I have some yarn. I want to make an afghan. I apologize to those of you who would like me to design more complicated items like sweaters instead of large rectangles, but at the moment this is what I need, knitting-wise. I want to do some colorwork and it's easier for me with a simple piece of fabric.

I've had about 60 ideas for this afghan, and along the way, I discarded 59 of them for various reasons (such as, "It might not bother me to knit 40 squares from the center out on dpns with a complicated pattern, but other people might not find that enticing"). I finally sat down yesterday with 6 freshly-wound balls of yarn and the intention of starting an afghan made up of squares featuring different kinds of color and texture stitches. Wouldn't you know it?—I started working the stitch pattern for the first square and decided that it would make a wonderful afghan all on its own. The stitch pattern looks so unprepossessing in the Barbara Walker book (one of the limitations of B&W photography, and this pattern wasn't on the Walker Treasury Project website). It's a slip-stitch pattern with some garter stitches thrown in. I couldn't have asked for anything better. I love serendipity, but I wish she wouldn't take so darn long to show up.

So I spent almost a week trying and discarding ideas, and the one I finally settled on came out of nowhere. It looks really lovely knit up in the colors I picked. I'm doing it in Berroco Vintage Chunky. I do love that Vintage yarn.

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The husband and our friend Sheldon and I went on a hike this past Saturday. Sheldon is on the fire department with us and he likes to hike. Last year we went to Mount Aeneas, up in the Jewel Basin. We could have done that hike again (finally, now that the snow has melted), but I decided that we should do the hike up to Strawberry Lake. You can see Strawberry Mountain from our front yard. We live right across the street from the road that leads 3 miles up to the trailhead. The husband has done that hike a number of times, including when he's gone elk hunting, but I had never been up there.

It's a 3.5 mile hike from the trailhead, which is a 3 mile drive from our house. We went up around 11 a.m. and I was surprised to see how many people were already up there, including people on horseback as well as mountain bikes (and the trail isn't that wide). The climb begins with a pretty steeply vertical section through the woods. I didn't count the number of switchbacks, but I am sure there are many. The trail levels out near the top.

When you reach the top, you are rewarded with this (I have no idea who those two guys are):

Just in case the trip up here isn't enough hiking for you, there is a sign here that points the way to other places. It would have been possible (although it would have taken several hours) for us to have headed south from Strawberry Lake along the ridge of the mountain range and ended up at Mount Aeneas.

The husband, ever on the lookout for wildlife, got out his binoculars. He didn't see anything, though.

This is a much closer view of Strawberry Mountain than what I see from my front yard. Do you know why it's called Strawberry Mountain?

We spent about an hour up at the lake. Sheldon did some fishing, the husband and I ate trail mix and hard boiled eggs, and we visited with other hikers who came through. Soon, though, it was time to head home. I got to be in the lead on the way down, and I stopped and took this picture. The husband and I stood here and located our house down below us. It is on the bottom middle right of the pic, just beneath a large swath of green which is the meadow behind our property.

The husband and Sheldon on the trail.

All in all, a wonderful day. We like hiking here because the views are almost as lovely as those in the park and there is a lot less traffic on the trails. Sheldon wants to do another hike this weekend, a little bit further north of us. The husband suggested that we hike up that other trail, come over to Strawberry Lake from the north, then come down the Strawberry Lake trail. That's a bit more involved because we have to position multiple vehicles in the proper spots, but it would be a fun hike. And a couple other friends from the fire department have said that they'd like to join us. We need to do this now, because all too soon this area is going to be snowed in for another 9 months (we're already hearing predictions of another big snow winter like we had this past winter).