Well, hell. I'm off the tracks already in the Dark and Stormy sweater department. We had a mess of sloppy, wet snow last night so I thought it would be a perfect day for winding up the rest of the crinkly yarn I had from the old bad sweater I ripped out. It needed a good soak so it could relax and be knit into the Dark and Stormy. I went upstairs to the spare bedroom closet where I keep all my yarn and yarn related items in order to grab my winder and get to it. I had planned on watching a really bad Lifetime movie while I wound and wound all the yarn into nice hanks suitable for soaking. Damn! The door was locked and there was no key hanging on the not-so-secret hook in the linen closet. Double Damn! I am reasonably sure that the key is in the locked room somewhere and hubby will have to take a butter knife to the door frame to get the door open. How do I know this? It has happened many time before. Why do I still have a locking button on the knob? I don't know. I only lock the room once a year at Christmas time so that nobody can peek at presents but I might have to rethink this whole present/locked door situation. For my own sanity. I know it was the grandkds messing around who did this...they think it's hilariously funny for some reason. They usually enjoy being part of the action when the door has to be pried open but for some reason they all went home days ago and I knew nothing of the locked door. Crap.

I ran a few errands, did some laundry, cleaned up a little mess and then thought I would knit on poor Listeme for awhile. She's been so neglected. I got her all organized and turned on the TV to see if I could catch another horrible Lifetime movie but all I got was a blank screen. The satellite was out. Damn again. Now, every once it awhile our satellite dish behaves wonky but not very often. I suppose it was the heavy wet snow but we didn't get very much of it...just enough to make a mess....so it never occured to me that I wouldn't be able to watch bad TV. I pressed the reset button on the receiver. Nothing.

I sat looking at the dark TV for awhile then I knit a little and listened to a book on my MP3. I saw something come on the screen when I peeked up at it for the 20th time.  It was a list of suggestions for what I could do to try and remedy this problem. I could start wiggling wires behind the receiver, taking them in and out to see if that would help. Um, no. I have no idea what goes on back there anyway and why screw it up any worse. I could go outside and brush whatever was on my dish off of it. That was a big no as well. The dish is bolted to the roof. I'm not going anywhere near that thing. The last suggestion was to call this number: 1-800-something ext: 771. That was easy so I did.

The phone was answered by an autowoman. She seemed very nice and ever so concerned about my problem. Even though she was not human she had sympathy in her voice. She asked me for a description of what was going on. I was supposed to just talk to her like I would if she had been real so I did. I yelled my answer though because I was afraid she couldn't hear me being that she had no ears. She replied to me and asked me what my phone number was. I gave it. She asked me if there was anything on my dish. I replied that I didn't know because I was not going to go up on the roof. She asked me if I was experiencing bad weather. I told her that it wasn't too bad but that it had snowed. Oh. She told me with a hint of sarcasm in her auto voice that if there was snow, my dish probably wasn't going to pull in a signal and to just wait for a few hours. Sigh. We had been having such a pleasant chat.

The TV works now but it's time to get dinner ready. This evening I'm going to try not to think about the winder and the locked door and the autowoman on the phone. I'm going to just get back on the track with Listeme and see how that goes.

While I enjoyed Billy Crystal and seeing all the lovely gowns the stars were wearing I knit like crazy on the Dark and Stormy. She is not nearly as dark and stormy as the Ravelry boards led me to believe so I am happily knitting my way down through the charts. I still love the color and I love cables and charts so it's highly enjoyable.

Listeme appears to be sulking again while I work on something else but I can't help that. She will just have to be pouty. I can't find her pattern anyway. I was going to have a go at her for my Oscar knitting but the grandkids were here during the day and stuff gets moved around at the speed of light. No pattern. I think it might be under the couch with all the Zoobles and Thomas engines. Hubby will have to go on a search misson for me.

