Oh my word, it's December!

Could someone tell me where the year has gone? I woke up early this morning, and as I was laying in bed trying to decide whether or not to get up or attempt to go back to sleep, I realized that I hadn't thought of a Chrismas present for Kyle. Last year we agreed not to buy each other Christmas presents because we had bought ourselves ski equipment that fall. We haven't even talked about it yet. This might be the incentive I need to get started on his Chicago Bears socks. This week's blogstalking assignment is: What do you do Friday night to kick off the weekend? I took today off(because I'm on call next week and my next day off after Sunday will be December 16), and we'll probably spend this evening decorating/tidying up for the Xmas party tomorrow, and then watch a few episodes of Lost on DVD. So I have decided that my weekend was kicked off last night, when I went to knit at Blenz. Our Blenz knitting group is very small - we now meet on Thursdays, and the most knitters that have attended is 3. There are knitting classes at our LYS on Tuesday night that are kind of SnBish as well - that's usually 6-8 knitters. But even though we are small in numbers, we have alot of knitting energy. Plus Blenz has awesome ginger cookies! This photo is actually from a few weeks ago: Ev is on the right(she works at our LYS and has designed several of the items I have knit lately), and Susan is on the left. Susan just started knitting this year, and it's amazing how much progress she has made. She started with scarves and mitts, and is now doing Christmas stockings, felted slippers, Noni bags, and last night I helped her to start the tam pattern from the winter IK. It's kind of fussy right at the start because you are casting on 8 stitches on the dpns, and placing markers between each stitch {which seems kind of silly to me, because you then double the amount of stitches right away by doing an m1 after each stitch, so why bother with the markers until you are up to 16 stitches.} I was relieved to see that I hadn't twisted it because it was so awkward to work with until I had done about 4 or 5 repeat rows. She's using Rowan Felted Tweed, which has a bit of a halo to it, which made it difficult for me to tell that things weren't twisted. It also would have been impossible to see the ladders to pick up to do all the m1's, but I just substituted kfb's for the increase (I have yet to figure out how to twist the m1 so that it doesn't leave an eyelet)Susan's great; she's so enthusiastic and full of wonder about knitting - the other week she said "These needles really are sanity sticks, aren't they?" Here's Janice and me (wearing my mobius). She just moved here from the Coast (near Vancouver). The first time I met her she was knitting a cashmere scarf as a gift - you have to respect that! A new knitter who makes something that scrumptious for someone else! She's been doing some totally cute felted purses, and powered through her first maryella in less than a week!