Nine Days

This has been a long day. It began with another last. My last meeting with Holy Needles, our parish shawl ministry. And here are the last two pieces I completed as part of this ministry.

The crocheted baby blanket that I got about 2/3 of the way through and had to tear out back to the third row to fix a couple of mistakes:

And a crocheted shawl:

We presented Sally with a crocheted shawl and Lois with a knitted shawl, both made from yarn leftover from various shawls. We managed to surprise them, in spite of the fact that we've been passing both shawls back and forth for several months. The group also gave me one of the Shawl Ministry books.  This group has been an important part of my life at Grace Church, and I will miss them.

When Holy Needles finished for the morning, I headed back to home to finish staging my apartment for the packing party my friends planned. We thought it might rain, but fortunately, the weather system didn't arrive as soon as originally expected. Instead, we had a great afternoon for moving--sunny and cool.

1:30 p.m.:

2:30 p.m.

3:30 p.m.

5:00 p.m.

The crew after packing and before dinner:

I can't believe we got this much done in 3 1/2 hours! In spite of the apparent chaos at 1:30, I managed to stage things well, and the packing not only went the way I expected, it took less time than I expected. I still have some things left to load into the container, but thanks to Mike, Lisa, and Rachel, the bulk of it is done.

And after all of that, these folks took me out to dinner. The rationale for this? Their going away party for me. At least they let me buy the first round of drinks. We followed dinner with a round of Cranium before heading to our respective homes.

It's been a long day. And so to bed.