This dog might want to be your best friend. In fact odds are pretty good that he does. Unless you are a kid. Or if he thinks you might be getting too close to my things. Or if you are the vet. Or if he sees you from a distance and isn’t sure who you are. Or if you are a raccoon. Or a strange cat.

The more I learn about dogs, the more I realize how crazy it is that we all take them for granted and don’t think twice about meeting strange dogs all the time. Corrie is mostly an incredibly smart and well-behaved dog for being only 6 months old. But he has snapped at kids three times now, has to be muzzled at the vet’s office, and strongly guards my things from other dogs. Recently, he’s started guarding my actual person from other dogs, so other dogs can’t come say hi to me at the dog park without Corrie getting all up in their faces. He growls and lunges at some strangers (I don’t know why some and not others) until I say hello to the stranger (which apparently means to him that they are okay). I would feel sort of guilty, like maybe I’m not being a good dog mom, except that I talk to a lot of dog people and it turns out that all of these things are pretty normal. Individual dogs’ quirks vary, but most of them have something that makes them a little dangerous in public. One woman I know can’t EVER have a tennis ball around or her dog will attack anyone or anything in sight that might (in the dog’s mind) want to take away the ball. Many dogs guard food or toys. Many are reactive in some situations but not other, subtly different, situations. Many dogs do fine with other dogs, unless they are on a leash in which case they freak out. Some dogs are okay with other dogs while on or off leash, but only if the other dog is not on a leash. Or only if the other dog IS on a leash. It’s all very complicated.

All the time I’ve lived here before I got Corrie, I would walk by the dogs in the neighborhood and I had in my mind that they were probably all pretty much like any dog. You know, friendly, charming, eager to please, would love to be patted on the head by all strangers. Since I’ve had Corrie, I’ve actually met a lot of these dogs and talked with their owners, and there is a fascinating world going on here that you’ve probably never noticed in your neighborhood either. So here is a brief intro to some of the dogs that live within a mile or so of me, who I meet regularly at the dog park or on walks.

We’ll start right next door with Sparky. Sparky was rescued from a gravel lot and was mostly feral when the neighbors adopted him. He is terrified of most everything and everybody. He’s a pretty classic mutt, maybe some beagle and springer spaniel, but I don’t know what all else. He probably weighs around 60 pounds. He spends most of his time at home alone. The neighbors are two 20-something guys who work all day. When they get home, he gets 3 minutes or so in the backyard to do his business and then hangs out inside with the guys all evening. He has escaped several times (usually by scratching open an unlocked window and chewing/clawing through the screen). He has charged Preston and I several times, one time actually getting his mouth on my leg before his owner could grab him, and another time I had a shovel in between me and him to fend him off until the owner could get him. When we see that he’s made it out the window (we can see their living room window from our front door), Preston and I carry a big Maglight flashlight with us to go outside in case we need to fight him off. He’s not safe around other dogs and the guys next door have made it clear that I should keep Corrie away if I see Sparky out unattended.

One of Sparky’s many problems is that he doesn’t get enough exercise. So enter Ammo, the Blue Heeler/Rottweiler mix who they got to keep Sparky company. I don’t know how they did the intros, but Sparky and Ammo seem to get along fine. Ammo is so named because as a puppy they would get him all worked up in someone’s lap and then toss him at Sparky to keep the two dogs entertained. Amazingly, Ammo is a pretty cool dog. He gets to go to work with the guys so he spends his days at a boat shop interacting with the customers. He plays rough (no kidding!), but is otherwise harmless.

Two doors down are Pepper (a Border Collie mix) and Patches (a spaniel mix). They have a small fenced yard and they go on one short walk per day. Sometimes, someone comes to the house to “walk” the dogs during the day, which consists of letting them out of the fenced yard, throwing the ball down the street once, and then spending the next 15 minutes yelling at them to come back. They don’t appear to know their own names, let alone any commands. They are friendly and want to say hello to everyone, which is what they are doing while the guy yells at them to come back.

The house behind us (their backyard adjoins our backyard) has a Boston Terrier named Maddie and a Pit Bull mix named Kona. The side of their yard adjoins the ravine at the end of our street and they don’t have a fence on that side. The owners seem to think that if they just let the dogs run loose, they will play down in the ravine. They do that (I see their tracks down there a lot), but they also wander the neighborhood. Maddie likes Corrie, and sometimes she will even come scratch at our door to see if Corrie will come out to play. She afraid of people though, and she yaps up a storm if you look her direction or move towards her. Kona is older and seems mellow. I’ve run into both of them unattended on the street in front of our house and all through-out the neighborhood, sometimes several blocks from their house. I worry about what will happen if we run into them down in the ravine. The neighborhood is pretty neutral territory, but both they and Corrie might think of the ravine as “theirs”.

