Not dead yet

You get into a thing where you want to update but you think it's silly without pictures so you don't update because you keep forgetting to take the pictures and then when you do your camera batteries are shot and so you go look for the recharger and then you forget why you're in that room and you do the laundry and you take the other load upstairs and your room is so squalid you go and knit and then the next morning there you are wondering whether you are, in fact, dead, because you have not updated your blog. And your room is squalid and you really never will find the battery recharger, and that makes about three in the last ten years

I will buy some double A's.

Sarah came over yesterday and sat and knitted while I put away four months of laundry. Maybe only two. I have both floor and clean underwear again. I may get the room really tidy by the New Hampshire sheep and wool festival in May. But I wouldn't bet on it.

Sarah says she is not dead either, but she seems to have given up the whole blog thing. This is a pity because she is still knitting like a fiend.

But I have not taken any pictures.

After my cri-de-coeur about not caring about knitting any more I went on a binge and finished the faux entrelac scarf for Doug. It is way cool (think a woven-look shelf fungus) and apparently way warm, now that we have weather where scarves are a serious consideration (think of a picture). I had good intentions about not starting things without finishing other things, and as a result of this hubris the nearly finished second twined-knitting silk and alpaca mitten and the yarn disappeared totally (out of a locked car, which showed no other signs of burglary. Doug thinks it's in a bag). I really wish it would turn up. It was not under the laundry. I doubt that it is abiding with the battery charger, except metaphorically.

I made one and a half bootees for my boss's any-minute grandchild. As I had only one weight of superwash wool they will fit the child when he is about three, but as long as he likes Darth Maul he should be delighted with them (think of a picture. They are based on the Zebra Bootees in the bootee book). I have now got some green and yellow Baby Ull and no interest in making my boss's relative anything, but it's hardly the child's fault.

Meanwhile the Only Beloved Daughter has gone to a Better Place, which we call Italy. She landed yesterday, having left her breakfast and her favorite sweater in a rubbish bin in the Zurich airport (She bought a pink t-shirt in the gift shop to be decent in, poor child). Said sweater was a store-bought (you can exhale) very fine gauge purple angora and lambswool with the holes of short-stapled fiber appearing all over it; I think it is in Sweater Valhalla, where there are no moths and only valiant cats sleep on you. Before she left she had grudgingly ("You don't NEED another Project. You don't NEED more yarn.") consented to my starting a sweater in a Noro Silver Thaw that looks like an impressionist hyacinth field (the picture does not do it justice). I am doing Ann Budd's pullover, as OBD doesn't like the way raglans hang, only I did the back and front in the round with a false seam up to the divide for armholes. I began the sweater on January 12. To her amazement (and mine, and both our pleasure), I finished the back as she was driving us to her boyfriend's house on Friday the 19th. Yesterday I finished the front and started the sleeves. (Think of a picture.)

During the time that OBD (I think this will be a fine acronym for her, but her name is really Ellie, if I forget. I have an Only Beloved Son but he is at college in Maryland and not terribly communicative) was here, we continued the years-long lament for how bored Mena is. After some more havering, we have a shelter kitty named Marten (imagine a picture - he's a light brown tabby with white paws and mask). He is about a year old and a goof. Unfortunately Mena thinks he is disgusting and he keeps trying to play with her and Digger and Asterix and fur flys and ugly words howl through the woodsmoke. Marten (named and spelled for the protagonist of the webcomic Questionable Content)(in this link, he is the guy. Not the librarian) thinks they are BOOOOOR-ING.

OBD wanted us not to get a kitten because she points out that older kitties have more trouble getting adopted, which is, of course, true. There are an awful lot of beautiful kitties in the Bedford and Manchester shelters. The ones that hurt worst were the fat 8 and 9 year olds whose owners had to move out of cat-friendly residences, or at least that's what they told the shelter. But we wanted a young cat and a male, which let out about 7/8 of the talent. Marten is a sweetie. But Mena might have felt more comfortable with a kitten, and I am still having midlife-kitten hunger. So I am still looking for sweet little male kitten, in a sneaky, guilty way.

We are unusual in our region for actually having had some snow. Think of a picture of the orange pin flags (marking the bulbs I planted last fall) on the white hillside, like the flags of a leprechaun slalom. I will get batteries.