Pets – Page 3 – The Knitting Doctor

Dog Tricks

I’m back at work this week, so I haven’t had much time for knitting. I’ve put the two-color socks at the top of my list to finish, as I have NEW Socks That Rock yarn to get to. Not to mention that I haven’t done the socks from the last shipment of STR. So the two-color ones just need to get done. I do like them, it’s just that I generally see socks as that easy mindless project to pick up when my brain is overloaded, or when I have to pay attention to something else, or when I only have two minutes to knit. I’m only about an inch farther than the last photo, so check a few posts back, add an inch, and you’re good. I have reached the heel, so it won’t be long.

In lieu of knitting pictures, I have good dog and cat photos to show. We got Riley (and the cats, too) from the Humane Society when she was about a four month old pup. We did the dog-training thing, and she’s probably one of the best-behaved dogs I’ve ever seen. She follows the usual commands that dogs should follow, though she draws the line at “roll over”. She did it for awhile, then when she got older she just refused. For a few months she would run in a circle when you would tell her to roll over, but then she even stopped that. This dog will do nearly anything for a treat, but rolling over is clearly one of those things that she thinks is pointless.

Her best trick is the dinnertime trick. We did not want her to be one of those dogs who is jealous and grabby about food, so from the time we got her, we trained her to sit and wait when we put her food on the floor. She has to sit there until we tell her “that’ll do”, and then she can eat. She has pretty good self-restraint, and most of the time will sit there and wait even if we leave the room. This comes in handy, as we feed the cats a little dish of wet food in the evening as well as a treat. Riley just loves wet cat food. She’s pretty sure that it is much better than even the best dog food. The cats rarely eat the whole thing, so Riley gets to clean their bowls once they are done. She has to do the same “sit and wait” thing for that too.

All of that is a very long-winded introduction to three photos. You can see that the cats (Willie in this one) don’t seem too perturbed by Riley drooling on their heads, waiting patiently for them to finish. She will sit there for as long as it takes.

“That’ll do, Riley!”

Spain Photos, Part 3,

Or,

The Case of the Missing Sweater Sleeve

First, the knitting content. I’ve finished all the pieces to the Not-Really-An-Everyday Cardigan. There was a little sleeve mishap in the process. I finished the body pieces before we went to Spain, but didn’t take it along to work on, as it was a little bulky for the carry-on bag. After I got home and recovered from my jet lag, I pulled out the sleeve that I had started, and went back to work. I was about a third done with the sleeve, and decided to go ahead and block the body pieces and the first sleeve that I was certain that I had finished, so they would be dry and ready to start seaming when I finished that last sleeve.

The only problem was that I couldn’t find the first sleeve. I was quite certain that I had done it before we left for the trip; so certain that I tore up the house looking for it, and even considered the possibility of a sleeve thief in the neighborhood. After digging around for days and losing sleep over where it might be, I reviewed previous blog posts, counted up the balls of yarn remaining, and determined that I indeed had not ever knit the first sleeve. I do occasionally dream about knitting (OK, I frequently dream about knitting), but I’ve never actually hallucinated finishing a whole garment piece that I have in fact never started.

After some judicious swearing, I have now finished both sleeves, and it’s all blocked, ready for the sewing party, then the neck and band finishing. Here are the pictures:

Now for the Spain pictures. Today, we travel to Gibraltor. We drove from Marbella along the coast to get there, but then parked our car on the Spain side and walked across the border, thereby avoiding the hour-long line of cars trying to get over. Here’s the Rock from the Spanish side:

And walking in:

We took a guided driving tour of the city, which took us to all the major sites. It’s not that difficult to walk the whole area, but as we only had a few hours, we opted for the more expeditious way to see everything. Part of the Rock is a nature preserve, and is home to the famous “Barbery apes”, which are anything but wild at this point. Here’s one fine example:

And a few more:

A word of warning to any other Barbery ape visitors: these monkeys are little thieves (maybe that’s where that sleeve went). That cute little fellow on my shoulder snatched my reading glasses off my bag on his way down and scampered off with them. Our guide had to bribe him with a whole bag of cheetos to get them back.

This photo is a reminder of what Gibraltor meant to the British in past years:

They wouldn’t let John fire the cannon, for some reason.

