On Being in A Loop

Today's blog entry is provided by the ever-generous Lisa Louie, out there in Paradise, otherwise known as Maui, where I would really, really like to be starring in a Corona beer ad right about now. You know the ones, where all you see is somebody's arm hanging out of a hammock slung beneath a palm tree, and nothing else but surf noises and beer?

Like that.

Update on clinic: The Board of Veterinary Medicine has accepted my proposal for consideration. This does not mean I have approval yet. What it does mean is that they did not fall on the floor in helpless laughter and fling it back in my face. Which means that they will have lots of questions that I will have to answer with a modicum of intelligence and clinical terminology and Dilbert words. I do expect to have some sort of feedback on my proposal by the end of the week.

Until I can get a grip and write something about knitting, here is a cat picture (a cat on a sweater, double points) and a guest blog from Lisa.

Say, "Thank you, Lisa."

Lisa writes:

Our fearless leader, the Yarn Harlot herself has reported substantial computer problems in a recent entry. This, is apparently, a new skein, if you will, in the recent sweater of computer difficulties. I empathize. Even worse, I can completely relate.

I myself have a brand new computer as of a few months ago. This would be cause for great joy had the previous computer gone toes up on me, not once, but twice prior to this purchase. Both times, apparently viable components have ceased functioning earlier than expected for no obvious reason. In other words, the sucker broke twice just because it could.

Both times it “ate” most of my documents and my entire schedule and address book. I was left scrambling to try and recreate all that information. Before you ask, yes I had backed up the documentation. Due to electronic evil beings, all files were corrupted due to some sort of glitch in the programs and my backups couldn’t be saved either. Needless to say, I used copious amounts of language Grandma Gremel would NOT have approved of.

The pc fiasco came after several weeks of trying to install a single, functioning wireless router that actually cooperated with our then-internet source. The only good thing I can say about calling an 1 800 customer service number that connects you to somewhere you can’t find on a map, is that none of the people they have answering the phones really and truly understand enough English to make sense of some of the things that are said to them when my husband gets truly unhappy with their company’s performance.

Just before the PC was diagnosed as terminal, the electronic menehunes were playing with other items in my life. Among other failures, the digital readout on my car’s dashboard quit reading out and went totally blank. At first I thought it was some kind of a weird eye test: can you read your numbers? But no, the sucker malfunctioned.

I won’t bore you with the recital of cell phone miseries. Those were next. I’m sure you can write your own book on that story. Suffice it to say, we’re counting down until the phone contract expires and we can get a new contract with a new carrier, and a new free phone.

In addition, the stereo and CD player completely freak out every time we turn them off. The stereo flips in and out of tuning, fades in and out and the CD player stops, restarts and stops again after only a few seconds. Either it has developed a severe case of attention deficit disorder, combined with a loss of short term memory, or it too has succumbed to the curse of things with wires.

Next, my laptop kept locking up for no apparent reason. My husband told me it was “in a loop.” That’s when this all finally made sense. Or at least as much sense as it can make. In a LOOP. What do we do with our lives? We put yarn in loops and create something wonderful. Ah ha. Our nature, our essence, our karma, our life force, whatever name it is within us, has caused us to dedicate our existence and seek joy and fulfillment by putting yarn into loops using two needles. This force within us is intuitive and so ingrained and such a part of our basic nature that other items in our lives respond to it also. It takes complicated and unsuspecting gizmos like laptops, PCs, routers, cell phones, stereos and turns their internal structures into loops, causing them to malfunction, break down, lock up and generally drive us crazy.

It makes me feel better to know I’m not alone. The Yarn Harlot herself is apparently also a victim of this looping problem, being an extremely dedicated yarn looper herself. On the other hand, my husband rarely has problems with electronics and is perplexed by my on-going issues. His lack of problems is explainable because, with the exception of an occasional garden hose, he rarely puts anything in a loop.

While I know there is no scientific rationale or data to prove my theory, it makes as much sense as any of the competent, logical, rational explanations any of the people trying to solve my electronics issues have come up with.

“Beats the *&^%$# out of me” was the best they had to offer.

Now I’m going to go sit in the living room and attempt to loop more yarn around needles. I’m backing up this piece, emailing it to Dez, and I’m touching nothing else electronic between here and there.

Wish me luck. If you are reading this, I was successful in this endea…………………

--Lisa Louie, Maui

The Few.
The Proud.
The Readers.

I want to thank all of you nice, wonderful and exceedingly patient knitters for your patience these past few weeks while my poor blog lay neglected and forlorn. I simply haven't had the creative energy to blog.

Not only did I have to move my office all of a sudden in February, but couple of deadlines have caught up with me. One is a grant proposal for a low-cost spay-neuter clinic, and one is a proposal to put before the Board of Veterinary Medicine for the operating plan for the aformentioned clinic.

The BVM proposal is due tomorrow.

Morning.

Early.

But it's not like I'm nervous or anything. That slight quaking you detect in the text here?

The text is supposed to look out of focus and squiggly.

New typeface. It's called, "Trepidation Italic." Like it?

It's not from nerves or insomnia or mainlining Maui coffee (thanks again, Lisa).

Honest.

Really.

Okay, okay ... my Mom didn't believe me either.

The truth?

I am as nervous as a cat in a roomful of two-year-olds.

Here is my whole labor of love, on paper, about to be picked to shreds.

Ulp.

I hope to be back to knitting content by the weekend ... unless you really want to know how many different types of suture we plan to buy and what the instrument sterilization procedure will be.

Best,

--Mambocat

"P"

Since I probably will lack photos for at least another day or two, I present you with the letter "P."

Diann has tagged me in an ongoing game of Alphabet Blog-Tag.

The game goes like this: somebody tags you and gives you a letter of the alphabet.

Now you're It.

You list ten things you like that start with that letter.

When people respond to your post, you randomly assign a letter to them, and, if they have a blog, then they list ten things. And so on.

Diann gave me "P."

Pets, of course, is a little too obvious for me. That's what I live and breathe and it's also my job. I could stay with Pets, and come up with Paws, Purring, Puppies, Palominos, Pythons, Ponies, Pugs, Persians, Parrots, Pyrenees, Pharoah Hounds, Pomeranians, etc. and tons and tons of other living things I dearly love that start with "P," without ever leaving one topic or even getting into veterinary terminology or non-companion animals like Pumas and Pangoliins.

