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Dear Ellen,

I realize that this post must have had you immediately wondering why I would make mention of my luncheon habits , but actually I was referring to the tour I took last Friday of the mighty warship USS PROVIDENCE (SSN 719).  PROVIDENCE is, of course, Allen’s submarine.  I flew up to the city of Providence* on Thursday evening and on Friday did some business at the Submarine Base and then Allen gave me a tour of his boat. **  I was so proud — mostly of the fact that I didn’t fall down any ladders, but also of how well Allen is obviously doing on board as the Supply Officer.  We spent the rest of the evening walking around New London, having pizza and laughing at funny web sites like Regretsy, The Man Repeller and Texts from Last Night.  Ah, a great mother/son evening.*

The next morning I drove him up to his mechanic’s house in Hebron so he could pick up his 1973 Innocenti Mini who had been in getting a new fuel pump.  We took pictures with the mechanic’s red minis (larger and smaller!) and then headed out for breakfast and to see me off at the airport.  A very nice visit.

While on the flight I started a new scarf.  You may recall that I made a Sparkly Scarf for Ava several months ago — and mom Katie made the comment that she so wanted one too.  She’s not going to get an identical one, but I’m taking the leftover yarn and making her a Lamina with the same beads. It may have to be a pattern repeat or two shorter than the pattern calls for, but it will be plenty long enough to be a nice accessory. And with all the sweaters I’ve been working on, I need some snack knitting!  I’m calling it Katie’s Sparkly Scarf because I am so creative.  If you look at the cast on edge, you’ll be able to see a bunch of live stitches on a stitch holder.  The instructions called for a provisional cast on so you can knit half in one direction and then return to knit the other direction (after picking up live stitches and unraveling your provisional cast on).  I figured, why not just use a toe-up sock cast on and put one half the stitches on a holder so you don’t have to screw around with any of the silliness of the waste yarn and all.  I expect it will work out perfectly.  Stay tuned.

I’ve decided to go ahead and post pictures of the sweater I made last year for Allen.  (Remember, I was going to submit the pattern for publications, so couldn’t put pictures up?)  Well, I never submitted it as I decided it needed some tweaking before I would do so. Plus I’m going to knit something similar for Dale, so will use his as the submission…someday.  It will be different enough to qualify as a different pattern.  I learned a lot from making this one for Allen and am quite pleased with most of it, especially things like the applied I-cored neckline, but there are other areas that need adjustment (like shoulder width, scye depths, that kind of stuff).

Today has been a quiet day.  I took the dogs for a nice long walk and enjoyed just being.  We’ve got wild grapes all over everything along the trail that the dogs and I follow.  Some honeysuckle and wild snapdragons too, but mostly wild grapes.  The dogs pretty much ignored the flora and me.  They were far too involved in conversations of their own.  I love how much they like each other.  I could have used more nap time, but the day was pretty good regardless.

Love, Jan

* Sorry for all the bizarre new spam we are sure to get.
** Notice we fully capitalize the names of our naval vessels like PROVIDENCE (in order to make them appear even more powerful).  We do not fully capitalize the names of cities like Providence.  It’s a Navy thing.
**For you landlubbers — NO, not you laplanders! — we call submarines “boats” and we call ships…well, “ships.”