How I spent my Internet vacation

Greetings, all! My Internet access in Charlottesville was sporadic at best (hello, Residence Inn, no wi-fi in the rooms? really???) so I decided to just go with it and let myself get further and further behind.

We had a great time at the JAG school, but I didn't take the first picture. It was wonderful though to link up with old friends and make new friends and, of course, spend some time alone with Fred. We got home late Friday night and had yesterday to catch up on laundry and last-minute details before Fred left to return to Afghanistan for one more month this morning.

I'm going through my recent photos, and I see one from FSU that I neglected to post. Fred found a fellow Pike to chat up while we were waiting for Mike to finish orientation:



I got a lot of knitting done on this trip, since when Fred is around I gladly give up the role of driver for that of navigator. I've had a pair of wool socks in progress for ages, and I was determined to finish them up. I used a new technique to knit them both at the same time using 2 circular needles. It was interesting, and it did avoid the dreaded Second Sock Syndrome (in which one would rather open a vein than knit the second sock after finishing the first), but I found it tedious and confusing. Still, somewhere in Florida I found myself 2 toe seams away from a finished pair of socks, which was kind of exciting:



No way was I going to weave the toes closed in the car though, so I didn't get around to finishing them until later on in the hotel in Charlottesville:



I knew that I would have lots of time for knitting while in class at the JAG school. It may look like I'm not paying attention, but the knitting makes it easier for me to pay attention to the speaker, assuming I don't choose too challenging a project. For this one, I chose a sweater I had started in the winter and somehow put down and had trouble picking up again:



When I left for the JAG school, I had the body and one sleeve completed up to the yoke. I figured if I could get the second sleeve that far in the week I would be doing well. As it turned out though I got on a roll and wound up getting well into the yoke before running out of yarn:



I have plenty of yarn at home to finish it up, but this left me in the potentially frustrating position of having 500 miles of "navigating" ahead of me on the way home and nothing to knit. So Friday morning while Fred was finishing up at the JAG school, I went downtown in search of a project. I've been in the mood to try some color work, but I didn't want to start anything too intimidating, so I chose these cute little kid socks from KnitWhits:



I had to re-do the ribbing a couple of times before I was happy with it, but I still managed to get a fair amount done in the car on the way home. I need to work on keeping my tension looser, but I am having fun with them:



One final knitting story! So there I was, sitting in the back row and knitting in a class being taught by a young JAG major on her way to a deployment in Afghanistan. All of a sudden she noticed me and pointed and exclaimed: "Oh my God, you're knitting!" All heads swiveled 180 degrees as everybody turned to stare and I tried to melt into the floor. I went up to her after the class to apologize if my knitting had seemed rude, and she said no, that she just thought it was the coolest thing and that her attempts to knit had been less than successful. I decided that anybody who was so enthusiastic about knitting needed a pair of freshly made woolen socks, so the next day I presented her with my two-at-a-time socks. She was so sweet and happy and said that she will be taking them with her to Afghanistan. I encouraged her to give knitting another go but this time with bamboo needles instead of aluminum.