My only problem with the Dark and Stormy pattern has not been anything major or bad.... that can happen so I'm knocking wood...but it's a little glich in the back chart. I don't know how one would fix it so I should just shut my yap but it's so odd that I have to comment. The chart is lovely and easy to follow right up until you have to start working the chart from the beginning again. The middle cables are fine and beautiful but the little cables on each side of them go all wonky if you just blindly follow the chart. Huh? You have to switch which direction they go. In your mind! You have to ignore what is in front of you and do the reverse. All the way down the back of the sweater. Gak! And, of course, I have them all highlighted so I can't un-highlight them. It's not horrible. Just odd. It will keep me on my toes.

I got a lot of knitting done during the Oscar's telecast but not as much as I would have if George Clooney hadn't been sitting right in the front row being all handsome and charming.  Yum.

It appears that I have hopped off the sock train, turned around, and jumped on the sweater train. Tickets. Tickets, please. Now loading on track 11. All aboard the Sweater Train Express! I don't exactly know how this happened but I now have two sweaters on the needles and a whole mess of yarn balls on my couch. It seems as though one minute I was unpacking and taking naps and the next I was casting on a mess of stitches. Right in front of the Listeme sweater and all the bags of second socks that need to be knit. Before I knew what hit me I had the pattern printed off, the correct size needles found and I was highlighting the cable chart. I have no idea what got into me.

Well, it might have been Ravelry that got into me. Since I've been gone I haven't spent much time on Ravelry so yesterday I sat down and perused the site. I'm always looking for something else to knit even though I actually have stuff to knit. Poor Listeme has had her bad front ripped out and reknit. The other front has been started but I guess I am at the boring stage with her. Sad little sweater...she's a beautiful color and I know that the sleeves will be even more boring than this second front piece will so I think I was already open to the idea of knitting something exciting when I turned the computer on.

I found the beautiful Dark and Stormy sweater by Thea Colman within minutes. Hell. I was actually looking for a lace pattern. Something that would hold my attention and allow me to read tiny charts for weeks on end until my eyes bleed. I love that. I like to click on the pattern tab and see what pops up. It was Dark and Stormy that popped up. Oooooh...cables and charts and markers. Oh, my! I started seriously looking at the pattern and then found a group that had a knit-a-long. I began to read the 885 comments on the knitting of Dark and Stormy and found that so many people had had so many problems just starting the thing that I bought the pattern then and there just so I could see what was what. This is, apparently, what I do. Find something that is hard and disturbing to knit and then endlessly complain about it.

The pattern looked okay to me. I even had the yarn upstairs in the horridly messy yarn closet. It had mocked me for years trying to be a sweater that just didn't fit. The back and fronts were done and sewn together but after trying it on about 50 times it just wasn't going to work no matter what I did so it has had a really long time out. AND there were 4 skeins that hadn't been touched. Damn! I didn't have to unravel anything yet. And I had the correct size needle! I didn't have to make an emergency run like I usually do. This sweater was just calling my name.

The mistake I made was reading the comments. The problems were epic. I began to mark up my pattern and got it to the point of me not understanding it anymore. There were questions about row 7 and questions about purling 6 stitches and there was so much detailed explaining and then more questions that I didn't know if I was coming or going anymore. What in the world had I done? I couldn't even find row 7 in the pattern. I had to purl? Where did it say that? I read and reread that pattern over and over and made a giant mess of the thing and was almost to the point of jumping off this train when it occured to me to just start knitting. So I did.

Everything is fine. Just fine. I managed to get through the first 7 rows without incident by ignoring all the crap I had written on the pattern. I am 3 rows into the back cable and that is fine as well. The hysteria has died down and I am just going to sit in the back of the train now and knit. Thanks for traveling with us.

These two characters are what meet you while you are sitting in the Orlando cell phone lot waiting to pick someone up at baggage. They are storks. Food begging storks. They walk over to your car on their long storky legs and stare you right in the eye. Feed me! It's a little disconcerting to be eye level with a big bird demanding food. I didn't give them anything for fear they would peck me in the eye with that extra long beak once I ran out. You just don't see this kind of stuff in Minnesota. Oh, there are seagulls and pigeons but no giant birds balancing on spindle-like legs prancing up to you and demanding food. Or giving you the stink eye if you don't produce.

