The Knittery - my knitting haven.

So I'm trying to knit a nice lace shawl from one of the patterns in this book and I'm learning how difficult lace can be. Don't get me wrong - I'm enjoying myself (mostly) - but I've never struggled so much while trying to knit anything else. This is what it will look like when it is finished (I hope), though I'm making it out of a plum-colored yarn instead of this sage green.




I got the alpaca/silk yarn I'm using at a local knitting shop about a mile away from our place. They have all sorts of lovely yarn out of just about any material you can think of, and there's a nice old lady that runs the place and welcomes any questions. I went in yesterday and got some help and I was really impressed that she would sit down with me for ten minutes just to answer some questions and watch me knit.

So I'm giving her business a shameless plug. This is her website, where you can order products or get help with tricky patterns.


-Amy

Hot Stone Training

This weekend I got to go to a two-day course to get certified in hot stone massage. I figured it would be pretty relaxing, but what I didn't expect was to learn so much about injury treatment and triggerpoint therapy. Oh, and who knew that you can freeze stones and do cold stone therapy sessions as well?

As with any massage course, we got to do a lot of hours of trades on each other (after each lecture and demo), so I probably received about five hours of massage while I was there. That's a pretty good bargain for the money I paid for the class, and I of course also get the continuing education credits and the opportunity to do hot stone sessions at work and get paid a bit more per session.

For those of you who are not familiar with hot stone massage, I'll answer some questions you may be having right about now. Yes, we really do stick hot rocks between your toes like the picture above. No, we do not actually leave hot rocks just lying on your bare back like you see in every ad depicting hot stone massage; we have to keep many towels around to wrap hot stones in for that purpose. We do, however, use the stones to rub the oil into our clients. The heat helps melt the sticky points in fascia and muscle so the massage can get really deep with much less effort on the therapist's part. The ice helps set the newly-relaxed muscles in their stretched out state so the treatment lasts for much longer than a normal massage session.

Anyway, that was way more information that I'm sure any of you ever wanted to learn about rocks or massage, but as you can tell I'm feeling excited about learning a new modality. I had a good but exhausting weekend, and I'm SO glad I have a day off tomorrow so I can catch up on my sleep.

--Amy

A “Church Home” For Books

Last week Amy and I tried to find a good bookstore. Let me explain what I mean by that. When most Christians relocate they have to find a new church, a new “church home” they call it, where they can feel comfortable worshipping, socializing, and being preached to.

I guess if you follow the analogy through it's like we kinda worship books. We don't really, though we have a healthy fetish for them. To be clear, our fetish is more for the contents of books, not the objects themselves. We’re pretty conservative about how many books we buy and keep in the house.

Mainly, we love to browse, scope out the reading market, or just soak up the literary vibes while we work on our writing projects.

The Salt Lake City Borders store was our favorite haunt in Utah, but the one here turned out to be pretty different.

When I lived here before I used to spend a lot of time at the Borders. There, books were King. The coffee shop was nice with live music on Friday nights. The CDs and DVDs were tucked away under the mezzanine, and the store itself was set apart from the mall and the teeny-bopper crowd.

Not anymore.


The store’s been relocated to the heart of the mall, recently rennovated and expanded. Everything is now catered to the teeny-boppers with over-priced DVDs and swimsuit calenders everywhere you turn.

To coin a phrase, it sucked.

The nearby Barnes and Noble was okay, but only just. Set apart from the mall, it felt a lot better in there, but we’re still searching for the best place to go.

Seattle is a reading town with plenty of hole-in-the-wall places to check out, so we’ll see how it goes as we explore some of our other options.

-Tom.

Visit With Lorena

These pictures were actually taken about 2 weeks ago when Jeremy and Abby came into town for a visit, but I hadn't gotten the chance to post them yet. Lorena is getting big and doing great. We love to hold her when we get the chance; there's just something about the smell of a baby...



It always makes me giggle when I see Lorena's smile in this picture. Abby got a great shot!


-Amy