The Dog Days of Fall

I call this "Elphie with Evil Ears"

So, Niki's colitis has resolved. But. Thursday night, after I got home from knitting, I noticed that Niki was coughing a little. Around 11 PM, it got worse. *Cough, cough, gag, wet sound*. No barf. Repeat every 5-10 minutes. To add insult to Niki's injury, we trained him to throw up outside on the patio (smart, right?), which meant that he didn't get any sleep because he was still amped up from running outside.

When he tried to get comfortable to try and sleep, it was almost funny. He was so frustrated that he would go and "fluff" one of the dog beds, and growl under his breath at it, decide that it just wouldn't do and move to the other dog bed. (We have two dogs, so we have two dog beds.) It would have been funny if he wasn't so tired and uncomfortable.

At 11:30, I took our Dog Book of Doom (the Home Veterinary book) to try and figure out how to alleviate his discomfort. I checked his throat to see if something was stuck, and nothing was. I called the Emergency Vet. "Hi, I brought my dog in on Sunday, and he's coughing. I can't see anything in his throat, and he just sounds terrible. Should I bring him in?" I ask. "No, he probably picked up kennel cough here on Sunday," she replies. "But they're vaccinated for that," I say. "It's a different strain. Just take them to your regular vet in the morning." So, six hours (and fifteen minutes of sleep) later, we went to the vet, and the dogs got industrial strength cough syrup and antibiotics.

Sleep is bliss.

What once was lost, now is found...

This morning was a coup. Not only did I leave the house in time to get my ribs put back where they belong (ahem, spinning hunched over to the side is pretty bad for you), but two other terrific things happened.

I found an elusive tube of lipstick. I've been looking for it for almost a month. It was in the very bottom of the purse.

And.

MY WALLET TURNED UP!!!

[Props to Mom.]

On Monday, when it first decided to try a day in the life of sitting on the chair, Andrew was digging in my purse, after Mom and I had given it (ahem) several thorough cavity searches.

"If you find my wallet in there, I won't buy yarn for a year," I said, confident that it wouldn't be found.

For some reason, he was very motivated to find my wallet in my purse. He may have even tried willing it to appear.

I can't imagine why.

The Root of All Evil

That's right, you heard it here first! Coming in October 2547:

Hellraiser XXVI, The Root of All Evil
Sometimes, turnips just go bad.

[I won two prizes in the Turnip carving contest at work, which were 4 movie tickets. That's like $7000, last I checked.]

Never a dull moment

First, Niki is doing much better. Our vet is the BEST, and answered all of my neurotic, web-search induced worries. If you live in the Santa Clara/San Jose/Campbell/Los Gatos area, ping me and I'll send you her info.

Niki has colitis, which is much less serious in dogs than in people. Phew. The antibiotics are working wonders, and once this course is done, his colitis will be gone.

Monday, after I returned the rental van, my wallet diappeared. Poof! Gone. Fortunately, nothing irreplaceable was in there (except for some cash, but still, not a huge amount), and so far, nobody has tried to charge anything.

The drag is that I have to get my driver's license replaced. The credit cards are easier. So are the library cards, my Barefoot coffee card, Costco card, and the other stuff I use once every million years.

Upside? I'm going to the DMV first thing in the morning, with my hair done, makeup ON, and ready to be photographed.

In more topical (and fun) news, you can bet I've been spinning. I finished plying and set the Wild Thing:

Here is my next sock-spinning project- it's Crown Mountain's "Twist and Shout". I'm spinning it on the Victoria:

This last one is "Berry Patch" from Angora Cottage. I'm spinning it on the Schacht for a sweater:

Every day a little doo…

[WARNING: This blog post is about dog health. If you're squeamish, skip this post.]

Sunday was a hard day. I got up on the early side, and Linda and I started to make brunch plans. Niki was running around, being his normal self, and I caught a glimpse of something in his butt fur.

I took a closer look, and it was blood. I woke Andrew, called the emergency vet, and collected a sample of bloody diarrhea from the backyard. I checked Elphie, but she was all clear, so off we went to the emergency vet.

The emergency vet is not a good place to be, ever, and that's really frightening. Especially when you're holding a bag of bloody dog poop.

Niki was really good with the vet, who suggested that the bleeding may have been caused by stress, or trying too hard to poop. You know, straining. We were sent home with instructions to keep an eye on him and bring him back if he got worse. We felt much better.

This whole time, Niki is his usual self. No fatigue, no change in behavior, NOTHING. That was the most unnerving thing.

An hour later, there was significantly more blood. Back we went to the emergency vet, where they ran a bunch of tests on his poop and his blood. The first good news that they rushed to tell us was that there was no problem with his coagulation (woo!). Next, the vet came out and gave us a list of what could be the cause of the bleeding.

