another bad kitty

Please meet Another Bad Kitty. A.B.K. was made as a birthday present for my all-time favorite craftista next-door-neighbor Ileana, who has adopted A.B.K. and taken her in when nobody else would.

A.B.K. has several bad habits, including never ever brushing her teeth, drinking the last of the milk and then leaving the empty container in the fridge, leaving the toilet seat up (after drinking from it), kicking kittens, and selling the furniture on Craigslist to get money for beer. She's been a bit of a handful at my house, so I'm hoping that her new friends Applejack and Mr. Henry will model their good behavior skills and maybe even rub off on her a little.

A.B.K. can also be very charming. Her hobbies include blowing fancy smoke rings, playing the drums, mixing cocktails and collecting vintage cars, though I can't imagine where she gets the money for them, unless her squirrel-removal business is more successful than one might imagine. Here's a shot of her after she chased a particularly wily squirrel out of our garden:


and don't come back!

didi

Didi is a wise little cat.

She is the oldest of a litter of one hundred kittens, so she knows all about being a big sister. On Wednesday she'll go to live with her new best friend, who just became a big sister, too. Being a big sister can be tough.



Didi knows about the pressure of having someone smaller who looks up to you all the time, and to never ever bite, scratch or hiss at your younger sister, even when she is a total pain.



And she's a very good listener.

sleepy kitty

Don't let that cat go to sleep!


simon trying to sleep in his cozy new bed

We have to poke the cat every three minutes or so to keep him from going to sleep. This has been challenging since his friends Applejack & Mr. Henry gave him a cozy new cat bed (which he overfills rather blissfully).

Simon is very lonely since Jackie passed. He shows his loneliness by begging for my attention, all day and all night. He follows me everywhere I go, meowing and tugging on my pants. Every time I sit down, he sits on me, unless he's already sitting on HWWLLB.

Night is the worst. At night Simon normally sleeps in the bed next to me, and gets me up about thirty minutes before it's actually time to get up, which I don't mind much. But lately, he needs me to pet him, get up and watch him eat, chase him out the door, etc. etc., about every hour or two, all night long. He's driving me crazy! I look like the parent of a newborn, what with the puffy eyes and the haggard look that says "please kill me now so that I can get some rest."

So we have taken to sleep deprivation to spare my sanity. Whenver it looks like Simon might be drifting off to dreamland, we poke him. He hates it. But since the poking regimen began, I am getting a lot more sleep. Poor Simon's sleep schedule is all out of kilter - and it's almost tolerable.

goodbye, sweet friend

We lost a dear friend yesterday. About a week ago we found out that our sweet kitty Jackie had a big, mean tumor in her belly. Since then she has made a rapid decline, and yesterday we said goodbye to her and buried her in the garden. I can't remember when I've ever cried so much.

About five years ago we moved into a rental house downtown, and she came with the property. Jackie technically belonged to the landlady, but lived outside, and when the landlady moved out of the house, she couldn't catch Jackie. So she became our outside kitty. For about three years we fed her, and slowly she softened up enough to accept a scratch on the head with her dinner. Then one June, she disappeared.

After four months, we had given up hope. She had lived an adventurous life, but we figured some final adventure had taken her away. One night in October, I was fixing dinner and our other cat, Simon, was going nuts at the back door. There was Jackie, cold, hungry, emaciated, covered in parasites, and with a badly injured hind leg.

I've already written the story of how our wonderful neighbor, Dr. D, saved Jackie's life that night, and how she recovered the use of her nearly-severed leg. I haven't written as much about what a wonderful friend Jackie is to Simon, how he became a well-adjusted domestic pet after she came to live with us (after ten years of neurosis worthy of a Woody Allen kitty movie), or how Jackie and HWWLLB became best buddies in our new house. Her favorite thing was to sit with him in his big recliner, and she would always come running when she heard the recliner creak as he sat down.

