You can look, but you'd better not touch

The cake pop shop wasn't yet open when we wandered by this morning. Their hours were noon to 7 – Ashevillians apparently start their days a little later than I do. Heh. At any rate, the caramel-covered cake pops (and marshmallows and pecans and other confections of unknown origin) made for pretty good eye candy, and not a speck of sugar was consumed in the process. (I don't remember the name of the store or I'd try to find a link. Perhaps I was drooling too much to pay attention to their signage.) ETA: Found the name in another photo! It's Kilwin's.

On our tour of the downtown area, we also went into a chocolate shop. There was a tiny table and two chairs in the corner of the store, and I went straight to the chair, do not pass go, do not collect $200. I was invited to see what a five-pound heart-shaped box of chocolates looked like (it was under glass, and thus safe), so I ventured into the center of the room but I dared not go up to the counter. It smelled heavenly, and if you can handle sugar and chocolate, I think The Chocolate Fetish would be a great place to spend some money and time.

I, fortunately, left spending none of the former and only a couple minutes of the latter.

Yesterday, after lunch at 12 Bones and before we met up with our friends, my husband and I went to a place called the Screen Door, which is part flea market, part architectural salvage, part gift shop, part home decorating – kind of a you-name-it interior and exterior art and design conglomeration. Lots of inspiration there, including a tree-shaped sculpture made of progressively smaller pieces of driftwood. Since our home is near three different rivers, I'm thinking this might be a free project for us, and would be a nice addition to our new front-yard landscaping project.

After lunch, we spent quite a bit of time in an old bookstore (there are many of them downtown, Malaprops is probably the best-known but we'd been there previously and really, these other places need to upgrade their branding. Or I need to upgrade my memory.), followed by a tour of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial.

Wolfe, best known for his novels Look Homeward, Angel and You Can't Go Home Again, was raised in Asheville, in a boardinghouse owned by his mother. His father and six siblings lived two blocks away, and everyone came and went at will. It sounds chaotic, and from what the tour guide said, it sounds like Mama Wolfe could have been one of those eccentric types. Papa Wolfe certainly was.

The tour was interesting and the house is amazing – 29 rooms, including the private family rooms as well as dining areas, sleeping porches and more bedrooms than we could count. Oh, and one bathroom. Rather amazing what people would accept for accommodations back in the day. It's furnished in period pieces, all of which have Do Not Touch signs on them and most of which were original to the boardinghouse or owned by members of the Wolfe family.

Makes me want to read Thomas Wolfe again.

Now we're back at the hotel, resting before we all decide what we want to do for dinner. This is not the height of tourist season in Asheville, NC, so there's not much available in the way of Events To Go To this weekend. And none of us are the young, bar-hopping type (snort!). If we were, there would be lots of hopping opportunities.

We've certainly enjoyed spending time with our friends and getting away from home for a short time. Makes you realize that you can go home again. And you tend to appreciate it even more, after a shot of city life.

Finis!

Remember those clogs I was working on throughout the college football bowl season? The first half of the first and littlest pair was done less than a month ago. And while my original goal was to make four pairs and then felt them all at once, I stopped after three:

The blue ones are for my daughter-in-law and granddaughter, leaving the
brown/green ones for my husband.

I'm still going to make the fourth pair (they're for me) and, in fact, have already started the project. But my husband kept asking when his would be finished and I wanted to send the mother-daughter set off before summer.

My husband has never worn slippers, because he used to go outside every hour on the hour (I might be exaggerating a bit) to smoke. Now that he's a former smoker for almost a year(!), he can slip his cold feet into toasty warm wool clogs and relax every evening. Just like an old man.

He kind of makes fun of the old-man-ness of them, but he truly appreciates the warmth of wool. He only has two pairs of handknit wool socks (I should probably work on his sock drawer) and he loves wearing those during cold weather. Which we haven't had much of this winter, but he's managed to pull them out of that drawer a few times.

Okay! That's the knitting part of the post. Thanks for paying attention and letting me brag about a Finished Object or six.

Moving on to the weight-losing part, it appears my attention span for journaling lasted exactly three weeks this time. I thought 21 days was what it took to form a new habit! For me, 21 days was the signal to quit.

And I'll be honest with you: While I'm not chowing down on forbidden fruits, I'm certainly eating more than I did when I was writing everything down. Go figure.

The first day of non-journaling coincided with the decision to join the gym. Am I so busy that I can't journal and go to a gym three times a week? Does my brain only have the capacity to handle a minimum number of successful weight-loss strategies at a time? And if that's true, why would I toss out the number-one predictor of weight loss?

I have no answers, only questions. And a firm resolve to begin journaling again. It's not hard. I love this web-based application that also has a syncable BlackBerry app, but if you read the article I linked to in the previous paragraph, there are many others that do the same thing.

To sum up: In addition to working out regularly and following South Beach Phase 1, I will attempt to create a journaling habit again. Starting today. (Adding one carby food per day the last two days – a serving of Shredded Wheat Wednesday and a low-carb whole-wheat tortilla yesterday – has completely wiped out the stellar two-pound loss from Tuesday's weigh-in)

I'm heading out of town for the weekend. My little Hershey girl, whom you met here yesterday, will be in the hands of my very capable neighbor/housesitter while my husband and I meet some friends to explore Asheville, NC. We won't be meeting them until Friday night, so my husband and I are planning to have a mid-day meal at 12 Bones, a lunch-only rib place that appears to be SB-friendly. (And, really, what restaurant isn't? The grilled-chicken salad is ubiquitous, isn't it? Chez KnitRunRepeat served it last night, as a matter of fact.)

Also, if 12 Bones is good enough for my President, it's good enough for me. I'll do my best to throw up a daily post while I'm gone, since I've committed to doing January NaBloPoMo. Might just be photos; I imagine after this wordy post some of you would enjoy that!