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Today, no talk of running, because if you want to hear about running, you should go to the exploding site Runagogo. Seriously, people, that site is a-freaking-mazing. Every time I go visit, which is ALL THE TIME, there are three or four more posts by members. There are ninety-nine posts in just a day! POSTS! And over a hundred comments! And the comments! So good! So encouraging!

I remain amazed by knitters. Always.

However. We’re talking about dogs again, because, you know, I rarely talk about knitting. So many of you are knitters, and yet you still come here? I’m not sure I know why, but I’m always ever grateful. Someday I’ll show you knitting.

I’ll even talk about it for a minute! Two socks at a time in the magic loop method! Dude! That magic loop is damn cool. However, as cool as two socks at the same time are, as fascinating and interesting as they may be, it’s not intuitive knitting and I like my socks to be totally brainless. Seriously, and this is truth, my regular toe-up on-two-circs socks I can knit completely in the dark excluding toes and heels. The rest, all by feel.

So suddenly having two balls of wool to deal with, or if you’re like me and started at work and didn’t have the means or motivation to ball a second amount of wool out of the Trekking XXL skein, and you are knitting with the outside strand for one sock and the inside for the other, then you’re effed when it comes to turning the needle around. Always messing with it, untangling, pulling.

I will gratefully finish two socks at the same time, bind them off, sew in the ends and relish in having, very suddenly, a pair. And I will never do it again.

The magic loop method, though, that’s rad.

OHMYGOSH! Look how you distracted me from telling you I never write about knitting! Nice job, you. Very tricky.

I was telling you dog stories! Boonie The Amazing Returner has endeared herself to the knit-world. And she’s done even more amazing things. I quote from Whosadele, who left this in my comments:

Rachael,
your story kept me going today. My dogs disappeared last night. At
11:00pm the gate was open and the dogs were gone without a trace. My
old, too old to be running around, Springer mix and our
one-year-old-on-Friday lab aussie mix. That girl has always been a
runner, the old boy will sit in the open gate and wait all day for
someone to come home and close it for him.

My husband went walking too
look for them, then went driving, then I went driving and calling their
names until 2:00am. Up before dawn this morning, I was thinking of your
wonderful Boonie story, I kept thinking: three days, three days, they
found her after three days. I stayed home from work. I remembered
someone called after seeing the posters, so I made posters, I waited
for a call, I looked out the window, I called shelters, I thought about
Boonie. I drove around more, I gave posters to every postman I saw,
stopped at the vet, went to the city shelter, the county shelter and I
cried. I ch
ecked every lump, branch, and garbage bag along the road, relieved that
none of the lumps was a dog.

I kept thinking of your story with a happy
ending, three days. I called the answering machine, there was a
message, “I have two dogs in my front yard with your phone number…”
Bobbie, as sweet a lady as could be, had seen them in her front yard
and decided they ought to be tied up and she called me. I can’t believe
the old dog made it that far, six miles, he pants after walking two
blocks. He couldn’t even get into the car, I had to lift him in, they
both fell asleep on the way home and then I had to lift the old boy out
of the car. I am relieved that they stayed together and that they
wandered into the yard of a sweet pet loving person. Thank you for the
inspiration, I needed it today.

Isn’t that the best? Yay!

And if you want more, I’ve been enjoying Erika’s How to Return Dogs Saga. Follow up story here. Seems she has a problem collecting dogs on accident, and has a 100% success rate in returning them to their rightful owners. We heart that.

 Introducing the new site for our fun new plan:

Runagogo.com

How AWESOME is that? The lovely and talented ScoutJ set it up for me with a snap of her fingers, and now YOU can go sign YOURSELVES up over there. I’m removing that silly little sidebar thing, and now we have a blog to share!

All of us! Blogging together! Seriously, I’m too excited. That means all y’all without blogs? Come over and register. Those of you who do have blogs, you already know how fun it is.

Run/walk/treadmill/swim/crawl your way to 100 miles more than you would have if you hadn’t signed up, and come over, register, and blog your hello. See you there.

YAY!

(Button courtesy of ScoutJ)

So this is what we’re doing.

100 Miles by April 1.

Put your knitting down and join us!

You can walk, jog, run, crawl, swim, treadmill, spin, or bike it. Any method we crafters can
use, any method to get us out of the house and out of our cars and out
in the world, using our bodies to get around.

