Annie Knits: A New Week

This week's knitting amounts to this:

Not quite half of a February Lady's Sweater knit with Rachel's slubby cotton. Can you say compulsive behavior, boys and girls? We have a lot of this cotton at the shop and Rachel has some on her website. I think she's taking some of it to Strange Folk as well. Get it while you can. Good deal, great hand when it's knitted up, beautiful dye job. What else is there?

My last FLS, knitted while on vacation, is something I love with an unreasonable passion:

Unreasonable because, while the color, buttons, sleeve length and general swingyness of the thing all make my heart sing, it doesn't fit right. The garter stitch yoke has gotten too stretchy and hangs off my shoulders. This yarn, Noro Sakura, has great drape and not a ton of memory. Good for lace, bad for garter stitch. I plan to rip just the top and reknit on smaller needles. We'll see. The photo makes the stripes look wonky, but they aren't. Perfect sweater for getting long repeat stripes to line up.

But enough about silly things. Our church community had a tragedy this week, and it's eaten up all of my interest in the silly.

Last weekend, due to circumstances beyond the usual party giver's control, we had the annual summer church choir volleyball bash chez Annie instead. The food was great: brisket; summer salads; killer desserts. The wine and beer flowed, but not too much. We sang old fashioned silly songs accompanied by a yukelele and laughed and played volleyball into the night.

Here I am with Godson. He's wearing the Hawaiian shirt we got him in Oahu ; ) .

The choir can't resist singing along when there's any kind of music,

but some of our spouses can resist just fine.

It was a really fun evening. The weather was that of a perfect October evening, and seeing as it was August 30th, I believed myself lucky.

By the next morning, one of the boys who'd laughed, played volleyball into the evening, and been one of the objects of 16 year old flirting had killed himself. He'd valiantly battled the demon of depression for a long time and I guess he just finally lost the fight.

He'd been a volunteer with special needs kids, helping them play baseball. He'd played and coached club hockey and was one of those kids that the parish thought of as our own. He was an Eagle Scout. His mother and sister and the rest of us spent the 6 or so hours with him at my house that afternoon not knowing what was to come. I don't know if he knew it.

I have pictures of him too, playing volleyball. I'll share those with his mother when she wants them. The funeral on Saturday morning was a stunning testament to this young man and his family and our parish.

I hope you'll put us all in your prayers as we'll need them.