Mail and a clueless male

First, and coolest in my opinion, my yarn came from Phyl's Central Park Footie Contest!! The color is actually a very earthy brown and I love it!! Plus, it's Opal, which is one of my favorite yarns, and it's solid (which I didn't know Opal did).


I think I might make these socks. They're subtle enough to wear to work on the few days when I can't wear jeans and more colorful socks, but interesting. Or maybe these.


In addition to the above mail, we also had a clueless male in the house. Jo was trying to make the bed today, and Sly was not taking the hint. So, Jo pulled the sheets off the top half of the bed and pushed them towards the Sly.


Since this didn't do anything, she pulled the covers down a bit further and started to cover the boy. This earned her a look, but no immediate movement.


Jo was hopeful that this dirty look would turn into action, so she left him alone for a few minutes and then found this:


...a boy kitty with his eyes closing to go back to sleep. *sigh* He was promptly removed from the bedroom and the bed was remade with clean sheets.

We won!!!

Well, okay.... Tribble won, but I reap the benefits since bunnies don't knit. :) Phyllis informed me last night that Tribble won a prize in the Central Park Footie Contest. The prize is yarn, but I won't know what until it gets here. Tribble won for the furriest foot and has spent a fair amount of time over the last 24 hours chattering at her bunny friends. I'm pretty sure she's telling them that she may be little, but they haven't won any prizes. Smart bunny!

In other news, I've been working on preemie hats for Chell's challenge. I've got six done so far, and I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to sneak in any more before the end of the month. I've got the time, I'm just unwilling to buy more yarn for this and the appropriate part of the stash is kind of buried behind a few pieces of furniture that haven't made it back into the bedroom now that the new floor is installed. *sigh* We'll see. Maybe if tomorrow is as cold and nasty as it's supposed to be and I work from home, I'll use my breaks to try to get to the rest of the stash and dig through it. Wish me luck. ;)

Cats and quizzes

So the Harlot's post today was about her cat and how she helps with baths. I had to laugh, because Sly has to inspect the tub after I use it. He has never done this for J, just me. After I open the bathroom door, he stalks in (I can't believe you locked me out!), puts his paws on the edge of the tub so that he can make sure there's no water left, and then hops in and inspects every inch of the tub. He occasionally even stops to lick the tub. Weird!

Also, saw this quiz today:

You paid attention during 91% of high school!

85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don't get scores that high! Good show, old chap!

Do you deserve your high school diploma?
Create a Quiz

and was somewhat surpised at how well I did. :)

Let's see... knitting content - I spent some time working on the second Dashing (for me) today. For some reason, my hands don't like this pattern. I'm using the same yarn on the same size needles (Cascade 220 and size 6) to make J's mittens and that doesn't bother me at all. I've had to take frequent breaks, so even though the pattern is simple and fairly small, it's taking me forever! I'll try to get pictures up soon.

The first official FO of 2008

Earlier this month, I found a very nice pattern for a pair of two-color mittens. The pattern looked complex enough to be interesting, but not enough to be intimidating. (Scroll past the Finnish at the top and you will find English instructions.) I grabbed some stash yarn and tried the pattern out, mostly to see if my ability to manage gauge while knitting with two colors had improved from my last attempt. Amazingly enough, it had! Since I didn't really like the stash colors, I promptly wandered out to Joann's where Paton's Classic Merino was on sale. I wanted to do the mittens in red and navy to match my jacket, but ended up with red and black. A few days of knitting later and I have these:

I love these mittens! They aren't perfect, but I don't care. I'm sure the next pair will be better, but considering how absolutely horrid my tension was on my last stranded project I count this project as a major success. The corrugated ribbing on the cuff is very even, it's mostly at the change from front to back that I can see the tension issues. *shrug*

I'm not sure how Celtic this pattern is, but it's fun, easy, and knit up very quickly on size 8 needles:



The palm pattern was harder to knit and took me through the end of the second mitten to finally figure out the repeat in the pattern.


I'm wearing these to work tomorrow and I'll find out how warm they are then. It's supposed to be bitterly cold, so warm woolen mittens will be a Good Thing.

On Bunny Thumpers and Cat's Paws

I can't believe it's really been 5 months since I last posted! Life got a little crazy around here with my job changing (same job, just different duties), a critical volunteer in the bunny group leaving, and some health issues. Now that all of that seems to be under control I'm back and will try to do better. :)

While reading Kris' blog I learned about a "bunny thumper" contest and was all excited... And then I learned that "bunny thumpers" are part of a cat's back foot. After some sweet talking, I did manage to get Sly, the new boy cat who came to live with us a few months ago, to agree to let me near his foot with a ruler and a camera. The result:



Since it only seemed fair to include real bunny thumpers in the picture, I snagged Tribble and took a shot of her dainty little foot:



The fuzzy feet obscure the reading, but her foot comes in at a dainty 2.5 inches. Although, now that I think about it, her foot is 2.5 inches and she weighs about 3.5 pounds and Sly's foot is 5.5 inches and he weighs about 15 pounds.... Perhaps her foot isn't the dainty one after all.

Victory over the mouse!!!

We actually got the mouse to move out a couple of weeks ago, but I've been insanely busy and forgot to blog about it. The mouse went through 4 traps - as in ate them and made them not usable any more. We then bought a couple of metal live traps but Mr. Mouse refused to use those. I'm sure I could have dusted for prints and found little mousey paw prints all over it.... *sigh* Then J found a cool Smart Mouse Trap online. We ordered a couple early on in the mouse escapades, hoping that we wouldn't need to use them and would just have them on hand for the next time we got invaded. Since Mr. Mouse was still living in the basement when the traps arrived, I set them out. Six hours later J came upstairs and got me so that I could check out the weird noise coming from the basement. Sure enough - we had caught us a mouse! I promptly drove him out to a nearby island and let him go; after giving him a sharp reminder that not all houses would try to catch him humanely for several weeks and would probably just resort to poison or kill traps. *grin* Who knows if he understood me or not, but I feel better about it.

Mystery Stole progress

I love this pattern! The pictures aren't awesome, but the stole looks amazing. I did block the stole out to see how long it is so that I could decide if I wanted to add or delete any length during clue 4. I've never blocked lace before and, like darn near everyone else, I am amazed at the difference. Here's the progress so far (with 3 lifelines - the white bits across the top).



In other news - the mouse is now up to 4 points to my 0. The little snot has destroyed 4 traps and now that we switched to metal traps he is avoiding them. At least he's not coming upstairs like he was before I switched to metal traps. *growl*