In spite of all of our travel troubles....did I mention that our hotel potty over flowed?.... hubby and I had a wonderful time. Ft. Lauderdale was fun and Orlando was even better because we had the grandkidlets with us. There was swimming in the ocean, visiting Epcot and Universal Studios and all around hilarity because these particular grandkids are just so darn funny. They can make a joke, they get a joke and they do cartwheels just because they are so damn happy. I love that. And they are very fun to travel with. They eat, they sleep, they don't complain...much...when hauled out of bed at 6 a.m. to catch a plane home. And they make me laugh. They are pure joy to me.

It was nice being away and having some time to relax and then having some precious time with my family but I am glad to be home. It seemed as though we were gone for so long because we took back to back trips. My suitcase feels as though it's been rode hard and my cat doesn't understand our behavior at all. My knitting has suffered as well. Not one stitch did I knit on this last trip. I was just too tired from all the hilarity, all the driving and all the being pushed around in wheelchairs. It's just not as pleasant to be pushed around as one would think. It's tiring even though someone else is doing all the work. Most rental wheelchairs are very uncomfortable and you have to find various methods of padding your behind so that your feet don't go numb. Then there is the problem of just being able to see only a portion of what you would like to see. The person pushing you is trying to do a good job and also trying not to clip people in the ankles but really...all you are seeing is the rear end of most people and that is, for the most part, not a pretty sight. 
 
 And the sad thing is that most of humanity has decided that people in wheelchairs don't matter in the least. They don't watch where they are going and frequently bump into the chair. Or they walk directly in front of you and get all pissy when they are banged into by the chair. Or, and this is my personal favorite, they speed walk and try to get ahead of you in line so that they don't have to be held up in any way by whatever is keeping you in that wheelchair. I saw more than one person try to hurry their fat ass to get in front of me at the airport or push their kids ahead of me so they could get out of the plane sooner. And the elevator...they try to beat you to the elevator to make sure there will be room for them first. It's amazing what people will do so they won't have to be inconvienced in any way.

Oh, it was a great trip in spite of all the people who think what they are doing is ever so much more important than what you are doing. We had a good laugh at a few of them. Little did they know that their bad behavior was sometimes pretty darn hilarious. I'm happy to be home in my own little house with only my cat walking slowly in front of me 

Sh-h-h-h-h. Hubby is still sleeping. He told me yesterday that even though I might physically ache all over from our nasty 13 hour travel day on Tuesday, he aches emotionally. We decided, also yesterday, that we will never try out for The Amazing Race. There would just be too much swearing, name calling and map throwing from us. We would be bleeped all of the time. Never mind all the potty and smoke breaks I would need to take. Oh, we might be good entertainment but we would never finish the first race.

The day started off okay. We left our house at 7:45 a.m. all set for our trips to Orlando, Ft. Lauderdale, and then back to Orlando to meet up with the grandkids for a visit to the Happiest Place on Earth. I managed to get my seat changed from a window to an aisle so that I could sit more comfortably but that was not without a bit of humor. My being in a full hip brace didn't deter the gate agent from asking me if I could manage the duties of sitting in an exit row. Well, I said, I could probably open the door but that would be about the extent of what I could handle in an emergency. She looked at my brace and decided that I was probably right. We boarded the plane and had a smooth and uneventful flight. That was the end of uneventful.