So I'll venture outside the realm of things a reader might immediately suspect about me, which means I will also leave out things like Purling (which I do love), and Peace Fleece, and Prism yarn, and Koigu KPPPM, which technically does not start with a P but contains a lot of them.


The Letter P:


Pastures. Preferably dotted with sheep.

Pink; not the color but:
a.) Floyd
b.) Flamingos
c.) Panther
d.) all of the above.

Poe, Edgar Allen.

Pisceans (it is amazing how many Pisceans are in my life -- including my husband and mother. Also lots of Capricorns in my close circle, too).

Porches. Big honking old-fashioned front porches, not open decks baking in the summer sun, and not those nondescript little modern concrete ground-level landings which don't hold much more than a mailbox and a potted plant. I like deep, shady porches with steps, and a good solid railing, and a ceiling fan, and a screen door, and porch furniture, and a swing, and maybe even a hammock. The kind of front porch where you can sit and drink coffee and read the newspaper on a rainy Sunday morning in your pajamas without the neighbors pointing fingers at you and snickering.

Professor Longhair (how can you be from New Orleans and not love Professor Longhair?)

Portland, Oregon, where I would dearly love to live one day, which is full of ...

Pine trees and...

Precipitation. Okay, I'm a freak. I love rain and snow and most other things that come out of the sky in reasonable quantities, unless it is precipitation in some extreme form, or a tornado, or an object being hurled at me by a hurricane. I am a high-energy, high-anxiety horse, and few things besides knitting soothe me they way rain does. Rain on a tin roof ... damn, if I had a continuous loop tape of that, I probably would not need sleep aids. Not just rain-sounds like on those little noise machines that make surf sounds and waterfall noises. Rain on a tin roof, specifically.

Pekoe. Love me some strong, black tea.

Hopefully, I will have photos tomorrow.

--Mambocat

OTN and OCD

So. I am sitting here contemplating knitting a pair of cotton pants, trying to calculate the gauge I need, the effect of gravity on cotton that I need to account for, the effect of humidity on cotton that I also need to account for, the eccentric orbit of Pluto (as well as its new non-planetary status), the migratory patterns of purple martins, the inexplicable and profound disagreement between the scale at the YMCA and the scale at our house, global warming, and other factors that might come into play regarding the fit, drape and potential attractiveness of said pants when they are actually applied to my personage.

Yup. I am knitting a pair of pants. Cotton pants.

I can't be the only knitter out there to fall off the deep end of knitterly OCD contemplation and consider what it might be like to replace nearly every item in my wardrobe, with things I have knitted myself.

What might it be like to actually have this pursuit of nearly complete wardrobe self-sufficiency as a sort of side-mission in my life?

Okay, the Levis and Hawaiian shirts stay, as well as the T-shirts and Haynes undies and the cotton turtlenecks for under-sweater wear in winter. And the medical scrubs I need for work. But most everything else?

I am reminded of an old '70s BBC sitcom ... the name escapes me ... it involved a young couple working on "self-sufficiency." In a town, somewhere in England. In various episodes they grew a garden, canned vegetables, wove clothing ... all with hilariously disastrous results. Does anyone remember it? I am utterly drawing a blank, and I admit a bit of shame here, because I am a hopeless BBC junkie. I should recall the name of this show. After all, I can quote many Monty Python episodes verbatim.

Regardless, I like to think what it would be like to slowly replace most of my wardrobe with things I have made myself. Specifically knitted things. I don't enjoy sewing very much, unless it's something quite plain and flat, like curtains. I'll leave the mastery of seamtressing to LornaJay.

I've been thinking about this self-sufficiency thing a fair bit lately and I've considered that, although in real life I work for government and non-profit animal welfare agencies and as a result do not earn the sort of income that affords me a whole lot of power and influence in the world ... I do have a set of skills that would make me a highly valuable commodity in a post-apocalyptic situation. Of course, I hope this never happens. Just sayin.'

But have you other knitters ever sat down and considered the skills you could use if, for some horrid reason, this whole techno-bubble that we all inhabit came crashing down around our ears one day?

Have you ever made a list of what low-tech skills you could offer for trade in desperate times?

I actually made an inventory of mine the other day, and was actually quite surprised at the extent of the list.

• I can raise and care properly for a wide variety of animals, both for domestic companions, transportation and farm use. In my post-apocalyptic world we'd have lots of milk and eggs and cheese and wool.
• I can grow a garden. It is not my favorite pasttime, because the beastly summer and billions of bugs and weeds are major components of gardening where we live, but I can do it. If you could do a garden with only the spring-planting and fall-harvesting parts, and none of the de-weeding and de-bugging in July, I would even enjoy it.
• I have only sheared one sheep, but I have the general idea, and could get better at it with practice.
• I can wash, process and card a fleece.
• I can dye wool.
• I can spin wool/alpaca etc. into yarn, both on a drop spindle and on a wheel. I am considerably more adept at spinning wool and other animal fibers than I am at spinning cotton.
• I can knit any kind of garment. Know a chilly octopus? I can help.
• I can weave presentably, if not with great skill. That could improve.
• I can fish quite well.
• I can cook, I know how to can vegetables, and I know how to salt and pickle things.
• I know how to find edible mushrooms and other wild food. Not that there would be much of that in a post-apocalyptic urban world, but perhaps if we had to hide in the woods...
• I can train dogs and horses.
• I know a fair bit about healing herbs and home remedies.

So I think if things ever got desperate, I'd be in high demand.

I would hope.

Anybody else ever go off on knitterly wanderings like this?

I've also, when stuck in slow traffic and unable to knit, created a Sci-Fi world in which I am at the helm of a starship full of artisans engaged in the interplanetary trade of handmade goods.

In my future-world, Earth has gone off the deep end into a babbling techno-hell, as if Tokyo and Times Square had conspired to do a complete Techno-Terraforming, so the entire planet is covered in huge glass buildings bristling with squawking plasma TVs and hideous traffic, like that in which I am stuck while I imagine all this.

So the only way for us artisans to survive and preserve our skills (as well as our fleece-bearing animals and companion animals) was to load a bunch of us up onto: Art-Ark.

For example, amongst our many trade adventures, we buy rare fleeces from the mountain goats of the Klingon homeworld, and we knit and weave them into magnificent things that we sell to the Vulcans for fair prices and for which we totally skin the Ferengi. We have also created a major upheaval in Ferengi culture, having convinced them that keeping their females unclothed does little to show off their vast wealth. The Ferengi females have taken to this notion quite well, so we have lots of gold-pressed latinum on Art-Ark with which we can purchase plasma cores and other things we need to get along out in space.

