Today I was cleaning the family room,

which involved moving the ignored toys around. Of course, as soon as I touched her stuff, it became the center of attention.

 

Oribel had already pulled her bootlace out of the toy bowl to get a better look at what else was in there by the time I grabbed the camera. (About an hour later, her bootlace had found its way into the kitchen, near her box.)

 

She decided at that point the best thing to be found in the toy bowl were her catnip pillows.

 

Personally, I think it would have been a lot easier for her if she had taken them out first.

 

 

Yes, she is perfectly capable of getting them out of there if she wanted, and no, I am not going to do it for her. They are her toys and she is responsible for putting them where she needs them when she want to play with them. Unfortunately, she is much better at getting them out for play-time than she is at putting them away when she is done.


(Yes, I am mean like that. Just ask my kids, I made them carry their own school bags full of snowsuits and boots into preschool every day too. Well, maybe my kids didn't think it was mean, but I do remember another preschool mom saying as much one day.)

Last year

I only got four pairs of socks completely knit, but I have three other pairs that were started in 2010 and are still in progress. I also have had four other pairs that I started but for some reason or another they were all frogged, to be remade at a later date. (Mostly they didn't fit the intended person, as in go over their heel, but all were stranded/color-work so I can work on that problem this year.)
These were some Thuja's I made May 3-11, for my mother-in-law's birthday.

This is a pair I made for Hubband, started in February and finished in April.

These are some Colobus No Purl Monkey socks. I know, they aren't symmetrical, but I figure the monkeys aren't all the same either.


These are mine, and I made them September 7-11.
In addition to these three pairs, there was the pair I made my mom for her birthday in January. Yep, that's it, the sum total of the socks I got finished in 2010. Fortunately, they aren't the only things I knit last year, nor the only things I made out of stashed sock yarn. That said, you're going to have to wait another day (or couple) to see some of the other stuff that can be made out of sock yarn.

Tuesday Miss Oribel

decided she actually wanted to go outside. Lately it has been more of a "I want to go out! Open the door! Now! Wait, what is this wind in my face crap?! I don't do wind!" Then about ten or fifteen minutes later we have to do it all over again because, you know, the wind might have stopped. Not that I really blame her, I am not that crazy about -15F (or lower) windchill myself.

 

 

For some reason, she didn't go very far.

The other day

I was driving home and saw the neighbor's cat.

 

Once again, I was really glad I carry my camera with me whenever I go out.

The miracle of the Christmas season

was made more wonderful in our lives by my father being welcomed into the arms of our Lord and Savior two days before the celebration of anniversary of his birth.

For the record,

I haven't forgotten about this thing. I just don't think my life is really all that interesting right now. Of course, I suppose it could be a lot more interesting to someone who has no idea what is going on (perhaps interesting being closely related to curious). Anyway, my time most of the summer/fall has included (not any any particular or proper order) several surgeries for my dad, on-going care of surgery sites between a couple of them, various doctor/surgeon/follow-up/etc appointments for/with my dad, a whirlwind trip to empty his house and finish getting it in proper selling condition, signing my name to all sorts of stuff that isn't my stuff, in general hanging out with him and taking him fun places as well, lots of back and forth stuff to sell his house (thank goodness!), spending three plus days watching my dad hang out in a hospital bed with pneumonia (and signing more stuff), and who remembers what all else at this point. Well, watching him decline into the abyss of Alzheimer's, part of the time slowly and part of the time more quickly would be one of the what-elses, but that seemed kind obvious. Right now he is not recovering very well from the pneumonia, which isn't too surprising, considering what how long it took both (healthy and much younger) Hubband and DTY to recover when they each had it. Dad is neither terribly young, and has other complicating issues in addition to not really being able to tell us if he is in pain, hungry, tired, etc.
Of course, that is just one part of my life. There is still the rest of it, which some days might be more interesting than other day, but somehow the days just seem to run short a lot of the time. Well, except for the time that I take to knit or read to keep myself sane. I have gotten a fair amount of knitting done this year. Is anyone interested in hearing about/seeing knitting stuff? Well, this time of year there might be stuff about snow too, I suppose.
I can say that I will try to get here more often to let you know what is happening her at Casa Coffee Yarn, but I will also say I am not going to make any promises. I never know what each day is going to bring in terms of what dad is up for/to or not, though lately it really isn't very much at all, I can tell you that I/we will be pretty busy in the next couple of weeks, with several snow storms coming our direction, DTY arriving at her big sister's today (no clue yet when we get her, but I think it will be Friday at the latest), and one of my brothers coming next Sunday for a few days to see dad. Of course there is some other stuff smushed into the next week as well.

