Overlapping Worlds

One of those delightful collisions of two worlds happened yesterday.  And it was accidentally even captured on film.

Major Milestone and Coincidental Meet-up

A good friend of mine, Charles, after working for Princeton University for 52 years, had his retirement reception yesterday.  The photo above shows a blurry photo of his joy in opening his retirement gift from the University (which is a gorgeous Lalique glass Buddha, by the way).  

There were many coworkers and friends attending the reception...after 52 years at the same employer, I guess you get to know a lot of people.  Charles kept his work life pretty separate from his social life, so I didn't know anyone at the reception, except from things I had heard from Charles about a couple people.

After the formal presentation, one of the presenters (possibly shown in the photo above...in case the person would prefer not to be identified) came up to me and said, "You're queerjoe!"  That kind of chance meeting of a blog reader, especially one so influential in the life of a good friend is always surprising in the most delightful ways.  Turns out this reader is a hardcore knitter who is quite involved in the local and on-line knitting community.

It was a joy to be able to meet a reader in such an unexpected way.

Current Knitting

I'm making progress on my new scarf design.  Progress was slow until I got the rhythm of the pattern stitch down, and I also had to rip it out a few times before I got the hang of it.

I like how the scarf is coming out, and it will look even better once it's blocked and the pattern will be more obvious.

But there are some shortcomings to this design so far.  First (and most importantly, in my mind) is that the stitch pattern doesn't work that well with 2 different colorways of Koigu like my three other scarf designs.  I may be able to find two colorways that would work, but the genius of the Bright Lizard Scarf, Crochet Interlocking Scarf and the Cross Stitch Scarf are that even somewhat random colorways of Koigu work together very well.  The second is that the pattern isn't reversible.  Not a critical feature but it would have been preferred.