Kitty report

I took Schmade to the vet yesterday for a 2-weeks checkup to have his thyroid level tested now that he is on medication. His level was well within the normal range, and so it seems one pill a day is what he needs, and I am so relieved it's silly.

I am going out of town this weekend and have a petsitter coming by. If you happen to live in the Franklin area and need a great petsitting recommendation, email me at the link in the sidebar and I will hook you up.

Last night

I waited two hours (with friends, visits from friends, nice people and two very energetic kids in line in front of us) last night in the queue for a new iPhone at the Apple Store. I wanted a 3G phone from the beginning, but I didn't want to wait till July for it. (My old phone is going up on eBay this week.)

So, two hours in line and finally for the last hour or so we are standing right outside the entrance while AT&T has some kind of network seizure, and we already know they are out of black 16GB phones but we want white anyway, so we are doing our best to be patient even though someone's feet stink and it is hot and we are all kind of over the whole community-building experience. And the really nice, helpful girl in the Orange Shirt (the "Concierge," to be perfectly correct about it) comes out and shouts "WE ARE ALL OUT OF 16GB IPHONES." And while we are all standing there trying to decide if we should break her arm right then or just come back later, she realizes it was a miscommunication and yells an apology. Guess we got Punk'd.

Half an hour later I walked out with a fully-functioning new phone, hallelujah. I went home, synced my old phone, hooked up the new one, chose "restore from backup" and twenty minutes later all *my* information was on the new phone - every setting, every note, voicemail, and even the wallpaper. Thank you, Apple! Let me count the ways in which you are better than Sprint!

So...do I like my phone? Yes. Very much. I am bummed that InCase doesn't make the cool protective cover for it yet, but my old one fits it pretty well. The signal is great, although the old Maps feature actually pinpointed my location at home better than the GPS does (it must be all the tinfoil on my windows protecting me from the aliens).

The App store is a revelation - so many cool programs, ebooks and other fun things. Once I get a new case and a new plastic sheet for the front, I'll be a happy, happy girl.

Knitting, later. I spent all my time last night with The phone.

TDF knitalong progress

I have to admit I only did a tiny bit yesterday. Here's a photo of my progress on the Tour de France Knitalong socks.



I love them as only a TDF fan could. :)

WOW

See the entire Tour de France route through the magic of Google Street View.

Breaking news from the peloton

I have just geeked out entirely and decided that my Tour de France knitalong socks will have 21 cables from cuff to toe, one for each stage of le Tour.

Grady is on a temporary hiatus from his medicine because he was experiencing some side effects. Tomorrow he goes back to one pill per day.

There is a little stray kitty in my neighborhood that has been hassling me for food. I've been calling her The Grifter. She's REALLY sweet, but usually she just wants attention. Lately she's wanted food - I know that meow - and I fed her a couple times a week or so ago. Then I decided she was probably someone's cat, because she is not skinny. Her fur is really dry though, so I am not sure she's an indoor kitty. ANYWAY, last time I fed her I think I got a couple flea bites from her. Two days earlier this week I tried to resist, but she sounded so pitiful last night I finally rationalized giving her a giant bowl of food because I put brewer's yeast on it so the fleas would leave her alone. She totally inhaled the food. I started wondering if she is pregnant, so I looked it up online. She does look rather like a little burro with skinny legs and a big tummy, and has a voracious appetite. She has no collar and I've seen her around the neighborhood for a couple years.

I can't take in another kitty, but I don't mind feeding her, and I am wondering if I should put a box out in the woods for her to nest in.

A story

Y'all, many years ago I went to a fantastic church outside of Nashville and had some fantastic church friends. Kirsten is one of them; Todd and Nicol Smith (now Sponberg) are two others. Todd and Nicol started the christian music group Selah, so you may have heard of them (Nicol later left the group). Their parents are longtime christian missionaries to the Congo, and wonderful people.

In the past few months, Todd and his wife Angie lost their fourth child, Audrey, a couple hours after she was born. You can read Angie's blog about the experience here. Seven weeks after they lost Audrey, Nicol and Greg's 10-week old son Luke passed away from SIDS.

I don't want to try to wax eloquent about the pain this family is feeling, just say that you could search the world and it would be hard to find a nicer family. I want to hug my friends and tell them that God is faithful. I know that they know and believe this, and it must be very difficult for anyone who is not a christian to understand why and how I could possibly say something like that in the face of such tragedy. But He is.

