The Post I Didn’t Want to Write

I’ve been avoiding my blog, the phone, people, email … for a couple of weeks now. Every time I have to tell someone that my puppy Audrey passed away, it just makes it a little bit more real, and even though it’s been a week and a half, I haven’t quite gotten past the point where I hope someone will tell me it’s all a big mistake, a joke in terribly poor taste, and that she is coming home soon.

It’s not a joke, though, her kidneys just didn’t want to work anymore. Back in December when she first got sick we had hoped it was an infection or Addison’s maybe, something we could fix, because she was just 9 years old in June. But it was the havoc that age wreaks, and age has a terribly uncompromising inevitability. For Jeff and I it’s been a long, sad, difficult year and a half of caring for sick animals, balancing good medical care with their quality of life, and finally making the decision about letting them go.

We cherished the 8 years and 9 months we had with Audrey. Audrey taught me much about what’s important in life, and what isn’t. She brought immense joy and exuberance to everything she did and was full of life and mischief every day. Her greatest gift was her limitless capacity to love. I miss her terribly.

This and that and a few threads

There are six columns in my flower afghan and eight rows.  48 granny squares.  4 borders each.  When I am done with this thing, I’m going to count approximately how many stitches there are in the entire thing.  Squares, borders, the whole thing.  And I’m going to figure out about how long this blanket has taken me.  I am fairly certain I am going to be appalled by the number of hours, but not surprised, exactly.

All six columns are now assembled, and two have been stitched together.  If you’re wondering, yes, this feels exactly like making a quilt, except FAR MORE labor intensive.  I never thought anything could be as labor-intensive as a quilt, but I was wrong.  After the columns are stitched together, then there are two borders of different color.  I could have just done one, however, I had to buy an entire new skein of red yarn to finish the last two red squares, so it’s getting a red border.

Meanwhile, I tried out a few stitches on my  birches quilt.  Take a look, because that’s the last you’ll see of them.  They’re supposed to be waves, but I definitely did not like and I ripped them out.  I think I know what I’m doing now (haha, sure).  Tell you what, all I’ll commit to is that I’ll try the next one I thought of, and I’ll show it to you regardless of whether or not I like it.  I can’t promise to keep it.

I wish my camera showed the color variation in the blue fabric well … the warp and weft are different colors, and it gives it an interesting depth.  The weft is the blue that you see, but the warp threads that were used are silvers and golds.  It’s so pretty.  Unfortunately, that means that most of the blue and gold embroidery threads I’d chosen do not show up at all.  Bummer.

To take a break from big projects, I keep cooking, hopefully nothing too hard.  I find I’ve been liking pureed soups for their simplicity and how tasty the simmered ingredients can be when blended.  Last week I invented some zucchini soup with basil, which I enjoyed very much.  I just looked for a similar recipe online with no luck – this one’s not chilled or curried or made with dairy or mushrooms or whatever else, so I’ll have to write it down sometime.

This week I tried my hand at African Peanut Soup, but made it a whole lot spicier than the recipe indicated (honestly, 1/8 tsp of cayenne in a tomato/peanut butter soup is nothing!  That’s not even respectable!).  I even made my own peanut butter for it, because I have a food processor, and I can.  I fell in love with the peanut soup at a local restaurant and had to try making it, and this is pretty darn close.  It was also pretty simple, even though I made the peanut butter.  Plus, I then got to mix the leftover peanut butter with honey, which I will apply to graham crackers later.  Winner!

I will leave you with The Two Troublemakers.  Oh, and they certainly are.  Audrey got a good report on her health the other day – she will probably never be totally well again, but we are told her recovery so far is unusual and really very good.  She’s out of the woods.  Callie, on the other hand, is completely well and leaping tall buildings and all that, and getting fatter and fluffier by the day.  She’s a year and a half old now, and thank pete she’s not a kitten anymore.  That was just a nightmare.  I’m kind of dreading spring as our temperatures climb above 85F – what will she be like when she sheds?! O the horror!

In the immortal words of Chevy Chase in National Lampoon’s Christmas vacation: “Later dudes.”

Cute and warm

I am sitting here waiting for some medication to take effect.  I am sick again.  This hardly seems fair, and I am endeavoring to not be a grumpy Gus about it.  So I find myself with a half an hour until sleep, just enough time to post pictures of my dog. As promised, I have completed Audrey’s dog sweater.  See?

The sweater was originally a different project, a sweater for a cousin, begun way before this blog started.  It began to be a dog sweater when I messed up the stitch and ended up with a fairly wide bit of fabric I couldn’t use and wasn’t sure what else to do with it.  I discovered that the length of fabric fit around Audrey well.  She was then 11 pounds, which is a tad bit on the hefty side for a Yorkshire Terrier.  Now she’s about 9.2 pounds through cat-inspired exercise and illness, which means the sweater had to become a wrap sweater in order to fit.  I still need to shorten the wrap ties, but those ties make this one of the easiest-fitting sweaters I’ve ever wrestled onto a dog.

Honestly, dog clothing is on the silly side, and Audrey doesn’t like wearing it.  I mean, she’s a lapdog, but she’s still very much a dog‘s dog, if you know what I mean.  Nevertheless, I made this because Yorkies have fur issues – they don’t actually have fur, it’s hair, and they don’t have an undercoat. That’s good ’cause they don’t shed, but bad when it’s freezing out, because she takes a step out the door and starts shivering so much her paws skitter on the pavement.  So you can see that her getting deathly ill in January sorta made me think – hey, where’s that sweater!?

This one was designed to be loose in the right places, cover her tummy but leave her legs bare.  Audrey has this funny (really hysterical, actually) problem with her legs and feet – if they’re covered, she stops dead and refuses to move.  If you really want her to stay in place, put shoes on her.  She’ll stand there for hours on three legs.

As a last step, I am going to sew a harness right into the inside of this sweater, because separate harness + sweater = 15 minutes wrestling with dog.  That way I’ll just put this on and clip on her lead, and there will be less fuss for everyone, and a dog that doesn’t end up shivering pathetically!

Now I’m going to go collapse in bed.

P.S. So the Lion Wool (the royal blue in this sweater) … after about 5 minutes I had to get a hand covering.  It started to feel like I was rubbing my fingers with steel wool or an emergy board.  That can’t be good.  I guess this isn’t what it feels like to people who aren’t allergic?  What does it feel like?  I really don’t know.  Surely Lion Brand wouldn’t sell any if it felt like that to everyone.