Grass. Not That Kind.

Cat grass! Any other cat people grow grass for their cats to nibble?

I had read about it somewhere, as something that cats enjoy, and that can be good for their digestion. Since Maggie sometimes throws up, I decided to try her on it. See if she liked it, see if it helped. While I can't say it's helped much, she does seem to enjoy it, so I keep planting more for her.

The first time, I bought a kit at Petsmart, and then once she gave it the okay, I bought another, and more seed, as well as a pot to grow it in.

I rotate between pots, and try to keep up with it, so she doesn't have to go without (yes, she is very spoiled, I know). Here is just-planted, planted last week, and growing fine (and slightly chewed on).

They don't look that appealing to me, personally.

But then, I'm not the target audience. 

 

She ignores it.

She poses near it.

Demonstrating that the original instructions to let them sprout in the dark bring some yellow grass, compared to not hiding it in the closet.

But it still tastes good!

Any of it, all of it!

She's a fan.

Knitting Away

As I mentioned last week, I've started a new knitting project. And I'm having such fun! 

I wanted to use the Infinity Fade gradient set from Fiber Optic in a pattern that would really show off the progression. It's 14 colors! And I don't want to waste a bit of it. In poking around on Ravelry, I came across Valente by Martina Behm, which is described as a "cape-cowl-hybrid" and can be made to button up or not. Since it's done sideways, using short rows, it seemed like a good match to the yarn. I cast on more stitches, so it would be a bit longer than designed, and do not plan to add a button band. It's a simple pattern, which is suiting me just fine.

Just to get the negatives out of the way, I am finding that the yarn bleeds a bit; I don't notice it too badly on my hands, but see the needles? The one on the left used to be about the color as the one I out next to it.

The set came with instructions on rinsing with vinegar to help set the colors, and I will certainly do that.

The other things is, I had a terrible time winding the yarn! Something about the way each mini was wound and tied off, I don't know, but there was much cussing done. However, even in the midst of it, I knew it would be worth it, and it is.

 

The Bruins play this afternoon, and I'll be knitting and watching. I'm into the third color, so over one-seventh done!

Doing Better, Knock Wood

An awful day and a couple of non-normal days, but the period seems to be winding down again, thankfully. Ready to be done with it all, any time now!

Meanwhile, look!

I ordered a custom 3D-printed yarn box from String Theory Colorworks, and it arrived yesterday.

She'll put what you want on the sides; I got one with my initials on it, of course.

As well as the yarn ball with crossed knitting needles, which I love.

The top slides open, and has a hidden magnet closure.

I've always been hesitant to get a yarn bowl, figuring that the way I yank the yarn, the ball would go flying out the top, so I like the idea of a closure better. And it's miles better than nothing at all, which always ends with the yarn either rolling off the couch, or flying up in the air. Yay!

Urgh

I got my damned period again. I feel like crap.

Ugh, ugh, ugh.

How Cute Is This Cat?

 

Knit Teaser

The knitting is underway! Details to come.
 

It Is That Time

After a whole year of (waves hands around vaguely) all this nonsense, I finally get to look forward to visitors! How lucky am I? My brother plans to come as soon as he's vaccinated, please may that be soon, and a good friend whose March 2020 visit was cancelled wants to come too, in May, when we will both be fully vaccinated (yay for that day).

Before I go on, let me be clear: I'm delighted for both visits. Sincerely. These are not difficult guests in the slightest.

But. (You knew there was a 'but' coming, right?)

My office/yarn room is also the guest room, and I haven't had to properly clear it up for that use since, oh, the last time my brother was here, which is Thanksgiving 2019.

It may have gotten just a wee bit out of hand in here. Perhaps. I don't feel I've crossed the line into hoarder territory, but clearly the room belongs to someone who would rather go read or knit or be a cat lap, versus tidying up. There are a lot of "just haven't gotten around to it" areas here.

So! It is time for me to look around, decide I don't like what I see, and do something about it. Let April be known as The Month of Some Decluttering (I don't want to get overly ambitious; the goal is improvement, not perfection).