The last week has been so hard, so sudden. One day she was our happy little housemate, and suddenly she was weak, skinny, starved for affection but unable to eat. Yesterday HWWLLB held her on his lap as she died. She is resting now in our garden, and we have planted a rosebush on her grave, with big juicy rosehips for the birds to enjoy in winter. I scattered sunflower seeds on her grave, and lots of squirrels and birds have been visiting her in her new resting place.

More than once we have joked that Jackie was the spunky, red-headed heroine of a romance novel. She was tough, smart and beautiful, and her life was a series of hair-raising adventures. Last night as I sat at the window looking out at her rosebush, I imagined her walking down the path to kitty heaven, or the kitty ancestral home, or wherever it is that good cats go when they die. Little birds were singing to her and keeping her company along the path. I imagined that somewhere in his mind, Simon might be singing a kitty song to help her find her way, that maybe all the cats in our neighborhood were singing that special song.

Goodbye, sweet friend.

make a nest

I learned something important from our kitty this week: When you're feeling bad, make a nest.

Make a warm little nest in a quiet corner of the house, eat only your favorite things, and don't bother doing things you're supposed to do... just do what feels good.

Her nest is under the bed, and not very photogenic, and it's occupied with someone who is in no mood to have her picture taken, so there's no photo for you. But here's my nest:


tea, knitting and other kitty are all close at hand

This weekend I blew off most of what I was supposed to do, and instead I snuggled into my nest, knitted and listened to music. There was a little baking and cooking, and some quality kitty time, and that's about it.

One of the happy results is that a certain Christmas sweater is finally showing some progress. I had given up on it some time ago, bored to tears with the endless rows of stockinette stitch, but was inspired to picked it up again recently. Stockinette stitch can be tiresome when you are restless or frazzled, but when you are hiding away from the world's ills in your warm little nest, endless rows of stockinette stitch feel just right. Nothing else is calling but 100 more rows of wooly, charcoal gray knit stitches.

P.S.
Thanks for all the virtual hugs over the last few days... I really appreciate them. Hugs back to all of you!

good kitty / bad kitty

Watch out! Someone is waiting to pounce on you!



It's Bad Kitty! Be careful - he has razor-sharp fangs and claws!



Don't worry, he's just showing off. He won't really hurt you - he's too busy planning his next prank on his sister, Good Kitty.



Here she is sniffing flowers. Good Kitty loves flowers, butterflies, unicorns and candy. Her favorite color is pink, and when she grows up, Good Kitty wants to be a ballerina or a veterinarian, or maybe an astronaut.



Bad Kitty and Good Kitty are destined to be birthday presents for Miss Jay, who will be five this week. They are named after her two big lazy kitties at home (they have real names, but Jay has re-named them based on their attitudes towards small children).

Making this pair of sock monsters was a treat, for several reasons. It was my first experience with HWWLLB's fabulous sewing machine, which I have been too nervous to use until now - I guess I was afraid I would break it or something. Ha! That Swiss-made sewing machine laughed at my sock monsters, and they were done in a quiet, blissful blink of the eye. My old machine may never see the outside of the closet again.

It was also fun to make these because all the socks were donated by friends: Mitzi gave me the pink ladybug socks that made Good Kitty's sweater, and Bad Kitty's sweater is made from a pair of HWWLLB's old dress socks. Bugheart recently gave me the boot socks that made both kitties' bodies (and I think I got that green ribbon from her, too).

Bad Kitty's fangs and claws are my first attempt at embroidery in about twenty years (I know I tried embroidery, along with cross-stitch, as a kid). Let me tell you, I suck at embroidery. But I loved it! It was fun to be able to add a bit of detail to the monster - I think I will be doing a lot more of it in future. Check out the embroidery detail on Jaypeg's latest monster - I swoon for it.

