Celebration!

I had a lovely time last night celebrating my great-aunt’s birthday. My parents, sister-in-law and I took Priscilla and her husband Wally to a restaurant way above the valley on Mt. Hamilton road, appropriately named “The Grandview”. And a grand view it is. It sits on the edge of the mountain, with just enough room for a short deck before the mountain dives down, and high enough up that we were looking down on the planes heading into the airport.

The internal décor looks as if it were frozen in the mid-fifties back when the building was last rebuilt after a fire swept the mountain: dark wood paneling, a cherub-crusted fountain in the corner, and artificial pine garland complete with burgundy bows for Christmas. The menu, too, is probably unchanged, but the veal piccata that I had was well prepared and the portions were ample for a very reasonable price. And, oh, the view! Sadly I didn’t think to take a picture before dark, and though my point and shoot does a pretty good job in the dark, it really doesn’t do justice to the city stretched beneath us. (Click to embiggen.)

But more impressive than the view is that Priscilla and Wally have been together since 1942. Of course, if you manage to find, and be, as nice as Priscilla and Wally are, it’s probably easy to stay together.

Christmas Mystery Shawl

A Time to...

I know I’m not alone. No one has enough time to do everything they want/need to get done. But I will admit that there are times when its just laziness. So I hereby announce my other goal for the month of September: Finishing. I have an enormous pile of WIPS of many varieties. In the garment area there is knitting of course, but also sewing, stash cataloging, pattern writing and many more. And one of my worst piles of undone is the mending pile. So for this month I will finish one thing a day. And I mean finish. Ready to wear, publish and/or fully put away. Given the mending pile, this shouldn’t be hard if I just set my priorities.

Teal Pants.

Back to…

I’ve had a few false starts at keeping a blog. And since September is the Back to… month, this seems a good time to try one more time. As is my wont of a Tuesday, I wandered into my favorite LYS today, and of course several of my favorite knitters were there. Our discussions reminded me to pull this picture out of the files.

Back to last year’s Christgiving, the theme was the sock. I made twelve pairs, one each for my cousins (more accurately the cousins on my Dad’s side), their mother (aka my aunt), their husbands and their children. There are more sock-viewing-friendly pictures in the old archive, but this post really isn’t about socks. This picture is about Green Planet Yarn, and the fabulous people that hang out there.

As you might have guessed, Green Planet has a lot of ecologically friendly yarns. Variously local, green, sustainable, and fair trade yarns have a role in the shop. Wool of course, alpaca and cotton, linen and bamboo, but also some unusual things like milk and nettle. Beth, the owner, is a second generation yarn shop owner, one of her sisters works there regularly, and her mom stops by every once in a while. The staff are always helpful and friendly to knitters of all shapes, sizes and skill levels. There's even a fabulous knit doctor who provides free consultation several days a week.

But even better than the yarn and the expertise is the big table and the diverse group of fabulous people that gather around it. The picture shows a few of them and their reaction when I brought a dozen pairs of socks to show off before doling them out to their recipients last year.