What I did on my summer vacation

Hi again!  I know last time we met here I mentioned that I was enjoying my holiday, and that if I wasn't back the next day it wasn't necessarily because I'd been attacked by a stealth loon... but seriously: the next day, I got into the lake and saw another stealth loon swimming nearby before diving under water, and wished I hadn't written that.

Loons aside, I have to show you what happened to our friend the chompy sock on our way home from the cottage:

That my friends is not loose yarn pulled out from the cake and ready to knit.  That is frogging.

This was one of those scenarios where you make a simple yet incredibly annoying mistake - in my case, I shifted the toe decreases on one side of the sock two stitches over from where they should have been - and make it much, much worse.  I discovered the problem about five rounds into the toe, and decided it would be faster to drop the offending stitches down and work them back up again with the crochet hook I keep in my purse for emergencies.

WRONG

About forty minutes later, with very wonky looking re-worked crochet hook stitches and big gaps where the decreases were supposed to go, I gave up and frogged and took the picture above, then started knitting again.


Another thing I did on my vacation was to take a closer look at the Torquay ware jug we've kept pens in since I noticed it languishing in a kitchen cupboard at the cottage:

Isn't it cute?  I love Torquay ware anyway but I especially love this piece, for the motto on the other side:

"Never say die; up man and try" - much as I resent making an effort most days, I still manage to live by this rule.

Anyway as I was looking at it (because I was taking the pens out, shifting them instead to a bin inside the upper part of our hutch that miraculously fit into the back of our truck with 1/4" to spare and is now living in the main room at the cottage) I noticed that it is a cream coloured jug with dark brown trim and inky blue accents.

In other words, OUR HOUSE COLOURS.  How did I miss that?

I am totally bringing this jug home at the end of the summer to fit into a little decorator's tableaux somewhere or other.

At another point, I was tidying up the guest room, aka the room my aunt and uncle used when they owned the cottage, and I stopped to admire a cute picture of them from maybe fifteen years ago.  In the picture, they are chatting happily while seated in the wooden outdoor chairs they bought and painted yellow, and which now look like this:

mainly because Pete and I are such terrible people.  Well, that's me really, because of course Pete is an incredibly nice person.  I was the one who suggested we not keep dragging these pieces up under the cottage every fall, because I was already overwhelmed with the magnitude of Closing.  We never, ever sit outside together and I still don't know how my aunt and uncle managed to do it (massive amounts of insect spray?) so it's not like we were ever going to use this set as anything but rustic art, but I still feel a little guilty about this particular judgement call.

Another thing I feel a little guilty about is not finishing the jigsaw puzzle.

I think we snuck in a few more pieces after we got this far, but it's clear that the older boy's back and the father's knee will be perpetually missing a critical piece.  Tell you what though - however incomplete, you can still tell the mom in this picture bought her kids' clothes too big so they would last a size or two, and then sent the three of them off for an outing by the river so she could take a nap.  And isn't that really what this particular puzzle is all about discovering?

Pete and I have been telling each other with glee that this year is the one where we finally hit our stride with the cottage.  It's our fifth summer there, so we were due, but it is still an exciting surprise.  While Pete indulged in endless busywork and early-morning kayak outings, I collapsed in a heap.  My days dissolved into an ebb and flow of naps, jigsaw pieces, moving through water, and card-playing.  I learned that no matter how good I am at Euchre and Cribbage, I will always lose at Sorry Revenge.  I appreciated Bancroft, a small Ontario town with a truly stunning landscape surrounding its humble buildings.  And I learned to cut myself a lot of slack because obviously, if I am comfortable not writing at my blog for the better part of a week, I need it.  Normally I get twitchy if I skip a Hugs post.

After I finished knitting my sock back up to where I'd frogged it, I carried on knitting, and finished off the last rounds of the toe as we were approaching our house in the city to pick up the mail.

It didn't look as neat and tidy in there as the stitches on this sock do - it's drywall time after all - but it sure did look beautiful to us.

Hope you had a good week and I'll see you tomorrow!