Becca's Blog

Take it to passiveagressivenotes.com.

Today I carped at my coworkers via e-mail for leaving yucky stuff in the sink. Amazingly, no one retaliated by piling the sink full of garbage or throwing a slushie in my face.

Really, though, nothing jaundices my view of humankind more than being the lunchroom lady (aka on kitchen cleanup duty) for a week.

Velcro is the devil's fastener.

Or maybe it's just that Velcro is the enemy of knits.  In the past few weeks I've spent a lot of work time away from my office, which has meant schlepping things in lots of different bags. And because it's been cold and wet, I was wearing lots of sweaters and usually a parka of some sort.

During a two-week time span, Velcro fasteners on my bags and jackets snagged two scarves, three sweaters, and a ball of yarn--numerous times. And every single time, I was annoyed, although I eventually stopped being surprised by it. The most annoying one was the Velcro strip on the *inside* of my REI soft briefcase, which is meant to secure a padded laptop insert. When you take the laptop and insert out of the case, and put knitting in, minus the customary plastic bag because you're trying to pare down the amount of crap you neurotically carry around, the result is yarn that is markedly fuzzier in spots.

Knitting has never traumatized me like this before.

Last Saturday night, as Jane took the sleep of the just in a small fuchsia tent on the beach, I spent the evening at my in-laws' home, alone with their two labradors.  I wanted to settle down and do a bit of knitting and keep the dogs company, seeing as they'd been alone since midday. But knowing that they're a bit rambunctious (to put it mildly), I didn't want to give them access to anything that I'd be really sorry to have chewed up, like my almost-finished carwash flaps scarf.

I grabbed a couple of small balls of leftover yarn and some plastic needles and sat down to start a hat for Suzie's Knit With Love project. I soon realized I needed to put the dogs outside because they were climbing all over me. Once I had the big one out the door, I went to pick up my supplies again, and I couldn't find one of the balls of yarn. I looked all over the room and under the sofas as Monty coughed slightly in the backyard. I went back upstairs to the guest bedroom to see if maybe I'd left that yarn in my bags.

For about 20 minutes I fought down dread and resisted the knowledge of where that little ball of yarn was. Then I started looking around for a phone book to find an emergency vet clinic. Luckily, my in-laws had the number posted on the fridge. So at 8:30 on Saturday night, I hauled hundred-plus-pound Monty into my rental car and down to the emergency vet for induced vomiting and a set of x-rays. That ball of yarn was almost certainly in his gut, where it stayed for at least the next couple of days but apparently caused him no distress. I haven't heard the ultimate, erm, outcome, but it didn't seem like he'd end up needing surgery. (My brother-in-law says he's waiting to see Monty shit a mitten.)

My job has been kicking my ass lately, so this is the only post from me you're likely to see for awhile. I took a few pictures during Jane's walk, and she's got some too, and I'm trying to persuade her to guest-blog about her 3-Day experience. She had a good time, had several good cries, and knew that her mom would be pleased and proud of what she and Susan accomplished. She does want you all to know how grateful she is for your support. With your help she raised over $5000 for breast cancer research and services.

I love my cat ... I love my cat ... I love my cat.

Two Thursdays ago I spent some precious knitting time threading the partially finished blue blanket onto crochet thread and putting it into a lingerie bag and through the washing machine on gentle cycle. I had to do this because the cranky old man barfed on the blanket when it was sitting on the coffee table. And of course he did it right after I joined a new ball of cotton yarn, which I had to cut, and now I'll have to rejoin.

A couple of good things came of it, though: I found out that the yarn stands up to washing pretty well, and I got to look at the blanket fully stretched out and measure it. Right now it's 36 inches across. It looks like I've been increasing too much, because the edges don't lie flat. I hope that means I can just work even for several rounds.

I'm about ready to pick it up again; for the past couple of weeks I've been working on a knitting pattern to submit to the e-zines. Wish me luck.

Insert Tab A into Slot B...

During the winter of domestic entropy, one of the things that fell apart was a file drawer in my office. The one that held all my office supplies.  So after my taxes were done and I had some money left over, I invested in some new drawers from Ikea.

Setting up my shiny new rolling cabinets was kind of interesting. Putting together the drawers was kind of like assembling a gift box from a department store, or furniture for a paper-doll's house. I've never folded a drawer before, and I suspect I may never do so again.

  But now I can move my knitting needles and notions out of the 15-year-old cardboard box and into their own drawers. ... As soon as I find the right drawer dividers. (I just remembered I can buy little plastic bins at the dollar store. Cool.)

Of course it's going to take a lot more than a couple of cheap sets of drawers to declutter my office. Next weekend: adventures with jigsaws to repair the file drawer, then use it for the files it was designed to hold.

On the DL: My left thumb.

I thought I needed the tip of my thumb for knitting, but it turns out that I can hold it out of the way and still get yarn around needles (I'm not so sure this would work with continental style). I've found this out because on Monday night I was going to town putting vinyl tile down in the utility room and cut myself with a sharp new linoleum knife while trying to trim down an odd-sized piece. This is (hopefully) the conclusion of the new-floor project that was begun late last summer, after Orange Boy polluted the ratty old parquet floor. It's far from perfectly installed, but it looks better than what was there before.

In other domestic news, we have a hummingbird family living under our roof, we're about to have a big influx of in-laws, and I'm drugging my cat.

There's a pair of nestlings in a hummingbird nest under the eaves next to our bathroom window, so we have an OK, albeit backlit, view of the nest. We've been watching the mom for about three weeks, and about a week ago we saw two small, pointy beaks poking out of the nest. They're getting bigger by the day, and sometimes we see the mom feeding them. Unfortunately, the nest is in a terrible location to photograph, so I'm not likely to get any decent pictures. I did take pictures of fledging hummingbirds in our magnolia tree several years ago, but they're analog. I was a mushy, soppy, weepy mess the day those babies left the nest--you'd have thought I brooded them myself.

The imminent arrival of houseguests is kind of a kick in the pants to finish a few house projects, like the floor.  The in-laws will be in town because one of Jane's nieces is graduating from college in a couple of weeks, and another niece is attending her college orientation. Various family members will be staying with us for varying numbers of nights, and we'll be spending a night in the South Bay to make sure we arrive at the graduation birght and early. Can you tell that I'm excited?

And yes, I made good on my promise to start the cranky old man on Prozac. Now he gets a quarter of a human pill every evening and he seems a bit less cranky. We don't think he's sprayed since, but all of his favorite spots are still inaccessible to him most of the time, so it's hard to say the drugs are doing the trick. You don't know what fun is until you try jamming a tiny, crumbly, bitter-tasting pill fragment down a cat's gullet. One side effect is that he seems to hate me less. He doesn't scream at me as much and he's back to sitting on my lap or perching next to me on the couch. Which is nice, because I kind of missed his hairy, dandruffy ass.

Lost weekend.

Here's what I could have been doing this weekend:

• finishing the orange sweater
• recasting on for Jane's hat
• creating Joe's birthday crossword puzzle
• finishing the socks for Joe's birthday
• dying my hair
• getting a haircut
• cooking fabulous meals

Here's what I did this weekend:

• dragged junk out to the curb (Big. Trash. Day. Three little words that mean a lot to a homeowner.)
• drove around to hardware stores to buy more things that will get used once and maybe never again
• pried up the floor of the utility room with a crowbar (that was satisfying. Could only have been more satisfying if I got to fling the ratty old parquet the way the roofers got to fling ratty old composition shakes.)
• found a mess of vinyl, linoleum, and plaster under the existing floor
• got knocked backwards by the stench of formerly covered up cat pee
• wished I was wearing a gas mask
• began chiseling up the pee-soaked plaster and old vinyl tile because I love a time-consuming and futile project
• took lots of ibuprofen for an incipient migraine
• bought $50 worth of anti-spraying spray at the pet supply store
• had to ask for OTC cold medicine at the Target pharmacy counter and was told they were out. Treated pharmacist to a small dose of 40-year-old lady attitude (Do I *look* like I have a meth lab in my bathroom?)
• blocked the hole in the fence where the feral cats had been coming through
• removed the water source that was attracting the ferals and replaced it with a small, off-the-ground birdbath
• moved the feral cats' food bowls out of sight of the jealous Orange Crabby Old Man