Vacation Wrap Up

I've regained the will to live after vacation. Maybe I was just tired because now I feel like a big whiner. I am truly grateful for a chance to GO on vacation, and also to come back to our nice house and not have to dive immediately into work, unlike my poor husband who looked like a hunted man after his first day back.

Maybe I'm feeling better because, despite the fact that the trash pick-up happened once again at 7:30 this morning, I was ready for them. HAH! Take THAT!

I want to do a little last vacation post, if you'll bear with me, but first I have to ask my sock-knitting readers a question. Those of you who don't knit can skip right over this part.

BEGIN SKIP

Here is a sock I am knitting for my husband. I knitted on it all through vacation but as I am A) a slow knitter and B) knitting a lot more stitches than I ever have in a sock before, AND C) I had to frog back an entire day's work after I cast on too few stitches, it is taking a long time to finish. (You can get a larger version of this picture by clicking on the photo but you have to use your back button to get back to here.)
My question, though, is: does this gusset look right to y'all? I cast on 84 stitches and then I knitted the heel flap and turned the heel and I picked up like 26 stitches a side. I decreased but maybe I should have decreased more rapidly? Does this look like it's going to be too baggy? Please give me some feedback so that I can either frog it back or just set fire to the whole thing. As an aside, I had no idea that knitting 20 more stitches on a sock would translate into SO MUCH MORE KNITTING. I don't know how the Yarn Harlot does it--her husband has size 13 feet!

END SKIP

There were things I forgot to tell and show you along the way in Vacation Land. Like my beautiful Ana's face in Waffle House. Ana was MADE for Waffle House--those are her PEOPLE. We also learned something very interesting but to tell you about this, I have to use my husband's first name, which is something I never do when writing about my family. I don't know why. But if you check out my humor columns, So, the thing is, you'll see that I have written whole columns about him and NEVER used his first name.

But anyway, his first name is Mark. While on our way to Alabama, when we stopped into a Waffle House the first time, we thought the cook's name must have been Mark because the staff kept saying it when they were calling out orders to the cook. This made my husband a bit jumpy. He'd be about to take a bite of eggs and someone would call out "Mark!" and he'd start and look around.

Well, on our way home from Alabama, we stopped into another Waffle House and imagine how disconcerting it was to realize that the cook in THIS Waffle House was ALSO named Mark! Jump, jump, jump. Finally, I asked the waitress, "Is your cook named Mark?" And she just laughed and laughed. "No, it's a system of communicating to the staff in the kitchen. We use these tokens and we MARK a place on the plate." Then she showed us how by, positioning the token on various spots on the place, they signalled "scrambled" or "fried" or "waffle" or "grits" or whatever. "We don't cook from memory anymore, " she said, a bit sadly.

So now you know that if you go into a Waffle House, your cook's name may or not be Mark but you will definitely hear that word a LOT. Now please forget that I told you my husband's first name. (The things I do in the name of blogging.)

On our trip, we saw license plates from:
Arkansas
South Caroline
Florida
Texas
Louisiana
Wisconsin
Mississippi
Oregon
Alabama
Arizona
Illinois
Georgia
Oklahoma (Does anyone else want to bang a pot with a spoon over their heads while chanting "Oklahoma! Oklahoma! "Oklahoma!" when they see the name of this state?)
Tennessee

One game Jane played a lot in Alabama was Grocery Store. She would draw and cut out all of this stuff to stock her store. Here are a few of the things she drew (I helped with some of the lettering):

Here is the map my husband drew for me on the day I got so lost with Ana in the car. Looks pretty simple, doesn't it? Really, it was the lack of signage thing more than the Operator Error thing. That's all I'm saying. No, really.

And then a bit of distressing news: my foot doesn't seem to be healing and I am back in my boot/walking cast thing. The doctor told me the bones are healed but something is wrong because I have pain every time I step, even when I'm in the boot. (This may have something to do with the fact that the boot keeps deflating on me as I'm walking. It has a hole in it. Of course it does.) I went to physical therapy today and ended up coming right back home because there wasn't anything she could do for me as long as I am in pain. I see the doctor on Thursday. The PT thinks that maybe I went into a shoe too fast and didn't have the calf muscle to walk in it so I've developed some tendinitis. I, um, cried when I told my husband. It's a bit discouraging after so many months.

And you know, the hell of it is that I still need to go to the grocery store in the worst way. Looks like I'll be taking the motorized cart. And woe to any old ladies who get in my way!

Two more quick pictures that show why we do these kinds of trips:


PS: I also shaved both legs.