Nothing's worse than not being able to knit when you want to knit. This weekend I went on a camping trip with my triathlon club to be the club cheerleader and photographer for a race. Just because we were on a camping trip didn't mean that the Cinco de Mayo festivities would be left behind. Someone brought a pinata and I got conned into taking a few whacks at it. Well luckily for the person after me, I had some very good hits, which allowed him to break open the paper mache present of sweets in two one-handed, half-assed whacks. In the process of the pinata whacking, I unfortunately broke my thumbnail. Y'all saw how long my nails were in the last post, and they weren't that long. But yay for me and my nail, my pinata antics broke my thumbnail past the "quick" (that's where the pink part starts right?)! Ow is an understatement. Not only does my thumbnail look oddly short now, it prevented from knitting and using my thumb actively for a few days.

In addition to that, when we got back home from camping, we weren't welcomed by the blanket of fog that usually greets us when we approached South San Francisco and Daly City when we're heading home from the south. Not only was there no fog, but the temperature on my car read the SAME as it was where we were camping! Yes, freakishly hot for San Francisco for this time of the year. Now, I'm not complaining about the heat, but I'm complaining about the allergies that come with an extreme temperature change. The past three days, the sneezing and dripping were pretty horrible, but the eye itching? Holy cow, all I wanted was some sandpaper to sooth my irritated eyes!

The other thing that has been bothering me lately have been my PS socks. As much as I love the look of variagated yarn in the skein, you just don't know what you're going to get once you start knitting with it. So for me, usually that means I only stick to stockinette or ribbed socks, and the occasional patterned sock. But even that's not a guarantee.

Garter ribbed socks for the Yarn Pirate both results in self-striping despite the different stitch counts for both. And Cookie's yarn paired with her Monkey pattern, way too much going on. I'll admit the self-striping in the yarn pirate wasn't too bad, better than pooling, that's for sure. But I was so looking forward to the random pairings of the different colors next to each other that I just wasn't looking forward to knitting them.

So then what do you do? Try a new pattern.

Thanks to Miss I May Be Knitting a Ranch House's new sock pattern, I have something to look forward to now. Yes, the self-striping is still there, but I like how the colors are lining up here. And if you look closer, there are some parts where the yarn doesn't know if it still wants to stripe. Oddly, I actually like it like it. Now what to do with the other two..

So how did I make myself feel better with my allergies? Bake!

These are strawberry sour cream muffins from the King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking. Made with mostly white whole wheat flour and some all purpose flour, these muffins weren't heavy at all. They're not too sweet, which is a good thing, because I want mama&papaFasu to enjoy them also. The fresh strawberries were good in them too. I want to tinker with this recipe a bit more to see if I can use all whole wheat flour without turning them into paperweights. I've got some whole wheat pastry flour in my freezer so I've got something to work with already. But next time though, I want to make sure I have some coarse sugar so that the shiny crystalized crust that forms when it bakes is a little more apparent. So pardon me for a moment, there's a muffin waiting for me.