Back from Vacation/ The Big Move Part Deux

I'm (sorta) back from vacation! TD and I flew down to Ft. Lauderdale, FL for a few days to visit my sister, and then took a 7 day Western Carribean cruise with ports of call in Grand Cayman, Honduras, Belize, and Mexico.

Here we are having finally boarded the ("fun") ship:


I didn't do a ton of knitting while gone because, despite carefully selected vacation knitting selections, I managed to leave behind a necessary needle for the "cruise knitting" and ran out of yarn on the "plane knitting". C'est la vie.

Here we are in Roatan, Honduras (where we actually managed to escape from the other 3,596 other people on the ship):

I am, however, halfway done with the muti-directional diagonal scarf, which is lovely. Pictures to come soon.

Since I was visiting my sister in Ft. Lauderdale and was woefully behind in getting her a birthday gift this year (Which was April 28... and also I never manage to finish anything I try to knit for her), I bought her the gift that keeps on giving: the gift of knitting! I got her Debbie Stoller's first Stitch 'n Bitch book, some size 10 addi bamboo straight needles, and 6 skeins of yarn to make a overzealous-airconditioning-combatting shawl.



I have to tell you, I think she's a bit of a prodigy. I gave her the gift, and then before giving any instruction, I jumped in the shower to wash the airplane grime away. By the time I got out she had mastered the long tail cast-on. Sheesh, I thought, I guess you don't need my help after all.
By the time we got back from the cruise, she was 4 skeins in to the garter stich shawl, which looked near-perfect.



I'm not back to Pittsburgh yet, though. I'm in DC (well, Northern VA, technically) helping TD pack up. I may not have mentioned this (I think I was afraid that if I wrote it down, he would change his mind), but (drumroll, please) TD is moving in with me. So, the next 10 days will be spent packing and tackling the second big move of the summer. Then we'll have a couple weeks to adjust to domestic bliss (?) before I start work in mid-September.

Whew! This has really been quite the summer!