The silent scream

I'm not sure if I have ever mentioned that my husband was born with an ear for music. So, in addition to his love for his other hobbies (hunting, reloading, etc.), he also loves his guitars. He has five of them that all do something different or has a different sound to them, and lately had been neglected. He doesn't read a note of music, but has quite an extensive repertoire of songs that he has learned to play on his own over the years. I love it when we're home on a Saturday, and he thinks nobody (read: me, the dog and cat) is paying any attention, and he picks up his Martin (if you know guitars, this one is pretty impressive) acoustic and just starts playing. One of our neighbors was in a band at one time, and has been wanting Scooter to come over some evening and jam with him and a couple of other former neighbors. Ray is very, very good, and has a voice that you could sit and listen to for hours on end. This past Saturday, the guys were finally able to connect and Scooter came home with a few new techniques he had learned. He is looking forward to their next jam session, and I'm so pleased! This is a guy that moved to northern California five years ago, and had no intentions of building any kind of a life here. He was going to just buy a house, work for five years, sell the house and make some money, and head back to his home state of Idaho where he would buy some land for a whole lot less than you can here, to retire on. He bought the house, and then he met me, we got married three years later, and now he has that settled in kind of family life complete with extended family, a couple of pets, and loads of friends.

  Scooter (left) and Ray (right) while waiting for the others to arrive

One of the pets I could live without would be the uninvited variety, like reptiles. Egads!!!!! Sunday afternoon some friends of mine whom hadn't met Scooter yet, invited us up to the foothills for dinner at their new home. We didn't stay for dinner, but we had such a nice visit catching up on old times (I've known Doug for 42 years!). It was late by the time we got back home and had dinner, and not realizing the time, I made the mistake of drinking a diet Pepsi with my dinner. Caffeine never used to affect me this way, but now it keeps me awake. So when Scooter was ready for bed, guess who was wide eyed and couldn't sleep. Yup, moi. I quietly got out my knitting and around midnight, it was interrupted with Maggie raising all kinds of commotion out on the back patio. When I got to the door, it looked as if she was getting quite the argument from what appeared to be a huge earth worm on steroids. I grabbed a flashlight we keep by the back door and discovered it was a snake!!  It was all I could do to keep from disrupting the quiet in the neighborhood with my screams. I came back in the house and instead screamed for Scooter. Poor guy...being woke up out of a sound sleep must have been startling. He used the leg of a chair we have on the patio to wrestle the thing while he sent me running to the garage for a small bucket he keeps on his work bench. Talk about a constant stream of shivers going up my spine. I just don't do reptiles, and no, I don't bait my own fishing hook either! We managed to corral the snake into the bucket and since our neighbor next door is out of town and his housesitter was probably in bed, he tossed the snake over the fence. I didn't know he was going to do that, so now I'm afraid to go to bed at night...thoughts of Indiana Jones runs through my brain. Ugh.

Up until last night, my Kudzu shawlette was coming along very nicely. I love this pattern and can see myself wearing it all the time this winter. I have realized I'm going to run out of yarn before I'm finished, so I placed an order with Knit Picks for some more. It usually always takes at least a week to a week and a half for me to receive my orders from them, so I will finish up the skein I have left and then I'll have to wait. Oh well, it's not like I don't have anything else to work on while I'm waiting. I spun for a little while last night, but not enough for pics, so I'll show you in future posts.

Have a great rest of your week!!