I actually got a bunch of errands done before lunch. First, I had to take a package to the post office. And, therein hangs a tale.

I had heard rumors about paying the postage on-line and printing out a mailing label, so I decided to try that. I went to the USPS web site, registered for an account, input the particulars for the package, and prepared to print my label. So far, so good. The instructions specify that you should print a sample label before printing your actual mailing label. The sample didn't print. The instructions specified that you need to have Acrobat Reader installed, so I downloaded Acrobat Reader (and, once I installed it, discovered that I already had it). But, Reader didn't pop up when it was supposed to. I had some vague recollection that Reader plays more nicely with Safari than with Firefox, so I tried again in Safari. (The account information was saved, but I had to enter the credit card info yet again.) Still, no dice. And, when I looked in the list of Safari plugins, there was no sign of Acrobat Reader. So I started googling for info about how to make it appear on the list. After about an hour of reading useless stuff, I finally hit paydirt. I'm running OS 10.6.2 on a relatively new Macbook Pro. OS 10.6.2 and other Apple-provided software, like Safari, runs by default in 64-bit mode (normally, quite desirable). However, the Adobe PDF plug-in for Safari is 32-bit only, and the trick to having it available is to force Safari to run in 32-bit mode. So, I did that (in the Get Info panel), and, to my surprise, I was able to print my label. And next time I have to send a package, it will be a piece of cake to print the label (and save a few cents on postage, and get free delivery confirmation).

So the first errand was to drop the package off at the post office. Then, I decided to head for Milford, about 15 miles away. Normally, the Milford shopping run involves the LLBean Outlet and Trader Joes. (It used to include Costco, but I decided not to renew the membership this year. While there are products I really like, I just don't buy enough there for it to be worth the membership fee.) But today there was an addition. Whole Foods has come to south-central Connecticut. I've heard all the stories about high-quality organic food, not to mention all the complaints about prices. And, yeah, the quality did seem to be good, and I liked the way they highlighted local products throughout the store (even though their notion of "local" was a bit more expansive than mine would be). But, the prices... At some level, I suppose I really thought the complaints about the prices were based on a comparison with Walmart. I know that organic, grass-fed meat and wild-raised fish cost more than their factory-farmed counterparts. But, really, I can't justify blowing my entire weekly grocery budget on enough meat for 3 or 4 dinners. At least the wild salmon fillets were on special, and I could get a small one. And their base chicken (not the super-crunchy organic) pieces were OK. But I don't see putting Whole Foods on my regular shopping rounds. Except for one thing...they have a bin in the front of the store for recycling #5 plastics, which I can't put out for curb-side recycling. That's worth something to me.

In the LLBean outlet, I found a new pair of heavy winter mittens that will serve me well when I have to shovel snow on really cold days. And in TJs, I stocked up on frozen food for my parents.

Then on the way home, I stopped in at the farmstand for cabbage and a few other things. To my delight, they have kale, so I took some local sausage out of the freezer, and tomorrow will make sausage and kale soup. I picked up the sausage at a local farmers market—I'm not sure which one—and, while it was a little more expensive than supermarket sausage meat, even the local brand, it was still about half the price I would have paid at Whole Foods.

And, now, I should be doing laundry, but instead I'm puttering around online.

I didn't need new shoes. Really I didn't. I actually didn't need anything at the LL Bean Outlet. But I always stop in anyway, when I go to Trader Joes, as it's in the same plaza. And I saw these. In my size. And, unlike some other shoes LL Bean sells, these ran true to size. So I have lavender shoes. Yep, purple shoes.

The task list for today:

1) Freecycle
2) Clear out a flower bed
3) Rake some leaves
4) Plant a metric buttload of bulbs

Accomplished:

1) Half the stuff I offered has been picked up. The other half hasn't gotten any nibbles. On the other hand, the last time I offered stuff, there was a lot of drama about when people could pick stuff up, so I just pulled it back. This time, I used anti-drama wording. So it's probably a win.

2) The flower bed has been weeded and dead annuals pulled out.

3) I dumpled about 5 tubs of leaves into the woods in back of the house. This is an excellent start, as there are still many leaves on the trees, so I will have to spend a lot more time at this as the leaves fall.

4) I got about half the bulbs I wanted to plant done.

What should have been added to the task list:

I (re)discovered the bag of day lillies that a colleague gave me (in exchange for some bearded iris). These have to be planted also.

