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October 20, 2008

every handful is a whole new snack

file under: meta

I've decided to turn the comment moderation off for a while and risk getting slammed by sp@mmers again, because I don't like not getting e-mail notifications of comments. I miss being able to write back. We'll see how it goes.

*edit: how funny is this, a sp@m comment came in right when I was publishing this. ah well, I'm determined to leave it open for now so that I can start replying to your comments again!)

file under: road food

Everybody please rest assured that I did not eat that nasty lumpish thing I posted a photo of the other day. Cousin Mary got it right: the yellow thing masquerading as a fallen rutabaga on the roadside was actually a filthy blob of yellow insulation foam. I brought it home and threw it in the garbage, and tonight when we go for groceries I'll get myself a nice decent rutabaga that I'm sure will taste wonderful even though it didn't fall off a truck. By the way, the phrase "I dig rutabagas" came from a t-shirt my uncle Ken used to have in the seventies, that he got from the Ontario Rutabaga Producers' Marketing Board. It pictured a tall skinny dude with a shovel standing next to the words I Dig Rutabagas, and if I remember right the shirt was yellow on top fading to purple on the bottom. I've long wanted one of those shirts but am pretty sure they don't exist anymore, and a Google search on the phrase yields only one link: mine. Uncle Ken had a whole bunch of those shirts but had cut them all up for shop rags long before I thought to ask him for one.

file under: shill, baby, shill!

Oh, I slay me sometimes.

Speaking of my cousin Mary, she's been working all summer teaching herself lampworking, and has a new line of stitch markers up in her etsy store using gorgeous handmade glass beads. Y'all should show her some love so she'll keep making them and also so she'll upload all the amazing lampworked earrings I got to see when we visited last week. And remind her that I have a birthday coming up. Heh.

I've been plugging away (sluggishly, due to the chest/head cold I picked up over Thanksgiving) at getting my own shop updated, and finally managed to upload a couple of printed satchels, with more to come later in the week. Now just as soon as I feel I can go back to working under the buzzy studio lights without getting a migraine (a heightened possibility when I'm already compromised by illness), I can print up some more canvas for the next batch. I know, I'm such a delicate flower, it's pathetic.

file under: unwelcome guests

Last Tuesday I was sitting at the sewing machine in the front room with the front door wide open behind me (it was a beautiful warm day and we don't have a screen door on the front). I caught a movement in my peripheral vision and looked up to see a black squirrel standing next to the leg of my ironing board, a good metre and a half at least inside the door (that's about 5 feet, y'all). I said, sharply, "excuse me! get out of my house!". It turned and walked out, seemingly in no great hurry. I followed it to the door and there it was, sauntering down our sidewalk, whistling a happy tune.

I don't know if Cleo was asleep when this little dude slipped past her watch post but I get the sense she's not all that interested in catching things anymore. She used to be quite the efficient hunter in her day, but now that she's reached retirement age she seems quite happy to focus more on her hobbies: shedding fur, throwing up, and lying around in people's way:

file under: more harebrained ideas

I've decided to do the one hundred push ups programme, and today is my first day! I feel I've lost a lot of strength over the last few years, what with ditching the gym entirely during grad school (not that I was ever really able to do any significant amount of push ups). So: new leaf! Starting right now, in fact, as soon as I hit publish. Wish me luck.

Posted by jodi at 03:19 PM | Comments (5) | categories:  capitalist pig : crazy cat lady : dumbass

December 27, 2007

boxing day madness

My hometown was once a Royal Canadian Air Force training station. In the 60s it was decommissioned and sat empty for a while, eventually becoming the property of the Ontario Development Corporation, reconfigured into a booming little industrial park with attached town. You couldn't buy a house there when I was growing up; the town was an experiment, an attempt to draw industry with its conveniently located cheap rental homes for factory workers and its military sized airport. It worked really well all through the seventies, before the factories started moving to countries where they could more easily exploit their workers.

