Knitting night cookie fest

This post is a tad belated, but Tuesday night we had our knitting club meeting at my place as a special Christmas treat. It was full of cookies and spiced cider and more cookies. Here we have Vivian (six months pregnant!), Anne-Marie, and Kristen enjoying the festivities:A good time was had by all, and I still have a few cookies left. Vivian brought some really tasty chocolate cookies that I now have in the freezer for emergency cookie cravings, and I was able to convince Kristen to take some home for her husband, but there were a lot of cookies for the four of us.
Before Vivian and Kristen arrived, Anne-Marie and I exchanged presents. You can see what I made her in my previous post, but she made me a neat cup cozy, shown here: I believe it's the first crocheted item I've owned, for a long while at least. It's pretty big - that's a 20 oz. cup inside (Full of tea. It would be way more mocha than I could handle.). I have to say, I took it to work on Wednesday and I think it kept the tea warmer than those little cardboard wrappers they give you, even in a brisk wind, and it's better for the environment! She also gave me The Knitting Answer Book, which I suspect will come in handy. Thanks Anne-Marie!
We had a slight fire incident while opening gifts. Yes, you read that correctly - fire incident. I had wrapped Anne-Marie's scarf in tissue paper inside a gift bag, and there were candles burning on the kitchen counter. She stepped back a bit to try on the scarf, and I was watching her when all of a sudden I saw more brightness than usual in my left eye. The tissue paper, which had been tossed on the counter, had encountered the candle and burst into flame. I blew on it (bad move), Dave ran over and blew on it (still a bad move), and then I grabbed it and flung it in the sink (finally, some sense). Here's the evidence: Should you be planning on trying this yourself, note that tissue paper burns very quickly and without much smoke. Combusts, really. And blowing on it makes it burn even faster. Funny, that whole oxygen feeding the flames thing! However, there was so little smoke that it didn't even set off the smoke detector which was almost directly over it. Good times!
I'm just getting ready to head to the airport to go back to Pennsylvania for eight days. Should be nice. They have snow, I will get to relax (please?), get some knitting accomplished, read a bit, etc. I've been a bit stressed as I was busy at work and I had to give a big talk today (It went well, thank you for asking.), so I haven't really had that much time to contemplate being gone for over a week. Hopefully I packed matching clothing and remembered my underwear...My parents have dial-up, but I don't want to vanish entirely, so I think I'm going to pre-write some blog posts, with photos, of the Christmas gifts that I've knitted but not posted about, so that I'll have something to post quickly while I'm away.
I wish you all happy holidays and lots of knitting surprises under the tree!