Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder...?

Is that true? Did my month-long hiatus make you yearn for another Beta post? Haha.

I'm not really sure why it's taken me so long to update this. I'll assume its a good thing and means that I was having a wonderful and busy August.
I did get to take 3 vacations:

• A weekend in NYC with Passionknitly
• a week in Rhode Island to catch a Jimmy Buffett concert
• and a week in Key Largo w/ parents at my aunt's summer house

I should add that I LOVE the benefits at my job ;)

Also, sandwiched between the 2 big vacations was a busy week at work where I didn't get home before 10pm the whole week. We had all of our international staff members in town and we had to show them a good time of course. The 'good times' included a Nationals Game (its hard explaining baseball to people from Indonesia, Kenya, India, etc), a walk around Adams Morgan and Dupont circle at night, ethiopian food, a barbecue on Capitol Hill, and a happy hour at the Front Page.
Ok, so maybe my "busy week at work" isn't really anything to complain about.

I do have photographic evidence of the last month's adventures, as well as a 75% complete falling leaves sock but they'll have to wait for now.

Lately I've been sacrificing knitting time for reading.
Recent reads* include The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri and The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Next on the docket is My Ántonia by Willa Cather.




*A little homage to mikahasablog

Summer-ness

This is mostly defined by the heat wave we've all been having. Truth be told, I haven't suffered much due to the wall of AC at every destination in my travels. I even managed to ride my bike to work on a couple of the hottest days.
Other evidence of summer-ness:

• Sunday is our 1 year anniversary. Its kind of surreal. How did that happen? This has been the fastest year EVER! To celebrate we're having dinner on Saturday at DC Coast, thereby FINALLY using a gift certificate given to us exactly one year ago by some great friends. And on Sunday we're going kayaking on the Potomac! I've never been kayaking in the area and I have no excuse. We kayaked on our honeymoon in Nicaragua so I'm looking forward to reliving the 'magic'.
  
  
• Trips! At the end of the month we'll be hopping over to Brooklyn to visit PassionKnitly (creator of the famous wedding afghan). And in August we're spending several days in Little Rhody with family. The timing of the trip centers on a Jimmy Buffett concert on the 10th. Yes, I am the daughter of a full-blown Parrot Head (which in Buffett-lingo makes me a Parakeet). I've only ever been to 1 other concert (in 2000) and it was a blast. I grew up listening to his tunes :)

And now a knitting update sans photos. I gave the mother-to-be the finished Daisy cardigan about a week ago. It went over very well. I showed her the two sets of buttons I had picked out and told her after the baby's born, I'll sew on whichever set she chooses. It was my first baby shower and the best part was seeing the story books that everyone brought as requested on the invitation. I brought There's a Monster at the End of this Book and A Child's First Book of Poems. The mother-to-be wasn't familiar with the Grover book so one of her friends proceeded to read it aloud to us.
I've since cast on for another Daisy cardigan using the exact same yarn for an older baby in RI. It's going kind of slow however. In the most recent knitting vs. reading battle, the book won so I must heartily recommend the Time Traveler's Wife because of its victory over Daisy 2.

Knitting update

The Daisy cardigan is nearly finished. I just have to finish sewing the arm seams and weave in ends. It was so fast and very satisfying. I was even pursuaded to order 2 more sets of the same yarn (one is the same color, the other is blues/greens) for 2 other babies I know. Clapotis is rounding the final stretch, but I fear I will run out of yarn. I'm really bad at guessing how much yarn is needed towards the end of a pattern so I'm holding off on ordering more until there's only an 8 in. tail hanging. Team M2 has lapped me and thereconstruction since they already have a completed Clapotis. Before, I was using the excuse of the cardigan interruption, but when you see how many projects Seal Daze has whipped out since she started Clapotis you'll see why my puny excuse is embarassing. I originally thought I wouldn't be able to wear Le Clapotis until the fall, but the level of AC in our building (and many others in the city) now means I can wear it at work all summer!! I knew there was a silver lining to the foot-numbing temperatures of our chilled office.

Mac vs. PC

Nothing earthshattering here, but I LOVE the Mac vs. PC commercials.