We toured the Siege Tunnels that were built by the British. Here are a couple of photos from inside the Rock:

Yes, the road in and out of town goes right across the runway.

That would be the shadow of the Rock, from inside the Rock.

After a busy day of touring, we stopped at a pub in town for some very British pub food and a pint to tide us over.

Ahhhhh. And no, I was not the designated driver.

Here’s another view of that runway, from ground level as we were leaving.

I hope they don’t make any unscheduled landings here.

Back in our condo, here is John reading up on the history of Spain, with a visiting feral cat that seemed to like our hospitality. Note: if you happen to be the owner of this condo, move along. There’s nothing for you to see here. We certainly weren’t the ones who let that cat in.

That’s enough of the travelogue for today. I swear, I’ll finish these soon! I’ll leave you with a puppy photo from earlier today. Riley likes to sleep in on cold mornings. Actually she likes to sleep in every morning; she’s not much of a morning puppy.

Chaos, Part 2

Unfortunately, I think there might be more than 2 parts to this home-remodeling chaos. The floors are sanded, stained, and have the first finish coat on them. The painters got them covered up with paper before I could get a good shot. Tuesday the painting guys showed up, and we are finally getting an idea what this will look like when it’s all done. Here are some photos:

Our bedroom, wrapped in plastic.

Everything in the house was previously painted a stark white. When we get done with it, the trim and ceilings will be a creamy white, with a yellow shade for the walls, and a light sage color for our bedroom.

The new bathroom door that the guys rigged up:

Riley loves this project. There is somebody new at the house every day. She thinks they are all here just to see her.

Lucy the Cowardly doesn’t think much of the whole project. Being the big chicken that she is, she has discovered this spot in the TV/cable box cabinet to hide out.

Here are our new French doors out to our patio, with the first coat of yellow on the walls:

And a shot from our kitchen which shows just a little of how different this place is going to look when we’re done with it:

The really bad part about remodeling is the “oops, I made a clean spot” phenomenon. This really started as a wood floor project, then morphed into knocking out walls and replacing tile, painting, and new doors. Yesterday we decided that all the carpet in the upstairs master bedroom level is going to look like crap next to the new tile and paint, so it’s going as well. I don’t want to pack up all that junk upstairs into boxes twice. It’s all jammed into the garage now, so we might as well go for it. We picked out the floor carpet yesterday in about five minutes. I think I have reached that “I can’t make any more decisions right now” point.

On the knitting front, I have gotten a bit more done on Birch, in between micro-managing the home project. I’m hoping to have it done by the weekend. Blocking might have to wait a bit until the mess around here is under some control, though.

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We received some very sad news over the weekend. If you’ve been visiting here regularly, you’ve met Daisie, our neighbors’ Corgi. She and Riley were best friends, since my husband would pick her up on the way to the park almost every day over the last year. Daisie was hit by a car on Sunday, and died instantly of her injuries. She was just the sweetest dog I’ve ever met, and we’ll all miss her greatly.

I Passed!

My tendons passed, that is. Thursday I had the tendons tested, which was a hell of an excitement, let me tell you. I actually had a dream about it the night before. In my dream I had taken my splint off to show somebody how it worked, then couldn’t get it back on correctly. I showed up at my “test” and Amy was none too happy with me. Any of you who have been through “higher education” would probably recognize this as a variant of the dream where you realize that the final is today and you forgot to go to class all semester.

The actual test took about ten seconds, then I was on my way to doing active exercises. This has been a rather distressing few days. I’ve lost a lot more power and range of motion in my hand and wrist than I would have thought possible in a month. I need to keep reminding myself that I’m not supposed to be at full strength for another two months.

The real surprise was that my splint was revised yet again. Amy replaced the tape that straps it to my wrist with velcro straps so I can TAKE IT OFF to do exercises, and to wash my hand to get the gunk off. Hooray! In case you think this less than thrilling, let me just say that a lot of gunk builds up when you can’t wash your hand for a month. I’m exfoliating the skin off my whole hand and leaving my DNA all over the house. Guess I can’t commit any crimes for awhile; Gil on CSI would identify me in a minute.

