I am finished with my xmas shopping. Not the knitting, but the shopping. The only painful part about today's shopping trip was the parking. Well, that and the carapace of ice on my car. The weather has finally decided to act like winter: cold, wet, and miserable. Fortunately, I was none of those things.

In search of the new issue of Knit.1 magazine, I went to Borders and Michaels. Ugh. Borders was a zoo, but their magazines are near the door, so it was a quick in and out. Michaels was another story. I'm not a huge fan of big box craft stores. I know that they serve a pretty wide market and they are good for somethings, like emergency notions and guilty pleasures like Cotton-Ease. Well, I discovered that my local Michaels is closing. Soon, by the looks of it, since they were packing everything up while people were trying to shop. I was a little vexed that they'd already packed up all of the yarns that were on sale, but since I don't really need yarn now, I guess it was a removal of temptation. It's all part of a trend. All of the fabric stores in my area closed in the past couple of years, and now Michaels is leaving too. Now I'll have to drive half an hour just to pick up some thread or a crochet hook. How inconvenient.