And you thought Big Brother was the worst that could happen? Think again.

Ah, yes. So here I am continuing the new tradition of a blog a month. Frankly, it's a sucky tradition and it needs to change. And it will. Soon. But, babies, such a tale have I to tell!

(No, I did not drive through the garage door. I didn't, okay? Give me some credit. And no, I did NOT have another work computer monitor almost spontaneously combust on me again. Oh. I've not told you that story? Never mind, then. It was nothing. Really. coughilovemynewflatscreenmonitorthoughcough)

Anyway, on to the tale. Do you have someone to snuggle? A good blankie and piece of comfort knitting ready for the scariest parts? Perfect. Then let us begin.

The Harlot's been talking about them for years. You know who I mean. Those fiber-stealing felons who make off with freshly-washed fleece.

Those squirrels. The plotters.

Well, the little suckers decided to kick it up a notch in my case. Not content to sit about and hope that I would eventually get round to washing fleeces and laying them out to dry, they instead planned the ultimate Home Invasion.

The little blighter who volunteered for the mission came down the chimney a la Tom Cruise, no doubt doing spins and twirls that would make a ballet dancer proud. I fear my hope that it whacked its little head a million times on a tumbling trip down is all in vain.

I know this because its wee iPod was playing the theme music from Mission Impossible. I thought I had dreamed the music when I awoke in the dead of night, but clearly it was real. Beside, we found its little harness and pulley contraption dangling in the chimney after the horror had ended, and a tiny helmet underneath the wood. It was prepared, damn it.

I walked out in the morning, unaware that it had tossed all the wood in the fake fireplace hither and yon. I also failed to notice that the fireplace's glass door had been skillfully jimmied open just a tad.

I did, however, notice that the curtain and rod which hang over the small window behind the TV were knocked askew. (Remember that window? I sure do.) I was puzzled by that, but as I was running close to being almost-but-not-quite-late, I simply rehung the curtain and left.

My only excuse for such somnolent behavior, such blatant disregard for the massively glaring signs of badness approaching was that I had to have been subjected to some kind of gas that fogged my thinking. Probably something made from fermented acorn mash. (Did I mention the tiny spray bottle we also found? I didn't? How did I neglect that?)

Any idea what a grey squirrel, when left alone in a house for eight hours, gets up to?

A freakin' lot. That's what. A howling group of sugar-crazed preschoolers intent on scattering every toy in the house had nothing on this guy.

(I could have taken pictures, but quite frankly, I'm trying to erase the images from my mind. It's not working, mind you, but I am trying.)

Lamps were overturned. Books tossed. Magazines scattered. (I think it tried a taste-test lick on several pages of Spin-Off.) The clean dishes had paw prints on them and the apples on the counter had been seriously terrorized. It took time to play several games and then neglected to put up the pieces. Woodwork had chew marks galore. Anything that could be made a mess of was.

Anything, that is, EXCEPT the yarn. Yes, I know. You've been clutching your comfort knitting so tightly you bent your metal needles, terrified of what had befallen the stash. But be of good heart. All is well.

I have the yarn stored in tins on a high shelf. But after viewing the rest of the house, I've no doubt that that presented little obstacle. They knew what they were about when they sent their lone rodent in.

I also know how well they planned because my ever-brave Thing 2 caught the rodent in the act. She strolled into my room just as it was getting ready to shoot its little grappling hook up onto the shelf.

It was that close.

Instead of a quick zip up a nylon rope, it reverted to "look I'm a cute woodland creature" behavior and made a dash across her feet into the enclosed porch, where, unfortunately, all the book boxes are stored, not to mention the games and crafts cabinet. It had been there before, as I have mentioned, and clearly thought it an excellent place to hide.

With great presence of mind, Thing 2 shut the door behind it, trapping it. The Things conferred, then opened the door just a bit and rolled the last untouched apple into the room after it. They watched as it pounced on the poor apple from above, clearly worried that it only had .5 seconds to pull the right seeds out and deactivate the cleverly concealed bomb. Satisfied it had secured the area, it retreated.

