Happy Saturday!

There was a great cartoon in the Baby Blues series last week. It showed the weekend BEFORE and AFTER kids.

BEFORE . . . relax, sleep in, read the paper, enjoy a great new restaurant, yada yada yada.

AFTER . . . synchronize your watches.

Since 5:30 this morning, I've washed clothes, walked the dog, cleaned up the main floor, changed bed linens, and emptied the dishwasher. I also unexpectedly drove over to St. Luke's to take a shower. There's a water main break down the street and who knows when we'll get water on again. That's more of the fun of living in an aging urban environment. Lots of great culture. Really bad infrastructure.

Now it's time to fix everyone some lunch and gear up for the first day of spring training. AG's softball season starts today with lovely weather and a half-finished ballpark. After years of delays for one reason or another, a cancelled Fall Ball season, and worries about not having this year's Spring season at all, the county finally started work on Murphy-Candler's softball fields. (The original construction season would have started right at the end of one spring season and end right before Fall Ball.) And now there's a drought. So even though the fields are technically finished, the sod isn't. The girls will have to play on a football field and we'll have to drive over to another park for practices.

Sigh.

Anyway.

I'm putting together my travel bag, knitting that is. The fold up chairs are tossed in the back of the van along with AG's amazing array of softball gear. It'll take us a few weeks to get back into the groove of practices and games. All in all, we love the softball season and are really glad this one didn't get cancelled as well.

Travel knitting is all about size and pattern complexity. I have very stringent requirements:

• Ease of transport.
  
• Conducive to knitting while sitting in a fold-up arm chair.
• Pattern easy enough to memorize (no tricky counting or changes midstream).
• Single skein/ball design - forget stranding.
• A picture of what I'm making for all the curious parents.
  

Right now, Jaywalker #2 is the perfect travel project. I have the pattern permanently fixed in my head, and the #1 doublepoints are easy to work with in the folding chair. I'll likely finish the pair in record time, considering two practices and one game nearly every week from now until the end of May.

I also have my Under Armour ready - February is COLD and metal bleachers are COLDER. So while the girls are warming up on the field, the parents are slowly going into hypothermia. Hence the fold-up chairs. At least, that used to be the solution. I haven't seen the new layout yet so chairs may not fit anywhere within viewing range!

Oh, yeah. Need to add one more thing to the van: a really large warm fleece blanket.

Play ball!