At the end of the street is Beezy, a purebred Border Collie who came from an Amish breeder back east. Even though he’s a 2-year old unfixed male, he is probably the coolest dog I’ve ever met. His yard isn’t fenced, but he stays in the yard anyway. He is Corrie’s favorite dog in the world too, and every time we walk by their yard, Corrie whines and pulls at the leash to try to go scratch at the door for Beezy to come out. If Beezy is outside, they will run and play and they totally love each other. Beezy has never been taught not to jump on people, and he’s big for a Border Collie. If you don’t want a 60+ pound dog to launch into you at hip level, you shouldn’t stop to say hello to Beezy. He is also not good with kids, and has been known to chase and snap at them. And sometimes he’s a little weird about bicycles. I’ve had to stop and talk him down a couple times when he wouldn’t let me pass on my bike.

Down the street a few block is Tao. He’s a basset/lab mix who came from the pound. He’s a super-sweet dog and he and Corrie have played together at the dog park before. However, he’s leash-reactive, meaning that if he’s on leash and sees another dog he freaks out. We ran into him the other day on a walk and his owner was riding a bike while he ran alongside on the leash. She had to jump off her bike and get two hands on the leash to just slow Tao down (she wasn’t strong enough to stop him) while Corrie I and got past her and out of the way.

Tao and his people just moved in with another dog that I know from the dog park, a husky(?) mix named Autumn. I don’t know much about Autumn except that her person made it a point to just do a quick pass-by at the dog park and keep moving. I’ve heard from Tao’s owner that Autumn is also not great with other dogs while on leash.

A few blocks further is Lucy, who I suspect is leash-reactive because her owner never has her on leash. She is some sort of small beagle/german shepard/something small mix. She’s smaller than Corrie is now, and probably weighs about 30 pounds. When Corrie was a puppy he met Lucy and Lucy growled and snapped at him. Lucy’s owner said she is sometimes like that with puppies, but I think she’s just like that. Every time we see her, she marches over to assert her dominance and if we don’t keep moving she’ll get increasingly aggressive. Her owner bikes around with Lucy a lot, with Lucy running alongside, unless she sees something that she thinks needs attended to. I don’t know that Lucy knows any commands, because I’ve never heard her owner tell her to come or do anything at all.

Tilly is a Border Collie cross who is fine when we run into her and her owner on leash. However, at the dog park, she gets way over-excited and can’t stop barking at the other dogs very aggressively. It makes all the other dogs nervous and generally leads to a scuffle breaking out that has to be separated by the humans. When she starts that, Corrie will lunge and snap at her to get her to stop barking at him, but she’s super fast and can dodge out of his way easily while still barking.

Sunflower is a Golden Retriever who is really probably the world’s best dog. She’s 11 years old and truly a ray of sunshine. I don’t know of anything bad about her at all. She is super sweet and mellow. When she comes to the dog park she will be polite to the dogs, but she doesn’t really care about them much. She just makes the rounds of all the people, leaning against their legs so they will pet her. If you don’t pet her in a minute or so, she’ll politely move on to the next person. Once she’s made the rounds, she will sit next to her owner and reach up with one paw to touch his hand hanging at his side. She will just sit there and look at him adoringly, holding his hand, until he decides to go. We run into them walking around the neighborhood often, and she is always just that mellow and sweet. I should ask him, the next time I see him, if there is anything that makes her mad.

So there you go, a little tour of dogland her in West Oly. There are many more dogs in the general vicinity, but they don’t come out of their yards or they are on very different walk schedules than us because I haven’t met them or their people. But doesn’t this little intro make you wonder about the dogs in your neighborhood?

We are having a full-on winter storm. I know, for those of you in Montana and Alaska and such, this doesn’t count for much, but in this neck of the woods the city has maybe one snowplow and none of the roads are sanded or salted or anything. And also, many of the people who live here didn’t grow up in places like Montana or Alaska and so don’t know how to drive on snow and ice, or even that maybe one should avoid driving on snow and ice, if possible. We have around 8 inches in the backyard, although I don’t know what the official count is for snowfall in the last 2 or 3 days.

That means that I have a solid excuse for taking snow days from work, since the roads are bad and traffic is bad, and a lot of my job I can do from home anyway. So Corrie and I have been playing in the snow a bunch (pictures coming soon) and hanging out by our fabulous wood stove. Various predictions (weather.com and NOAA) say that we aren’t supposed to get above freezing for the next week, and the snow should stick around, and maybe even accumulate more. That’s fun and novel, but it does jeopardize our holiday plans. If roads are still like this the day after Xmas, we won’t be heading to Eugene to visit the fam. That would be a bummer.

