Calm Before the Storm

Kathleen-
Warning: long, picture heavy post to follow.

I believe we've now reached the calm before the storm in my job. After a chaotic late Nov/Early Dec, we've now got a touch of downtime before craziness starts again in the New Year. I'm off to Seattle at the end of this week for 4 days for work- anything I shouldn't miss in my downtime in the evenings? Several people got the dates of my Seattle trip mixes up, and therefore called me during last week's flooding to make sure I was ok. I was completly confused until I figured out that they thought I was in the NW!

I've been VERY focused on Grandpa's Socks. Current progress:

That would be sock #1 done! And sock #2 only needs 2 repeats of the pattern and couple inches of ribbing to be done. I'm beginning to think this is going to happen on time. In the past week, I've knit on these socks at home, at work during lunch, on the bus, in the car (as a passenger!), at knit night, while bowling, while playing board games, at a really excellent concert, and at a party. They've been quite promiscuous about being knit in public.

Here's a closeup of the texture- the color is inaccurate in both the pictures, as we're officially experiencing "dreary" weather.

Friday Mike and I picked out a Christmas tree. It turns out I have an interesting relationship with the size of our living room, but it worked out. We'll be decorating it tonight:
Friday I also experienced credit card slippage at Borealis:
That would be 3 skeins of Smooshy in Nightwatch for Jeanie from the new Knitty: I'm hoping to cast on before heading for Seattle (as soon as Grandpa's Socks are done). Here's a closeup of the shade:
I also ended up with one more skein of Smooshy for socks for me, this one in Deep Seaflower.

Today once I finish cleaning up the living room and start dinner, I'm planning on working a bit on the following secret project... not knitting, blocking!

And last, but certainly not least. I won a contest on Shelly's blog, and the prize was a copy of the Knitter's Book of Yarn, which is fabulous! I've already read most of it since it arrived yesterday, and its chock full on interesting information about yarn.