We are home.

We are back from Texas and I would like to show you some pictures of our trip.    Above we have a picture from the Fort Worth Stock Yards.  It is a fascinating place with lots of restaurants and shops of all kinds.

We had to laugh when we saw this sign at the restaurant we ate at with some old friends of ours.  We were wondering if this was the Micro Brewed Beer of Texas!

No trip to the Stockyards would be complete unless you went to Billy Bob's and spent some time in there.  We met my brother and his wife there for lunch one day.  They do not have a mechanical bull.  Instead they have REAL bull riding every Friday and Saturday night.  You must have your bull riding card to participate but all are welcome to watch.  (we left long before bull riding began)

From left to right is:  Susan (my sister in law), Stan ( my brother ), me and Joe my wonderful husband.  I am still wondering when my brother went country.

We celebrated Bryson's 7th birthday while in Texas.  He sure looks funny here.  We were all singing to him and I think he was worried about all the wax getting on the cake.

I am not a proponent of giving children guns to play with but.........his daddy does work with aviation ordanence for the Navy and is a fire arms instructor too.  He had wanted this cap gun since Christmas.  It uses the old fashioned rolled caps.  I know they are old fashioned because they were around when I was a child. (and that was some time ago)

I had to have a picture of their 7 month old puppy Kiowa.  She is a real character and this is one of the few times we saw her actually relaxing.  She is a very busy lady wanting everyone to play with her toys.  She was a Christmas/houswarming gift from us to the family when they moved into their house this past December.  Just think, she has another 17 months to grow.  I think she is going to be a rather large GS!

Here is a picture of the Texas family.  It was so hard to leave today.  In the back row is Jamie (my daugher in law), Jay (our son) in the front row is Bryson and Jadin (10 yrs old).  They have 2 other boys (Neiko 17 and Skylar 22)  but  Neiko was not home and Skylar is in college in Philadelphia and couldn't make it home.

This was my favorite time today.  It was just before we left and I got to hold the boys and love them a lot.  They are wonderful children and I wish we were closer so we could see them more often but that is the Navy for you.  There isn't a base here in Arizona so Texas was the next best place for them to pick.  It is only a 3 hour flight or a 14 hour drive (ugh!)

While on this trip I finished my Multnomah prayer shawl and started back working on my La La's simple shawl.  I still have Eva's shawl to finish after this.  But I did manage to get the socks done for Jamie before we left and she loved them.  I have a request from Jadin for convertible mittens for this winter.  I am going to have fun making them as I never got a chance to make an outline of his hand before I left.  I did hold his hand to mine and it is quite a bit smaller than mine so will just have to punt.

I need to go to bed now.  It is back to work tomorrow and I am sure there is plenty for me to do there since I have been gone for 7 work days.  (sigh) Only 9 more years and I can retire.  (big big BIG sigh)

So what do you do when you don't have a swiffer to help you wind your yarn into a nice neat cake?  You go up to the dear unsuspecting spouse who is watching his baseball game and ask him to hold his arms out about so wide.  Then you plop a hank of beautiful yarn on his arms and tell him to hold that for just a few minutes while you manually roll it into a nice ball of yarn.

I think he did a great job!  After I finished this hank he actually asked me "how many more of these do you have to do".  I told him that not to worry about it as I was not going to do them all tonight. 

I have 3 more of these to do so I think I had better spread it out a bit.  Of course if I do them all one right after the other I might find a swiffer in my mail box someday soon.



I finished up my magic loop beanie class tonight.  I really liked the way it turned out and now am looking foward to doing many more hats this way.  In fact the yarn that DH helped me with tonight is going to become one of them but I will alter the pattern a bit as I am making it for a woman and want it to be a bit more femine than the one we did for class.

I finished the socks for my Daughter In Law and will be taking them with me to TX.  I tried to do the stretchy bindoff and could not get it.  So tonight while in class I asked my instructor to explain it to me as the instructions were really hard for me to grasp.  He explained it to me and told me to take out the binding and to attach the yarn back to the place where I started the bind of and do the bind off that way and then I would just weave in the ends.  So I am going to do that so the socks will go over her heels.  Otherwise they are really really a tight fit.

I am still working on the 3 prayer shawls and hopefully will be completing one of them soon.  The other two are kind of on hold until this first one is completed.  I was starting to get a bit confused as 2 of them are very close in their patterns.

We leave this Saturday for our 10 day trip to TX.  I am really looking forward to seeing the grandkids there and of course their parents too.  I am not looking forward to the weather there as it has been raining almost everyday for the past month it seems.  So the humidity will be really heavy.  Whereas here in AZ we are still around 11% humidity.  Ok,so I have already decided: no makeup, no fancy hair style, cotton clothes only, drink tons of ice water while there.

Better close this post up for the night.  I still have 3 more days of work before I can get on that big jet plane.