Goodbye to 2010! It’s been an interesting year.

Lucy and I will be back next year. I will be ending the year knitting the sleeve of my Calmer sweater:

Lucy will be doing what she does best: acting adorable. Right now she is resting up for our big New Year’s celebration tomorrow night.

You can tell this is serious napping by the tail-over-face position.

I finished the front of my Calmer Aran.

I had been toying with the idea of working a square neckline but at the last minute changed my mind and did a round neck instead.

I plan to do a narrow neckband of one sort or another. Stay tuned.

I am working on the first sleeve now. This sweater will have saddle shoulders, so the center panel of the sleeve will be extended up onto the shoulder. Again, stay tuned.

We never did get much of anything in the way of snow — the huge east coast blizzard grazed us and we just had a dusting of snow. Lucky near miss, eh?

Lucy is doing her Greta Garbo impersonation.

I like how her little ears are flipped back so she can keep track of me.

It seems like we’ve been waiting forever for the big storm that is supposed to hit the area today. Forecasters keep pushing back the start time — apparently this storm is just creeping up the east coast, taking its time. At the moment there are just a few flurries out there.

We had a lovely holiday here and we hope you did too. I did very little knitting on my Calmer Aran because I’ve got some sekret knitting that is due the middle of January, so I worked on that over Christmas. But here is the front of my aran:

Maybe I’ll take a break from the sekret knitting today to work on it a bit.

And here is a photo essay of Lucy’s Christmas.

She opened one present on Christmas Eve:

(Thank you, Sharon!)

Then she settled down to sleep.

She had a lot of fun with the wrapping paper on Christmas morning:

And she was delighted with the needle-felted mouse firefly sent to her. Thank you, firefly!

Later, she seemed to be trying to hatch it.

(Note that she is keeping her fuzzy rat close by as well.) This was after she sampled the organic catnip her Daddy gave her. 😉

By noon she looked like this:

There’s only so much excitement a little kitty can handle.

Stay warm!

And visions of fuzzy rats danced in her head.

I am still calling this the Calmer Aran because I haven’t given any thought to naming the design. Maybe I’ll call it “Serenity Now!” Heh.

Despite a weekend of feeling like something I trod on and subsequently scraped off the bottom of my foot, I did manage to finish the back of this sweater.

If it looks a tad short to you that is because this baby will have a rather wide shoulder strap extending up from the sleeve.

Shameless Self-Promotion

In a frenzy of self-promotion, I would like to point out to you that both Socks From the Toe Up and Toe Up Socks for Every Body are available for pre-order in the Kindle edition. Follow the links on each title. According to their pages on amazon, they will be released on January 19, 2011. I checked the Barnes & Noble and the Sony Reader sites as well, but they are not yet listed there for the Nook or the Sony Reader. But they will be.

Back to Business

It has been colder than usual here for days. My heat is on, and I have even been wearing a hat on my commute. Both signs of the apocalypse being imminent, I believe.

And Miss Lucy is loving basking on the back of the couch under a lamp.

A fun fact about Lucy. She really really hates it when I talk on the phone. During a phone call last night she kept trying to climb up my arm to get to the phone (presumably to kill it). After the call ended, she jumped down, ran over to her fuzzy rat, and beat the crap out of it.

Just because.

Note to myself: must remember to wrap Lucy’s presents.