Today, I took the day off from any new crochet, and I felt guilty, almost as if I had skipped school and was playing hooky.

Instead, after I had completed the morning’s list of “things that must be done,” I got in my car and headed to Charlotte.

A friend from at least the seventh grade was in town, and she had a few hours open to get together, so I packed up a few crochet items to show her, and headed out on a gray and rainy day to the slightly warmer and less rainy clime of Charlotte. I under three hours I was there.

When her schedule finally freed up, we headed out to lunch and over jerk chicken and ox-tails at Lawrence Caribbean Restaurant, we caught up on 10 or 15 years of things we had done and places we had been. We also talked some about our fathers, both named David, who had been friends for many years, and who had both (to our minds) died far too young.

By the time we finished lunch we still had at least another decade to cover, which we did over a pot of coffee, and it was over that pot of coffee that I learned she has an interest in tablescapes (or “tables capes” if you have an overactive spell check) which, as I learned from “your dictionary,” is “an artistic arrangement of articles on a table.”

And, as it happens, there are people who take this particular endeavor very seriously — as seriously as I take my crochet — and one of the better known competitions takes place at the Los Angeles County Fair (you can read more about it here)

And then, the afternoon was over. There are still a million topics we have yet to cover, but the will have to wait for another day, and in the meantime, we got this photo of the two of us with “The Afghan that Eluded Me,” as a visual counterpoint to an overcast day:

And if you want to know all about how I finally finished the Afghan that Eluded Me (as well as why I named it that), you can read about it here.