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Why Fiber Is Good For You, Part One. It is a sign of either my generally poor manners or my particularly poor readjustment to damp, sea-level air that I have been home for almost four days and still have not written a blessed word about what a wonderful time I had in Colorado. Meanwhile, all of my fellow travelers at the Estes Park Wool Market managed to write witty, thoughtful, wonderful posts -- they are, after all, a witty, thoughtful, wonderful crowd -- within a day or two of their collective returns home. I could not begin to do justice to their superb accounts of our weekend, so I will encourage you to visit them and see, in words and pictures, what a grand trip it was. Despite what my post from Snowballville would indicate, I did not spend the entire weekend fretting over pie crust and scones. I also had the great good fortune to meet the brilliant women who joined Snow in making a knitter out of me, including but not limited to Margene, Mim (who designed the first lace shawl I ever knit, and who started working on a new shawl design at Estes; Mim, I cannot wait to see the finished pattern!), Kristi, Carole, Amanda, Michaele, Stephanie, Birdsong, Anne, Laurie, Bonnie, Imbrium, Taelixev, Jessamyn, Karen, Wanda, Jenifer and at least a dozen other knitters I met at the bloggers' meetup at the market, whose names are, sadly, lost in the fog of altitude readjustment.

To say it was a madcap weekend was an understatement: eleven of us slept double-bunked in a duplex cabin, and we had anywhere from 16 to 20 people at dinner. (I will confess that thanks to the steady supply of Fat Tire at my left hand, both at play and in the kitchen, I sort of lost track of the head count by dinnertime, but I was too cheerful to worry about it much.) Every one of us came to the Wool Market hungry to browse and even hungrier to buy. I had thought that fitting a dozen or so of us in the cabin was an impressive feat, but fitting a dozen of us *and* our big bags of yarn, roving and fleece was nothing short of miraculous. Fortunately, if there's one thing I've learned in 15 years of New York City living, it's how to have fun with a lot of people in a small space, but if I might be so presumptuous, it appeared that even those of us who came from more wide-open-space-places had lots of fun in our tiny noisy merry little place. Thank you, each and every one of you, for being so kind to my newbie-assed self; for gently razzing me for trying to carry on a conversation while knitting a fairly complicated lace shawl; for your very kind words about the food; for your very kind offers to help with the food prep (on which I would have taken you up if only we'd had, say, more than one cutting board and one decent knife; special thanks to Anne and Michaele for taking care of the salad and the wine at the exact moment I could feel myself beginning to wilt); for your innumerable shopping tips, pointers and advice; for your abundant senses of humor, kindness and decency; and for making me feel as if we'd all known each other all of our lives. And thanks again to Snow, who not only took me to Estes, but also let me stay in her house for a week, fed and watered me like a champion, and drove my ass everywhere from Estes to Boulder and points between. She really is the hostess with the mostest.

To anyone reading this who was not at Estes: Really, you want to be reading all these other folks' posts. They are all uniformly terrific, and really, you should see how happy Carole looks, holding that big bag of fleece.

Why Fiber Is Good For You, Part Two. After all this company, all this fellowship, all this sundrenched travel and all this yarn shopping, the trip back to reality was a tough one. I probably didn't have to wait more than ten minutes to disembark from the plane at JFK, but in that ten minutes, the humidity that dare not show its face in the Mile-High Desert settled upon my head like a mantilla, and for the first time in a week, I knew the true meaning of desolation. Lloyd eased the transition somewhat by greeting me in our air-conditioned apartment and then whisking me off to dinner at our French local, which has become the de facto place we go to eat when one of us has returned from a long out-of-town trip. The dinner was wondrous and the company even better, but any bloom still on this rose was definitively off by 3 o'clock the next afternoon, my first day back in the box factory. Fortunately, I didn't have to wait long to get it back, and I owe it all to Cara. If you are familiar with her website, you know that she is a genius knitter and spinner, possessed of a sharp wit and an immense, generous heart. In person she is all this, but even more so. Several months back, Cara set the wheels in motion for Spin Out, a day for spinners and knitters to meet at the Cherry Hill Fountain in Central Park. She organized a raffle to benefit Heifer International; people donated generously, more and more companies offered raffle prizes, and the original goal of $3,700 was easily met and surpassed. Cara has now raised over $12,000 on Heifer's behalf, and if the past weeks are any indication, she will easily hit her goal of $14,400 by the time the registry closes -- and the raffle prizes are awarded -- on June 30.

Just when I thought Cara couldn't impress me more with her ingenuity, doggedness and spirit even more than she already has, she raised the bar even higher. She has been tracking the weather all week, and every day the forecasts got worse and worse. Rain and high humidity. Even more rain and higher humidity. High humidity and isolated thunderstorms. High humidity and rolling thunderstorms. Rolling thunderstorms and flash flood warnings from Friday night through Sunday afternoon. Things looked more and more dire for our little party in the park, especially when Cara discovered that the Parks Dept. generally doesn't offer rain dates on summer park permits, because that necessitates blocking out two blocks of time at the height of the demand for outdoor permits. In short, it was Saturday morning or naught, and Cara did not want to shrug and say "sorry, kids" to the folks who had traveled some distance to get here. On Thursday night, she began searching for alternate venues and issuing calls to action to anyone who might be able to help us. Her excellent friend Shana (who doesn't blog, but really needs to, in my opinion), who works for the Parks Dept., managed to find us a space at the East 54th Street Recreation Center, with plenty of room for everybody to bring their spinning wheels, or, for people like me who don't know how to spin (although Ann did a champion's job at trying to teach me), our big bags of yarn. Once again, chatting, laughing, advice-giving and bonding were the order of the day. We would not be beaten by any stupid humidity. Spin Out ruled the day. So did Cara.