You won’t be mailing me your time or mileage (unless you want to —
feel free, I’d love to know!), but register yourself at Runagogo.com and keep us posted on your mileage and your attitude! You’ll have friends with you every step of the way.

It’s totally do-able, I swear.
3 miles, 3 times a week. Or a little more than a mile a day. You can do
it! For some it will be a challenge. For others, a literal walk in the park. But we’re in it together.

At the end, we’ll post a list of everyone participating, and what
their end mileage was. And then we’ll all sit around in our jammies and
knit and eat chocolate and not run anywhere for a little while.

If you have a Nike+iPod, send me your username (my email is to the right) and I’ll add you to the runagogo challenge over there, if you want to keep track that way…..

If you don’t have one of those nifty gadgets to track yourself, I’m hearing good things from people using Cool Running (link is to the log function — keep track of your distance, time, even tells you when to change your shoes).

A great way to track distance before you leave the computer (or after you come home) is to use the Google Maps Pedometer.
I LOVE this thing. Put in the address or city under Jump To and then
switch to Hybrid view for a really easy way to find exact mileage.

Now, my little chickadees, get out there and move! (I suddenly feel an urge to dance around like Richard Simmons….)

If you’re playing, please steal a button! (But don’t forget to save the image onto your server before using it…..)  How cute is this one, huh? Thanks to Janice in GA!

 

Thanks for all the comments on the last post! I  LOVE THEM, and y’all. So much.

Happy New Year! This post is about running, although it has only to do with health, NOT resolutions. I only make one resolution every year: I will not stab ANYONE this year. I’ve done well every year with it, so I feel no need to change it up.

But the running. I’ve been running again. I had been, even before I got my new Nike+iPod toy, but now that I have it, I’m unstoppable, people.

So here it is: Wanna run with me? Wanna prove that knitters can get off the couch and into the streets? Show ‘em how sexy, strong, and fit we can be?

Wanna pledge to run 100 miles before April Fools Day? Three months, a hundred miles, that’s nothing, really. That’s a little less than 3 runs a week, 3 miles apiece. You can do that. Or if you can’t, you can get near it. Or do your best?

If you have the Nike+iPod, I’ve set up a running group on the Nike page – just go to the site where the device automatically takes you at login, and search for Runagogo  in the forums and join me.

Or just join me in spirit: send me your name and I’ll make a list of those of us doing it.  Keep me up to date with your progress. At the end, tell me how you did.

And if you finish, I have no great prize for you, but you can steal my idea if you like, the prize I’m giving myself – I’m going to allow myself to buy enough yarn for a sweater with no guilt, with no online price-comparisons, just shopping for yarn I love to make the perfect sweater. Because the next sweater is always the perfect sweater, right? Until then, I’m stashbusting, but if I make a hundred miles, I’m shopping.

Now! Champagne for everyone! Happiest!

Two days after Christmas, my sister Bethany left my parents’ house in order to drive home to the Bay Area. The folks live about 4 hours south, on the Central Coast. She drove a bit north, and pulled over in San Luis Obispo for a tire rotation and a lunch.

We’d been having wicked winds, and while she was waiting for a sandwich to be made, the wind blew over a heavy metal table.
Bethany’s dog, Boonie, was spooked, slipped her collar, and ran.

Now, what you have to know is that Boonie BELONGS to and with Bethany. Boonie’s a Thai fighting dog, a rescue straight from Thailand. She’s named after the jungle dogs that lived on Saipan when we lived overseas — the fast packs of dogs that act as intelligent units.

Boonie’s almost feral, not threatening, but certainly not tame. She’s the kind of dogs who can, and has, lived on street scraps. She runs faster than any dog I’ve ever laid eyes on, and she won’t be touched by anyone except Bethany and Bethany’s roommate. I’m allowed to give her treats (to Boonie, not to Bethany’s roommate), and every once in a while I graze her head with my hand, but that’s only allowed because I see her all the time (Clara is a favorite chase-buddy of hers).

But Bethany – Bethany is HER person. When nervous or feeling threatened, which is often, she climbs Bethany like a tree.

