Hang Over

I'm so lethargic right now, but felt like saying HI, if only for a quick post. My hubby and I went to my company's Holiday Party yesterday, and we had a blast. It was at the SJ Rotary Summit Center in the banquet room at the very top of the building, about 7 stories. There was obviously open bar, and great food. I had some hella good roasted purple potatoes, with a ceasar salad, steamed carrots, and some prime rib. My hubby had pretty much the same, but also fresh cooked salmon in a bechamel sauce. To drink I started off with a glass of Merlot and my hubby with a Corona beer.

As we were eating, we enjoyed entertainment from the cover band, The Cocktail Monkey's, and continued to drink on.

We danced our booties off, and enjoyed the open bar. By the end of the night, I must of had at the very least 7-8 full glasses of wine (that I remember counting), and my hubby upgraded to SVOP & coke. We left I think a little before midnight straight home. It's been such a long time since I've drank that much, I'm not a real drinker, I'll have some wine, but it's a rare occasion that I get drunk, and I did. I passed out as soon as I got home, and quickly removed my 4' inch stilettos that I danced in all night. My feet have been killing me all day, and will probably ache for awhile, I've been pretty much useless all day, along with my hubby, who has been the exact same way. I wish I had pictures to share with you, unfortunately we didn't take any.

I didn't get anything done in the way of knitting this weekend, I have moved along on the "Labor of Love" beanie I've been working on. I have gotten faster at knitting cables without a cable needle, so I'm past my learning curve with it. Now it's just a matter of getting the right length on the beanie then decreasing to finish. I also got a few Xmas gifts for the kidees, but still need to get some more. I'm not too enthused about going to the stores right now, mainly because things are so damn expensive, but also because I hate shopping during the holidays, people are always so mean when they shop for the holidays.

I'll share some pics of my beanie progress with you tomorrow, hopefully I'll get this baby done, it's like the neverending beanie.

Hope everyone had a great weekend!

Bocce Ball

Tonight I went out to a get together after work with my boss and team members. This is our very first outing since we formed our group, which is entirely new to the company. I got to suggest the first outing adventure, and I choose Bocce Ball. We have Campi De Bocce in Los Gatos, Ca, and I've went to it before with a previous company.

It was a fun evening, unfortunatley no knitting 8(, but alot of game play. Bocce is an age old game, similar to bowling and or pool. The goal of the game is to get your balls as close to the main ball, closer than your opponents. Each ball you have closer than your opponent is 1 point for your time at the end of the game when all balls have been thrown.



First I should say the scenery and ambience is very nice, in fact this is the first time I've went to play Bocce in about 8 years, and last time was indoors, outdoors is way more fun. I had 2 glasses of a delicious red wine Merlot Lael, very smooth. Everyone else had their own choice of beer, we had Fried Calamari, Lamb Chops, and Tenderloin (YUM-O!).

Here's the gang I work with..



From left to right, it is Rich (my boss), Ernest, ME, Leslie, and Mike. Gosh looking at this, I seriously need a new hairdo, and need to shed count it, at least 20lbs, oh well, guess that's what New Year's Resolutions are for, right?

Sad to say, I have no new knitting, I'm stuck in this odd purgatory knitting this cable beanie, that's turning out to be my worst nightmare. I can cable wihout a cable need now, but I'm not happy with it, and it feels uncomfortable, and too tight. At what point do you give up on a WIP? I've yet to encounter one like this, that for some reason or another just isn't satisfying, but I so desperately want to finish to have it as a present to my hubby. I think I'll give it one more day of knitting it, and hopefully, it will end!

By the way, I also have to start a new TWEED seedlet for my Traveling Scarves 42 Tweed Heads group, because I found out from Cpurl17 that my poor little seedlet was stolen from her doorstep when she left it there to send out. The nerve of people! What a dissapointment they'll get when they open the package to see it's yarn and a journal. It's kind of sad because it has more emotional value than monetary value, I can't imagine they'd get anything for it, it will probably get tossed in the trash. 8( Poor scarfy, I'll send it my best wishes and will start a new one to send off this weekend. ::Ok, I know I sound insane, sorry::

I'll share more with you later on "As the Knitting Turns", (LOL), have a good weekend! TGIF!
~Rocky