The haul. During our tour around the Wool Market, Margene gave me a gentle reminder (of course, that's a relative term, "gentle reminder" -- we are talking about Margene, after all that even though my blog content is about 75% foodwriting to 25% Other Things, it is still permissible to take pictures of one's knitting projects, particularly when one has teased the knitters in the audience with pictures of shawls in progress, only to welsh on showing the completed shawl. She is right, of course, but I am still shy about this whole knitblogging thing, mostly because, as I've said before, that my vocabulary and skill set is still pretty small. Give me some new fruit at the farmer's market, some new rice at Kalustyan's, or some horrible annoying new processed food, and I will go on until the cows come home, regardless of whether anyone wants to read a tantrum in print or not. With knitting, though, I'm not comfortable with going on beyond simple declarative statements, the kind I used to make when I was about three: Yarn is pretty. It feels good. I made a shawl for my mom. I like socks.

Of course, because I do love Margene so well, I agreed to find a venue for the knitting projects. I had planned to put a new photo album in my sidebar, but once again my advanced template has bested me, and while I can add stuff to existing lists, I can't seem to create new ones. Between this and Friday night's Audblog fiasco, the time for migrating to a new provider comes ever closer. In the meantime, I will let Flickr do the hard work for me, and once it's ready, I'll provide links -- and, of course, I can post a picture of what came home from the market with me:

For you knitterinas curious about the yarn specs, here they are, from left to right: Sportweight wool (in the wound ball) from Plain and Fancy, for socks; alpaca/tencel/nylon eyelash yarn from Textiles a Mano, for my mom, who makes gorgeous scarves from this sort of yarn; two hanks 100% silk from Textiles a Mano, one little scarf's worth for my mom, one little scarf's worth for me; superwash wool/silk/viscose blend from Brooks Farm Yarn, for socks; 2 skeins laceweight alpaca, from the stand whose name escapes me at the moment because I keep thinking of it as "Mim's local yarn shop" (Mim, help!); the piece de resistance, 2 skeins of qiviuk/silk/merino blend, purchased at Skaska Design's booth. I spent more on those two little skeins than on the rest of the haul, but as qiviuk is almost impossible to find in New York City, I gave up my wallet gladly for it. What will it turn into? I do not yet know.

Tell her like Tony told Cleopatterer! One nice thing about coming back to LuthorCorp -- other than getting to see my friends again -- was the big, big box of Amazon.co.uk goodness waiting for me. Back in April, I had ordered the BBC Shakespeare Collection on DVD for Lloyd's birthday. These are the 37 plays produced by the BBC between 1978 and 1985, which were aired in the U.S. on PBS as The Shakespeare Plays. I was in high school when my local PBS station began airing them, and I can say without qualification that these productions were the ones that embedded in me the love of Shakespeare that continues to this day. Their production of Twelfth Night is my favorite one ever, and their production of Macbeth, with Nicol Williamson as Macbeth and Jane Lapotaire as Lady Macbeth, scared the wits out of me. (The surprising of Macduff's castle, and the slaughter of his wife and son, was so frightening that I couldn't sleep after I saw it. The following week, my English teacher screened it for my class; I was the only one who had seen it previously, and I sat with my fingers in my ears and my eyes squeezed shut, but I could still hear the gasps of my classmates all around me.) Fan though I am, Lloyd's love of Shakespeare eclipses even mine; he had never seen the BBC plays, and he has longed to see them for years. When he told me that Amazon.co.uk was selling them, and at a tenth of the price at which the American distributor was selling them (I know that the American distributor is also selling broadcast rights along with the set, but still! geez!), I knew what I wanted to give him for his birthday. We did have to wait a bit due to an out-of-stock situation, but eventually they got more, and they sent it to us in a ridiculously short time, at ridiculously cheap shipping prices. Dear friends, I know that it is bad to put too much stock in our material goods, but I just can't help myself. This set is wonderful.

Lloyd and I are watching Pericles now, watching Juliet Stevenson rule every scene in which she appears. Last night we watched John Cleese do his brilliant thing as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, and while I was at Spin Out, Lloyd spent part of his afternoon watching The Winter's Tale. As the credits for Shrew rolled last night, Lloyd announced, "I've watched five hours of Shakes today." He is hardcore, that Lloyd.

The Tale of the Hunza Apricots. It would be a cruel thing to tease the promise of an actual food story here, only to end without delivering it. Nevertheless, that is exactly what I am going to do. There are foodstuffs to prepare for the week's lunches and dinners ahead. There are trips to the bank to be made, and, if I am lucky, there will still be time for me to join the Hellgate CSA, the farm-share program that delivers boxes of locally-farmed vegetables to the coffee bar up the street from my house. I promise, though, that there is a tale of Hunza apricots, and I will share it, dear friends.