I don’t know about all of you, but I don’t see my mom very often. The last time I saw her was last Christmas, though thanking the magic of the Internet we are in regular communication via email. Isn’t email a wonderful thing? The main reason we don’t see each other very often is that she lives 400 miles away. But Mom was down here this week, fairly close anyway, on a tour with a senior group. They took a train down to Santa Barbara, spent a couple nights there, saw some stuff, then got on a bus and took that down to Pasadena. Since Pasadena’s only 50 miles from here, I drove up to see her. We had a nice little visit. I got there about 11:30 am, after a rather pleasant, completely uneventful drive. Note to Kristie: Google Maps wanted me to go up the 5 to the 110 again. I so wasn’t going there. I opted to go up the 57 to the 210 instead, in spite of the fact that it was a whole seven miles longer.

I had a moment of brilliance, and before I left I printed out a list of a few restaurants that were close to Mom’s hotel. We looked at the list, decided on The Yard House, and took off on foot. It was only a few blocks away, and walking sounded good. It was a lovely day. I was actually kind of surprised that Mom wanted to go there. It is a pub. But even Mom admits that pubs often have good food. Yea! It was rather loud inside the restaurant, and we almost turned around to go, but the nice hostess suggested we eat outside. Perfect! We grabbed a table along the edge so we could people-watch, ordered a beer—Mom can never drink a whole one, so we split it—and lunch from our very nice, quite cute, but such-a-southern-California-boy waiter (we expected him to pull out his surfboard any second), and… we had a very nice time. Lunch was excellent. And huge.

On the way down to the pub we saw a couple of things that looked interesting, so we took the long way back to the hotel. The first place we stopped to visit was a fabulous church. I know. We’re not exactly a religious family, but we always enjoy visiting nice churches, especially old ones with lots of stained glass windows. The one we found turned out to be an old Episcopal church, built, I dunno, a long time ago, based on the structure, the quality, all the wood inside, and all those gorgeous windows. Naturally I didn’t have my camera with me. I really need a new, smaller one for these outings. The only picture of the outside of it I can find on their web site is here. It’s a quaint old building on the outside. Very appealing. We noticed that they have a large pipe organ, and we were very lucky to get to hear the organist practice for a little while. It sounded marvelous.

When we were done looking around, we went across the street to the Pasadena City Hall. It’s a beautiful building, about 70 years old. Evidently, they just finished doing a seismic upgrade to the structure, and got everyone moved back in in July. We could tell that the courtyard had recently been re-done. All of the shrubbery under the three old olive trees looked fairly new. This building is unlike any city hall I’ve been in before. For one thing, the hallways are all under nice overhangs, but are all open to the courtyard, with no windows to keep the elements out. You can sure tell this building was designed for a warm climate. We did a full tour of the building, well, of the outer hallway. We didn’t go into any of the offices. We did climb up one of the tower stairways, and had a nice view of the grounds.

After this we decided we’d had enough walking for a while, and returned to the hotel where we had a nice cup of tea in the lounge. After tea we did a little shopping, got a light dinner of fresh fruit and corn bread that we took back to Mom’s room. I left to go home about 8:30 pm, and got home about 9:15. No traffic. Yea! All in all, it was a very nice day, and a lovely visit with Mom. After two more days of sight-seeing, she’ll be flying home this evening.

I know. Knitting!

I’ve been knitting madly on my South Seas Stole. I have now knit all the way up the left side, rounded the second corner, knit to the middle of the far end, broken off, and started knitting at the bottom again, this time moving toward the right side.

Yesterday morning, before I actually rounded that second corner, I wanted to know how well my corner worked out, so I sort of blocked just that one corner.

I think it’s going to work. I sure hope so, anyway. After I got it wet and stretched it out a bit the pucker in the corner went away. Good. Good. I like the way the waves go around the corner.

When Kristie and I went to see the Yarn Harlot on Saturday I’d just started a sock for Dave. I mean, there’s some sort of a rule, isn’t there, that you have to be knitting a sock when you go see the Harlot speak? Well, we thought so. This is as far as I got, while we were listening to her. You know, there’s something totally fun about being in a room where that many people are knitting all at once. Anyway, I think I did too many increase rows in a row. Look how that toe is flaring out. I think I’m going to have to rip it back and start over. And pay more attention to my knitting this time.

I don’t know if you’ve even thought about my swift in the months it’s been since I posted about having problems with it. I have. So has Dave. He finally reminded me to get a box for it at the Post Office when I could remember it, so I did. That was last week. I have now boxed it up and sent it on its way.

I took a picture of it, which I included in the package. I thought you might enjoy it. You know how the clamp at the bottom is supposed to hold up the center part so it doesn’t fall? Well, mine doesn’t need the clamp—hence the pink arrows in the picture. It stays all by itself. And it doesn’t spin right. Too tight. Hopefully they’ll be able to fix it up for me. They said they would. It’s supposed to have a lifetime warranty or something. I have my fingers crossed, and will until my swift is safely home again. It’s making knitting (and typing) somewhat awkward, though.

I’ll leave you with this picture of Ricki enjoying the view. I just love how neatly she sits there on that railing.