Corrie thinks the whole thing is pretty swell (although he doesn’t know about the potential for missing Xmas). It’s pretty hard to capture a picture of him in the snow, since it seems to be some sort of puppy speed, but this might give you some idea how he feels about it. (click for bigger)

I said I would post pics of the actual setup once I got a chance, so I finally got around to getting them all uploaded. All the pictures can be clicked for larger views.

The basic problem that I needed to fix is that the bed of the Explorer is just a couple inches too short for me to stretch out all the way and sleep (I’m not quite 5′7″). I needed a sleeping platform that would lift me up over the barrier of the back seats (the part that sticks up when they are folded forward). There are a ton of really cool projects online for how to do this all stylish-like (search for “truck sleeping platform” if you’re curious) but I needed something really easy and low-tech because I can only hold two numbers in my head at a time and I get frustrated with a project if I have to, like, plan it out ahead or anything. (Just one of the reasons that Preston and I don’t work well together on projects like this.) I also wanted my platform to break down really easily so that I could still fit passengers in the truck if I needed to. So I created two simple boxes, sized so that, when stacked up, they fit into the very back of the truck with all the passenger seats available.

The legs are just 2×4s, cut to be the same length as the height of the edge of the bed in the front (you’ll see in future pics). The top is 3/4 inch plywood. Note that the top box has two layers of plywood on top. That’ll make sense in just a minute. Each leg is attached from on top of the plywood with two screws. The odd leg arrangement on the top box is to accommodate the wheel well on that part of the bed. The platform fits over the top of the wheel well, increasing usable space a little bit. Clothes and books fit nicely under the box, and the space under the second box is used to store the Thermarest and sheets and what-all when the boxes are arranged all compact-like. Laying the bed out is as easy as putting down the back seat and setting the top box down in front of the bottom one.

At this point, it’s only about 4 feet long, which obviously won’t do. And that’s where the second layer of plywood comes in.

There are hinges on the front of the top box that allows the top layer of plywood to swing forward and rest on the edge of the back seat. That’s why the legs of the boxes need to be the same height as that barrier. I’m actually using that edge as another set of legs to support the hinged piece of plywood. I know it’s hard to tell in the following picture, but the platform is now 6 feet long, and plenty long for me to rest comfortably and kick the covers around and what-all. The driver’s seat has to be tilted forward in order for the whole thing to fit, so I can’t drive with the bed down, but I don’t have to break it down completely. I can just fold up the hinged piece and have plenty of room for the driver’s seat to be comfortably arranged.

Because I am very lazy, I didn’t want to deal with sanding down the plywood, but I was worried that it would poke a hole in my thermarest, or scratch me up in my sleep, so I covered it with a warm, fleece cape that I made years ago and never use. Looks almost legit, doesn’t it? Also helps keep clothing and other items that are stored under the bed out of sight and looking a little tidier.

So then I roll out my Thermarest, throw a sheet over it all, and my pillows and sleeping bag on top of that, and it’s one of the more comfortable places I’ve ever slept, once I figured out how to manage parking spots. This one you pretty much have to click on to see the details.

I specifically designed the platform to be narrow enough that the other passenger seat could be up without breaking down the bed. That passenger seat is where my spinning wheel rides, buckled in for safety.

Then, I don’t have pictures, but the floorboard in front of the spinning wheel was where the food and cooking supplies (backpacking stove and nesting pots) went. There was plenty of room to keep a week’s worth of food in a box there. Coupla jars of rice goulash that I canned up one weekend and used to make burritos, a bag of mixed oats that I heated up for breakfast, some dried fruit, some pb and honey to put on tortillas, some canned fruit, a handful of biscuits that I made at home before I left, and let’s not forget the coffee singles! That left both front seats for whatever I needed to have out (books, my backpack, whatever), or to drive around with a passenger.

It was totally freaking awesome and I will never again be really all that stressed about being able to make the house payment Seriously, I could totally live this way semi-long-term and I would love to travel around the country with this setup. It would take a little more planning to get it to work for two people (and I’d probably have to stick with a drop spindle and leave the wheel), but it’s definitely do-able. If I was going to do it longer-term, i would make a couple simple adjustments to the platform:

1) Add braces to the legs. Any of you with any carpentry skill at all are probably cringing at the sight of those 9 inch long legs spindling around with no support but a couple of screws, and you’re right. While I didn’t have any middle-of-the-night disasters, the legs had started to work loose after two weeks, and there would have been a collapse eventually, when one just tipped sideways. Just a simple 45 degree connector from each leg to the plywood would make it last a lot longer.