This was probably three hours of work, punctuated by lunch and chatting with the freecycler who took the coats and sweaters. It's a beautiful day, a perfect autumn day. And I'm glad I spent a good chunk of it outside. I had a radio with me, allowing me to experience the real time Schadenfreude of the abrupt end of the Red Sox' season.

I moved into my house in Hamden a bit over eight years ago. I pay taxes to the City of Hamden, at a fairly high rate for cities in my state. In exchange for those taxes, I receive municipal services, including trash and recycling pickup. For the entire time I have lived in my house, trash pickup has been every Friday morning, and recycling pickup has been on alternate Fridays. So, I have a routine: Thursday night before bed, the trash and recycling are moved to the curb. Generally, due to the alternate week pickup and the fact that I subscribe to two newspapers, I have substantially more recycling than trash, in weight and volume. I have no garage, so the recycling is stored in the house until alternate Thursday nights when I take it to the curb.

In the past few months, the recycling pickup has slipped to Saturday morning. Whatever, so long as it gets picked up. Well, this morning, it wasn't. My neighbors' recycling was picked up, but mine wasn't. It's at the same curbside location that I've used for eight years, in the same city-issued recycling tub that I've used for eight years. And because the pickup slipped to Saturday, every single office that I can call for an explanation is closed, and will be closed Monday for the holiday. They'll listen to their voice mail on Tuesday.

In addition, the city has a transfer station for items that are ineligible for curbside pickup. In addition to its weekday hours, it's open on alternate Saturdays. Today isn't one of them, and I have all-day plans next Saturday.

So, I guess I'm going to be one of Those People who leave stuff at the curb for weeks at a time. I simply don't have space in the house for a huge pile of damp, rained on newspapers. And I don't have a garage. I really hope the next-door neighbors, whose house just went on the market, don't mind too much. Meanwhile, I'll just steam.

In a departure from off-day routine, I actually got something done before lunch! It's a dryish day out (at least the humidity is no longer at mid-summer levels) and there's a light breeze. So I finally pulled out the duvet cover that was lying in the spare room. It needed to be washed and put away until November, or whenever I decide that it's time to bring back the down comforter. So, the duvet cover (along with two pillowcases) is hanging on the line. While I was at it, I washed my old winter coat that I want to freecycle this winter (I feel guilty freecycling stuff that needs serious maintenance); that's heavy enough to rate dryer time. And while I was at it, I folded about half the laundry that I did last weekend.

Lunch today was a salad, sourced as follows:

Lettuce, from a local farmstand
Radish, from the farmstand
Sliced onion, from my garden
Cherry tomatoes, from my garden
Cucumber, from the farmstand
Hard boiled egg, from a local farm (may have been bought at the supermarket)
Havarti cheese, from a local cheese shop (I'm not sure whether they made it or not; they have both cheeses that they've made and cheeses that they get elsewhere)
Dressing, home-made, from my standard ingredients, all mass-produced
Half an apple, from the farmstand (new crop!)
Peanut butter, all-natural brand from the supermarket

I am hopelessly disorganized. I'll admit it cheerfully. So, I have my credit card accounts set up to send me email reminders for various reasons. Different issuers have different options (one, for instance, will email for purchases over some threshold). But they will all email you a few days before a payment is due. This is great, as I can check the credit union bill-pay site to make sure I've paid or scheduled a payment, and, if I haven't, I can remedy that in time to avoid a late payment fee and, possibly, a ding on my credit record. So, today I got email from my backup card, one I almost never use, reminding me that a payment is in 5 days. Well, I hadn't paid or scheduled a payment, and I couldn't find a paper statement. So, I went to the credit card web site to check the current balance. Yep. The payment that's due in 5 days is for the sum of $0.00. Phew!

It only seems like I haven't done anything all weekend. OK, I haven't done a lot, but I did get some things done.

Yesterday I did two loads of laundry. Since it was grim out, I hung them on the racks in the basement, and they're almost dry. There's a third load in the machine now, and I left enough space on the racks to hang everything in it. (If I'd been energetic enough first thing in the morning, I could have hung this load outside on the line, but now I'm not sure that things will dry before dark.)

I also went out briefly in the afternoon because of a chocolate emergency, the emergency being that I had none. While out, I filled the car (it was running on fumes, and filling it over the weekend will save time on Monday morning). The closest sensible place to buy chocolate is my local health food store. While much of what they have is natural and organic junk food, they do have some bulk items and natural ingredients. In their gluten-free section, I found something I've been looking for for a while: chick pea flour. It's lower carb (and higher fiber) than conventional wheat flour and is, I think, the breading for the fabulous cauliflower I had at an Indian restaurant a few months ago. And, they had free samples of locally-picked early-harvest apples. So, I came home with a Gingergold, which was every bit as good as I remember them being last year.