We also have the occasional battle in which we soundly tromp the Borg, who, in addition to being evil, also have no appreciation for Art in any form.

Generally I have a mental Borg-tromping battle when some jerk in a Hummer cuts off my little Golf.

Black Hummers are always driven by the Borg.

An essential perk to being the Captain of Art-Ark is that there is an awful lot of knitting time sitting there at the helm, in between planets and battles.

I could go on, but I promised to answer a few questions from previous posts. I'm usually spotty at best about answering questions, so I'll tackle a whole bunch at once by way of repentance.

Criquette .... thanks for the thoughtful burning of king cake scented gris gris candles. I need all the luck I can get with this clinic endeavor.

Joan, I'd be delighted to take a bit of your nasty winter weather off your hands. We don't have snow plows or salt machines, so that would mean I could have all kinds of excuses to sit home and knit.

And Gae, our Tessie sends warm, purry greetings to your Vegemite (I've always wondered what it tastes like -- the spread, not your cat -- as anything yeasty gets my interest in a hurry). You are so fortunate to have your dear old gal for so long. I wish her several more happy, healthy (if a bit creaky) years. Tessie wants Vegemite to know that she is eighteen and mightily annoyed that she cannot vote simply because she is a cat, as she is certainly much smarter than most of the peeps out there.

Barbara Kay, the clinic will be somewhere in the Baton Rouge area. I need volunteers for everything from fund-raising, to actual daily help in the clinic, to hooking me up with people with fat checkbooks.

Jo, we are eagerly awaiting your official state visit as Ambassador of West Cork and do I have an itinerary planned for you! Don't be surprised if you have an entourage of your local fans besides myself, either.

Southern Gal, I will mail you some details of the clinic quite soon -- and thanks ever so much for your kind offer.

Carol: Dave rates socks because somebody has to wear them, eh? And is was his birthday, after all.

And Diann, thanks for your offer to help with clinic funding ideas. Every idea helps. I'll contact you soon. I also can't wait to read more on your blog about Stitches!

I hope all this reading material makes up a bit for the lack of photos, until The Mighty Jake is done with my regular computer.

Jake, of course, is the Computer Officer on Art-Ark and gets to wear lots of handknit sweaters on the show.

--Mambocat

Question of the Day:

Excuse me. I just went to get a cup of hot tea (Irish Breakfast, in case you are interested, Jo). My husband asked me if I had a piece of string, and I laughed so hard, I poured a full cup of tea into the sugar bowl before I realized it wasn't a cup.

"Do you have a piece of string?"

String? In this house? That's like asking Clint Eastwood if he has any guns.

What kind of string? How many wraps per inch? What color? What fiber content?

"Plain thin white string like for wrapping a package."

Oh, okay. Yes, I have that too.

Snort. Okay, I've collected myself. I have also rinsed out the sugar bowl and plonked it in the dishwasher. Good thing it didn't have much sugar in it. Hate to waste, you know.

--Mambocat

Before we get on
to knitting:


This is what my husband wants to eat for breakfast.

Purina Clown Chow.




















Granted, Dave is old enough to know better, and it is his birthday today, so he can eat whatever he wants. But he also eats this when it is not his birthday.

And since it is his birthday, he gets birthday socks, fetchingly modeled by our eldest, Tessie ...



















Among other things, Dave's birthday adventures will include the Traditional Annual Birthday Bookstore Splurge. As a knitter, I feel privileged to be married to a Pisces man who does not fear the judicious use of color. And yes, you have seen socks very much like these on this blog recently. Dave saw mine and wanted a pair of his very own in the exact same colors. Who am I to refuse?

Y'all, it is already spring today, and while I am sure some of you folks in Toronto and Yonkers and maybe even in Patagonia might envy us, it's disturbing for me to have spring arrive before St. Patrick's Day. Not because I don't like spring. But in South Louisiana, winter is short enough already as it is, and the early arrival of spring does not herald an extended season of lovely spring weather. It merely portends the early onset of summer, when sun is the enemy.

Granted, the leaves have not unfurled on the critical trees which officially usher in spring -- not even a blush of green on the cypress and crepe myrtles -- so I can cling to the hope of another cool front or two. But the Japanese plum, redbud trees, red clover and other flowering things are starting to get busy.

Birthday socks for Dave were completed on time, but due to a screw-up on the part of the cable-internet people, I only got Mom's sweater finished up to the joining of armpits and sleeves.

Whoops! Sorry! Moms don't have armpits. Especially Southern moms. I meant to say, "lower armholes."

Mom got an IOU on the nearly done sweater and received other goodies for her birthday. She turned 39 again, by the way (it always amazes me how much younger than me my mother is). I was also tickled that my dear cousin Andrea could join us for Mom's birthday dinner. Andrea was one of the first victims ... er, I mean recipients ... of my knitterly adventures back when we were kids.

I should be able to finish Mom's sweater this weekend, allowing for the vagaries of the weather and the cable-internet people. There just might be one more cold front in store for us, so she may have a chance to wear it once or twice before next winter. We shall see.

"Wait a dadgum minute," you say. "And don't try to distract me with all that drivel about armpits and the weather. How are the cable-internet people responsible for you not finishing Mom's sweater on time? "

Simple. When I went to babysit my new office space and wait for the cable-internet guy to show up, I brought only Dave's unifinished second sock, which had only half a foot and the toe to go. I should have been wise enough to recognize the sort of Bad Cable Installation Karma that I was invoking by not taking Mom's sweater-in-progress along as well, and of course, as we all know, when the cable dude says he'll be there "sometime" between 9am and 6pm, he shows up at 5:15.

And the sock was finished by ten.

If I had brought along Mom's unfinished sweater, that would have allowed me the excuse of several uninterrupted hours of internet-less time at my office, in which I could have knitted the yoke of Mom's sweater, but no. I found myself with finished socks, and unable to run out for Mom's sweater, because if I did, of course, that would be the exact moment the cable guy chose to arrive at my door, and I would have missed him. Thus is the capricious nature of the Cable Internet Goddess as she directs her minions.

So instead of knitting the yoke of Mom's sweater, I found myself doing what work I could manage in a halfway-moved-into office: unpacking file boxes, throwing away outdated materials, that sort of thing.

