Sweetpea is pretty damned happy to be at Wintergrass again. The 2020 festival was the very last public thing we did before the pandemic hit two years ago.
I’ve got the knitting planned, we have reservations for most of our meals taken care of. I’m pretty damned happy to be here, too.
Wintergrass! We’re headed to Bellevue later today for the whole weekend of bluegrass music.
Sweetpea is ready.
I have enough knitting packed to last through about three months of bluegrass. And a spindle and fiber, just because I can.
Excuse me, I need to go make sure I packed underwear. Stay tuned for banjo updates!
It is DONE DONE DONE. I can't wait for blocking to show you a photo. I won't be able to finish this officially until I get home and have a few hours to block it properly, but I know you are all waiting on the edge of your seats to see it.
Sweetpea for scale. And one without the bear.
This is easily the most complicated thing I've ever made. Project Details will follow when the blocking is done.
One repeat of the edging left to do, then graft the beginning to the end, and block. This might actually get finished.
We're on the Oregon Coast with my sisters and spouses this week. Here are a few photos, all phone photos. The car was packed so full that there wasn't room for the camera bag.
And there has been a little studying going on. I'm hoping Sweetpea remembers it all.
Sweetpea has her passport ready and so do I! We leave in a couple of hours for our great adventure. We’re spending a little more than half of the two weeks on the Normandy and Brittany coasts, then several days in Paris before we come back home.
And as always, the house and vast yarn stash are well guarded by a crack team of house sitters, led by Lewey the Fearless Wonder Corgi, so don’t even think of showing up to sniff around the wool.
Depending on wireless access, I’ll post along the way!
Which stands for “Another Bloody Cathedral”, or “Another Bloody Castle”. We’re now 16 days into our vacation, with three more full days of the cruise left, then we’re staying in Budapest another couple of days, then home. I can’t possibly do a blog post for each stop on the cruise, since I just had to dump a nearly full 8 GB photo card off my camera so we can finish the trip. That’s way too many photos to show you all. So here are the highlights. Get yourself a beverage before you start…
Cologne, or Koln. Magnificent cathedral. Of all the ABCs we’ve seen, it’s my favorite. Gothic excess out the wazoo.
It wouldn’t fit in one photo, so you get two.
We had a glass blowing demo on board one morning. He was a comedian as well as a glass artist.
Cruising through the Rhine Gorge. Lots of ABCs here.
That was taken at the Residenz Palace in Wurzburg. I’m not showing you a photo of the Palace, it looks just like a humongous castle and a church combined.
Teddy Bear shop in Rothenburg:
I found a new friend for Sweetpea. He doesn’t have a name yet, his ear tag says Fynn, but I think he needs a German name, don’t you? Any suggestions?
I had a birthday, and shared it with about 140 or so new friends!
This was in Bamberg. I wanted a photo of the guys in front, but pretended to shoot the monument.
Nuremberg. What can I say? This was one of the most sobering places I’ve ever been. That’s Hitler’s rally grounds, never completed. What he was planning to build there would have been terrifying.
That’s of course the courtroom where the Nuremberg trials were held.
On a cheerier note, sunrise off our “balcony”.
ABC. This one is in Regensburg, or RRRRrrrrrrreghghensburgggg, as Jan, our cruise director pronounces it. This has probably been one of my favorite of the cities we’ve seen so far. This may have had something to do with it.
John continues to be amazed at my ability to find yarn. I was like one of those people who won a contest and could take home everything I could pick up in five minutesl
Do you want to see a closeup of what I found? I thought so. Here’s Sweetpea and not-Fynn to show you.
Doesn’t Sweetpea look happy? She might have found her true love. I should ask her, she probably knows his name.
Next up was Salzburg. It was a lovely city, and I could show you lots of photos of castles, old buildings, and churches. Here’s a different one:
That’s a bridge in the city over the river Inn, which runs into the Danube. The tradition in the city is for lovers to pledge their commitment to each other by placing a lock on the bridge with their names or initials on it. I asked the guide if they have to take it away if things don’t work out, which sounded like a reasonable question to me. She didn’t have an answer.
Last, but not least, finished socks! I’m not doing the whole “Finished Project” thing. I started these eons ago (February 29th, according to Ravelry). The yarn is Unique Sheep Tinsel Toes, color Primary Ink, same old pattern, size 2 mm Ivore needles.