Now the houses are being sold (not the land, though; so the industrial park I grew up in is now a trailer park, and my mom, who now owns the house she formerly rented, pays lot fees for the land her home sits on). There are a lot of changes happening here, in a place that sat virtually unchanged from the late 1960s to the turn of the millenium. Houses that have looked the same for decades are suddenly having additions built on, sunrooms, southern-style wraparound porches. I've already watched the disappearance of many things I loved about my hometown, like the school (which had already been closed for a few years before half of the building burned down, and is now a boarded-up eyesore in the middle of a neglected field), the air force dormitories and tennis courts, and the airstrip where we used to play as kids and, as teens, drive out to the middle to do beer-addled doughnuts (the airstrip hasn't gone anywhere, but it's all fenced off now so kids can't get onto it anymore). So most of the changes happening to the houses don't bother me too much (except for that one particularly hideous one). But this is really lame:

Huron Park has been rebranded as "Huron Village Green". Blech.

Cleo had an exceptionally good Boxing Day this year. My dad's wife Sherry made little catnip pillows for everyone (my dad and his wife are crazy cat ladies; the kitty population in their home recently swelled to fourteen and now sits at eleven indoor cats and one outdoor cat). I don't think Miss Cleo has ever had catnip before, and she tore into it with abandon. We had to eventually take it away from her after she became so totally baked she was wobbling a little.

She started yelling outside our bedroom door at 5 in the morning, no doubt suffering from a killer case of the munchies.

Posted by jodi at 02:57 PM | Comments (9) | categories:  crazy cat lady : dumbass

December 25, 2007

picture and words unrelated

disco dentist!

I already got my Best Present of the year, yesterday morning. Peter and I were heading out to run some errands and as we pulled out of the driveway we saw a big fluffy cat in the alley across the street. It was the Old Kitty, who hasn't been around here since a couple of weeks before I left for Athens in July. He's disappeared for months at a time in the past, but this time I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that the old guy must be dead. But on he goes. He's all fluffed up for winter, his bald spots having all grown back in. I looked for him this morning as I walked down to the river to set free yet another trapped mouse, because you know that no matter how much I worry about how those mice will fare once I've left them on the cold, cold riverside, I'd gladly feed one to my sweet old alley kitty in a heartbeat.

Posted by jodi at 09:47 AM | Comments (3) | categories:  crazy cat lady

December 14, 2007

kitty in the window

I'm supposed to be cleaning up the house for our party tonight, and I have done a bit of work on that. But on cleaning-for-a-party days (which is pretty much the only time the house gets cleaned, and is a great reason to have a party if you ask me) I usually spend time procrastinating by doing some little task or other that has needed doing for months, one of the things we otherwise neglect forever. So today I threw out all of my dead plants from the dining room window seat (don't blame Peter, they don't get much more water when I'm home than they do when I'm away), and put Miss Cleo's bed up there.

Poor Cleo has had a lot of upheaval in her life in the past six months, first having the person she'd spent her whole life with disappear into the hospital and not come back, then after a few tense weeks of watching her house get dismantled and packed into boxes she took a long, hot, terrifying car ride to a strange place where she was no longer allowed out-of-doors (she's allowed out now, but is a wimp about the cold in her old age and so she mostly stays in these days). When Pete's mom's house was sold we brought Cleo's window bed back to our house and it has stood leaning on the wall in the dining room ever since. So I thought I'd do something kind for her and get rid of those dead leafy eyesores at the same time. And when I showed her the bed she was thrilled and quickly settled down, purring so violently it was making her whole head shake, excitedly watching some guys across the back alley loading things into their cars.

Of course, as soon as I finished writing about how happy she was, the territorial old bitch started hissing and clawing at the glass because of the cat on the porch next door. Sigh.

*EDITED TO ADD: Peter suggested that my post seems to imply that his mother, with whom Miss Cleo used to live, passed away in hospital. Happily this is not the case, but rather she moved into a retirement home where there isn't really room for a cat, and Cleo's emotional upheaval was so great during the move to Windsor that we don't want to subject her to the trip back.

Posted by jodi at 03:20 PM | Comments (5) | categories:  crazy cat lady

July 16, 2007

kitty love

While Mikell's still in hospital and while we take care of moving her from house to apartment, Peter and I have brought her kitty back to our place to be babysat. It's nice to have a cat in the house again, as we've decided to put off inviting new kitties into our home and our lives until I'm back from school for good next year. Strange, though, to look over and see miss Cleo curled up snoozing in Benny's favourite sleeping spot.

