In which I discover my inner geek

I left for a trip to California and discovered I am a geek, in the best sense I'm hoping. Work called me out west for my first visit to California. I had to visit one of our locations in San Jose, which was a nice sunny balmy 60F when I landed. The two hour time difference between home and the west coast didn't seem too bad until I found my eyes becoming quite heavy at early evening. I rested, met my coworkers in the morning for breakfast, then realized I was in Silicon Valley. To an IT professional, it was like landing somewhere only to look around and have it dawn on you that you are in Disney World.

As we drove to the office, I began to shout excitedly "Oh, there's Yahoo! There's Intel, oh my gosh, was that Cisco?" My exclamations greatly amused my non-IT coworkers. Later, a counterpart at the office offered to drive me around to see the sites. I thanked her for her graciousness and then promptly asked, "Do you know where the Google office is?" Forget the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, or Lombard St in San Franscisco. I spent the next couple of hours driving around Silicon Valley taking in the sites of a bunch of IT company office buildings. Yes, I found Google, and you can google Goggle on Google Maps when you get a little lost, which we did. It was one of the best site seeing jaunts ever.

I did not, though, take any time to get in some fly fishing, which Italian thought was a bit nutty. The guy is great. He was encouraging me to extend my trip away from home so I could trek out to a remote lake or river and catch a fish. I was anxious to get back to my boys, plus, fly fishing without the guys just doesn't seem right; not yet anyway. I did finish the Spey Valley socks on the flight.

From WIPs

They were an extremely quick knit, spanning a few hours over three weeks. If I had actually devoted time to these socks, they would have been complete a while ago. The yarn is from a small indie dyer and the base yarn is nice and squishy. The pattern supplies just the right amount of variance to be interesting but still works well with a self striping yarn. Overall, I'd knit the pattern and this yarn again, which is good, because I have more of this yarn in my stash in other colorways.

From WIPs

After casting off the socks, I picked up a shawl. This teeny tiny mess of lace weight yarn had been languishing in my knitting basket. It was feeling forlorn and looked sad when I packed it for my trip. It began to perk up though somewhere over the Rockies and slowly started to look like an unblocked piece of lace, still messy, but with some life and potential. I have to say, lace is a great plane project. It is compact and unobtrusive, plus the concentration required helps pass the time quickly.

From WIPs

Before I close out for today, I need to wish my goddaughter a belated happy birthday. She had the honor of turning three last week, on Inaguration day. The entire nation held a great big party for little Nay Nay (and Barack Obama. Nay Nay was nice enough to share her day). Happy birthday, sweetie!