There's no excuse

No, really there is no excuse for the three week or so (no, I'm not counting) absence from blogging. I may have bored the shit out of you if I had blogged though, 'cuz there's nothing going on.

I did finish the Here There Be Pirates hat though:



I've worn it, quite a bit in the past few weeks.

I lost a bit of my mojo lately. I have been attempting to make Frankensocks since the first of the year, but the pattern is just not working out for me. I moved to crochet to try the Chronium Star Baby Blanket, but I don't think my crochet skills are there yet.

So I made some amigurumi food instead:







Thinking that I warmed myself up on crochet, I attempted the star blanket again, but no go. Then I tried the square hole crocheted hat from 101 Designer One-Skein Wonders with some Noro Kureyon that I purchased on eBay about 4 years ago. Mind you, this is the third time I've attempted this pattern. I had to stop the first time because I found out there was errata, but the errata had been taken down from the publisher's website while they've revamped. I did attempt, with the errata, to crochet this but it just looked like a big fugly head doily, so I decided that this pattern isn't a good match for me.

Instead I knit a different pattern from 101 Designer One-Skein Wonders:





The hat came out great, and it fits both of us. I made it yesterday while sitting on the couch watching Beverly Hills 90210 on DVD.

This was my first time knitting with Noro Kureyon. My thoughts while knitting with it ranged from "wow, this stuff is cool" to "*I* could spin yarn like this". The thick/thin can be really apparent when there are spots in the knitting that are "gappy" due to it being thinner. The bulges from it being thicker don't bother me though. I have one more ball of this colorway, so I'm making some mittens, using some label-less deep purple Lamb's Pride-like stuff* for the cuffs.

*It's like Lamb's Pride in the sense that it is a single and feels like it has mohair in it, but I don't think it's Lamb's Pride because it is a bit thicker and doesn't seem to felt (I tried).

In other news, it's snowed about 5 times since I last posted. Twice this weekend alone! We also had a week of weather that was between 1 and 15 degrees (I hope that is over). I'm ready to kick winter in the taint and move on.

Also, Ellie had her annual appointment and has been put on a diet. I wonder why:



She's on Hills R/D, which we can only buy at the vet's office, and is really expensive. It's okay for Ken to eat it as well.

Speaking of Ken, he's doing pretty well. He bit the shit out of ZMrK's hand this morning, and tried to eat some of my yarn. He also enjoys lunging on Ellie and biting her, and had an obsession with the walls of my closet one day:



I wonder if we have mice.

I discovered that that fucking orange cat that I call Curtis has been pissing on our front porch. I don't know whose cat he is; I think he belongs to the people next door. He's out all the time, and the lady behind me feeds him. He's not neutered, so he travels all over the neighborhood, pissing off all the other cats. He likes our yard because we feed the birds. I've seen no evidence of him killing any of the birds, yet, but it could happen one day. We've had up to two dozen birds in our yard at one time. ZMrK came home to find a hawk in one of the trees, so the large number of birds is attracting predators.

I just hope that the landlord doesn't think the cat pee smell is from us, you know? They've been showing the upstairs apartment (which has been vacant since Sept. 1; know anyone looking for a 3-BR?), and I don't know if people are picking up on the cat pee smell. I can just assume that others don't have the awesomely fine-tuned nose that I do. Fucking orange cat.

I won't promise that I'll post more often, but I'll try.