Aftermath

Jake's parents have left, and as a result, my home is now cleaner and more flowery than it was before they arrived. Technically they left Tuesday morning, but I didn't have a chance to blog yesterday.

The visit was quite nice. It's been 6 months since Jake had seen his parents and over a year since I had. They had about the worst timing ever coming down, hitting DC during Friday afternoon rush hour, so they traveled a whopping 12 miles in 3 hours on 495. By the time they arrived, needless to say, we didn't do anything :) Saturday I went to knitting in the AM and they came up to meet me and we wandered through Olde Towne. Jake and his dad went out fishing Saturday night and Deb indulged in a few hours of Home Improvement shows on TV (they don't have TV back home!). They had told us while we were shopping they wanted to buy us an engagement gift. Of course, we 'need' nothing, so it took a while to figure out what we would get. On Saturday we had been through an awesome garden store - not a nursery with flowers and stuff, just copious amounts of cast iron and cement garden pots/decoration etc. Sunday we decided to go back and pick two urns for the front porch as our gift (OK, Jake wanted a chainsaw, but. . . .). Aren't they awesome?




They didn't get flowers until Monday - and hopefully the flowers last (I'm certainly not known for my green thumb, but I'm going to try!). Deb is really into flowers so she had a good time putting them together for us.

We also, of course, visited the beach (and had some great fish tacos while there) during the visit and spent Sunday night at the Tides game. They lost, but it was the perfect night to be outside. . . not too hot, oddly light humidity (as in NONE!) and no bugs!

In addition to the pots up front, I got a few new garden dwellers for the backyard. We have SO MUCH garden space that I do nothing with (due to lack of aforementioned green thumb). While we were at the beach, though, I saw these gorgeous flowers that turned out to be Hibiscus, so we planted one.
I love the deep burgundy center in the peach bloom! It's supposedly a pretty hearty thing, so maybe I can learn from this and figure out how to grow some other stuff, too!

There was knitting. I finished Bob's hat. . . until I tried it on him! It's a bit short, but I'm going to be able to pick up along the cast on and just extend the ribbing another inch or so. I love the pattern and can't wait to make a 2nd for Jake. You should knit it just for the cleverness of the designer! The way the decreases happen up the crown to keep the cables going is fantastic!

So that leaves me the sleeves of Maude, Jake's socks and my socks OTN. However, Kemtee was a very bad influence and suggested making goddess in the comments of one of my blog posts as a new cast on. Well, I forgot that that was in my queue and I REALLY like it, and I found a mercerized cotton on Elann that would make the shirt for ~$10, so the yarn practically bought itself and is en route to me now :) So much for no new yarn. . . .

Alright, at this point I feel like I'm rambling, so if you made it this far, congrats! I'll be back when I have something more interesting to talk about!