In the desert

Greetings from Phoenix, Arizona. Mark and I flew in yesterday afternoon and will be spending a few days away from home and the girls (our dogs). For Mark, today is a working day. This trip was precipitated by business for him. Me, I'm just along for the ride right now. Tomorrow we start our mini-vacation as we head north to Sedona.

Phoenix is very flat and very brown. There are mountains ringing the valley where the city is located, but the actual valley itself is topographically bland. The gardener in me is fascinated with the desert vegetation, though. Palo verde trees are just trippy! They have such tiny, needle-like leaves and are green throughout their entire being.

And what is that tree that has such beautiful, purple flowers on it now? For some reason I want to say jacaranda, but I'll have to look it up. At least I'm not seeing streets full of green lawns like we did in Albequerque. Of course, for now we are in the city of Phoenix business district. We'll see if the clever and sustainable desert xeriscaping continues or whether it is replaced by wasteful lawns when we move on through the communities ringing Phoenix tomorrow.

Since the past few days have been full of work, work, work and then last minute packing, I felt the need to catch up on blogging today. Technical difficulties have prevented me from using the Blogger interface so I'm using the email functionality. That means no photos in this post. But of course I don't really have any photos to show at this time. I'd rather not post photos of knitting WIPs, and that's all I have right now.

I am almost done with my Inside-Out socks from the Rockin' Sock Club. I'm about 5 rows away from binding off. It's taken me quite a while to do them since the first sock involved lots of ripping and re-knitting, but the second one is going much faster now.

Socks are usually commuting projects, though. At home and during weekly Stitch 'n Bitch, I've been working on the Lift and Separate wrap cardigan from Big Girl Knits. The back is done, the left front is done, and now I'm working on the right front. I was whipping right through it until last weekend when a combination of allergies, general sleep-deprivation, and work deadlines affected the weekend.

Last Saturday was spent just sleeping or trying to sleep. Every time I got up to attend to some work, I found myself nearly paralyzed with exhaustion. Then I would shuffle back to bed and sleep for another hour. On Sunday, I finally felt refreshed, but I had that deadline for work so I sat down and worked for about 7 hours. Once weekend errands were done, I had maybe one hour of knitting time left before I needed to head off to bed.

It was a busy week at work so there was little time for knitting in the evenings. I've brought the right front of the cardigan with me this weekend, just in case. Even though I will be doing all the driving this weekend, I'm looking forward to getting some prime knitting time in. Between the time at the gate yesterday and the nearly 3 hour flight from Chicago to Phoenix, I completed the short row heel and half the cuff on the Inside Out sock. Ahh, I'm feeling better already!

If there's convenient Internet access over the next couple days I may just post an entry and some photos. Sedona is supposed to be beautiful and I'm hoping to get some really nice shots with my little Canon digital camera.

I must be missing the girls and home already. Although I slept well last night, my dreams all involved our house or the dogs. Maybe they were dreaming about me...