Since my office has been what's distracted me from my blogly and knitterly duties for the past couple of weeks, I'll bring you up to date. I finally found some affordable office space for the purpose of grant-writing, meeting and planning for a low-cost spay and neuter clinic in our city. Our goal will be to provide at-cost spay and neuter services, caregiver education, and to create a client relationship with the caregiver of a freshly sterilized pet and the veterinarian of their choice, for the pet's ongoing health needs.

I will be going through the 501 (C) 3 process -- for my international readers, that means I will be generating prodigious amounts of paperwork to convince the U.S. Internal Revenue Service that we are indeed operating a humane services clinic and not laundering money for the Mafia, although I could probably afford to spay a whole lot more animals if I were.

I am sub-leasing office space from a nice massage therapist who has an extra space in her suite. We share a waiting room, restroom and break/copier area. Exept for the scary peach-and-teal drapes, it's a pleasant space, centrally located, and convenient for the other people with whom I must meet over the next several months to get this project off the ground. The best part is, the rental is month-to-month, as I hope we will soon be able to move our operations into a proper vet clinic as funding and equipment manifests.

I suspect that my office space is having a bit of an identity crisis, because the landlord, who was the prior occupant of this space, was a prodigious Mary Kay distributor (she even left a pink couch in the waiting area), who recently retired. After so many years of Mary-Kay-coordinated pinkness going on in there, my room is suddenly full of file boxes and folding tables and pet supplies and a motley crew of people scurrying about in humane society T-shirts and scarcely a shred of makeup in sight.

I hope the office doesn't mind too much.

More soon. I have a birthday dinner to get ready.

--Mambocat

Only eleventy-thousand,
three hundred and
eighty-four stitches to go.


I spent last night on the windy plains of Upper Nerdlandia, watching the SciFi Channel on cable TV and knitting away like mad on my Mom's birthday sweater. This is where I am on the body:































Bwahahahahahaha!

Oh ye of little faith. Not only do I believe in fairies, I believe in wormholes, too. Time isn't linear, or so says my soul-sis Leef. Especially on Mardi Gras weekend. I am fretting because it seems that the entire population of south Louisiana is not at their workplaces from Saturday through Wednesday morning, so I have been put on a sort of involuntary hold from getting any significant earning-money sort of work done. This situation does, however, provide ample kntting time.

I am disgruntled with the color quality in this photo. I have learned that I can get a certain amount of stitch definition and something besides glaring, blazing, neon redness if I pose red garments against this sage green blanket. But the background does something to make the red warmer, more russet in color than it actually is. This yarn is actually more of a ruby color than it looks in the picture (at least on my monitor). Someday I really, really promise to go to a digital photography class and simply ask, "RED. What the hell is going on with RED already?"

I've been absent from the blog ... and for this I apologize sincerely. I could say that I was abducted by aliens or something, but in fact I have spent the last few weeks moving into new office space and having some extra memory and a wireless card added to my notebook computer.

Please do not ask me what sort of techie stuff the darling young lad at CompUSA installed in my notebook. I am one of those people who is ever-so-politely referred to as an "end user."


Being an "end user" means I think HTML is short for, "Hate The Miserable Laptop."

It means that I need point-click-and-drag programs.

It also means that when the shiny machine offends me, I simply drag it to CompUSA, invoke my Instant Three-Year-Old Superpower and say, "Waaaaaah! Computer slow! Sob! Computer don't work at coffeehouse! Waaaah! Make computer fast!"


I am also being a three-year-old because everyone else in the world except me (and possibly Jo in West Cork) is at Stitches West.

Hi Lisa, hope you're having fun!

So since I can't quite use my new office until Wednesday, I am on a mission: Dave's socks and Mom's sweater, to be done for their respective birthdays, by Friday.

Yes, I am surrounded by Pisceans.


Oh, what did you say? What yarn is that? It's a yarn I scooped up on massive discount at Michael's awhile back. It's been marinating in my stash for awhile. The yarn is "Dublin" from their "Passports" yarn selection, which I think has been discontinued. It's a heavy worsted/light bulky 51% wool, 49% acrylic, machine washable on gentle. Works up at 3.5 st./inch on size 11 needles, which is as big as I go.

My apologies for the long absence. I'll try to make it up to y'all. I am also trying to stunt blog for Joan Hamer while she is in hospital.


--Mambocat

Garter

On one of the knitting lists I subscribe to, there was a recent discussion of Sally Melville's Einstein Coat, its use of garter stitch, and the various results achieved by different knitters. Several people reported droopy results.

I am afraid that these were the people who did not swatch.

The Einstein is designed specifically to counteract the effect of gravity on garter stitch -- and it holds up quite nicely in real life. The pattern also says quite clearly that it is absolutely essential to get the correct gauge. Thus, it is essential to swatch.

I strongly suspected (and this was confirmed by some individual correspondences) that the disappointed knitters either chose an incompatbile yarn or failed to get exact gauge, or both.

Among those who admitted not bothering to get precise gauge, the most common argument was, "but it's only garter stitch."

There is no such thing as "only garter stitch."

When I went to Stitches West last year, I wore a simple serape to the classes and yarn market one day, and I received what most people would have thought to be an exceedingly odd compliment from a number of hard-core knitting people, including both Rick Mondragon and the Xenakises:

"You do very good garter stitch."

I did not think this odd.

In fact, I was delighted to get such a fine compliment from the sponsors of Stitches and some of my other knitting gurus, like Lily Chin. The same people had also commented on my cables and lace the previous days, but I figured that they were mostly being gracious, and that they fussed over everyone's work to be supportive and encouraging. But having such people notice your garter stitch is something else entirely.

I suspect that most people would think this is an uremarkable thing to get excited about being complimented on, because garter is the first thing we learn, and so we may assume it is the easiest thing to do, and not worth giving serious consideration. Surely we must be on, and quickly, to the business of knitting a beaded Orenberg shawl, or a show-stopping cape with intarsia cables using Bohus techniques, with shadow-knitting in the background panels and enough colors to make even Kaffee Fasset run out of crayons, shouldn't we?

But good garter stitch is the basic. Garter is to knitting what breathing is to yoga.

Garter stitch is the first and most basic thing taught a new knitter, but, contrary to popular belief, "basic" does not mean "simplest."

"Basic" means "essential."

The base of any object is its foundation.

Garter stitch follows all the rules of texture knitting. Just as you would ordinarily choose a firmly twisted, robust yarn to showcase textures, you often need a similar yarn to make garter stitch sing.

