I miss my knitting friends

SO MUCH! I missed knit night last week to watch my daughter in concert at her school, wherein she showed us that performing arts high school is the right place for her! She was tops. I missed again this week 😦 because Chip, her former guitar teacher (scroll down the link a bit for a video of cool jazz) of 8 or so years gave us a call yesterday 🙂 , and invited her to participate in a Master Class given by Douglas Niedt. If you checked his credentials you can see that yes indeed, everything IS up to date in Kansas City.  Mr Niedt (pronounced NEET) has been a visiting artist at Elon University this year and gave his farewell concert  tonight.  His program is astonishing, including such varied works as “Mack the Knife” which was romantic, haunting, and almost unrecognizable as the same song Bobby Darin sang, and “Peter Gunn” which is instantly recognizable across all generations as crime-fiction supercool.  Henry Mancini wrote it for a TV series, and got 2 grammys and an emmy nomination.  The Blues Brothers version can be heard here.  I couldn’t believe how Douglas Niedt got it to work solo on an acoustic guitar, but he most certainly did.  Daughter Juliet was enthralled.  We bought 2 CD’s and some sheet music.  practice, practice, practice.

I’ve neglected my blog . . .

but I do have a good excuse. And my husband now has a very heart-healthy diet, because he doesn’t want to stay at this particular bed and breakfast again any time soon:

Edited 4/4/2011 because I removed the DH in ICU pic.  You know you didn’t really want to see it anyway.

Edited 4/17/08 to babble on a bit about why I included this image here.  First, no, that is not tape on his face, just a little photo-doctoring to spare you (and me) the full impact.

I don’t ever want to forget how those few days felt. I especially don’t want him to forget how it felt. I want him to take better care of himself because this experience scared the hell out of me. I want myself to remember to cherish him, remind him he is the love of my life, and show him I feel this way in every little thing I do for him. I’ll see this image fairly often if it is published here, without having to put it in a frame on my bedside table. That would be too strange, even for me!

Me, I got a lot of knitting done, and Sorelle (my version on rav) will be forever the sweater I “Knit on, with confidence and hope, through all crises.” -EZ. At least, I knit on it through maybe the scariest one so far, and I credit knitting for my calm and confident outward demeanor through the whole ordeal. Anyone who knows me knows that calm and confident is not my usual inward demeanor. He’s doing very well now, and starting his cardiac rehab tomorrow. I don’t think the rehab staff will have any trouble with getting this patient to comply with diet and exercise recommendations.

So that you’ll forgive me for the depressing family emergency stuff, and not judge me for the tackiness of taking that picture AND the nerve of then publishing it, I’m lifting our spirits with this collection of spring photos.

These are from my yard:

I’m going to grab a color palette from that dogwood closeup to dye yarn with. I just love those colors together. They say spring to me.

I just love the show Piedmont NC puts on in the spring. These next are from the arboretum, one of our favorite places to take a walk. We’ll be doing that a lot, now. If I can pry the boy away from work sometimes.

That last was a buttercup growing defiantly by the otherwise well-cultivated path. I like its moxie.

This next I don’t know the name of, but it’s a beautiful ground cover:

and some more moxie:

This is an old tree with a very large trunk, and all round it an enormous, glorious, homogenous bed of yellow pansies, with this little bunch of blue close to the trunk. It’s either artfully placed to look like a volunteer, or else it is in fact, a volunteer. Either way, I like it. I especially like that if you examine the yellow pansies closely, you find this:

Sparsely scattered throughout, every so often you can find a rogue blue petal! It’s worth looking closely, and looking at a lot of all yellow flowers, to enjoy the rare blue petals. I could so easily have missed them. There’s a life metaphor here, which a more clever blogger would surely be able to put into words. Me, I’m just happy when I have a chance to enjoy a rare beauty.