Hurricane, anyone? and other stories …

So we had a hurricane hereabouts this past weekend.  Not *here* in Austin - we didn’t get more than a few sprinkles, some nice cool breezes and a low pressure system.  But my parents and Jeff’s mom live in or near Houston, and they certainly got a lot of hurricane Ike.  Jeff’s mom has been here all weekend because her town has been under mandatory evacuation since last Wednesday (she lives 20 minutes from the coast).  Neither of my parents have power and some trees got uprooted, but their houses are okay.  From what I hear, people are doing the Post-Hurricane Refrigerator Fest:  grilling/cooking everything in their refrigerators on their grills and campstoves because it’s going to go bad if they don’t.

Meanwhile, I spent the weekend up to my ears in fabric and other materials for my swap.  Such fun!  I am so far pleased with what I’ve come up with - also pleased that what I planned is working out instead of having to switch course midstream.  Sometimes I come up with kooky plans that are way too impractical.

I put my daisy-flower afghan up on the wall to see how it looked a couple of days ago - you may recall I was thinking I had all the squares done.  However, when I got it all tacked to the wall I realized it was not going to be the size and shape I wanted, and that I also wanted to rearrange the colors.  One issue was that I decided not to put a border on the squares, but just to stitch them together as they are so I had to deal with the loss of several inches.  The end result of my reconfiguration is that I have nine more squares to make.  I was kinda hoping I was more done than that, but it’s better to have it turn out right than wimp out right at the end.

I don’t know if you ever look at the “currently reading” section over there –> but lately I’ve been trolling through this Embellished Crochet book almost every night trying to decide what I want to do from it.  I don’t know why, but the prospect of beading and/or embroidering a crochet garment is attractive, whereas normally I think something that sounds like thhhbbbbpppttt when I think of making clothing.  I really am not fond of making clothing, but I think I might make that sweater there on the cover.  I bought this book while going to look for the BH&G Holiday Crafts magazine that Anna VS mentioned - I liked the snowman on the cover and the mention of lots and lots of felt crafts.  I like felt.  That magazine is going to get me in trouble, because I’m going to try to do too much this fall again.

Seems like September has inspired a fresh bout of crafting, eh?

The Benefits of Organization, or How I Always Lose Stuff

Last spring I wrote down the pattern I made up for the brown squares that will go in my flower afghan.  When I decided to stop working on the blanket for the summer, I put everything - yarn, finished squares, crochet hook and pattern pieces into a basket and closed it up.  The point was - TRY NOT TO LOSE ANYTHING.

Raise your hand if you know what’s coming next.

Yeah, that’s right, I can’t find the piece of paper with the pattern for the brown squares.  I also apparently thieved the crochet hook from myself. Oh, and I didn’t write down which type of brown yarn I was using or save a label.

So it took a while to figure out what drugs I was on what I had been doing with this brown granny square.  I figured it all out again (eventually, after three failed attempts) and then decided I could improve it.  So half the squares will be of one sort and half will be a slight variation.  Hey, at least they’re all the same color now.

I did figure out the hook size and yarn type (it was only the second one I tried).

Crocheting shall continue apace. I have just four more squares to do!  That’s a little bit less of a woohoo because I still have to put borders on everything and sew it together, which is not a throwaway bit of work.

<crosses fingers it turns out well>

Swap!

I’m excited because it’s almost September. I just realized I sidestepped mentioning my birthday back in July. I feel like birthdays are really weird now - I just can’t seem to wrap my head around the idea that I’m in my thirties - 33, in fact. I seemed to have a concept of what this age would be like in my head, and I’ve realized that age really isn’t what I made it out to be when I was younger. Like I’m settling down - ha! Sometimes I feel like I’ve just recently grown into myself enough to start really being nuts.

SO - I’m all ready to get out the fall stuff. The days are getting shorter, the temps are only in the nineties and I’m doing a swap! It’s called the Very Vintage Halloween swap. I do not really know what “vintage” Halloween means, but the idea somehow still appeals to me.

If any of you have any ideas about what might count as vintage-y Halloween items, I’d appreciate hearing them. Seriously. I mean, Halloween to me is spooky things and cauldrons and black cats and witches in red-and-white striped stockings! Carved pumpkins! Hasn’t it always been that way? One thing I did suggest to my swap partner, the lovely Claudia of The Knitting Blog by Mr. Puffy the Dog (isn’t that an awesome name?) was Dia de los Muertos. That’s sort of retro … to me. The catrinas of Dia de los Muertos and The Nightmare Before Christmas always struck me as having a similar vibe, too. I love those things.

Meanwhile, I seem to have gotten my crocheting vibe back. I’m working on both my blankets again, and possibly a third if I can just manage to decide on the pattern I want to do. One of the blankets is a revisit to the very first thing I learned crocheting on. It’s going to be four very large granny squares (that’s a pic of one there to the right). I’ve decided to finish one large square per year, and I’m on #2. I would finish it faster, but I’ve found that it’s interesting working on this project over time. I can tell how much better I am at crocheting now than the last time I worked on it. I’m interested to come back in a year and see if I can tell a difference in my skill then. One thing I will say is that Red Heart Super Saver is very rough yarn. I mean, I can see starting out with it, learning and stuff, and I use it for stuffed animals still. But … wow. I do believe I may be exfoliating my fingers with this stuff.

I have to say that I’ve been pretty amused today because my cat Callie is very, very high. It’s nothing big, just pain medicine, but she’s being very loopy and her pupils are dilated and she’s kinda crossing her eyes. Dilated pupils must be rough for a cat, since they have such light-sensitive eyes. Poor kitty. She was spayed yesterday. When Jeff went to get her, he got the usual finger-shaking-in-our-face from the vet about her - about how she’s violent, and she wouldn’t eat, and she wouldn’t let them give her pain meds last night.

Honestly, I’m not terribly sympathetic. This is a veterinary practice, yet they’re lecturing me because my cat was defensive about being terrified, in pain and locked in a cage away from everything she knows? Pardon? This doesn’t seem right to me. I’m not arguing that the cat isn’t a handful, she is, but surely if you’re a vet you have a few tricks up your sleeve for handling terrified, defensive animals, right? Surely instinctive defensive behavior isn’t a shocker, either.

Off to investigate my bed. I’ve spent a bunch of time working on Photoshop and HTML today, and my brain is BEAT. I’ve been Twittering things today like “there’s nothing like a computer to make you feel like you’re being ignored.” Ain’t that the truth.