We Have a Winner!!

If you haven't been checking the comments to see where people are knitting (and I think bathrooms need to be redesigned with a knitting corner, or knitting rooms need a lock for those times you need to concentrate, but I digress) check out Susan's answer. She wins!! The Brother (and former California cop, former Pennsylvania police chief) said, "She was Knitting!?!? She really should have gotten a ticket. Do you have the officer's badge number?" So, for freaking The Brother and just getting a warning I declare Susan the winner. Either send me you mailing address (at: schwartz 141 at verizon dot net) or let me know when you will be coming towards Altoona. Congratulations!!

Driving Miss Needletart

The Baby is getting ready for his driving test and has therefore been doing all the driving on our errands. Yesterday he drove for an hour on our three-hour car ride to pick up his girlfriend. I did not knit. I was too busy holding us in our lane with pure will power. Not that I yelled, "Look out for that tree!! You're going too slow in highway traffic! Pick a LANE!!!" N0, no The Baby is really quite competent, I'm just a nervous mother (says The Husband, "Funny, you don't look nervous." Besides once he gets a driver's license I may no longer have a car).
Today he and his girlfriend went to the mall (neither has a license). He drove over, I drove home to do laundry. Then he called and I drove back. While I was waiting, I worked on the Red Hat socks. When he started the car, I saw no reason to put my knitting away.
Tomorrow I will go back to holding the car in our lane with will power. He was fine, I was a nervous wreck. We were just too close to the cars on my side.
PS. Don't forget the contest. Where is the weirdest place you have knit?

Update

We're all a little swamped around here. The Husband is working about four hours away and only comes home on the weekend for the foreseeable future (on the up side, since I am now responsible for all the cooking, I've lost four pounds this week). While he is out of the house, I am trying to wrest neatness (or at least some form of organization) out of the normal chaos.
The Baby is having a house guest for the next two weeks and then is heading to the guest's home for another week. Sooooo, I'm trying to excavate the day-bed in the sewing room for said guest to have a place to sleep. It's not so much the yarn and fabric, but the ironing is threatening a hostile takeover of the second floor.
Contest? What contest? Oh, all right. Tell me the oddest place you have ever knitted. Remember that Stephanie covered the ocean and I have been knitting on the local walking track. Oddest place gets a knitting pocket, a Rowen knitting book, and some other little goodies.
Place your posts.

Portable Socks

Still no pictures of the PPP, but I did find the Charlene Schurch book. It was under the pile of library books on the entry hall table. These are the socks I am working on. The yarn is from Knitpicks and is called Red Hat. My Red Hat Group was supposed to go to a baseball game at the local ballpark yesterday and I was planning to knit merrily away, but The Husband is going south for work and will be gone for several days at a time. Naturally he decided he would need to take the laptop so he can be connected. That meant we shopped for attachments all day long (three trips to Best Buy for printer, USB, and surge strip). By the time we got home the game had started (and seriously, folks, me? at a baseball game? What were we thinking?) Luckily, we are going to pick up The Baby's girlfriend next weekend and there should be some extra knitting time. Notice the nice little bag the sock is resting on? We were at Target and found some Organic Cotton pillowcases on clearence and they were packed in these nifty bags. I got one white one and two blue ones. They are just the right size for a ball of yarn and a started sock. There are ties at the top that are just the thing for tying to a belt loop and you can knit as you walk (boy, do I get some strange looks on the track). Notice that I drew a measuring "tape" down the side. I also wrote basic stitch counts and measurements for family members who get socks (based on The Harlot's basic sock recipe). Now for the fun stuff. Even if I want to keep one of the blue ones I still ave an extra. I think this calls for a contest. What do we think, knitters? Sound like fun? I even have a Rowen knitting book that irritates me (most of the sweaters only go to a 40" bust and I am too lazy to rework them) to throw into the pot. Now, what should I have you do? Bwa ha ha!!

Emily J.T. Perez

I joined the Mother's Day Project a while back and this is the name I drew. The founder of this idea was anxious to do something to protest the war, and this was what she came up with. Each blogger would receive the name of a woman who died in the war and we would record our thoughts as we worked. As usual, I wasn't very organized, but here is some of what I was thinking:
1. The woman whose name I drew was a graduate of West Point, so I chose Cadet Blue for the embroidery thread.
2. I chose the chain stitch not only because I am sure that Second Lieutenant Perez would have gone higher up the chain of command (and therefore worn "braid") but because the chain of her family was broken.
3. Those aren't French knots, they are colonial knots. I know we're the United States, but we started as a group of rebellious colonies and if this is the only way I rebel against a wasteful war it will have to do.
No matter your politics (and mine are oddly tilted to the left) I hope you appreciate the losses we suffer for the next generations. I came of age in the early 70s and my thinking is largely informed from the summer of love and peacenik music. All war is bad. There must be a better way.

School's Out for Summer!!

Today was my last day at school. Yay!!! I have worked every school day for the last six weeks or so (except for the three days I lost my voice). Pretty good for a part-time job. That means that there will be a little money in the exchequer for garden pretties, furniture for the Edler Son (if he ever finds a place he can afford) and maybe a little left over for yarn? On the knitting front, I have finally finished the PPP! If I can get a good picture I will post. Of course, it is now June and we will undoubtedly have a blazing hot summer meaning I will have to wait for, ohhhh, October to wear the darn thing. I also finished the aloe vera socks, also wool and too warm for now. So what did I cast on? Wool socks in the Red Hat colorway from Knitpicks. I am knitting a pattern from Charlene Schurch's book "Sensational Socks". Sadly, I put the book down after photo-copying the instructions (I like to highlight my numbers and don't want to permanently mark the book) and I have not been able to find it since. Add cleaning to the summer list???
Wait til you see what I came up with for knitting and walking. Tune in.

Zotzed!!

You may have heard that there were a few storms around the area....We were hit by lightening. The maple tree between our house and the neighbors was struck. The neighbors got hit worse than we did. They lost phone service and all their computers were fried (The Husband put a surge suppresor on the electric and phone lines. If you haven't, you should). At our house we lost the answering machine and the tuner for the stereo system, which brings up another story in the continuing series....
How The Husband Proposed
The first time The Boyfriend (not yet The Husband) invited me to his apartment for dinner his stereo system was having a few problems. He said he would get around to fixing it one of these days, once he figured out where to take it. I asked for a screw driver and a chair (the stereo was on top of five-foot bookcases) and had it all staightened out in five minutes. Said The Boyfriend, "Wow! I should probably marry you. You can fix anything!"
Eight months later he did.
Twenty-seven years later, I am still doing all the hook-ups for the stereo system. This time we have stereo sound(apparently the last time I hooked it up, I reversed one of the speaker wires and never bothered to fix it)! Yay!!