Five Years

It’s been so long since I wrote anything here that the formatting tools have all changed and I have no idea how this will come out.

A lot has happened in the past half-decade (!!!) and recapping it all will probably depress me and bore anyone else. I admit it’s the former that concerns me more since I am the primary audience of this blog. I don’t really want to relive the pain of losing my five oldest cats — Triquet and Velcro in 2019, Rhombus in 2020, CMY and Moonstone just in the past six weeks — but I do want to remember them. And it occurred to me that some of those memories are best suited to a blog format. For that matter, things like my knitting notes tend to be written as if they were a blog, so why not put some of them here as a present to Future Me when I read them again long after forgetting?

Maybe I’ll never get back to this. As I noted in my first/second/third post, I’d like to avoid the standard blog arc of 1) “Here is where I’ll put interesting stuff!” 2) “I haven’t posted in a while but now I really will start posting again!” 3) “Here is a picture of my cat.” So I don’t want to make promises I won’t keep.

But some forms must be observed. Here is a picture of my cat.

This is Marble. She showed up in September 2020. More on her later, I hope.

This Mind Unintentionally Left Blank

So it turns out that blogging as an aid to waking up has a problem: I’m least able to think of what to say when I’m barely awake.

Since I was having trouble thinking of words, I looked through recent photos for inspiration and found other people’s words, in the form of signs.  But then when I was going to sit down and type, CMY begged me to go into the yarn room with her and cuddle. Okay, I’ll join her in the giant kitty bed where I sometimes nap with her and just write the post on my phone. That will work, right?

The good part is that the abrasions from her affectionate grooming of my face are tingly enough to keep me awake. I think. And it did prompt some words of my own:

I probably should have gone with the signs.

A Challenge

I haven’t blogged in quite a while, for various reasons.  One of them is that I’m just not using my laptop so much these days, reading things on my phone instead. But posting from my phone is a pain, not least because I have not mastered thumb-typing and do it all with my index finger.

But I need to adjust my schedule.  Currently I take my spouse to the train station in the morning, a good two hours before the cats’ breakfast.  Not being a morning person, I usually end up back in bed reading on my phone for an hour, then napping for an hour or more and often feeding the cats later than I intend to.  And then after that it still takes me another couple of hours to get myself together enough to go to work, in part because I eat breakfast after feeding the cats and take my meds then.  Ideally I would leave for work right after feeding the cats, but that almost never happens.

So, I’m going to try to do something else with that morning time.  This.  Today I dropped spouse off, returned, took meds, and made toast.  I’m hoping that if I recast the morning interval before cat feeding as time in which I get to do something that I usually don’t get around to, it will keep me awake long enough for the meds to start working so I stay awake through to kitty breakfast time.  Admittedly, I picked a very bad day to try this, because I was up very late last night and really need that sleep, but at least even if I do doze off again I’ll have gotten a blog post out of it.

Of course, it doesn’t really count without an illustrative photo.

 

Problems and Quests

Long ago (mid-late 90s) I gave a dinner party for all six of my friends.  One was vegan, and as I was setting out appetizers or something like that I mentioned that I’d checked a lot of labels to find crackers that were vegan.  She laughed and was appreciative, but surprised and a bit apologetic that I’d gone to the trouble.  Another friend of mine said, “Robin is a problem-solver. Of course she’d look for food that would work for you.”  I had never thought of it like that, but it’s true.

This story came to mind when I was looking through a box of yarns that are mostly 10-15 years old and wondering why I had so many of a similar color, which, while nice, isn’t really a favorite color.  And I remembered that I have a nice jacket that my mom made that I really like, and when I started knitting in 1998 or so I wanted to make myself a hat (beret) that matched it.  (I had already made coordinating beaded earrings that match it really well, that being my primary craft prior to taking up knitting.)  She’d made the jacket from, among other things, some Italian yarn she’d knitted into a fabric and then cut, and coordinating colors of woven wool fabric.  The yarn was black and grey mohair with dark magenta accents, and the jacket has a dramatic V of magenta fabric edged with the knit and then the charcoal grey forms the body of the jacket.