I was inspired to embroider after Mitzi came over recently for a mini stitch+bitch and was embroidering on a purse she had knitted. We dug out a bunch of my sewing and crafting books to read about embroidery techniques (it was the first time she had done it since childhood, too). Now I am hooked. And even more in love with the beautiful embroidered things people can make - like the beautiful tea leaf detail my sister added to a shirt she gave me last year. The next sock monster will definitely be full of my sloppy embroidery.


the end

97,000 stitches

I can't believe I went to San Francisco without a camera. What a beautiful city! It was only my second time there. The first time, HWWLLB and I were on a crazy west-coast road trip during which we visited Susanna and Mike, back in the days when they lived in that beautiful city. This time, I was there for a conference - one helluva conference - and sadly there was no free time at all. The only free moments I had were spent eating - once at a pretentious fish place and once at a cheap and delicious Indian restaurant, both times bleary-eyed and late at night, especially by my eastern time zone standards. There was no museum-visiting, vibrating, or even trinket-shopping. There was much listening to presentations, much learning, much networking, and much exchanging of business cards.

There was also much knitting. Very much knitting.

The project that I worked on during this trip: Ann Budd's Pullover Flair from Interweave Knits Spring 2006. Jenn is working on this one, too, so we decided to start a mini knit-a-long for motivational purposes. (You can join!)

I know, we are behind the times. Spring 2006! That was a whole year ago! Luckily, I have never been one to stay on top of things (see how I spin that into an asset?), so the non-timeliness isn't bothering me. I am just excited to use this lovely stash yarn that has waited too long in the yarn cabinet to be taken out and loved. Actually, I did try knitting a cardigan last spring with it, but the Knitting Olympics and some sizing difficulties put the kibosh on it. This time, I counted on the nearly-unbearable tedium of cross-country airline travel to seal this project's fate as a garment, and early indicators point to garment completion in the not-too-distant future.

Yarn: Queensland Collection Kathmandu Aran (a.k.a. Jo Sharp Silk Road Aran). It's mostly merino, with a little silk and cashmere thrown in for fun. I have been daydreaming about knitting something with it for far too long!

Pattern: A highly-modified version of Pullover Flair. I'm knitting it the Icelandic way, bottom-up, all-in-one. It's such a simple pattern, with such elegantly easy shaping, it really lends itself to reworking however you like (I realize as I write this that I may be back soon howling with regret for my lack of caution, but hey - we'll cross that bridge when we come to it).

Is anyone else out there knitting this sweater? Maybe it's just too straightforward and - dare I say it - perhaps a bit boring? But I love simplicity, and I think this is something I'll actually wear quite a lot. If you're knitting it (or thinking of knitting it), pop on over to the knit-a-long and post some photos!

So, the progress: after three days of airports and conference presentations, I calculate that I've put in about 97,000 stitches on this sweater.



That makes most of one torso (from the bottom edge up to the armpits), and the start of a sleeve. Now you know why I didn't have time to go take a cable car.

P.S. Egregious cat photo: Simon helping with the laundry.

undocumented happiness

A bland and colorless missive is being beamed to you today from the desk of this writer. My apologies - the battery charger is non-functioning, and so the camera is powerless to capture pictures of any of the bright and happy things I wanted to share with you today:

• the amazing sock yarn that came in the mail from epicurus
• the vase of marigolds and lavender in a cherry red vase on my kitchen windowsill
• jackie's ever-more-orange fur
• the pile of rubble in the back of red betty
• the hat I'm making for HWWLLB's brother
• a secret-squirrel package for someone far away

All these colors and more could be yours... if I just had some batteries for this camera. Oh well, you can use your imaginations.

The sock yarn is amazing. It fades to color, so it's intense salmon orangey-pink at one end, and almost white at the other end. A slow fade, perfectly packaged in sock-sized balls, two just alike. I can't wait to use it! But it is in line behind some other projects, and I think all the October sock-knitting wore on my wrists a little - I must knit much tighter when using tiny needles. So at the moment I'm taking a break from the wildflower socks to work on the aforementioned hat, which on size 9 needles feels like knitting with broomsticks, but my wrists sure do feel better!

The other thing is Jackie's fur. It is changing color. Jackie got this mysterious sickness back at the beginning of October, where she seemed to have a urinary tract infection, and was also wiping her poopy butt all over everything. It wasn't pleasant. The vet came and gave her antibiotics, and it miraculously went away immediately. Then as soon as the antibiotics were finished, it all started up again. So he came back with stronger antibiotics, and shazam, all gone. Then, as soon as the drugs were gone, the sickness came back. It made no sense at all.