When a christian says "God is faithful" we do not mean that life does not contain tragedy. We mean that when it does (and it does), and when we have nowhere else to go, He is still good, faithful and strong. I can't explain it any better. Why do those awful things happen, I don't know. But I do know that when they do, we are never alone.

If you're a praying person please keep the Smiths and Sponbergs in your prayers. And kiss the people you love, and tell them you are thankful for them in your lives.

Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. (Heb. 10:23)

Summer

It's summer.

My Tour de France Knitalong project

I literally could not believe it when I found this gorgeous Louet Gems sportweight yarn at Threaded Bliss today. The colour is Goldilocks.



These are the Cable Socks (Ravelry) from Sarah Dallas Knitting - a great book I am glad I rediscovered. (This is all part of the Tour de France Knitalong, which I LOVE!)

My team is Francaise Des Jeux; the French lottery is the sponsor. At the moment I am keeping my eye on Sebastien Chavanel.

Awwwww, THANKS!

Thanks for all the nice stuff y'all said/sent my way this week. :) Sniff!

Grady is home and I wish I could say he's ALL better. He's not. He's certainly doing better than he was - logically, he's now on thyroid medicine so he's GOT to be better than last Thursday - but he's not himself. He's lethargic and just kind of not-right. I don't blame him - he was locked up in a metal box and peed on a towel for five days. It also could be his body adjusting to the meds or the lower level of thyroid hormone. He gets a pill twice a day, and I use Greenies Pill Pockets to give them to him. He also has an eyedropper antibiotic for his icky teeth. (No cleaning/anesthesia until the thyroid is under control.) That works ... not so well. You have not lived until your cat has flung wet antibiotic juice out of his mouth onto you.

Here is a summary of what happened in any given 15-minute period last night:

1. Schmade wanders in the room, snoops and sniffs around, and finds a place to lay down.
2. I reach over and pet him, or at least mentally note where he is.
3. Fiona walks by, nonchalantly, and just as she reaches him, stops, looks over, and hisses. Walks off. He lifts up his head, blinks at her, and lays back down.
4. Schmade gets up and drinks water.
5. Hides under bed.
6. Comes out, wanders, snoops and sniffs.

Etc.

I am stopping to by a Feliway refill tonight on the way home. Have I mentioned that stuff is MAGIC? (I am not sure I have. It's a little air-freshener plug in thingy, and moods calm down NOTICEABLY when it's full. But they had reached a truce, so I wasn't filling it up again. Clearly truce is off.)

I think Schmade stinks of the kennel and this is why Fee is hissing. I am going to probably give him a bath tonight or tomorrow.

It could be worse.

So, car is in the shop getting oil change, tires rotated and a/c checked (not cold). Turns out leak. Turns out hose. Turns out $350 for hose because it's on bottom of...something.

Cat also in shop, $400 for that. He'll have 2 pills a day until we figure out if that's what he needs for his thyroid levels to work right. I bought 3 packages of Greenies pill pocket treats and I hope he LOVES them. (Because I am going to Mom's this weekend, and it's too late to find a sitter and kind of hard to ask friends to shove a pill in your cat's throat.)

Just to wax philosophical for a couple of seconds - I am trying not to get into some kind of slump over all this. Money isn't a problem, it's more the hassle of the last week. But thinking about that last week - it all could have been so much worse. The lady I saw crack up the mailboxes could have been seriously injured and needed immediate treatment I know nothing about. The deer could have hit me full-on. Grady could be incurably, untreatably sick, and rather than hearing that I have a car in perfect condition except for one hose, I could have a lemon.

It's hard when you are going through something difficult to see that silver lining. But sometimes God's protection and guidance isn't keeping *everything* bad from happening to you - it's controlling things to a degree that is manageable. In other words, I can't reasonably expect that cats won't get old and cars won't break and deer won't run out in front of me. But I do think that sometimes God mitigates the damage for us, and there is a blessing in that. The near-miss can be harder to see and appreciate.

Y'all know one of my most favorite songs ever is "Keep on the Sunny Side" by the Carter Family - message and music. I'm tryin'!

One of the things that has made me super happy is my crazy 70s-basement throw. Because, LOOK! (The file has been heavily manipulated from an iPhone shot - mostly because the color is not true and I can't stand the bag color the yarn is in. The gold is redder and the brown is less-red, but I can't make it right.)



I love how the notches alternate when you do a color change. :)

Somebody probably ought to stop me, low-rent edition

Thank you for all the well-wishes about Grady. I am still waiting to hear back from the vet about treatment.