The list included:

-Hemorrhagic GastroEnteritis (possibly caused by bacteria)
-Colitis
-A parasite

She also mentioned that the bacteria could have come from pig's ears, and the top two could be caused and/or aggrivated by stress.

Strangely enough, the treatment for all three was antibiotics. We've already seen an improvement in how much blood there is in his stool, and it also appears to be firming up.

A Quarter Of A Century

On Saturday, we celebrated my 25^th birthday Minion-style: we went on a ROAD TRIP! After a fair amount of haggling and wrangling, we ended up with a Christian Youth Group style van (seats 13) for a song. (The best part about renting this van was seeing people's faces when I was driving it. I look about 14 without makeup, and here I was, commandeering a land yacht.)

See how comfy everyone is? They had to be- to get to Sacramento, it's a 2 ½ hour drive each way.

You might wonder why we would choose Sacramento- I would, too. Franklin Habit was there doing a shoot for his 1000 Knitters project. How cool is that?! The Minions were all good sports, and the ride up and back went as smoothly as anything could. (Well, it could have been a smoother ride. Colleen may have caught some air after we hit some of the bumps on the freeway.)

We got to Sacramento around noon, found the building where the shoot was scheduled at and went and had lunch at a terrific Mexican restaurant. Not only was the food great, but you could order ceviche by the POUND. I did. It was glorious. Then, by some act of evil Minionage, this happened.

Sombreros. Singing. Startling. When I find out who did this, there will be a proportionate response.

We went to the shoot, and Franklin charmed each and every one of us. I didn't know that most of the Minions don't like to be photographed, but evidently, he managed to immediately put everyone at ease. As always, we have a shot of the Minions with Franklin, and Franklin with my sock.

I have to admit, I was completely uncool. I was so star-struck that my brain just froze. Franklin asked what the yarn was, and my brain went BLANK. I stammered. I don't STAMMER!

I looked at the yarn, and I started talking. "She has a 'C' name… She does that wonderful silk…"

Finally, Mom saved me with "Claudia?"

"Yes! Claudia!"

Ok, I can remember where, when, and how much I paid for yarn. I can usually tell you the yardage from memory. I may not know what today's date is, but I KNOW my yarn!

All-in-all, it was a pretty terrific 25^th birthday celebration.

[Here is a shot Rachel got of me during the 1000 Knitters shoot:]

Updates, Earthquakes, and Headaches

I am a terrible blogger. I let work get in the way of the blog. But, until this blog turns into a book deal, off to work I go. Part of what keeps me from blogging is lack of photos.

Until about a year and a half ago, this was a text-only blog. BO-ring! I find that I like reading blogs that have pictures better, and I don't want poorly lit, blurry pictures. I try to keep my photo quality high; I do decent work, and I want it to be an accurate representation online. Some of you readers don't see me in person, so what's the use of posting a crappy picture?

I normally try to take pictures when the light is good, which is increasingly challenging as the days become shorter. Still, I do my best.

I've begun plying "Wild Thing", which is now 75% superwash merino, 25% silk (for you who don't like math, that's 3 plies of the Crown Mountain, one of the Susan's Spinning Bunny Silk). It's a light fingering weight, which just means that I need to chill out when I'm spinning.

I'm still fixated on lace, but one of my projects is making me want to rip out my hair. I'm not going to go into detail, but how can SUCH a simple lace pattern require so much brainpower?! I have 8 repeats to go, plus edging. This is totally do-able. I just have to do it.

I was the lucky recipient of an Alison (yes, that Alison!) shawl. I think the yarn is Lisa Souza's superwash, in Valentine. The pattern is "Bigfoot", which is on my list of things to start. Photos of the shawl are pending. When I showed Mom the shawl I said, "MINE. You have your own Alison shawl."

I've been working on the Argyle 2 socks, which bleed like a mofo and turn my hands blue, but I'm down to the heel on #2, so those are almost done. A guy at the chiropractor's office commented on it.

"Wow, you'd think you came to the chiropractor to knit," he says, looking at my sock. Yeah, we'd been waiting for maybe 15 minutes.

"It keeps me patient," I say, "This whole sock has been knit while I've been waiting in different places."

He looks at the sock, and huffs at the tangibility of (what I like to call) "line-time". ("Line-time" is like the space-time continuum, but different. It's full of physics.)

"There's no getting around waiting; at the end I'll have a pair of socks," I said, feeling very Zen about the whole thing.

A few hours later, the earth shook below our feet (5.6!), and I learned that instant messenger won't crash when everyone is on it, but the phones will. After trying to get in touch with people by phone for an hour, I assumed my friends and loved ones were fine, and went back to watching TV and plying.

I'm all heart, I know.

Sometimes you just have to suck it up

I won't lie to you.

