cosmicpluto knits!

a slow re-entry

I spent all of last week in Boston, exploring, meeting up with friends, and eating. The weather was good for the most part – a little dreary during the week, but totally beautiful on the weekend. I spent a couple hours at the Museum of Fine Arts on a drizzly day:

I carried my camera around a lot, but I didn’t really take any other photos – like of biking around, exploring Porter Square, Jamaica Plain and the South End, and meeting up with people for drinks and Alice in Wonderland. I did, however, manage to take a few photos of food I made while there! Mmmm, food. (I didn’t make the Boston Cream Pie, that was from Flour Bakery!)

Back soon with Actual Knitting Content.

hi!

Hey there.

The good news is that apart from that last incident (which I’ve mostly gotten over but still feel extremely stupid about sometimes), my trip to Boston and Rhinebeck was awesome.

The bad news is that I didn’t take any photos. Seriously, at all – I took like 2 photos of Boston, and 2 photos of the kitchen at the Rhinebeck house. Hmmm. Makes writing an interesting blog post kind of difficult!

Boston – lots of fun in the city with Vig, a longtime friend. He’s at MIT for a master’s program and hasn’t done that much of the historical/touristy stuff, so we did a bunch of that. Checked out Harvard Square (awesome bookstore!), ate panini subs and too many cannoli in the North End, and even managed to stumble upon the beginning of the Columbus Day parade while wandering around looking for a place to eat! We also walked most of the Freedom Trail, sat in the park, and walked back to the T through Beacon Hill, which was gorgeous.

Monday the 12th was Boston’s “Opening our doors” day, so we went to see the Mapparium and Isabella Gardner museum for free – both highly recommended! We walked all around that day and I took the photo above walking across the Mass Ave bridge. Pretty view!

Tuesday Ysolda arrived in town, so we went for pizza at Regina’s in the North End and more cannoli from Modern Pastry. They fill the cannoli to order, yummmmm. The rest of the week was sort of a blur of shopping for Bob parts, eating, more shopping, and just hanging out. Wanna see a behind-the-scenes of the now famous Bobsolda?

Skeeery.

Rhinebeck recap in the next post! That gives me time to try and take photos of the yarn I bought, hmmmm.

backlog

Hi!

I’m back from Ottawa to a very busy week, so I don’t have a lot of time to blog right now. But I’ll be back soon with photos, stories, and lots of new patterns too!

I had fabulous time going to 3 different markets in 3 days! And I came home with a flat of strawberries and a huge basket (over 5 pounds) of Quebec wild blueberries. Mmmm.

aloha from honolulu!

Well, we’re not in Honolulu anymore, but it was a snappier title! Today (Saturday) we arrived on Kauai but there’s lots to tell about our couple of days in Honolulu.

Long travel – 5 hours from Toronto to Vancouver (which was delayed), the longest airport transfer ever between the domestic and international terminals, and then the 6 hour flight from Vancouver to Honolulu. No free movies or tv on that flight, either, which kinda sucked – but since we arrived in Hawaii at about 5am Toronto time, I was sleeping anyway!

We stayed at the Sheraton Waikiki, and although the room my sister and I shared didn’t have as nice a view as my parents’, it was bigger! The view from above was ours (there was an obstructed mountain view towards the right)…

This one was the view from my parents’ room!

There was a huge pool, although it got pretty darn crowded in the morning.

Across the way right at the base of the hotel was the Royal Hawaiian plaza, filled with fancy shops and a pretty interesting food court. Coach, Ferrari (not the cars, but the apparel), Louis Vuitton, Tiffany…everything was there. I really liked how pretty much everything could be had in walking distance from the hotel! I know it’s pretty much a huge tourist trap, but sometimes that can be fun.

We had a fancy dinner at the “Top of Waikiki” restaurant which is a revolving dining room. They did have a vegetarian entree, a tomato gratin with fresh mozzarella and mushroom ragout.

The next day my youngest sister and I took a city bus to the Ala Moana Center, a huge open-air mall – the biggest in the world if the map is to be believed! It really was huge, but we didn’t do the whole thing since it was pretty much the usual stores. I did manage to zero in (by sheer luck) on a Hawaiian chain store with super cute clothes, Cinnamon Girl.

And that was pretty much it for our two days in Waikiki! Good things about the Sheraton: excellent location, nice bed, nice lanai (balcony), nice pool, really good shower, excellent air conditioning, free wifi in the lobby.

Not as good things: super overpriced food even in the casual cafe (but there was lots else to be had close by in the other mall), no free internet in the room, and since it’s a huge hotel, there’s just so many people! I did really like it though, and I would’ve liked to stay another day or two in Honolulu, at least to visit some other parts of the city.

Now we’re on Kaua’i, everything must be driven to, and it’s much quieter. No air conditioning, but a kitchen. Everything’s a trade off! I think it’ll be pretty quiet here. I’m hoping to get some knitting done!

time to go!

It seemed to both take forever and sneak up, but it’s time to head to Hawaii with my family! I’ll be gone from the 1st to the 18th, but I’ll definitely try to post a few times. I’ve got a fun multimedia blogging idea that I’d love to work on too!

The Koigu above is some vacation knitting. Of course, the hardest part of packing was deciding what knitting to take! I decided today that I wanted to knit something out of a ball of black Zephyr I know I have, but for the life of me I couldn’t dig it up. Frustrating.

Happy Canada Day, and talk to you all soon!

random things

My knitting is really fighting back lately! I forgot my sock project at a friend’s last week just as he was going out of town so I couldn’t work on that. I keep having to re-do the math on a compound raglan and ripping out what I’ve knit.

Then today my Honeybee cardi was fighting me too – I knit a whole hem (around the body) and found out that it didn’t really work. So that was a day’s work ripped, and I ended the day right where I started. Booo.

Hopefully I can get my knitting back on track and get some new projects on the needles too. I’m going to be traveling in July so I need knitting I can count on! My parents and sisters and I are taking a vacation to Hawaii!

We’ll be staying in Waikiki, and on Kauai and the big island. I don’t intend to spend all my time with them, so I’d like to do some exploring on my own too. Does anyone have recommendations for things to do, places to see, eat, or shop? I love unique sorta boutique-y shops for clothes (I’m especially fond of dresses and skirts from local designers) but I’m having a hard time coming up with particular places.

And so this isn’t a photoless post, how about some eye candy?

Megan brought me back this gorgeous, huge skein of laceweight from Squam – it’s merino from the Woolen Rabbit. Beautiful!