Veryvery quick

That's what this post has to be. I've distracted the children by asking them to clean their rooms (I won't see them again until next month, if I'm not careful), so I have a few precious moments to post before the next thing comes along.

First, a finished object!
There they are. The anemone socks. I finished them last night at a meeting at a friend's house, and put them straight on. The non-knitters in the group stared at me a while as I was knitting, until finally one of them asked: "Are you knitting socks?" She was far too polite to make the usual five dollars at Target comment, but it was there on her face. Once they were on my feet, though, the looks got a bit more speculative. No-one asked to learn how to knit, however, alas. Next time.
I did get lots of compliments on the colors, which pleased me because I adore this colorway. I may have to get another skein for myself -- I'm sure I can think of something to knit with it, right?

So, to recap. These are the Anemone socks, from last fall's Socks That Rock sock club, in the Tide Pooling colorway (lightweight). This motif must eat up yarn, as I used far more of the skein than I usually do (although this was by no means a nail-biter, there was plenty of leeway). I used my size one celtic swan dpns, and didn't modify the pattern (except I think I messed one bit up and had to fudge, but I won't tell if you won't).

I promptly wound the yarn for this month's sock club installment, and I cast on today (pictures at some point, I promise; this is a great pattern). I'm also knitting Rick's socks again, but this time with no patterning, so they'll be something I can knit during this conference/workshop/thingamajig that I'm about to head off to. That means that at this point, I have two active projects OTN, and they're both socks. I'm OK with that, since we'll be doing a lot of driving and travelling next week, and having two small projects, one simple and one more complicated, seems like a very good idea.

The flowers are out in full force around here.
The azaleas are in bloom (these bushes, tucked under on of our big old pepper trees, make me happy every year).
And Tilly is full of energy.
I am not so full of energy right now, as this week has been insane. I've almost finalized my presentation (still three minutes over, drat it!), put together a handout to go along with it (that's how I cut five minutes off the time to start with), written an Institutional Review Board application with supporting materials, and put together an application for a small internal grant. On top of that, we had some family stuff happen this week that required a lot of time to deal with; it's going to be fine, but it took precedence over everything else, and added to the general sense of franticness.

I leave tomorrow for my conference, and again immediately after getting back from the conference for our road trip (this one's for pleasure) to New Mexico. So it may be that I'm not able to post again until I get back, just after Easter. I'll be taking lots of pictures in New Mexico, though; there's even one fiber stop in the works, which I'm very excited about. I'm dreadfully behind on reading blogs, but I'm hoping that the hotel I'm staying at for the conference will have wifi, and maybe I can catch up on my reading as a reward once I finally lose those last three minutes from my presentation (this is like a diet, but harder). That seems fair, doesn't it? Now the question is what I should pack to wear, and whether I should also pack along my bottle of Talisker...