Let's start with... I'm alive?

Hi everyone - everyone who hasn't dropped me off bloglines, that is! I am still alive, believe it or not!  I've just been away from the blog, mentally speaking, and from blog-world too.  Since I last posted, I: 

• made a quick run to visit a friend who lives a few hours away and has access to some really old books that I need in the dissertation. She wrote about my visit way back when. (I was tempted to link to her blog to say, "Look what I've been up to!" and that's when I lost my blogging mojo...)  
  
• a week later I found myself in New York City, surrounded by big tall buildings, for a week of research and crashing in a hotel room with a relative. I got so busy with family, research, and seeing the city that I forgot to check out yarn stores. I did see Spamalot, though, and I laughed a lot; I did get to go to bookstores, which are sadly in short supply where I live
  
• then I had a week off from travel, except I got off a wait list for a retreat
  
• and I went on the retreat March 14-16, which wasn't quite what I was looking for but was probably a productive time anyways
  
• Now I have a couple weeks off from travel before I head to my home institution and a conference I've spent the last year planning... 
  

So it's not as if I haven't been busy! I've just been focusing my free time on things that don't translate well to a fiber arts blog! I also feel like what I've been working on in the knitting world hasn't been terribly interesting, in that it doesn't merit more than a "show and tell" type post. I'm not sure, right now, how to make the blog more than a show-and-tell, without making what it's not meant to be.  Maybe when I finish the prototype of a shawl I'm trying to come up with, then I'll have something more fiber-related to talk about. But for now, I don't know if I'm going to come out of this internet-hibernation, or remain in it?  

Regardless, there's still fiber. I finished the long-suffering socks for my MIL, and have been spinning some pretty, baby-blue, tweedy corriedale from Greta_Jane.  I have three 4 oz. balls of the stuff, and I'm spinning it fairly thin. I'm about halfway through the fiber; I have still another ball to go. One of these days I'll get to try three-ply! Or the gorgeous merino-tencel I bought while in Carrboro a few weeks ago!

Coffeeboy and I also have been hiking, looking for signs of spring and finding beautiful scenery nonetheless.  In that picture on the right, what you see are the evergreens of the North Carolina mountains - pines, rhododendrons aplenty, and mountain laurel.  

I hope all of you are well! I do stop by many of your blogs from time to time, but truth be told, I haven't been reading blogs all that much of late, either.  (There's been a fair amount of book-reading, as in, books that are not related to the dissertation, and that cuts into the knitting time, too!) I hope wherever you are, you are having a beautiful spring!