A-list visitor

A couple of weeks ago, in between the weather being reminiscent of an Edgar Allen Poe piece, it warmed up, and my friend A. called and said she was coming to town. A. works for a company that sends medical professionals to hospitals with staff shortages, so at any given time A. is living out of a hotel, a temporary furnished apartment, a friend or relative's house, or (between contracts) her car. Since A. left her extended stint in Kansas City, she's been to Boston and South Dakota. She was on her way to Iowa, but last night I entertained her on the phone during the grueling drive to her new destination, Pennsylvania.

I've known A. since forever and ever and ever, and it's crazy that we ended up with so many things in common besides being from the same tiny town - especially when none of those things were part of our experiences in said small town and our families wonder where we came from.

Needless to say, I like it when A. visits. While A. was here, we did our usual things, plus some extra:

We went to visit Amber:



We went shoe-shopping at the Legends, and got fished out by the statue:


We went to Tea Drops and got high sniffing all the tea:


We went to Korma Sutra and celebrated A.'s escape from temporary exile in South Dakota, otherwise known as Land of No Good Indian Food.

We went to Izumi and ate obscene amounts of sushi. There are no pictures - at least on my camera. A. took pictures not only of the obscene amounts of sushi but of the empty plates.

Someone started her second scarf, which involved learning how to increase and decrease AND slip stitches, as well as a ball of soft and squooshy alpaca yarn:



There was also an incident in which A. left me knitting on my recliner with an ice pack on my foot and said she was going out to eat lunch with a former coworker and would be back in an hour.

In that hour, which I planned to spend exactly where she left me, the entire world was swallowed up into the vortex of the weird.

Hurricane Jo descended on my house with tales of sexist mechanics (come on, raise your hand if you've never had that happen to you), and the next thing I knew...

• My husband had made a pot of tea


• We were sitting at Panera eating tomato soup


• We ended up in my car


• There was a stop at a roadside Girl Scout cookie stand to appease Jo Minor's boyfriend, who was ticked off because Jo isn't telepathic


• We ended up at Jo's house to get T-pins, and because she was having a bad day, she brought along yarn she had no intention of knitting, just so she could pet it. There are rumors of this yarn later having adventures that involved it contracting VD, but those are unsubstantiated. It insists it just sat forgotten in the floor of my car for a couple of days.

In the meantime, A. had gone to Pei Wei, which apparently does not get along with her stomach as well as sushi and Indian Food, and there is a (mumble, mumble) story about my poor friend banging on the door of my deserted house and begging to get in to use the bathroom, which ended with her calling a friend in Pennsylvania to Mapquest her up a gas station.

All's well that ends well, but somewhere in the shuffle, there appears to have been surreptitious stash enhancement in the form of Noro sock yarn:



I have no idea where that came from, but I'm so blaming Jo Minor.