We hadn't eaten breakfast in the morning thinking that we would grab something at the airport. We didn't. We ate the food Delta provided. Miniscule bags of tiny treats and half cans of Coke. I do like those cookies, though. We were both kind of hungry when we landed but the airport was so huge and hubby had to push me in a wheelchair whilst dragging our carry on luggage to the far corners of the airport acreage just to find our bags that we didn't stop to eat. We came to a fork in the road and chose the wrong way. There was swearing and sighing all over the place when it was discovered that we had to tromp back to where we had come from and go a different way in order to get our luggage. And let me say this: if the wheels on a wheelchair aren't locked once a person gets on an airport tram said person rolls around in circles while the tram is moving. I'm just sayin'.

The luggage was finally located, the car was rented and we took off. In the wrong direction. For some reason, the map we were given was so out of any kind of scale that a map usually is that we were in the Disney Parks area before we knew what hit us. We had been trying to go in a southeasterly direction and somehow missed every road that took us that way. There was more swearing and map crumpling. We had been driving farther away from our final destination. Sigh. Being that it was now around 4 in the afternoon, I forced a stop at the dirtiest Wendy's in the world so we could get some food in us before we had a slap fight at a toll booth. None of the tables had been wiped off, the potty was disgraceful, and there were no napkins. Seriously...I had a good laugh reading the sign in the 'Ladies' that stated 'this establishment is proud of their dedication to cleanliness' while standing ankle deep in brown paper towel wads.

We got lost 3 more times. We were going the wrong way for most of the day. My super powers of direction had vanished, my superb map reading skills had flown out the window and the GPS was acting all giddy. Like it didn't even know it was in Florida. We managed to get lost using a map, a GPS and a SmartPhone. I know it sounds as though we never leave town but we do. We get around just fine....we geocache for gods' sake... but for some reason all our combined knowledge couldn't get us to go east for quite a while. We would have never made it to the mat and stood in front of Phil to hear that we had been kicked off The Amazing Race for being the last pair to get there. Someone would have had to come with a flashlight to look for us while we endlessly circled a round about in England. I'm going to blame it all on not eating breakfast. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Money isn't everything. I know that. In my heart of hearts, I know that. Family, friends and the blue of the sky is what counts. However....when life is the the 3rd act and there is no money to live on anymore it breaks your heart. It saps your will. It makes you wish that the lottery guy would actually pick your damn number so that you could pay your property taxes. And your homeowner's insurance.

My mom is in this financial mess from hell that I have been trying to get her out of for that past year. It's not working, it only gets worse, and I have had to apply for a reverse mortgage just so she is able to stay in her home. Her home for the past 60 odd years. Her home and my home and my sister's home will soon be the bank's home. I don't care what anyone tells me....it won't be ours anymore. It's a sad day.

I'm very tired of banks and various lending groups and people telling me what they think I want to hear. I'm tired of banks and their fees and then more fees and the fees on top of those fees. I'm exhausted from listening to numbers being quoted. All the papers being flipped over in front of me that I don't have time to read and don't understand anyway and need to be signed seem limitless in number. I have to sign as Power of Attorney so it's not just my name I'm signing but a whole long sentence that ends with my mom's name. I don't much like that either. And I'm certainly not enjoying the stream of drivel that flows from the mouth of the loan officer at the bank and the reverse mortgage 'person'. I really don't know what to call her. I feel as though I am being over-sold a car with a lot of miles and a knock in the engine.

The companies out there who are willing and ready to sell you a reverse mortgage make it sound like the best possible thing that could happen. Why, you could do this and get money to buy yourself a new house. You could take the trip of a lifetime. You could move to Florida. You could get a new set of teeth. AND...you never have to pay it back! It all sounds so fabulous until you read all the fine print and do a little research. It's really not the beauty of a solution that one hopes for and it's a very, very expensive solution. It will cost almost $10,000 to get the equity left in the house, which is not much, and that equity needs to be used to pay moms taxes, insurance, household bills and food. For about 5 years. That's about it. Then it's over, the money is gone and the house has to be sold to pay back the bank. That's the upshot they gloss over while they smile, hand you a pen and make it seem as though all your dreams are about to come true. Sadly, there is no other alternative for us. 