I got a great surprise package in the mail this week from Kristen. Check out her blog here. Here is a picture.

Though I can’t knit, she figured I could manage Kool-Aid dyeing. There is a ball of Patons wool, which she skeined and tied for me so it’s ready to go. She included the Kool-Aid as well as gloves; a regular one for my regular hand, and a plastic bag to go over the splint. There are treats as well: chocolate for me, a knit catnip mouse for the cats, and a cookie for Riley. Here’s Willie’s verdict. He’s been trying to kill that mouse ever since he got it.

And Riley’s thoughts on the matter:

The chocolate is long gone, so no pictures. Thanks Kristen!

One more tip for any of you who unexpectedly find yourself unable to wash your own hair for three months. I got a little tired of looking like Phyllis Diller after the first week and went to my salon for a shampoo and style. It was wonderful, but a little spendy to do very often. John called his barber to see what they charge. The barber that owns the shop is a woman, and she charges $8 for a wash and dry. So I’m splurging and going every week.

Still More Rogue

I finished the body of the Rogue sweater last night. I have a question for anybody who has made this sweater. What’s with the lone stitch on a holder at the front of the v-neck? I was just going to knit it together with the next stitch on one side, but I figured there must be some reason for this. The directions say to keep it on a holder till you are doing the finishing, then tack it down in the back. Hmmm. I am to the point of picking up all the stitches around the neckline to start the hood. I am also assuming that you need to pick up the wraps that are done on the throat cabling shaping, though it doesn’t specify this in the pattern. There is a lot of cabling on that hood, is all I have to say.

We leave for vacation in a week, and I probably won’t get much knitting done in the meantime, so I’m trying to decide whether to pack this along or not. I doubt that I’ll finish the hood before we go, and it is pretty bulky for travelling purposes. Bummer. I really want to finish this soon. Maybe I’ll just put the hood on a holder and start a sleeve…that won’t weigh so much.

We are going to Spain for about two weeks, and part of the trip involves train travel, so we’re planning (hoping) to travel light. Actually my husband is planning to travel light. Travelling light to me means only one steamer trunk. I start out packing with good intentions, and by the time we’re ready to leave I have everything I own in bags by the door. I’m already negotiating to purchase part of his suitcase space allottment.

Here are pictures of the Rogue progress.

That throat bit is actually a split v-neck, though the picture doesn’t show it well. The markers are on those wrapped stitches so I don’t forget about them.

The pattern also called for short row shaping on the shoulders, which I’ve done before. But then she has you bind off the shoulder stitches and seam them later instead of doing a three needle bind off. I did it the way the pattern is written as I thought that there might be some reason for this, but I believe you could do a three needle bind off easily without changing anything.

Last but not least, here is a gratuitous dog picture for your amusement. We all went to the park again yesterday. Daisie’s ears just make me laugh.

91,955

That is just the most embarrassing number. I wrote a few posts back about my stash inventory system. This week I got the bright idea to add up all the yardage to see how much yarn I actually have. According to my database, I have 91,955 yards of yarn in my stash. That’s 84,094 meters for all of you from the rest of the world. Of course this doesn’t include the latest purchase.

This lovely pile of yarn is a Colinette AbFab Throw Kit, in Amethyst. I have just been coveting this (which commandment was that??) for a long time, but had not bought the kit. I wasn’t sure I wanted to deal with “the look” that I get when yet another shipment of yarn arrives at the house.

My covetousness began in earnest when Kerstin posted this. Then Crayonbrain had to go and suggest that they were taking these kits off the market. I took this as a sign and whipped out my credit card. I have no idea when I will ever get to this, but I just thank God that I didn’t miss the AbFab bandwagon.

Here are a couple of rare Willie sightings. (That doesn’t sound quite right does it??) I mean Willie the cat…get your minds out of the gutter, boys and girls. The boy cat howls like a maniac till we let him out in the morning, then about mid-morning he howls like a maniac to get back in, and occasionally climbs the patio door screen to let us know that he is serious. He likes his comfortable warm morning nap.