Posted by jodi at 10:08 AM | Comments (3) | categories:  crazy cat lady

November 21, 2006

sleep on, sweet babes

My beautiful Miss Benny followed her brother this morning, as gentle a passage as he had last February. I feel like a whole era of my life has ended; Benny was born in my bed almost fourteen years ago, and she and Fat Boy have been with me longer than Peter has. She rests beside her brother now, right where we'll plant our flowering crab in the spring.

This morning I wrote to my mom that in a few short weeks I would be snuggled on the couch back home with my head on Peter's shoulder and Benny curled in my lap, where I belong; when I wrote that, my baby girl was already gone. Goodbye, my darling girl.

Posted by jodi at 07:14 PM | Comments (55) | categories:  crazy cat lady

June 09, 2006

Peter is going to kill me for this. . .

I gave some food to the Old Kitty.

I've been trying to get to know this decrepit old alley cat ever since we bought our house three years ago. He looked impossibly old and feeble the first time I set eyes on him, all scrawny and crusty and covered in matted tufts of fur that stuck out at all angles (think Bill the Cat only gray and white). He's got a bum hip that hitches at a weird angle when he walks, and his legs are so stiff that in order to get low enough to creep under our back gate (which has about six inches clearance) he has to lay his hips down on their side and drag himself through. It's amazing to me that this cat can survive in the wild, winter after winter, and each spring when I spot him for the first time I rejoice that he survived the cold months.

The first summer we lived here, Old Kitty would often sleep the afternoons away in our backyard, slowly moving across the back corner as the sun crept in and the shade from the cedar tree dwindled to nothing; when all the shade was gone he would haul himself up and set off to find a shadier spot on someone else's property. I would stand at the back door with my mug in my hand and watch him sleep, wishing I could get near enough to touch him, pick him up, maybe take him to the vet. But he was wary of me and would never let me get closer than a few metres; eventually I gave up trying to get close to him, worrying that I would frighten him away from our property altogether. Then I cut the cedar down and he stopped coming by so often.

That first winter there was a litter of four kittens living in the bushes at the back of my neighbour's lot, and I thought that the Old Kitty was their mother, because I would see him (her?) out there playing with them, watching over them, and even rubbing his (her) nose on theirs. I've since come to believe (although I haven't been able to have a really good look) that Old Kitty is a boy, but can't quite figure out why a wild tom cat would behave that way towards a bunch of kittens. That spring Old Kitty would often be found curled up with one of those kittens, a tiny brown and orange speckled female I'd named Greek, atop some mattress fabric I'd left out on our back deck (um, an art project gone to seed, don't ask). When those kittens disappeared from the neighbourhood, Old Kitty stopped hanging around our place for good, and since then I've only seen him rarely.

I can't explain why I feel such tenderness and longing for this nasty, flea-bitten old mess of an animal. Maybe because he's the only one of the many alley cats around here that could ever come near my own cats without them freaking out: I even caught Fat Boy and Old Kitty nearly touching noses at the bottom of the front porch steps once. But it's probably just because he's so ugly, and because I can't even imagine him being able to move his old bones quickly enough to kill a rat, but he must somehow. As Pete often reminds me, he's probably not even all that old, likely far younger than my fat healthy 13 year old indoor cats. I know he can take care of himself, and has done so for quite some time, but every time I see him he seems a little scruffier, his joints a little creakier, and I just wish that I could help him out a little.

This afternoon, as I went into the kitchen to make some more tea, I saw him there on my deck, lying down right outside the screen door. For the first time, he didn't start up in alarm as I approached the door, and when I sat down just inside the screen and spoke to him, he didn't run away. So I gave him a little dish of the food that Benny isn't allowed to eat anymore (because it isn't geriatric diet food), and some water. He didn't flinch when I put my hand just a few centimetres away from him to set down the water, and I didn't press my luck by trying to touch him. He ate what he wanted, looked up at me, and then slowly tottered down the steps and dragged himself under the gate.

I don't know what I'll do if he comes back expecting to find more food. I know we can't keep feeding him, there are too many rats in these alleys to leave food outside, and I know I'll have to throw out the food he left behind pretty soon. I know that it was a mistake to give it to him in the first place. He's certainly not ready to be turned into a house cat, even if Benny would put up with him in her house (there's no squid-jigging way, I know that). But I really, really want him to be my kitty.

Posted by jodi at 04:33 PM | Comments (18) | categories:  crazy cat lady

February 01, 2006

Goodnight, sweet boy

My beautiful boy died today.