All of this financial reversal mess has been a huge lesson for me. Don't run up credit card bills. Don't take out home equity loans that there is no chance in hell you can pay back. Don't listen to the loan officer at the bank who will tell you, at age 86, that you can take out $50,000 worth of equity, fritter it away, and it will all be just fine. It won't be fine. It has to be paid back somehow. It will be a big stinkin' mess and there will be the threat of foreclosure hanging over you every month. Don't listen to loan officers period. I'm beginning to think that banks and their officers are the devil. Insead, please, please go to an impartial credit advisor. Please!

This credit councilling session I had to attend was a mandatory deal, with fees, that had to be done in order to even apply for the reverse mortgage. Instead of the hour long phone session I was offered I opted to have my session in person. Face to face. With papers and numbers and a woman with a red pen sitting right across the desk from me. It was wonderful. She explained everything so well and I learned so much that I now feel it should be mandatory for anyone who buys a house, wants to refinance, or wants a home equity line of credit. I'm certain the banks and their hinky loan officers don't want this to happen. I think over half the people who would hear the plain truth not wrapped up in any promise of the money to fund a new set of teeth would be appalled at the costs and ultimate results of borrowing willy nilly and change their mind. No wonder the housing market is in the mess it's in. It was all just smoky promises of what a person could have even with no way to pay it back. The lending instutuions should be ashamed of themselves.

The reversal of forture of everyone stuck in upside down mortages, home equity payback nightmares and threats of foreclosure is very sad.  It was all just a fake promise that has a bitter end.

My dream library has every book ever written available to me. Whatever I want to read is there. I can wander the stacks picking out this or that, leafing through old pages that smell like mystery, and reading the first sentence of every tome I put my hands on. I can listen...er, read whatever my little heart desires. In my dream I live in the County of Everything. Unfortunatly, I live in Dakota County.

I discovered a couple of years ago that I love having books read to me. I love listening to stories, inflections, modulations...everything about it makes me happy. I must have been one of those little kids who begs for 'one more page, one more story, one more chapter'. Please. There are pictures of me as a little girl sitting on laps of various people being read to. I must have dragged my ragged books through the house looking for a place to sit and someone who would read to me. I don't remember it but I do remember going to the big old Carnegie Library in St. Paul every two weeks to pick out my own books. I remember the smell, I remember the date stamper, and I remember thinking that I would read everything there. There was always a new frontier. The children's books, the young adult books and then.....the rest of the library. I've been book drunk ever since.

The MP3 player I got for Christmas from Hubby a few years ago was a thrill. I could now download, once I learned how, books from the library and listen to them being read to me. Such a pleasure! Oh, there were a few narrators I didn't much care for but on the whole it was as if a whole new library was opened up to me. And there were SO many books! I was in heaven. I could listen while I knit. I could listen in the car on the way to work. I could have a fabulous story read to me as I dusted and cleaned. The vacuum cleaner posed a little problem but there was a feature on the MP3 that allowed me to pause and pick the story right back up later. The world of books was my oyster.

Then, suddenly, my oyster snapped shut. It's now the world of E-Books. Kindles, Nooks, and whatever else is out there lurking in the bushes. The world of audio books is slowly shrinking and libraries are replacing them with e-books. Hell. Add to that the Hennepin County Library's decision to not allow anyone who doesn't live in their special county to download from their vast selection as of January 1st of this year. There has been an open door policy with libraries for some time. If you have a card from one county you can use it in another. You just have to know your 14 digit number and your secret code. I do. Now, I can still drive over to Hennepin County and take out a book if I must but I can no longer download anything because I would be taking the audiobook out of the ears of someone who lives in their county. At least that was how it was explained to me after I complained.

This has left me with Dakota County. Sigh. They used to have a pretty good selection but that has changed as well. They now have something called One Click Digital which doesn't work sometimes....you just never know when. And they have the truly terrible EBSCO. This 'host', and I use the term lightly, has almost nothing to offer unless one wants to listen to John Sanford over and over again. There's nothing wrong with John Sanford but he is not on my list of what I want to listen to. Let me put it another way.....they have 8 audiobooks available in their biography/memoir section. Eight. I am so sad.