2) Cut the cape down to the right size. You can’t see it in the picture, but it is oddly-shaped (you know, like a cape) and it was hard to keep it from bunching up awkwardly under the platform.

3) Add some way to attach the top box to the lower one when they are stacked in the back. It has an annoying way of tipping over when going around corners. If I was really using that as a shelving system while it was stacked, the constant tipping would be inconvenient.

3a) Add some sort of lower shelf to the top box, so that if I want to use it as a shelf, all the stuff can stay with it, whether it is stacked or extended. This could be as easy as attaching another piece of plywood to the four legs at floor level.

As far as the overall set-up, separate from the platform, I would invest in some sort of curtain set-up, and a sunshade for the windshield. The night that I spent in the Walmart parking lot, I felt like I was sleeping in a display window, since the platform is pretty much level with the bottom edge of the windows. For the most part, that wasn’t an issue this time, since I was sleeping in places like the private property that belongs to Wilderness Awareness School.

But obviously, if I was driving across the country, it wouldn’t always be possible to park in beautiful secluded cedar groves. And I would invest in some sort of system to keep the mosquitos out with the windows open. Some sort of velcro system and screen. Pretty simple fixes, all in all. I highly recommend it.

I’m back from summer camps, and I plan to write up my experiences from the second week, but a lot happened (all good) and I haven’t yet processed it into a linear format. So in the meantime, I want to tell you about one of the oddly synchronistic experiences that has happened to me since I’ve been home. I’m telling you about this one first because it’s the cutest

Tuesday evening, I was feeling restless. It’s hard to adjust back to a desk job after running around in the woods for a couple weeks. I went out for a bit of a wander around the neighborhood as it was getting dark. I wandered around and smelled people’s flowers near their front walks. I watched a buck and doe wander down the street, meandering from apple tree to apple tree in various front yards until a dog chased them off down the street. Eventually, I circled around towards home, it being nearly completely dark. There’s a house a few blocks from ours with a really big front lawn, as as I started walking past it, I noticed a 20-something girl in the front yard. It took a minute or two for me to walk past the width of the yard, and just before I turned the corner out of sight of the girl in the yard, she called out, “Excuse me…”

I paused, and she came over to the edge of the lawn with something in her hands. “Um, I know you’re just out for a walk in the neighborhood or something, but, umm, I have this baby bird and I was wondering if you know what I should do with it.”

She has in her hands a complete nest with a gawky little baby robin in it. The robin is sleeping soundly, taking slow even breaths, and seems content. He is fully covered with downy feather, but definitely hasn’t fledged yet. His flight feathers are just starting to come in, but they are still in the shaft. His beak is by far the biggest part of him. It turns out that the landlord was there cutting down some trees on the property earlier in the day, and the nest and baby had fallen out of a tree when it came down. The parent birds were around then, but the people didn’t know what to do with it, so they hadn’t put the baby out where the parents could find it. Of course, at dusk the parents had gone to roost and weren’t around any more.

The girl’s name was Christina. I told her that I have a wildlife rehabilitator friend that I could call. I thought that the parents would come back in the morning and look again, but I didn’t know how long baby robins could go without eating, or if he was old enough to keep himself warm though the night outside. I called Tammy, and she confirmed that if we could get him into a nearby tree near dawn that the parents would probably be back. But they definitely wouldn’t fly at night, and the baby should be kept somewhere warm and quiet for the night. He wouldn’t need anything to eat for the night, but if the parents hadn’t shown up by 9am or so, he would need food and I should bring him in to her. Neither Christina nor any of her roommates was able to be there at dawn or at 9am to check on the little guy, so I took him home and he slept peacefully in my craft room for the night. Preston and I got up at 5am and took him back to the house. Preston climbed up in the tree nearest the one the nest had come out of and hung it up there in a hanging planter box.

Preston walked back home to go back to bed, and I settled in to watch the nest and see if the parents showed up. Nearly right away I heard a lot of robin commotion. Lots of chipping, and a call that I haven’t ever heard from a robin before. I couldn’t tell if it was coming from the baby or from one of the two adults circling the general area. Sort of a high-pitched squeeling whistle. One male and one female bird spent a long time checking out the whole area. They landed on the stump of the tree that was cut down and peered into every nook and cranny of it. They seemed to see the nest in the adjoining tee, but they didn’t land on it. Afer 20 minutes or so of patrolling the area, they seemed to start hunting. One or the other of them was always in sight of the nest in its new location, while the other would do that little robin dance (scurry scurry, head tilt…scurry scurry, head tilt) across the lawn, or would fly into the nearby trees. I watched one eat two whole salmonberries off the bush. After another 20 minutes, I was starting to worry that they weren’t going to feed the baby, but just after I started to wonder, I saw the female robin stop briefly on the nest and seem to feed something. I wasn’t sure, so I hung out another 10 minutes or so until she did it again and this time I got a better view and saw for sure that she had been handing over some food.