Lesson Learned

A lesson learned indeed. I have common sense, and my common sense did tell me "Don't save your credit card!" "Don't be lazy, enter it manually!"...what am I ranting about? Well, I do alot of shipping for either my swap packages or my Traveling Scarves group, and so on, so I try to make my shipping tasks as convenient as possible. These past 2 weeks I had alot of packages to send out, and I was on USPS.com and because I had more than 3 packages to print shipping labels for at one time, I saved my credit card info so I wouldn't have to manually enter it for each shipping label. I thought "It's USPS, it should be ok". Well Friday evening while I was knitting at about 10 p.m., I got an email alert. I went to look at my checking account and found purchases at USPS.com for items I didn't charge, all equaling over $300! I immediately called my bank, canceled my card, and so on. I've been on a "cash only" basis for the past week since my account is all messed up, nothing I can do until the fraudulent items hard post to my account. Right now, it's just in a pending state. It's pending alright, pending my A**, I can't use my account, pay invoices I have from PayPal, nothing. It's a lesson learned, no saving the card anymore. Phew! Ok, I'm done, got that off my back.

Onto my therapy, yes 8-) my therapy.

I received my Christmas 2008 Swap package, and it is a wonderful Christmas package indeed!
My secret spoiler is HarlemQueen on Ravelry.



She knitted me a beautiful Santa dishcloth, a cute white bag cozy, filled with my FAVE Chai Tea, 1 skein of Blue Sky Alpaca 100% Organic cotton in Black, 1 Angel bell ornament (totally pretty), 4 of the most glamorous beads I've ever seen, and 1 Statue of Liberty ornament (I'm in love with this one, I've never been to New York, I dream of it, and this is just the sweetest closest thing to it), and 1 wrapped "don't open until Christmas" present (already nestled under my tree). Thank you HARLEMQUEEN!





Another great package came, and that is my "Peppermint Patty" kit from Woolgirl. I love the yarn colors and all the contents, especially the candy cane tape measure.

Contents are: 400yds. fingering weight of Miss Babs Peppermint Patty, a mini-skein of Miss Babs Red, 1 candy cane stitch marker, 1 candy cane tape measure, 1 peppermint chocolate cocoa, peppermint pattie chocolates, candy cane mints, Peppermint Patty lip balm & cream, and a knitting pouch.





Last, but not least, I received my Snowman Stitch Markers I won on the Nautical Knitter's blog, thank you!!!



In other news, I've been teaching myself how to knit faster without a cable needle doing cables, links for this given to me from a good friend Devotion2Knit. She gave me the link to Grumperina's instructions on this. It's been challenging and I'm fighting off that "bad taste" in my mouth for this project, I need to get this done. I've done a few repeats with the new method, and this is about as far as I've gone, doesn't seem like much difference from the other day, but it is moving along.



Well now I gotta go and continue knitting this beanie, wish me luck!

And I'm off!

The De La Hoya vs. Pacquaio boxing get together party Saturday went great. We BBQ some marinated carne asada and chicken, I made a fresh macaroni salad. For orderbs we served Garlic & Cheese Toast with fresh Spinach Dip, BBQ Hot wings and Chips & Salsa. For desert, I whipped out my secret weapon.



I made some Cranberry-Pumpkin bread that I make every year around this time, it's delish!



It's a combination of fresh cranberries and pumpkin puree with seasonal spices. I know the recipe by hard and right smack in the middle of it, I realized I was missing my key ingredients, FUDGERS! Well, not wanting to waste more time, I decided to improvise and make my own combo of spices, and boy, what a great thing that was, my bread came out better than it's ever tasted. So good in fact, I'll stick with my new combo of spices and will no longer make the original recipe. My bread was a complete hit and before I could snap any fresh out of the oven baked pictures, it was almost all gone! Here are a few left over morsels...



I'll be making more later this week because I still have 1 bag of fresh cranberries left. I shared the original recipe click here if your interested 8-)

Our get together was fun and relaxing, but the event we all gathered to watch, De La Hoya vs. Pacquiao turned out to be horrible. I was hoping that De La Hoya would pull it off, but he did such a horrible job, in fact he didn't even fight? Pacquiao had such an easy job to do and win when all De La Hoya did was just stand there and get hit. I never saw De La Hoya do this before, it was so upsetting. He may just be done with boxing as a fighter, but as a presence and force in the sport, he'll be around forever.

Friday evening before the party, I finished off the last 3 Traveling Scarves I had, which I had one from each group.

Here is Purpleturtle's scarf from Group 25 SO, I added the top brown section using Lamb's Pride Wool, I strung 2 ends of the yarn together to get the right gauge for the section. I went with a Box Stitch.



A full shot of the scarf



Here is Mspalmtree's scarf from Group 37 Noro. My section at the top, using Noro Silk Garden in 245 & 279 knit with the Box Stitch.