I've tried Ramsey County and that doesn't look promising. I've looked into Audible and I do not have the correct MP3 player never mind the high cost of downloading from them. I loved my Hennepin County access while it lasted. It was the library of my dreams. Now I'm just a cranky little girl dragging my MP3 player around looking for a lap and someone to read to me.

One self striping travel sock done, one pair of Christmas socks done and one pair of fabulous black and white socks done. And the sun was out yesterday so that I could take a picture. Hooray! And it's cold outside. Perfect wool sock wearing weather. All things come to those who wait.

Since the Listeme sweater is in a time out I started another pair of socks. Sigh. I don't know what the deal is with all the socks but that's how I'm rolling these days. I'm on the sock train and I can't get off.

The new sock is White Rabbit from my year of Alice in Wonderland sock kits by WoolGirl. I have so many sock kits stashed away in a closet upstairs that I'm almost afraid to open the door. They seem to multiply when I'm not looking. So many of them are similar but I love getting to knit with yarn that I wouldn't ordinarily find in a yarn shop. And the White Rabbit is different.

The White Rabbit sock has a darling little ruffle around the ankle and is tied with a sweet little ribbon. I had to dig around for awhile in order to find some #1 dpns that were long enough to hold the 160 stitches needed to cast on but I did. Turns out they are my grandma's knitting needles and are long enough and dangerous enough to put an eye out. I love that I have my grandma's hoard of needles. Every once in awhile I need some odd size needle and that's where I go....to the hoard of sharp pointys hidden away from the grandchildren so that nobody really puts an eye out on my watch.

I used to see my grandma knit when I was little but I didn't pay too much attention, I guess. I was always at her treadle sewing maching screwing up the tension. She must have knit socks. She had so many tiny sized needles that she had to have. I never saw any of her finished knitting except for the fabulous grey/red/white plaid afghan that was over the back of her couch. The one I used to snuggle in when I stayed over night. She showed me how to knit and I made a tiny, hideous scarf with scraps of the yarn she had. Hideous. But I learned. She taught me and I learned. I like to think she knit socks for the soldiers during WW1. I keep that notion in my head as I knit my own army of socks.

It is so gray and gloomy out today that there is no way to get a good picture of dear Listeme but you can at least see that there has been a lot of knitting being done. The back has been completed and appears  to be the correct size. The right front is almost, almost done and also appears to be the correct size. The armholes match up and the bottom ribbing has the same number of rows. It should be golden and I should be casting off the back neck right about now. I'm not. I'm in hell.

I got all the way up to the bind off for the neck front and discovered that I had too many stitches on my needle. Way too many. What? I pondered this  for a minute and decided it was because I didn't do the waist decreases and increases. I was happy again and continued to knit. I believe I was in a codine cough syrup induced haze because I just kept knitting. All the way up to the shoulder. I was so darn relieved to have one front piece done and that I could now cast on for the second front that there was no stopping me.  Seriously....that codine can mess with your head. It finally occured to me to hold the sweater front up to my own front where I had the shock of my life. The sweater front not only covered three fourths of my front including the hip brace but there were so many stitches left on the needle for the shoulder seam that it hung quite a ways down my arm. I wanted to cry and then blow my nose in the thing. Idiot sweater! Crappy cold! Damn hip!