On the agenda for today, aside from the remaining laundry, is figuring out what to do with the cup or so of blackberries I have. I'm thinking some kind of syrup to put in yoghurt would be good.

And, of course, there will be knitting, and, if I get energetic, the bathrooms need cleaning.

We have sproutage, yes indeed. Three out of the four seed packets that I planted from on Sunday said that germination would occur in 7-14 days (the fourth, beets, said 14-21 days). Yesterday, when I inspected the plot, I thought I could convince myself, if I squinted just so, that the spinach was starting to germinate. Today, no squinting was necessary. There are definite little sproutlets in the areas where I planted spinach and lettuce. That's 4 days! I hope this turns out, in retrospect, to have been an auspicious beginning rather than false promise.

A few weeks ago, I pulled up the last of the arugula (and harvested a huge number of seed pods). I also did a serious weeding, and laid down some more fertilizer and watered it in. But, I didn't plant any fall greens, due to a variety of circumstances that meant that I didn't have any free time on a good day for planting. Finally, today I had time and it wasn't raining or too hot. I had leftover beet seeds and, when the thought of fall greens had occurred to me (there's more space than usual because the beans got eaten by bunnies), I had acquired spinach seeds and more lettuce. In the meantime, I had read somewhere that kale is more winter hardy than any of the other greens. So, when I went out to the farmstand, I stopped in to a nursery for kale seeds which, of course, they didn't have. So, when I got home, I started calling, found a garden center that still had kale seeds (they were nice enough to check for me), and made a special run. For kale seeds. Yeah, for kale seeds.

By the time I got home, the Mets were behind 3-0. And it went downhill from there. As soon as the game ended, and the less said about that the better, I went outside, did some cleanup weeding, and planted my greens. They should start germinating in a week, and I have some anti-bunny pellets to put out then. With a little luck, I'll have greens into November.

It's been a strange year, gardening-wise. I planted beans, lettuce, beets, radishes, scallions, and arugula. The radishes, scallions, and arugula did just fine, but they're done now, and I have plenty of arugula seeds for next year. However, the lettuce, not so much. Once the leaves were large enough to sample, a critter got them. So, I've had very little lettuce. This same critter got most of the leaves off of the few bean plants that germinated. In addition, it ate the leaves from a number of perennials, in two different flower beds. The beets were an experiment. I'm not sure what possessed me. But they've been a grand experiment, an experiment that keeps on giving. I've been eating the thinnings in salads since June. I've sautéed up greens on a regular basis. And I've had borscht for lunch. So, all in all, a very successful venture. Here's today's harvest.



There's a small stand of wild black raspberries on the edge of the woods. They don't get a lot of sun, and because it's been so cool this summer, they're only just now starting to ripen, about three weeks later than usual. The tradeoff is that there are more than usual, even though it's still not all that much. This bowl is three or four day's worth.



I also picked one purple bean. It may be the sum total of my bean harvest this year. And it's entirely fitting that the picture I took of it is totally out of focus.

I really try to minimize waste in my life. I (mostly) bring my own bags when I go shopping. I try to buy local as much as possible, from local (non-chain) merchants. This time of year, I shop at farmstands and farmers markets as much as possible. But sometimes it's very hard.

Years ago, I bought a cheap plastic glass for rinsing when I brush my teeth. I don't remember where I bought it, though it was probably the housewares department at a supermarket. Well, that little cup has reached the end of its useful life. It's gross looking even when it comes out of the dishwasher. So the time has come to replace it. Ideally, I wanted to buy a few 6 oz plastic tumblers, so I could rotate them through the dishwasher, and even have spares for overnight guests. Plastic is necessary, since there are too many hard surfaces in a bathroom and it's too easy to drop something on one of those hard surfaces.

Easier said than done. I tried two different supermarkets. While they have plenty of disposable plastic cups, they didn't have anything approximating a child's juice glass. Hell, they don't have glass juice glasses, just larger glasses. Bed, Bath, & Beyond was equally useless. They have very nice tumblers matching their other decorative bath pieces (soap dishes, etc.). But these are really decorative only. The average price was $10; they're large and breakable; and they're not dishwasher-safe. So, not so much. On to the bathroom decor sections of Lowe's and Home Depot. One of these didn't have household items at all; the other had a selection pretty much mirroring that from Bed, Bath, & Beyond.

