out of 9 1-pound cones of Peaches & Creme double worsted weight, which you can order directly from Elmore-Pisgah.

My Stonington Shawl is to the point where I need to start the edging, which is knitted on sideways.

This has been a very relaxing knit -- garter stitch, easy patterning in the center, no patterning on the borders.

My big news (boy, is this going to cut into my knitting time...) is that the local school district has hired me to teach high school math next year. I have just received notice that I have enough college math hours to accept the position; I need to take 8 more hours of math courses, plus the education courses required for alternative certification. I'm hoping I can get quite a bit of it done online. After 15 years as a stay-at-home mom (I worked for a little over a year as a bank teller before my 2nd child was born), this is going to be a big change for me. I'm excited -- I know a lot of the kids & teachers & administrators, so at least I won't be a stranger. I have really enjoyed Jean's "What I learned in school" posts on her blog (Needles, Notes and News) as she has been doing her student teaching the past 2 weeks. Since I'm going to be jumping in the deep end without my little water wings this fall....