New hiking socks!

 Hello, everyone.

I have a new pair of hiking socks! They're Merino blend ones, and they don't turn into warm, wet sponges on my feet! (Darn Tough, I'm looking back at you here.)

These socks from Icebreaker and they're made as different socks for different feet. It should minimize the rumpling problem when hiking. 

The light gray rectangle on the top of the foot is thinner and breathes. There is some padding underfoot and at the toes, but not enough to be huge. These are ladies' quarter socks, in a summer weight. 

These socks are really comfortable so far, but we're just beginning our training for the next Camino walk and I really want to see how they work out on the 7 mile tram loop road, plus fire towers, at the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. 

There are other gray socks around the house, so I took some wool yarn and embroidered a little wine-colored granito on the outside edge of each ankle. This is my sock marking method, it keeps pairs together and keeps DH from trying to mash his feet into my littler socks. 

The need for sock marking became clear in 2015, actually, though I didn't act on it until much later. We gave our wash load of sweaty stuff to a nice man at a place we slept for him to run it through the washer. He brought the pile back later and my three identical looking pairs of Injinji gray liner socks were in balls. The next morning I was shocked--hey, the eyes weren't even open yet!--to discover that he'd apparently rolled pairs without realizing that Injinji toe socks come in left and right. I had 2 left socks in my hand. The next ball was 2 rights. It took a bit to wake up enough to cope with this! Later I put a granito of green on both halves of one pair, and red on another. I can't remember if I dotted all three pairs in different colors of yarn or decided that no-dot is also a mark. Later when my navy/white socks got mixed up with DH's black/white same-brand socks, mine got a blue dot on their ankles. Because folding laundry is so much easier when I don't need to stress out about sock matching.