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This is clearly a case of being careful what you wish for. A few people wanted more pics of the kitten and they have gotten their wish. He’s not the easiest creature to photograph. He has two settings, naptime and hyperactive bitey fiend.

Here, getting ready to bite me:

And here in, “I just woke up, aren’t I cute, soon I will bite you”, mode:

The napping lets me get my less kitten friendly fibre work done. When he’s awake, the act of crocheting or knitting becomes a battle of claws and spray bottles. I haven’t even tried to spin. Hate to think what the little bastard would do to a drop spindle.

Gir is enjoying having a real-live chew toy that’s screams and runs away. Of course the chew toy also turns around and whacks him and pounces on him when he’s asleep.

Good times.

We’re into the crochet section of Nihon year 4 now. My crochet skills are not exactly what anyone would refer to as skills. More like a collection of clumsy fumbling that sometimes produces a pattern. I’m not even going to talk about my technique. Let’s just call it unorthodox and move on.

Because I’ve been trying to improve my crochet ability, I’ve actually been doing non-class related projects. Okay, I’ve been forcing myself to crochet instead of knit. Easier said than done, but I did manage to finish this scarf:

Angela gave me a very pretty ball of german sock yarn and showed me this pattern. It’s quite simple and didn’t take very long. The long colour repeats in the yarn made for a great finished effect. Now I just have to choose patterns for my crochet garment and do the swatches. I’ve decided to use a very fine kid/silk blend so the stupid thing is going to take me forever.

I can be very dumb a lot of the time.

Wish me luck and speedy fingers please.

PS: My new winter boots are now on sale for half what I paid for them. Argh!

This is Looshkin. We adopted him on Sunday. He’s 8 weeks old now and has settled into his new home very nicely.

He purrs like a mad fiend and loves to chew humans.

Last night, he slept on my face.

Not sure about that last one. Might have to put a stop to it.

The sun is finally back on a semi-regular basis and I’m feeling more human again. This makes me view my surroundings in a much more positive light. I hate being cold and I hate being wet and cold and I hate short cold days. I really should live somewhere tropical, but until I can do that, I have to pretend that winter isn’t nearly as sucky as it is.

How do I know that the sun is here to stay for a while? Because my super warm and dry winter boots have arrived. This most definitely means that spring is here.

I love my new winter boots. My old ones had me shoveling snow with cold, permanently damp feet during the last big dump of snow. They are going to live somewhere else now that I have these:

Yup. Your monitor’s not acting up, they’re a fairly bright green and I don’t care. They were almost half price and they’re WARM, and DRY. So in another 8 months or so, when the wretched white crap returns, I will be ready!

Of course, me having good winter boots likely means it won’t snow here again for at least a couple of years.

I also love that I can go out to the stash looking for yarn for the Nihon crochet project and find 3 likely candidates:

There’s possum, silk and cashmere and merino, all in lace weight. All I have to decide is which one to swatch first. I’m leaning towards the merino on the far right.

Loving the doggie feeling better too. He’s pretty darn perky now. He still can’t really jump, but I think it’s more mental than physical. He ran with us last night and did quite well.

I’m trying to convince the monkey that Gir needs his own kitty. Doesn’t he look like he needs his own kitty?

An update on the things I wanted to get done this year:

I’m about 150 pages into Cryptonomicon. The word problems that take up an entire chapter are slowing me down and totally turning me off. I’ve read six other books while I’ve been trying to read this one. My friend says that I’m not supposed to actually try to solve the math problems, but I just can’t help it. I’m not giving up on it, I will finish this book.

I’m more than half way through the bin of sock yarn. I don’t know what the total of socks knit is, but I think it’s around 30 pairs. I’ve put more yarn in that bin, but I’m happy with the progress.

The monkey and I have finally started running again and plan to start the 100 pushups a day program this evening.

I think it’s all coming along nicely.

I’ve broken up my months by week, assigning each week a discipline. This week is homework and design work, the next two are spinning homework and the last is what I call mop-up. I’m hoping this will help me get more done. So far so good. I spent yesterday designing and starting a sweater for the monkey and I plan to swatch and design a garment today.

I’m also looking into putting a couple of patterns up for sale on ravelry. The Firefly tank and the Tamarrissa sock pattern.

Hooray for progress!

A few weeks ago, Judy told me she only looks at the pictures on blogs.

She swore that she didn’t mean my blog. I know she was lying.

So this one’s for you Judy. There’s pictures and a little bit of text. You can just look at the pictures, you’ll get the gist of what’s going on.

I promised pics of my new tatts and here they are:

Go ahead. Tell me your sob story. I am ready to show you how I feel for your pain. Really.

This is a hockey one. All you Americans will have to go ask your Canadian friends what it means.

And finally, a little bit of the pretty that’s finally popped up around here:

The monkey and I spent a good part of yesterday planting flowers around the house. Our place no longer looks like an abandoned shack. It now looks like a well-tended shack.

A little note to the Canucks:

WTF? You all need to step up your game. If my hockey induced tourettes gets any worse I don’t think I’ll be allowed to watch any more. If someone was paying me roughly $75,000 a day Mr Fats Sundin, I’m pretty sure I could put the puck in the net. A little tip for the whole team, the guys in the different coloured jerseys are not on your team, stop passing them the puck.