I left feeling pretty good about the world, and like that is the sort of meaningful work I want to do.  I left a message on Christina’s phone letting her know about the success, and also tipping her that in a week or two the little guy would probably fledge and she shouldn’t worry if she sees him on the ground then, but if she sees him out of the nest or on the ground and there are no parents around, she should feel free to give me another call.

Interesting that this is the second close encounter with a baby robin I’ve had this year. Maybe I should do some looking into what robins are all about.

Last year, I was supposed to be unpacking from our big move to our new house, and instead I took a day off to take pictures of each type of flower currently blooming in our yard. You can see the 1st Annual Tour here. This year, I’m not really supposed to be unpacking (except we really still aren’t done with that a whole year later), but I am learning how to use my new SLR camera. So I headed out to the yard again, where there are flowers galore. And of all the things I’m likely to take pictures of (the cats, Preston, birds) flowers are the most patient and willing to just sit calmly looking lovely while I figure out what the heck is the difference between a picture taken at f-5.6 at 1/600 and one taken at f-6 at 1/800.

But after I got inside and uploaded the pictures I noticed something interesting. There are a LOT more flowers in our lawn this year than last year. Partly that’s because it’s three weeks later this year than it was last year when I did the photo tour. But also I like to think it has a lot to do with our having lived here for a year. We’ve been selectively mowing the lawn, going around the big stands of clover and other interesting flowers. There are some volunteer bleeding hearts and columbines coming up along the edges of the house (sorry, flowers are already past, so I didn’t catch them electronically). One of the most common flowers in our yard is some sort of weed, but I like it a lot and I’ve even weeded around it in the flowerbed to make it look like I planted it there on purpose. And of course, we’ve planted a few flowers as well. I’ve also included flowers on plants in the vegetable garden, because I figure they count as far is increasing food sources for bees and other insects. And also because a flower is a flower dude.

There were too many to put them in a blog post, so I uploaded them to a flickr set, which you can enjoy by going here. If there is no note below the picture saying what the flower is, that’s because I don’t know, and you should leave me a comment (either on the picture or here on the blog) if you know what it is.

And if you want to appreciate the fabulousness of detail that my new camera allows, you can click on the button that says “All Sizes” and that will give you a bigger version. Of course, the camera takes a much bigger picture, but it would take a long time to upload the full versions, so I just left them as large as seemed reasonable. I have definitely noticed what most reviewers have already said about the Canon XTi, which is that the stock lens isn’t great. I really feel like there should be a better level of detail in the larger versions than there is. But I’m confident that a fancy new lens will fix that

Last weekend, Hobostripper stayed with me. I’m not sure what else needs to be said about that. How often does one get a Hobostripper and her well-trained dog hanging out for a few days? I don’t know about you all, but this doesn’t happen to me all that often. We played in the woods, went to visit Rusty Cock Ridge, talked a lot. She wants to start some sort of wilderness education program herself, so we talked a lot about the things I’ve learned in the last few years. She made a fabulous beef curry stew that we ate for every meal for about three days straight. After that was gone, we resorted to eating amazing salads mostly from the garden in the backyard (just add cheese and hearts of palm…mmmmm).

The day she left, Preston got back from driving across the country. According to Mapquest, it should take 45 hours to drive from South Carolina to here, with no stops. Preston did it in 70 hours, including a 12-hour stop in Boise to hook up with some old friends, in addition to all the gas stops, construction slowdowns, and the occasional rest area nap. We have a conception in our culture that if you love someone, you should love them without reference to their actions. I’ve heard this called unconditional love, though it’s rarely actually without condition. Anyway, I love Preston for lots of reasons, and I would still probably love him if he didn’t have mad driving skillz, but it’s definitely one of the reasons I Like him a lot. And it’s not just about the driving, but about the capacity to take care of oneself (and beyond that, to act graciously and gracefully) in unfamiliar and uncomfortable situations. He’s pretty cool and I’m glad he lives with me.

And then, two days after that, several pounds of alpaca fiber showed up in my mailbox!

