Red Hot Chili

Today I scored the Tickle Me Elmo of yarns. Through my obsession devotion to Ravelry.com, which is sort of a Facebook for knitters, I learned about Wollmeise. Wollmeise is a brand of yarn hand-dyed by a German woman named Claudia. She has acquired a cult following among knitters. New stock doesn't last 10 minutes on her Web site. She used to give her fans advance notice on the updates, but had to stop because the demand would crash her site. Now, she updates at random times on random Fridays. People get up in the middle of the night every Friday for months and months to check the site, and still miss out. I happened to check the site this morning, and lo and behold, there was some yarn for sale. I bought one skein of a red-orange-pink colorway called "Red Hot Chili" just to see what all the fuss was about.



Yarn should not excite me this much!

What I've been doing

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They're both gifts, but one has been gifted, and the other will imminently be gifted. I'm pretty happy with the way both turned out.

I'm Army Strong Now

Here's my convoy get up. Normally I wear khakis and polo shirts but that stuff isn't fire retardant. So, this fashionable get up is my outfit of the day when we drive out of Panjshir, complete with flak jacket and helmet. Yes, I know, green is my color.

Notice the great New Balance shoes to match.

Power outage

There was a major storm on Wednesday, including a tornado that touched down not far from here and killed a woman. We lost power Wednesday afternoon and didn't get it back until last night. So Wednesday night, we made a frozen pizza on the grill, and made soup on the gas burner on the grill. It was still raining, on and off, while I was cooking the soup, so I had to stand over it with an umbrella.

Jeremy in a cage

So, I don't write much because my life is boring now. I spend much of my time knitting, but all my current projects are presents, so I can't even show you my progress. Instead, I'll post this picture, which Jeremy sent to me this morning. This is how you cross a river in Afghanistan. Jeremy and his fellow PRTers used this cage-and-pulley to get some donations to a village across the river. I'm sure the device has an actual name - but I don't know what it is, since I am not there.