Wanna know the mood of a secret agent squirrel after it's been trapped for an hour? Bit shirty, to say the least.

And did you know that a squirrel, after being subjected to routing from hiding places in an effort to get it out the porch door which leads to freedom, will obstinately hide behind a curtain and growl really, really loudly?

Like, really loudly.

Eventually, we left the apple near the open door and tiptoed away. And the agent, accepting defeat, vanished into the night, dragging its apple-bomb behind it as proof of its ordeal. Or maybe as a palliative to the rest of the squad for the loss of all that G. I Joe gear. Think of the hand-to-paw combat they had to go through to score that. I mean, seriously.

When faced with that much destruction to clean up, I did the only sensible thing.

I knit.

One very UFO double knit scarf has reached the proper length.



The train in being duplicate stitched on. New matching mittens (with trains, of course) to follow, as Thing 4 says the other mittens are getting tight. I'll be using this pattern (Rav link). (And I'll be twisting all the knit and purl stitches on purpose! Knitting wrongly deliberately! My favorite!)

And I'll be vigilant. Because you know how they are...

Sunday, Catholic-style Guilt--A Day Late

Yes, it's Monday. For another hour and forty-eight more minutes, anyway.

And no, I'm not Catholic. I'm Lutheran. But ask anyone who has attended Lutheran schools growing up and if they're honest, here's how they'll define a Lutheran:

We're disgruntled Catholics.

Sure we threw out purgatory, Latin, and those pesky saints (though we keep them for our school names, a dichotomy I've never quite figured out) and other such things we couldn't be bothered with, but we kept the guilt.

And here the blog promised, away and far ago, updates on the ongoing projects. (This was before the blog took a job-hunting hiatus. You know how busy blogs can get.)

Puesdo-Catholic guilt hit hard on Sunday (as all good guilt should) and thus produced results with me on Monday (my life tends to work like that).

So, pictures and updates.

Totally unblogged but were-meant-to-be blogged baby hats for charity for the Yarn Harlot's Tour. I knitted two, Thing Two knitted one (the blue one, if you couldn't guess).

Mind you, I didn't actually get to see the YH speak. I was at Thing Four's vocal concert with Thing Three keeping me company in the audience. (Songs and poems that were all about food. Not to be missed.) Thing Two, with Thing One as a non-knitter chaperone, went in my stead to laugh. (And even Thing One found the talk funny. That gives me hope. He's the only one I have left to corrupt...)

The pretty, pretty self-patterning sock yarn did arrive at the YH event in time for the signing, though, and it had its photo op. (Please ignore the non-Harlot person in that picture. Not only does she suffer from frozen smile-itis each time a camera is pointed in her direction, she also has been experiencing what can only be termed as a bad hair lifetime.)

The train hat, in its third and final incarnation, with some previously unblogged mitten buddies. Both hat and mittens, especially mittens, are already much battered by winter wearings (since winter went long this year), a tendency of the Bernat yarn to pill and many tussles between the mittens and their Velcro-ized brethren in the mitten bin. (Damn Velcro anyway. We hates it, we do.) So yeah, I should have gotten pictures the day they were done and still shiny and new. I guess I can say they look well-loved instead, right?

The mittens, of which 1 and 3/4 were knit in one bizarrely fast--for me--day (last 1/4 completed the next day), aren't technically done. They still need the trains duplicate stitched on. (That should be fun as all get out. Anybody want to guess the number of times I'll fuse the two sides of the mittens together? Me neither.) I promised to line them as well. Midwestern winter winds are cold. And of course, he's getting a tubular scarf, one side red, one side blue, trains across each end in the same pills-from-hell producing yarn.

Maybe I'll make him a whole new set this summer. The pillish ones can be backup.