I took this picture of him when I was at home over the holiday; it's not a very good one, but it's the last.

There was nothing (apparent) wrong with him, except that he was almost thirteen. Aside from having lost a little weight (very little, and only because we've had them on the old-fart diet food since I left in the summer) he was fine. Peter was out of town, and poor Dylan found him lying in the hallway and buried him. Thank you, Dylan. I wish you hadn't had to do that by yourself.

Ghod, I fucking wish I was at home right now.

Jae, I was going to answer the meme you tagged me with tonight. In fact, I was halfway through writing it when Peter called. I am going to leave it until next week, now.

Posted by jodi at 11:59 PM | Comments (50) | categories:  crazy cat lady

July 20, 2005

A little scare

This morning when I came out of the bedroom, only Fat girl was lying in the hallway waiting for me. The usual routine is for both of the fats to rally in the hallway (can you call it a rally with only two attendees?) before six in the morning, and start making noise and clawing at the door when we don't get out of bed right away after the clock radio comes on. Then when I get up and go into the bathroom they follow me, cornering me on the toilet to get attention and to bump against my knees, and when I come out of the bathroom the two of them go tearing down the stairs together and straight to the food dish. Today, only Fat girl. Fat boy was nowhere to be seen. I didn't start to worry about it until he didn't turn up at the sound of the cat food being dished out (Fat girl didn't seem at all worried about where her brother was, she was too intent on getting her breakfast). I looked around, looked in the basement, went back upstairs: no fat boy. I checked under our bed. Not there.

Beginning to panic, I went down the basement again and called him. I even put my arms in the slimy sink water and felt around to see if he'd fallen in and drowned (our sinks aren't draining very well, and fill to the top every time we do laundry so that we have to bail them out with buckets for every single load. And of course I didn't bail last time, so they're still full). He wasn't there. I realized then that I hadn't seen him since before bed last night, when Peter shooed Fat girl in off the back deck and locked the back door. I went outside and looked around the back yard, then up and down the street out front, then in the back yard again and under the deck. I went in and told Peter that Fat boy was lost and that he was going to have to help me go out and look around the neighbourhood for him.

Peter went downstairs into the kitchen, opened the screen door and said "here he is".

He did get locked outside last night. He spent his first night ever all alone outside. The fats are indoor cats, and only go outside in the daytime, and only when I'm home. Fortunately, he's too big a chicken to run off; I have to prop the screen door open for him to go outside at all, because if it closes behind him he freaks out and cries like his life is ending until I open it and let him back into the house. So probably he just cowered under the deck all night and worried and felt sorry for himself, the dumb little shit. He was pretty shaken, but okay. And as soon as he'd had his breakfast he was right back outside.

Posted by jodi at 12:48 PM | Comments (9) | categories:  crazy cat lady

May 13, 2005

New beginnings

Peter found these while walking near the university yesterday. They were a little too high to jump up and bonk our heads on, sadly.

Thanks to everyone who wrote and reassured me that it is okay to cry over a broken cup. I've been thinking that maybe I'll go ahead and get a bunch of those mugs, since I know that my special mug can't really be replaced by a lookalike. Snowball assures me that Anasazi knockoffs are common and plentiful where she lives, so maybe I'll redo my whole kitchen in it. A nice big bowl in that style for mixing bread would be lovely, if I can find one. I did call Mesa Verde today but nobody was there.

And I decided not to throw the fats in front of the bus after all, because I don't know which of them broke the cup and it's not really fair for the innocent one to die, and plus throwing cats in front of buses is illegal. And they've been with me for a long time (although not quite as long as my cup), and ruined countless things, none of which I have killed or even harmed them for. So I guess I'll just forgive the stupid little shits.

Oh look, they've clawed the crap out of this chair. Ah well, that wouldn't be the first chair they've destroyed. Shits.

So today I started some seeds for the garden. Only about a month late. Here is what we need to do in order to get our property the way we want it:

Back yard:
-finish taking down the deck
-cut down the trees next to the house
-dig up the remaining roots from the lilac bush I cut down; cut off the remaining stump from the cedar tree I cut down; dig up the rose bushes
-mark out where the new patio will go and put down limestone screenings
-mark out paths
-move the tarp to kill the rest of the grass
-take the pool pieces to the dump
-build a composter
-prepare beds for the seedlings and the plants we're bringing from Pete's mom's place (since we moved to Windsor we've been storing a lot of our plants in her garden)
-plant

Front yard:
-rake up the Barbage and throw it away (the half of the front yard that was garden is full of white marble stones, terra cotta chips and cedar mulch)
-stake down a tarp to kill the remaining grass
-prepare beds and plant.