Altogether, that’s 4 pounds of alpaca fiber. You can’t really appreciate the color of the grey/silver in the background, but it’s quite lush. My mom totally hooked me up. There was an ad in her local newspaper from a local alpaca ranch. They were looking for folks to spin up their fleeces. They will send me all the fiber I want, I’ll spin it all up and send them back half. I can do whatever I want with my half, including sell it. Wow! I was thinking that if I could spin a pound of it in 6 hours, then I could make somewhere around minimum wage for selling my half of the spun yarn. I tried it out last night. Haha! I spun less than an ounce in 1 hour. (For those of you who don’t live with an engineer who knows these conversions off the top of his head, there are 16 ounces in a pound.) So maybe I’ll have to go back to looking at it as just a great way to get fiber for personal use. But the alpaca is really nice to work with, so soft and really seems to want to spin thin. My first spindle is coming out to be a two-ply light sportweight, about 15-16 wraps per inch. This is definitely thinner than I usually spin without some effort. Here’s a close-up of the four colors, although you still don’t get a good sense of the grey fibers.

So far I’ve just been spinning the white fibers. They are really clean and un-matted. I haven’t had to wash it or card it, just pick out the occasional bit of hay as I spin, so I’m basically spinning right from the animal. He also sent me a half pound of suri alpaca to play with. I haven’t ever worked with it before (see my previous post about alpacapalooza for pictures of the two different kinds of alpaca). Their hair is longer and straighter and seems to matte more, so I will have to wash that stuff.  I’m also going to try washing some of the regular huacaya fibers, even though they don’t seem to need it, just to see what difference it makes.

And just to top it all off, Preston’s economic stimulus check showed up this week, so we are feeling even a little richer than usual. He’ll be putting his into surfboard shaping supplies (…”maybe a router,” he’s been musing…). I’m waiting impatiently for mine, with which I plan to buy a digital SLR, probably the Canon Digital Rebel XTi. And speaking of cameras, I’m motivated again to put some more effort into making something happen with selling photos. I feel like my current job has given me a lot of tools for online marketing and sales that I didn’t have the first time around. So I’ll be working on updating the main Whoa! Photos website and posting a new series of pictures that I’ve taken of a beautiful pin-up girl type. Lots of beautiful nature shots for all you pagans out there

I realized that as far as y’all know, I haven’t knit anything since, um, wow, last October! But I have indeed been knitting since then. For those of you who don’t really care so much about the knitting, I recommend just skimming down to the bottom where there are cute cat pictures. Most of this post will be boring if you are the sort of person who has never been so in love with a ball of yarn that you wanted to eat it. If you are curious about any of the pictures, they can all be clicked on for larger images.

First off, my sister brought some yarn with her all the way back from her trip to Italy, and it as the most scrumptiously soft yarn you have ever felt. It’s by Filatura di Crosi, and I’m afraid it’s discontinued. It definitely needed to be a scarf, so that is what it is.

I really like how it turned out to go around my neck really narrow, almost like a choker and then have a bunch of drapey folds in the front, but it turned out like that totally by accident. When I started it, I started it way too wide, and realized I was going to have a very small baby blanket rather than a scarf. A very wise woman at my knitting group suggested that, instead of having to frog the whole thing and start over, that I just decrease a bunch. I had only two skeins of the yarn, and it’s discontinued, so I decreased a bunch and went until my first skein was gone. I decreed that to be the halfway point, and used the second skein to  increase back up. It created a pretty funny-looking flared end on both sides of the scarf which look really funny laid flat, but I like the way it looks on.

From there, I decided to tackle a felted slipper pattern that Jane had given me almost a year ago. I had enough handspun wool from Lupine, Kathy’s sheep, to make 10 slippers (or so I thought). I finished one of them (highlighted over on The Dailey’s Weekly back in March), but was almost out of wool and had to wait for an emergency shipment of more wool from Kathy before I could spin enough to make the second slipper. (Turns out it takes a LOT of yarn to make a felted slipper. When I made the first one, I just couldn’t believe that the instructions were right. The finished slipper, before felting, was big enough for three or four feet.) But anyway, I finished them both up finally, and Preston seems to like them. They look like Bigfoot Feet to me, and if I ever make another pair, I will try to felt claws on the front

It felt (haha!) really good to have completed a whole project using all yarn I had handspun myself, so I decided to tackle a project where I had to actually spin the yarn to a particular dimension with a particular project in mind. All the spinning I’d done before was just learning how it all worked and spinning the fiber to whatever dimension it seemed easiest to do. This time I decided that I wanted to make a beautiful and elegant scarf for a friend of ours. I knew she wanted something in red, and I wanted to be able to do a lacy pattern, so I looked around online and in some books and found a classic lace pattern called “Crest of the Wave” in a book I got from the library. (Sorry I don’t remember the book.) I spun up two slightly different shades of red, about an ounce each, and spun them as thin as I could. Then I plied the two shades together, and at a two-ply, it came out to be heavier than lace-weight yarn, but definitely lighter than worsted-weight. The red shading was very subtle but added some dimension to the color. I used #9 needles to knit up a scarf for my friend. She loved it. I think I could have blocked it more severely to open up the lace a little more.

