Next Stop: Whineyville

::Whining Alert::

I should be on a train. Right now. I want to go to the Sock Summit soooo baaaaad. An airplane is not an option, so I should already be on a train in order to make it to Portland, Oregon by Thursday. I know I'm fortunate to have family, and three of the most goofy but wonderful dogs ever, and a job, and a home, and it's not like I'm the kind of person who has to "have it all" but a little bit more would be great. Not a lot. Just enough to get me to Oregon and back, plus hotel, plus Sock Summit registration, plus meals, plus an enormous yarn/book/souvenir allowance would be just about right.

Little Miss Green Eyes

A week or so ago, this little creature showed up in the garage.

The garage! That's Joseph's domain! He rarely allows Joanie, Lizzie or Tigger in the garage - those three cats make their home in the chicken coop because King Joseph is usually very territorial. Tigger will sometimes venture into the garage, but as soon as Joey shows up, Tigger beats it out of there like a bat out of hell. That's why we were so surprised to see this little one in the garage.

Anyway, she's been eating (Joseph's!) cat food, and some kitten food that mom's cat Bessie didn't like. Oh, and milk. Warm milk. Warm milk with a shot of Carnation Fat Free French Vanilla Creamer, thank-you-very-much. She's got a soulful meow, and you can tell she wants desperately to be loved, but she's very skittish. My sister tried putting food and toys in a trap, but that kitty is too smart to fall for that old trick. She will play with cat toys, and lets people get really close, but not close enough to grab her. That is, no ordinary person can get close enough, so we called The Cat Whisperer, a.k.a. my niece Jen. She has rescued countless cats and found homes for them. She's like a snake charmer when it comes to stray cats. Jen came over and just reached down and scooped up that sweet little kitty, and put her in a cat carrier.


I wish we could bring this little girl into the house, but my sister is horribly allergic to cats. Not to mention the fact that any newcomers would have to get past these three hooligans who hate cats with a white hot passion.

Jen has a great cat cage (that her two favorite aunts gave her for her birthday this year) and took the kitty home so she can socialize her. After all, Jen has 8 cats and 3 dogs, not to mention the sheep and horses and chickens and ducks and guinea fowl, so what is one more, right? We will pay to get the kitty vetted and spayed when she is old enough.

After that, this little girl will need a home. She's a pretty little thing with long hair and green eyes. Jen is calling her "Olive" because of her pretty green eyes.

Anybody want a kitty?

Dogs on Thursday

Thursday already? Really? It's not possible. I'm off from work this week, and it's amazing how quickly the days go by when you're on vacation.

Not that it's a real vacation vacation. So far we have spent a couple of mornings covering up some old fake tile in the bathroom with wainscoting. I say "fake" tile, because the floor and up to about 4' on the walls is concrete that they scored to give it a tile-like look. Ugh. This is the bathroom in the old part of the house, circa 1915. I guess that was the thing to do back then? Who knows? If we ever get a tornado in southern New Jersey, we're safe. That bathroom is like a concrete bunker.

We've also had to have the repair man out to fix the door on the dishwasher earlier this week. Somehow, the door broke, and when you would go to open the dishwasher, you had to brace yourself so the door didn't rip your arm right out of its socket. Luckily, it was still under warranty. Still, I wish I knew how the door broke. Hey, wait, you don't think it could have been this?

No. No, certainly not.

Anyway, today we are going out to Lancaster County, PA with mom and dad, so I'm posting this Dogs on Thursday post extra early in the morning. Since it is almost August, you know what that means... Time for the dogs to choose another Brown Bag Sock Yarn! Yippee! You can see how excited they are about it from this video:



Maybe they're not really all that excited. How hard is it to show a little enthusiasm? Seriously, I don't ask much from these dogs, the least they can do is pick some darn sock yarn once a month!

Just kidding! The love they give me every day is more than I could ever ask for, and certainly more than I deserve.

FYI, here is August's sock yarn.


Love it!

A New Game

With Emma's new pee pee problem urinary incontinence, we have been playing a new game this week. It's called "Where's Your Hiney." No matter where I place the miscellaneous bath mats, it always seems as though her hiney is just over the edge. Take a look at this picture. There is a bath mat on the chair, and a beach towel, cotton throw, and bath mat on the ottoman.

Notice the location of her butt? I'll go over to her and say "Where's your hiney? Where SHOULD your hiney be?" and she just sits there and wags her tail at me. I don't have the heart to make her move. It's all good, though, because our Wonder Vet put her Proin and it really seems to be helping. No new leaks in two days. Woo Hoo!

Back to our regularly scheduled...

Dogs on Thursday! I feel bad for having skipped last week's DOT post, but I have officially survived last weekend's event at work. We're all talking about getting t-shirts made up that say something like "I Survived Another Hell Weekend." This was my 10th one - I think there should be balloons and party hats, or at the very least a cake, right?

Anyway, I thought I would be working 12 days in a row, but it turns out I needed to take off this past Tuesday to take Miss Emma to the Vee-Eee-Tee. I don't want to embarrass her, but she has been having some, shall we say, dribbling. You know, pee pee problems. It started about a month ago--no blood or urgency, just every now and then a little wet spot where Emma was laying. Our wonder-vet put her on two weeks of an antibiotic to see if it was just a little infection. It seemed to help at first, but then started up again.

The next step was bloodwork, but we had to wait until this week to have it done so that the antibiotic was out of her system. Emma was a very brave little soldier when she was getting her blood drawn. I think it helped that the vet tech drawing her blood also happens to be The Nanny!