A full view of the scarf



Finally here is Adore1's scarf from Group 42 Tweeds. I added a Mock Cable stitch using O'Wool 100% Organic Brown Tweed yarn.



And I'm off finally knitting my Christmas gifts, starting with my husband's beanie that I've been improvising the design on. It's nothing fancy and nothing cutting edge, a Cable beanie.



I'm slow at cables, it's annoying, and I can get slower if I let the cables annoy me. I need to get this done by Tuesday, if I can without wanting to kill the cable needle.

Last, I'll leave you with a snugly picture of my doggy sleeping by our Christmas tree, she looked to precious to not take a picture!

My Friday

For today, I just need to get through this early but short day. All week I've been working 6-3, and it's nice getting off at 3 p.m. in the afternoon, but just tiring getting up to be at my job at 6 a.m., but not too bad considering I have about a 15 minute drive, if not less. I have no issues getting up early, but this week has just been tiring for me. I do feel I was very productive this week though, with all my personal stuff that is.

I got all my 5 swap packages out to all my spoilees, this was a task in itself. Just packaging everything making sure I had all the requirements for the swaps and also making sure it catered to my spoilees preferences. I hope the packages are greeted with acceptance and glee!

I also sent out 2 Traveling Scarves packages, one for my Group 37 Noro Combo, which was Gramma's gorgeous scarf and also for my Group 42 Tweed, which I totally flaked on, well inadvertently.

I had finished Cristi-Lael's pretty tweedy scarf weeks ago, put my notes in her journal, packaged it and left it on my desk in my office to send out the next day. Well my son or daughter, one of them, both won't own up to it, moved the envelope package and covered it with my son's binder. It was out of sight out of mind for me, and the other day when I was going through my office I came across it and was just in complete horror! I immediately updated my post for the group's tracking thread with an apology. I think I'm going to have to buy a lock for my office cause my kidees seem to like being in there and also using it to discard of unwanted things.

One cool thing I found out from a awesome Mod in my RR group on Ravelry (I apologize I don't have her Rav ID), which if you don't know, you gotta try, is being able to ship First Class Mail packages from your doorstep without having to actually visit the Post Office.

You say how is this?

Well if you have a PayPal account, then you can! Logon to your PayPal account and go to Products & Services, select Multi-Order Shipping Labels, from there Create a New Order, I use a fake Order #, like for Group 37 Noro, I used 37-1, 1 signifies my first package sending out, the next Noro package I send will be 37-2 and so on. Fill out all the info, and weight, and delivery confirmation, then do Pay and Print, and voila, you have a valid, paid for, label printed for you from your printer. Tape to the package and put in your mailbox for your Post Man to pick up. I just love this! It's so much easier than having to go down to the Post Office. If you need to ship a package and don't want to be hassled, this is a pretty easy way.

So, speaking of my TS Groups, I also finished another scarf, Purpleturtle's Group 25 SO, but still need to weave in ends and package. It should go in the mail tomorrow, which will leave me with only 1 TS scarf! WhewwHoo! (can you feel my joy?) I do love participating in the TS groups, but sometimes it can get just a wee bit overwhelming, especially when you start getting a bunch at once.

Contest info to share, I submitted my comments and post to "The Nautical Knitter's" site the other day for the Snowman Stitch Markers Contest she was having and guess what, I visited her blog again and found out that I was one of the lucky winners! Thanks so much DK! I can't wait to use them. Congrats to Deb (aka iaisknitter on Ravelry) and Yvonne from Purlin’ Goldens who also won some cutesy stitch markers.

These are the cutesy Snowman Stitch Markers I'll be getting soon!
Photo courtesy of DK the Nautical Knitter's blog



Now onto some gritty stuff, this weekend is going to be a huge boxing fight, yes the De La Hoya vs. Pacquiao fight!



I'm pulling for the cutey, De La Hoya, I've always been a fan of his. I must admit though, I am not a 100% convinced he can beat Pacquiao, who himself is a very strong boxer. Pacquiao is fast and has good stamina. In De La Hoya's 24/7 series, he says there will be a knock out, I'm thinking it will go 12 rounds. I'll be having a nice little boxing party get together at my house Saturday for this, complete with dip, spicy buffalo wings, pizza, and of course beer and wine. Only dilemma I have is choosing what knitting project to do during the fight, needs to be something I can do blind.

There are many other things going on for me this weekend, but none as exciting as the De La Hoya fight. I hope you all have a good weekend! **Go De La Hoya!**