When Boonie slipped her collar, she left her tags behind, obviously. She’s microchipped, but apparently the Thai chips don’t talk to our machines here. This is a dog that would take months and months for animal control to snare, if they were ever able to. This dog would run, completely unapproachable.

Bethany was beside herself. She had to leave – had been heading out of town when it happened – to get back to work on the railroad. She managed to wrestle some time from her job to stay and search, and my other sister Christy and my parents threw themselves into the search, driving the neighborhoods and calling.

They papered the neighborhood with fliers, sparing no pole.

But Bethany finally had to drive herself back up north for a job run, inconsolable. When I called her, her voice broke my heart.

Then someone called her cell and reported seeing a dog matching Boonie’s description running fast in the area. Bethany borrowed my folks’ car to head home for work, and left her truck in the area (even though it wasn’t in exactly the same area as where she’d originally been lost) gate open, bed and food in the back. She didn’t hold much hope.

But Dad, yesterday morning, went to the truck and staked it out.

He saw Boonie jump into the bed of the truck!

He approached the truck, and of course, Boonie took off hell for leather in any direction that didn’t have a person in or near it. Dad called Bethany at 11am, and she was in the area by 3pm.

She went up to the truck, looked inside. No Boonie.

She called Boonie’s name.

A small head popped up from the cab.

Boonie had scrambled through the window into the cab of the truck and had been resting on the passenger seat, just waiting for Bethany to come find her.

Isn’t that the best story? Almost three days later, reunited. And Boonie had found the truck, on her own, not even at the sandwich shop where she’d been lost. And she just waited there, for Beth to come. Which she did.

I’m so damn happy for them.

Santa listened to me this year and sent (via Lala, who calls him the Christmas Hippie) me the Nike+iPod kit. This thing is awesome. There’s a little do-jobber that you fit into the end of your iPod Nano, and a remote sensor chip that you’re supposed to fit into the base of specially designed Nike shoes. Welp, I love my New Balance 855s, and I don’t need to buy the special, expensive shoe. There are a bunch of do-it-yourself hacks out there (I found a good list here), but I didn’t see any instructions on how to knit yourself a sensor cozy, so here you go.

It’s dead easy, and took about 20 minutes. You should be a bit versed in sock construction, since I don’t go into details.

Grab some leftover sock yarn (you’ll only need a bit) and 2 circular sock-sized needles, whatever you like. I used size 1US, but I knit looser than anyone else, so you might need a 3US, or whatever gives you a nice dense fabric. I chose a bit of KnitPicks merino.

Following the instructions for a toe-up sock found here (I used, as I usually do, the figure-eight method) to cast on twelve stitches, six on each needle. Do one row on each side, and then increase to eight on each needle by knitting into the front and back of the first and last stitch on each needle. You now have sixteen stitches total. Work six or seven more rows.

Now try it on for size. Slip the sensor in. You want it pretty snug, but don’t worry about getting it super tight. If you like it, now is a good time to turn it inside out briefly and weave in that tail end.

Keep knitting around until you can just about close the top of the pouch over the top of the cozy with a small tug.

Break your yarn, leaving a long tail. Put the sensor inside, and then graft (kitchener) the whole thing shut. (Kitchener video HERE.)

Mine is a little wonky, but come on, it’s going on your foot! It’s okay if it’s wonky. Isn’t it weird to sew your new toy into a closed cozy? I think so.

Use your needle to continue weaving in that long end, drawing it eventually down to the middle of the back (the side of the sensor that’s rounded).

Pick a place near the toe of your shoe that looks likely, and using the same long tail, sew it on. Don’t worry about being neat — make sure it’s on there tight. You can always cut it off later and make another one if you change running shoes.

Keep sewing it. It won’t fall off (and if it does, a voice tells you the sensor and the receiver are no longer in communication after two minutes), but you want to make sure it won’t, right?

Look! Cute! Knitting!

Yay! Thanks, Santa!

(How much do I LOVE that when you link your Nano back up to your computer that it automatically dumps your info to the Nike site that tracks your progress? Tells me my speed and calories burned and average pace…. Awesome. Some would argue that it’s too much information that can be gathered, but come on, if you want to track me with a running shoe, you’d be better off just buying a video camera and going full stalker-mode, since the shoes aren’t on that much, anyhow.)

Cost: $29, minus the cost of the iPod Nano and the special shoe.