Happy Birthday, 2BDH!

And now it can be shown! The scarf in all its damp glory, before I left for work yesterday.



And a close-up.



I found a card on the way home last night, ran in the house long enough to grab a bag and some tissue paper and the scarf, and motored on down to the kids’ house. Got there just in time for the closing prayer for their Family Home Evening activity [putting up the Christmas tree], and BittyBit picked me to give it. Then I got real hugs and real kisses from my Bitties, and off to bed they went.

2BDH liked the scarf! I have enough yarn to make a smaller version for BittyBubba. And I will. But [yesterday and] today at least, I am working on my Wollmeise sock, which is also my Sock Knitters Anonymous sock for November and must be finished ~ with its mate ~ by the end of this month if I hope to qualify for any of the prizes. That’s how I got my skein of Smooshy last year.

In work news, the automation specialist was back in the office on yesterday, and we struggled mightily to reset the ID message for my extension. It was still asserting that I’m the person who used to sit at that desk, although my voicemail message per se said I was me.

Always comforting to get a bit of confirmation on those days when you meet yourself coming and going. I would love to be her age and have her figure, but I’m also quite content not to have a houseful of short people, charming though they might be. [I’m rather fond of mine, though none of them is all that short nowadays.]

The woman who used to sit at my new desk, is sitting where the new “me” used to sit; i.e., far away from the switchboard, and her phone claimed that she was our new receptionist. Who no longer has voicemail, just as I had no voicemail for 9.5 years.

Confused? Yeah, me too. But we got it all straightened out, and now if you were to call my extension [please don’t], my phone would tell you that I am indeed myself, and then you could leave a message. I also know how to forward my phone to voicemail when I leave my desk ~ woohoo! ~ and get it back again.

Old dog. 1970’s-era tricks. Making haste, slowly. My initials are not G.E.; progress is not my most important product. Chez Ravelled, it is more along the order of a reason to celebrate. Preferably with dark chocolate.

Good news on the yarn front. I found a source for the yarn for Brother Sushi’s Christmas present. And it’s on sale, close-out actually, so it’s probably a good thing I decided to make this for Christmas and not for oh, say, Valentine’s Day. Not that we do anything for each other at that time of year, other than to leave voicemails saying, “Happy Singles Awareness Day!”

Trying to figure out what to take to Relief Society tonight that does not involve an hour of baking [sugared pecans] or 15 minutes of standing over my cast-iron skillet [sugared almonds]. I don’t suppose any of the sisters at church are as enamored with tapioca from scratch, as I am. I could do that in the microwave in a really large bowl, in five or six two-minute increments.

I handed off most of the remaining Robert B. Parker paperbacks to Trainman last night and have already sold the few that I kept. He thought he might have hardcover copies of a couple of the ones he took, and if so will bring them back.

You might want to alert the Guinness people. The ones who keep the book of records, not the ones who make the beer, unless they are the selfsame people and decided to keep the records in order to aid those who are impaired by their beer(?) This is the first year in recent history that every one of the [handmade, if not all by me] birthday gifts have been completed on time. Yes there are still two more birthdays to take care of, plus a handful of Christmas gifts, and yes I am tempting fate by this declaration, but it’s been a wonderful year on that score, and I am thankful.