Claire taught me to knit on New Year's Eve. My only previous tortuous adventure in knitting resulted in a trapezoidal disaster created in an attempt to secure some badge for Brownies a ba-zillion years ago. I come from a family of knitters. My mother was a power knitter who could turn out a pair of mitts at the drop of a hat. I remember coming home from school bereft of one or both mitts in the dead of winter and there would be a new pair waiting for on the kitchen table in the morning. The hat pictured above is my first "creation." I'm going to call it the "toque-ra" in honour of the number of episodes of Star Gate SG-1* watched while honing my knitting and purling**. It ain't pretty, but then, it's not trapezoidal. I'll take that Brownie badge now please! My monstrous submission to lalaland and You Voluntarily Assume the Risk of Serious Injury or Death by Attending to Ticketstubs. * What's up with SciFi's new network "bug"? To my eye it reads "Safi." On the whole, the new identity is crap and far less elegant than the previous. Blech! ** I did knit a little on the flight home, much to the annoyance of my seat mate. Not so much that I was knitting but that I'd somehow managed to hang onto my needles while she'd had her crochet hook confiscated at some departure point in Virginia. Security in Ottawa was far more interested in wanding all of my possessions for traces of who knows what and confirming that the three metal tins buried in my suitcase contained my beloved Canadian maple syrup and not some flammable liquid.