Work In Progress Wednesday v.53

Hi again!

Sorry I've been MIA for so long, this year is just stupid crazy and I can't seem to get out from under the wheels of the bus.  So...

When last we spoke, Mr. Right and I were starting 2 weeks of No Contact in our counseling quest to decide if we'll get married or call it quits.  I was doing pretty okay with that,  well... better than expected, anyway.  On Sunday, I went over to our friend A.'s house so he could do some maintenance work on my yard.  I was feeling awfully proud of myself for getting it done, too.  I hate spending free time doing stuff to the car.  Anyway, he fiddled with it for a while and then I drove home, all excited about how happy my car sounded.  I was about 2 miles from home when the car died while I was going 70 mph.  Dang.

I called A. and asked him to call Mr. Right to see if this counted as one of our "emergency contact" situations.  (Mr. Right knows my car inside out, having put a new engine into it last year).  Our friend is *dying* for us to end up together, so he called Mr. Right and told him I was stuck and he needed to come get me.  No explanations or anything.  He's sneaky, that one.

Anyway, long story not-so-short, Mr. Right came to rescue me, and we spent the next 5 days seeing each other every day to "work on the car".  I'm hopeless.  Then he drove me to the airport so I could go visit some old friends in Tahoe for the weekend (super fun!), and picked me up last night.  It was lovely, but all of it earned us another week of not talking to each other, since we thoroughly cheated our way through the last one.  Sigh.  I guess it's a good sign that we hate being apart, right? 

But I did more than just cheat on my counseling assignment over the last two weeks.  I also knitted the Vest From Hell some more.  It's all together now, just adding the trim around the front, then the shawl collar and the armbands.  It's getting close.  (Sorry about the sideways pics -- for some reason I'm not allowed to rotate them today.  Hmmph.)  See?
Hopefully, it doesn't look dreadful on me when it's all finished.  When I started working on it, I was afraid it would be too small.  Now it sort of swallows me up, but it's still hard to tell how it will look once all the trim is in place.  I'm trying to keep an open mind.

And, since I was traveling, I needed a smaller project to tote along on the plane.  I *finally* pulled the Hedgerow Socks out of hibernation, with different yarn, and started on them again. 

They're cool, but they're awfully loud in this red, and though it looked like a pretty solid color in the skein, it's doing a crazy stripedy thing in the sock.  Don't get me wrong, I'm generally a HUGE supporter of anything striped, but it's not really working for me in this pattern.  I'm on the fence.  What say ye, WIPW'ers?  Keep on trucking or head for the frog pond?  Share your thoughts, please.  I'm a huge disaster at making decisions these days.

Vacation was nice.  If I'd remembered to actually take any pictures, I'd share them with you right about here.  Suffice to say I spent 4 days at a house near Donner Lake, hanging out with good friends, playing Bananagrams, canoeing, knitting and reading.  Ooh!  And we went to a fabulous dinner at the Cottonwood.  If you're ever in the vicinity of Truckee, CA... I can't recommend it enough.  Yum. 

I also (with loads of help from the World's Greatest Neighbor) stained my back fence last weekend.  It turned out pretty good, if I do say so myself. 

Good thing I like the color, as it ended up on my shirt, and in my hair... and on my legs...

For those of you keeping track, that's two WIPs and one vacation in the last two weeks.  Not bad considering I spent the previous few weeks curled up in the fetal position. 

Now go check out the other WIPW entries (all one zillion of them) and see what everyone else is up to!