A Week Away....

Like many of my fellow Upper Midwesterners, such as certain other Wisconsinites & Minnesotans, we're going Up North. Ever notice how we in the northern and central states vacation northerer? Anyway, a friend at the Museum offered us her cabin for a few days, before the school tour season starts - and we're going.

I do believe that there's no innerwebs to speak of in the portion of northwoods to which we journey, so there'll be muteness here for a spell. (How does this differ from prior mute periods here, Dale-Harriet?) Well -- it's announced in advance is all. Therefore I am going to leave you with some pictures to look at in my absence. No cats (!) no books (!!) but there are references to knitting. These are illustrations from our foray to New York last May: the first are at St. Marie Among the Iroquois, a wonderful historic site (aaah, you guessed that!); the second are of Mr Dearling having a Religious Experience, fondly remembered from his college days; the third is the serendipitous discovery of a yarn shop, and the last shows how dull we really are - we LOVE going to grocery stores away from home to see what they have that we don't. You wuz warned.

Mr Dearling gets information about the site from a local guy

Admiring the rush-lights - very feeble light sources!

This is hand-embroidered goldwork on the priest's vestments from Ste-Marie-Among-the-Iroquois. Think on it - probably the work of 17th century nuns, these flawless stitches are as beautiful today as when they clipped the last threads.

This is a detail of the same piece. Not only is the work eye-wateringly beautiful - gold thread is not, I imagine, as easy to use as your standard DMC cotton. The pure devotion in every stunning stitch of this work held me transfixed. I spent a LONG time looking at this piece and consider it a privilege to have been able to lay my very own eyeballs on it.

A word of explanation here: Mr Dearling spent part of his college career in Buffalo. While there, he and his roommates ate pizza...prodigious amounts of pizza. Specifically, THIS pizza. Bocce's. This is his gold standard for pizza - he says "Even lousy pizza is delicious, it just goes UP from there"...and at the top, the pinnacle, the ultimate? That would be your Bocce's. Nothing for it, on the way home, being as we were in the neighborhood, we stopped for a Bocce's pizza & ate it then and there, in the car.

Look in the dictionary under "Anticipation". You'll find this.

And this? "Rapture"

Now -- fair's fair, yes? En route, we passed through Snyder, New York. (If you're map-savvy, and it seems this must have been out of the way, my recall for the exact order of our adventures that day could be off. Nevermind.) And my recollection is that I shouted "STOP STOP" but actually Mr Dearling might've seen it first....I was knitting. However, we did stop, and found it to be a CHARMING LYS! I believe this was where I bought the delicious Great Adirondack sock yarn which will be displayed here in future - it's becoming a sock. It's aging nicely while I do that Dr Who scarf. And what is the name of the dear proprietor, Dale-Harriet? Uhm....OK, our nephew is sleeping in the den at the moment (LOOK at the time, will you?) so I can't go get her card, but I WILL post it in future. P'raps with the sock picture. Suffice it to say, I had a wonderful time, and so did Mr Dearling, who is becoming quite conversant as we say in French. He delighted her with such things as "She has a blog, you should read her blog, mind if we take pictures for the blog?" What can I say, I love him.

This is me, HAPPY! Truly, if you're in the area, you would do very well to stop at this comfortable, well-stocked and very friendly little shop, and I'm saying that entirely on my own: it's the plain truth and not a word of a lie.



OK, by the time you've ploughed through all of this, I may be home from Michigan. Let me 1) apologize for wonky picture placement - I *am* still working on it; and 2) let me end with a picture of Your Humble Blogger, which is a way of saying ME -- and a confession.

We're Very Boring People, Mr Dearling and I. One of our chief delights in life, when travelling out of our own area, is to find a grocery store, and walk up and down the aisles. We look to see the kinds of stuff they have (a lot of stuff is regional, did you know that?) and sometimes they have tasty samples (you can have yourself a light lunch or small supper if you hit the right day). One of our favorites is exclusive to New York and maybe Pennsylvania, in fact I've mentioned it here before. (TWICE you're talking about a grocery store, Dale-Harriet? Well I swan, you ARE boring!) It's the ever-popular Wegman's. Very upscale-looking, the sort of place you wash your face before you go in there. The sort of place with a fancy-olive section, and a fancy-cheese section (which had WISCONSIN cheese in it, so you know it wasn't just talking the talk) and...remember, this is a grocery store -a "Literary Acquisition" section, and I don't mean just a magazine rack with newpapers full of alien two-headed kangaroo-platypus babies. I wish we had a Wegman's.

Could WOULD I make this up?