Hat for the daughter. Yeah, I snuck that one in. First official cable job. Discovered something there. I can have a glass of wine or two and cable blithely along. I cannot cable and chat at a family gathering at the same time, though. Not. At. All.

The pretty, pretty self-patterning yarn. Again. Apparently its appearance with the Yarn Harlot wasn't enough. It wants more face time. (Quite the blog pig, if you ask me. I guess I shouldn't tell it that Thing Two and I have named it the Sockey Monkey Butt Socks, because the heel reminds of said part of a sock monkey's anatomy--hey, it sounded funnier than Sock Monkey face/mouth/nose socks. We tried all variations, just to be sure. Sock Monkey Butt Socks was the decided fav.)

And bwa ha ha! I have defeated SSS; see? There's the second and all it's fighting now is the deadline knitting. (The since finished birthday shawl and bookmark; the definitely NOT finished baby-to-be-birthdate gift and gift for baby-to-be's big sis, whom I suspect will be a bit put off at the interloper moving in on her grandparent adoration territory. She's getting a bunny with a trousseau that is beginning to make me jealous. Someone hit me on the head with stitch dictionary the next time I get grandiose ideas, okay?)

What makes me happy, though, is that I managed to match up the patterning; I was only one stitch off (and was able to hide that one white stitch on the cuff with the dark tail of the yarn). This means that I don't have to count rows; when the pattern gets past the next block of pinkish tan, I switch to my heel work.

My little Frankensocks, made from yarn which is not really sockish in nature. Erm. Yes. Well. The two-at-once Frankensocks are still on the agenda, but not on the needles. I decided to practice with cheapo yarn in different colors. This, I felt, would make me more confident when having to switch back and forth with yarn that looked the same. And so they've been pushed even farther down the line, what with deadline knitting and de-feeting SSS (ha ha ha).

But I've got a long bus trip coming up and miles to go before I sleep (probably rather literally) and...

well....

Frankensocks may have competition.

I feel disgruntled-Catholic guilt coming on big time.

The only question is, should I feel guilty about doing the Leyburn pattern or the Froot Loop pattern?

Gak

It's a Bill the Cat, hairball kind of day.

I should have known it was coming. When one has to go to bed with an extra blanket (most likely crocheted by one's aunt or grandmother) and use one's wee heating pad as a sort of bed heater, and furthermore must wear two layers of clothing and wigwam socks (which are, short of creating oneself a thrummed pair of socks that would make one look as if one had been attacked by a swarm of deranged bees, the preferred warmwear for the discerning feet), one should suspect that the following day will be…fraught. Fraught with what, you ask? Read on.

~One large amount of cold.

It's freakin' -20 F out there this morning and I'm writing this with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders rather than turn up the heat (heat costs, the blanket doesn't). When I walked my son, the Thing Four one, to school this morning, the snow that generally looks like dirty brown rock salt strew across the hardtop (from the street salt spread out) was frozen solid. The snowdrifts were so tightly packed that we could walk on top without breaking through. My hair, which was dry when I set out, was frozen due to me having the temerity to breath.

And on the way back from the school, the freakiest thing happened. A guy stopped the delivery van he was driving to let me cross the street. I've never seen any car so much as slow down around here. Kudos to the driver, and here's hoping he wasn't in the delirium stage of hypothermia (did I mention it's freakin' cold here?).

Not enough? Oh, there's more.

~One kid with the flu

(and I'm thanking my stars for Nintendo DS, trying to adjust to teenage coolness that will not permit a mother to fuss over him and praying that not all of the other three get it).

~One car that thinks it has the flu and had to be jumpstarted

(we won't talk about the interesting sparks I generated, okay?)

