Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

This is possibly the silliest thing ever. I wrote this for a Ravelry contest in the Selfish Knitter’s group. An ode to all those tired of ripping, tinking, and frogging. Sing it with me (to “When You Wish Upon a Star”).

When you rip upon a scarf
Makes no difference where you are
Every stitch of that attire
Will come unglued

If you come upon a seam
No hard tug is too extreme
When you rip upon a scarf
As froggers do

Fate is kind
She brings to those who tink
Ample reasons to think
They’ll be reskeining

If it’s laceweight or it’s bulk
There’s no reason you should sulk
When you rip upon a scarf
Your seams stay true.

Red and Jasper

Originally uploaded by addlepated

Have I introduced you to Red yet?

Red is Jasper’s littermate. How we came about him was this:

When we were out of town and had the cats boarding at the vet, Jasper developed a cough. The vet x-rayed his chest to make sure his lungs were clear and discovered that he had an enlarged heart. I took him to a veterinary cardiologist for a sonogram and she confirmed it.

Diagnosis: Possible early stage dilatative cardiomyopathy.

If you remember, Jasper came here to live after we lost Icey to a nasty battle with leukemia.

I called Jasper’s breeder and she was really upset about the diagnosis. Because of the cost we’d incurred with vet bills, and because she really liked the girls when we came to get Jasper, and because Red had a kink in his tail and couldn’t be a show cat, she wanted us to take him home with us. So we did, on a trial basis.

Red’s first few days at our house were not great. He was really freaked out and hid inside of the box spring about 23.75 hours of the day. But over time, he got happy (Feliway dispenser helped a lot) and now he’s a full-fledged member of the household. He plays fetch. A lot. And attacks my daughter’s pink poodle toy and carries it around the house, howling like a mighty warrior, and drops the nasty wet thing on my head while I sleep. Oh thanks. A gift.

Jasper still has an enlarged heart and we’ve started a beta blocker in the hopes that it will control or reverse it. Still not sure what this means in the long run, other than another cardiologist visit in six months. But he’s a happy boy who likes pats on the haunches and he pounces on people as they walk by the back of the armchairs in the living room. And for now, I’m just enjoying him.

After three years of the original iPhone, we upgraded to the iPhone 4. My take? It’s lovely – quick, responsive, solid-feeling, and a pleasure to work with.

Do I have the signal strength issue? Yes, I do. And it’s more than cosmetic; a 3G speed test is 10 kbps down/1 kbps up/27414 ms ping when I lay a finger across the little black stripe on the lower left corner. When I remove my finger, it’s 1409/1265/293.

For now, I don’t notice the issue because I have a case on it. I had been considering moving to screen protectors though. I think that’s off the table for the moment.

Is it worth it? Well, with the new phones, we switched from T-Mobile to AT&T. And there’s been a noticeable difference there so far: less dead spots, like the one that was in my office; the ability to use data on Mopac; heck, the existence of 3G. And it’s just so darned much faster than our 2G iPhones. Plus, I took video the other day that just blew away the video quality from my Canon camera. So yes, worth it.

Last summer I was totally and horribly addicted to Harper’s Island (warning, spoilery Wiki article), this terrible schlocky murder mystery show where a character got bumped off every week. I mean, really addicted. To the point where I was a total spoiler hound and went to try to find bits of the Canadian broadcast which aired a couple of days before the US one did and then when the finale aired, we were down in South Texas and actually went to a REST STOP that has WiFi to see if we could get the damned episodes (we couldn’t).

So there was this one very very emotional scene when one (well, two) of the characters died to the song Letters from the Sky by Civil Twilight. (Here’s the scene, if you want to see it – spoilers, duh.) And I was so caught up in the moment that I went and bought the song and rated it high in my mp3 library and played it over and over for a couple of weeks.

And promptly went and forgot about the whole thing.

So in the last several days, Letters from the Sky has been getting a ton of airplay on the local alt radio station, and I would get all tingly and adrenalined and couldn’t figure out what was up. Finally tonight, I heard it again and started shouting, “That song — television show? People running? Something big happened? What WAS IT!!” and went and looked it up on my phone and realized what it was.

Isn’t it funny how wrapped up in Harper’s Island I was last summer, and this year I couldn’t even remember the character’s names or who died when? How fickle I am.

My poem bone is decidedly rusty, but at a funeral recently I had an image – that of trying to describe the arc of someone’s life being similar to trying to describe how tremendous a shooting star was to someone who didn’t see it – and I thought I could expand it into a poem about grief. Let me know what you think:

When They Leave Us Behind

We quietly live out our everyday lives,
Assuming the world in its entirety thrives,
And it’s as if we are suddenly one day struck blind
When they leave us behind.

When they leave us behind, we freeze
In a bolt of dismay; feel the breeze
As a foul wind that sets our once-warm cheeks to stone.
We want neither company nor to be alone,
When they leave us behind.

When they leave us behind, we marvel
At the astonishing pattern their lives made in travel,
And we vainly explain – “‘Twas so bright and so far!”
But we’re describing the movement of a shooting star,
When they leave us behind.

When they leave us behind, we end
And reflect on those gone as our lives we suspend,
Then crawl into the light where the world still performs;
But that’s wrong, and will never again be our norm,
When they leave us behind.

When they leave us behind, we ache
In the missing pieces of us that they take.
Our phantom pain tingles and itches and races
Until we’re finally able to fill in the spaces,
When they leave us behind.

—-Dee Cook, 2010

Shipwreck Shawl – blocking

Originally uploaded by addlepated

I had great fun with this shawl, even though I had some “adverse events” take place during its construction. I really need to take a whole-shawl glamour shot where it’s not all full of pins.

The pattern is from Knitty, the yarn is from Perchance to Knit, and the beads are from Legendary Beads.

Springtime Bandit

Originally uploaded by addlepated

This was a side project that I started to work on while I was traveling. I couldn’t work on my Shipwreck Shawl outside of the house because of all the beads! Anyway, I tried to squeeze an extra body repeat out of the yarn and didn’t quite make it all the way through the pattern. It’s missing about 3 rows from the bottom edge.

The yarn is Studio June Star Struck, which is a merino/silk blend that has strands of silver running through it. It’s a wee bit scratchier than I hoped it would be, but it makes a very pretty shawl.

Norwegian Woods wedding shawl

Originally uploaded by addlepated

I made this shawl for my friend, who is getting married this summer. There are a lot of details in it that I’ll explain further once she has received it and had a chance to look at it, but if you’d like to look at more pictures, they’re in this Flickr set.