I had a bit of the yarn left over at one point in my life, which may not have ever overlapped with my knitting life. (I still hope to find it again someday, but it’s been 20 years.) Greys were not difficult to find. But I have SO MUCH magenta yarn that’s almost but not quite right.  I think I last purchased some around 2012.  No, the hat has never been made, and I haven’t worn the jacket in a while (though of course I still have it.)

This is less problem-solving and more of a quest.  And even when I’ve decided that I probably won’t make the hat it’s still sometimes hard to not get yarn that might work just in case.  It’s not the project that I kept buying yarn/fiber for even after mentally conceding that I won’t do it any time soon. (Another one was to make a cabled hat to match this shirt I bought my husband back in 2001, so he could wear his favorite shirt and the hat and match his Mii. Would he actually do this? No.  Yet, I have actually hand-blended fiber on my drum carder to spin yarn to match the shirt, which is cross-woven red and blue so it’s pretty much impossible to match.)  The quest never ends.

It was when I got to this point in my thinking about the yarn that I realized: I’m a NPC in my own life.  The story around me changes and I still have a (side)quest that will never end, walking in place in my house.

(That ending really calls for a wry screenshot from a game, but I don’t have one.  So here’s a cat photo.  Feel free to count them.)

They Love This Project

I’ve been posting a number of pics on Ravelry of cats enjoying my current knitting project, and it finally occurred to me to post them here too.  Colors will be a bit annoyingly off for the reasons I complained about previously (not having a decent editor on this machine), but the cats are the correct colors and that’s all anyone’s really looking at, right?

Triquet taking a nap.

Quot flossing his teeth.

Triquet “helping”.

Moonstone napping.

Also, here’s an unimpeded view of the underarm of the sweater, just to show the colors a little better.

It’s the Little Things

It’s been someting like six months since I’ve posted an entry.  I’ve taken photos, I’ve had random thoughts, whatever else would go into an insignificant personal blog without a particular theme.  What’s the holdup?  Nothing really big, just…annoying.

First, in I think November 2016 (maybe even 2015?), Windows updated its Photos program and totally dumbed it down by replacing its color/temp/cast/whatever controls with a limited number of dumb useless filters.  I discovered this when I was about to edit a whole bunch of yarn photos, for which I actually rather care about their exact colors, and was so frustrated I was about in tears.  Why…why would you SUBTRACT features that worked and replace them with far less applicable ones?  I was far from the only person to complain about this, but that didn’t fix it.

I did find another photo-editing program that basically served my needs without being too oversized, but as far as I know it doesn’t have the simple capability of browsing my photos from the folder they’re in and seamlessly doing some minor editing on them and saving the duplicate.  Which is really all I want.  If I needed to do serious editing, I have Photoshop on another machine, but I don’t want to do that.

This problem is less of a problem now because I also changed phones and the new one has a better camera, so I have less adjusting to do (and I can do some of that on the phone).  But my phone should not be more suitable as an editor than my laptop, darn it.

The second molehill I kept tripping on is that my main laptop was getting harder and harder to use, not because of software or hardware issues, but because the touchpad was becoming impossible to click.  That laptop has a touchscreen, which I have always disliked because I really don’t need to make things happen every time I brush away the ibiquitous cat hair, but for the first time I actually had a use for it as a substitute touchpad, sort of.  The scrolling functions still worked just fine, but I couldn’t click anything without extreme pressure.  I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts, but not for cropping photos.  And of course the photos that I’ve been saving for posts are all on that machine.  Occasionally I’d try copying a few to my other laptop for posting, but then I never got around to it.

A week or two ago I finally complained enough about it that spouse looked into it and found that this wasn’t an uncommon problem with that laptop due to battery swelling.  Which is what had happened.  The touchpad was literally being forced out of the keyboard surface.  So he ordered another battery and put it in and also replaced the hard drive and now all I have to do is reinstall the software and I have my functionality on it again, with its larger screen and fixed hinge (as opposed to the flexible hinge of the Surface I’m typing on, which is not so useful when one actually uses laptops on one’s lap).

