Bullet Points for Weekend and Beyond

Lots going on here! More than I have time to fully delve into, but that's life, and better to touch lightly on them than not at all. If you're interested in more detail on any point, let me know, and I'll try to oblige!

• Safely back from the trip, obviously (well, I guess I could be blogging from NY, but I'm not). Carlos is relieved. Miri, not so much. And I actually got to scritch Grandma's cat on top of her head! She's been inside a long time, but she was feral once, and contact is an achievement. I have no idea how it happened, but my mother saw it, so I think it really happened.
• It was a good weekend overall, though of course there were highs and lows. 
• Lowest low: migraine, damnit, and a bad one. Sigh. 
• Also low: snow Saturday morning made the beginning of the trip messy.
• Highest high: seeing Mum, getting hugs, being well fed through no effort of my own.
• Funniest moment: when Grandma opened the Penny Saver and proceeded to read aloud the column on house training your dog. No one in the room had a dog, has ever had a dog, or is getting a dog, but that wasn't stopping her. She's in her own world, and she makes the rules there.
• Expected development: I got a lot of knitting done. I finished the toe of the first bike sock, and cast on for the second, so it was ready to go when I am. I had to rip out the start of the latest purse sock--too big, as I had an inkling it would be--and got well into take two. And I finished the shawl! So glad I got to show it to them, and can't wait to see what blocking does for it.
• Most unexpected development: I came home with an iPad. I know, who could have seen that coming? It's essentially a re-gift from my mother, who was given it and didn't want it enough to deal with how to work it. One of her neighbors, who is super-nice, has been going through tough times recently, and my mother has been gladly helping whenever she can, even if it's just providing a shoulder to cry on. In gratitude for her help, the woman's son just gave my mother an iPad (which I'm sure he had a reason for choosing, though I don't know what it was). My mother found it frustrating to try to figure out, understandably, and asked me if I wanted it. Given that I've been thinking of getting a tablet/reader/device this year, I was glad to take it and try out the concept for myself. New toy! Mum was happy to see it go, and pleased to be able to tell her neighbor that it has found a good home, instead of feeling pressure to use it herself. We call this a win-win. (And I need to spend some time with a tech-savvy friend to figure out what I need to know; I've been poking around, blindly, but I bet I'm missing things.)
• Non-weekend-related low: If you're a knitter, you may have heard that KnitPicks had an incident with its data, or whatever you call it when the story tells you your credit card information may have been compromised. I read about this on the Knitlist, and on various knitting blogs, as the company apparently is mailing out physical letters to let people know, sometime, eventually (how 19th century of them). And so I checked the recent activity on my Discover Card, and, well, look at that: I wonder what I bought from Apple last Friday, for $138.07, and liked it enough to do it again the same day. Yes, my luck has finally run out, and the credit card number that I have had since 1989 is no more. Shit, man, that is a bummer: I'll never get my brain cells to learn a new one, nor will they ever let go of the old one. I don't imagine I'll feel like ordering from the company for some time to come. And I'll be looking into what each of my credit cards offers in terms of disposable numbers for online ordering. I'm lucky that this is only an annoyance, not a disaster. But it really is annoying.