I cast on for the second sock that was supposed to go to Florida and furiously set to knitting because somehow, someway, I know how to knit socks. As I knit I mulled over my sweater front issue. Could I cut it? This is always the first thing that pops into my brain but I knew that with the amount of snot plugging up my head I shouldn't listen to what it was suggesting. I finally thought that I should maybe read the pattern over. Genius idea! I read the right front section. I read the left front section. Then I read the back section again looking for clues because I really had no idea what had happened. I added and subtracted the decreases and increases that should have been at the waistline. Then I saw it. In what seemed like smaller print than the rest of the pattern I saw that I should have decreased 12 stitches across the right front after the bottom ribbing. Damn it all to hell! I didn't remember decreasing on the back so I grabbed that piece and took a good look. There they were....the decreases. Oh, I should be shot. I should never be allowed to knit a sweater. All my needles and yarn should be taken away from me and I should have to sit and watch TV with my hands in my lap. And then some duct tape should be placed over my mouth to stop the swearing. The sweater was not the idiot...I was the idiot.

I'm just going to do a little cleaning today and more laundry and kind of pretend that the sweater isn't even there. I'm going to dust around it. The right frame of mind will be needed for yanking this yarn out yet again and I'm not in it.


I

Ah yes, I am home. Tired and needing wool socks on my feet again. Even though I love winter this isn't the kind of winter I love. Where the heck is the snow? All I could see from my window on the plane was brown, brown and more brown. It's a little depressing and I'm glad I had some bright Florida sunshine to keep me from a case of the sads. I'm going back again in a couple of weeks so I should be alright in the not enough sun= extra cranky department.

The person who really needed the vitamen D was the large cranky gal who sat next to me on the flight home. Hubby and I didn't have seats together...and might I say here that Delta isn't helping any with their manner of seating people willy-nilly. It took forever to get everyone to sit down so that the plane could take off because there was seat trading going on all over the place. So, I had a window seat and Hubby had a window seat across the aisle and one row ahead. Bummer. I guess I really don't need to sit with him but I like to and the way the hip has been sliding around I feel better when he is next to me. He was indeed sitting next to me and we were waiting for the person who was supposed to have that seat show up so we could ask to trade seats. Well...This large woman lumbers up to us and states, 'That's my seat'. We allowed as how it was but could we trade seats with her so that we could sit together. No. She went on to say that she didn't want a window seat, wasn't going to trade and that 'I don't care what you think'. H-m-m-m. Hubby got up and moved forward to his seat. I just sat there stunned. As she lowered herself into the seat she said. ' I suppose you don't like this much' to which I replied, 'no'. 'I don't care' she said. I sarcastically thanked her for her kindness and the plane took off.

The sock got finished on the flight and I then took a little nap even though my feet were cold. I listened to my book on the MP3 player but mostly I thought about how mean people can be. I hope that if I am ever traveling alone I will trade seats so that people who want to can sit together. I hope I am never that cranky. Oh, I'm cranky but I don't ever want to be that cranky. I don't want the stink of hate coming off me in waves. I also don't want to ever wear that ugly of a sweater but that's another story.

We got home and I immediatly took off the cumbersome brace and went to bed for a 2 hour nap. I woke up when the grandson showed up. We had a fine time with him and after he left I took out my sock so that I could finish up the toe and cast on the second one. I just didn't have it in me to sew it up on the plane. I cut the yarn and got ready to thread the needle. H-m-m-m. Something didn't look right. The foot looked too short. Hell! I tried the sock on my right foot because I CAN bend that leg up and .....hell and damn! The sock WAS too short. Damn, damn, damn. I had measured it at least twice on the plane but, of course, hadn't tried it on because who can get their foot to go anywhere but on the floor in that tiny area they give you to live in for 3 hours. Talk about a toad in a hole. Sigh. I ripped it back to right before the decrease part and started knitting again. Crap. Now, because I cut that yarn, I will have to add more and it won't be as beautiful as it should be. I'm blaming the large cranky gal.

I'm going to finish it up today and then take Listeme out of the suitcase. The second sock will have to wait while I knit on the sweater for a little bit in between unpacking and doing laundry. By the time I get the laundry from the trip done it will be time to pack it up and fly off with it again so I think I'll leave the second sock for that trip. The hip and the sock made it through this trip so the hip and the second sock will make it through the next. Let's hope I have a better seat mate this time.