Wonderful Skies

In my business, you get tired of hearing about how awful it is to travel post-9/11 and you can always get a frequent traveler who can beat your best "awful flying story" with one of their own.

I Must Be The Lucky Flier!
I really have very few awful flying stories...however if waterboarded for anything over 3 seconds, I could easily come up with a lie about some.

However, I can think of at least 3 times when my flying life was completely charmed.

1. A few years back, Thaddeus and I were vacationing in Cancun with a friend of ours. We had booked the same flight down to Cancun as she did, but the non-stop back to Philadelphia was too expensive for her, so she booked a flight going through Charlotte on her way home, but scheduled it to arrive in Philadelphia at the same time as our flight. When bad weather in Charlotte threatened her chances of making it home, I was able to not only have her rescheduled on our flight at no extra charge, but I was also able to use a companion upgrade coupon to get her upgraded to first class.

2. Last week, I was slated to fly home from Seattle with a stop in Phoenix. At boarding time there was a maintenance issue on our plane, and they eventually canceled the Phoenix leg of my flight. In calling my travel department, they were able to book me on a non-stop flight later the same evening going directly to Philadelphia...a flight I didn't even know existed and I would have much rather been on anyway. I just changed all my future flights home from Seattle to that flight (and it's cheaper than the 1-stop flight through Phoenix).

3. Finally today, I boarded a jammed Monday morning flight to Seattle (with only 2 empty seats on the whole plane)...Not only was one of those seats the center seat next to me, but the man on the aisle and I started talking about my knitting, and it turns out he had just spent some time with two of the guys at the retreat center where we hold the Men's Knitting Retreat, who are also knitters (and attend the retreat). The man was fascinating and the 5 hour flight...well, flew by.

So if you need a positive flying experience, come fly with me.

Current Knitting
I finished up the pair of Newland socks for Thaddeus and they came out extremely well.

The sock blockers, I just recently purchased from Seven Yaks, along with some other awesome items...

...this is a site I will be stalking regularly to find anything new and interesting she comes up with. Two of the balls of roving in the bad photo above are some of the nicest/softest feeling rovings I have ever touched in my life.

I also started a new sweater project.

Yeah, I know it's not much, but it's a start. This is the seed stitch edging at the bottom of the back of a pullover I'm designing on the needles. I'm using the Malabrigo Silky Merino I purchased from Sean a year or so ago when he still had his yarn store. The edge/contrasting color is some old Rowan yarn I had hanging around from somewhere.

Readers' Comments/Questions
Jayme writes, "Sometime I hope to see you wax philosophical about how you've backed away from identifying yourself solely as what you did well career wise. Has being an exceptional knitter/friend/blog poster helped balance your identity?"

That is an excellent topic, and I will try and incorporate that into a blog entry soon. In short, the answer to your question is, "yes, somewhat" but it certainly wasn't what prompted me to establish an independent identity from what I did for work. More will be revealed...thanks for asking such a great question!

Thanks everyone for the nice compliments about the neckwarmer fashion photo...I just looked back at it, and I'm afraid I'm going to show up on that web site..."Man or Old Lesbian"...but I'd be happy with that too!