My brother and I actually talked about this recently, and how we aren't clearing things out for the sake of the person visiting, but for our own sake, when the fact that someone is going to be visiting lifts the blinders off our eyes and we say, "Yikes, I really live this way, do I?" 

So, practically speaking, what does that mean? Well, there are a few different categories, or levels of need. 

The single most important thing we need is literally the floor space to set up the inflatable bed*. Some things, like the stools that hold my swift and ball winder, can go down to the garage during visits, and the cat-scratcher-posts too, but there's still some other clearing I can do. A lot of cardboard boxes have built up in one corner, for instance! 

*Speaking of which, it will be a good idea to test that ahead of time and make sure we have no technical difficulties.

Next, on the floor and on surfaces, a lot of yarn and knitting projects have built up (gosh, I wonder how that happened?). I'm going to do some sorting and arranging of that this weekend, is the plan, and then see what else needs doing in the floor space department. 

I would like to make some hanging space in the closet (I am long overdue for a sort-and-purge there), and perhaps even some drawer space (ooh, radical, I know).

What else? I've mostly been drinking cold-brew coffee, so I should clean the Keurig in case either guest wants to have hot coffee.

Making room for a guest to use the bathroom is pretty straightforward, so there isn't a lot to do that way. 

If I have any remaining energy, it will go toward tackling things that are messy but not in guest spaces; for instance, the top of my dresser is invisible under a layer of stuff and I have been wanting to clean it off for a while. Does it need to be done for the sake of a guest? Absolutely not, but perhaps an incoming guest will help me do it anyway. 

And away I go!

Whew

The first few days of work this week were just killer, and though today wasn't that bad, I still feel a bit shell shocked. But it's April, at least, and tomorrow is Friday. 

And I'm playing with yarn.

Maggie had been all curled up in the bed, but of course she had to see what I had put there.

And once her bath moved ONTO the yarn, I made her get down, to her irritation. 

Later she helped me get started. 

Such a helper.

Feeling Fine

I am happy to have very little to report on vaccine aftereffects. My arm was sore after getting the shot on Thursday, and more so on Friday, but not bad enough to even bother my sleep much. Yesterday was not even as bad as Friday, and today is nothing. Whew!

I have heard that I may have more of a reaction after the second shot, and I'm ready for that, but for now, it's all good, I'm very relieved, and I want everyone to be able to get their shots. A surprising number of my friends got theirs last week too, based on what I saw on social media, and I bless every one of them. Let's get this done.

Shot 1, Done!

It's the red bandage of courage.

Thank you, Walgreens. 

I'm Getting Shot!

My goodness! 

Florida announced last week that starting this Monday, ages 50 and up could get the COVID vaccine, and I was able to make an appointment today! Two, actually, one for this Thursday and one for four weeks later. I'm getting vaccinated! And by May, I'll be able to (carefully, cautiously) do semi-social things indoors. What a wonderful thought.

And if you think I haven't been randomly saying, "I'm getting shot!" all day, you're wrong.

As if that wasn't enough good news to make up for The Day I had last week (when I learned, a day after getting my stimulus payment, that I would owe all that and more in taxes this year), I also got this surprise in the mail today. I knew it was coming, but we don't generally get mail on Sunday, and also, let's be honest, my mail isn't often this glorious:

I really want to show off the colors when I knit it up; I'm considering the Valente pattern, but may look around more before I get going. We'll see.

Bit of a Day

You know?

Some days are like that. 

Cat Trap

As it turns out, if you (being lazy) drop a box on the floor to deal with later, this can happen:

 

Reasons Today Sucked

Surprisingly, not the time change! Some bigger things and some smaller things.

