Conversation pieces

There may be no hope for me. My mini-sweater addiction is like a runaway train. I just can't seem to help myself. I have, however, met quite a few new friends as a result of knitting them out in public. People seem fascinated by the small piece of knitting and the 5 knitting needles I can now manipulate quite skillfully. Someone will walk by, stop, and zoom in for a closer look. Before you know it, we're talking about our kids and our hobbies and our arthritis.

So today we took a trip to the nearby Asian dollar store to browse. It's always fun to see what's new, and we usually find something to buy. This time we were on a mission to find some cheap bubble wrap. I will explain later. Tech Guy, who came along on our shopping trip, was quite amazed by some of the merchandise and conveniently had his camera/phone.

I guess if a person had an inclination to leave the house with a banana to eat later, this little gadget would be handy:

I'd probably be more inclined to pack it full of M & M's and just let people assume I had a healthy snack. Then there was this--a package of 5 very large ziplock bags....which we bought to go with the bubble wrap. It's always fun to read the package descriptions. The Chinese have a special way with words.

So now I must confess that Mr. Gadget and I are gearing up for another cruise. We'll be leaving next week for two weeks to Hawaii. We've done this cruise before, a few years ago, and we enjoyed it....even though we missed 2 out of 5 ports due to weather and had to fight off the Noro virus.....so we've decided to do it again. We're dragging our Connecticut friends along, in spite of their reluctance to leave the east coast winter-from-hell.

You're probably wondering about the bubble wrap and the ziplock bags. We're hoping our half-dozen bottles of wine will have a safe journey to our stateroom. Although.......I never really thought about knitting wine sweaters. I guess that woulda worked.