Pleasant Surprise

I had such a great day yesterday. My husband surprised me by arranging to have a friend watch the kids for the afternoon. My husband is not very good at birthdays and anniversaries, but every once in a while he'll do something like this for no particular reason, which makes it very special.

We started off having lunch with our friend and the kids at this neat place called Sushi Train, on Yonge just south of Bloor. They have this revolving track that carries plates of food, and you just grab what you want. Very cute! Then our friend went off with our kids to the Royal Ontario Museum, and hubby and I were FREE!! Whoohoo! We checked out the movies at Varsity, but we were in between shows, so we ending up just wandering around downtown all afternoon. First window shopping on Bloor, then we took the subway to the Eaton Centre. I forgot how enjoyable shopping could be without children! We grabbed a latte, then slowly walked our way back up Yonge St. We had a quiet dinner at a dark, candle-lit restaurant, then picked up our kids at our friend's place. What a great day!


Oh, and I finished my Monkeys:



Great pattern + great yarn = great socks.



Yarn is Koigu; did these on 2.5mm. Love 'em!

The Esther socks are coming along nicely too:



The pattern is by Stephanie van der Linden and is available for free at Socken-Kreativ-Liste Yahoo. The group is free to join, and there are a few other really nice patterns there, but the site is in German. If you're familiar with joining other Yahoo groups, then it's a piece of cake because the sign-up routine is the same. The pattern is in the Files section, or "Dateien", and in a file called "Monatsmuster". There, you'll find lots of nice patterns in either German or English. The Esther pattern is "Juli 2006". This sock is a little slow-going with all the twisted stitches, but I really like the pattern. I started with the small size on 2.5mm, and it was tiny. I'm knitting the large size on 2.25mm and now it fits fine.