• I woke up at 2 this morning, went to the bathroom, all very usual. Never fell back asleep. So that's half a night's sleep to function on today. Using 'function' loosely.
• After I was up (though not at all alert), Maggie threw up, so I had to clean that up. And then deal with her wanting to be fed, pesty-pesty, starving-cat routine, until I felt like it was safe again.
• When I sat down to start work, I opened the Word doc of the report I worked on all last week, and on the pop-up box that allows me to jump to the section where I last closed it, it said, "Someone made changes since you last opened this document." Well, someone better not have! No one should be able to open a document on my computer but me. Especially when the computer is turned off.
• My personal computer didn't want to start up at all. It did eventually, but it took long enough that I was facing the idea that it died overnight.
• Then I noticed that the clock on my work computer hadn't changed time. I looked, and it still said it's doing daylight saving time, but apparently they don't have it set up to the server in such a way that it will update. (It's funny, I'm pretty sure I would remember if it had been an hour off from a year ago to November, yet here we are.) Fortunately, it allowed me to change my preferred time zone. Turns out I'm in Santiago, who knew? Perhaps things are looking up.
• Then my period started. So that would be a no.

 In the category of 'trying to find a bright side, really stretching,' the Bruins played so terribly on Saturday that unless they do a complete flip, tonight's game will not tempt me to stay up. Yay?

Thinking about reading, and blogging

As you may have noticed, I haven't been blogging a whole lot lately; not near my usual pace, anyway. I just don't feel drawn to it the way I used to.  

Reading, though, I have been doing a lot more of. I've read about half as many books this year as I did all of last year. Interestingly, to me at least, is that it's been almost exclusively sci-fi and fantasy books. There are a number of reasons why that might be, and I don't know which or how many of them are true, but I do find it interesting.

My clear favorite so far, as I mentioned, is Winter's Orbit, by Everina Maxwell; I also very much enjoyed Winterkeep, by Kristin Cashore (you want to have read the previous books in the series), and The Return of Fitzroy Angursell, by Victoria Goddard (which, again, you really want to have read The Hands of the Emperor first), and of course Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells, about which I will go into detail next month, when it is published. Lots of good reading happening.

A friend of mine is putting together a zoom book club for a whole group of people, some I know and some I don't*, and though my only past book club experience was not a positive one, I am willing to give it a try. We're having a kickoff meeting today.

*I imagine that to her, it's like the time my brother threw a party, invited people he knew from all different areas of his life, and looking around, realized that for a lot of them, he was the only thing they had in common. Which can be fun, I would think!

Meanwhile, there's more of this on my horizon:

I got one order in last week, the Community Matters colorways for January from Kim Dyes Yarn, which are lovely:

Oddly enough, this one is not in Ravelry, though many of her yarns are; it's called Cheesecake DK, and is 50-50 merino and silk. Mmm.

I have a few orders out there: one that is lost, hopefully not permanently, in the ether of the Postal Service, and two others that should be on their way shortly, and I look forward to showing them to you when the times come.

A Little Knitting (very little)

My low points of my headache today were at 3 and 7 AM, but the rest of the day I felt varying degrees of fragile, and work was busy. Survived the day, at least! And I have a tiny but optimistic piece of knitting to show (from yesterday, that is).

I dampened and pinned it out to make sure that the unblocked wonkiness of it was not going to be a problem.

But I think we're good! As (some) knitters (sometimes) say, that shit will block right out.

More details on it to come; I'm off to rest my brain.

This was a quick knit

While I often enjoy the projects that are longer and more involved, sometimes it's nice to just bang out a quick project! 

I can't find that I blogged it, but last fall I bought a skein of worsted yarn from Gauge Dye Works (via Indie Untangled), in the colorway Field and Pasture.

Looks mostly green, right? Well, wind it up and you get this:

Which of course was hinted at on the swift.

I knew that it was going to be striped or even kind of color-blocked, so I wanted to knit it in something of one width. I picked this simple chevron scarf (Ravelry link), but made it a bit wider than called for.

Which became this!

The blue bit at the tip of the green end was actually a small amount of a different yarn, since I was running out and didn't feel like ripping back to redo. I used up every bit of the skein of Gauge, and two grams of Symphony Layers from Prism that I had in the stash (colorway Sapphire). I think it fits in just fine!

The blocking added some length, so it's now almost my wingspan, long enough to throw over one shoulder, and softened it a bit (not that it wasn't soft before). This took less than two weeks, and I'm delighted with it!