Thank you, gentle readers, for your comments on my last post. Really, it was meant to be humorous. The whole trip was so absurd. And what could I do but go along for the ride? I was at the mercy of the weather and Continental Airlines.

One more self-indulgent travel-and-life post, and then we’ll go back to the knitting content. I promise. And there will be knitting content to show you, because what else can you do for 3 hours while sitting in a plane? But for now we will return to my little story. Skip if you’re not interested – I won’t be offended.

When we last saw this intrepid traveler, I had arrived in Miami a day late. I found the location of the forum I was supposed to be attending, but there was nobody there. I knew they were all eating lunch somewhere, but I couldn’t find them. Later I learned that a marvelous lunch was served outside on a patio overlooking Biscayne Bay. I was too tired to be very hungry anyway. I found a bagel and a banana left over from the forum’s collective breakfast, and poured myself a cup of coffee. (Really, gentle reader, this wasn’t gross at all. Piles of various foodstuffs were available at all times in case anyone felt a trifle peckish.) I have no idea what was discussed that afternoon. I was asleep on my feet. So I skipped the semi-obligatory Opening Night Reception in favor of room service and bed.

At midnight, my cell phone rang. Sleepily I answered…

#1 Son: Hi Mom. Were you asleep? How come? Can you move my car?

Me: Yes, I was asleep. I was asleep because it’s midnight and I’ve just had the plane trip from hell. I’m in Miami. It would be very difficult to move your car. What’s wrong with it? [ed. I will interject here to add that #1 Son lives in a neighborhood that requires permits to park on the street, where he parks sans the permit he’s never bothered to acquire. Currently he’s in Canada on a band tour, thus it would be difficult for him to move it himself.]

#1 Son: My roommate said I got a ticket or something. So I thought maybe you could drive over there and move my car so I don’t get another ticket.

Me: Can’t your roommate move it?

#1 Son: I didn’t leave them my keys. So there’s only your set.

Me: Well… right now I’m going back to sleep. I can’t do anything about it until Friday. But I really don’t want to spend the next three weeks juggling your car, so I suggest you find someone who can come and get the keys from me and park it some non-permit-required location.

#1 Son: OK. I’ll get back to you.

The rest of the stay in Miami was uneventful. Part of it may have included drinks that should have had little umbrellas in them had the bar not been out of umbrellas, and a whole bunch of shrimp at Bubba Gump’s, and my ever expanding and contracting hair.

At the Miami airport, I changed my seats when I checked in. For some reason, I’d been booked at the back of the plane on all of the flights. I moved myself up to the front. My flight left the Miami airport almost on time. There were severe thunderstorms in Houston. We circled Houston for 90 minutes while the tower debated what to do with us. Eventually they gave in and let us land. Since I was at the front of the plane, I was off quickly — and with 8 minutes to make it all the way across the Houston airport to make my connection, I needed to be quick.

Right there at the gate was one of those cart things that they give people rides on. I hopped on and asked for a ride to gate E8. The driver started off. First we went to the C gates. Then we went to the D gates. Then we stopped to find out where someone needed to go who didn’t know where their flight was. Then we saw the high-numbered E gates. I started sweating into my ever expanding Houston hair. Can we hurry? I asked the driver. You’ll get there. he said.

I was off the seat and to the gate before he even came to a complete stop. Portland? The gate attendant asked. I handed over my boarding pass and was allowed on. I was the last person on the plane. The doors were closed and the plane was pushed back. The pilot moved the plane out towards the runway, then parked and turned the engines off.

We sat on the tarmac. For. 3. Hours.

I didn’t care. I was on a plane bound for Portland, and they were going to have to drag me off kicking and screaming if they tried to end the flight before arriving at my intended destination.

On Friday, #1 Son’s friend fetched the car keys from me and attempted to move #1 Son’s car. Except the car wasn’t there.

It had been towed.

So friend and I went to get the car out of hock instead, and then friend drove off to park the car in some non-permit-required location. He promised to treat it gently.