The rocking chair is one of my few prized possessions. Most of the furniture in our house is of the “I like it but wouldn’t be tormented forever if it disappeared one day” variety. My grandfather built this chair in the early 1900’s for the farmhouse in North Dakota where they lived. It is definitely not fashionable, though it is as solid a piece of furniture that you will ever find. One of the pieces of wood on the bottom of the chair looks like it was salvaged from a box used to ship farm equipment. I had it reupholstered a few years ago, and when I sit in it, I think of my grandfather sitting in the same chair after a long day’s work, playing his fiddle and perhaps sipping on a jug of whiskey if my grandmother wasn’t looking. I’ve mastered the whiskey sipping; someday I will learn to play the fiddle as well. Here’s a better picture of the chair.

Here are a couple of Rogue pictures. I haven’t done more than a few rows all week, due to work interference, but have made a bit of progress. I’ve attached the pocket to the body and am to the underarm section where the cables start to widen out again.

And a better shot of the pocket.

Knitting that pocket back on was just a barrel of fun. I took some pictures but they didn’t come out particularly well, so if you want to see what it looks like, you’ll have to knit it yourself. It is an ingenious pattern, and I could really see doing this again. (Have I mentioned that before??)

Rogue, Real Life.

I have been knitting on Rogue. I even took pictures of my progress. Unfortunately they all turned out to be crap, and I am not posting crappy photos today, even though I have done so in the past with impunity. It’s one of those famously gray western Washington days, and not very photo friendly. I suppose I could have fixed it, but I’m way too lazy. So you’ll have to take my word on it. I’m not making speedy progress due to the intervention of work this past week, but have gotten into the spirally cables up the side. This is really a hypnotic project to knit, as many others have found. Ei and Dorothy are making much better progress than I am. Go look at their pictures. Mine looks like that, only not as far along, and mine is pink. They also evidently know how to take good pictures.

I do have a picture of the pets doing what they do best. Daisie the Corgi was here visiting again, and I guess somebody must have tired them out at the park:

Note that Willie is on the dog bed too. My husband took that photo, which explains why it is not blurry.

I was going through my site stats and found a couple of things that amused me (it doesn’t take much to amuse me, really). I always look at the search strings in Google that got people to my blog. My favorite for the week is “graph paper knitting alien”. Right up there is “flannel sheets at Costco”. I was the fifth hit on that one. My flannel sheets are from Costco, actually, though I don’t remember ever mentioning it in my blog.

Work this week just plain over-ran me. I didn’t get much done except work, eat, and sleep, and not that much of the latter. I have a work schedule that most people would find nuts. I work 7 days in a row, then get a week off, which sounds great. The 7 days on basically put two and a half weeks worth of work in one week, and I sleep for the first 2 days I have off. Then about 4 days into my week off, I’m pretty excited about my work schedule again, and by Monday (my last vacation day), I’m all pumped up to get back at it again. It sounds crazy, but it has its moments. Anyway, I’m still in my jammies at 10:30 this morning, and would have no intention of changing that if I didn’t have a couple of meetings this afternoon. It probably wouldn’t do to go in my bathrobe. Though I might just take my knitting with me.

The Cat’s In The Bag

No, Lucy is not trying to kill herself. I pulled Rogue out of the bag to knit yesterday morning, and within about 2 seconds Lucy was playing in the bag. Yes, I’ll be more careful to put it away from now on.

Though now that I think about it, maybe she was considering suicide. We have the neighbor’s dog here for a day or two while they have a family thing going on. Daisy is a Corgi, and just the cutest thing, though Lucy really is not impressed.

Daisy is barely a year old, so still acts like a puppy. She and Willie, the other cat, get along just fine, and she and Riley are great friends from their many trips to the park together on walks. John takes Riley to the park daily, and generally stops at the neighbors’ house and picks up Daisy as well. It’s the next best thing to having a Corgi of our own (maybe better!).

Rogue is just the most fun thing I’ve ever knit. I am done with the pocket and have resumed knitting in the round. The cables up the side are just a blast to knit. Here’s where I am:

Purty, huh?

I had a bit of a glitch (actually two) when I started to pick up the stitches after doing the pocket. The pattern calls for knitting the body in the round, then knitting the pocket back and forth on part of the front body stitches. When you’re done with the pocket, you go back and pick up a line of stitches at the inside base of the pocket, and start knitting in the round on the body again. It was a little hard to see where I was, and I kept getting off a line up or down. So out came the trusty dental floss.