The front yard is going to contain all native plants. Southwestern Ontario is a pocket of Carolinean forest, and the Windsor area is a tiny overlapping pocket of tall grass prairie. We're going to concentrate more on the Carolinean, but might allow some tall grass prairie plants to creep in there. The back yard will be divided into four, with one area for big messy perennials, one area Japanese, one area kitchen garden and I don't remember what we talked about for the fourth area. Woodland, maybe. Where I'm cutting down trees we're going to put in a flowering crab, and plant shade-loving stuff like sweet woodruff and trilliums. This is the corner of the yard that's visible from the computer desk, where I spend most of my time.

So here is a list of the seeds I've started today. Some will go in the front and some in the back.

-purple obedient plant (front yard)
-two kinds of hollyhock, black and red
-echinacea (front yard? is this native?)
-two kinds of rudbeckia, the good old fashioned side-of-the-road kind and one with a red centre
-butterfly milkweed (front yard)
-something called "cleome", seeds harvested from the native Carolinean garden on campus. I don't remember this plant at all but I drew a picture of its flower on the bag of seeds and wrote "big, purple", so I'm sure I must have liked it at the time (front yard)
-bergamot. Even gone to seed and then stored in the freezer for eight months, it still smells divine.
-joe pye weed, one of my all-time favourites (front yard)
-lavatera: I have no idea what this is, Rob collected the seeds and mailed them to me, and he knows us pretty well so I'm sure we'll love it.
-marigolds, for dyeing
-strawflower
-thyme
-sweet basil
-coriander
-parsley
-chinese lantern
-coreopsis, a solid yellow, not my favourite coreopsis tinctoria. I had a nice healthy patch of that last year until the roofers killed it. Grr. They killed my eryngium too, the pricks.
-something labelled "? beside sage, yellow flower", from the back garden Pete put in at his mom's. It might be that thing that's like savoury but you don't eat it; does that have a yellow flower?
-silver dollar plant
-love lies bleeding. This is a gorgeous weedy trollop of a plant and I try to plant it everywhere I go. Even the seeds are beautiful, like tiny, tiny garnets.
-thai basil
-thai chili pepper

I'm hoping the weather will be pleasant enough over the weekend to get some of the cleaning up and prep work done. And since I've discovered that you can't kill a forsythia bush by leaving it in a bucket for two winters, I'm going to plant that, where I'm taking out rose bushes.

Posted by jodi at 04:05 PM | Comments (7) | categories:  crazy cat lady : projects

May 12, 2005

Disaster

Look at what the fats did.

They broke my cup.

This may seem like a small thing. But it is not.

I bought this cup in the Salvation Army store twelve years ago for about a dollar. It's a replica of a CE 1200 Anasazi black-and-white pottery mug, originally sold as a souvenir. It holds about 25% more than an average coffee mug. Its base is fatter than its rim, giving it a jaunty air, and its handle is thick and sturdy, with plenty of room for all four fingers. And it has this amazing zigzag design. This cup saw me through years of caffeine addiction, and since Peter and I gave up coffee in December of 2003 it's held several cups a day of Irish Breakfast tea instead. I am unhealthily attached to this cup, so much so that I've actually spent time worrying about whether I should take it to Athens with me or leave it here so I'll have it when I come home to visit (because I couldn't imagine drinking my tea from a different mug here in my house). I even dream about my cup sometimes, that's how much I love it.

I know it's just a thing, but I cried bitterly when I came home and found it smashed on the floor this afternoon, and briefly considered tossing the culprits into the path of an oncoming bus. I cried way more than anyone should cry over a thing. The fats, of course, were trying to get at some knitting I'd left next to the computer, and in pulling it down off the desk they knocked the cup onto the floor. Yes, I left my mug out on the desk, and yes I left knitting out too. I am a little piggy in a pigsty. But there must have been at least ten different knitting projects scattered about the room, plus umpteen more balls of yarn kicking around, and they always go for the stuff on the table, never the computer desk. And I always leave my mug next to the computer.

