I guess we've dodged the bullet long enough.  The heat wave that has been scorching the rest of the country has finally paid a visit to the Pacific Northwest.  Although I know our temps pale in comparison with those in other areas, you must remember that very few homes here have air conditioning.  It was in the mid 90's in the Seattle/Tacoma area yesterday and today.  It was a little cooler here on the island, but that didn't help us because were were in Tacoma for our nephew's wedding.  And, as fate would have it, hubby had volunteered his vintage 1970 Karmann Ghia convertible for the wedding.  Which meant – a 2 1/2 hour drive down and back in a non-air conditioned car.  "Ah," you might say, "but it's a convertible.  Just put the top down."  In this heat you might as well throw in a stick of butter and set it on broil!  That's to say nothing of the wind shear associated with tooling down the freeway at 60 miles an hour.  So the top stayed up on the drive down and back.  And, as Abby said, everyone probably thought we were one "hot" couple.  They would have been right.  But it was all worth it because the wedding couple were thrilled and got some beautiful photo ops:

And we got to spend the day with some of our favorite people in the world, including Ben, Abby and the girls.  Isobel and Mei-Mei were not nearly as impressed with the wedding as they were with the tree house that they got to play on during the reception.

Afterwards we tooled on over to Lakewood and spent a lovely evening with John and Lorette ( the Knitting Doctor).  They always spoil us rotten and we feel as if we'd had a stay in a four star hotel.  It was so blessedly cool by the the lake:

And peach martinis did a lot to take the bite out of the heat:

And just to prove that I am not above looking a little dorky, I once again demonstrated why they call them drop spindles:

Lorette is determined to make a spindler out of me, so just to please her I have ordered one.  I'm not sure if I have the patience for the dropping kind, so I ordered a supported spindle, the Spindolyn.  They're fairly inexpensive and this will give me some practice during our road trip.

It's certainly been too hot to work on Ben's sweater, so I started another shawl for the 10 in 2010 challenge. 

The yarn came from the Embrace the Lace club last year.  I didn't really care for the project included with it, so it has been marinating in the stash awaiting the right moment.  After several false starts with other patterns, I finally settled on Aeolian and it is a winner!  This is a beautiful pattern and has enough complexity to be interesting, but not so much that I have to keep referring to the chart.

Tomorrow we really need to start planning in earnest for our road trip.  There are so many things to consider when you're going to be away from home that long.  Although we'll have someone minding the house, we still need to do some planning.  And, of course, I need to have plenty of projects to keep me busy on the road.  Somehow I don't think that will be a problem!