Friday Mishmash

My sweet friend Fran mailed out some Dutch candy recently, and guess who went crazy for it?  I swear, I've never seen Paco get so worked up over candy, of all things:

 

GIVE.ME.DAT.

"Smells so gud, Mom"

"Look.  I sit.  I gud.  Now give me CANDY!"

For the record, I didn't share any of the peppermint discs with him - they are too good!  But the next morning, when I started to take pictures of the licorice candy, well - I'll let the pictures tell that story:

Have you ever seen a dog eat a piece of licorice?  Well, now you have.  He loved it!  Strange, strange dog.

Thank you, Fran - what a fun treat to arrive in our mailbox!  All the way from the Netherlands to the United States of America...I love how international friendships have formed via blogland!

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I finally printed out some race pictures and rearranged my wall o'achievement, and I'm pretty happy with how it came out.  To be honest, sometimes I look at these pictures and still can't believe that this is me, a runner...but there you go (and here I am):

The Houston 2016 memory wall of the Renegade Run Club came out pretty cute.

Closer look at my Houston wall - I had our graffiti picture printed on metal, and it came out really cool:

JAZZ HANDS!

Top framed collage is from my first year of running; bottom magnet board houses more current race picture.

 I look at this and see a lot of effort, fun, and friendship!

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Knitting update:  I managed to darn the moth hole in my Dad's hat - despite watching some pretty good YouTube videos on how to do this, it was still really challenging, and I didn't do it perfectly.  But after several restarts, I finally got it fixed enough...and sometimes, that's all you can expect.  Here's my process - I did this at my desk, where the morning light was bright enough to see what I was doing, and in front of my computer, so I could watch and pause the darn(ing) videos:

Here's the hole...

Starting the duplicate stitch (in purple) - I would eventually knit over this and then remove it.

After I removed the purple yarn - hey, the hole is still there!  First attempt was a fail.

This is when I called it a day - you can see it's not perfect, but the hole is closed...and it's in the back, so I told my Dad to just keep turning his head if someone happens to be standing close behind him when he's wearing the hat.

So, darning is not easy.  And it's something I hope I don't need to do very often, which also means I'll probably never get much better at it.  But that's OK - there's way more fun things to do with yarn, like making socks:

Almost finished!

I have another sock that is already completed and is waiting on its mate, and I have a plan for yet another skein of sock yarn - the knitting fun never stops around here!

Have a great weekend!