Archives for November 2004

Harriet likes to ride with her nose right up to the cold-air vent in my car.

I feel like I did when I was twenty-five and in snow for the first time: I noticed that snowflakes really DID come in snowflake patterns. I had always thought that was just poetic Hallmark-license. I like learning things about dogs at thirty-two, things that probably everyone else knows, like the air vent thing. And how when you pick up their poop with the plastic bag, you have to feel that it’s actually warm. That was so surprising, and gross. Deal-able, sure. But who knew? (You did, probably.)

The animals did pretty well last night. Adah opened the accordian doors to my bedroom and then reconsidered hastily when she realized what was on the bed with me.

And here she is next to me, a few minutes ago. Doesn’t she look disgruntled?

That’s because to my left are these:

Can you tell by Miss Idaho’s proximity to my computer how teeny she is? Here, this might help:

And another tense moment:

I think if Lala knew about this photo, she’d come right back from Buddha Camp. Digit is a son-of-a-bitch, and for a second I thought he was going to go all whirling dervish on the dogs. But no, he just leaped off the couch in disgust.

And knitting! Dogs and cats and knitting, all in one day! Alert the media! (Aside, related to none of this: I’m highly irritated that I’m still fighting off whatever it was that I had last week. I had a fever all last night when I went in to work some overtime, and now I just feel stuffy and cruddy. I need to get BETTER! I leave for Hawaii a week from Thursday to run the marathon. There. I’ll go make more tea. Back to knitting, which is where I was going.)

I love this gansey so much.

Like, SO much. I thought about making it a Christmas present er sumpthin’, but I just can’t. I can’t give it up. Plus, I’d better mail the Boys their Cromarty, so this will take its winter place. It’s going to be fitted, friends. I have to warn you. I was really worried about running out of yarn, so I made it a mite small. A sexy gansey? Oxymoron, or an idea whose time has come?

Pattern is from Silver Creek Classics, number S-806, available here. I only bought it because I had seen and touched one made from this lovely, lovely wool at MDS&W. The pattern picture? Tres early nerdy eighties. But I love it. Have I mentioned I lurve this pattern?

Babbling too much. I’m cold and may go back to bed for a nap before work. But I might knit a leetle bit more first.

What’s truly weird is how I felt yesterday, when I picked up Lala’s dogs for a sleepover. I felt giddy-happy. Almost ecstatic to see their little jumping happy heads.

See, I don’t know from dogs. I’ve never, ever been a dog person. Whatever. I thought they were sometimes cute but dumb, and drooled a lot. I just figured it out: They get you by making you feel like the most important person they’ve ever seen. I’ve always seen Lala’s dogs when, duh, Lala was around. They freak out when they see me, but they really freak out when they see her, so before yesterday I’d never had the opportunity to open the door and watch them lose their little minds in sheer joy that I was there, that I was just who they wanted me to be, that I was the most wonderful, beautiful, head-petting person they’d ever, ever seen or hoped to see.

It makes you puff right up with pride and then you have to HUG them. It’s easy to hug Harriet, harder to hug Miss Idaho, since she is, after all, only five pounds, but I managed  with no serious injury on anyone’s part.

And then driving them to my house, they were so HAPPY that they were in the car with me. Then home, they were so HAPPY to be outside. Then going in the door, they were so HAPPY that they got to come inside.

(Dude, I might be a dog. Must think more about that.)

And inside, the cats just growled. There was no happiness in cat-land last night. Both of them did eventually get off the top of the refrigerator, and they slept on the living room couches, but it was with the highest level of disgust. The dogs don’t even pay attention to them. Perhaps that’s the problem, actually. They’re feeling slighted by not being chased?

It was totally selfish, me getting the dogs. I sleep SO much better at night with them in the bed. See, during my day-sleeps, my cats are the best. They cuddle and purr all day with me, and I sleep like a log. My night-sleeps are horrible, since Adah wakes at 2am and spends, literally, the next FOUR HOURS jumping from my head to my feet to my head to the bookcase to my head to my hands. She’s a jumper and a pouncer, and I have no doors in this house to lock her out of the bedroom (just accordion-style doors that she learned to open within the first thirty seconds of being in the house). But with the dogs on the bed, Adah does not jump on my head. And the dogs sleep late. It’s a lovely thing. I’m using them again tonight, too.

Pictures tomorrow, maybe? And I’m working on a gansey that I’m loving, a pattern and wool I picked up at Maryland Sheep & Wool, and I can’t remember when I’ve had such fun knitting a pattern. Cromarty was amazing to knit, but it was so HARD, and required constant graph reading. This pattern is memorize-able but still fun on every damn row. Love, love, love it. Worried I’ll run out of yarn. I’d hate to be making a vest.

(As I post this, both dogs are on the couch next to me, and Digit just crept across the living room floor and skulked up to sit on the other side of me. It’s obviously not that he likes me, because right now I’m prolly pretty low-down on his list of favorite things. He’s just asserting his right to me. This is better than TV.)

Holy cow. You MUST see the Rachael, the Em, and the Iris, done as only Zay can. Go HERE.

Dear Lala,

As I understand it, you’re meditating right now, right? You’ve up and left for Buddha Camp up north and left me to deal with the crazy people at work. And the citizens who call me while I’m there, too. (I’m pretty sure the people you’re with right now call it something else, not Buddha Camp, maybe something like the Buddhist Autumn Retreat, but I like your way better. It makes me think you’ll chant songs around a campfire and roast soydogs on long sticks, while carefully and humanely shoo-ing mosquitoes away.)

