Finally Getting Settled In

Well after working for a week and a half, I finally feel like I'm setting in to living in CT...sort of. Now that all of our furniture is here and set up the apartment is really starting to feel like home. Meghan and I even accidentally coordinated furniture colors in the living room.

And my bed finally arrived! Or I guess it's more appropriate to call it my futon. I decided since I'll be moving in with Lane in the spring it would be silly to buy a nice bed. So now I have a nice bed that also makes a really nice couch.

here it is when it's a couch:

And lucky for me it came in a really pretty green color! And now I have it set up as a bed with a mattress pad and all. Though I still need a comforter, and my only complaint is that there's nowhere to tuck in the sheets on the side so they just hang down to the floor.

So, now that the bed is here and I'm off the air mattress things are really looking up. Though I did have a slight mishap at the CT DMV when they decided not to accept my paystub as proof of residency so I'll have to go back on Tuesday to try and get my license changed over to a CT state license. Grr....frustrating. 

Also, since I've been settling into the apartment and my new work schedule I haven't got much knitting done. But my scarf is now more than a foot long, which is more than my last post. It's also coming along quicker now that I am purling the correct way :)

Hopefully I can get more done now that I'm getting used to getting up early and then having nothing to do after work. I'll also try to update my blog more often, since I've been meaning to post for a while and just haven't gotten around to it. 

Skew done, hat done, moved to a new apt...whew!

Well I finished my skew socks right on time! They are a little hard to get over my heels but once they are on they fit perfectly. They also photograph quite nicely:

I really liked working with this yarn. The colors are great and it's nice and soft. It did shed a little bit of fuzzies, but I think that was worth dealing with. 

Once I finished up the socks it was time to speed knit Ceara's student wizard hat for the Harry Potter midnight showing on Thursday the 14th. Lucky for me the pattern was a quick knit and I was able to finish it in about half a day. It even fit perfectly!

Ceara also made herself a robe to go with the hat, so she had the whole uniform. She even was on the news talking about it since the news lady was so impressed with her costume. 

Now that those projects are done I decided to start up on a lace scarf to use up my enchanted forest colored imagination sock yarn I got from my first time going to the Taunton SnB. So far it's coming along nicely

On the non-knitting front, I've moved into my apartment in Danbury, and I've been doing well unpacking. I only have about one box left of stuff to unpack along with some little bits and pieces that I still need to decide where they go. 

I'm really excited about this apartment. It's really nice and the gym is so close I'm hoping that I can keep up the motivation to exercise regularly. I don't have any pictures of the apartment yet since I still have some empty boxes lying around. But hopefully I can finish unpacking by the end of this weekend and get some pictures up!

Disney, Harry Potter, Knitting, etc!

Well I obviously haven't blogged in a while. But I think it's with good reason. I went on vacation with my family to Florida to go on a Disney/Universal Studios vacation, and it was amazing!

Main Street Disney

This vacation confirmed for me that you are never too old to go to amusement parks. Disney was as magical as ever. We went to all of the parks and I took lots of pictures of everything. However, I don't think they'll all fit in one blog post. Ceara made it onto the stage for the American Idol experience at Disney's Hollywood studios (the new name for the MGM park) and that was really cool. Every day they pick 15 people to perform out of the ~300 who try out and she made it! It was really cool.

Harry Potter world was amazing! Hogsmead looked just like I thought it would. Though for some reason they chose to depict it in winter... maybe that was so you could feel like it wasn't 92 degrees out?

Entrance to Hogsmead

And once we walked through the village we made it to the Hogwarts castle and let's just say if I could live in Harry Potter world and go to Hogwarts for school, I probably would.

Hogwarts

We also got to get Butterbeer from the Hog's Head pub and ate lunch at the three broomsticks.

 

Overall I recommend going to Harry Potter world, though the shops were in my opinion a bit too small and the whole place a bit too crowded... the off season would probably be the best time to go.

Now that we are back in VT, Ceara and I have been craving the sweet deliciousness that is Butterbeer (aka cream soda with some sort of delicious butterscotch foam stuff on top). And so we've started the great adventure of trying to make our own. Today I think we met with success after trying a recipe we found online here. And we added butterscotch caramel ice cream topping to the foam to make it taste more like the stuff they give out at the park. Here is the fruit of today's efforts:

It's delicious and pretty close to what we had at the park. I recommend trying it out if you want to have butterbeer in the comfort of your own home. 

Anyway that's the story on my vacation and now it's time for the knitting update. Which, even though this is a knitting blog I seem to get easily distracted. I like to think it makes my entries more interesting. :)

I've made some good skew sock progress since my last post. I finished the left sock and have started work on the right one. Sadly the first sock took longer than I planned since as I realized on the plane to Florida I reversed my markers and did all the short rows backwards. So, I had to take out about 50 rows and re-knit them. But have no fear the sock came out well once I fixed it.

The sock has a tight fit but it does fit! So I feel pretty successful. And the pattern is really interesting to make and not as difficult as I feared. The origami heel construction is really cool. 

After finishing the first sock for the second time I decided I needed a break before I started the second one. So I took a few days to make Lane a very belated birthday gift... an angler fish! It came out so cool: 

And now that I finished that mini project in the middle I've moved back on to the second sock and should hopefully be done that in the next few days. After my skew socks are done I've been commissioned to make a Harry Potter hat for Ceara in time for the last movie premier. So I'll be kept busy for the rest of this week knitting.

Next week I'll be moving to CT on either Monday or Tuesday (based on the vague date the moving people gave me) and then I start work on the 18th. I'm pretty excited! Hopefully the moving process is relatively painless...