So, one evening a few weeks ago, I started Googling. With some judicious massaging of search terms, I discovered that plastic cups like I wanted are, indeed, made, and I could even order them from a variety of on-line vendors for less than a dollar each, plus shipping. For any reasonable quantity of cups, I'd be paying more for shipping than for the cups. But I couldn't find them locally.

Until tonight. I had to stop in at JoAnn Fabrics to get some hemp twine to replace the brake band on my spinning wheel. In the same plaza, there's a Dollar Tree and a Walmart. The Dollar Tree had nothing useful. However, while I was wandering through the Walmart, trying to figure out where I would be if I were a plastic cup, I found 4 plastic cups that another customer had ditched with in the food container department. They definitely weren't in the right place; I couldn't find a shelf label of any sort matching the price. The cups are almost exactly what I wanted; they're 10 oz rather than 6 oz, but they cost less than 50¢ each. And, they're dishwasher safe.

Now all I have to do is remove the stickum from the labels, discard the grotty old cup, and come to grips with the fact that I found what I needed at Walmart.

Dear Microsoft,

Today I had to, for the first time in eons, write an actual business letter, on actual business letterhead. The letterhead is, you know, a template. I want to save the letter as a document. I do not want to save the letter as a template, because it is a letter, not a template. It is not helpful for you to tell me that I cannot save my letter as a document but rather as a template, especially when the Save As… dialog allows me to select Word Document for my file and even, helpfully, changes the file extension from .dot to .doc. You are not enhancing my productivity, not in the least.

ETA At least doing a -A and pasting the contents of the letter into a new, blank document also copies the letterhead and lets me save the letter as .doc. But I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO DO THAT!!!!!

A lot of my friends, on LiveJournal and elsewhere, are downright religious about food. I'm not just talking about diets predicated on a conventional religious belief system, such as keeping kosher. I have friends who are vegetarian, or even vegan, as part of an ethical belief system, although different friends have different motivations for their choices (concern for the conditions feed animals and fish are raised in, concern about the ecological impact of raising animals for food, a belief that it is simply wrong to eat previously-living flesh). And then there is the whole locavore movement, eating food from close to home. One of my LJ friends, sizztheseed, has written extensively about his efforts to grow what he can and supplement that with food raised close to his home, which is, apparently, fortuitously near the farmlands of southern Ontario. I admire his efforts, but can't imagine sticking to such a program myself.

On the other hand, I grow what I can. And I have gradually identified local sources for produce and eggs. Given a choice, I will, almost always buy local. Or local-ish, at any rate. For instance, I can get locally-made cheese and butter, but I honestly don't know where the raw materials come from. Likewise, there is a sausage producer in New Haven, but their meat surely comes from somewhere in the midwest.

And between the vegetable garden and my favorite local farmstand, I've been eating quite well lately. I stayed home from work today to do some errands. So, lunch was a large spinach salad. The spinach was purchased from the farmstand, and grown at a farm elsewhere in Connecticut. I have no idea where the red onion came from. The tomato was also purchased at the farmstand, and grown in southern Ontario. The cheeses on the salad were imported, as were the ingredients in my home-made dressing. For a mid-afternoon snack, I had strawberries from the farmstand—the first of the season, and the email from the farmstand Saturday night crowing about the harvest got me out of the house much earlier Sunday morning than is my usual habit; I needed these strawberries. (Of course, the cream on the strawberries wasn't local, but, dude! Strawberries! And cream!)

For dinner tonight, along with my chicken (supermarket all-natural brand), I had a salad of freshly-picked greens from the garden (lettuce, arugula, beets), some chopped scallion from the garden, and the first radishes of the season. When I picked the radishes, I noticed that the greens were in good shape, albeit fuzzy. And i remembered that last year, Norma of Now Norma Knits had had several posts on preparation of radish greens. So, I figured, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I treated the greens like spinach or chard. I washed them, spun them dry, and braised them in peanut oil with two sliced garlic cloves and a bit of scallion (I have lots of scallions!). I finished them with a bit of balsamic vinegar (also imported!). They were, in a word, OK. Not spectacular, but, on the whole, not bad. Next time, I'll season them with hot pepper flakes, I think. But, there will be a next time.

