the friendly skies--yeah right

So I'm back home, back to work, doing my usual thing. The trip home was pretty rough, coming to a grand total of 14.5 hours in airports and planes, at least two of which involved involuntary subjection to very catchy, very annoying elevator music while pointlessly sitting in a broken plane at the gate. That plus a thunderstorm plus very rude airline employees plus Dunkin' Donuts being out of milk and cheese and biscuits plus not packing enough yarn or library books in my carry-on... let me tell you, I went from grumpy to surly to downright hostile as the day went on.
Luckily, I did mail all the yarn to myself instead of attempting some kind of baggage heroics involving a carry-on and a "personal item" crammed full of yarn. Schlepping all that through airports for 14 hours would have been hideous. However, unluckily, I didn't save a skein of it for my carry-on just in case I ran out of my travel project, which I did about halfway through the day. The bad news: I was miserable. Too bored to sit still, too tired to keep pacing around for all those hours, and too fidgety and pissed off to find any of the books in the airport bookstore appealing enough to buy. The good news: I finished my shawl!


This is the one I made out of my own Sock Pairs Bamboo Blend, the very first skein of it that I fell in love with and tangled up into a miserable twisted mess in the middle of the night a month or two ago. The skein that reduced me to tears is now a beautiful shawl. You can see the colors better in this one:


I think I'm just going to keep this one. It's warm but doesn't take up a lot of space, and it's pretty. And the yarn was my first baby, after all.
I also finished the Acero shawl while I was in Manchester, and not a moment too soon--I was freezing between the excessive air conditioning and the rain. As soon as I finished it, I put it on. I'll have to show you pictures of that one later, though--it's in the mail with the new yarn right now, and I didn't have my lovely model with me in New Hampshire, so I had to photograph it on myself.


And the other pictures were worse! Maybe I'm a vampire.