Yarnivorous

G'day all! I have run up against a dilemma. A dilemma of Rather Large Proportions. Over the next two months, we want to go to Sock Summit, Europe and Australia. Australia is non-negotiable. Europe is non-negotiable for DH. We have a certain amount of income. That income, generated by my DH's work, can either take us up to Portland to Sock Summit for a rather long weekend of SS and sight-seeing (the SS and SS Portland trip) or I can go to Europe with DH. This is my dilemma: I either give up on going to the Sock Summit or I don't go to Europe with DH. This might be my one and only, last chance to go to the Sock Summit. If I lived overseas, I would not fly all the way to the US to go to the Sock Summit. I've never been to Europe and DH has long promised to take me. An alternative would be if some magic fairy waved her/his/its magic wand and conjured me up a job for a few weeks (minus the sock summit long weekend of course!). Or if I wrote up the patterns and hundred...

No g'day today! It is NOT a good day. Nathan's boss told him today that all travel has been suspended due to the US recession. This means that Nathan will still be going to the conference in Brazil (where he will present a paper = very important) but he won't be going to Oz or NZ to develop business relationships. This means I won't be going home either. I can't leave Nathan by himself for weeks. I am soooooooooo disappointed. I've been looking forward to the trip for months. Now I feel like I've been jilted and in a big way. Maybe gutted is a better way to describe it, though it isn't my gut that hurts. Sigh. At the same time as all I want to do is curl up and whimper in a corner, I have to get the old apartment clean. I am not enjoying the new apartment. It is darker than I expected (three weeping birches and a pine tree contribute to that) and not as airy and light as I hoped. It is also telling me I have Too Much Stuff. The kitchen is roomie...

G'day again all! Here is our itinerary: Saturday 17 November: Denver to Chicago, arrive Sunday arvo. Sunday 18 November: Chicago Monday 19 November: Chicago to Milwaukee Tuesday 20 November: Milwaukee to Minneapolis Wednesday 21 November: Friday 23 November: New Ulm Saturday 24 November: Minneapolis - Chicago - Washington Sunday 25 November: Washington, arvo Monday 26 November: Washington - Philadelphia Wednesday 28 November: Philadelphia - Chicago Thursday 29 November: Chicago - Denver 30 November - home! But only for 5 days as we leave for Calgary on 5th December. If you live around those areas or know of something good to do *and* we have not already arranged to meet up with you, let us know! anon!

G'day all! Thank you everyone for your kind wishes after my last post. (Gosh it is another day! I started this post on the 13th I thought but now it is well and truly the 14th.) DH is chucking wobblies left right and centre. I am trying to figure out how on earth we can schedule in the people we want to see on our train trip. We need a laptop - DH won't survive a week without a computer and since we are going to be travelling for the next six or so weeks.... Plus his PhD is not finished and he is extremely unhappy about that cos he wanted to finish it this week before we left. If it is not finished we realllly need a laptop. The cheapest we've found locally is $380 for a secondhand laptop of unknown provenance. Seems awful dear considering we can get a bottom of the range brand new Dell for $500 (plus tax). Anyways, I think I have developed a plan, to be ratified by he who must be gruntled. We go to Chicago and arrive Sunday 18th November. Then we go to Niagara Fall...

G'day all! We are going back into the past - it is after all nearly two weeks since I took the pics I'll show today. Fort Collins, day three. Oh dear. This day did not start well. We had gone out for dinner with Nathan's new team the night before. I had a lovely gluten free noodle dish. Something kept me awake until 4am. Argh! I just could not sleep. I had to flush something out of my system (and cistern) literally before I could get to sleep. If I had had anti-histamines with me it would've been easier but I didn't have any. Over the previous couple of nights Nathan and I had both woken up about 3:30 or so. He did again that night. I never got the chance to wake up then. LOL. At last I fall asleep. Blessed blessed sleep! 6am the clock radio alarm goes off in the next room. Full bore (just like the shower in our room - the water came out so fast even on the softest setting it hurt). It sounded like someone was having a party in our room. So I go bang...

G'day all! You get a travelogue cos I have waaay too many pics to show you and not enough stuff to talk about here. Like do you need to know that I've spent half of today trying to work out which washed fleeces were stuffed into jiffy bags without labelling them? No, I thought not. As always, Nathan fell on his feet at LAX. He saw a lady admiring my finger knitting, so he invited her and then her husband to sit with us. We had a lovely chat - me with her, he with him, for almost a couple of hours. Having a Nathan around facilitates meeting people. He's just that sort of chap. The flight from LAX was interesting - the poor lady with the window seat had to put up with both of us trying to look out her window. She was a little embarrassed cos she could not name the sights from the plane even though she lived in Denver and had flown that leg lots. As it turns out, we pretty much have seen the Grand Canyon now. We saw Lake Mead and lots of bad lands all round the area - ...

G'day all! Phew! Hot again today. Actually, it is not that hot just humid. We Melburnians understand dry heat but not humid heat. We live here cos we don't like tropical heat. However for the last two weeks, or more is it now?, we've had 30+ degree days and humidity. I've been a bit busy recently doing not a great deal. Funny how that happens, isn't it? I finished the lonely sock - it will never have a mate as there is only one skein of this yarn, which was shoved in the pot to sop up excess dye. Do you like the way the pooling changes up the sock? It started off as a 64 stitch sock, then pooled on the gusset (toe up with gusset), then after the heel went down to either 62 or 60 stitches and then I started a little cable. This sock was intended as a plain sock to check out if the 160m of yarn promised on the ball would knit a sock. Umm, yep, it did and I had about 10g left over after deciding I couldn't stand doing plain any more, how about a little ca...

G'day all! How sweet! DH did actually go into a yarn shop in SF but he thought USD15 for 50g of yarn was a bit steep. He must've gone to the classiest (or at least most expensive) one in town! He did buy me a knitting novel/anecdote book from the Stanford bookshop (plus a book of jazz pieces arranged for piano for him) but somehow or another the girl have him the WRONG BAG and instead he came home with two totally different books, one by Ralph Nader and the other an anthology. I think we should write to the bookshop and ask for a refund of the money - after all they did give him the wrong books.... (OK, he didn't check them either but you expect to have been given the right books when someone puts them in the bag and shoves them at you.) Well it looks like we *both* are going to the US in 2 or 3 weeks. I have to go get my passport replaced today. We doubt Nathan will go work for the big G. He didn't enjoy the atmosphere and would have to be paid a LOT to work ther...

G'day all! Just got a phone call from DH. Happy happy joy! He is in his hotel (a Hilton hotel, blah) and is jetlagged to all b*ggery. Apparently he didn't sleep much on the plane. His fight from LA to San Jose was cancelled after they had all boarded it - some engineers came along with a roll of duct tape (!!!) and poked and prodded at some stuff then said "Nope, can't fix it. This one is staying here." So it took an extra hour to get on another plane, one that was airworthy. Eek. Then he caught the light rail to Mountain View station, only it was about 5km from where he was meant to be staying and he ended up getting instructions on how to get there from the local Scientology temple. Apart from the accents and the sheer number of Starbucks everywhere, he almost feels at home - the street plants are Australian (blue gums, tea-trees and some others). He said there were a lot of car repair places, presumably for all those people who have to drive the 200m f...