It’s Furious Balancing

I am going to admit to being in a bit of a rut.

Looking over my blog posts for this month, it seems that I have been dragging myself from LOLCat Friday to LOLCat Friday with some grumbling (and a lot of knitting) thrown in for good measure. I’m not going to confess to being tired of winter — because I would much rather have snow up to my kneecaps than have to deal with a nasty Michigan summer filled with ghastly 90 degree days and 105% humidity — but I am definitely tired of something.

I have been feeling uninspired, and the No Yarn, No Books, and No Meat on Friday Lenten diet is beginning to wear on me.

Thankfully, there are compensations. The first being Easter candy you eat:

and the second being Easter candy you torture:

If you Google peep microwave you’ll uncover the horrors of which I speak. There are many pedestrian versions of “What happens when you put a Marshmallow Peep in a microwave?” For a more erudite treatment of the subject, I highly recommend the scholarly article Fear Response in Peeps. For a less erudite treatment of the subject, The Washington Post sidebar article on Peep Jousting fits the bill.

Actually, tooling around on the Innernets, one can find all sorts of disturbing/hilarious things concerning the ubiquitous Marshmallow Peeps. Unsettling indeed is the “factory tour” at the Official Peeps Web Site (WARNING: Plays obnoxious music!) Actually, most of the Official Peeps Web Site is unsettling, now that I think of it.

If one looks long and hard enough, one can find a Peeps 2008 Wall Calendar; a yellow Peep Costume (adult size); a recipe for Peep Crispy Treats from a blog that had good amount of knitting content and a homemade bookshelf project I would love to emulate; and a March 2007 newspaper article from the Topeka Capital-Journal citing the poll result that if a Marshmallow Peep came to life, the female celebrity it most likely would be — and there’s no surprise here — is Jessica Simpson.

Still, my all-time favorite Peep show is the Flickr photoset collection Peeps for Passover.

Whew.

I’m stopping the blog post right here, right now with my Friday LOLCat. I’ve given myself a remarkable headache with this Perspective of Peeps on the ‘Net, and have found myself well-nigh stunned and overwhelmed (in the best possible way) by a Peep-less candy diorama of The Battle of Helm’s Deep. How in the world did I wind up there? But my, those gummy Urak-Hai look tasty…. Forth Eorlingas!

Dear God, they did the Battle of Pelennor Fields, too.

Where was I? Oh, yes, LOLCat.

Another week has flown by and it’s LOLCat Friday once again.

Enjoy your weekend, cats and kittens. Mine will involve a great deal of knitting — sleeves for the brown Malabrigo raglan sweater, gifts for a baby due to arrive in May, and the project for my appearance on the Kitty Knits Blog Tour coming up on March 4th. There’s going to be some Stash Management thrown in there somewhere, and I need to watch the second tape of The Seven Samurai. Something tells me one of my projects will be dedicated to Akira Kurosawa.

When I started this blog some 14 months ago, I didn’t imagine that it would turn into a knitting blog. Technically, it isn’t, if only because there are a few posts that don’t even address knitting at all.

There are plenty of other topics I would like to write about, but they are either (a) poorly-formed with no satisfying resolution or, (b) work-related and thus dealing with Other People and privacy issues and suchlike and so on.

Topic (a) would include the media’s utter irresponsibility in reporting the Northern Illinois University shooting from the “mentally ill gunman who stopped taking his medication” angle. That is offensive on so many levels, the primary one being that a person described as “normal,” “intelligent,” with “no red flags” is being tarred with the rather broad brush that not only stigmatizes people who take prescription psychotropic medication — such as myself — but also offers an oversimplified, pat answer that the American Public will swallow whole without stopping to think.

Surprise, surprise.

Topic (b) would include my belief that – despite all the jokes about unscrupulous lawyers — the most unethical people who walk into our office are clients, not attorneys. I work with estate planning, probate, and trust administration issues, and I often say that I’ve seen it all when it comes to the intrafamilial squabbles after a death (e.g., “Uncle Henry’s dead! Who gets his stuff?!”). The particular estate I have in mind at the moment involves outright fraud — intentionally concealing assets from other beneficiaries and intentionally misdirecting assets intended for charitable purposes into their own pockets. And people say attorneys are shysters? ‘Nuff said.

<deep breath>

So let’s talk about knitting, shall we? It’s a lot less complicated than Real Life. Most of the time, anyway.

I’ve been slogging along on the Malabrigo top-down raglan sweater and have a progress picture for you:

Again, not a good picture by any set of standards, but it gives you an idea of how far I’ve come along. I’m just starting the k1p1 ribbing at the bottom, and I’ll probably give that 3 to 4 inches. The collar looks too small/too tight in this photo, but that’s more k1p1 ribbing; trust me, I can get this over my head without any problems.

Happy LOLCat Friday! I watched The Lord of the Rings trilogy yet again while The Husband was out of town, so…

* * * * *

That’s about all I’m good for at the moment.  My sinuses have bugging the hell out of me today (and the past several days).   Yeesh.  Couch sitting, knitting, and a DVD are about all I can handle.

I made a lot of catnip mice.

Well, I made THREE catnip mice, from start to finish, over my long weekend. That includes the knitting, the felting, the drying, the stuffing, and the sewing up. Tiny little projects, but, oh, they’re so much fun!