Yesterday was the Connecticut Sheep and Wool Festival. Among my purchases was this 2.5 lb roll of prepared fiber. It's carded Ramboulet from A Touch of Twish. Other than staring at it and fondling it, my intention is to spin it, using one or another of my trusty drop spindles. Then, I will knit myself a sweater out of it. That should take about half of it, so I suppose I could eventually knit two sweaters.

It is every bit as gorgeous in person as it is in the picture..

God Bless America in the Kate Smith recording, in place of The Star Spangled Banner, before a Philadelphia Flyers playoff game, WIN

God Bless America in the Kate Smith recording, in place of Take Me Out to the Ballgame, during the 7th inning stretch at Yankee Stadium (old or new), EPIC FAIL

I took a vacation day today, as the forecast was for great gardening weather, and there was day baseball on the radio. In three bursts, here's what I accomplished:

• I cleared a bunch of leaves from a corner in the back yard where they accumulate.
• I planted petunias in the three boxes on the deck.
• I spread fertilizer on the veggie patch.
• I sifted compost and spread some on the veggie patch.
• I fertilized the lilac.
• I pulled out some proto-dandelions.

And here's what I learned:

• Compost doesn't decompose as quickly as they say it does, even if you turn and aerate it. Eggshells and avocado peels are especially recalcitrant.
• You can't cheat mother nature. If you leave the SKU stickers on your avocado peels, out of sheer laziness, you're just going to have to pick them out of the compost when you sift it.
• The scallions I planted on the deck a few weeks ago are coming up. And the chives are coming back. I should have a chive omelet for breakfast tomorrow.

And the shawl I'm knitting is coming along. I've finished 10 out of 14 repeats of the main chart, and have more than 300 stitches. That's a fuckton of stitches, and by the time I'm done I'll be well over 400.



The blue/purple/brown blob is the shawl as of a few days ago. It doesn't look like much. But the thing about lace is that it comes into its own when you block it, as shown in the gold swatch. That's made from leftover yarn from a pair of socks I knit last year.

The pattern: Adamas, by Miriam Felton
The yarn: Socks That Rock Mediumweight, in the Jubilation colorway (the swatch is in 24 carat)
The needles: US 7 (4.5mm)

Last week this time it was starting to snow. And snow. And snow. Today, the second day in a row of 60°F temperatures, the snow is almost gone. Yesterday when I went out to retrieve the lid to the compost pile—it had blown off in the storm—it was so muddy and slippery that I couldn't survey the back yard without slipping. Today was another story.

I had lunch with a friend and ran some errands afterwards (yet another garden center doesn't have onion sets in yet). When I got home, I wanted to do nothing more than take a nice long walk. But I took a look at the yard and decided that I could start cleaning up.

Looking at my LJ records, which serve in some measure as a gardening journal, I see that my first cleanup of the year last year was some two weeks later. One result of deferring the cleanup was that my crocuses weren't happy. There were enough leaves over them that they didn't thrive, and, when I finally raked away the leaves, those crocuses that came up were bruised. And so, I didn't have the carpet of purple crocuses that I had envisioned. Thus, one of my first priorities was to rake out the area where the most crocuses were planted. I think my timing was OK. There are a few crocus leaves peeping up, but no blossoms to be bruised.

The tulips on the side of the house have been peeping up for a while. In the winter, that area gets a lot of sun, and the wind patterns were such that there wasn't a lot of snow drifting there. The daffodils? I'm kind of letting them fend for themselves. The main daffodil area is mixed in with the pachysandra in front of the house. There are still leaves to pull out of those beds, but they'll wait. I contented myself with cutting back the snapdragons that I hadn't gotten to in the winter. The snapdragons aren't supposed to be perennial in this growing zone, but, planted right next to the house, they do seem to come back. My mother has tried to convince me that they must just be reseeding themselves. That may be. But they also have live stems in March, so I rather doubt it.

I also picked up a bunch of sticks and such like from the front yard and cut back dead flowers from the border to the front walk. The Dusty Millers still look OK—the nice man at the garden center tells me it's hard to kill them—so I left them, and will leave them until there is new growth. Once I cut back the dead stuff from the sedum, I saw some nice new growth. But not much of anything else.

It's still too wet to do much with the large flower bed and with the patch of irises by the stairs to the deck. And I'm going to try not to think about the area in the corner that needs major fertilizing for anything to grow. I put in a flat of vinca there my first year in the house, and there are maybe 5 plants left alive out of a flat of 40 or so plants. And we won't even talk about the poor excuse for a mountain laurel that's too stubborn to either die or bloom. (I don't get weeds either in this area.)

