Silver Linings

In the spirit of Elisabeth's Happy Things Friday, I'll try to look on the bright side of now. How will I do?

• I visited Mom last night; the place she is now is an inpatient rehab hospital, not a skilled nursing facility, and the important difference is that instead of an hour of PT a day, she'll get three! So she shouldn't have to stay nearly as long as at the last place, and should make much more progress in a shorter time. Hopefully, anyway. She likes it better than the first one, too; the food is better, she says, and the people have been very nice. (To be clear: at the SNF, some of the people were nice--but not all, she says.)
• My birthday is next week, and I got my first birthday card in the mail yesterday. I truly don't care when anything comes--celebrate me all month!--but it's nice to get a fun card, isn't it?
• Then a gift arrived in the mail today. Technically, it's a "sympathy for your stress these days" gift, and not strictly a birthday gift, but tomayto, tomahto. Or in this case, carmelcorn:

• Also in the mail today is a present I got for myself. No, not yarn (after my wild August yarn shopping, I only bought yarn once in September, good heavens), but it is knitting-adjacent! (Who's surprised?)

(I'll blog more details on it separately, but the link is here and I read about it in Knitty, here.)

• My mother and I will have our my-birthday-out-treat-dinner once she's back on her feet, but in the meantime, I'm having lunch with friends on Monday, so I'll have that on the day itself.
• And on Sunday, I'm "attending" a Zoom yarn chat by the author of a new yarn-stash book, Marie Greene, so that's fun, too.
• How out of date am I with updating my knitting on here? I finally, finally finished the Comodo sweater I've been working on for months, yay. It isn't blocked yet, but a friend down here invited me over to try steaming it. It doesn't need a ton of stretching, or anything, but I'd like to even it out a little. (Though the tonal qualities of the yarn do hide unevenness pretty well.)

While not undoing the way the edges curl, because I love that!

• I also finished another project, the Close to You shawl that I started in the spring of 2022 (mentioned here), which got put aside at some point, but I picked up to be my trip knitting to Key West. Before blocking:

And after. It grew!

• I wound the rainbow gradient yarn to start my next project, Radiata. So pretty!

• Finally, I unpacked a few things I got in Key West, and when I went to photograph this coaster, it was near some yarn that really accentuated it:

Pretty! 

Well, Elisabeth was right, it helps to look for happy things. I recommend it.