It took me a few days to realize that it wasn't the antibiotics fixing Jackie's problems at all - it was her food. She had been eating dry food for the last year since coming in from her life on the streets to the bosom of our home. But to give her the pills, I had to mash them up and put them in canned food. Over the course of the last year, she has become morbidly obese (up to 14 pounds from a scrawny little starving 4-pounder last year at this time!). Her weight problem was pretty amazing, considering that we really don't feed her very much at all, and as she got fatter we kept cutting her rations, with nothing to show for it but a cranky, tubby cat.

Okay, so then I read some articles about cat nutrition, obesity and urinary problems on the web. As it turns out, urinary and digestive symptoms and obesity can be side-effects of a grain-heavy dry food diet. Most commercial cat foods contain corn, soy and wheat products for bulk, but none of these ingredients belong in a cat's diet (being as how they are pure carnivores), and are quite hard for them to digest, though many cats adapt to it well. But some cats just become obese, while others puke incessantly and become scrawny. Many have urinary and digestive troubles. Dry food is also a lot lower in moisture than canned food, and cats tend to get most of their fluids from their food. Dehydration is a big factor in urinary tract illness.

So the solution presented itself: Jackie is now eating canned food that is pure meat - no corn, no soy and no wheat. Just lots of chicken, organ meats and chicken fat (yum). All her horrible urinary and digestive symptoms are gone, and she looks so much better. She is steadily losing weight, little by little, though if you saw her, I'm sure you would still think she looks pretty chubby. But her hair - it's turning from dusty tan to bright orange! She has always been an "orange" tabby cat, just without much color. Now she looks like the color of a carrot. It is really amazing.

Simon, on the other hand, does quite well on dry food, though he is pretty tubby, too. I kept him on dry food because he drinks plenty of water (I've never seen Jackie at the water dish), but the kind I'm buying now is pure meat (no grains). He too is losing a little weight, and his hair is darker, glossier and silkier to the touch than it was before.

So my pets are off junk food and looking fabulous... wish I could say as much for myself. In fact, we were just discussing getting some beer and Indian buffet for dinner. Sorry I won't be able to take a picture of it, though. I'm sure you can use your imagination.

monday lists

On Friday I was feeling mopey and wrote a long, whiney missive that I'm glad I didn't post. I think the shorter fall days are getting to me. I'm also crazy busy, fighting off a cold and traveling a lot, and these things are adding together with the less-sunlight to equal more frequent BAD MOODS.

I even considered faking sick so that I wouldn't have to get in the car for a long drive to the Nantahala National Forest for HWWLLB's Family Camping Trip this past weekend. Now I'm so glad I pulled myself together - it was a beautiful weekend. Beautiful weather, good company and time outside worked like a tonic on me, and I got some more perspective on the things I was mopey about.

Instead of whining, I'm writing some lists of the good, the bad, and the other. Making lists helps me look a bit more objectively at what's going on in my life and why I feel the way I do, and also, how to feel better. So here we go:

things i miss

• going out to see live music
• drinking tea/coffee in the afternoon with friends (and without having to make an appointment)
• thrift shopping with pals
• unplanned saturdays
• free time
  

people i miss

• essi
• bugheart
• BA henry
• miss daily
• bea
  
• beverly & alex
• grandparents
  

stuff i am really grateful for

• walking to work every day
• yoga
• dinners with my sister
• knitting and artsy-craftsy projects
• fall colors
• HWWLLB
• friends in blogland (and in reality)

a typical dinner with my sis

current projects

• our organization's 20th anniversary
• gentleman's shooting stockings for HWWLLB
• brushed suri & beads scarf for my mom
• some toe-up knee socks for essi
• starting a journal at work
  

recent yarn stash enhancement

• mountain colors sock yarn
• meilenweit sock yarn
• one skein of alpaca cloud to assist the suri scarf/bead interface

the recent sock yarn purchases, clashing happily

some things i have learned more about recently

• short rows
• global climate change
• probability
• the ethics of relationships
• mortgages
  

things my cat has wiped her butt on recently

• the bathroom floor
• my camping chair
• the loopy bath mat

rip & redo

From the beginning, I had a bad feeling. I gauge-swatched, I really did. Maybe the light was dim while I was reading the little window in the ruler... whatever the case, shortly after this photo of Delanna was taken, I tried her on again, this time with the critical eye that had somehow eluded me during previous fittings. Too big. WAY too big.

