Light and Momentary

Sandiversary

One year ago today, Sandy came to live with us.

We fostered a bunch of dogs during the pandemic, and collectively they had convinced me that dogs were high-maintenance animals. I was not sure I had done a sensible thing, bringing home a permanent dog. She was so frightened, her stumpy tail tightly tucked.

And then, slowly, she unfurled. She decided she could trust us. She learned to rely on having food in her dish and walks at regular intervals and occasional treats. She learned the sound of our cars in the driveway and our feet on the sidewalks. (She does sometimes get a little confused about whether it's Stella on the front porch (exciting) or the mailman on the front porch (worrying), but we all have our little moments of confusion.)

The part I wasn't expecting is that I have also learned to rely on her. If I am feeling a little down I can call her name and she will come running to sit next to me. When I come home at the end of the day she comes racing to greet me, her tail wagging like an affection-powered helicopter rotor preparing for liftoff. "I missed you too," I tell her.

She is stretched out next to me as I type, making contented little Chewbacca noises. She is still sometimes cautious about men she doesn't know -- it took her months to stop flinching if Elwood made a sudden move -- but she is an agreeable girl these days, willing to make new acquaintances.

Tonight I asked Elwood to save out a little bit of the ground pork he was cooking up for dinner, and Stella and I gave it to Sandy after her evening walk. "This," she said with her eloquent brown eyes, "is the most delicious thing I have eaten in a very long time." You may be skeptical about my capacity to interpret the language of Dog Eyes reliably, but twelve months in I'm pretty well acquainted with this particular dialect of Dog Eyes.

I wasn't sure, a year ago, that it made sense to act on the Dog Eyes message I thought I was getting. "Maybe," she seemed to be saying, "you could help me out here, Nice Lady? Because I don't like it here in this crate at all. Maybe I could go with you? Maybe that would be good?"

And do you know, she was right about that.

Mystery resolved

After I posted about the groundhog that dug a big burrow right under our dining room window, next to our foundation, I called the company that keeps the neighborhood mice at bay for us. To my surprise, they called me back on a Saturday night. To my gasping still-unresolved astonishment, they said it would cost me $1200 (twelve! hundred! American! dollars!) to trap and remove one (1) groundhog.

"Excuse me, did you say $1200?" I asked her, certain I must have misunderstood.

"Yep," she answered, "let me send you a proposal and you can sign it and send it back."

"Well," I said, in the exaggeratedly calm voice that means I am deeply annoyed, "I'll need to discuss that estimate with my husband." By this I obviously meant, "You'd better be planning to gold-plate that groundhog and send him back to me in a trophy case, lady, if you are seriously planning to charge me $1200."

Phone tag ensued. I called a local guy with the same last name as the farmer who sells us bulk beef. He couldn't take on a new client right now but he referred me to a guy named Dave. Dave called me back pretty promptly after my initial message, but his mother-in-law was entering hospice care in another part of the state and he couldn't tell me how soon he'd be able to get over to my house. Dave gave me Nate's number, and so I called Nate. Nate sounded sensible and reasonably priced, so I arranged to meet him at my house on Wednesday morning.

AND YOU GUYS it was the SAME NATE, only self-employed now. "You know," he said, when I walked out to greet him, "I remember you."

"Yeah," I said to myself, reflecting with a wince on that regrettable conversation full of Edna Mode and celibate mice and anti-rat perimeters erected by the POWER of my MIND, "yeah, I bet you do."

So I did my very best impersonation of a normal non-Edna-Mode-channeling person while Nate placed his trap and his camera and talked about what would happen next, but for a few days the only thing that happened next was a stray possum strolling by and ignoring the trap. I was beginning to think that my massive weeding effort coupled with Nate's construction zone (that trap was FIXED in place -- no getting around it) had spurred our groundhog to find himself a new home with more cover and fewer clankety elements.

Today, though, five days after Nate set his trap, he sent me a 7am text. "We caught something!" he said. "I can't see what it is on my camera, though." 

It was a groundhog, who seemed to have thought better of his wanderings. "There's no place like home," he said to himself, at least until Nate's trap clanged shut around him. The groundhog is gone, his oversized burrow is filled in, and it cost me <30% of that initial estimate.

I won't be getting a gold-plated groundhog in a trophy case, though.

The very strangest

Do you remember the mystery knit-along that looked like a manta ray with an attached clown collar? Do you remember the part where I said that MKALs need a Goldilocks level of mystery -- not too wacky, not too predictable?

Well. 

It turns out that after knitting a big striped square with a heavy 70s vibe, and attaching it to a ruffly-edged square with a traditional Scottish vibe, we were assigned to pick up stitches along one ruffly edge in order to knit a giant fan in wide solid-colored wedges. I think this wins the prize for "most conspicuously weird thing I've ever made."

This pattern is sparking some mutiny. I don't think I've ever seen this many participants saying "nope, too weird for me." Right there in the discussion thread with the designer's name on it, they are dropping out grumpily. I am hanging in there, but I keep asking my kids if it seems as weird to them as it does to me, and they keep assuring me that it does.

Here, I will show you a picture. (The green wedge on the right-hand side will be joined by four neighbors, one in each color.)

I should mention that the pattern told me to make a solid-colored square in the center of the second block, and I decided to take the opportunity to rebalance my yarn quantities instead. I am not persuaded that a solid center would make that block any less odd.

I am enjoying the process, because short-row garter wedges are particularly pleasing to make. I still like the colors, and the weirdness will be less conspicuous when the eventual piece is slung around my neck. No one ever asks me to stretch out my big shawl/stole/wrap thingies so they can admire the details; it seems probable that this...thing will fulfill its intended purpose in my wardrobe.

And in the interim, it is definitely making me laugh. I can't begin to guess what part 4 will involve. I'll be sure to keep you posted.