Here's to the future

So after a year long silence I finally come back, right? Okay. I had a good reason for my silence, nicely encompassed in two words: Physical Chemistry. That lovely little two semester class made orgo look like an adorable kitten. I got hardly any knitting done, and don't even get me started on my writing. It was depressing. Of course, now I am a blissful graduate with a degree in chemistry and no job. I guess you can't win them all.

So on the writing front, I doubt anyone's interested or even if anyone reads this thing, but Heart is coming along nicely, and I am almost done with Aurora's and Shadow's intros on Voyager's. I might even post a snippet of one of them soon.

Knitting: I finished Evangeline, but the person I was giving it to was rather hard to track down, so in order to give the gloves to her I practically had to kidnap her and drag her to my room. Then when the gloves were already on her hands I realized that I didn't have a finished picture of them, so I took one with my camera phone. Now the stupid picture is trapped on my phone, and there's no way that I can see to get it off of there, so yeah. There might be a picture eventually or there might not.

The next project I cast on was Chevalier and I am finished with one and at the beginning of the cabling on the second. Why do I always go for the wild crazy cable projects? I personally think that that might be why I keep my hair long. When I have it pulled back, my ponytail makes a great place to store needles when I am not using them.

The photo really doesn't do the mitten justice. I had to take it rather quickly and the light was bad. When both are finished I'll take a better one in natural sunlight.

One more thing I want to brag about: Origami. I started teaching myself how to do some pretty designs right before winter break so that I could use it as a study break during exams. Then I made the huge mistake of making one in front of the bride-to-be, my cousin. She immediately had the brilliant idea of making paper lilies out of this bandanna scrap-booking paper to match the theme of the rehearsal dinner. I spent the next couple of days making paper lilies until my fingers bled. Here are the finished, albeit unopened, results.

She lives!

I was waiting until I got to school to do an actual update. So much has happened, including moving into the new house. I took a lot of pictures early on, but didn't do much afterwards, so only the old pictures go up here. This is one of the first pictures that we took off of our dock. Yes. Our. Dock. It's amazing. You can go out there on your pajamas and look at the water early in the morning.

Of course it wasn't fun immediately. This is a somewhat silly picture, although entirely candid, that is nicely illustrative of the sorts of things people do when moving. The television I bought for my dorm room a week ago is larger than the set my dad is watching.


The first thing unpacked was my muse. My aunt thought it was so unlike something I would own that she complained about it and nearly tossed it out.
And this is to show everyone that I wasn't lying about the knitting. These mitts were made for my sister using the free Knitty pattern Manresa.
Yes, I know they are supposed to go on your feet, not your hands. I think they look prettier as gloves, though. I added an afterthought thumb on line 58-ish of the pattern. The thumb was modeled after the one used in Fetching.
Also, I modified the cuff near the finger end by decreasing until I had as many stitches as I started with and then knitted it so it would be identical to the cast-on cuff.

My sister agrees that they look better on her hands.

Movin'

So the moving is all done now. The house looked so heartlessly plain I had to take a picture of it when everything was all said and done. I am existing in the limbo that is life between moves. But I realized that I hadn't posted any of the pictures associated with my final days in Sicily and my fight home. Everything went according to plan, except for the airlines losing my luggage again. >< Still, the airports were crazy as usual. In Heathrow they had even posted signs telling people not to beat up the airport personnel. This picture is not from Heathrow. It was from the Catania airport. I got through that line. It didn't look nearly that big from the ground, but I guess I was too busy doing line jumping. Yes, I am one of those people. No, I wouldn't do it anywhere else except in Italy, and I was only pushing ahead there because everyone else was. The best person at it when I was in line, though, was a nun.

Me at my very first wine tasting. It was a real hard decision whether to bring home this wine or the one I ended up bringing. In the end I settled for the red. It was so much fun, and the scenery couldn't be beat.
A meal I had at one of the coastal restaurants. It was so pretty I just had to photograph it. I think the place was called Spizzica or something like that.
I miss Italy. It was so beautiful, even when it wasn't trying to be. I needed to get home, though, and I am glad to be back in America.

The column and I

Cute pictures that give you a slightly better idea of the scale of the temples at agrigento. This is at the temple of Hercules, the one that is all knocked down and destroyed. It is one of the smaller temples there. In total there are four of us around this column.

Too many pictures, not enough time!

Okay, folks. This is hopefully not the last blog post that I am going to make while in Sicily, but it is certainly tempting to wait until I have a reasonable internet connection. Even my typing is lagging, and I uploaded 130 pictures for y'all. This is how much I love you (and how much time I spent sitting and reading for class). As usual, description will follow, but for now I will go ahead and post. It has been two weeks since my last post, and I apologize for the long silence. I will be home on the 28th!