Double Nickles
9:56 a.m. - 2004-10-10


Well, Happy Birthday to me. What a lame vacation I am having, in that I have done almost nothing but sit and knit. I feel a lot more rested though. I watched 19 videos so far, sat on the couch, and am almost 3/4 of the way finished with Abby's hooded sweater. I have been wondering how to spend the little bit of money I had saved up from birthday gifts and mad money so I decided that the more the money mounts up, the more you feel that you should spend it on something important or worthy, which is a bummer. I decided to be impetuous and impractical and so I just bought The Incredible Sweater Machine. Now it is not that I don't have three other knitting machines of various ages, but I don't have one that is good with knitting worsted weight. I am hoping this is. I got the intarsia plate, too, just for fun. I have never tried intarsia on the machine, but life is all about trying new things. Also, life is too short to sit there doing plain knitting when you can do it in ten minutes on the machine. Melissa wants to try it out when she comes home for Christmas. Because this machine is one fifth the cost of my other one, I will be more inclined to let her experiment with it.

We went for a drive on Friday so that I could say that I went somewhere on my vacation. We went to Sebastopol for some apples, but we got carried away looking at the scenery and eating lunch and forgot the apples until we were almost to Santa Rosa, too late to go back. We forgot to stop at the yarn shop and never did make it to the museum that was the destination of the trip. We did, however, have dinner at the Buckhorn in Winters, which is now a lovely dining room and not the hole in the wall it was when we were in college. I had prime rib and he tried elk, just to be daring. There was very light traffic on the way home which surprised us for a Friday night.

Yesterday was my actual birthday, but I did nothing but return some books to the library. He presented me with a lovely necklace and earrings. The amazing part of this is that I had pointed the necklace out to him a while ago when we were thinking of getting me some jewelry to wear to the charity auction, and he actually remembered which one I liked and where it was and went back and got it. I asked him how he remembered which of the pendants I liked the best, and he broke down and admitted that he didn't remember, he just picked one and lucked out. He took me out to dinner again, this time Italian, then I watched my Japanese shows.

So this is my last day off for five whole days. Thank goodness my boss is back from Italy, because doing the namerun without backup for three weeks was nerve racking. I hope that all the problem maps were finished up in my absence. I also hope that they forgot about my birthday and that I will not come back to a decorated desk and assorted hoopla. There is a reason that I plan a vacation around my birthday. Next weekend we may take a quick run back up to get the apples.