The Vay-cay

I owe you a little insight into my week-and-a-half absence...I was getting back to my hillbilly roots, so to speak. The C family (and some extended family, the T's) have traditionally taken a week off each summer to go houseboating in Tennessee together.


Ahoy!
This week consists of the basics: eating a lot, drinking, water-skiing at dawn, squirting anyone who is trying to relax with water guns, you know, the usual. These trips got more sporadic as we got older, as things do (I'm still resisting growing-up though, kicking and screaming all the way). The last was four years ago, and we figured it was high-time to get back on the water! I was pumped. I thought that I was going to have sooooo much time to knit. I mean, a good 50% of these vacations are supposed to be just lounging around; I could get so much of Mystery Wedding Project done!

Well friends, I did get a fair amount of knitting in, but only on the car ride to my home town in Indiana, and the subsequent car ride to TN. I know you're tired of hearing my bitching, but it was so....flippin'....hot. The novelty of the houseboat of course, is that when you're too hot, you can jump right in the water. However, being soaking wet is not terribly conducive to knitting and frankly, I didn't want MWP draped over my legs....like a wet blanket (groans at own pun).

I was inspired, however, to knit myself a headband. I'd been thinking about doing this for a while and I figured this was the time to do it. A headband is small, so no worries about having to have some bulky thing on your lap, and it could actually be helpful for riding around on the speed-boat. My hair is at that odd length where I can't quite get all of it in a ponytail and so what's left out whips around in any kind of breeze, tangling up and generally driving me crazy. Working on the shawl has gotten me into lace (I love how quickly it knits up!) and so I chose a simple stockinette lace pattern out of my Traditional Knitted Lace Shawls book (despite my earlier tiff with Martha Waterman, I still love this book).

I got about halfway done and realized that the fabric was curling into a tube. Unh, mental headslap. Apparently I didn't learn from the incident when I was first learning how to knit and decided to do a scarf in simple stockinette stitch; I ended up with one long tube that refused to flatten no matter how aggressively I blocked it. I finished my headband, assuring myself that it would flatten if I aggressively blocked it. Yeah....

Here's what it is (sort of) supposed to look like:


Aaaaaand here's what it actually looks like:




Curled up all snake-like.
The moral of the story is, if you're making a relatively thin strip of fabric DON'T USE ANY FORM OF STOCKINETTE. Just don't even try. For me this was apparently one of those "do the same thing and expect a different result" forms of idiocy. NEVER AGAIN.

I tried to rally and started another in a garter stitch with some eyelets:


But I ran out of steam quickly. So instead, how about some amusing vacation photos?


Here's me inhaling a bunch of water on a ski start. The copilot looks on thinking, "What is her deal?"


I share 50% of my genetic material with this man.


Some candy cigs from a much, much earlier trip (presumably before they were banned) were passed around and the copilot tested their ski-worthiness. My conclusion: I'd look extremely trashy as a smoker. I'm just not good at it.


Happy faces all around!