I love Nancy Bush

Don't we all? Her patterns are not flashy or gimmicky or super-trendy like some of the socks you see in recent publications (socks that frankly are kind of annoying and sometimes turn out completely unwearable). Her socks are elegant, timeless, never boring and always work:



Conwy from Knitting on the Road, made from Araucania Ranco on size 1 needles. Pure love.

What we did this weekend

I had a lovely, lovely weekend, and here's a little part of it:



Hiking in my favorite state park with my favorite fuzzy dog. This park is little-known, which I like because it means the dog and I usually have the park to ourselves. It is lovely, though - all the land used to belong to one local family, and the woman who inherited the family businesses and the land was very big about never selling land. She eventually donated it all to the state, and it makes for an interesting park. It is still difficult for me to realize that all the forests around here are not virgin forest; there are walls here and there in the park, perhaps boundaries of old fields. You might also find yourself coming out of the forest into a very sunny clearing, which used to be an old field, I'm sure, and we also came across the ruins of a house. I find places like this fascinating. They remind me of the Coa Valley in Portugal, where people lived for thousands of years and carved numerous boulders, only to abandon the valley in the 1960s, or Wissahickon Park in Philadelphia, which used to be a bustling mill and industrial district a hundred years ago and is now "wilderness".

I also find it somewhat amusing that the dog and I, both raised mostly in the city, have become such outdoor bums.