I Heart fake vacation!

My employer has a policy that if you don't use the three personal days you earn every year on your anniversary date by your next anniversary date then you loose them. Right now I am enjoying a fake vacation because this is the last pay period before my anniversary date and I needed to use up my personal days so I took off Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday...and bonus...Monday is a holiday! I love having time off work with no plans to leave town. I get to hang out with friends that I don't normally see because of my wacky work schedule and spend a little time knitting and watching movies or TV on DVD. My current DVD favorite is season one of Psych which is the funniest show I have seen in a while.

Today I went to lunch with my friend Meg and her two month old daughter Haley. This is the first time that I have seen Meg since Haley was born, mostly because Haley had to have emergency surgery and then she couldn't be around a lot of people because her immune system was compromised while she was recovering from the surgery. It was lovely to catch up in person and Meg let me hold Haley most of the visit! Now, I don't want children of my own but I adore babies and my heart went pitter patter when Haley fell asleep while I was holding her. Meg is doing well and she said that she has gotten into a good routine so it should be easier for us to get together semi-regularly for lunch. Did I mention that Meg wants to learn how to knit? She wants me to teach her and I am a little nervous because I am still a beginner myself. I will give it the old college try though because I love the idea of being responsible for creating a new knitter!

I talked to my mom yesterday and she agreed to take a knitting class with me at the LYS. She is a lapsed knitter but she is an active crocheter who is working on a huge afghan for my brother. We are taking a sock knitting class! I am so excited to learn how to knit socks. The class is on the magic loop method as no prior sock knitting experience is needed. I am sure that eventually I will take the top-down sock class or the toe-up sock class but you need some experience working on double-pointed needles to take those classes so I will have to save them until I get a little practice in on the double-points. I am already coveting a lot of the sock yarns at The Loopy Ewe so this class is probably going to cause me to do a lot of damage to the ol' bank account.

I am still working on the scarfs for the Red Scarf project. I have the first scarf completed and I ended up really enjoying working with the Plymouth Encore worsted. I am not enjoying the Cascade 220 superwash as much but it is working up into a nice scarf. I started on scarf number three which is my very first cable project and so far, the cables look like cables! I was talking with my mom about my quest to find a good machine washable yarn to make these red scarves out of and I almost fell over when she professed her love for Red Heart! I guess I have turned into a bit of a yarn snob because Red Heart feels so scratchy to me. Mom said that when you add up the fact that the yarn is cheap, readily available, and can go in the washer and dryer you just can't beat it. I think mom would have a fit if she knew how much money I spent on some of my yarn. Oh well. Of course, I wouldn't trade the afghan she made for me out of Red Heart for the finest yarn in the world so I can't be too much of a yarn snob.


That will about do it for me today but here is a picture of scarf number three. Cables rock! I will try to get a better picture once the scarf is a little bigger so you can see more of the cable detail.