I made it through the party, and it went amazingly well. We had 8, 10 year olds over for dinner. They got to choose between tortilla soup and enchiladas. Nate made pina coladas and strawberry daiquiris. They played with a mic and amp for awhile, each made a quilt square for Abby, planted a pansy for themselves to take home, and everyone’s happy. The nice thing about Liv is she’s happy about an exact duplicate party for herself, so a lot of my work is already done on the next one. I think we’ll go italian food however, I’ve eaten enough mexican-style leftovers for now and won’t be near ready to repeat it in a week and a few days.

Abby loved her shawl. She wore it to church on Sunday, but I don’t have a picture yet. It wasn’t until I told her it was called “Angel Shawl” that she even remembered me knitting it.

I went to the doctor yesterday. She put me in braces for tennis elbow and told me to take Aleve and vit B6 along with my multivitamin regularly for a couple weeks. She asked me to stop knitting for a little while, but didn’t make me stop playing guitar.

We both think it was Sam’s scarf that did it. She’s not a knitter herself, but apparently, all of her relatives are serious knitter/crocheters, and she’s tried it many times without success.

I’m ready to start knitting again, but I think I can survive another couple of weeks, and I hope that the braces and vitamins and such work. If not, she wants to give me cortisone shots. Neither of us think it’ll go that far.

I have a guitar lesson today. I’m finally starting to feel like I’m getting better at fingerpicking and can do it semi-automatically without feeling like I have 10 thumbs. There’s still much room for improvement, but I’m good enough at it now that I at least enjoy it.

My friend Sara, who just started up playing again and is also taking lessons with Roger (and seriously kicks my butt at the fingerpicking and speed of chord changes) has some $$$ to buy a new guitar and we’re trying to find a time to get out sans kids this week so she can spend it. It’s so exciting!