It’s cocktail hour, so I need to go find a glass of wine. We’re finally on the beautiful Danube river, we head to Vienna tomorrow. Stay tuned!
Now there’s a catchy title for you! Let’s see, what’s going on at the Knitting Doctor Palace?
Hardly any knitting. I started a pair of mittens a couple weeks ago. Here’s where I am now.
Yes, I know my desk is a mess. But those are damned pretty mittens. And since it’s gotten cold here, I need them.
By the way, when I’m Queen Of The World, I’m going to make it a rule that every electronic device that needs a cable to hook to your computer has to use exactly the same cable. I’ve got a cable for the phone, a different cable for the Kindle, and yet another cable for the camera. They are all white, the end that hooks to the computer is identical, and they lack any other identifying markings, so I spend at least twenty minutes trying to find the right one every time I try to download photos or charge the Kindle. I should come up with a system for keeping track of them.
Back to the update.
I’ve written 28,327 words so far for NaNoWriMo. To stay on schedule, I should be at 28,333 by the end of today, so I’m in good shape. Of course the damned thing makes no sense, but that’s not the point.
I have to work every day next week including the whole weekend, except I have Thursday off. I have a dozen people that will be around my Thanksgiving table expecting to be fed, not expecting me to brag about how many words I’ve written, so I probably won’t get much writing done. I suppose I should spend the next few days banking some extra words. Blog posts don’t count in the Nano world. Neither does a swell turkey dinner with all the trimmings. And we’re having three kinds of dressing, since I’m an overachiever. Most of the family like bread dressing, but some are gluten intolerant*, so there will be wild rice dressing too. And there is a contingent of Southerners that insist on cornbread dressing, though I think that’s heresy. I suppose that makes me a Yankee. I farmed out the making of the cornbread dressing to one of those Southerners.
Last but not least, you’ve all met Sweetpea, or at least you have if you’ve been here awhile following me around in my travels. She joined our family back in about 1994, I think, and has been on every world travel trip we’ve taken since then. She’s gotten dragged around on buses, trains, automobiles, and airplanes. Oh, and boats. And river rafts, on a camping trip. She also went camping on a two week horse pack trip way back when in Montana. She traveled by pack mule on that trip. She has gotten dragged around the bedroom by a dog once, pawed by the cats, and I sleep with her. Every single night.
Up until today, she has never had a bath. There was that close call on the Mediterranean Cruise in 2006, here’s what I wrote then:
I promised a bear tale a few posts ago. Sweetpea is a rather unadventurous bear, at least up until now. Generally, she’s been satisfied to hang out in hotel rooms and ship cabins. Occasionally we get a room/cabin attendant with a sense of humor, and we find her perched in different places in our room when we get “home” at the end of the day. But that’s about as much fun as she usually has.
Until now. One day on the cruise we came back to our cabin after being out and around the ship, and found our room all cleaned up, as usual. Don’t ask me how, but the cabin attendants unerringly know when you’ve left the room, and whiz right in to tidy up and make the bed. This particular day I was rummaging around to find my knitting, and noticed that Sweetpea was gone. She was nowhere to be found. I rather frantically called the number listed on the card that our attendant had left. I found that she was on a break, and I had reached room service. They listened quite patiently to my rather lunatic-sounding story of the missing teddy bear, and I could almost hear the eye-rolling and snickering in the background, though the man on the phone was well-trained enough to not laugh out loud. He said he would look into it.
Not five minutes later there was a knock on the door. A young woman had rescued Sweetpea from the laundry, where she had apparently arrived wrapped up in our sheets. She was very happy to be home, and did not even think about having any more adventures for the entire rest of the trip.
She’s been looking more and more bedraggled looking as time went on, so I decided to give her a bath this morning. She’s drying out now, but John snapped a photo before she came out of the washer.
I can see why children are terrorized by their parents tossing their favorite companion in the wash. I paced nervously the whole time she was in the machine of death, but she did fine, and smells a whole lot better.
Enough stalling, I need to go make up some more words.
*Does anybody know if there is a way to make gluten free gravy? I’m pretty much a gravy making traditionalist, make the turkey stock from the inside parts, then do the flour thing in the turkey drippings and it all takes about a zillion hours to make, but boy I never get any complaints. Except it would be nice to have something without flour for the ones who can’t eat it. Any ideas?
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