The Two Sock Otters!

Oh, it's been a good week in otter news. First off, biologists think there are otters living in the Chicago River, which is great. Now, when the Fool drops balls of sock yarn in the river, he can see if an otter will bring it back to him.
We also got back from San Francisco, where we rented a car with our friend Erin and drove to Monterey to see the otters at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Let me tell you, those beasties do not sit still very much, so all the pictures I have are of furry blurs whizzing past the window.
This is the best one. Isn't she lovely?




I also learned about some other strange creatures, including the sheep crab.



(I realize now that the second picture looks a lot like someone threw a set of bagpipes in a fish tank, but really, it's a sheep crab. Can't you see the wool?)
We were really in San Francisco for a wedding. Here's the happy couple outdoors in December.


And here's the Fool walking to the Ferry Terminal Market building with me so we can get coffee before catching a bus to the wedding site.



After the wedding, we stuck around town for a couple days to do some sightseeing. We visited Imagiknit, ate dim sum in Chinatown, went to a session at the Plow and Stars (the Fool fiddled; I knit) walked around the neighborhoods a lot, climbed Telegraph Hill, saw the wild parrots who live there, had dinner with a high school friend of the Fool's that he hadn't seen in 13 years, and met a Ravelry friend, CraftyAbby, who had written a couple weeks ago to say that she liked the blog and if we were ever in San Francisco, to look her up.
Ha!
I wrote her back and said, as luck would have it, we were going to be in San Francisco the very next weekend. We agreed to rendezvous at ArtFibers, where the Fool sat in a corner messing with some stainless steel yarn of theirs and muttering, and I bought a little ball of aran-weight silk and wool that I'm going to make a nice little hat for myself out of.

Anyway, we took the bus across town to Japantown, where Abby was looking for an excuse to try a Chinese restaurant with hand-pulled noodles. The noodles were pretty good. The garlic eggplant was much better, and the Dungeness crab with garlic and peppers and salt was even better. But not as fun as the conversation.



Angus spent a couple hours this morning pestering me when I didn't get up with the sun, poking me with his nose. When the alarm finally went off and I ended up hitting snooze a couple times, I rolled over to find the little stinker curled up in a purring, sleeping ball, worn out from all his tromping around on the bed.