Somewhere along the path, I think while I was working on the slippers, I discovered that I can knit and read at the same time! According to Elizabeth Zimmerman (who I am totally in love with and want to marry…her motto was “Knit on with confidence and hope, through all crises.”), anyone who can read aloud can also knit and read at the same time, since both involve reading a few words, or sometimes a few sentences, ahead of the words that you’re actually understanding, sort of like the function on CD players that keeps them from skipping. I’m not yet good enough to do it on patterns, but I can work just a basic knit in the round while reading. And just in the knick of time, I came across the pattern for a Kitty Pi. (Based on a design by Elizabeth Zimmerman, called the Pi Shawl, and based on the concept that as a circle’s radius doubles, it’s circumference does as well.)

So I spun up a bunch more of Lupine’s wool (same stuff as Preston’s slippers) and made up a kitty pi for Pavarotti. Magoo already has a little Magic Carpet, the one and only weaving project I ever finished (and by “finished” I mean I got it 2/3 done, and then took it off the loom and tied off the extra warp ends and called them “fringe”). So I thought Pavi should have his very own place to nap. The kitty pi is designed without a top crust, but I thought Pavi’s should wrap over the top a little, since he is a burrowing animal. This was another felted project, so I made it huge and felted it down. I learned an important lesson about felting different wools. The Lupine wool was washed either by Kathy herself or by the small mill she sent it to be turned into roving. The creamy white merino that I used for half the top of the pi was processed by some large commercial facility. I think the Lupine wool still has a fair amount of oil in it, and it takes a lot longer to felt than the commercially processed white stuff. So I ended up with a lot less creamy white topping than I intended, since it felted a lot faster than the main body. Even though Magoo already has the Magic Carpet, she immediately knew that this was a fancy upgrade and moved right in.

Pavi also likes it, but he thinks it is better suited as a place to hide toys and then pounce on them when they are least expecting it.

Preston also loves the kitty pi and he wants to know how long it would take me to knit up a 6 foot one. I think this might take more wool than Lupine has to offer, so Preston made due with pretending that it was a kangaroo pouch and taking Little Roo (aka Pavi) on the hippity-hop tour of the whole house.

Pavi thinks bad attention is better than no attention, so he didn’t mind the tour.

And finally, we come to the most recent project, which is a Knitting Mystery. Preston couldn’t have a 6 Foot Preston Pi, but I agreed to make him a hat instead. He picked out colors from the yarns I had, and I used the same pattern I had used last year to make my favorite hat. I guess I must have finished it sometime during my blogging hiatus, because there’s no picture up, so you will have to trust me that this is a very fine hat. So I embarked upon the second one, using the blue and yellow yarn Preston had picked out. I followed the directions just as I did the first time. When the hat was done, and I cast off the circular needles, it seemed unnecessarily big. Rather then re-knit it, Preston suggested the we just felt it down a little, since it was all wool. Brilliant! So we dropped it in the washer, where the most peculiar thing happened. It turned into a kitty pi!

I often say that I don’t know what happened when I just don’t want to admit to a stupid mistake, but in this case, I really don’t know what happened. I made exactly the same pattern 6 months ago, and it turned into a hat. Very peculiar. I re-checked the pattern, but there weren’t any decreases that I missed or anything. I’ll take it with me to my knitting group on Monday and see if any of them can explain it to me.

OMG! IT’S A BABY SQUIRREL!!

He fell out of his nest, and I think maybe he was too heavy for momma squirrel to carry him back up to the nest. I heard a squirrel in a tree near the neighbor’s driveway making a sound that I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t an alarm, or any of the usual chatter that I hear squirrels make. It was a low grumbly, talky sort of a sound. I stopped to watch for a minute, and the squirrel was looking down at the ground, but I was in the middle of doing something and I didn’t walk over to see what it was. A few minutes later, I was in the back yard and I heard Preston yelling at Magoo to “drop it!” (Magoo is such a dog sometimes, cuz she totally dropped it.) Preston scooped Magoo up and I headed toward the little fuzzy grey form squeeling on the sidewalk.