These days, I am trying to keep in mind what the Yarn Harlot said about crochet, because I agree absolutely: it's dangerous. It goes so fast, you can be midway through a complete travesty and never even notice it. It uses approximately eighteen times the yarn knitting does. Dodgy all the way around.

So I've been playing around with scrap yarn that I had from a knitting project, and that's where the yellow, orange and green granny-square blanket came from. A week or so ago, I found an Erika Knight book called Simple Crochet, and it is lovely.

If you want to just make simple, beautiful non-granny stuff for your home, it's your book. However, if you ALSO want to spend $270 crocheting a leather basket for your magazines, it's also your book. So be careful.

Now, for some reason, I never feel like using anything but Wool-Ease or cotton for crochet. Probably this is because I have internalized the Yarn Harlot's warnings too much, and because I am afraid of making a $300 basket. Eventually I will get through this phase and use some of my nice yarn for a crochet project. But this one has to be washable if it is anything, and I mean wash-and-dry-able. And I don't yet trust my crochet skills enough to do a fancy project. So...this is my first-ever ACTUAL crochet project, following a pattern, using more than scrap yarn, and not granny-squares.

It's going to be the Striped Throw from the Erika Knight book. (You will have to trust me, I can't find a picture.) So what you see here is basically 1800 yards ($30! HA!) of brown (the color of powdered hot chocolate), avocado and gold Wool-Ease worsted yarn that is going to become a 70s-appliance-colored throw. (My crafty basket is a 99-cent Whole Foods bag with a tear in the bottom and the sides rolled down.)

The stitch pattern is lovely (just a variation on single crochet) and it didn't take me very long to do 22 rows of chocolate (see note above). It's about 36" long and 6" high at this point.

I am not really sure why I thought brown, gold and green was the most fetching of color combinations, but I think this will be very cool in a 70s-basement kind of way. (I hope.) Do y'all need to schedule an intervention with me?

Update on Grady

He doesn't have kidney disease, or any other disease except severe hyperthyroidism, which is apparently fairly common in aging cats. Two years ago, he weighed 25 pounds. Last summer, he was 20 or 21. Today, he weighs 16. That is the equivalent of a human losing 100 pounds! I knew he was skinnier but he's not emaciated - he's still overweight. I have to say I did not see this one coming. It's serious, but it's definitely one of the more treatable things that could be wrong with him.

Anyway, he's staying at the vet till Monday afternoon and we discuss treatment then. It will either be a pill, radioactive iodine, or surgery. I have no idea which. If it's a pill, it's a pill a day for life. I'm cool with that.

Thanks for your prayers and well-wishes. Fee and I are having a slumber party this weekend. You know, karaoke, sleeping bags, paint your toenails. Fun!

:)

Schmade

Grady is staying at the vet this weekend for tests/antibiotics. He has horrible, horrible, make-you-feel-ill breath, is lethargic and just not himself. They've ruled out teeth/mouth problems and diabetes - those tests were normal. Next step is a blood test to check for kidney function. The vet thinks whatever it is, is treatable.

My poor kitty has to stay in a metal cage all weekend, sniff. But hopefully he'll be feeling better soon, and hopefully they can treat whatever they find.

He's 11. Sniff.

PS

I just removed Snap from this blog because it was driving me freaking batty with those stupid little ads that pop up every time you roll over a link.

That is all.

An update

In the last week, all of the following has happened:

1. I made my deadline.
2. I hit a deer. On my birthday. Thankfully we only struck glancing blows and my car is not damaged and neither am I.
3. I turned lsdfjklds years old.
4. I ate a lot of cake.
5. On Friday, I witnessed an accident where a little old lady cracked up a few mailboxes driving her VW Beetle through a ditch. She was a sweet lady and we waited with her while the sheriff/ambulance came. She was okay but thinks she blacked out.
6. I made more granny squares. I also made a crocheted basket from Erika Knight's Simple Crochet book, and am working on a stripey blanket. (Pictures soon.) I started knitting the BYOB bag from Knitty. The cotton hurts my hands. I am not making impressive progress.
7. I spent two days working on the colour palette for the new design, and now I have a headache.
8. I have a cold.
9. I managed to take pics of the cats. I think you can really see how much weight Schmade has lost.



This was only the second picture of him I took. Meanwhile, I took about thirty of Fiona and this was the best I got.



She's very good at ignoring me.

Hope you are having a good week!