And we can’t talk for eleven days? Dude. I get so used to today’s methods of communication — we must email each other more than twenty times a day. I have JUST learned your phone number, since I never use it, and when I do, I just pull it up on my cell phone. But up there in the thoughtful woods (are there woods there? There should be woods), you’ve got no access to a computer, and your cell will be turned off, and for the first time in five months, I won’t be able to talk to you.

And you won’t know what I’m blogging, either. Hah! I’m going to steal your dogs from your brother (okay, borrow ’em) and dress them up and take pictures of them! Yeah!

Miss Idaho would like you to know that even in California little five-pound dogs need sweaters in the winter.

Okay, I know that one’s store-bought, but I also know that you learned to knit just so you could make her sweaters for the snow. Softie. (But I’m glad you learned to knit. SO glad. I love it that you can intelligently discuss stitch patterns with me. That’s rad.)

I had a fine Thanksgiving, by the way. I woke up and had bacon and eggs. (Makin’ Bacon? Now there’s a cool item. I swear. That bacon is perfect.) Then I came to work and had some ham that a coworker had brought and some mashed potatoes from downstairs, provided by the officers’ association. Then I ate a lot of cake. It would be better if you didn’t ask how much I actually ate. I brought an apple pie, boxed from the supermarket, which is still sitting in the back room. Oh, well.

So in terms of Thanksgivings, this one wasn’t particularly outstanding. But seeing as I don’t like pumpkin pie, dressing, gravy, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, or green bean casserole, Thanksgiving is usually something of a white-plate yawn anyway (white turkey meat, plain mashed potatoes, and bread with butter make up my plate every year). I missed my family something fierce, though. And you.

Oh, if your dogs could talk. Rather glad they can’t. Have a good, wise, and compassionate week, okay? And have a soydog for me.

So. Cari’s outed our little girl gang. I think most of y’all might have picked up on the tightness between us, anyway, but she did a good job of describing what we’re doing. Basically: Em, Alison, Cari, and I are doing round-robin sweaters. By the end we’ll each own a sweater that every other gal worked on. I’m working on Cari’s sleeve right now, and I’ll want to show you it, and we knew we’d have to ‘fess up eventually. Plus, we’ll HAVE to show you the finished product. (My goal is to someday show a picture of all four of us, together, in our GAWK sweaters. It’ll happen.)

And she made well the most important point: It’s not that we love you any less, because that’s not it at all. We just love each other a whole hellofalot.

More knitting content: I finished the Rowan thing-a-ma-bob recently. Boy, you’d think I’d pay better attention. I haven’t shown you it before this because I’ve been too busy to put in a zipper. But I wore it the other day and realized it looks okay without one, too, so here ya go.

Specs:

Pattern: Rowan, Denim People, pattern: Bomber
Yarn: Paton’s Classic Merino, to gauge

Size: Bust 38

All right. It’s Turkey Day tomorrow, and I hope you have wonderful plans with your families, and I hope no one throws the gravy boat at anyone’s head. I’m not able to go home this year because I’m working, so think of your local dispatcher, okay? For god’s sake, if you have a 24-hour Starbucks open on the holiday, call and offer them a coffee run at night. Tell them you know a dispatcher in California, and then tell ME about it.

And lastly, Oakland rocks.

Boy, I’m so lucky. I’m always learning. You know how they say that’s a good thing? Keeps your mind snappin’ and blows away those old mental cobwebs, that’s what they say.

I learned this yesterday: BART doors are not like elevator doors. Betcha didn’t know THAT, didja? And if you did, don’t tell me.

Lala’s superpower is to make the train leave just as she reaches the platform. Me, on the other hand, I’ve usually arrived just as the train is pulling in. (But I have no parking karma, so it evens out.) Yesterday, however, I heard the train pulling in as I was going up the escalator. I ran up, up, up, and got to the doors just as they were closing. They have rubbers bumpers on them, just like elevator doors. So I did what I do with elevators: I stuck my hand in between the doors.

Let me say it again: BART doors are not like elevator doors. I was standing there, with my hand caught tightly (and rather painfully) in the door, people inside the car gaping with horror at my little fingers grasping at air. I think we all had a mental image of the train starting to roll. Two people leapt up and tried to pry the doors open. I learned later that the conductor can tell if a door is open and will look out her window and pop the doors, which she did. I fell into the car, trying not to clutch my poor mangled hand (it wasn’t, but it felt like it was), and had to face approximately nine thousand concerned, shocked faces. "Oh, it didn’t hurt! Isn’t that weird? It didn’t shut hard. [Yes, it did.] It was just surprising. No, I’m fine! Yes, I’m glad I didn’t die. Yes, I’m sorry your child is crying. Yes, it IS a tragedy narrowly averted, thanks for reminding me. ‘Preciate that."

I meandered as casually as possible to the back of the car, having these conversations with, like, EVERYONE, and then at the next stop, I (carefully) changed cars. I needed the pitying stares to stop. (My hand is fine, by the way. My pride will take about a week to catch up with the hand.)

I think I blushed all the way to Powell Street. There I met Brian-Mark, where we caught up with each other to the tune of a $110 lunch (!) and a bottle of wine each. Each, mind. O joy merlot divine. In Venice,  I met him on a boat, and in the one minute of conversation we had, I got his room number at the Hotel Rialto. I left him a note later, and the next day I picked him up in the lobby. We wandered the city together for the next two days. Yesterday, I picked him again in a hotel lobby, and we wandered another city, marveling at our luck, and admiring each other, and the way we managed to meet each other in the most romantic city in the world, the lesbian and the queer boy, walking the narrow streets above the canals, arm in arm. Yesterday was a lovely, lovely afternoon. And I was hungover by 6pm.