The Wonder Vet did a broad spectrum blood panel to check out lots of things, and when he called and left a message with the results, he said Emma has "gorgeous bloodwork." Those were his exact works. Yay! I'm hoping to talk to him tonight about the next step, but am so very relieved that it's not something with her kidneys or whatever. Dribbling I can deal with, as long as she is healthy. In fact, we have started covering all of her favorite spots with bath mats - the kind with a rubber backing.

She thinks it's great, and wonders why we didn't provide this extra cushy blanket before now!

Elizabeth Bennett had it right...

I totally missed yesterday's Dogs on Thursday, and I can only plead tiredness. It has been an exhausting week at work, and even though it's Friday, my work week is not over. In fact, today was only day 5 of 12 days in a row. I'm getting too old to work 12 days in a row!

I won't go into much detail, but this weekend is a big to-do at work. It's an every-other-year event, and I absolutely dread it. It is basically a bunch of people who have more money than God getting together to do competitive shopping for "art". If these people want something from you, you are treated like a servant. If they don't require your presence, you are lower than a speck of dirt on the bottom of their shoe. I swear that if I ever have enough money to attend an event like this, (or even any money at all, really) I will never, ever treat anyone the way I have been treated today, and will be treated tomorrow for 12 hours, and on Sunday for another 8 hours.

This just proves, yet again, that Elizabeth Bennett was a very wise (though fictional) woman when she said "The very rich can afford to give offence wherever they go."

The Adventures of Country Mouse

Country Mouse is back in the country! I had a wonderful time in the Big City meeting City Mouse Cynical Knitting Gal from Chicago. I'll admit that I was a little nervous about going into Philly, and then a LOT nervous right before I got off the PATCO train. For a fleeting moment, I considered calling CKG and telling her I couldn't do it, and just staying on the train and riding right back to the (relative) safety of New Jersey.

That was just a fleeting moment of weakness, though, and I got off the train and found my way up to ground level and just started walking like I knew where I was going. Luckily, I was headed in the right direction (I had a 50/50 chance of being right) and kept walking until I came to Rittenhouse Square - a lovely park! There were dogs everywhere. It seemed as though I saw every breed except for brittanys. That's probably a good thing, though, because at that point I was so highly strung that if I saw a brittany I probably would have accosted the dog and smothered it with hugs and kissed just to be near something familiar. Then the owner would have called the police and I would have been carted off to jail and I never would have made it to the place where CKG and I were to meet, which is here:

Rosie's Yarn Cellar on Locust Street, just west of Rittenhouse Square. Sadly, that is the only picture I took in the city. Rosie's truly is a cellar - small, and cramped, but good things come in small packages! There was yarn everywhere. It was really warm in there - uncomfortably warm - so after some fingering of yarns, we made our purchases and then set out to find somewhere to have a bite of lunch. Nearby was a place called the Irish Pub (I think) and they had veggie burgers! Jackpot! (I mentioned to my mom that I was happy they had veggie burgers, and she said it's not surprising-- lots of restaurants in the city are catering to "weirdos who don't eat meat". Those were her exact words...) We spent quite a bit of time there talking about knitting and dogs and more knitting and more dogs, then wandered around Philly some more and found a cafe type place and sat and drank coffee & tea and talked more about knitting and dogs.

Then we wandered back toward my subway station, and I descended into the bowels of the city once again and got on a train back to New Jersey. ,It was great to meet CKG in person after blog commenting and emailing back and forth for a couple of years. I had an absolutely wonderful time, scary parts and all!

Making a list...

...and checking it twice. No, it's not time for that jolly guy in the red suit! It time for this country mouse to take a trip.

I will be leaving my own little corner of the Earth, and venturing into the big city!
More later, but for now, I've got to get back to that list!

Dogs on Thursday

For this week's Dogs on Thursday, Tara deserves to be in the spotlight. Earlier this week, Tara found good ol' Turtle Number 5 (remember him from this post?) and was so very proud of herself. Number 5 was hanging out right up against the fence and Tara was so happy to see him that she was howling like a beagle. This was at 7:00 am, so I didn't take the time to run back into the house and get the camera, figuring that I should put an end to the howling by running around the fence and moving Number 5 out of Tara's eyesight. Mission accomplished.

By the time I walked around the fence and got back into the yard, Tara was off happily digging in the dirt looking for worms, a favorite past time of hers. At least I thought she was looking for worms. Turns out, she found herself another friend. A turtle friend. A tiny turtle friend, no bigger than a golf ball. Again, Tara was so happy with herself! She pranced around me, wagging her beautiful tail. At this point I picked up the turtle and ran into the house for my camera...and a bottle of nail polish, of course.

I couldn't remember what number turtle we were up to, and this is such a teeny tiny guy, I just gave him an "X". Meet Turtle X!

Here he is next to Number 5:

Here is the proud Turtle Hunter:

Doesn't Tara look so very pleased with herself? This is what she looks like in her own mind:

Dogs on Thursday

It's a new month, so you all know what that means...time to choose another yarn from the tote for this month's Brown Bag Sock Yarn. Since Emma normally does the honors, I offered her first crack at it, but she was too tired to get up off of the sofa. No problem, I brought the tote to her.


She didn't like the orange tote in her favorite snuggling spot, so I took the bags out of the tote.

Nope, she still didn't like the bags invading her space, so I put them on the doggy bed behind the sofa.

That was better, since she got to curl up in her favorite spot, but she was just too stressed out from having the bags invading her space to be able to help choose a bag of yarn. At this point, I called Cooper and Tara in to offer a hand, but it was a pretty hot day, and no one really wanted to work up the energy it would take to make a decision.

Just as I was contemplating breaking out a jar of peanut butter to smear all over the bags, Tara stepped up to the plate.
She choose Sockotta from Plymouth Yarns (ravelry link).

Good girl, Tara! Thanks for your help.