Tuesday, May 16, 2006

A visit to the Frog Pond and other Touristy Sites

I've forgotten how exhausting playing tour-guide can be. While it has been a lot of fun having my parents out here to visit (they leave early tomorrow afternoon), I also feel like I have not slept in days. It's the questions, I think, rather than the schedule. I don't know what kind of pretty flower that is. I don't know why the cows are in this field and not that field. I don't know how long strawberry season lasts here. I don't know when the harvest season for the wineries is. This weekend was pretty tame, as I had shows for most of it. Sunday, my parents, Steve, and I headed south to a really truly amazing steakhouse. Really. Truly. Amazing. Yum. Have to save up so we can go again. Yesterday, we did some of the wine tour stuff. We hit three vineyards and ended up with five bottles of wine. We decided that since we had the wine, we would make dinner at my apartment. Making dinner requires having food at the apartment. Hence the time for the birthday present. I now have no excuse to not eat for the next year and a half (approximately). And not just eat. Eat well. Today was spent down in Solvang doing the touristy thing and then we made the rash decision to stop by one of the produce stands and get fresh strawberries for smoothies. Dad mentions that the perfect meal for the evening would be homemade bread and fresh strawberry jam. I should take this moment to point out that I was eleven years old before I realized that other people BOUGHT jams and jellies in the grocery store. I seriously and honestly cannot recall a time when there was a jam jar in our house that had any label on it besides Dad's handwriting dictating what kind of fruit and what year it was made. Ever. So I was NOT ABOUT to disagree with him there. After another grocery store run and a run to Target (I am very sick of shopping right now, btw), we have fresh bread, homemade jam, and wine for dinner. (Yes, I have extra jars of jam. No, I am not giving any of these out quite yet. It's too good.) And more questions.

Oh, and the Cleo halter is journeying to the frog pond as we speak. I was not ever going to wear it in the stiff double-stranded cotton state it was in, so why not use the perfectly good yarn for something else? No idea what, I just needed to frog something, and it poked its head up out of the WIP basket. I showed Mom a pic of Ene's Scarf, and she really liked it but "didn't know when she would use something like that". So now I'm not sure if I should make it for her or not. I pointed out that I use my Lady almost every day at work, and Dad said that she could use it for sitting on the porch in the mornings when it was cooler. She's thinking about it. I'm going to ask her for a real opinion tomorrow before she leaves, because I don't want to make it "for her" if she won't use it. (I'll make it for me, in that case!) Continuing work on the first Column sock. The heel turned with no problems whatsoever, reinforcing my belief in the cursed Jaywalker yarn. I found one of Nancy Bush's sock books in the bookstore the other day and was amused and yet slightly disappointed to see several sock patterns very similar to my Columns in there. I guess it's hard to be truly original in ribbing. I did, despite my mother's dubious looks, pick up a copy of The Yarn Harlot's Knitting Rules! I love reading through it so far! Mom needs to read the first chapter about explaining knitting to non-knitters. She appreciates the fact that I knit and enjoy knitting (heck, she does cross-stitch, and there is absolutely no practical use for that, so she can't really complain), but she doesn't "get" why I think it is perfectly okay to carry a half-finished sock around with me "just in case". Parents!

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