I still want to fight the trend of using the term PC in these instances. Why did that become the standard word instead of IBM or IBM-compatible? Is it simply because there are fewer syllables in PC?
Anyway, I know Macs have plenty of their own problems, but I find these commercials so entertaining! Another gem is this anti-mac spoof:

Football & Knitting

Sounds like a fun weekend, huh. I LOVE rainy weekends when I don't actually to be anywhere. Our skylight in the living room makes the rain and lightning so much more entertaining.
I've felt kind of annoyed with myself lately because while I love the World Cup and can actually tolerate watching soccer games (as opposed to nearly all other sports), I have not made any effort to catch a game in this year's World Cup. I think I was expecting that despite the very inconvenient times of the matches, I could just sit back and one would fall in my lap while flipping channels in the evening. This method doesn't really work. And I also nixed the idea of leaving work at 11am or 3pm to find a bar that's showing the games. So that leaves the weekends. Last weekend we were camping in the Shenandoah without electricity, TVs, cell phones, etc. I've been making up for lost time this weekend: yesterday was Mexico vs. Argentina at 3 and today was England vs. Ecuador. This obviously is very conducive to knitting. I'm still working on clapotis and I've finally gotten to the decrease rows towards the end. I freakin love dropping those stitches!!!!
I realized though that I have quite a baby-backlog - friends having babies and I haven't knit them a darn thing. The last baby item I knit was a hat last November. So I took some yarn off of Mika's hands and cast-on for the Daisy cardigan last night. I usually try to finish 1 project before starting another but in this case, there's really no reason to finish clapotis anytime soon. It's more of a fall piece. Plus, I LOVE the feel of suddenly switching to a different project with new colors, texture, patterns, etc.

Two yanks who went out west

BOO!!!

I scared ya, didn't I? You clicked over here expecting that same old book post and instead you're hit with a spanking new entry!

E* and I just got back from a wonderful trip to Colorado. It started with the wedding of a friend and continued with a bit of family fun and the requisite death hike.

Let's begin at the beginning. And because bullets on the screen are preferable to real bullets..

• This friend studied with me in the DR 3 years ago. She is now the blushing bride of a recent air force academy grad. Their honeymoon is 60 days long! (basically that's how much leave he has until he begins the next appointment in Florida). The wedding was gorgeous - that air force academy chapel is intense! E* and I were joined by my very good friend Titties McGee from Ohio who also studied with me in the DR. She was our hotel room chaperone to make sure we didn't get fresh. We managed to squeeze in a midday traipse around the Garden of the Gods before the wedding. What a cool place!



• As the weekend came to a close and people headed back to their homelands, E* and I drove 30 min. north of Colorado Springs to Larkspur to visit my aunt & uncle who pretty much live on the side of a mountain. They warned us before a short hike behind their house to watch out for bears, mountain lions, and rattlesnakes. Nice. While I admit I did get a little giddy that I might actually get to see a moutain lion in the wild, we were not granted the pleasure. However, we were graced with multiple, up-close encounters with foxes, mule deer, hummingbirds, and butterflies.





• Its been a full week now since our Hike of Death and I feel I have enough distance from it to be able to speak about it. ;) We had been chatting with various REI people over the weekend about the feasibility of hiking Pike's Peak. It was to be a training session for E's Machu Picchu/Inca Trail extravaganza in August. While most of them said we could probably handle the hike, they were all fairly hesitant about their statements because the weather changes on Pike's Peak so quickly and severely that even very experienced hikers are suddenly put in a lot of danger. After a lot of back and forth, we decided to nix it in favor of another challenging hike with similar levels of altitude since that's really all E wanted to experience: how his body would respond to 9, 10K feet.



