Knitting, with Dogs

Feeling MUCH Better Now

News from the Dog World:

Cammie (aka Cambot, aka The Bot, aka Baby Bop, aka Baby -- nicknames multiply exceedingly in our house) is feeling much better today! I cooked some rice and added broth to it, and she started eating that yesterday afternoon. By last night she pretty much had her appetite back, and was looking more like her old self. This morning she looks pretty much as usual:

She's got a little cough that we'll watch carefully, but I feel much better today. I worried all day yesterday.

Daily Knitting Report:

I finished the second ball of yarn for the baby blanket I'm working on. This is an all garter stitch blanket and it's pretty tedious to work on. Then last night, somehow I dropped a stitch. NEVER drop a stitch when you're working with a yarn that is textured and tends to stick to itself. I frogged back a few rows (an adventure in itself) and I think I'm ok, but jeezopete. Maybe I should go back to crochet for quick projects. Except that I hate to crochet. Well, hate's too strong a word. I don't do it that well (I do good granny squares and that's about it), and I don't think it looks as nice as knitting, so I stay away from it.

Since I'm putting myself on a budget, and I've read my last store-bought ebook, I went searching on Project Gutenberg for public domain freebies. I found a few that looked promising. I found out that Mobipocket does a good job of converting HTML files to PRC files for Palm devices. Apparently quite a few of the new entries at Project Gutenberg are in HTML in addition to good old .TXT format. I haven't figured out how to incorporate the images that are sometimes included with HTML files into the PRC file, but I haven't really tried that hard.

Happy weekend all!

A couple of things

Thanks to Wendy and Abi-Station's Icon Maker, here I am:

Click on the image to go to Wendy's Rules for Bad Ass Knitters.

I look too pleasant to be Bad Ass, don't I??? Oh well.

News From the Dog World:

My old dog Cammie isn't feeling well. She doesn't want to eat, and that's SO unlike her. She didn't even want to clean up the bacon dish. We gave her sub-q fluids this morning, and I think it perked her up a little, but she's still pretty lethargic. I think I'll just stay home today and knit and keep an eye on her. If she doesn't feel any better tomorrow, we'll take her to the vet.

She seemed to be feeling fine yesterday. I gave her her quarterly bad haircut, and she seemed fine and happy and patient as usual. And she had bloodwork done on Monday that was ok.

So yeah, I'm worried about her. She's around 13, and is creaky already, as well as being in the early stages of kidney failure. She's my sweet old lady.

Time on my hands

My contract job is over, so I've got some time on my hands now. I did enjoy the income from the contract. And someday I'm sure I'll get over the bad feelings I had from being laid off from That Place. Those feelings made it very weird to go back there. And the fact that they turned out not to need the work that they'd hired me to do didn't help. (It was an accounting decision -- they thought they were going to need a lot of set-up and data moving work that they found out later they actually didn't need. All I can say is, it figures.)

But I got a decent chunk o' change out of it. And I did feel useful (if not happy) until the we-don't-need-what-you've-been-working-on decision came down.

So anyway, I'm back to being home full time. So one of the first things I did was change this blog around a little. I've been meaning to do that for a while. Now I have links to some of my favorite blogs up on the right-hand side. Updating just gets a little time-consuming, since I'm still effectively living in the last century with dial-up internet service. And when it rains, our connect speeds drop dramatically. And it's rained a LOT lately. Maybe when I again become part of the working class we can move up to cable or DSL. But I've got a little time before that.

Daily Knitting Report:

I'm half-way around adding the border to my grey circular shawl. When last seen, it was still in the Big Sloppy-Looking Bag stage and looked like this:

I knitted till I had 80 stitches in each section, so that's about 640 stitches on the needle to knit the lace edging onto. I REALLY want to finish this. I think it's going to be yummy to have when the weather cools down.

I need to finish a baby blanket for a co-worker of Dear Robert whose daughter just had a baby. It's a quickie project, just garter stitch, but in a neat textured yarn. No picture yet, but I'll post one soon.

News from the Dog World:

We got the boarding bill straightened out at the vet. The dogs were happy to be home, especially Ivan. Of course they'll go back week after next, when we go to Fripp.

Travelling is fun, but I wish we could take the dogs. I miss them when we're gone.

Back from Alaska

We're back from our cruise to Alaska! Pictures ahead!

We got to see a tiny bit of Seattle, mostly as we were departing:

Near Juneau, we saw the Mendenhall glacier and went rafting:

It was cold, but they dressed us up warmly. The only really chilly part was sitting with your feet in about 3" of icy water for the last easy part of the trip. (I did have waterproof rubber boots on, but my feet still got a little cold):

We went on whale watching tours twice, once in Juneau

where we saw humpbacks:

and once in Victoria, BC, where we saw orcas:

We saw lots of spectacular scenery like this fjord view from Tracy Arm:

The weather was really pretty good. Many days were a bit overcast, but then the sun would come out for a bit to show us the sunny face of Alaska. We did have one night of bad weather, but it was fine by the next morning. But we only saw one really spectacular sunset. It happened on our last night out, while we were on the whale watching boat in Victoria:

Oh, and there was an earthquake one night! We were sound asleep, and at about 2:50 am something went BLAM BLAM BLAM-A-BLAM BLAM!!! real loudly, and the ship shook a tiny bit. Well, I had to get up and go see if anything dramatic was happening. Nothing was, but while I was out on deck I chatted with a guy who used to be a commercial fisherman in the Bering Sea some years ago. (He'd also come up to see what was going on.) He told me some great stories about his experiences. One image he left me with was of cold, calm nights when the water was so clear that you could see the phosphorescent trails left by fish as they swam by the boat, way down in the water. Very neat.

We found out the next morning that what we'd experienced had been an earthquake that happened a couple hundred miles away from us. Apparently we just got the sonic shock waves or something. I never imagined that you could feel an earthquake while on the ocean!

I did actually get a little knitting done!

This was my first cruise. I thought it was ok, but I think it's an experience geared to people who are more social than I am, and who like to drink and eat and go to clubs. I was mostly interested in the things to do on shore, but in several places, we only had about 4 hours ashore. I didn't get to see much of Juneau or Ketchikan or Victoria because all our time was spent on excursions. Of course we did get to see some spectacular scenery (and whales!) in Juneau and Victoria, and in Ketchikan we got to go on a sea kayaking trip, and that was wonderful. (I love sea kayaks.) But the only town I really got to visit was Skagway. I liked Skagway a lot, and I'm sure I'd have liked the others too, if I'd only had a chance to visit them more.

Enough for now -- long post! And I have to go talk to the vet where we boarded the dogs. They have our account all messed up (overcharged us mostly). Oh well.