Hello, from Michigan

Thunderstorms, down-pours, and electrical outages, OH MY! Well, you wouldn't know about it looking at the pictures, but our 2 hour trip turned into a 4ish hour one and our family reunion got jump-started by having no power for the first couple of days. It wouldn't have been so bad if the family size was smaller, and we didn't have to buy so much food all the time and store it into a fridge that didn't have power, and also if the whole town wasn't under either for a few days. We had to travel far to buy food, and lucky for us, the stove ran on gas.

However, it has been fun having "me time"...reading, knitting, walking along Lake Michigan and such. I can get used to this whole no work thing real fast.

The sign above is a little snipit of what we saw on the beach: do not enter signs. It was really hilarious. You get to the beach, and you have like 100 feet of actual beach front where you can do as you please and to your left and right are all of these "keep off" signs. We did learn that you were allowed to walk along the beach, as long as you keep the rule "wet sand=green, dry sand=red."

We had several cabins to hold our generously-sized family. Joe and I practically had a cabin to our selves (it was a one-room one, but had a kitchen and bathroom with a washer and dryer in it). The scenery and decor was amazing, and the whole theme was "Elephant Walk" after the movie and book. Elephants littered the premises.

Here is a preview of the BSJ 3, for baby boy, if there is such a gender residing inside of me. Here's the thing, I first had trouble getting my hands on the pattern, but when I did, I happily knit and followed the predictable decreases until halfway through the pattern when I noticed that the back had more stitches than it should have (like in the double digits). I thought to myself, that can't be right...I did all of the decreases in all of the right spots and timings...until I looked through the pattern one more time in the beginning and noticed that on row 11 or so I was supposed to increase the sleeve stitches, thus adding many more decrease rows. The piece was not salvageable, and I had to frog the whole darn thing after two days of knitting it with color-switching and love. That really set me back, but I restarted it the next day and I am currently (and very tiredly so) am approaching the home-stretch. The sweater is cute, and I am loving the color scheme and natural alpaca quality to the yarn.

I used my Frog Tree yarn in sport that I had from the LYS that recently went under. It looks like I put a lot of work into color-switching...and I did, but not with lots of strands on the edging. Every row twists the 4 yarns together, and unwinding the tangles takes up a good percentage of the knitting process. However, it's worth it. The little tyke, or tomboy, will look cute in it.

I think I'm starting to feel the babies kick some. I put my hand on the spots, though, and the kicking stops. Meanies. 29th is the next ultra sound...will they let me find out what they are?