Of course, I expected it to be bad. Magoo has a history of inappropriate behavior with small fuzzy baby wild animals. (the link is to an archived version of the page, with some wonky formatting, but it’s still worth reading). But I picked up this little guy, and I could see by his fur that Magoo had just been holding him by the scruff of his neck. He was small kitten sized, and his distress call was like a high-pitched kitten distress call, and I wonder if Magoo thought he was a kitten. In any case, I couldn’t see any puncture marks. Within a couple seconds after I picked him up, he relaxed and curled up. His little eyes weren’t open yet, but he seemed to fall asleep. Every minute or so, he would wake up again, give a little distress call, and then fall asleep. We brought him inside, put him in a little box with some towels and turned to our #1 emergency resource, Google. We learned that you should keep them warm, that baby squirrels have very high metabolisms, and that if you leave them under the tree where the nest is, momma squirrel will probably come pick him up within an hour or so.

I also knew, from an interview a year or so ago, that the local human society contracts with a wildlife rehabilitator, so we called them to get the rehabber’s number. Her name is Tammy, and she said that we could try putting him in his box with a jar of warm water at the base of the tree and see if momma would come get him, but it was really cold out that day, and she didn’t think we should just leave him out. I think the way this is supposed to work is that the baby is supposed to be concerned about his safety and making distress calls so momma hears where he is and comes to get him. But this little guy is pretty comfortable with the world, and as soon as he was warm, he just curled up and went to sleep with nary a peep. Momma never knew he was there, and we started to worry that he would get too cold even with the towels.

When Tammy got off work, she came by to pick him up. She has the resources and knowledge to raise him. But she and I got to talking, and it turns out that she needs a fair amount of help with web design, and marketing, and maybe even a certain amount of feeding baby animals. It came up that Preston surfs, and she said, “Oh darn, it’s too bad I didn’t know you all last year! I had a baby river otter and I really needed someone to teach him to swim.”

!!!

Can you even imagine how cool it would be to take a river otter surfing with you!? I guess they are not born knowing how to swim or how to catch fish. Tammy ended up using a rescued raccoon to teach him to fish.

Anyway, so I’ve been working on some web design for her, and some brochure stuff, and she works during the day at the local vet hospital so I’ve been stopping by in the mornings before work to say hello to the little baby squirrel, who she carries around in her pocket. So cute! His eyes are open now, and he tries to suck on my fingers when I hold him.

I had just got to my spot in the backyard, next to the garden, when I saw a dandelion leap into the air all by itself! It leapt up along with all the dirt around it in a neat mound and then settle back down into the ground looking as if nothing had happened. This seemed like unusual behavior for a dandelion, so I kept watching. This action repeated several times, and seemed to be moving underground across the garden bed, leaving a trail of slightly mounded dirt on the surface. A mole in the garden!

Or was it a gopher? It didn’t move any dirt to the surface, and I didn’t see any dirt hills nearby.

While it was fascinating to watch, I also don’t really want moles cavorting about in the garden, so I thought I might try a little test. I’ve seen those nature documentaries where the coyotes dig madly after some burrowing rodent and often come up empty-handed. But how fast can a mole really move? They don’t even really have legs to speak of, just big hands attached right to their bodies. So I thought I’d see if I could catch a mole, and also maybe give it a little scare to convince it that it would rather dig somewhere other than my garden.

I didn’t come anywhere close. The first time, I didn’t think strategically, and just started digging where I saw the motion. Of course, it had plenty of time to retreat before I got as deep as it’s tunnel (about 8 to 10 inches deep, but I didn’t measure so I’m just guessing). After uncovering its tunnel, and realizing it was long gone, I want back to sitting quietly. In only a few minutes I saw dirt being pushed into the exposed hole of the tunnel from the inside, blocking the entrance. And shortly after that, I saw the earth moving from further excavations in the same spot, only about 8 inches deeper. This time I waited for it to get a little ways further than where I expected the new tunnel to be and started digging behind the guy, thinking that I would collapse the escape tunnel and have him trapped. I’m not sure what went wrong with that plan, but there was definitely no mole or gopher or any other critter in the tunnel when I got to it.

I waited several minutes to see if he would come back again, but either he had moved his construction plans for the morning, or he simply outwaited me, and I eventually had to get up and go to work. I left the second tunnel uncovered, and I’m curious to see how the area looks when I get home this eve.

Also, I’m using this month as a kick in the pants to choose a new sit spot, since I haven’t done so after the last time I moved. I wonder if this is one vote against using the garden as a sit spot. Rather than just observing what’s going on, I have a vested interest in who resides in my garden and I am tempted to intervene.

This is a slideshow of the progress in our living room since we moved in, starting with taking out the carpet all the way up to yesterday when I brought home a chaise from the antique store. It is still very much a work in progress, but as I was going through these pictures I was encouraged by the progress. Each of these images was taken from the same spot in the corner of the living room, so it’s kind of fun to watch it as a slideshow and see the progression.