And now the story stops being amusing.

On Saturday morning my phone rang with the news that my former father-in-law, #1 Son’s grandpa, had passed away. He was a gentle man, active in his community and his church, who loved his family and his friends and his grandson very much. He will be sorely missed by many, including this reporter.

I called #1 Son in Toronto, his tour stop of the day, and we discussed logistics. I can’t figure out any way to get him home for the funeral. Get a passport was one of those things, along with moving his car, that #1 Son was supposed to accomplish before leaving on tour. The key words here are was supposed to. Like moving the car, the passport didn’t happen. And wasn’t needed since they drove across the boarder. But he can’t fly out. He will not be allowed through customs at an airport without a passport. I have extended his apologies to grandma. I think she understands.

But, you can understand, gentle reader, that I wasn’t too surprised when #1 Son called me later Saturday morning to tell me that his amp had blown while taping a show for a Toronto radio station. I wasn’t too surprised at all.

If I had read this series of event in a novel, I would have tossed it out as being way too unconvincing and way too much.

The amp, fortunately, was repairable. My sanity, unfortunately, is questionable.

We will now, hopefully, return to the mundane existence that is normal at chez PI, in which I have to search long and hard for interesting events to blog about and where knitting content is the rule rather than the exception.

Thank you for your patience.

Look! I’m still here!

I can’t believe how busy I have been this week. I haven’t blogged. I haven’t read blogs. I haven’t even knit much, although the Moosecreek socks progress in tiny increments. Strangely enough, although they are starting to feel like the socks that never end, I still love them and I do feel like I make progress every time I knit them. The pattern is fairly simple, for all it looks relatively complex, and I only have to pay attention once every 4 rounds. So it is good for TV watching, etc. — if I had time to do that. But I do want to get them finished.

This is the April Rockin’ Sock Club yummy. It’s called Walk The Wild Tide, and it’s a brand new Blue Moon yarn called Silkie — both the name of a chicken, and an indication of the fiber content — 81 % superwash merino, 19% silk. And look at the color! Doesn’t it look like it’s blooming amongst my wisteria? The silk and the wool took the dye differently, causing multi-hued light/dark yarn. And the silk gives that nice silky glow.

The inside of the ball band on my skein said bladder fucus. That made me raise my eyebrows a bit — ‘scuse me? Bladder fu. . . ?!?!?!? But, thanks to Wikipedia, I know that bladder fucus is another name for bladder wrack, also known as that cool seaweedy stuff with the bubbles in the stems that you can pop and not, thankfully, either a swear word or a disease (as though the lovely Blue Moon ladies would either swear or toss diseases around willy nilly on their ball bands). Bladder fucus bears no resemblance to this yarn, however. None. I can positively state that I have never had the desire to fondle bladder wrack.

Once again, though, I don’t think I will be knitting the pattern that came with the yarn. It’s a standard toe-up, flap-and-gusset heel sock. But the stitch used is a YO, P2tog lace — a true lace that is worked on all rows. It makes a very nice bumpy netting that I think would look great with a solid-colored yarn. With this yarn, the lovely colors got lost inside the netting. I swatched it on US#2 and was way off on gauge and not loving it. So I swatched it again on US#1 and got gauge, but still didn’t love the stitch. So I frogged it again and knit a swatch in the same track of the turtle faux cable pattern as the Snake River Socks. This time the pattern got lost inside the colors.

Here I’ve swatched a simple basket-weave pattern I am sort of liking this one. It still has the nice bumpy purls, but there is enough smoothness that the colors pop instead of being lost in the netting holes. What do you think of this idea, gentle reader? I’ve knit basket weave socks, and was pretty happy with them.

The Silkie yarn has been wonderful to knit with. It’s very soft and squooshy. It’s not very tightly twisted, and I was concerned that it would be splitty, but that has not been the case. It slides right off the needles and there’s nary a split in sight. Tough, too. The yarn that I swatch and frogged out 4 times still looks like I just wound it off the hank.

