tradition, hoooo!

My Thanksgiving was pretty great. It involved my grandmother, aunt, uncle, and three cousins as well as ye olde nuclear family; my grandmother told us the story of how she and my grandfather met (the long version... again...), and my uncle and the boy cousin showed us all how you can make an awesome soda-pop volcano with Diet Coke and Mentos (seriously, try it--our best one shot up 7 feet!), and I introduced the whole family to Japanese television personality Hard Gay. The last of which resulted in our gathering around my uncle's laptop watching youtube clips for over an hour and then ending all of our sentences with "HOOOOOO!" for probably another hour. I really hope that becomes a tradition.

An already-established tradition is that of me starting my Christmas knitting in July or August, going like gangbusters, and then stopping for some reason and waking up mid-November realizing how little time I have left. This year it's a sweater for my father, an Elizabeth Zimmerman saddle-shoulder in Cascade 220, sort of a slate-grey color. And this year's reason for stopping was the aforementioned disaster. For almost two months before I left Japan, we were pretty sure that the end was near, but hoped that it wasn't. Our mid-September paychecks were late, and I just gave up, because I didn't want to knit the fear and indecision and general negativity into my father's sweater. Well, really, I was too depressed to have the energy to keep working on it. So I have barely touched it in almost two months, and it's just this torso-tube, and I can't find more than two size 7 dpns to start a sleeve, and I braved the Christmas-shopper traffic today to go buy some with my dwindling funds, and the craft store didn't have any. I mean, come on! Are they unaware that I've just been through an international unemployment incident? Do they know it's Christmastime at all? Won't somebody please think of the children?

So I've rooted around and somehow come up with a couple of fives and a couple of sixes, and I'm going to cast on with those and see if they'll get me through the ribbing, after which I can switch to a hat-sized circ.

Hope your Thanksgivings were as full of joy, food, sugar explosions, and hip-thrusting as mine was.