Puppy Nap Time

Between noon and two every afternoon the puppies take a nap. My children never had a scheduled nap, but the dogs do. Some days I use this time to run errands. Some days I do housework. Right now I'm just enjoying the quiet. I hear the cat licking his paws, and the thermostat on the dishwasher. The mail just came down the slot. Other times of my day are noisy, but between noon and two, it's not.

I have a lot of events crunched into the upcoming weeks. Next week I'll be at the middle school during puppy nap time, in the cafeteria with over 200 11-14 year-olds, and there won't be any quiet. But for now I can enjoy the hum of the refrigerator.

Frustration Thy Name is Eyelash

I'm working on this scarf for Halloween, I know I have the Suede Granny Square one started, but I can't exactly wear the same scarf to school while I sell Boo-Grams for a WHOLE WEEK, can I? Yes, it's horrible synthetic novelty yarn, I know. But I LIKE it.To start with, I got the yarn on clearance for $1 a skein (yes, yes, to the yarn snobs that's still too much, I know.) It's silky and Muppet-y. I think it's the Muppetty-ness I like the most, it's just plain silly and it makes me smile. The puppies like it too, and they keep grabbing it and running out the dog door/cat flap with it. (Boa goes z-z-i-i-i-p-p-p-p as it's being pulled through the dog door at a high rate of speed.) So far I've been able to deal with any of the damage the dogs have done to it: it's sturdy, it doesn't show soiling, the leaves and bark shake right out, and I've been able to deal with the tangling. Granted, a couple of times the dogs have managed to get it off the needles, and I had to start over, but I wasn't too far along.

Now it's gotten frustrating. I'm over half finished with it, and the last time I picked it up to work on it, I knit it in the wrong direction. So this scarf that I'm knitting lengthwise and that is 5-6 feet long has one half with 13 rows and one half with 14 rows. I can rip out and pick up stitches in regular yarn, I haven't been knitting long, and it's hard, but I can do it. In eyelash yarn, SOB, it's just too hard. All that fuzz gets in the way and I can't see the little loops themselves, much less what direction they're turned. And I just DON'T WANNA start over again, I don't!! ((Foot stamping here. It makes me feel better.))

Getaway. . .

This weekend we boarded the puppies for the first time, and we went here:

I don't know if it counts as a true getaway. It was for a retreat given by my husband's employer and we had both the kids with us, but we weren't responsible for any of the pets, and I didn't wash anything more arduous than my hair all weekend. So maybe it does. I don't have any pictures of John's band rocking the hotel (literally, I went up to check on the kids and the music could be heard quite clearly on the third floor, and someone else said they could hear them on the fourth,) but they were the entertainment after the big dinner on Saturday night, and it went well. We've been to the retreats in the past, and the band was at least as good as any "professional" entertainment the hospital has arranged. There was MUCH dancing, at times the dance floor wasn't big enough, and they had their own DANCING NUN. Sister Anne is my favorite of the Sisters of Peace who administer over St.John's Hospital, and she likes to dance. I've done the Hokey Pokey with her myself on a previous retreat.

The Heathman is a strange place. It is the perfect mountain lodge, in the middle of the suburban business district in Vancouver,WA. We had to drive by the mall, turn right at the Olive Garden, and go past Big Lots and Marshall's to get there. But once you go inside it's all hewn timbers and wool trade blankets and I fell in love, with this:

That is the light sconce in our room, and I love it. I covet it. We don't have any lodge-themed paraphanilia at our house (other than a moose trivet I bought during the run of Northern Exposure,) but I seriously think I could find a place for it. We kind of have a Twenties-style Arts & Crafts vibe going on in our house, and I think I could make it work. Here's the side:

I love the owl. The pair of wolves on the other side were a little menacing, but I love the owl. It wasn't exactly a relaxing weekend, John was attending meetings, and we had to drive back to Longview for Audrey's soccer game Saturday afternoon (a 3-1 win, bringing our season to 3 wins, 2 ties, and 3 losses so far,) but it was good. Still, as nice as it is to get away, it's important to come back to this:

Those are the puppies sprawled out on the couch, on top of John and the newspaper he was reading. I think they've become part of the family.

"Round and Round the Garden"

You know that rhyme for babies? The one that goes "Round and round the garden like a teddy bear, one step, two steps, tickle you under there!?" I've been round and round the garden today, THREE TIMES. I was chasing puppies who had made off with my knitting, or yarn. I've got another scarf on the needles, this one out of Bernat Boa, a slippery (but sturdy) polyester eyelash yarn. Boa makes a distinctive and peculiar sound as it's being pulled full-tilt through the cat flap/dog door, I've come to recognize it. You can say all sorts of nasty things about synthetic novelty yarns, but bark chips and bits of blackberry bush shook out of it just beautifully.

Debi, my recipient for the "Art and a Cup of Java" swap has probably received her package by now, so I'm going to show the contents:

Debi is an animal person, so I chose to do a picture of cat for her. You can't really see the pearlescent ink I used on top of the watercolor, so it loses a bit in the photo. I'm not entirely happy with it, but it wasn't too bad for my first try at any sort of art in a very long time. I hope Debi likes it. I confess, though, I coveted that tea cup. Debi had lost her collection of tea cups, so I wanted to find her a nice one. There's a thrift store downtown which I go to almost every Wednesday, and I looked for one there for weeks before this one showed up during their moving sale. It's old Noritake, I wish I knew what the pattern is, but everything except "Noritake" was in Japanese.