The crocheted doily was made by my Great Aunt. It’s probably around 80 or 100 years old, but I don’t have any way to date it definitely. Nor do I know which of my Great Aunts actually made it. Several of them crocheted. I have quite a few doilies — crocheted, knitted and tatted — and I try to find uses for them here and there.

There won’t be much bloggage this coming week, either. I will be very busy at work — so busy that I will not have computer access because I won’t be actually in the office or at home much. #1 Son is off to parts north for a month, on tour again. They have booked a show on a ferry, and I am dying to hear about that one.

The Persistent Illusion blogiversary is coming up this week. I can’t believe I’ve been at this for 3 years. My first blog post was titled So What Do I Do With A Blog. Sometimes I still wonder. 😆 But I can also answer confidently: I make friends, I meet wonderful people, I learn new things, I join an amazing community of knitters all over the world. Blog content may be spotty at times, but I can’t imagine not doing it at all.

Saturday morning, #1 Son called me: Hi, Mom. We’re going down to Eugene to see a show. Taking my car. I’ll be back tomorrow, probably in the early afternoon. Definitely in time to have dinner with Uncle Bro. Sure, I’ll call you when I get back.

Mom: Please drive carefully.

Monday morning, #1 Son called me: Hi, Mom. I forgot to call you last night to tell you I was driving up to Seattle. That’s where I am now. I’ll be back home probably late tonight, but maybe tomorrow. Yeah… I’ve been coming up here more than I’ve told you about. I’m sorry I keep forgetting to call you and tell you. I’ll try to be better about that from now on because I know you like to know where I am.

Mom: Please drive carefully.

Now… It’s around 120 miles from Portland to Eugene. It’s about 175 miles from Portland to Seattle.

This is the same #1 Son who will not drive the 10 miles to my house because it’s too far and gas is too expensive.

Yeah.

It’s all relative.

When my brother and I were children — way, way longer than I care to admit — we loved to listen to music. (Still do, of course.) This was back in the days when music meant a jukebox (I’m old enough to remember a cafe that had a jukebox selector at every booth), or the radio, or the record player. It played vinyl records, boys and girls. 8-tracks had not been invented yet, and ipods were not even a dream in Steve Job’s brain.

Mama picked up a couple of folk albums for us — gotta be contemporary, ya know. Our favorite was one called The 3D’s — New Dimensions In Folk Songs. The D’s had set classical poetry to folk. The music was nice and the harmonies were lovely, and we played the thing over and over and over again until I’m surprised we didn’t wear a hole clean through the groove. To this day I can still recite Jabberwocky flawlessly. ( ‘Twas brillig, and the slithey toves. . .) And Charge Of The Light Brigade. (Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die. . . – for some reason that’s not found amusing when I quote it in meetings.) And Gunga Din. (You may talk of gin and beer while you’re quartered safe out here. . .) And I will never forget Bess, the landlord’s black-eyed daughter, plaiting a dark red love knot into her long black hair while she waits for her lover, The Highwayman, to come to her by moonlight — though hell should bar the way. That last really made my romantic little heart pound. Oh, how I longed to have a dangerous highwayman come riding for me by moonlight. (I may have also learned to plait love knots into my hair, ahem). Alas that my hair was not black, nor were my eyes. (And the Highwayman and Bess really did not come to a good end.)

At any rate, we listened and listened and listened to those poems until they became old, familiar friends. So imagine my delight when I learned that we needed to memorize 50 lines of poetry for English class the year that I was a Freshman in High School. OK… I wasn’t so thrilled to have to memorize poetry (I was a normal kid). But I was thrilled when I saw that one could either memorize several smaller poems, or get the whole thing over at one whack (and get extra credit besides) by reciting Gunga Din.

The only hard part was to avoid bursting out in song during the chorus.

