in which i am sheepish....no pun intended

Ok....it's been waaay too long since I've posted. I throw myself upon your mercy (if there are any of you left checking this blog) and apologize whole-heartedly....although I have a sneaking suspicion that your lives have gone on perfectly fine without my blathering entries....still-- so sorry my friends. I have been reading your blogs and posting comments when I could, just not keeping up with things around By Hook or By Crook! I vow to be better in the future, and will try to post at least once a week, pinky swear. No real excuses on my part, except to say that life has been weird....chaotic, strange...much like this picture:



All this crap was on my little table beside the couch....I snapped this picture when I was feeling fed up one day and realized I felt it was how my brain probably looked at that moment.

Of course there's yarn in it, what did you expect?


I won't go on ad-nauseum about what I've been up to since March, but here's a couple things I did.....

I got up close and personal with our resident chipmunk, whom I called Theo.....well, as close as me taking this picture through our back screen door...

Here he is telling me to put down the damn camera and bring him some peanuts already, jeez, I'm slow!

Then one day while keeping a watch out for our ducks, I spotted this little guy out front eating plants and had a little conversation with him:


A little bit hard to see on account of his natural camoflage I suppose, but it's a little bunny!! I dubbed him Buster, as in "Hey Buster!! Stop eatin' my green thingies!!" Don't you just love my technical gardening jargon? I am still flabbergasted as to why all these wild critters keep showing up around our place, it's not like we're out in the middle of nowhere...unless "nowhere" is in the middle of a busy street in a smallish city....

One thing I didn't do was sign up with Twitter....maybe I'm getting old (maybe??) but I just don't see the point....or maybe my life isn't that exciting that I need to be updating my status every 20 minutes....

I have been doing a lot of knitting and crocheting (duh!) and will post more pictures in the following entries...don't want to bore you all at once now...what fun would that be!

Cee's brother practically begged me on his hands and knees asked me if I could make him some socks like I had made for cee so I happily obliged him. No pictures as I used the Mock Wave Cable pattern from Favorite Socks that I've shown here previously, and aside from being a relatively fun pattern to knit, in dark grey they are hopelessly boring. I do love the pattern though, and from the last pair I'd made Cee I had almost 2/3 of a skein left, so decided to just use the same colour.....can you tell where this is going??

Cee came with me to buy the yarn, and just happened to be wearing his socks, so when I held the skein up to his socks and saw that the skein was much darker, I figured "Oh, it's faded in the wash...it should be okay"....famous last words. I bought two skeins of Patons Gentry Grey kroy socks and got to knitting. I finished the first sock and was about half way through the second when I needed the partial skein of yarn....so off I went to dig it out.....that's when I realized.....

Can you tell the BIG difference in colour? Cee's socks hadn't faded at all....same colour, same yarn, different label...WAY different shade....sigh. So back to the store I went. Then I finished the sock and realized that even though Cee's brother's feet are much smaller than his, I had way less yarn leftover.....wtf? Then I had a bit closer look at both labels....

Those sneaky Patons so-and-so's have decreased the yardage from 192 to 166! or 175 to 152 metres....man, that sucks! I notice they also haven't listed the weight on the new label.....sneaky sneaky petes!

Anyway, I got over the trauma of the kroy socks and coasted into summer feeling pretty good...and then it happened. And no, I'm not talking about the death of a certain pop king, although that was tragic and weird. I got hit with Sciatica....or at least that's what they think it is/was.

In early July I was completely minding my own business (like I always do, snort!) and getting out of the shower, dried off and hanging up the towel (oh no, did I put an image in your brain? Sorry!) and doing nothing in particularly special at all and all of a sudden I felt like someone had plunged a knife into my lower back/side (top of my rear basically--oh no, another image!) Very soon it became apparent that something was seriously wrong...mostly because every time I put my left foot down on the floor I screamed in pain.... The pain travelled down my leg and very quickly I couldn't walk or even stand up straight. This was the scene for about 4 or 5 days....couldn't stand, couldn't sit, lean, lay, get comfortable, sit, do much of anything except cry in frustration and take anti-inflamatories that never really took the pain away and depend upon my knight in shining armour Cee to take care of me, which he did, very brilliantly. Every day it seemed to get just a little bit better, and I kept trying to do a bit more and push through the pain when I could, and now six weeks later I am very much improved, although I have to take it slow at times on the stairs and not sit or lay in one spot too long....there is a little numbness around my knee region too, which is also frustrating...I am told it can take up to 3 months to completely recover....Cee's aunt has had it off and on for a year and a half...../me shudders!!

The worst part of this is I have no amusing or entertaining anecdote as to how it all happened, I mean, taking a shower? Man, I should have been base jumping or something! Like that would ever happen...but seriously, that's as bad as walking and breaking your hip....I hate getting old! This didn't just come out of the blue, I have had issues with sciatic pain going back to my mid twenties, but nothing as bad as what I went through this summer.