Last night

I opened the preheating oven the oven to put the first part of dinner in, and saw something I have seen in an oven once before, about twenty years ago. Guess what? This is not really something you want to see happening to your oven element. I decided to go ahead and chance cooking dinner in there and see what happened.

Dinner cooked, and apparently the problem moved along too, which I have to admit to not really expecting. The last time I had an oven element look like that, it flamed up and made a puddle of melted metal in the bottom of the oven. This time it kept sparking its way along the element, around the curves and turns. Yes, I know I should have turned it off and I probably spiked our electrical usage for the month (or more), but I really wanted to eat dinner. I did check on it a couple of times to make sure it wasn't doing anything drastic (and Chan, I promise the fire extinguisher was right there).
Sometimes when I checked it, the element just had a red hot spot, and sometimes it was white hot and sparking like a sparkler.

Which is pretty much what it looks like all cooled off and ready to have a new element installed. We are hoping that Home Depot sells them so that life can be back to baking as normal around here before Tuesday.

On Monday,

I was talking to DTE on the phone while sitting on the deck dead-heading geraniums. Suddenly there was a little mouse headed my direction and as soon as it saw me, it turned and ran a different way. For some reason it seemed to decide that was the way it should go so it came back toward me, freaked out and dashed off again in a different direction. That direction was going to lead to the open screen door and I didn't want to have to live with the results of it getting inside.
I quickly took the opportunity to grab my camera while getting the door shut. Of course my moving around just upset the mouse even further, so it ran over to the edge of the deck and took advantage of the lattice work down the side. About that time Sadie discovered the fresh mouse trail, so she and her nose went into high gear snuffling out its path. She did an excellent job of tracking where it had been and taking the newer scent path whenever an old and new one crossed.
It didn't take her too long to figure out just where the mouse had gone; I think she would have really liked to figure out a way to get off the deck and join it on side of the deck.
Around that time, Someone wandered by, or out from under the deck, I didn't really catch which.
It didn't take her very long to do her best to get up close and personal with the mouse. Suddenly hanging out eight feet up in the air on some lattice work wasn't so appealing and it got out of there. I think it went back up onto the deck and scurried off the other edge, but I don't know for certain. I do know that it was no longer anywhere around by the time Oribel climbed down and dashed around to a spot where she could jump up to the deck to see where it had gone after it ran away from her.
(Do you know how tricky it is to lean over a deck railing eleven feet up from the ground while kneeling on a bench, talking on the phone, and taking pictures?)

Yesterday afternoon

I made sure this was empty when I was sweeping off the deck, not that one would know that from this picture. Right after I got soggy, I emptied it again, for science and all (or something).

 

Of course, one wouldn't know this was clean too.

I can't believe

the Brooklyn City Council actually thought this was a good idea, or that it was an effective strategy. (Transcript version of the news brief heard on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday.)

Good morning. I'm Linda Wertheimer.

Forget bedbugs. Brooklyn has a larger pest: opossums. The New York Post reports that three years ago, the city tried to curb its rat problem by setting opossums free in local parks. The idea: opossums would eat rats, and when that food supply was gone, die off. Today, the nocturnal critters with twitchy pink noses are still around. They rejected rats. They eat garbage and climb fruit trees. And the rats are OK, too.

(FYI: It is very rare for opossums to carry rabies due to a low body temperature.)