On a Rainy Saturday

The weather here is appalling.  It started last night when the varsity football game--for which my son's youth football team was to provide the halftime entertainment-- was put in time out immediately after the kick-off.  Somewhere among the rainy skies, an alert safety monitor had spotted lightning and we were required to stop the game and abandon the metal bleachers (I was all in favor of that plan, frankly) until the skies had been lightning-free for 20 minutes.  Or 30.  I had a hard time understanding the announcements and it didn't matter anyway.  We went home to eat dinner and be dry.

The rain quit long enough this morning for us to take the dog out and deal with the chickens, but as soon as young Mr. Football and Ms. Softball headed out the their respective practices and tryouts, it picked right back up again.  Football practice proceeded in the rain because men are like that and there's no reasoning with them when it comes to football. Softball tryouts, on the other hand, were postponed due to weather.  This makes no sense to me.  The team spent the first three tournament weekends playing  in monsoon-style rain coupled with temperatures low enough to keep me from knitting. I don't know how they expect to sort out which girls and parents are dim enough to sit out in the rain all day  bold enough to play through extreme meteorological adversity if they're going to call off tryouts for a little drizzle.  Which is probably why no one asks my opinion.

The rain has continued, on an off, since this morning and it is now clear to me that the only possible remedy is coffee and knitting.  I'm ready for both.

Below you see my brand new coffee mug. 

I'm madly in love with it.  It is short, so it fits in my Keurig.  It is also roomy, so I can brew two cups of coffee into it.  It is glazed in one of my favorite shades of blue-grey.  And it had just the right amount of pot-belly-ness to fit perfectly into the curve of my hand.  It was made by the  same potter who made the yarn bowl that I bought at Rhinebeck last year and--try not to swoon--I bought it from the yarn shop. It just screams "comfort" at me, in a comfortable non-threatening way. I feel about mugs the way that I feel about sweaters and wool socks: there is no such thing as too many.  The only thing that has kept me from buying all the mugs that I have loved is that I can't fit them in my kitchen, but, thanks to some accidental culling by my kids, there was an opening on one of my shelves.  Problem solved.

Unfortunately, when I made the coffee I felt morally obligated not to waste the ground beans that had been sitting around since early August, so the coffee was putrid.  Also, I learned today that if you swirl putrid coffee around in a mug that is short and fat, it is easy to spill coffee into your lap. Plus, it takes more than two tries to fine tune your swirling to the shape of the new mug, so you can reasonably expect to swirl putrid coffee onto both of your legs.  And possibly onto your keyboard.

As for knitting, I started a heap of shiny new projects while trying to avoid working on my neglected WIPs.  Then, when the kids went back to school last week while I was still on vacation, I was seized by an uncontrollable urge to make progress on something other than the mess in my house and I dragged this project out of a knitting basket that had been hiding in the back of my closet.

Serape jacket, knit here in a bazillion shades of lite lopi
 that fail to conform to the  designer's vision

As of Tuesday, I was up to the second row of the lower big blue stripe.  Since then, I have plowed through everything up to the arm divide and finished both fronts.  Today's plan is to finish the back and maybe get this booger blocked so that it is ready for assembly and a button band.  The sleeves, thank goodness, are already done.

The sweater, you may have noticed, is unusually colorful;  much more colorful, in fact, than anything I own.  The little trouble-making voice in the back of my head has suggested --more than once-- that I will look like a clown in it, but I've decided to ignore the voices and hope for the best. If all else fails, I'm sure it will make a spectacular felted bag.

This is hardly enough knitting to overcome a rainy Saturday, and you will be relieved to find that it is not the only progress I have made.  The first week of the Olympics--and hence the first week of the organized knit-a-palooza that I wish for the sake of simplicity was still called the Ravelympics but which has, for trademark reasons, been renamed the Ravellenic Games--coincided with our vacation to South Carolina.  Along with  the additional knitting time that a vacation usually brings, this vacation involved 30 hours of driving for my husband and a corresponding amount of bonus knitting time for me, so I decided I should knit three things (for reference, I knit one tee the last time I played this).  I loaded up my luggage with a bunch of yarns that I probably didn't need to buy last spring and plowed through:

1. The Age of Brass and Steam Kerchief . . .

with "Rootbeer" colored beads

2. The Sweet Caroline Shawl

and
3. Rondeur, a knitted tee, since the one other knitted tee I have gets more than its share of use in the winter, so I thought it could use some assistance.

The amazing thing about the projects is that I not only finished them in just over two weeks (although the kerchief was not finished until 2 hours past the official end -time of the games), but they were almost entirely trouble free.  I am now waiting for any one (or more) of my current projects to explode in my face.  This much good fortune must surely come with a price tag.

And with that cheery prediction, my coffee stained pants and I are off to work on a clown sweater.