I re-checked the gauge. Guess what? The gauge was 4.5 stitches to the inch - not 5. And you know, I really didn't like how the cast-on edge looked, and the lace panel was a little too narrow, and... so I ripped her all out.

Sometimes the little plastic ball-winder can be your best friend. In the days before I owned this gadget, frogging was so depressing. After an hour of tearing apart a lovely knitted garment, you'd find yourself covered in a shapeless pile of yarn guts, ready to tangle into a million unworkable snarls at the slightest provocation, adding insult to injury. With the ball-winder you can detatch yourself from the destruction, simply turing a little handle and watching the garment simultaneously unraveling and transforming into neat little cakes of raw material, ready to be knitted again.

So anyway, with the help of the ball-winder and moral support from Paloma (who also had a major frogging event recently), Delanna became yarn cakes. Over the weekend I cast on again and as of Tuesday morning I'm almost back to the point where the carnage began. The fit is much better this time, and the design flaws corrected. If she comes out well I'll post the pattern on a Free Pattern Friday some time.

Meanwhile, the big feline haps this week is a new favorite nap spot, A.K.A. HWWLLB's spot on the couch. He must have softened it up.


yarn carnage be damned - it's nap time.

boob tube

I guess I was feeling left out. I wanted to know what my team-mates were up to.

And then at Sunday Stitch & Belch, which takes place in a bar with big teevees in it, I actually saw some Olympic coverage - women cross-country skiers, in which an Estonian woman won her country's first gold medal - ever. And you know, the humanity, the triumph, the tugged-heartstrings... they all made me feel like I was missing something, you know, with the whole no teevee situation at our house.

So I went up to the attic and dragged down the ten year-old teevee so that I could knit along with the games.

You know what I was missing? Commercials. A lot of fuggin commercials. Holy crap, what a lot of commercials! I guess it's been a while since I spent any time in front of this evil machine - it must be at least 5 or 6 years. I don't think there used to be so many commercials. And I think in the past, they must have shown more skiing, or nudity, or something, that made me sit and stare at this thing for long stretches of time. Look at it, sneering at the books on the shelf next to it. Lording over the side room from its perch atop the cat scratcher - it is an evil machine whose 16 days of glory have arrived.

Speaking of which, here's an Olympic update. Michelle Kwon: OUT! Me: kicking ass!

I am breezing along on this project, despite the multiple froggings I mentioned previously, and um, well, also working on some socks. Because I have to! I can't drag olympic gold along to board meetings with me! But socks... you know how socks like to travel. Plus they're merino (I love merino), and I had never tried this yarn before. It's Knit Picks sock memories, and I'm doing my first lacy sock pattern, thanks to my wonderful Secret Pal who sends me contraband photocopied knitting book patterns (she's the coolest).

I don't have any sock pictures for you (not much to see yet), but here are some shots in the Olympic update genre:


day two day three (I know it's day four now, but I didn't actually knit today)

And a parting shot of Jackie. I think I still feel so sad for Jackie because she lived outside starving for so long and hardly ate anything, and then went through the terrible ordeal, and in my pity I have been overfeeding the heck out of her! Golly, look how dag fat this cat is getting! She looks like a suckling hog! HWWLLB kept calling her fat and admonishing me for giving her treats, but I guess I was blind to it all, until tonight. For some reason the scales suddenly fell from my eyes (she was sitting with her rather rotund rear end pointed at me), and I realized that our poor little wastrel was becoming morbidly obese. We must cut back on the kibble before she goes to the vet in two weeks - they aren't going to believe it's the same kitty. Hey - you've replaced your cat with a pumpkin! We're going to have to charge double!