Let's hope the Fall season will bring a bit more normalcy for all of us.

Until next time, don't make fun of that old lady on tv that says she's fallen and can't get up, it might come back to bite you in the ass one day!

lions, lambs, and cats

How great are all you people!! You showed such concern for me, buried as we are under giant piles of snow...I kid, really....sort of. The snow has melted a little, thank goodness. We can actually almost see over the piles to safely back out of our driveway now, which is always a plus. We passed the first official day of Spring with more snow in the air, but at this point I think everyone around here is on shovel strike, so unless a foot of it is landing, we shant be worrying about clearing the sidewalks any more this season. Really though, thanks to all of you for being so concerned, I was quite touched.

I have nothing on the F.O. front this week. I haven't worked on anything for almost a week, being so pouty about the snow and all, and it has a lot nothing at all to do with my spending more and more time on Ravelry, or anything to do with the fact that I have fallen in love with another man....It's shameful, self-destructive, and forbidden, but I just can't help myself, I'm a sucker for a cool loner, a rebellious type of guy:


Meet Jack, my MIL's cat...and my forbidden boyfriend. I've never been the type of gal who was a 'cat person', in fact I quite hated cats at one point in my life. When I was 14 years old, I was babysitting down the road and they had this evil ginger tom that used to jump up in my lap out of nowhere and take a swipe at my face at least twice a night. One night I was leaning over to pick up the baby to change her and the malevolent thing actually jumped me from behind and dug it's claws into my back, causing me to straighten up and scream (silently--it was like 1 am) and walk/run down the hall, ping-ponging off the walls with the thing still attached to my back, trying to bite either side of my neck. I managed to get the loathesome thing off me (got a lot more scratches and bites, too) and shoo it down into the basement and shut it in, then I called my mom and cried and told her she had to come rescue me....I still have nightmares about that one...plus I'm really quite allergic to cats...lucky for me, those people didn't go out much, and once I told them I was allergic, they made sure "Satan the-orange-haired-hell cat" was confined to the basement whenever I came over. Now I have known some really nice cats too, my best friend's cat Chevy was the nicest, most gentle cat ever--he snored louder than my dad!--and he would always lay down beside me and look up at me and put his paw on my leg as if to say "you can pet me now, so why aren't you, aren't I irresistably cute?? wouldn't you love to pet me, huh, huh???" And because of him I stopped hating all cats, but still remained, you know, cautious...even though I was grown up I was still scared witless allergic. You might think being allergic was an arguement, but I'm also quite allergic to dogs, and we have two of those....I digress...

Jack came to Cee's mum in an unusual way...which is to say about two years ago in the springtime, his mother decided to give birth to him and his other 2 siblings under Cee's mum's back deck, which is covered and a nice little shelter from rain (and snow!) Imagine MIL's chagrin when she realized she had a bunch of cats living under her deck! She is not particularly a cat person either, but is an animal lover and decided that she must feed and water these new "family" members....things went on, as things tend to do, and pretty soon all of the cats were gone on to greener pastures...except for one lonely kitten, who must have really enjoyed the Friskies, or whatever it was she was leaving out for him/her. But by then you see it was starting to get colder outside, and MIL decided if Kitten (he wasn't called Jack yet back then) was going to be her cat, he/she must be an indoor cat, so she patiently took her time and got close to him, he let her pet him, and would come when she called, but he would never let her pick him up (you can't be too careful, you know).

Anyway, in good time she finally got him inside, and took him to the vets, where it was determined that he was, in fact, a he, and he was given the name of Jack. Jack was very skittish at first, and he was quite unhappy about not being allowed outside, because you know, that was all he knew. Finally, Cee's mum and Jack made a bargain; she told him he could go outside as long as he came in every night, and he agreed. And even though some people (okay, me) don't think it's a good idea for him to go out---what if he doesn't come back one day? you'll be sorry then, won't you?---Jack is much happier being let out, and he always comes back in at night.

In good time and after many visits, Jack let Cee touch him and pet him, and in many more visits and even more time, I got up enough nerve and pet Jack myself, and he let me!! He even rubbed up against me and purred! And this really weird thing happened...I fell in love...with a cat!...a cat that wasn't evil and didn't spring up out of nowhere trying to scratch at my face and eyes...a cat that didn't jump on my back and try to use my skin to sharpen it's satanic claws.....well, you get the picture. Even Cee loves the cat, and he's not a 'cat person' either....and now every time I come over I threathen to put Jack in my purse and take him home...but of course I never could, the killer shih-tzu and queen collie would be most put out, I just have to settle for the odd head scratch or tummy rub. I think Jack and I are kindred spirits, because he's still pretty skittish about people, and I will always be skittish about cats. He did, however, let me pick him up the other day, much to both our amazement...

"Uh...I don't recall giving you permission to post any pictures of me...."