Glum weather and silver linings

The weather here in Southern California was crazy this week. This isn't the best picture (in the interest of well, privacy), but it was wet and windy at home:



My silver lining was hot chocolate DH's benchmate sent me. It's by Lindt, so you know they know something about chocolate, and it's thick and rich and creamy and not something you want to share. It was perfect for this week of cold weather. I might also add, this is nothing like Swiss Miss (even though Lindt is Swiss). This hot chocolate is just awesome.

Black licorice fantasies

Something I picked up over my vacation that I really enjoyed:



It's the strongest black licorice flavor I've found, and it's not overly sweet (which is not surprising, since sugar isn't an ingredient). And it's from Australia, so it's not something I can just pick up at Target or Ralph's.

Catch up

My first FO for 2010:


It's Hanna Breetz's Storm Cloud Shawlette. It was kind of cute and only required one skein of yarn, but making sure to drop every YO (which was every other stitch) or to do a YO every other stitch drove me batty. I accidentally added an additional stitch in like, row 58 and couldn't figure out how to fix it without leaving a ladder, so it stayed in. So, this is cute, but totally not me (my style doesn't really involve shawls) but it was decent stashbusting and something to do while visiting my in-laws while the kids were napping.