Still incommunicado, Tina and I, as we keep bashing out as much Sock Summit as we can before heading to Madrona to embrace the wonder of that weekend. Madrona is one of my favourite things of the year, and I can’t wait to get there, although it’s going to be hard to leave here. We’re in Port Ludlow, where Tina will be doing her Sock Camp in March, and it’s very beautiful here. Wanna see the view from my window this morning?

Yup. Beautiful. It’s almost distracting, and the urge to sit by the fire (did I mention the fireplace?) and knit instead of work is just about overwhelming.

(That’s Tina making her “there just has to be an easier way” face.)

We’re getting a lot done though, which is about eight kinds of awesome, since one of the hardest things about planning the Summit is that we’re trying to do it with a whole continent between us. Tina and I both have busy businesses and big families, and the luxury of a couple of days to shed all of those other responsibilities to get mammoth amounts of Summit work done is delicious indeed. Our goal was to see the conference center that Tina had arranged (check) assign teachers according to how many classes they’re teaching (check) figure out what rooms to put them in (check) and start getting their biographies together so that we can announce the absolutely stunning list of them on the 18th. (Er… not quite check, but I hope effort counts for something. I’ll keep working.) The vast majority of that last part needs to be done by email, and this place is very pretty, but the internet access has been dodgy, so our hours of work keep being punctuated by either Tina or I pounding on a laptop and screeching “OH COME ON!” The post-it note/bristol board system worked beautifully, although both of us now have now developed a positively Pavlovian response to the sight of adhesive office supplies of any sort. (Considering my love for post-its I expect that not to last.)

Those six sheets of bristol board each contain a post-it for each class, colour coded by class length, room size, AV needs and such. We eventually needed a sub-post-it system to manage the post-it system, at which point both of us declared it “beer-o-clock” and had a little lie down, only to get back up and further complicate it by adding a hi-lighter marker to the mix, ostensibly to help straighten it out. (It didn’t help, but I think the beer did.)

There has been a little knitting, although really, the handspun February Lady I was hoping to have done for Madrona is now something I hope to have done by the end of Madrona, though I love how it’s coming out.

(Tina took that one. You can see I have my Pacific Northwest hair.) In any case, only forward to Madrona. I think it’s going to be really fun, even if I don’t have a new sweater.