I'm back...mostly. After a whirlwind trip to St. Louis and a terrible case of the flu, things are looking up today. For those who doubt me, I did stay home from work on Monday when I was really yucky. I felt mostly better today, so I went to work. Although, I will admit to getting up, showing and even getting dressed on Monday before deciding that it just wasn't going to happen...

I got some really great stuff for my birthday. I got a sweater and 2 shirts, some awesome mugs, some cool fleece artist earrings from my aunt. My niece helped me open all of my gifts. I'd pick up a gift. She'd ask "Me???" We'd open it. She'd realize it wasn't for her and go right to the next gift. We didn't leave her disappointed though, the very last gift was indeed for "Me???" We bought her a magnetic Dora book to play with. She was happy after that. I had a very good weekend, other than the fact that Typhoid Mary (aka my niece) managed to get one more victim of her terrible flu before I left.

I did get some knitting done this weekend. I knit on the mysterious peach knitting project, which is coming along nicely. I also worked on these socks.

They are Mountain colors Bearfoot in the Wild Raspberry colorway. I love, love, love this yarn. Right now, they don't look like anything other than ribbed socks, but you'll notice sock #1 is still on needles. I like this Drops pattern, but it has you do the lace separately and then seam it on to the top of the sock. Those of you who know me well know that seaming is one of the things I dislike most in life. So, I figured why couldn't I just knit the socks toe up and then knit the lace onto it. So, I'm going to finish sock #2 and then attempt to knit the lace onto to top of the socks. At the very least, I have 2 pairs of ribbed socks and I could have some very cool socks if this works. Also, the Mountain colors yarn has a bit less yardage to it than most, so I want to make sure I have enough yarn left to do the lace.

In one of those maybe the world is finally coming along, but gee how weird moments, I was looking at usatoday.com today and I noticed that they had 2 new knitting books featured, Knitting Circle and Friday Night Knitting Club. Since when did knitting fiction become the "IT" thing? They're even making a movie of one of them. Both of them sound interesting, so I might see if I can read one or both sometime in the future, but they both sound something along the lines of the Debbie Macomber books. Why can't someone find another interesting idea on knitting to write about other than tragedy that people get through via their knitting group? We're more than that!