You also need to store garter (and all other knitted items) in the folded state, not using hangers for storage, and not even leaving your garment hanging off the back of a chair overnight.

Garter stitch can be glorious if you choose the right yarn (an elastic, firmly plied yarn in most cases) and if you pay attention to both the yarn manufacturer's recommended gauge and the gauge called for in the pattern.

If the yarn manufacturer recommends that paricular yarn to be knitted at five stitches to the inch, and it's worsted weight ... and your pattern calls for worsted weight at four stitches to the inch, do not knit that yarn at 4 stitches to the inch in garter st. and expect good results -- you will not get them.

You will, however, get droopy garter stitch.

How many of you faithfully compare the recommended gauge of the yarn manufacturer to the gauge in the pattern, or do you just look at "worsted weight" on the label and figure that one worsted will do as well as another?

Hmmm .... (squinting toward the rear of the auditorium...) I don't see too many hands.

What about swatching? Do you swatch to make sure you are getting the correct gauge?

What's that I hear? "I don't need to swatch ... it's only garter stitch?"

I have a lovely Brie to go with that whine.

Sorry, but you still are best advised to swatch, and hang it up from a skirt hanger overnight, and regard it in the morning, and then wash and block it, and then let that hang overnight, and measure and regard that. Compare your results. Repeat until desired result is achieved.

I know washing the swatch sounds like a pain the the tookas, and it is. But you do want to know how your yarn will wash, and you do want to know how the resulting fabric will look, and behave, after washing.

You do not want to knit an entire garment and discover, far too late in the game, that the yarn runs and the fabric grows after washing.

Nobody can force you to swatch. It's not a law. But it is best practice. And it is knitting.

You do like knitting don't you? Then don't think of the swatch as an obstacle to remove before you begin your main project.


Just think of it as more to knit.

If you still want to use that yarn in your pattern, you may need to go down a needle size or two, and make your pattern adjustments accordingly, or simply knit the next size up, after you have swatched and measured and calculated and compared results.

On the yarn itself: in any given pattern, you are usually best advised to use either the recommended yarn or another yarn very much like it, that is, a subsitute yarn with very similar construction (number of plies, number of wraps per inch, firmness of twist) and similar behavioral attributes (weight, fiber content, drape). Don't expect comparable results if you substitute Icelandic unspun roving for a four-ply heavy worsted.

The trick is knowing your yarn, swatching, and otherwise respecting your garter stitch. Go down a needle size (or more) if you need to, especially if you wish to use a loosely spun or un-spun yarn. But do your homework. I know this sounds a tad preachy ... but .... um .... well ... it is.

But not in a bad way.

--Mambocat

Socks That Rock,

My Own Personal Truck Stop,

and Stunt-Blogging

Because I have been in overdrive trying to keep one New Year's resolution (a personal, work-related goal which would be doomed by bad ju-ju if revealed at this moment), I have neglected another resolution (to blog more often) but, as you see, I have returned.

They have arrived: two skeins of Socks That Rock from Blue Moon Fiber Arts, purchased in a display of moral and financial support while the gals at BMFA fight the bad guys at Nastybank. This purchase involves a Near Occasion of Resolution-Breaking, but sock yarn technically doesn't count as a yarn purchase, in exactly the same way that sampling the apple-smoked bacon, grape tomatoes and cheese chunks at the grocery doesn't count as breaking your diet. Yarn purchases, like grocery-bacon-nibbling, is merely an act of grazing. No guilt.

The colors in my photo are very close to true. The top skein is Fire On the Mountain (me, with more than a touch of grey, buying yarn named after a Grateful Dead tune? Nah.), and the bottom skein is 24 Karat, a luscious skein of variegated golds which is looking at me with big, big eyes and pleading to be made into a Celtic design and, possibly, even kilt hose.

This bundle of color couldn't have arrived on a better day. Here in Louisiana it is chilly, grey and rainy, which ordinarily does not depress me (any weather not involving hurricanes, heat or tornadoes is good weather as far as I'm concerned, and I say this with authority because I have spent time in the deep freeze and all sorts of other weather extremes), but adding the Saints' loss to the messy weather doesn't make for a cheerful week at all.

Cold and wet and misty and muddy calls for knitting, and a pot of chili on the stove, and coffee. Lotsa coffee. For Christmas, the ever-thoughtful Dave provided me with a Hamilton Beach Brew Station Deluxe, so now I have my own personal truck stop in the kitchen:


















And I also have some caffieneilicious Hawaiian coffee to put in it, courtesy of Lisa Louie.

People who know me well understand my odd fascination with truck stops. I love truck stops. I cannot imagine living in a place like Siberia or Kenya or Outer Mongolia where there aren't any truck stops. To me it doesn't matter if the truck stop is large and bright or small, old-fashioned and tidy, as long as I can get coffee, a clean bathroom, diesel for the VW and something to eat, all in the same place. I have spent an inordinate amount of my adult life driving (and driving and driving), and as a result, I know where to find clean bathrooms, digestible eats and decent coffee in a surprising number of states.

One truck stop fixture that I have always coveted is a coffee maker where you just press your cup against a metal lever and hot, strong, heavenly coffee pours out into it from the urn above. No glass pot to fumble with and possibly crack if (when) you (inevitably) bounce it against the counter. Just a big, piping-hot Tower Of Java ready to fill my cup whenever I want.

And now I have one. I am happy. Very happy. Lots and lots of coffee have made this chilly, endlessly rainy January a surprisingly cozy time.

This calls for digging among the bags of UFOs and finishing a few cozy post-holiday items:

Ray Whiting may recognize the metamorphosis of a bag of various Noro Silk Garden leftovers into this casual shawl:

Does this butt make my shawl look big?

This snazzy pose demonstrates why I had to abandon my previous career as a supermodel.

Also, the interminable rain has provided opportunities for sock-finishing:

While it rains, I am also stunt-blogging for Joan Hamer as she recovers from yet another abdominal surgery. This arrangement actually worked out conveniently for both of us. I was thinking of starting a sub-blog for knit-alongs anyway, and Joan needs someone to keep her readers occupied until she feels well enough to blog regularly again, so, in addition to my regular blog here, I will be stunt-blogging and conducting a knit-along for my cozy fingerless mitts on JoanKnits.

And speaking of cozy:

Shamu says, "I love it when the humans have warm ideas like putting a kitty bed on top of the fridge, right under the heat vent. Oh yes, I love it a lot. You can't see it in the picture, but those toes are strategically positioned under the heat vent. Oh yes."