Seriously people, it’s February. This needs to stop. Just tell me who I have to sacrifice and on which altar for this to stop and I’m there.

Global warming my ass. My very frozen ass.

Bleh.

Really.

I’m not.

Maybe a little pre-occupied, but not dead.

I’ve spent most of the beginning of year making socks. I’ve lost count, but I think I’ve made somewhere around a dozen pairs so far. An intervention may be required.

But hey! Guess what you’re all getting for Christmas! At this rate, I should make my goal of knitting my way through one of my giant plastic tubs of sock yarn this year. Trust me, the tubs are big. It’s gonna take some work.

The year has also gotten off to a bit of a rocky start. This does not bode well for 2009. By the end of January I was ready to say, “UNCLE”, and just call it good. Go find a tidy cave and hibernate until 2010.

It’s all been little things, but they just seem to pile up. I’ve even been called for jury duty. The general consensus seems to be that I can just be myself and not worry about being selected for the panel. I’m fairly certain I should feel insulted by that, but I think I’ll just use it to my advantage.

Remember Satan’s Hand Puppet? AKA Gir? He’s finally been diagnosed with poly arthritis, which sounds bad, but he is expected to make a full recovery within a couple of months. Right now he’s being referred to as the ‘roid monkey. He may have a promising future in the MLB. It’s only been three days of steroids so far and the evil is already back. The cats are not thanking me for making the dog better.

I managed to get a solid dose of some sort of horrible cold/flu/plague thing a couple of weeks ago that is only now letting go of me. There was puking. It wasn’t pretty.

The Canucks looked pretty bad at the beginning of the year too. And that’s putting it mildly. They had managed to get into second to last place in the conference. Chances of going to the play-offs looked almost impossible. Luongo had replaced Fats Sundin ( thanks for that one dad, we use it all the time) as king of the douchebags for his comments about getting some “practice” games in with the team before doing the all-star game. Those three “practice” games were awful. He was a sieve. And Fats only seemed to score because he was goal sucking and waiting for someone to feed him the puck.

Tragic and painful to watch.

They seem to have turned it around. Will likely even make the playoffs.

Tomorrow is Hockey Day in Canada. Don Cherry is certain to be a giant acid burn to the retinas, let alone the eardrums. Of course, we’re still gonna watch it.

Last week was Madrona Fiber Arts Festival in Tacoma. I drove down mid-week and visited with some friends, got tattooed, got car sick, bought more spindles and fibrey stuff, and came home. It was a good time. Except for the car sick. That was not fun. Although the irony of throwing up in the bag that still had the motion sick meds in it was not lost on me.

I came home to find the monkey making a fabulous valentine’s day feast with duck breast and a side of red roses. I’ll be sure to make it home from the festival in time for V-day from here on in. It’s obviously worth my while.

That gets things mostly caught up. I’ll try to get pics of the new ink up soon. I find them highly amusing.

I hope everyone had wonderful holidays.

I’m kind of glad last year is over. Hate those “personal growth” years. It always translates into “you will learn things about yourself you never wanted to know”.

Bleh. Who needs that?

Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s good for me, it will make me a better blahblahblah…

I want this to be a rose coloured glasses year!

Who’s with me?

I don’t make resolutions anymore, I found that it put a yucky face on brand new years right from the get go, so now I just make plans to get certain things done or at least make a valiant attempt.

I bought myself a really good winter coat, that for reasons beyond my control (wrong sizing on website) does not fit me. I refuse to sell above mentioned very nice coat, so somehow I will whittle my enormous body down to a more manageable size. This time will not be like all the others. I am done with being huge.

I will read Crytonomicon. I’ve made a good start, already more than 30 pages in and much beyond the points I made it to the other three times I have tried to read this book. Thankfully, the weird gay math stuff seems to have tapered off. Long equations I can’t even remember from university calculus does not make for enjoyable light reading.

The coat just arrived. It is gorgeous. I can even get it done up. Unfortunately, done up, the top half of me looks like a big black quilted sausage. I think I need to work on that. Not a great look.

I will get the dog better. Hell or high water on this one. I miss the evil puppy.

I will write one pattern per month. This needs to be done. I just need the disappline to get it done. Now I just have to decide if I need violence or rewards as incentive.

Of course I may need to move to San Francisco so I can fufill what Denise seems to think is my destiny:

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/672031640.html

I think I can manage these things (except maybe that last one, even thought it sounds like a lot of fun). After all, I’ve got a whole year.

Happy first birthday Gir!

Well it’s official. The Canucks have signed Mats Sundin to a one year contract. In reality, it’s a 6 month contract, for approximately 5.6 million.

But it’s not about the money.

Yeah. Right.

It’s such a shame that this had to happen the day after they retired Trevor Linden’s #16 with such a nice ceremony.

Now we just have to wait and see if they take the “C” away from Luongo and strip Brown of his #13.

I really hope they don’t do either of these things, but they likely will.

This is the biggest bonehead move they’ve made since signing Messier.

*sigh*