Something brought the 3D’s to mind not long ago, and I wondered if their album had ever been released on CD, or was downloadable, or otherwise available. And a bit of googling turned it up. One of the D’s has released it. I ordered a copy for myself and a copy for my brother (his b-day prezzy). And I sent an email with a very belated thank you for the A in Freshman English.

Bro, niece Z, #1 Son and myself had dinner last night. I’d made a Have A Groovy Birthday card for Bro, complete with peace signs and smiley faces (gives you an idea of the decade that I was a Freshman). Bro was thrilled with the CD and listened to it in his car all the way home. No word on what niece Z thought about it.

If you want your own copy, you can order it from Phoenix Records on either CD or cassette.

Knitting: I have been super slammed at work, so not much knitting is being done. But I have managed to turn the heels on the Moosecreek socks, and I’m heading up the legs. Rockin’ Sock Club yarn should be coming soon, and a new sock class starts in a couple of weeks. So I need to get these puppies off the needles.

I lost my car last night.

I had been away for awhile. And when I returned, I couldn’t remember where I parked. Not was it section A row 11 or section W row 20? But Did I leave it at the airport or was it somewhere else? West side? East side? I couldn’t remember. I felt totally flummoxed and a bit panicked.

I love my car! My car’s name is Jane, and Jane and I have a very good relationship. How could I be such a careless car-mom? Jane… where are you?

I got on the Max (our light rail system) because maybe Jane was at the park-n-ride. I headed west on Max.

Then I had a brilliant idea: I would call #1 Son because he surly knew where Jane was! I felt that I needed to get off the train before calling. I got off at the zoo station.

The zoo Max station is 260 feet underground. It’s the deepest transit station in North America. For some reason it didn’t occur to me that it might not be the best place to get cell phone reception.

Sure enough — no bars.

I needed to surface in order to use my phone. There are elevators for that purpose. I started looking for them. I couldn’t find the freaking elevators anywhere! Where were they? I kept wandering around and around and around. Finally I walked through a large opening and found myself in… a mall.

Wait a minute… a mall? Underground at the zoo station? 260 feet under the ground? A whole mall? A mall that I didn’t know about?

That’s when I woke up enough to realize that Jane was probably in the garage, parked right where I left it. But the dream had been so vivid that I actually got up and looked. It was there. Whew.

Here is the progress on the sea-camo-weedy socks.

Remember how I told you last time, gentle reader, that I had messed up the pattern on the gusset and so I frogged out the whole, entire gusset and started them over again?

In reality, I realized last night that I had messed up the pattern somewhere down by the toe and had been happily following my own version of it ever since.

You can see how the seaweed sort of wobbles in the middle, instead of waving gracefully to and fro like seaweed is wont to do. This seaweed look rather like a large whale came through and thrashed it about.

It’s even more obvious from the wrong side. You can see how the pattern on the right is made up of nice diagonal areas of purls and knits all marching together up the sock, while the pattern of the left is sort of haphazard triangles thrown hither and yon.

We are not amused.

Last night I pondered whether I should rip back to the toe or just go my own way. I decided to leave well enough alone for the following reasons:

• Nobody has any business looking at the inside of my sock.
• The foot is going to be inside my shoe. See the first point.
• I can go back to the right pattern now, at the gussets, and make the leg all OK.
• It’s not that obvious unless you look really closely at the sock. See the first point.

It will probably bug me. For awhile. Hopefully I’ll get used to it.

What would you have done?

I found my socks!

I found my socks!

I found my socks!

I’m doin’ the happy dance, oh yeah! 😎

You know my sock drawer. The one that I cleaned completely out in the fruitless quest to locate my tangled socks? Yeah… That one.

Well, there’s this one dark corner where non-sock unmentionables live that I didn’t reorganize. Because I’d reorganized it not long ago. Today while looking for aforesaid unmentionables that were on the bottom of the pile, I spied a hint of bluish green in a cotton knit…

They were hiding.

Ah… I feel so much better now! The order of the universe is restored.

Guess I’d better forgive #1 Son for stealing them, eh?