Annie's Blog

Whoo! Gotta love birthdays that come with huge chocolate cakes from co-workers, who proceded to help me eat all but two slices (one for each kid–they even cut the pieces and wrapped them up for me to take home). I love the folks I work with. Pretty sucky that most of them will be laid off at the end of the month, but we’re all philosophic about it–contractors are on the low end of the totem pole in government work, and they know it.

So what do I want for my birthday? Not sure yet. I’ll definitely be shopping for myself (and probably from elann.com), but I haven’t decided yet whether my next project will be a sweater for DH or something for me. I am still a little leery of starting a project with a huge amount of effort invested in it; we haven’t worked out our puppy prevention measures entirely. And since I’m down to the last six days before I absolutely have to have the finished, blocked Clapotis to its ultimate recipient, I really need to concentrate on that first. It’s going to be close, that’s for sure!

So be sure to lift a glass on Saturday for a birthday toast–leftover green beer is just fine.

And now I leave you with a thought for March Madness (my favorite season!):

DOOK SUCKS!!!!

SCORE: Puppy 3 Clapotis 000

A lesser woman would have given up by now…

But at least this time I have a helper to get me through the heartbreak of frogging

This third time, I almost had to laugh at the irony of it. It’s not that I’ve been colossally stupid, leaving my knitting out where the dog can get to it. Quite the contrary. This time, Clapotis was not-so-safely inside my knitting bag, which was hung on the banister of the stairs. The bag has a spring closure on it, which, unless you’re extremely dexterous, takes two hands to open. The banister has a decorative lip, and you actually have to lift the bag straps up and over the lip to get them off the banister. But apparently, WonderMutt is even smarter than I thought.

The crappy thing is not the re-knitting (I’m getting pretty good at picking up all the stitches and twisting them all the right way, after all!), but the fact that now I’m getting really nervous that I’ll have enough yarn to finish this cursed Clapotis. I figure that during the three incidents I’ve probably had to throw away the pieces of about 200 yards of yarn. I think I’d better knit faster and enlist the aid of a certain web-throwing superhero.

Anybody want to buy a dog? Cheap?

On Monday, my week was going pretty well. That is, until I got home from work and was greeted at the door by a very happy puppy. Much hugs and loving until I realized…The Puppy Met Me at the Door. Which is Not Good. The puppy is not allowed in the house unsupervised. At all. Ever. Because the house contains wall-to-wall puppy toys and chew toys in the form of pillows, furniture, knitting, fiber, shoes, laundry, cats….you get the picture. Great fun for a puppy, let me tell you.

And fun he had. The downstairs escaped relatively unscathed (except for every one of my plastic knitting needles—you know, the expensive size 14 DPNs, the plastic cord on all the circular needles, the plastic Chibi case…

The upstairs, on the other hand, looked almost exactly like those photographs of post-tornadic activity in the Midwest. Figures that the dog is from Kentucky, right? So I did what any normal, red-blooded American woman would do in that situation—I sat right down on the floor and cried. And then I called my husband and made him take me out to dinner.

Fortunately, even though he had Great Fun all day in the house, he didn’t really destroy anything valuable—the only casualties were my knitting needles and the back of one leather shoe. It was a huge, honkin’ mess, but all he really did was spread it around and toss it in the air. In fact, I found one shoe on top of the six-foot tall armoire in the bedroom. The other good thing was that the kids’ bedroom doors were closed, so their rooms survived intact.

So to punish the dog, I’m making each cat a Kitty Pi, and I’ll make a Chihuahua Pi as well. And I’ve given DH an ultimatum—either he constructs suitable shelter for the puppy outside where there is no chance that he can break in to the house or I’m going to move the puppy into the garage and see what toys he can find in there. Actually, I think we can even construct an air-conditioned shelter for him outside—there is an extra vent in the garage that we should be able to duct out through the wall and directly into an insulated dog house. He’ll still be allowed in the house mornings and evenings when we’re all home (he’s such a lovable, good-natured dog—it’s a joy to have him nearby), but bedtimes and daytimes he’ll be outside in the backyard with his comfy, cozy, cool doghouse.

In the meantime, don’t pay any attention to my yawning today. DH and I woke up at 3:00 this morning for some reason, and since neither one of us was asleep, we both got up and started drinking coffee. I’m sure we’ll both be a ton of laughs by the time the day is over.

Oh yeah–we saw snow today. In Las Vegas. Go figure!