I wasn't very motivated to knit in the spring and early summer, so I haven't had much to show you, I have many things in process, hopefully more FOs will follow soon, but we were on vacation last week and I managed to start and finish a shawl.
Here is a glimpse of our vacation, I won't bore you with oodles of pictures, but of all the beautiful places we saw, this is by far the most beautiful.

We spent a few days in Vancouver and then took a rail/bus combo tour from Vancouver to Calgary stopping in Kamloops, Banff & Lake Louise. This picture is Lake Louise with the Victoria Glacier in the background. Everyone should go there once in their lives, it was peaceful and lovely beyond the ability to properly describe it.
Since we were in Canada, DH wanted to buy me Canadian yarn, I wasn't about to turn that down, so I came home with some Quiviuk, it's a silk blend, amazingly soft, I can't wait to make a small shawl out of this!

I intended to knit the Swirl sweater on this trip, but right before we left I decided I needed something else to work on, so I choose the Daybreak Shawl, and here it is!

It looks more like a sunset than a sunrise to me, with all the reddish color in it, now, again, I just have to wait for fall to wear it. It turns out that flying across the continent, traveling halfway back across it by train & bus and then flying the rest of the way home leaves a lot of time for knitting.
I haven't had much to show, so I haven't been posting much and I'm thinking about not renewing my blog when that comes up in December of this year. It seems to take more and more effort as time goes on and take too much time to do it right...has anyone else blogged happily for a while and then just sort of lost the bug?
There a few other things that I think are contributing - mostly, when I started the blog I was living elsewhere with no family nearby and a very small collection of newly made friends, here we have family and friends close enough to visit regularly not to mention local friends that we hang out with on a regular basis...I also had a job that didn't take any energy outside of work, my job now is practically all consuming for a good part of the year. If I didn't love it I would find that unacceptable...but I do...so I continue to give it my all and maybe a little bit more energy than I actually have to spare.
I don't know...
Ah, a puppy update, Duke is doing okay...the cancer has returned, unfortunately sooner than the vet was hoping would happen. He doesn't know he's sick, so we are doing the best we can, giving him chemo in pill form at home to keep the cancer in check as long as possible. As long as he is himself and not in any pain we will keep going with that, but there's no way to tell how fast it will progress, so we will give him what we can, while we can and be grateful for the time we have with him.