Peter says that cats are an engine of destruction, and they will work methodically through everything you own until finally they reach the things you love. I would rather they had broken every dish in the kitchen and leave this cup intact.

Look, the handle is indestructible.

I think I might be able to replace it. From Mesa Verde National Park you can get replica mugs, and you can even order them by mail. But while the website says there are eight designs available, only one is pictured. So I am going to phone them tomorrow, with the product number, to see if they still make my cup. Because I care that much. I wish I could just get all eight, but I'm a poor student, so that's not happening.

I'm feeling miserable about the loss of my beautiful, beloved tea cup, and annoyed with myself for being such a baby about a thing. And I really don't want to go to bloody Leamington tonight.

Posted by jodi at 06:08 PM | Comments (15) | categories:  assholes : crazy cat lady

May 11, 2005

Let's quit with the potty talk around here

Because this is getting ridiculous.

There is nothing to be found on this website on most of those topics. All of the nurses around here wear prim blue uniforms and starched aprons and sturdy shoes. Speaking of which, AS IF I write about my shoes. Please.

Instead I'm going to tell a cat story. Because we know that everyone who knits and has a weblog loves to write cat stories.

When Peter's son Dylan was seven, his favourite song was "Lost in the Supermarket" by the Clash, and when Pete played it on his guitar and sang it, Dylan had actions he would do along with the song. Essentially it involved pretending to push a grocery cart around our apartment and put things in it, but it was quite funny.

So yeah, how is this about the fats. Tonight Peter was playing and singing "Just like honey" by the Jesus and Mary Chain, and over on the armchair the fats were doing the actions: Fat girl was lying on her side with her leg in the air, and Fat boy, well, in the interest of keeping the Google searching pervs away, let's just say he was doing the actions to the "licking up" part.

Lucky girl.

Posted by jodi at 10:34 PM | Comments (4) | categories:  crazy cat lady : dumbass

May 08, 2005

Nobody here but us fully clothed people

Ahh. What better way to spend a sunny afternoon than out on the deck with knitting, bare toes and a sleepy kitty?

A recap on the week from heck: I got my submissions done for the magazine: four designs, three of which have three or more variations, so lots of options.

I gave my conference presentation yesterday, and it went pretty well despite the fact that I was totally unprepared and only started putting my notes together the night before (and even then I ended up watching about 4 hours worth of the Live Aid dvd with my houseguest instead of doing my work, and finished up my notes in the morning). Fortunately I have the gift of the gab, so I don't really need notes in order to talk and talk and talk. All was good. My talking even made sense for a change.

The Big Girl Knits sample is almost done. I'm going to work on it some more tonight, and it will definitely be put in the post tomorrow. And then, since the weather's finally warmed up, I can get on to the yard work that needs doing, and starting some slutty summer knits.

Does anybody know if cats can get stomach flu? Fat boy puked all weekend; I had to get out of bed twice last night when he woke me up gagging in the hallway (better to deal with it in the night than to have forgotten it's there by morning).

Oh, and I did a Google search for live nude girls, and although a search within the results shows that my site is there somewhere, I looked through about the first seventy pages and I'm not there. And yet "live nude girls" shows up in my search query stats almost every single day. Who the hell are these people, who have the time to slog through so much p*rn and still find me? Why don't they just go buy a magazine?

Posted by jodi at 09:30 PM | Comments (7) | categories:  crazy cat lady : dumbass : sticks and string

March 02, 2005

Great.

It appears the cats are now arranging their kills by colour.

This reminds me of when Benny's sister Agnetha Pandora (Benny was the only one of my kittens who got to keep her Abba name) used to kill baby birds and line them up on the sidewalk, perfectly spaced and all facing the same way. Given the options, I think I chose to keep the saner sister.

Just to show Rachael that her Digit is not fat, I offer you this shot of Benny, trying to get her fat arse up off the deck:

My poor baby. She'll be turning 11 next week. Yes, she's on a diet, but it doesn't do her much good when she keeps skipping the gym.

Kool Aid dyeing seems to be the cool thing to do this week, and I did some too.

The two skeins on the left are something I'd never heard of before, "Emerald Irish Knit" (Canadian-made); I got 4 skeins of it at Value Village. The skeins on the right are recycled lambswool, and used to look like this:

Looks much better now, eh? By my primitive method of reckoning, there are about 250 yards in the top skein, and 285 in the bottom one. And that's just one sleeve and half the front; this stuff is really fine, and there's tons of it. I see lots of lacy scarves in my future.

