Yesterday, buoyed by the sunshine and relative warmth of the day, I once again set up a small crochet camp on my on my back deck, complete with a portable stash and all of the tools I would need to make the perfect square, but with a panoply of errands in front of me, I found myself, more than once, stuck in the not-so-fast lane.

I started by laying out the sixteen two-round center squares I had made the previous day — which serve as the foundation for my Josef Albers inspired color study poncho — and used the daylight to figure out which colors might work well together.

After identifying six possible combinations that just might work, I took hook to yarn and got busy.

First up was the two-round Red Heart Super burgundy yarn. After more thought than is reasonable, I finally settled on the Red Heart Super Saver shocking pink. Working past the first three rounds of my doubts, by the time the square was finished, I was more than happy with the outcome of my efforts:

Today was another lovely late fall day, and I again set myself up on the back deck to make use of the spectacular light.

Confident I was on the right track, I packed up my crochet gear and took a break in the early afternoon and headed over to Durham with my youngest son in tow to visit my mother. The idea was that we would all go out for coffee, and afterward my son would check on her various electronic devices and make sure that everything was up-to-date and working well, and while he did that, I would weave in ends and crochet some more.

Which is pretty much what happened, except that one of the downloads for one of the updates took a little longer than expected, and we got out a few minutes later than I had anticipated which thrust us right into the middle of late afternoon traffic.

No doubt many of the drivers immediately ahead of me, behind me, to my right, and to my left had errands more urgent than taking photos for their crochet blog, but like me they too were stuck in traffic.

For the first 45 minutes of what is usually a 20 minute drive, I held out hope that we would get home before the sunset at 5:01, but at some point, I had to face the reality that was confronting me: I was traveling zero miles per hour, and I would not be getting home before 5:01.

Unwilling to give up on documenting my day’s progress, I took advantage of the fact that traffic was a complete stop, and got this series of photos:

Soon after these photos were taken, we finally made it home without incident, my dog Clooney got his walk, and I was able to get started on yet another square for yet another color study.