Have I done that yet? Of course not.

However, that’s no reason not to put up a post with more recent photos.  Of course, none of these things were sufficient reason not to post anyway; the underlying problem is that I have, as spouse has put it repeatedly, the attention span of a goldfish.  But I should at least be able to manage a post per month.

Crud, it’s no longer January.  Oh well.  Still a good time to post a Find the Cat, right?

That one may have been a little obvious.  How about this one?

Better? No? Well, I’m out of practice.

That Cat

We were peacefully playing/watching Final Fantasy XII when there was an incredible crash from the kitchen, with the splintering tinkles of something glassish being broken.  We rushed over to find the floor and a few other surfaces covered with shards from a large CorningWare serving bowl, and an orange tail disappearing through the foyer.

What was in this bowl that had so tempted the perpetrator to presumably poke and prod at it to the point of pushing it off the edge?  Meat?  Shrimp?  Tonight’s very tasty fish?

No, it was a corncob and some husks.  An already-fully-eaten-from corncob.

I know his mother didn’t raise him to be a vegetarian.  She’s right here to confirm.

Placeholder Cats

I have various sets of photos edited to put in posts and keep forgetting the actual posting part.  As it’s quite late and I need to clean litterboxes before I go to bed, they’ll have to continue to wait, but here are a few standalone cat pics so I don’t entirely forget how to do this.

Moonstone on ottoman, a.k.a. the little giant kitty bed

Praline snoozes in the sun.

Half a Rhombus.  I guess that’s just a bus.

CMY carefully cleans a foot.

Gray Cat, the local feral who “introduced” Meringue to us.

Upside-down Licoris head!

Five-Spice, Vanilla, Walnut, and Meringue enjoy treats.

Another adorable Quot nap.

Velcro jumps!

Triquet chills.

Count the Cats: Yarn Room Invasion

Apparently the door wasn’t quite as latched as I thought.

Bird in the House

I was sitting on the couch about to drink my coffee when I heard bird sounds from the direction of the family room (to which the catio is attached).  At first I thought it was a forgotten cat toy recently rediscovered, but the sounds were too loud and varied.  I stood up and saw Praline leaping at the wall and realized we had a visitor.

(There would be a picture here of an adorable little bird on the floor near the stairs if I’d thought of it, but my attention was focused on keeping the cats away from it.)

The poor little thing was crouched trembling on the floor, watched by several slightly confused cats.  They knew this moving thing was interesting and worth catching (there’d been a similar experience with a small bat, which I don’t remember if I blogged), but had never actually had the opportunity to.  Since the bird was petrified, I took a chance and picked it up in my left hand, where it huddled and shook and cheeped but was otherwise still, and yanked the (human-sized) door to the catio open.  Vanilla was still out there, but she looked at me with wide eyes and skedaddled.

There’s a mesh door leading to the backyard from the catio, which I intended to go through to release the bird.  However, it has latches on both sides, and unfortunately they were both latched at this time.  As I discovered this, the bird struggled out of my hand and fluttered to the floor.  Spouse had joined me by then and I asked him to go around and unlatch the door from the back.  I then put a pillow in front of the cat door, because I’d forgotten that it locks from the inside rather than the side I was on.

After the door was unlatched I found the poor terrified bird and carried it out to the back and put it on a fence post.

It just sat there for a bit and at first I worried that it might be injured, but spouse pointed out that it was, well, terrified and catching its breath.  He went back in to properly lock the cat door to the catio, because once the bird recovered, it promptly did this.

Yes.  It flew directly to the one-inch mesh and popped through to land on the shelf.  Argh.  Well, at least we knew it could fly.

I went back into the catio and watched it for a bit.  I wasn’t the only one.

It rested for a while.  This gave me the opportunity to get a size comparison, though naturally the camera focused on the greenery in the background.

I stroked its soft little back one more time and it cheeped and squeezed through the mesh and flew around the corner of the house.  Phew.  I wonder if it’s learned anything from this.