Before It Is No More

I was reading on a forum on Ravelry about knitters who still had sweaters they had made decades ago, and it reminded me of one I made in the late 60s, when I was in college.  It took me ten months to make and about ten minutes to ruin.  I did wear it for a few years in between the two events, but when, in my later 20s, I decided I really didn't need to take it to be dry-cleaned, that I could wash it myself in cold water, IN THE WASHING MACHINE, well, that was the end of the sweater as a sweater.

I have taken a few pictures to remember it by, before it becomes a pillow.

The Sweater:

                                                                The Inspection:

What's Under Here?

Must Kill This:

It will soon BE killed, but by me, not by Molly.

I can't believe I was so dumb?  Uninformed?  Young, naive and arrogant?  (This will work because I say it will work.)  All of those, I suppose.

Anyone know of good uses for the sleeves?

You Can Thank Me Later

Because I'm selfish, I want to get rid of the image of what I originally thought to be a hairball that I found this morning. I gagged, picked it up with many pieces of Kleenex, all the while wondering why there was an eyeball looking back at me....... and then I noticed the tail.

Ickkkk...........It was a slaughtered mouse.

I screamed like a little girl, called for DH to take away the remains, and am now sharing this with you in the hopes that doing so will make the picture in my mind GO AWAY!

Now I'm off to NC for pleasanter things.

Have a nice weekend! :-)

Could You Please be Quiet?

I think that is what Cat is saying. He had been asleep on the sofa until Dh began pulling up the vinyl or linoleum or whatever it is on the laundry room floor. It's a noisy project - he has to chip up the edges and then pull and tear the stuff out. Cat is annoyed.

However, the reason that the flooring is coming out is NOT because it's twenty years old and worn (which it is), NOT because I don't like it (which I don't) but because it REEKS....of cat urine. It doesn't have a scent, or a smell, or an aroma. It has a stench.

We have tried every solution to this problem: putting in a second litter box; coating the floor with stuff that didn't get rid of the smell so much as just change the stench to something almost as bad; putting the water dish where he had peed (from the Humane Society site), and feeding Cat outdoors so he could make it to his outdoor bathroom more quickly. But each time, after only a couple of days of success, Cat went back to his new old habit: using the floor as his litter box. He has been to the vet's, had lots of expensive tests, is on cat glucosomine in case his arthritis is a problem, and nothing is working.

So now we (that's the royal we) are ripping out the flooring. We don't know what to do next. DH wants tile, but with tile comes grout, and I see problems with grout absorbing cat pee. I want self-stick, foot-square tiles because if one is damaged, or absorbs you-know-what, it's easy to replace. But the woman at the flooring department at Home Depot said that the self-stick tiles don't stick all that well.

So we're flummoxed.

Maybe drugs (for us or for the cat, whatever works).

Friday Fragments

This is the first time I have written a Friday fragments post on a Friday! I've had Monday editions, and maybe a few other days' editions too; I'm not sure, but the concept was created by Mrs. 4444 over at Half Past Kissin' Time. It's a place for all those partial post ideas that never turned into whole posts. Check her out!

First Fragment:

I big puffy heart my Knit Night knitters! (Hi!) Last night I took in instructions for a new project I’m working on. The book is from England and I just didn’t understand this wording for shaping the sleeves, both of which are knit identically:

Dec 1 st at each end of next 9 rows (ok), then on every foll alt row until 33 sts rem (huh?), then on foll 4 rows (ok), ending with WS facing for next row. 25 st.

The way I understood this, even after reading it over and over, and even aloud once, was that one side of the sleeve would be different from the other. And both sleeves would be identical, so I couldn’t even interpret the directions to mean that I was knitting a right sleeve and a left sleeve.

But I read it aloud to my knitting group, and within just seconds, they understood the directions. The at each end wording applies to all of the decrease rows, not just the first 9 and the last 4. OK!

Maybe my problem is that I’m an English teacher by training, and I parse every word to near-death, or, more likely, I’m just slow when it comes to interpreting instructions…

Second fragment:

Dh has been out of town all week. Yesterday I heard shrieking in the basement, and thought, RATS! My cat has brought in another bird. It sounded like a bluejay. So I closed the door at the top of the basement stairs, opened the door from the basement to the outdoors, and warned dh to check for a bird when he got home. (He usually works in his basement office.)

When this cat adopted us twelve years ago, we put a cat door in the basement door to the back yard. A friend warned us that we would have every creature in the neighborhood in our basement, and I laughed at the idea. Really, would chipmunks, squirrels, and birds learn to use a cat door???

