Familiar places

The Emperor and I scooted down to San Diego a few weeks ago to visit my dad.  On our way back, we stopped at some of my old haunts.  One was a restaurant called "The Place" in Flagstaff, Arizona, and for years I'd been measuring the quality of biscuits by the ones served there.  My husband had to agree that they're the biggest and softest available anywhere.  We brought two of them home with us because the rest of the breakfast was so big...  Here they are, on a ten-inch dinner plate, ready to be our breakfast when we reached our home.

To work off that breakfast, we also stopped for a short hike at Wupatki National Monument, and we spent some time at The Blowhole.

Wupatki is located in a volcanic area.  There are several underground chambers in the region, and some of them have fissures that reach the surface.  When the air pressure above ground is light, cool air flows out of the blowholes (thus the name), and when the pressure is heavy, air flows into the chamber.  I've always visited this blowhole when it was blowing out, and I love the earthy smell of the air as it comes out into the desert.  On this visit, air was flowing into the chamber -- or, as we said to other visitors, "it's sucking."  Yep, it's never dull at Orchard Ranch.

While out on the road, I started working on the Neck Down Swing Cardigan from Patternfish.  I'm using yarn I had in the stash that I bought a couple of years ago from the New Lanark historic wool mill in Scotland.  I didn't really need to start yet another new project, but I put my difficult case of startitis to work for me busting the stash and making something I could wear.  As of today, I'm almost ready to divide it up and start working on the section from the armholes down.  I've never made a raglan sweater, or a top-down one, so this is interesting.  So far, I'm liking it.