Full retreat

And then the day after New Year's, I went up to Ben Lomond for the South Bay Knitters annual retreat at the Quaker Center. You may recall the weather-related drama of last year's retreat, and so will be pleased to know that everything went smoothly. It was a lovely time.

I did have to rip out all of the knitting I'd done at Año Nuevo, due to an undetected yarn over in row 3, but the project went quickly, and I'm on the first sleeve.



The fabric is luscious, very drapy and soft.

And I bought some yarn at the Yarn Place, since she stayed open specially just for us, and gave us a discount, and I was the only person in the store, (yeah, yeah.) I got two balls of lace weight merino with those long color changes, and so I thought I'd play with them and swatch during one of our coffee breaks on the yarn crawl. Bad idea. I pulled out huge wodges of yarn, in my attempts to get at the ends of the center pull balls, then stuffed them carelessly back into the bag when it was time to go.

Saint Jocelyn spent over an hour of valuable knitting time helping me wind the barfed up parts back into useable balls, with her magical case of surgical crochet hooks that she used to untie knots I couldn't even see. And then Saint Cris, who had already made the whole retreat happen, anyway, helped me when the partially-wound ball of my project ripping-in-progress flew off the ball winder and got itself tangled. I was pleased to provide diversion and merriment to the group.

Año Nuevo photos

On New Year's Day itself, I took my husband and two friends on an after-hours walk, after my two regular walks were done. Here I am in my official red jacket:



SInce it's still pretty early in the season, we got to go far out on to the point, although we still had to skirt some bulls that were shifting around in the brush. I'm sure by now, those areas are closed. We watched a beta bull try to put the moves on a female (if you click through to Flickr and look at the large size, you can see his little nose and rather comical expression, and the female beneath him is roaring her displeasure.)



This caught the attention of the alpha bull, who reared up to shake his nose and put a stop to this nonsense. In the foreground you can see a nursing pup.




Out on the point, the low sun made for an atmospheric view, and there was lots of sparring among the males.



That's Año Nuevo Island in the background.

My next walk is the 19th, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I hope the weather is as nice.