I'm jealous of the colours other people are getting, but Zehrs only seems to carry about 8 varieties of Kool Aid: Norma's getting great results with "Wild Watermelon Kiwi", and Eklectika's got some awesome Mango-action going on. What gives? How come I can't find these colours?

I finally managed to get my arse in to the shop to do some lithography; I've started to feel guilty because Farrah wants to use my stone when I'm finished with it and I've been just letting it sit there unused while I work on other things. So I'm doing some printing, and when these prints are done Farrah can have my stone and keep it; nothing else I'm working on right now needs to be done in litho. Remember the ugly-ass prints I was working on, ages ago? They're all getting covered up, bay-bee, with a brand new image. No pictures yet, maybe tomorrow.

Posted by jodi at 02:12 PM | Comments (3) | categories:  art stuff : crazy cat lady : projects

February 16, 2005

Why fish make better pets

You know it's going to be one of those days when you're pulling 18 inch pieces of poo-covered yarn out of your cat's arse before you've even gotten out of bed in the morning.

Posted by jodi at 07:51 AM | Comments (15) | categories:  crazy cat lady : dumbass

January 24, 2005

I love the snow

It hides the junk in my backyard, so no-one knows that Sanford and Son live here. Yes, we have only half a deck. The deck on this house is huge and oddly shaped (to accomodate the nasty old above ground pool that used to be here, which we removed pretty much as soon as we'd closed on the house). We're taking the deck off so only the original porch will be left, which means more garden! This is the year we're finally going to do some work putting in the garden back here, because next year I *might* be away at grad school. So expect to see lots of pictures of dirt coming up this spring (whee!).

The fatties got their first taste of snow yesterday. They are almost 11 years old, but only go outside in good weather, under supervision. I let them poke their heads out the door while I was taking pictures:

This is how far they got.

Because I know you guys love the exciting photos of slides in sheets, here's what I did this weekend:

These are going to Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

I only have one more package to do, for the University of Georgia. I've decided to only apply to three grad schools instead of the original six. I have a pretty good reason for this, but I'll have to tell you later. In the meantime, today I'm going to London to teach papermaking! It's a two hour bus trip each way; how much knitting should I bring?

Posted by jodi at 06:27 AM | Comments (8) | categories:  crazy cat lady : school

December 20, 2004

And you shall know us by the trail of socks

I came home this afternoon and was greeted by this:

I know when I started this blog I said that I wouldn't talk about my cats, but those of you who know me well won't be surprised to hear that Cathode didn't get finished in time for Saturday (I've had a few more setbacks, but it'll all be okay), and since I hate blogging without pictures I'm showing you this instead.

So let me tell you a story. Benny and Pickle don't get out much and as a result they're a bit on the corpulent side. Last summer, in the interest of their health, I decided to put them on a diet. As soon as I started rationing the food, Benny got a little crazy and started performing ritualistic moving around of laundry.

(Okay, a little further background is required here: years ago, Pickle had his own ball of yarn that he would carry around and bring to me, and because I thought it was funny and cute I would reward him for it. When it became a nightly ritual of him waiting until we had been in bed for ten minutes then bringing the yarn ball into the bedroom, shouting his fool head off the whole time, we threw his yarn in the garbage and started training him that he could get love without having to perform for it. He switched to bringing me my knitting until I started hiding it, then anything I had knitted, then finally he gave it up, but they both still have this idea that they can please me with woolen stuff.)

So when the diet started, Benny started bringing socks down from the laundry pile in the bedroom and dropping them near me then standing at the food dish. She has even brought my sweaters downstairs, and we've caught her dragging towels out of our bedroom a couple of times. There was also a matched pair of striped socks laid out neatly on the dining room floor when we came in today, but I picked them up before I thought to take a picture, then found the trail of dead on the stairs when I was going to put the others away.

If anyone knows how to stop this kind of behaviour, I'm all for trying new things. Scolding doesn't work, and it's too cold to keep the bedroom door shut right now.

Other reasons why you should have your camera ready at all times: today we drove past a transport truck that said "show chickens inside" on the back. What the hell does that mean?

Posted by jodi at 04:33 PM | Comments (4) | categories:  crazy cat lady