New Project

I will post some recently completed projects soon (once I get pictures of them). In the meantime, it is finally time for me to start a cross stitch pattern which I bought a couple of years ago at a great little shop in Victoria, BC. It's a design from Stitching Studios.

It's one of the most dramatic cross stitch patterns I've ever seen. So I am very excited to work on it, although my mom warned me that working on black cloth will be tough. We'll see how well it travels with me to Maryland this week. I better get it started before leaving. Maybe the dim light on the airplane won't be good enough for black cloth, but I hate to lose all that great stitching time on the airplane.

This photo is from October. It is not so warm here right now that I can sit on the patio and stitch. But I couldn't resist posting this picture anyway. I wish it were warm enough to sit outside to eat my breakfast like I usually do. On the other hand, this weather is good for skiing.

Happy End of Year

I have been mostly without internet since the last post. So here's a recap of the past couple of weeks. We celebrated our anniversary by skiing at Monarch in southern Colorado. I was a bit nervous about skiing after being a couch potato for so long. However, I was perfectly comfortable turning and heading downhill. In fact, my abs feel better after a day of exercising than after a day of sitting.

Then we continued on north to Denver to celebrate Christmas with Troy's family. We also found some time to go hiking through the snow with Sarah and Srin.

I always like to take a project with me when I travel. This time, I didn't have much that would travel well. Fortunately, one of my Christmas gifts was a ball of yarn, a pair of knitting needles and a set of instructions. A day and a half later, I had a scarf. Troy was so excited about this homemade scarf that he would have kept it for himself if it weren't pink. Instead, he drove me to Hobby Lobby during a snowstorm (Denver got 10 inches of snow that day) so that I could get more yarn to make him his own scarf. His is not done yet. I will have to learn how to make the scarf more than one-skein long.

Another semester is done!

In celebration of finishing my 2nd semester of grad school, I am sharing with you an image of a wave propagating across the surface of a torus. In other words, these pictures are mathematically generated to show how a wave would interact with itself if every edge actually wraps back around to the other side. So this is what I do in school.

Now that I'm done with classes until January, we're heading up to Denver for Christmas and skiing at Monarch for our anniversary. Hopefully I won't suffer too much muscle pain from skiing. We have several pre-paid lift tickets for ski areas in New Mexico and southern Colorado. Then we're headed out to the east coast to meet my new nephew (and visit his family)!

Christmas crafts

Naturally, I have had plenty of time to work on crafts during my recuperation. One of the projects I picked up recently was a pre-printed fabric cowboy stocking kit from Hancock Fabrics. These two stockings will eventually be Christmas decorations hanging on the wall, because I have no need for more stockings. I am busy making them Christmas shiny with sequins, beads and stitching. Then I'll stuff them and sew them. There are also some smaller patterns with little cowboy boots, starts and holly that I may sew up and turn the whole assemblage into a cowboy-Christmas mobile. (I'm on a painfully slow and error-prone internet connection today, so you're lucky I was able to post at all, but no photos).

As of Thanksgiving, I am supposedly allowed to resume all activities including exercise. However, today I had such intense abdominal muscle pain that I had to take a Percocet (I tried ibuprofen first, but it just wasn't enough). I can already hear my Mom asking what crazy thing I did to overexert myself... well, I didn't climb a mountain, go skiing, or even go running... I swept the floors and vacuumed the living room.

According to the doctor, this muscle pain is perfectly normal. So she gave me an all-better diagnosis at my follow-up appointment this week. I guess I'm better, but I really can't jump into all of my usual activities yet. This leaves plenty of time for me to get more crafts done :)

Goodbye station wagon

Hello, Ford Focus. I remember how excited I was when I got my Volvo 960 station wagon. And how excited some friends were for me. However, somebody else is now the proud owner of that Volvo. The '02 Ford Focus I bought on Friday is probably not as exciting to those who loved the station wagon, but I like it. And it was much easier to parallel park this morning.

Guess what I found at Sunflower...

While I was shopping at Sunflower Market on Sunday, I was surprised to see a whole stack of bright red Ski Queen brand gjetost! This is the first time I've ever seen the cheese at a grocery store in Albuquerque. I've even looked for it at specialty stores, but haven't found it. It was always a tradition for my family to have this cheese at Christmas, so I felt very indulgent as I bought myself a package on a non-holiday. But I really don't know if they will continue to carry gjetost.

I realize that I haven't posted in a while and the most exciting news I have to report is finding my favorite cheese at the grocery store. Sometimes that is just the way it is.

Some blog news: I finally figured out why the little archive list to the right was using Albanian month names, and fixed it. I also now have a ClustrMap which lets me see where the people are who are reading the blog. At this point I can pretty well guess who the dots in Germany, the East Coast, and Oklahoma are. The Texans and New Mexicans could be any number of people. Of course, you could also leave comments so I know who's reading.

Labor Day

As a break from "work", we celebrated Labor Day weekend by climbing mountains in Colorado. Specifically, we tackled three 14ers near Lake City. We drove up to the trailhead for Sunshine and Red Cloud on Friday (it took about seven hours, so we had to deal with the rough dirt road at night). On Saturday, we started hiking around 6:30am to summit Red Cloud, then we traversed the ridge to Sunshine. Then we had to hike back over Red Cloud to get back down. So we actually climbed three 14ers in a day if you count Red Cloud twice. It was 11 miles round-trip, and such a beautiful day that we spent quite a bit of time on the summits. We didn't make it back to the camper until 4pm.

Troy and Wiley approaching Red Cloud.

Sitting atop Sunshine with the ridge to Red Cloud behind us.

On Sunday, we climbed Handies Peak from the American Basin trailhead. This was a relatively easy hike compared to the day before. Only 5 miles roundtrip, but the view was gorgeous!