I have about 10 skeins of Patons Classic Merino Wool in chestnut brown, paprika, and black in The Yarn Stash. The Patons was purchased with the intention of making more kitty pi’s, but, since I’m bogged down still in The Kitty Pi That Ate Cheboygan, I decided to make mice instead. I could probably churn out twelve dozen of these mice in the same amount of time as that Neverending Kitty Pi, to be quite honest.

The Before Picture:

The mice are poised atop my slip-cased collection of Jane Austen, by the way. I wanted something that would show the difference in size in the before-felting and after-felting pictures.

The After Picture:

The Patons felts up quite well. It only took one short cycle in the washing machine (hot water wash/cold water rinse) to get them to the right size. I gave them a day and a half drying time, then I stuffed their little mousy behinds with catnip and sewed them up with The Husband’s “invisible” nylon thread.

Since Christopher was disappointed that these mice weren’t for him — they’re gifts for Other Cats — I’ll placate the little guy by posting Yet Another Cute Kitten Photo. Beware the snorgleliciousness…

In my opinion, Caturday begins Friday afternoon at 5:00 p.m.

I went to the Innernets to find a definitive definition of Caturday and found myself distracted, as always, by completely unrelated links. It started with reading about LOLCats at the Wall Street Journal, then a LOLCat history that bandied about such words as “metacommunication,” and I woke up when I found myself at Cats Who Look Like Hitler.

I even rediscovered the Viking Kittens Flash animation. I hadn’t seen that in years.

Where was I? Oh, yes, Caturday. The weekend. Thank God.

Time to fire up Squeaker and prowl the ‘Net. I’m at the start of a beautifully quiet three-day weekend with just me, the computer, the kittehs, and a can of aerosol cheese. Oh, and a lot of yarn. A serious amount of yarn. Yarn that is almost to the point of Developing a Life of Its Own and pulling an Anschluss in my living room. It isn’t as bad as all that, but I am at the point where an inventory of The Stash needs must be done. I have to see what’s there and what’s what so I can get my wee head around it all. I need some large, translucent storage bins, methinks. Just knowing the yarn is tucked away in corrugated cardboard boxes – without being able to see it — preys upon my anxiety levels.

Sorry; moving along.

Three days. The Husband is off in the Great State of Texas visiting family and I’m here trying desperately to recover my mental health after another hellacious work week. I like my New Boss and I like my clients and I like my job, but it is extremely busy right now. Not only am I getting the New Boss settled in and acclimatized, I’m dealing with High Season in the Death Care Industry. I read somewhere that more people die in January than any other month. I believe it. Come January, they start dropping like flies. Now, for most of you, if your clients die, your work slows down. Mine doesn’t. My clients Take the Big Dirt Nap and it’s time for me to file seven different forms with the Probate Court, and no, I am not exaggerating the number.

<<deep breath>>

Three days. Computer. Cats. Yarn. Aerosol cheese. Not necessarily concurrently.

Since I can’t work on my Ravenclaw mittens without getting CTS symptoms in my hands, and since I’m in the middle of two long and tedious knitting projects, I thought I would take a little mental time-out and and whip up quick project from my new knitting book, Kitty Knits: Projects for Cats and Their People.

It’s a sweet little book; I do confess that I want to make several of the patterns in it, especially “The Cat” afghan — a cozy lace-centered blanket with different foreign words for cat duplicate-stitched on the seed stitch borders.

I had about 1/3 of a skein of Malabrigo left over from the Tempting sweater, and I thought fuchsia would be a most excellent color for a catnip mouse. I knitted up the little guy while watching the first VHS tape of Serial Experiments: Lain. I decided to do the felting in the bathroom sink, since throwing one lonely little fuchsia mouse in the washing machine seemed like overkill.

I will say that Malabrigo felts up beautifully. It only took two hot water soaks, minimal agitation, and two cold water rinses to “shock” the wool and get Mr. Malabrigo Mouse to the right size and consistency. I stuffed him with extra-strength catnip wrapped in some clean rags, and The Husband stitched up his mousy back end on the Singer — er, the mouse’s mousy back end, that is.

Aaron was kind enough to pose for me. He’s such a good, cooperative kitten…

Today, Groundhog’s Day, is also the Feast of St. Brigid. I conveniently forgot this little factoid until I saw other bloggers posting about the Silent Poetry Reading that has taken place for the past three years. Even though the event has caught me by surprise — yet again — I’ll contribute a poem this time around.

It’s from a book a poetry given to me by one of my favorite college professors, Conrad Hilberry. I had Dr. Hilberry for classes in 17th century literature and creative writing – poetry (I was a teaching assistant for him in the same poetry class the following year). Con was a very gentle and kind professor; I remember that he wrote his comments on our papers in pencil since red ink looked too harsh. He gave me a fine appreciation for the written word (and John Milton, especially).

The book was Louise Gluck‘s The House on Marshland, and I’ve loved the following poem ever since Con gave me the slim volume back in 1985.

——————————————

Gretel in Darkness

This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch’s cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas . . .

Now, far from women’s arms
and memory of women, in our father’s hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of that gleaming kiln–

Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
we are there still and it is real, real,
that black forest and the fire in earnest.

This accurately summarizes how I feel about typing at the moment:

I’ve got a serious love-hate thing going on with the computer screen right now.  I need to either (a) have a do-over for the month of January or, (b) decide that the New Year actually starts in February, and not necessarily February 1st, either.