I finally feel like myself again. Really. Truly.
*happy sigh*
I have been taking time for myself, taking care of myself, my to-do list has been reduced to a point that is no longer anxiety producing (because I actually did some of the things on it--whoop!), and as of this morning, I finally feel like I've caught up on sleep.

If my age and experience has given me anything, it is the knowledge of how to get myself out of deep doo-doo when I'm in it, and the wherewithal to actually do it.

The weekend away was truly like hitting a reset button, which is pretty great considering I almost didn't go. I bitched quite a bit beforehand, I'm embarrassed to tell you, about how the weekend had a pretty high possibility of sucking ass.

In my mind, it was going to be 8 hours in a car on Friday (my birthday proper), with both TheMostImportantGuy and I too tired to do anything but sleep....then maybe a wee bit of time on Saturday to eat breakfast and maybe do nothing else at all, followed by hours of sound checks and playing and watching TheMIG plugging and unplugging things...just so we could get back on the road again Sunday morning for another 8 hours of driving. Whee, was my thinking. And then on top of this glorious image, because I spent most of Thursday night throwing up from the I-Dont-Know-What that MyFavoriteKid and I both had, it looked even less appealing. Ugh.

Well, I was wrong. The weekend was great.

For the car ride on my birthday, I packed along an in-flight barf bag, that I happily did not use. I slept for some of the ride, listened to comedy on TheMIG's satellite radio thingy for the rest of it, and on the way down, TheMIG stopped at my all time favorite pit-stop, Anderson's, for some split pea soup (I've waxed not-so-poetically about this place before so I wont waste your time). I was actually able to eat (and keep down) a half bowl of pea soup and a wee bit of salad. Woohoo!

I was feeling much better by the time we arrived at the hotel, and the fancy schmancy-ness of the hotel TheMIG had booked us into didn't hurt at all. We unpacked, freshened up, and went out to explore the Hollywood closest to the hotel and walk over to the venue he'd be performing at the next night to scope it out.

That's when I accidentally bumped into Fred Astaire's star, and then.....I saw one more really cool thing.

We were on the side street that TheMIG's club was on, and it's one of those unmarked doors type of clubs with no signage, and that is when I look into one of the windows and see this:


Whoa. Is that....YARN???

Well, by golly it was. The sign said "Artstring Boutique" and the designer had a taped a note to the door that she was there and to knock on the door to be let in (so we did) and holy moly....


Some of the COOLEST knitwear I have seen.
She was super sweet and amazingly creative. She had handknit for years but now does custom design work using knitting machines. She had just gotten through hosting her regular Friday night knit-in (damn! just missed it!), and she was taking apart her wall of coned yarn and reorganizing it.

The whole shop was full of neat things, but I was particularly inspired by this piece.