Scrapbooking from Coast to Coast

The finished scrapbooks of our trip to San Francisco have arrived safely and can therefore be blogged about! Actually, there's nothing much to tell except that they were fun and a little sad to create. I made two of essentially the same book - - one will stay with our friends on the West Coast, the other will stay with us here on the East Coast. Here's a shot of the West Coast cover page. And some details of the Bonus Photo Albums that I blogged about before.
I spent the day home sick today, trying to not feel bad about missing work. It's terrible knowing that my colleagues might have to take time out of their busy class schedules to cover my classes, and it causes lots of folks to go to work when they should be keeping themselves and their germs at home. I think I could have suffered through a day at work today, but after 11 years of teaching, I've finally decided that I'm better off nipping a cold in the bud and not risking passing something on to others. After all, if the first person with the cold had done that, perhaps it wouldn't be flying around the school right now. If I ever write a book about teaching, it will include an entire chapter on allowing yourself to be sick. Hrpmh...I think I still feel a little guilty.

Well, I spent the entire day resting in bed and teaching myself to crochet. That's right, that's right. I'm a KNITTER and I"m going to try my hand at CROCHET, OK? I've accepted the fact that I'm only going to be using one needle, that if you want to you can make it sound like a really silly craft just by emphasizing the word "CROTCH" when you say it, and that the stitches look totally different than their knitted cousins, so it's a whole new world. But I found these insanely great patterns over here on etsy, and I had to have them. Hello?! Crocheted sea life? I'm all over it. I'd like to say that I took to crocheting as quickly as I did to knitting, but then I'd be lying. The truth of the matter is that it's currently 7 pm. I intended to have something worthwhile done before dark so that I could photograph it and blog about it. There is no photograph of a crocheted item in this blog post. 'nuff said.

But don't fret, my crocheting friends. I haven't given up on the craft. Indeed, after about 8 straight hours at it (with a small break for an equally frustrating stint with some bias tape) I finally figured out that the entire time I thought I was doing the basic single crochet, I was actually doing what's known as a slip stitch. Let's just say it helps to read the directions carefully. And to learn to crochet when you're home with a sore throat...it helps that yelling too much hurts.