"And, might I add, that chili smells darn tasty."

--Mambocat

"Is There A Commie

In Your Sock Drawer?"



















My husband was astonished.

"Who are they looking for ... Osocka Bin Laden?"

That's what Dave said when I told him what happened to the women of Blue Moon.

As a bank customer, what would you think of your financial institution if you had been operating a small business and maintaining an account with them for several years, and they suddenly refused to accept your money? And what would you do the next day if you discovered that your bank decided that your business was a scam, and they refunded all of your customers' credit card purchases? Without doing any sort of research or investigation?

That is exactly what happened to the women at Blue Moon Fiber Arts.

Blue Moon wanted their customers to be able to join their Sock Of The Month Club by using a credit card online. If you live in the United States, annual membership in the Sock of the Month Club is $210 US. If you are an international sock addict, the extra postage bumps you up to $240.

Lots and lots of people joined the Sock of the Month club.

Blue Moon's financial institution, who shall hereinafter be referred to as Nastybank (on the advice of their attorney, Blue Moon is not publicizing the name of the actual bank at the moment), became alarmed when a whole bunch of people from all over North America and a couple of other continents joined a two-hundred dollar sock club all at once.

Now before any of you knitting bankers out there start talking about fiduciary responsibility and national security and how it is the bank's responsibility to investigate unusual account activity -- please refrain from educating me, because I already know all that. And if the bank had stopped there -- if they simply had investigated an unusual blip in account activity -- they would have been doing their job. "Wow, Blue Moon sure is doing a lot of business! Let's look into that! Well, whaddaya know, a bunch of knitters bought yarn! Imagine that!"

But they did not investigate. Not one tiny bit of investigation-type activity occurred. Not even a Google search. Instead, a six-pack of suits at Nastybank had a little meeting and decided that it was impossible that a whole bunch of people could be knitting socks by hand. That it was impossible that anyone would join a Sock Of The Month Club. And, without further ado, Nastybank decreed that Blue Moon Fiber Arts was either running an Internet scam or laundering money for the Mafia, terrorists, Columbian drug lords or all three, so they shut down Blue Moon's credit card activity and refunded the membership dues to each and every person who joined the Sock of The Month Club.

Just imagine how that financial event would pull the proverbial rug out from under your small business.

Now listen up: I know for a fact that there are Quilt Block Of The Month Clubs, Birdhouse Of The Month Clubs, Fishing Lure Of The Month Clubs and Fruit Of The Month Clubs. I can't vouch for the others, but the Fruit Of The Month Club has been around for a long, long, time. My late aunt Miriam used to belong to it. Before you could get things like kiwis and starfruit at the supermarket, she sent a company in California some money every year, and then each month she got a box of weird tropical fruit. It was real. I ate it. It was good.

So let's talk about possible and impossible. I wonder if I went to Nastybank and declared, "I want to be able to accept credit cards online because I have an Internet porn site where people can pay to watch a Sumo wrestler wearing a tutu, cowboy boots and a fireman's hat have live sex with an albino midget wearing a Girl Scout uniform and a rainbow-colored afro wig."

"Oh, and also a Slip-n-Slide and a recumbent bicycle are involved."

Would the executives at Nastybank say, "No, we can't give your porn site the ability to accept credit cards online because it is impossible that anyone wants to watch a Sumo wrestler having sex with a midget." Would they?

You bet your sweet nether regions they wouldn't decline me. I would have the ability to accept credit cards online in about eleven seconds, and as soon as they got back into their cubicles each and every one of Nastybank's credit officers would log on, whip out their credit cards and crash the bank's server checking out that stuff.

But Blue Moon Fiber Arts did not want to sell porn movies, nor did they want to launder money for the Mafia, run a Nigerian wool scam, or secretly fund the Taliban.

All they wanted to do was sell sock yarn kits. But their credit account activity was somehow suspicious because:

(a.) it is impossible that anyone would join a sock club ...

(b.) they had an unusually high number of transactions. To underscore the highly suspicious nature of this alarming surge in account acitivity, I remind you that Blue Moon is a retailer and this spike in purchases occurred during the holiday shopping season. Somehow I doubt that Amazon or L.L. Bean's customers were all refunded their online credit card purchases because of the frightening nature of a spike in online retail transactions during the Christmas season.

Quick, somebody call the CIA! Dig up Joseph McCarthy, harvest his DNA and clone him! A bunch of women in Oregon are selling sock yarn -- and people are buying it! Clearly these women are terrorists, subvertng the minds of our youth, and must be punished quickly and to the full extent the law allows.

Now if you are like me, I was beyond fury when I first heard of this yesterday. I wanted to grab a pitchfork and join the mob screaming for heads to roll at Nastybank.

And, in due time and due process, they will.

But before heads roll, Socks Must Rock.

What can we do to help?

Because Nastybank's identity cannot be revealed quite yet, we can't all withdraw our accounts and have a run on the bank, or crash their server with emails from sock-knitters the world over. Nor can we send barbed-wire socks to the credit card review committee, or have a sit-in of sock-knitters in the lobby of the main branch.

We can do all those things later, when Nastybank's identity becomes a matter of public record.

In the meantime:

Order some sock yarn from Blue Moon. Just one skein. They have legal expenses, and also other expenses caused by having their finances jolted, and getting credit card acceptance back up on their website with a Nice, New Bank which is happy to accept money from a small business. So even if you have a New Year's resolution to knit only from stash, just one skein of sock yarn from Blue Moon won't count. The Knitting Goddess will absolve you.

Write a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal. We can't inundate the bank officers with e-mail yet, but they all read the WSJ.

For the full story, click here and go to the January 11 post for evidence that I am not making this up.
--Mambocat

Forty-Six Equals Ten


Things I Have Done So Far in 2007 To Create Knitting Time and Avoid Tax:


1. Yesterday was Twelfth Night, so I had to take down the tree and put away the Christmas decorations and put the tree at the curb to be recycled, and then today I had to do this:


















2. Have a birthday. Since my birthday falls at the beginning of Mardi Gras season, I get to have a King Cake if I want, instead of a regular birthday cake. People in other parts of the world only get to have King Cakes on January 6th. We get 'em from Twelfth Night up until Mardi Gras Day. For those of you who don't have a tradition of Twelfth Night, King Cake is essentially an oversized cinnamon-roll log, which is bent into a ring shape, and then it is drowned in icing, which is further engulfed in colored sugar sprinkles. A King Cake is nothing but sugary, fatty deliciousness, and it goes quite nicely with Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia ice cream.