I threaded it through the row of stitches I wanted to pick up, then found it very easy to keep on track. The second glitch was a slipped stitch where there shouldn’t have been one. It was at the very beginning of the pocket, and I didn’t find it till I was picking up the stitches to resume the body. In this heavy yarn I could barely tell from the front, but I knew this would bug me. I did the unravel and crochet back up trick again, which worked like a charm.

And here’s how I’m keeping track of everything:

It’s an old music stand, with a magnet board to keep everything where I can see it.

My only complaint with this pattern is that it is almost too much fun. It’s one of the few things that I’ve knit that I would consider making twice. The next one I could see in a woodsy, earthy, Druidy green. I’m a sick woman.

Fun Week

So far this has been a really fun week. I finished my work-week late Monday night, thinking I would have a week to catch up on blogging, knitting, and just generally hanging out. I woke up Tuesday with a horrendous pain in my mouth, and had an emergency root canal done on Wednesday. Between the pain and the drugs I’m taking for the pain (better living through modern chemistry), I haven’t gotten a whole lot done so far with my time off. I had the misfortune of growing up on a farm with non-fluoridated well water, and in a small town with marginal dental care, so have aging teeth that are starting to cost me a fortune. The good side of the story is that I live in a country that has superb dental care available to those who can afford it, and I am fortunate enough to be able to afford it. I could live the rest of my life without ever having to get another root canal, however. That would be just fine with me.

I bought yarn for a new project. This is King Cole Luxury Mohair, in the color Biaritz. I’ve used this yarn before and love its fuzzy mohair-y goodness. I wasn’t sure I’d like the black and white, but it is really shades of black, silver, gray, and white, and quite elegant looking.

I’m making a shawl out of this. It will be a simple rectangular garter stitch shawl, and the plan is for it to be quite large. Here is the start.

I didn’t really need another project, but I needed something that I could do while watching movies or TV that doesn’t require paying much attention. And I love warm fuzzy blanket-y things that I can wrap up in when it’s damp and cold outside.

The Rogue sweater is coming along. I finally finished that blasted hem. The twisted stockinette stitch combined with a heavy yarn and the smaller gauge required for the hem part was hard on my hands. Plus it was boring. Now I’m into the body section, with the cabling on the sides. I will just say that this pattern is very well written. Everything is spelled out, so you don’t have to guess what to do next.

I’ll leave you with a picture of Lucy. Well, really it’s just a picture of Lucy’s tail.

The visiting dogs have gone home, and Lucy is quite happy to have her house back.

Filler Post

So….what do you blog about when you have spent the last week getting to this point on a new sweater project:

Meet Rogue. If you think it doesn’t look like much in the picture, well it doesn’t look like much in real life either. This has been one of THOSE weeks at work, and I haven’t gotten much knitting done.

We have a house full of new dogs. We are dog sitting for a friend who is taking her male Kerry blue terrier to the Eukanuba dog show this week, and have her two female terriers here. I took pictures of Kiara and Bianca, but honestly, not being their mother, I admit that I can’t always tell them apart. Riley is used to having them around and knows they always go home eventually, so isn’t too worried. The cats, having a much shorter attention span, are pretty certain we’ve done something totally dumb and brought two new dogs here to stay. Willie, ever the adventurer, hasn’t retreated, but is a bit wary. He also just boxed Kiara in the nose a bit ago, so she is learning that cats are not necessarily just for chasing. Lucy is being her usual cowardly self, and we have the upstairs blocked off with a baby gate so she has a safe haven. Here they are, obviously making themselves at home.

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Competition in the Knitting Doctor world!

Go here and meet Kristen. Another knitting doctor (well, doctor-to-be). Woo Hoo! We’re taking over the blogging world! Here’s to knitting in class!

Gauge Wars…

Or, The Revenge of the Knitting Goddess

I spoke too soon. I believe I’ve used the word hubris in this blog before. After knitting a few inches of Rogue, I measured. My gauge was not the required 4.5 inches per inch, but more like 4, or even a bit less. Even accounting for the difference after washing, this was going to be way off. The only thing I can figure is that I was very excited about starting this sweater, and that I knitted my first swatch very tightly in my excitement. This has happened to me before. Most notably, when I went to Wintergrass, which is Tacoma’s annual bluegrass festival (which is coming up, by the way!!), I found that I knit very tightly while listening to wild bluegrass fiddle music. Who knew?