• On Tuesday morning we set out from Larkspur through Colorado Springs and eventually headed west into the mountains. We pulled over at the trailhead for the Waldo Canyon Loop around 9 am, two hours later than we had wanted to start the hike. We were packed with tons of water and lots of snacks even though the hike was only supposed to take 3 hours and covers 7 miles. The thinking was it would be good for E* to get used to carrying a heavily laden pack. I'll spare you all the gorey details, but sometime around 1:30 (1 1/2 hrs. after we were supposed to be limping over the finish line and back at our car) we started realizing that the trail we had been following was a little 'off'. As in, it was difficult to match up what our guide book said we were supposed to be seeing with what we were actually experiencing. And the trickle of hikers and tell-tale dog poop we had seen throughout the beginning of the trail had fizzled off to nothing. We're not sure when it was that we stopped seeing other people. But we hadn't been concerned because we were definitely following a well-maintained path. It just...didn't seem to be a well-maintained path that was mentioned in our 2 guidebooks. Also, we hit about 3 forks in the trail that were NOT marked. On the Waldo Canyon Loop, there AREN'T any forks. That's why its a LOOP! So we spent the next 2 1/2 hrs. trying to back track and figure out what the hell happened. We started thinking that we had stumbled off the main path and were completely entangled in an adjoining network of paths. But this made me angry for several reasons. 1) why weren't these other paths mentioned in our guidebooks? If only as a warning! 2) Why weren't these paths marked themselves to let a wayward hiker know that they were indeed NO LONGER on the Waldo Canyon Loop such that the mantra of "just keep bearing right around this clockwise loop" would be completely useless? and 3) why the f*&# was our guidebook entitled "Best Easy Day Hikes in Colorado" and in particular, the Waldo Canyon Loop was called, "the most popular hike in the Pikes Peak region"!!??



• Highlights of this unmarked network of trails that we affectionately refer to as Death Hike include, the Wagonwheel Meadow (where you enter a clearing and are faced with 5 different paths that head off in opposite directions), Rattlesnake Alley (where we were the tallest thing around noting approaching thunderclouds over the neighboring peak, and we were surrounded by very low brush and cactuses...and small holes in the ground about the size of a tennis ball), and Billy Goat Trail (this was the icing on the cake: a VERY steep path lined with about 3 inches of gravel where one had to snow-plow down ski style and that's with 2 walking sticks!). It was just after that last section that we were suddenly dumped out on what appeared to be the very first part of the original hike. 20 minutes later we reached the trailhead again and took the final pictures documenting our success at survival.

I apologize for the slight melodrama. To wrap up, we made a beeline for REI to consult their maps to find out where the f*&# we had been. There was ONE map there that showed dotted lines for a network of trails heading northwest from the main loop. It appears that we made 1 wrong decision about 1/4 of the way into our clockwise loop where we took a left fork instead of a right fork (we maintain that this was not marked but I'll admit that it was slightly moronic to take a left fork when we were supposed to be going CLOCKWISE/right around a circle). After that short lapse in judgement, we were punished for 5 hours. The REI guy estimated that we probably hiked 14 miles instead of the intended 7 and hit a max elevation of 8600 instead of 8100. There is potential for Death Hike Part II since we are going camping this weekend in Big Meadows. You can start placing bets on where our stellar navigational skills will lead us.

More on the book front

I liked the book. But I don't think I love it. Not yet anyway. I'll think about it for awhile and see if my opinion of it changes over time. I'm certainly glad I read it though.

Now that I've taken up the last 2 months reading the same book, its time to move on. Its taken me awhile to get my hands on these books from the library. Then of course, I suddenly got both at once when I was at the libary last week. 100 Years of Solitude was shelved incorrectly (with the M's instead of the G's) - my good deed for that day was taking the rest of the incorrectly shelved Garcia Marquez books and putting them with the G's. And that's how I found the copy that had eluded me online for so long. I was on a waiting list for Memoirs of a Geisha. But now I have a tough choice. I fear that I will only have time to read one before the due date. But they're both in such high demand, that I probably won't be able to renew the one I choose to read second. I'll have to return it unread. What to do...
Memoirs of a Geisha
or
100 Years of Solitude

The back story is that I was a Spanish major and have read several of Garcia Marquez' short pieces. This book escaped my reading lists and now I find that a lot of random people I know LOVE it. My original goal was to read it in Spanish. But I can't take another 2 months of the same book which is surely what will happen if I attempt Cien Años de Soledad.
Memoirs of a Geisha simply got on my book list because I wanted to read it before seeing the movie. The movie has come and gone in the theaters and I couldn´t get a copy from the library in time. Also I think I lost interest. But there's a Crafty Geisha I know who has reminded me about it :)

Care to weigh in?
In an upcoming post, I'll unveil the rest of the books on my list. Can you handle all this excitement?