So one more to go! Haven’t started on the left one yet…
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Book was a quick read – it’s not very long, and I’m pretty lazy today. I zipped right through it, occasionally pausing to read lines aloud to The Boy as he nodded and kept on with his video game. Wedded bliss, I tell ya. He has seen the demoralizing effect that sleeves can have on me – the dreaded “Escape from Sleeve Island” that Never Seems to End… And then it does. This is why I come back to socks. Second Sock Syndrome has nothing on Sleeve Island. Which reminds me, I have a second sock problem right now. The first sock was supposed to be evocative of a campfire, but instead resembles disco earthworms. Pix later to prove this point. I’ve never read a Yarn Harlot book (though I just bought a few for my Kindle, so I’ll get to them eventually). This time, though, I took some advice from Scalzi and started reading Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously At any rate – so far the book is pretty good. As a knitter, I totally understand where she’s coming from, yet it doesn’t have the treacley “we’re connected to the earth and generations before us” bullshit that I always fear in these kinds of books. We’ll see if I still like it when I’m finished reading. In preparation for Stitches West – I’m pretty sure I’m going next weekend – I decided to inventory all my needles. This took longer than it should, because I’m pretty disorganized when it comes to my needles and this inventory turned up some still missing. The setback: I discovered that after all my careful swatching and swatch-washing and gauge measuring… I cast on using the wrong size needles. Ugh. The good news? I was only on round 18. So back to the beginning on the gloves, but I’m not feeling defeated (yet). … that you just had to make it? I hate swatching. Hate it. But for this lovely, it is a necessity. I’m going to make these:  Squee! They're beautiful! Out of this amazing yarn from Karrie:  It's even prettier in person. I know! They’ll be perfect perfect PERFECT… if I can just through all this swatching. I’ve been laid up a bit with a tweaky back (and now a tweaky knee to boot). I haven’t looked at my phone since yesterday. Instead, I spent most of the day on the couch, chill pack on the knee, watching The Boy play Uncharted 2. VERY good story work on that game – plus excellent VO and mocap. I see why it got such high ratings just looking at the production values. I got a few inches of the FLS completed today as well… but I’m ready do get back to work! Link to the iPhone cozy pattern and associated tutorial are now updated. For the past three jobs, I’ve had basically the same start-the-workday routine.
So predictable… After living with us for as long as we’ve been married – that’s since 1996, for those of you who are counting – Natasha the tortoise died in July last year. This was a nasty, nasty shock. I expected her to outlive all of us. ALL of us. She was supposed to make it to 75 years old easy… and yet, suddenly, she was gone. Here’s the thing about Natasha: she was kind of loud to live with. The tortoise loved to dig. Unfortunately, her tank wasn’t very deep, yet she persisted. This led to the droning, 1 Hz thump of Natasha attempting to dig through the bottom of her tank to deeper, cooler ground. She had laser-like focus on digging. Thump…. Thump…. Thump…. And so on. Visitors never failed to comment on it. We didn’t really notice it after awhile, but on a warm day it was just constant thumping coming from Natasha’s tank. Cory and Jen suggested that Natasha was actually my role model – following her lead, I was just as tenacious even in seemingly pointless situations. Thump… Thump… “We can be better than this, we just have to look at it from a different angle…” Thump… I suppose they had a point. One morning in July and without warning, The Boy went downstairs to feed the tortoises and Natasha was gone. Just gone. No warning, no symptoms we had noticed. It was sudden and terrible and heartbreaking. I didn’t see her after it happened. The Boy cleaned everything up (my request) and by the time I came downstairs, both Natasha and her home for the past 13 years were cleared away.
We waited for the third. When it still hadn’t come out three weeks later, Nausicaa was back at the vet for another check-up. The egg was still in there, so another round of hormone shots was called for. This was serious. If that egg didn’t come out, it was going to kill her. In the end, that’s what happened. Despite her excellent veterinary care and many baths, the egg broke up and poisoned her. It wasn’t the total shock that we had with Natasha, but still terribly disappointing. For the first time in our marriage, there are no pet tortoises to nom up our leftover apple cores and lettuce hearts. No idea when I’ll be ready to bring home another tortoise. I’m just not ready to think about it yet. |
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. I’m a little more than halfway through, and so far I have to say that the author does a pretty good job of expressing both the comfort and the nuttiness that comes when you give yourself over to string and needles. I’m not like her: I’d never commit to finish a Starmore. I just… well, okay. If I ever do decide to go that route, y’all can call me out on it. But I just don’t think I have the stick-to-it-iveness to really push all the way through one. I can see me tackling a Kaffe Fassett pattern before a Starmore, and even that’s not particularly likely.