~One application

that asks for so much personal information (it's for the government) that I freaked and had to read a whole month's worth of the Yarn Harlot blog—September 2004, to be exact; I'm playing extreme catch up—just to calm myself down. These people want to know every address I've had for the past ten years. When I considered that a) I used to be married to someone who generally wasn't happy unless we were somewhere else every few years and b) I forget addresses and phone numbers if I don't use them for a long time (like a week), I realized that I would have to call the ex to get some of the addresses. It's enough to make me go back and read the October 2004 blogs as well.

And (since these blogs are supposed to be about knitting and/or crocheting, it had to be coming)

~One hat.

I've been very pleased by the hat. I found the basic pattern at Knitting-and.com (and if that doesn't show up as a link, save yourself a lot of hair pulling and just Google London Beanie) and tweaked it for the different yarn I was using. I added a few stitches and adjusted the number of rows I would need based on how many inches tall another hat I had knit that fit the kid was (I felt so mathematical).

I found the train pattern at Knitting Any Way and tweaked it as well by adding another car to match the number of stitches I'd figured the hat should be (the youngest son thinks trains are seriously cool at the moment). I'd cast on, and had fun doing alternate color ribbing (pattern tweaking again).

Things proceeded well at first. After the five color Christmas stocking, I felt I was ready for anything (the fact that I would be carrying five colors at the same time rather than two or three at a time should have warned me). But the knitting seemed to bear witness to my good feeling. The knitting was lying nice and flat. Like this:



What few bumps there were straightened out beautifully with a gentle tug. Hello blocking, you will be my hero. It was working, and I was finally shrugging off the title of the world's slowest knitter of lumpy objects.

Then I got to here:



Okay, so it was suddenly a tad lumpier. Not to worry. I pulled gently, confident I would see the knitting smooth like an abyssal plain.

Instead, I got nothing. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Well, that's a lie, actually. What I got was a bunch of yarn strands telling me in no uncertain terms that they were a bit uptight and if I was fool enough to think I could block them into relaxation then I was, well, a fool.

Still, I was undaunted. I finished the last bit of all red rounds and then jammed the thing on Thing Three's head this a.m., hoping it would stretch enough that it wouldn't really matter.

Did I mention that Thing Three has rather a large head? As in, bigger than his 13-year-old sister's head? You can already guess the results, can't you?



Aside from getting "the look" from a kid who still wears footie pajamas with moose all over them (namely due to the indignity of his mother trying to jam a too small hat that still had dpns in it onto his head before she would even let him have his breakfast), I was sure I could hear that damn hat sniggering at me. Sniggering.

(and if you are too, don't tell me.)

Now the hat looks like this:

But this is not bad, right? I mean, I can go back and add pale yellow for the window openings so they look more like windows; I'll like that better than the red, I'm sure. Floating one more color for a few more rows is really no big deal.

But….I now have this hideous scary feeling that the hat will be too tall and will fall over his eyes when he pulls it on. And I should mention that even the part that stretched over his head was still an extremely tight fit (why, I ask you why? This was a beanie for teenagers/adults, I added stitches to allow for the extra floats in back, and it was still very…snug. Either British teenagers' heads are incredibly small or my kid's head is freakishly large instead of rather large) and I'm wondering if it will really fit it the end or if I'll have to add more stitches, rechart the train and start back at square one? No, I shouldn't mention that. No worries; it'll be fine.

And, I tell myself as I straighten out skeins of yarn, it's interesting to learn that floated yarn tangles just as much when you frog out as when you're knitting and furthermore, if I have to frog out all the way, then I can use that cool technique I learned about in Meg Swansen's last newsletter to get rid of the purl bump when I increase (that random bit of blue did show up well in the red and if I have to do everything over at least I won't have to convince myself the blue purl bump makes the hat "unique").

And either, way, it has to be better than a 32-page application for a job, right?

That last sentence just killed off every positive thinking gene in my body.

All of them. I can hear taps playing softly in the background.

Think I'll go do the math for my simple, custom-fit, uber-basic ribbed sock in pretty self-patterning yarn now. Self-patterning yarn is good.