It's Like Magic!

For the first time in a long time, I enjoyed a more or less leisurely weekend.  After more than a month of back to back trials, I am looking forward to the holiday respite made possible by my judge taking off for a fortnight.  Who am I to complain? 

I've long since come to grips with the fact that the Bills are out of it this year after a promising start, but it sure is nice to have # 5  back and being productive (and about time they moved LosSman to where he belongs -- at third string).  At least they are fighting for some pride.  It was highly satisfying watching them pull off today's win.  

S0, while in Seattle this past May I finally made it out to the San Juan Islands, only to be besieged by torrential downpours foiling our hiking plans.  In search of a bookstore, we also found a little yarn shop where I picked up a skein of sock yarn and attempted my first patternless pair of socks. I figured that the self-striping pattern would suffice to keep the sock interesting.  I was certainly right about the striping ... not so much on the socks.  At the time I was operating without my normal tools (tape measure, row counter, etc) and was simply eyeballing everything.  I wasn't wholly off, but upon my return East I ultimately frogged the sock with plans to revisit it in the future.  

I had however had the Broad Street Mitts on my to do list for quite some time now, and frustrated by the lack of properly fitting gloves for my small hands in the swiftly failing retail industry, I turned to my rainy day yarn.  It's the perfect winter palate for a pair of of these convertible mittens and the pattern perfect for my preference for easy access to my digits.  It seems to be a pretty quick knit, but what I'm really enjoying is just watching the stripes and the fake-isle pattern develop.  It's like magic!

Speaking of magic, while the holiday season has crept up on me, it's hard to deny that it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas: