And I haven't knitted in at least a week. I'm developing some sort of arthritis in my right index finger from mousing (and I'm going to blame all of the Photoshopping I've done in recent months) and I plan to rest it for a while before I pick up the needles again.  Almost done with my simple triangular shawl though! 

Hate them all with a white hot passion.

This morning, blonde bunny was attacked by a hawk.  Dad scared the bird off, but the rabbit had been injured.  So Dad spent the morning calling various vets to see which of them would take in a wild animal.  He found one and took Mr Bunny in.  The vet said they'd give him steroids and see if he improved, otherwise they would probably have to euthanize him. 

The doctor who runs the clinic is a man I call "Doctor Death."  He used to be at Falls Road Animal Hospital, and every pet of mine he ever got his hands on died.  Two died young.  So I don't have a good feeling about Mr Bunny.

Dad and I are both sad. :(  But isn't he a good daddy? 

Still knitting that bamboo shawl I started eons ago.  Down to my last ball. I should order another color to use for trim. My right index finger has been killing me recently, from mousing while cruising the Interwebs and Photoshopping, so I haven't done a whole lot of knitting, but I try to do a couple rows a week at least.  I know, pathetic. :)

Have a good weekend - maybe I'll have something more to say next week.

As I 'splained in an earlier post, I don't have most of the family photos in my possession. No photos of the houses in their formstone glory. But...I do have these older shots, pre-formstone, when the houses were merely painted a sickly pink and adorned with blue shutters.

My Grandma owned both 530 (on the left, in the sun) and 528 (right, with ground-level entrance) South Ann Street. My parents, brother, and I lived on the third floor of both buildings (there was a door cut between them) and the 4th floor of 530. Back when we moved in 1984, the houses were still covered with formstone. 530 was gray; 528 was pink and yellow. Many years later, someone tore off the ugly old fake stone and attempted to recreate the original look of the exteriors. When I was a kid, that doorway on the second floor was a window; we used the "basement" entrance below it, which led into my grandmother's living room. Once upon a time, that same front room was used as a confectionery store, but that was when my mother was a kid and they still had an outhouse in the back yard.

I am so curious to see what the insides of these buildings look like now. My former home.

After taking my photos, I continued down Ann Street to Aliceanna (pronounced by locals as "Alizan." If you say it the way it's spelled, you're from Towson or something) to visit my favorite Fells Point boutique, Maja. I looked across the street from the shop and saw my old elementary school, St. Stanislaus, where I had spent four happy years.

I knew they had torn down the rectory, which is the big empty lot next to the Church in the photo above, but the school must have come down recently.  Seeing it gone made me sad.  I didn't really have any friends at St. Stanislaus, but I had loved my teachers and enjoyed my time there.  I hated having to switch schools in the 5th grade and go to Holy Rosary up closer to Patterson Park.  St Stan's was merging with St. Casimir's to become Father Kolby, and my mother didn't see the point of my having to take a school bus to the new place if there was another Catholic school a few blocks in the other direction.  Plus, Mom went to an earlier incarnation of Holy Rosary, when it was on Eastern Avenue, just West of Broadway.

(A related story - when we had decided to move away from Ann Street, one of the homes we seriously considered had been the convent of Mom's Holy Rosary, a big 4-story stone building with large bedrooms and a concrete back yard.  Then we decided we didn't want to get away only from Ann Street but all of Fells Point, so we moved to Guilford instead.)

Later, after lunch and a bit of shopping and a doctor's appointment, I was back in the place that I currently call home, only the third place I've ever lived.  Someday I'll probably have nostalgia about this house, with its clutter and cat hair.  But as long as my husband is with me, that's my true home.

I'm still working on the simple shawl of SWTC bamboo.  And that's about it.  It's nice and mindless and I just don't feel like working on anything that requires reading a pattern or paying attention at the moment.  That will change, because I'll get bored with this before I finish ball 2, and I really should think about finishing those mittens...and a couple more Christmas gifts!

In the meantime, here's Pete in a rare cute moment.  He was curled up tightly, but when I got near him he unfurled a bit and let me rub his tummy.  He's been having poopy problems so the rubbing probably felt good.

Ok - let me rant here.  Pete is on thyroid meds.  One of the side effects of said meds is diarrhea.  One of the side effects of not taking the meds is diarrhea.  However, before he started taking the meds, he didn't really have a problem in that department (he was more of a vomiter).  I thought we should call the vet and ask if we could lower Pete's dosage by 1/4 of a pill per day.  In the past, it had been determined that half a pill a day was too little, so we give him twice that amount.  But we never checked the effects of 3/4 pill, and I wanted to try that now because his diarrhea was unpleasantly out of control.  (I won't go into the gory details.)  So Neal calls the vet and he wants to see Pete.  Of course - to get more money out of us.  They take blood tests, do a stool sample in case he had a parasite (not considering that there's nothing wrong with our other cat who eats the same food and uses the same litter box).  Neal comes home with flagyl to control the diarrhea and expensive bland catfood.  

We have two cats - Pete will eat anything, but Julie doesn't want the bland food.  So should we feed one cat and starve the other?  As for the flagyl - it seems to have constipated Pete, but when he goes, it's still runny.  :::headslap::::  So starting next week, I'm going to cut his dosage by 1/4 and see how he does with that, because obviously the vet isn't bright enough to consider that option.

In other news, I need a vacation.  For about a month.  I don't even need to leave town - I'd be happy being anywhere other than sitting behind this desk.  I have far better things to do than work.  Unfortunately, none of them earn me money.

What I have I been knitting?  I finished two felted bags that need zippers, started the stuffed bear from the Holiday Interweave Knits, and a simple stockinette triangular shawl in SWTC Bamboo because I'm trying to use up some of my stash before I go to Stitches East in November.  Anyone else going?  I signed up for the Entrelac Design class on Thursday, and will spend part of Friday browsing the yarns.  But that's months away yet.... 

Do you feel that people only contact you when they want something?

Do you expect people to act grateful when you do the something they request?

Welcome to my world.

The Huckleberry Ascot from the Holiday 2007 issue of Interweave Knits. Knitted with 2 balls of Knit Picks Andean Silk in chocolate with trim in a little of the same yarn in cornflower.

A seed stitch scarf and hat in a forgotten acrylic/wool blend sale yarn I picked up at A Garden of Yarn in Chadd's Ford, PA sometime in 2007.

See? I do still knit, even if you seldom see evidence of it!

I hope though to get some pics of finished knitting and post them here eventually.  

Don't hold your breath though. :)

My house is pretty small, already full to bursting, so we couldn't take much at all.  My brother and I rented our own storage locker and took a truckload of stuff to it.  Other stuff my Dad wanted to keep - he laid claim on the family photos, stored in a drawer of my mother's massive triple dresser.  And now he doesn't know where they are.  I have to cry a little bit (or a lot) when I realize that I have my photos, the ones I've taken over the years, and I have my baby album, but nothing else.  Not my brother's photos, not the images of family get-togethers, nor my mother's photos from the 40s and 50s, stored in little black cardboard file card boxes.  They were not in the storage locker from where my Dad called.

What was there were some of my mother's favorite recordings.  Ones she played ad nauseam when I was a kid - the Ink Spots, Eddy Arnold, an album of African music called Kasongo.  Dad found someone who will buy the other stuff in the locker, but I want those records and I'm glad I don't have to regret not taking them to begin with.

What do I regret, besides letting Dad have the photos?  Somehow losing Grandma's cast iron skillet, in which she cooked just about every meal I ate at her table as a child.  My brother was going to take it, and I had left it on the kitchen counter for him.  He forgot, and now nobody knows where it is.  There were so many people "helping" us dispose of the china, glassware, books, furniture, etc., that any one of them could have thrown it away, or tossed it in one of the many boxes destined for Value Village. 

I know they're just things, and I have plenty others to take their places, but I still wish I had them, or at least knew their whereabouts.  Maybe the photos will show up sometime, in a box in Dad's capacious basement, but the skillet is most likely gone forever.  As are my mother and grandmother. 

But I still have memories. 

What I'm Reading: three things - Eric Clapton's Autobiography, Michael Ruhlman's The Elements of Cooking, and Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. Plus I have about three issues of New York magazine that I need to catch up on.  It's a great magazine, but its weekly pace is too often for me.

What I'm Wearing: my warm-weather wardrobe is largely from LL Bean.  I have the boat neck 3/4 sleeve tunic in five colors, and the modern flare leg trousers in three colors and two lengths! (I think I need to go shopping for variety.)  My go-to warm-weather perfumes have been Ava Luxe Gardenia Musk, Jo Malone White Jasmine & Mint, Hermes Eau des Merveilles, and Estée Lauder Azurée Soleil (last year's version of the new Bronze Goddess).

What I'm Watching: mostly old and new dramas on DVD (Mission: Impossible, Hawaii 5-0, Rescue Me), movies we missed in the theatre (Juno), plus Doctor Who, Top Chef (last episode tonight - sob!), and The Next Food Network Star (which I am recapping on my food blog ). 

What I'm Eating: too much, as usual :) 

What's everyone else up to? 

C'mon, everybody has to keep him or herself from blurting out something stupid or non-PC every once in a while.  Some fantasy moments of mine:

To the large African-American man clutching his crotch as he walks down the street past me: "Little boy need to go pee-pee?"

To the regular security guard: "Shut the f*ck up, you babbling lunatic!"  (I soooo prefer the roulette of guards we recently had to a single one every day.  Oh, I loved our old guard, but this one makes me a little batty.) 

To the people who say, "Oh that's funny" with a straight face: "Then why the f*ck aren't you laughing?"

To just about anyone who walks into my office: "So why don't you ever come in here unless you need something?"

To my boss: "You are incredibly embarrassing."

To the evening security guard: "Are you male, or are you female?" 

To all of the shrieking women on my evening bus, "Shut the f*ck up, you hideous bitches!"

Oh there are more....

I realized that Stitches East will once again be in Baltimore, and Brooks Farm has, in the past, had a vast collection of their yarns present for purchase.  Sooo...I'm going to set aside the blanket project until November when I can peruse the yarns in person and buy one or more similar or complimentary shades.

In the meantime, it's back to Christmas gifts and other small projects.  Until I find something else I simply must knit, of course.