Brief update

Hello! Greetings from New York, where I am currently going through a stack of xeroxed historical newspapers, instead of doing cool, New Yorky things. Perhaps this evening I will take a break from manic chapter-writing and attempt to take advantage of the lovely city in which I find myself.

In knitting news, I just finished my second Maude mitten. I'm very impressed with myself for avoiding second mitten syndrome. There won't be any pictures until I get back to Chicago, block this sucker, and reunite it with its mate, but it is done.

While I was in Boston, I went to an LYS and picked up the yarn for my Firefly-swap project. It is going to be really tough not to blog about that one, because I have my fingers crossed that it will be awesome. It could also be a total disaster, but I am hoping for awesome.

And finally, we get to the picture portion of our update. Yesterday, I went to Salem, MA with my friends Lisa, Tracy, and Tracy's sister Julie. We saw a big, fake old boat:

and the custom house where Nathanial Hawthorne worked:
and the original House of the Seven Gables:
and the lovely modern garden attached to it:
We also saw lots of witch-related stuff:



That last picture of was the Salem Witch Museum, which might have been designed with the express intention of pissing off American historians, of which three of the four of us are. It's a mess, but it's an entertaining mess with giant puppets acting out key scenes from the witch trials, and it's hard to argue with that.