Well, no they wouldn't. What she meant, and what we soon learned all too well, was that the CAT would bring every creature he caught in the neighborhood into our basement. Oh…..

Anyway, dh arrived home when I was at knitting and went into the basement to discover the head – only.the.head – of a rabbit. (Rabbits can shriek; don't ask how I already knew this.)

Oh, yuck. And I’m sorry to share this story with you, but I’m hoping that doing so will take the thought of it out of my head and put it someplace else. Sorry if it’s in yours now…..

Third fragment:

My family makes fun of me for throwing just about everything out, or taking it to charity, when I determine that I have no use for it. A couple of weeks ago I found this shoe belonging to my younger daughter. She just checked her apartment in LA and doesn’t have the mate. So she has chastised ME, saying See what happens when you throw things away.

Well, I have the shoe. She doesn’t have the mate, so just who threw what away, I’d like to know. Huh? Huh?

Fourth Fragment:

The leaves here are starting to turn red. Yay! A pretty fall is ahead.

Oh Rats! Oh Rats! Oh Rats!

My cat just killed, well almost killed, but close enough for horseshoes and hand-grenades, a beautiful male goldfinch. He brought it to the back door, where it is lying, breathing its last breaths.

Maybe the cat meant it as an apology for all the out-of-the-litterbox peeing he has been doing lately, but I would just prefer he use the litterbox, thank you very much. No nearly-dead birds!

I know that this is what cats do, but I hate, hate, hate that they do this.

D*mn.

to swan

My cat has been swanning about the neighborhood since he returned from having a bath at the veterinarian's.

There is nothing true about that sentence. I have always wanted to use swanning about in a sentence but have never had any occasion to, so I decided to just make something up. It's Old English, and I'm older-ish, so maybe that's why I like it so much.

But, speaking of my cat, while I heart my cat, I don't want to wear my cat, if you get my drift. However, if I did want to, here is a business that could make it happen: Pet Yarn Chic.

You can send them your pet's hair/fur/whatever, and they will make it into yarn. Ick, I say, but whatever floats your boat. And if you don't knit, Pet Yarn Chic will supply someone to knit for you.

If my cat would like to swan about, he can; I won't be stopping him to collect his hair to turn into yarn.....

Would you like some wine with that whine?

Yes, please.

While I generally try to be, if not a positive voice in blogworld, at least a neutral voice, today has gotten on my last nerve. Dh is out of town. My two children live in different states. So fair warning: whining ahead.

For a little background, for a few years I have had a friend I'm not especially fond of. She's nice enough. There is really nothing I can put my finger on that would explain my feelings. But I just sort of don't like her much. So last year, I started refusing offers of activities - not all of them - that might seem rude or something. But I hadn't heard from her since the end of last year, and I felt quite satisfied with the painless end of our socializing.

Then on Monday, she called. Could I go see Julie and Julia "today, tomorrow or Wednesday"? Oh great. There really is no way to turn down three days in a row by saying that I am busy all three days; I'm not very good at lying, and actually, that really had been true once last year and her response then had been, "I'm going to think you don't like me." (Gosh, you'd be right.) How very middle school of her.

So I said I could go today. But this morning I was greeted by a puddle in the laundry room and it wasn't from the washing machine; it was from my cat. He has had his "on purposes" in the past, but they were always on throw rugs, never just on the floor. He drinks lots of water, and my first thought was that he might have diabetes since the same thing had happened last week. I made an appointment for 4:30 with our veterinarian, giving me time to get home from the 1:30 movie.
I went out, did errands, and came home to find my friend ringing my doorbell. She said she was bringing me tomatoes. OK. But when I went in the house, I had a phone message, from her, recorded eight minutes before. So she had called, I hadn't answered, and she had assumed...oh, I don't know...that I was screening calls??? (I will now.) And drove over???

She said she would pick me up at 1:00, and she did. But then, instead of putting the car in reverse, she put it in drive and drove. into. my. garage. door, breaking it. Please, just shoot me now.

And then the movie ran long and we had to leave so I could make the vet appointment, and as a result, I don't know how the movie ended. SISTER MERCY!!! (Thanks, Bossy)

My cat doesn't have diabetes, but he may have kidney disease. We will know when the $258 of test results come back.

I don't believe in karma. We live; good things happen, bad things happen. That's what I believe. But really, am I being punished for being happy that the friend I didn't much like and I had gone our separate ways??? Really?????

I'll stop now and won't tell you all about the hand-me-down i-phone that dumped all my contact information. I promise.