I spent three days on a Florida beach without getting a sunburn. Then I go home and what happens? Bam, I've got a painful sunburn. I carefully wore a hat when I mowed my yarn (er, my yard) this morning but I forgot that the tee shirt I was wearing had a low back neckline.

I think I'm in a little bit of a knitting slump again. I bought a collection of NY Times Sunday crosswords to take on my trip, and I keep wanting to work on those instead. At least I seem to be getting better at it. One more thing to add to my collection of Skills that Don't Make Me Any Money.

There's sand in my purse/knitting bag.

I did NO KNITTING in Florida at all, which means, oddly enough, that it was a successful trip. We had glorious, perfect beach weather: temperatures in the 80's, not too much humidity, and a light breeze. Gramma says as soon as we left, it started to rain and rained all weekend.

For the most part, we shopped in the mornings and beached in the afternoons. I perused the Yellow Pages and hunted down what turned out to be the Worst Yarn Shop Ever. It was cramped, dark, and totally unorganized, and ninety percent of the yarn was acrylic. Even worse, the staff was downright rude. One employee snapped at me when I crossed some imaginary line into what they considered an employees-only area (not designated or physically separated, and visually undistinguishable from the rest of the store except that it seemed to be even messier). Another asked me what I wanted, and when I said I was just browsing, she said, "Well, if you'll just tell me what you're looking for, I'll tell you where it is." Bleah. I was out of there in five minutes.

I did find another, better shop the next day, practically on my way to the airport. They had a fair bit of really, really old stuff, like Pingouin yarns and patterns from the 70's. But they had modern stuff too, like carry-along novelty yarns and Saucy Sport cotton and even a wonderful Sesia superwash merino that I've never seen before. I had virtually no suitcase room left, though, so I settled for four skeins of a variegated rayon/cotton blend in apricot with accents of lavender and green. Josh got a free pattern for a crocheted yarmulke that they had made up in the shop, so he was amused, too.

As a bonus, we were scheduled on an overbooked flight, and we got to be the lucky volunteers who took a later flight in exchange for free ticket vouchers to anywhere in the continental U.S. or Canada. As a result, I was getting too tired by the last flight leg to work on my crossword puzzle, so I knitted on the Landscape Shawl. I got far enough to determine that my six skeins of KPPPM aren't going to be enough, and I don't want to downsize the shawl 'cause I'm an upsized person. I haven't decided quite what to do about that yet.

I'm off to Florida for a few days. I'm only taking two projects, so hopefully I'll get a lot of beach time. I've got a housesitter, so don't be getting any wise ideas about stealing my stash while I'm gone.

After the SBGK gauge disaster, I put that project aside and started my FiberTrends Landscape Shawl. I bought some gorgeous (after all, who buys ugly yarn?) speckled denim-y Koigu for this at Stitches Midwest last August. I worked on it for a day and what happened? Another close friend turned up preggers. So it's back to SBGK again. I frogged the gauge disaster and I've reknitted about half of it. Since I couldn't bear the possibility of running out of yarn after the reknitting, I'm making one size smaller, just to be sure.

I finished the first item of Secret Baby Gift Knitting (SBGK), where by "finished" I mean that I wove in most of the ends and I haven't bought the buttons yet. In my defense, I tried to buy the buttons, but Jo-Ann Etc. was out of the ones I wanted. So, I started a second SBGK item, and was nearly finished with it too, but it looked like I was going to run out of yarn. I was very annoyed at the designer until I discovered that, although I had carefully made sure to obtain the gauge of 17 st = 4", I had MISREAD the gauge in the book and it was supposed to be 18. I might have caught this mistake when I measured the width of one completed piece, but amazingly, I accidentally read the measurement for the next size up, which matched my finished width. UGH UGH UGH.