Zero Bars

May 21, 2012 - 9:25pm -- swingbug

Man oh man, did I ever need to get out of town. Last week was fairly nuts. Or the last few weeks... months. I don't think either my husband or I realized how much we needed to get the hell out of dodge until we woke up in a guest bed Saturday morning.

Let me tell you one of the very best things about visiting this particular family gathering spot. It's in an AT&T black hole. Zero bars. Zilch. All the due diligence in the world with the packing of chargers and remembering of cables gets you exactly nowhere. No one can call you unless they actually know where you are and have the landline number, which I'm happy to say, people just don't keep much track of these days.

It's a beautiful thing.

On Saturday Shawn and I split a beer and a couple of slices of pizza, strolled through a yarn shop, and stopped for coffee and it was simply the best day I've had in a good long while.

We bought sock yarn. One of these is for me and the other Shawn picked out to be socks for him. Want to hazard a guess which is which?

You're probably wrong.

I had no specific intention to enter another yarn store that day, but when a family outing left us standing in a little plaza with twenty minutes to kill, I found The Swift Stitch right in front of me and what was I supposed to do? Correctly stated, I found myself in a plaza with comic book store on one side, a yarn store on another, a coffee shop/bakery up ahead, and a local brewery just behind me. Decisions, decisions... The comic book store was closed, as it turned out, which dashed my hopes for Alabaster #2 but left me enough time for a swift look in the Swift Stitch. Then I was swiftly locating my husband with some not-quite-coherent string of dialog that went something like this: "There's the lace with the pretty and the green and the soft and I wasn't going to but the pretty and-"

He blinked at me.

"-I forgot my wallet."

"Ah."

He's a good husband.

It's a good skein.

I checked out the ocean while I was out that way. It's still there. Good to know.

And dropping back into the valley on Sunday night just after six o'clock, I pushed my sunglasses up and looked over the steering wheel out the window. 

"It's kind of dark."

"Was there a fire or something?"

"Doesn't look like it."

Ah, right... Eclipse. 'Cause I know stuff about science.

Duh.

Shawn grabbed an old program flopping around the backseat (this is why I don't clean my car - you never know when an eclipse will catch you off-guard), poked a hole in it with one of my sock needles and held it up a bit. There on the next page was a crescent sliver of a sun.

Zero bars, a quarter of a star and a ride on the Giant Dipper, three skeins of yarn, and a good weekend.

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