Two things

One, I am quite excited to find out that book two of Karl Schroeder's Virga series is coming out in August. I'll be looking for geeky fun things to read after HP7, and this will do nicely. :)

Two, after an 8-day-long work week (I'll be more careful about which Sundays I sign up for from now on), I was standing at the return counter today at 4:45, feet absolutely killing me, and the returns pile getting no smaller. Someone dropped off a stack of romance paperbacks, including one called "The Sheikh's Bartered Bride". Ok, that's not an unusual romance title. Every male in these stories is a sheikh, or a prince, or an Italian or Texan billionaire with a diamond mine. And then I scanned the book in, and noticed that our system has it typoed as "The Sheikh's Battered Bride". *snort* That was PRECISELY the laugh I needed. :)

(By the way, if you think I'm kidding, here's our first page of search results: Sheikh Surgeon (a doctor AND a sheikh--bonus!), Love-Slave to the Sheikh, Bedded by the Desert King, At the Sheikh's Command, Taken by the Sheikh, Traded to the Sheikh, Stolen by the Sheikh, Possessed by the Sheikh, The Sheikh's Innocent Bride, The Sheikh's Disobedient Bride, In the Arms of the Sheikh, The Fierce and Tender Sheikh, The Ice Maiden's Sheikh.)

Wait... what?

Sat down tonight with my 2nd sock to see how much I have left to go... and I was shocked to see that it's just 5 lace repeats left plus the toe. No idea how that happened, but I say, "Awesome!" Even if I only work on it on breaks at work, I should be done in the next week.

And then I can cast on for something else... :D

Thanks, gang

First off, I love my friends. You all are such a wonderful, caring, supportive group of people. I think I may have alarmed a few of you, and I'm so sorry about that. I'll make you some felted bags as a mea culpa... :)

Today was a good day; I knew there was one on the horizon somewhere!

I got to work and found a box on my desk. A box containing this:






I splurged a little bit and bought myself some Colinette Shimmer Five. I stumbled on a fantastic sale on it at Flying Fingers... for me, 40% off is the only way to buy Colinette and not feel rampantly awful about it. This is the "Toscana" colorway, which I thought was simply gorgeous. Along with my order, FF also sent a retractable tape measure keychain, and a handwritten thank you note on a sheep postcard--a nice little surprise. Any trip that takes me anywhere near Tarrytown will include a stop at their bricks-and-mortar store.

And here's what I'm doing with the Shimmer Five:


I didn't do a good job of explaining this sweater to folks at work... see, it's summery... even though it was in a winter issue of Vogue Knitting...

I also got my copy of Victorian Lace Today from the fine folks of the Harford County Public Library system. We don't have it in our system yet, so I got to order it from another county (library types, this was my first ever personal Marina request... very exciting stuff). OH MY, it makes me want to start wearing shawls.

AND I spent 2 hours of my afternoon at our SRC kickoff, where I helped kids with some travel-themed artwork. How can you not love that?

Still here

I'm getting absolutely no knitting done. It's been an aggravating and frustrating couple of weeks, but I'm under orders from a friend to "go be happy", which right now involves as much gaming as I can take before my eyes start to cross. Aggressive = therapeutic. I've dinged 6 times in the last week and a half; only 36 more lvls before I'm actually useful to my guildmates. Nothing like joining a guild where almost everyone has a lvl 70 main and realizing that, besides begging for instance runs, you can't do anything with them for another month and a half (and that's unbelievably optimistic... I can't keep up the leveling pace that I'm on right now).

I owe Sarah a belated "thank you!" for the magnetic chart keeper and the *awesome* box bag that she made:

Love it! The fabric is so cheery. :)

I'm inspired by all the sewing that the people around me have been doing lately, and I think I need to re-learn how to sew. I may have figured out why my machine has been breaking thread... It's about 30 years old, and I don't think the needle has ever been changed. I brought home a couple of basic sewing books, and "dull needle" was listed as a possible cause for thread breakage. We'll see if that helps.

I'm bummed that I couldn't go on the trip to the Mannings on Saturday with the gals... I had to work, and it looks like I missed a great time spinning and petting various animals and buying things and scaring waitresses. Hopefully things will work out so I can go next time!

A group of us went for dinner last night at the Red Parrot Asian Cafe in Columbia. Good food (yummy Thai basil chicken for me), but bizarre service. Mochi ice cream, by the way, is a ball of sticky rice filled with ice cream. Yes, I'm so much of a dork that I looked it up on Wikipedia...

A post-dinner photo from Lolly:


After dinner, we hung out and did our knitting thing, and I managed to get to the heel flap of my sock. Maybe I'll be more inspired, now that it won't just be round after round of this repetitive lace pattern. Very pretty, very easy, but kind of boring; I've done this same 6-stitch repeat 470 times now (270 total on sock #1, plus 200 so far on sock #2).