Some handdyed yarn porn

There haven't been many pictures here lately, so here's some sock yarn that I dyed for a trade with someone on the Knittyboard:

I'm really happy with how it came out. The colors remind me a lot of the southwest, and if I wanted to give this colorway a name, it would be "Painted Desert". I hope the recipient likes it!

This makes me think of the trips I've taken out west, which then makes me think of the structural problems out at Dinosaur National Monument that have caused them to close the main visitor center. If you've never been there, it is an incredibly cool place. The visitor center is attached to a wall of fossils that they've excavated. You walk in and there's this HUGE wall full of something like 1500 fossil bones, exactly the way they were found. Yeah, there's other stuff to do there, like hiking and rafting... but really, people go to see the fossils. What a great place to take a kid during the dinosaur obsession phase. I hope they can get the structural problems fixed.

I recently joined a wine group, and last night, some of us went to Boordy Vineyards. There's a Saturday night outdoor concert series there, and last night's entertainment was the Junkyard Saints, a local Zydeco band. As I was driving out there, the sky was getting more and more stormy-looking, and then it started POURING. They have a barn at the winery, and they move the concerts in there if it rains, but I was still glad that the rain had stopped by the time I got there. It ended up being a gorgeous night. I was the first one there from our group, and while I was waiting, the two guys who had been behind me in line invited me to sit with their ski club if my group ended up bailing, which was really nice of them.

My group did show up a few minutes later, and we had a great time! There was wine and food and music and dancing... my kind of night. I didn't even touch the knitting I had with me. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out what Zydeco music actually is, which was difficult because the Zydeco band kept playing very non-Zydeco things like "Low Rider". A couple of the people are also in a hiking/outdoors club, and invited me to go tubing next Saturday. I'm not sure that tubing is the best activity for me (I can't swim), but hiking is something that I've wanted to do for a while. And regardless, I'll definitely be doing more things with this wine group.