I stared at this, and stared at it. I briefly considered making a live animal offering to the Knitting Goddess if she would change what I was measuring. The cats were starting to get nervous.

“Take Lucy”, Willie said, “she’s older and prettier. The Knitting Goddess will like her better.”

That’s Willie. He doesn’t make many blog appearances, but I tricked him into the photo shoot by telling him it was suppertime.

I considered finishing the sweater as is, and hope it would fit someone. With my new measurements, it would have to be Bigfoot, and I don’t think he would appreciate a pink hooded sweater.

I did a new swatch; it works perfectly, this time on size 6 needles, instead of size 7. You have no idea of the variety of ways the “f” word can be used to apply to knitting.

So I ripped the whole flipping thing out. If you have made Rogue, and if you have followed the pattern suggestion to do a twisted stockinette stitch hem, you know how much fun starting this over is, especially on a size smaller needle than the main pattern needle size. I am already getting my money’s worth out of this yarn.

I’m not saying nothin’ else about gauge until I’m at least six inches into this sweater, and maybe not then.

As consolation, this is what the Pacific Northwest looked like this morning. We’ve been getting snow and storm warnings this week. They were wrong, I guess.

Short Blog Break

I realized yesterday that I have updated my blog only 7 times in the last month, and only twice since the beginning of this month. There are a lot of things going on in my life right now, and committing to writing a 50,000 word novel (NanNoWriMo) by the end of November has been sort of the last straw. Rather than feel guilty about it, I won’t be blogging until the first of December, unless I have some sort of Knitting News that just overwhelms me with its importance.

I will definitely be back, and I expect to start blogging around the first weekend in December, so please check in around then. I know how annoying it can be when you keep checking a blog for days on end and there is just nothing. Those of you who use Bloglines will automatically get notified when I post again.

Here are a couple of pictures for you in the meantime. The first is so I don’t get kicked out of the puppy/kitty rings. Riley the wonder dog and Willie the lunatic cat who thinks he’s a dog clearly love each other.

Here is what it looks like in the Pacific Northwest today:

It’s been a bit gloomy here the last few weeks, so the glorious sunshine today is just a gift. No offense to those of you who live elsewhere, but this is just the most lovely place on earth. I’m sure the place that you live is quite nice, but I just wouldn’t move anywhere else unless somebody held a gun to my head. Maybe not even then.

See you all in a couple of weeks!

Crochet Lady

No, this blog isn’t going to morph into The Crocheting Doctor. I had one of those moments at work this past week that reminds me why I will always love being a physician. I had admitted an elderly lady with dementia to the hospital earlier in the week with a diagnosis of “altered mental status”. Basically she was sent in for placement in a nursing home because they couldn’t take care of her at the facility she was in. Always the optimist, I tinkered with her medications and stopped some sedating drugs she was on, and the next thing I knew, she was awake and alert. She was still quite demented, mind you, but now very alert and interactive. One of the staff had mentioned that she was once a knitter, so I asked her about it. She looked at me and promptly said, “No, crochet.” The next day I took her some leftover yarn (the leftover balls from this) and a crochet hook. When I took it out of the bag, she didn’t even wait for me to explain. Her eyes lit up and she took it out of my hands and just started in. I checked back periodically through the day, thinking she might need a bit of help. She never did get past that first row, but she crocheted one heck of a long blue chain. The yarn and hook were discharged happily from the hospital with her.

Many thanks to everyone who left birthday wishes. I had to work, but my guy cooked me a wonderful dinner when I got home. He’s upstairs making Ethiopian Doro Wat tonight. I have no idea what inspired this, but I’m not about to complain.

Just so I don’t get kicked out of the Knitting Kitty ring, here are some pictures of Lucy. Lucy found a pile of old papers that were slated for the shredder earlier this week. Note how she looks so freaking innocent in this one.

A while later I found her under the pile. This photo didn’t quite capture all the little shredded bits around her. I guess she was just trying to help.