Today I am 46. That number sounds good.

If you add 4 and 6, you get ten.

I think I will be ten today. Bring on the cake! And where's my treehouse, so I can go hide and knit all day long, because it's my birthday and I can do anything I want?



3: I also did this:

Lots of this. Because it is my birthday, I can knit all day if I want to. And eat cake without worrying about whether or not I can zip up my pants tomorrow.

Because I am ten.


4. We have really, really clean litterboxes.


5. Flossed teeth.


6. Went to the YMCA yesterday to make up for today's cake in advance -- not sure if this counts as tax avoidance, because it does sort of count as keeping a New Year's resolution, considering the cake and all. Someone once told me that birthday cake has no calories if it's your own birthday. It's like a birthday present from the Cake Goddess. I'll buy that. Going to the gym also creates knitting time, whenever I can wrench the recumbent bicycle machine away from the way-too-skinny guy who spends most of his waking hours on it. I really wish he'd go try out the Spinner bikes, or something. The recumbent bike is the only excercise thingy I can knit on. I'm too spastic to knit on the stairclimber or anything else you have to hang onto.

7. Made solemn note of Elvis Day by playing some Blue Suede Shoes and cleaning the bathroom yesterday. January 8th is Elvis' birthday, and I'm sure that the elders in the Church of Elvis would be quick to point out that the King died on the toilet, so it's important to make sure that your bathroom gets a good cleaning so it is presentable on Elvis Day. Especially the throne.

8. Updated blog (see?).

--Mambocat

Another Year
Without a Valium Salt Lick

I called the feed store over there in St. Francisville -- like I do about this time every year -- and I got the same answer I always get:

"No ma'am, nobody's making a Valium salt lick yet."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, ma'am. I checked all the supply catalogs. Nothing."

I usually get a hankering for a Valium salt lick at about the same time each year that I have to collect up all the papers and put them in a box and bring them to Peter The Tax Guy (please see my January 1 post for more on this).

There are only two ways to safely approach the treacherous north face of Paper Mountain in January -- the highly caffienated way, or the highly sedated way.

Disclaimer: Just in case anybody from the DEA is reading this -- the concept of a Valium salt lick is a JOKE. Okay? Overworked, middle-aged women fantasize about Valium in the exact same way that middle-aged men fantasize about Angelina Jolie, which means, pretty much all the time. And, like your fantasy of Angelina Jolie, I have to live with the fact that a Valium salt lick just ain't gonna happen. But that doesn't mean a girl can't dream.

So back to the tax thing. I need to keep my resolution about this, and I also need to knit, and I plan to do both today. I will need a break from the tax, and because I don't have a Valium salt lick, I will have to settle for knitting and strong tea to settle me down when I take a break from sorting out That Which Can Be Deducted, from That Which Cannot.

I am one of those people who should simply not be put in charge of managing large quantities of individual pieces of paper which need to be sorted into various categories. At least, I should not be held responsible for sorting individual pieces of paper into various categories that other people can understand.

I keep telling people this -- do not give me paper to manage -- but they just refuse to listen.

I mean, I am technically capable of doing it, and all that, but this does not mean I like it. I have done it in the past, over and over, for grants and tax and jobs and everything, but it is hurtsome. I have done it well enough to suffer grant-management scrutiny and have every cent accounted for, right down to receipts for an individual roll of Scotch tape and a bottle of White-Out. But this sort of paper management requires my most earnest efforts, a great deal of concentration and antacids, and copious amounts of caffeine.

If I cannot be sedated for this activity, you can bet your sweet heiney regions that I am going to be wired for it.

Compounding my taxoid difficulties this year is the fact that our house is still throbbing with boxes from my office, which also contain paper in staggering amounts. So I live in constant fear that someone besides myself, in search of something they think they need, will open and strew about the contents of a box that does not contain anything they need, thus intermingling Paper Which Has Been Managed with Paper Which Has Not.

Ya know, most Americans are whiney-heineys about the simple fact that we have to pay tax so we can have things like paved streets and schools and police officers and all those things we whine about not having enough of, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy because the majority of us are always voting not to pay more tax so we can have enough of this stuff, and then we whine some more when (surprise!) we don't have as much of it as we want.

I am not one of those people. It's not the actual payment of tax that bothers me -- it's the fact that I have to do all this freaking homework so I can pay it.

And I also like to get something back. If possible. So this year I am doing mileage, what with all that commuting to New Orleans. And I will take advantage of the deduction for putting folks up at our house after Katrina. I'm looking up what else is legal to deduct, too.

Is yarn deductible? Does anyone know? Does it fall under "medical" for mental therapy? Or can I claim it under that thing where you can get a deduction if you insulate your house?

If I name my stash -- let's call it, "Roxanne" -- can I claim it as a dependent?

I do wish the medical-bills pile was smaller -- no one wants to get deductions through sick family members.

Back to the grind. Back to knitting content tomorrow.

--Mambocat

Not Taking Any Chances:



















Last night we had the whole nine yards for New Year's dinner -- blackeyed peas (for luck) and cabbage (for prosperity). Also, rice to put the beans on, because we are in the South, and because I am almost certain that you can get arrested if you serve beans without rice south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Not shown: generously buttered bread (also for prosperity). And it has to be real butter, mind you, none of that fake stuff. In days gone by, the wealth of an Irish household was measured by how thickly the family members buttered their bread.

I made enough of everything in the Good-Luck Food Group for a few days, just to be on the safe side. We stayed at home all day on New Year's Day, hopefully to assure an uneventful New Year.

On the counter, above the blue enamelware pot, you will see the bayberry candle I lighted on New Year's Eve still chugging along at dinnertime on New Year's Day. It finally burned out around 3:00 this morning, January 2. It was one of those jar candles, but since it burned all the way from New Year's Eve into today, I hope that is a good sign for the coming year.

Part of our uneventful New Year's Day involved watching movies and a considerable amount of knitting. Dave's sweater in La Lana Forever Random is now united in body and in sleeves, and awaits the insertion of the Fleur De Lis motifs I have worked out. I didn't finish Dave's sweater for Christmas, but if luck is with me I will have it ready, blocked and everything, before Twelfth Night, so it still counts as a Christmas gift.

Stay tuned.


--Mambocat

Still Waiting...


