It was nice to get out and work in the yard—a lot nicer than the snow shoveling that was my exercise at the beginning of last week. But I'm still annoyed that I can't get onion sets to plant on the deck. Agway says they'll have them in on Wednesday. I'm tempted to give them a call to check and then take off from work early to grab some. After all, it will still be light when I get home, and I can plant some before dinner.

Right now I have parked in front of my house:

(1) Car wrapped around telephone pole, driven by local college students on the way home from hockey practice (fortunately non-fatal combination of college kids, icy roads, and an SUV that, as the grownups know, doesn't stop any better than a normal car)
(2) Their friend's car
(3) A cop car
(4) A sheared off sign warning of the curve
(5) A tow truck trying to figure out how to remove the hockey players' car
(6) A bunch of guys with flashlights inspecting—or trying to inspect—the telephone pole for possible damage

This street is the only entrance to a decent-sized neighborhood, so it's a very good thing that a snow-plow did manage to get past.

I'm no expert, but I've navigated that particular curve in much worse road conditions, so I suspect that they were going too fast for road conditions. This suspicion is heightened by the piece of bumper that ended up in my front yard, about 20 feet from the phone pole.

Yesterday, I was out all day. One of the groups/forums I participate in on Ravelry (account required) organized a jaunt to WEBS, an amazing yarn shop in Northhampton, MA. So, about 30 wild and crazy knitters from all over the Northeast (at least the area delimited by a geometric area with apexes of New Haven; Cape Cod; Portland, ME; Rutland, VT; and Albany, NY) converged. And shopped. WEBS had been alerted to this plan, and were prepared with an open classroom for us to leave stuff in, goodie bags, and extra staff to facilitate check-out.

Lunch was a little chaotic, though, as the one Northhampton native was suffering from a sinus infection and went home to sleep it off. The plan we finally arrived at was to go to an Irish pub downtown, which I was assured was not walking distance from WEBS. So, I got in the car, together with another equally confused participant, and headed for downtown. Within two blocks, we passed an Irish pub, but decided that that couldn't be where everyone else was headed for, because it was totally within walking distance. Instead, the two of us lucked into a parking space downtown, with time left on the meter, and had a nice lunch by ourselves, because, as it turned out, almost everyone else was at the Irish pub that was totally within walking distance. No matter. While we missed out on the bawdy bar jokes, we still had fun.

I came home with a large bag of yarn, and plans to photograph it all this morning for my Ravelry stash pages. One problem, though. It's been rainy and overcast all day, and so no photographs, not of the new yarn, not of the various projects I'm working on or have recently completed.

Most of what I bought was sock yarn. Most of it was expensive enough that most non-knitters would freak out ("$20 for a pair of socks! You know you can buy socks, don't you?"). But I was delighted to find a new stock of my absolute favorite summer sock yarn, a Plymouth Yarns wool/bamboo blend, which comes in at $10 for enough yarn for a pair of socks. I had picked up a ball of it last spring at WEBS. After knitting a pair of socks (Ravelry link) with it, I'd tried desperately to find more, and had had no success to speak of. The yarn, Rockin' Sox, didn't even appear on the Plymouth Yarns web site. In the meantime, I'd tried a wool/bamboo blend from another manufacturer, one with a reputation for higher-quality yarns, and been disappointed at the number of rough spots in the plying that I encountered. Well, yesterday at WEBS, I found more of the yarn I wanted. But somehow, this year, it's called Sockin' Sox, but it's definitely the same thing. So that was a total win.

In addition, I bought enough Lopi Lite for a sweater. Mind you, I have enough yarn stashed for three or four winter sweaters (I realize that, in some circles, this would show me to be a rank amateur). But, of all my winter sweaters, the one I like the best is a very simple pullover knit in a heathered dark charcoal Lopi Lite. I made this long enough ago that I have no picture of it anywhere that I can locate, and it's softened up wonderfully (it's very rough yarn when you're working with it). So, I bought enough yarn in a light olive green to make another pullover. (Actually, I bought more than enough, because one always does.)

And I bought something that I once swore I'd never buy, sock blockers. These are forms whose primary function is to make socks look pretty when you photograph them. I'm such a dork that I had a sock along with me so I could make sure I bought the same size. (Actually, it's the finished mate to the sock I'm currently working on for my sister.)

I had to re-login earlier today, and discovered a comment that had been waiting for moderation for three weeks. I'm supposed to get email notification of comments from people not on my friends' list, but somehow this one must have gotten eaten by a spam filter. Sorry, Norma!