Darlings!

I got an iPhone 3G, and an eBook reader, and I've read Wuthering Heights and Persuasion all the way through since last week, and I completely forgot about knitting and blogging. I am sure to be kicked out of the Tour de France, which I quite deserve, but I have found the two novels completely entertaining, and I hope you'll read them if you haven't already. They are both love stories, but the heroes have very different reactions to being in love. (About the race: I find myself so put off by Versus' terrible "Take Back the Tour" ads that I am hardly even watching it, though I did catch L'Alpe d'Huez the other day. I also sorely miss Al Trautwig and don't like his replacement.)

Also last night I saw The Dark Knight, and while Batman is dark - the Joker is a loooooooooot darker. Worth a see, but he will creep you out - especially if you are like me and have a dislike for certain personal tics, like lip-licking or smacking and other terrible eating and talking noises (think of the Hardee's commercial where you have to listen to someone eat). That part grossed me out completely. HL is just plain chilling in the role.

Christian Bale, however, makes it all worth it. :)

I wish I had more to say - I don't. I'm in a knitting slump. I hope to be out of it soon, but until then - I'm catching up on my reading and making only plodding progress on my sock.

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. :)