When your college student comes home for the holidays

I have a book idea. It's called, "How to Live With A College Student".

Chapter 1: Laundry 101.
Chapter 2: Why your living room is not a dorm.
Chapter 3: Why your sofa is not a spare room for touring college friends.
Chapter 4: Snack food is not breakfast, lunch or dinner.
Chapter 5: How to get your child to stop texting while they are asking for money.
Chapter 6: How to get your child to text you to say they will not be home for the night.
Chapter 7: When should the family car be returned to the family.
Chapter 8: Laundry 102.
Chapter 9: Chores, and how to inspire a college student to do them.
Chapter 10: Prozac is your friend.

Lots of knitting, not many pictures

Dashing

I love this pattern from Knitty, the companion to Fetching. I made the first pair using Patons Wool. This one is Zara I think. I snapped this just before I frogged it because I did the cables in the wrong direction.

As some of you know, many of us here in Jersey are snowed and iced in. I shouldn't complain considering what my nephew is dealing with in Oklahoma. Still, December, in my mind, should never include snow - I don't care what that song is dreaming about. I need December to get adjusted to winter. To get cold and snow in the same month makes me want to just sit in my kitchen with a hot cup of java and simply spend the day looking out of the window -



Fortunately, there are some fun and games in December, not just lists, shopping and cooking. My garden club had its holiday party at a local restaurant this year. I was on the decorations committee. We gathered in my kitchen the night before and made 10 centerpieces and decorated a small tree.


My computer is still acting weird. For some reason, it won't let me comment on many of your blogs, some pages won't load and my bookmarked list of my favorite blogs isn't recognized in Firefox. Hopefully, during the holiday, I'll either get the time to fix it or Santa will bring me a new machine.

Skillz

Evidently I no longer have the right stuff to fix a computer. After much gnashing of the teeth, I've finally completed piecing together my operating system so I can at least load web pages. This "fix" will have to suffice until santa (hint, hint) drops me a new machine because I ain't even thinking about going through a system restore on this computer. Nobody would ever believe that I used to do this for a living 20 years ago. That was long before the destruction of billions and billions of my brain cells that, I must tell you my mamma never told me would occur after nursing 3 babies.

Yup that's one of those 3 babies and my mamma

So, what have I been up to? I'm almost done with my hoodie sweater but I don't think it will fit. Lots of knitting but no pictures for now, what I'd like to show you are some catching up flicks from the past few weeks.

Fortunately, being under domestic duress for nearly 20 years, one does acquire a new skill set:



Don't think that anyone in the picture below even notices what all is required to make anything from scratch but hey, at least we girls can appreciate a decent German Chocolate cake!

Thanksgiving was spent at my brother's house in Delaware. It was the first year that I didn't have to cook for what seemed like millions.


Stashing on Ravelry
I completed photographing much of my stash for Ravelry. Hopefully this exercise will remind me what I got so I won't buy any more!

A Family Affair
As you all know, I've been making chemo caps for my brother-in-law Larry James. What I didn't know was that his job was also making stuff for him, a huge tribute of 800 guests to honor his commitment to the world athletic and academic communities.

Olympic Team, 1968

Larry was part of the spirited 1968 Olympic Track and Field Team. He and many of his team mates endured enormous obstacles living in America at the time. They were expected to represent their country with pride while being segregated against and denied equal access to many institutions across our country.

Olympic Team, 2007

Larry thanking the guests. That's my sister under the flag.

Me with my niece and my sister's and Larry's granddaughter

That's my Jonathan cooling his heels at his table. At 13, he had 2 social conflicts that night - a huge Bar Mitzvah in New York City and a basketball game. I should have his social life!

After the testimonial that included his college teammates; Olympic teammates and officials; college and board presidents; and many colleagues, we were surprised to see that the school renamed their stadium to the G. Larry James Stadium!

We had the best time.

That's my little sister, her daughter and the tiny one standing is another granddaughter of my sister and Larry.

computer problems

Well, it looks like the appliance gremlin has taken up residence in my computer. I just spent the entire day with Dell Bombay trying to get to blogger and a bunch of other sites.

Finally, the genius from India suggested I load up Mozilla and tell Internet Explorer to buzz off. I can now get to blogger, yeah. But, I've run out of time so, hopefully, I'll be able to come back soon.