You might wonder why there are rarely pictures of Willie. Will thinks he’s a dog, and doesn’t usually stay in one place long enough for pictures.

I have been slogging along on my three little projects, making slow but steady progress. Just because it’s so damned purty, here is a picture of Birch:

This yarn is pretty fidgety to knit with, but I adore this color. It’s finally getting to the point where I can see some progress! Oooooh! Little Birch leaves!

Ahhhh, Lace!

But first, the Lucy report. She seems to be fine. I’m thinking she got into something outside and ate something she shouldn’t have. There are such a host of plants and chemicals that can make pets sick. We quit using slug bait because it can be so toxic to pets, and dogs especially love to eat it. That doesn’t guarantee that the next door neighbor isn’t using something like this in their yard.
At any rate she is back to her usual self. I was going to say “normal” self, but just exactly what is “normal” when you are referring to a cat? It took me about half an hour this morning to get a remotely decent picture of her.

“No, I said no pictures!”

Finally I got a decent shot:

“Aren’t I the prettiest cat you’ve ever seen?”

Riley said, “Not to worry. I eat stuff all the time; she’ll get over it.”

And now, the knitting report. I made a little progress on the Waffle Socks. For those of you that are not keeping up, I am finished with the first of this pair. I finished the heel flap and turned the heel last night. I love turning heels; it just seems like magic to me to take flat knitting and make a curved surface out of it. If any of you have heels you want me to turn, send them this way. (I like grafting toes too; I know, it’s a sickness.) I also got the gusset stitches picked up and am ready to rock on the foot.

Sorry that’s a little fuzzy; damn sock must have moved while I was taking the picture.

Last but not least, the lace neck piece for the Audrey sweater. This is just so addictive! The pattern looks like it might be complicated, but it is really easy to knit.

I started out using a lifeline with every pattern repeat. I might quit doing this, as it is easier than I thought it would be to keep track. For the record, I left them all in so you could see. Click on the picture to make it bigger so you can see them. I am using dental floss for this; at the end of each 12 row repeat, I just thread a length of floss through the stitches on the needles. If I screw up badly, I just rip back to the flossed row and put it on the needle, and I have a starting place where I know exactly what row I am on. OK, maybe I won’t quit doing this. It does seem like tempting fate.

So now when my dental hygienist asks if I’m flossing, I can answer truthfully, “YES!”.

By the way, Lucy says “Thanks!” for all the get-well wishes. MEOW!

Progress on Audrey

This has been one hell of a couple of weeks; of the last 20 days, I have worked 16 of them; mostly long, late days. It makes me cranky when I don’t have time to do anything but work, eat, and sleep. Not much knitting progress in the last 2 weeks, but I have finished the major pieces of the Audrey sweater. I finished the second sleeve last night and just have a few ends to weave in. I just got home from work tonight, so though I would love to start that lace border, it would make for a very unpleasant day tomorrow if I stay up till all hours knitting.

I’m blocking the pieces before I sew them together. Somehow the front and back are just a tad bit off as far as measurements. They are the same row count, one is just a bit tighter gauge, I think. Weird. It’s enough to bug me a bit, but not enough to even contemplate re-knitting one piece. I’m hoping blocking will make them closer to the same dimensions. I’ll wait to take new pictures till I can do it in the daylight.

I have a sick kitty…Lucy has been acting very weird the last few days. Normally she is a big lovable chicken and does not go outside much. If she does go out, it’s while we are on the deck, and she stays very close. 2 or 3 nights ago she was out and gone for the longest time. We went scouting around the neighborhood but couldn’t find her. Finally about 10PM she came tearing in the cat door like her tail was on fire and an alien was after her. She has been acting strange since; not eating, hiding in the closet, growling at us when we try to get her to come out. She finally today is starting to come out of it; she ate tonight and drank some milk, and is purring, though now she is hiding out in the pantry. I’m almost thinking she might have eaten something poisonous that made her hallucinate or something. Either that, or the eagles tried to get her and it scared the hell out of her. We talked to a vet friend on the phone and if she is not completely better tomorrow she is off for an appointment so a real doctor can look at her. Think “well kitty” wishes for her.

I promise some knitting progress pictures soon!