I'm officially bitter about not going to Rhinebeck. (This would be a side effect of reading all the knit/spinning bloggers who are posting about it.) I know, deciding to buy the new house was the better choice. Better? Yes. More fun? No.

I don't like making choices. It's true; given a choice between two desserts, I'm most likely to order both, buy both blouses, or two fleeces. I especially don't like making responsible choices that will directly impact my future.

I know that I don't need any more roving or yarn. I know. But I waaaaaant more.

Temptation has been waving it's nasty little self under my nose: Crown Mountain has their new colors up, and there are like 20 that I desperately want. (Let's do the math, folks: 20 x 19 = 380.) That's not happening for a while.

To be fair, at the pace I'm spinning the stuff, one bump has taken me close to three weeks of nightly spinning. That's the downside of spinning it at a sub-fingering weight, but it SOOOOO pretty that way. It's also not the only roving I own- though, I technically have MUCH less roving than yarn. You know, since roving turns INTO yarn, it's all a destructive cycle, but I digress.

I could, forseeably, spin all the roving I have in the next year, barring new roving/wool purchases. At one point, during what I like to refer to as Jasmin's Spinning Resurgence, I really did run out of roving, and Mom brought me a box of roving that she had bought more than TEN years ago. I plowed through some of that, but I still have about 2 lbs of that left.

Being a grown-up totally sucks sometimes. So does logic.

Catching up and catching my breath

So, this last week or so has been pretty long. I don't like to use the blog as a complaint forum (Hello? That's why I have a knitting group!), so I apologize if this sounds like a litany of woes.

Saturday (10/13) we attended a 75^th birthday party for Andrew's uncle. We drove all the way to Grass Valley, and stopped at two incredibly underwhelming yarn shops. In Sacramento, we went to Rumplestilskin, where I bought an out-of-print book. That was it. They had some boring yarn and disappointing roving. The up side was that Andrew got a good look at what a Saxony-style wheel looks like, and I think my next wheel will be a pretty Saxony.

In Grass Valley, we went to a very "stylized" yarn shop, where I wasn't enthused by any of the yarn, and left without buying anything. The fun side of this was that I managed to talk my way into a "closed" yarn shop.

The party was interesting; there's nothing like family to make you appreciate your friends. I wasn't really keen on the seven hour round-trip, but it was better for us to come home and sleep in our own beds and rest on Sunday.

Andrew and I both got pretty sick after that, and spent the better part of last week sick. As we both started to feel better, we decided to go and clean out the townhouse. When I went to gather the cleaning supplies, I noticed a stream of water coming from the water heater.

Fortunately, the home warranty is covering most of it (the expensive part), and we were only without hot water for two and a half days.

I've been actively updating my Ravelry page (I'm "cuteknitter"), so that means there are more photos for the blog as well.

In doggie news, we discovered last night that Niki has lost his ID tag with his name, address, and our phone number. Elphie's is firmly in place, but somehow Hairy Houdini managed to lose JUST that one tag. He still has his "I'm microchipped" tag, rabies tag, and the tag from the rescue. But still.

We've been doing some extra obedience and dominance work with Elphie, which has drastically improved her behavior.

As far as my crack-tastic dreams are concerned, I dreamt that there was a wasp-feeder in our house (like a hummingbird feeder, but you know, for wasps), it was at the top of the vaulted ceiling (which we don't have), and they were the size of Iranian cockroaches.

For knitting content, I'm working on a bunch of socks, my Ribbi Cardi is currently a Ribby Halter, and I pulled yarn out of my stash to cast on the Tangled Yoke Cardigan.

My spinning has been going slow, but that seems to be the consequence of spinning singles that (when 3-plied) are a light fingering weight. It's not good for my project ADD, and I MAY be doing some slightly self-defeating things along the way. Like weighing my bump before I start, and at the end of a disk of Six Feet Under (ahem, 3-4 hours), and noticing that I've only spun 6 grams. Andrew is discouraging the weighing. I can't help it. I need to see progress.

Here's the finished Big Yellow Taxi:

Here's the Wild Thing:

So, to leave you on a more positive note, I got moved to an awesome cube at work, which is bigger than my last cube, gets natural light, and has a view of the window. It has improved my mood something fierce, and I'm not dreading coming into the office anymore. I still hate traffic and EVERYONE who drives on 101.

Except for you. Y'all are awesome.

A Genius With A “J”

I may be, without a doubt, the most absent-minded person who ever lived.

I check the weather every day, sometimes, several times a day. I could tell you last week that it was going to rain last night. Did I remember to roll up the windows that I left cracked?

No.

Did I realize this when I got into the car this morning?

Yes.

Do I have a wet spot on my pants from sitting in a damp seat?

You betcha.