...for the bayberry candle to burn down, and its 8:00 Central time here in North America on New Year's Day, but lemme tell ya, this puppy is gonna burn out, you hear me? I lit it yesterday evening and it's still chugging along.

Last year, I made a big mistake. As in, "huge." The bayberry candle was still going when I woke up New Year's Day, so I figured it had done its job of burning overnight ... so I blew it out.

And all the bad Karma of 2005 just poured into 2006 like some sort of bad-luck levee had broken.

So Dave and I spent this New Year's Eve at home, safe from misguided drivers, and I spent the entire day being happily Irish and OCD, making certain to go through each and every ritual conducive to good luck in the New Year, from making certain that the house was reasonably clean and the chores done, to putting shiny new pennies in our pockets and a loaf of bread on the table ... and the bayberry candle burning ... and a log in the hearth ... and sweeping the old year out the door with a new broom (not forgetting to give 2006 a good swift kick in the arse on its way out) ... and and and...

Last year, I also neglected to make any real resolutions, partly because I didn't have time to make any --what with my workload in the aftermath of Katrina -- and partly because I didn't know exactly what I wanted to resolve to do, except to work.

It was kind of hard to think about anything except fur and paws, this time last year.

So here are my resolutions for 2007. Numeric listing represents the order in which these things came out of my head and made their way to my little scratch-pad -- this is not necessarily their order of importance.

1. Do everything within my actual, personal control to make 2007 not suck.

2. Go on a yarn diet. Let's be honest. I am putting this high on the list because this is the very first resolution I am likely to break, so I might as well break one resolution, and get it over with as quickly as possible. But my honest goal is to at very least look in the stash first when the urge to knit something new strikes, and not to buy any more yarn unless I actually need it -- "need" being defined as "Mom wants a Chanel-pink wool vest for her birthday and I truly have no Chanel-pink wool whatsoever in my stash".

"Need" in 2007 shall not be defined as, "it entered my field of vision."

Our house is not so big, and I have a lot of plastic tubs full of yarn. I also have all of my office stuff stacked in Permafiles all around the house until I find new office space.

Have you ever seen, anywhere in any Feng Shui book, the following words? "To increase positive chi, stack plastic tubs full of yarn and cardboard boxes full of books and files in every corner of your home."

Neither have I. Therefore, I have a sub-resolution (I should run for Congress) promising myself to:

2a. Organize the stash better. At the moment my stash is somewhat tidy, but it is not truly organized. It is roughly sorted into kitty-litter tubs marked "Koigu," "Cotton," "Wool-Ease," "Sock Yarn,""Handspun," "David Bowie yarn," "Various Alpaca," "Noro," "Magpies," "Brown Sheep," etc. If I have a whole bunch of one brand of yarn, it gets its own plastic tub (or two). But I have to come up with a better way to sort things out, particularly in the "David Bowie" and "Magpies" departments. Right now, if I have more than one skein of anything flashy or glitzy, like eyelash or metallic yarn, it goes in the "David Bowie" bin. Individual, impulse single-skein purchases, glitzy or not, go in the "Magpie" bin. Now "Magpies" is a great place to rummage when I need to crank out a one-or-two skein project for a hurry -up gift. But really. I have to do something about this. If the stash were better organized, it just might be easier to hunt for what I really and truly need, instead of buying more yarn.

3. Walk every day. Walk outdoors, unless the weather is absolutely severe. Okay, I can hear my fellow Southerners choking (sorry about that) and blowing coffee through their nose: "Mambocat is going to take a walk eleven times in 2007!" But I am serious: I shall walk outdoors in the winter, spring and fall until I cannot distinguish betwen outdoors and the Amazon Jungle (this is roughly May 1 through September 30). Cold I can deal with. Cold I can walk in. Cold? Drizzle? Bring it on. But heat? Mais non. I'll get on the treadmill at the Y in the summer, and on days year-round when the rain is coming down like a carwash. But every passably decent day shall be walked in.

4. Drink lots more water. This is both a little thing and a big thing because walking and drinking more water are part of my plan to:

5. Lose about 15-20 pounds over the course of the year. Not all at once. I know that's likey impossible, and not a good idea for weight stasis. I just like my jeans better when they are not so tight. One pants size down is all I ask.

6. Go to bed earlier and stop trying to get "just the laundry and blog and dishes and and and done" before tucking in. If you ever look at the time/date stamp on my blog entries, somewhere after 11pm is my average posting time. This is because I usually update my blog while the dishwasher is running and a couple of loads are going through the washroom. Granted, I am also having my Lunesta and a cuppa herb tea about that time, because if I didn't, I would be up till four. If anybody ever comes up with a real cure for insomnia, please let me know, okay?

7. Eat healthier. I got into a wicked pattern of convenience food in the months after Katrina -- not to mention the first few months when there was nothing but calorie-packed FEMA food for relief workers. Don't get me wrong -- we were very grateful for the food tents, but FEMA meals have about 11,000 calories per portion to keep you going when you are working your arse off. Which is fine while you are actually doing the physical work of disaster recovery, but once you slide into the management part, and spend more time in front of a spreadsheet than in the field, you just don't burn those calories quite as fast. And it's hard to cook when you are working 80 hours a week, even once the grocery stores were opening up again. Katrina Fatigue also hit me about the same time that I realized I had been married for twenty years, that I am the sole cook (I think my husband is the only Louisiana man ever born who cannot cook), and I have literally thought up, shopped for, prepared and cleaned up after thousands of meals. That realization makes it super-easy to pick up Chinese take-out, which also has the advantage of being cheap. So: More meals from sratch this year. Lighter, fresher, more use of the wok, less use of the pizza delivery people. It is very bad when all the kids who work for PIzza Hut know your first name.

7a. Also: take a multivitamin and a calcium supplement every day.

8. Try to get my act together to create some sort of online means to sell my patterns for extra income. This would also mean:

9. Get more original patterns into saleable condition: make graduated sizes, do them up nice on the computer, etc. My horoscope says that this September will present planetary conditions beneficial for Capricorns to turn a hobby into a career. I would like to do that very much, without losing focus on my animal work.

10. Do something pro-active to stop feeling like I have to be all things to all people all the time. This is a very vague resolution, but it is important. I don't know what "pro-active" means for me yet -- anti-anxiety meds? A shrink? Yoga? -- but I am sick and tired of wearing myself out because I can't stop raising the bar on myself in ways that it does not need to be raised.

11. There is a very important career goal I need to focus on, but I can't reveal the details yet. I need to focus on it really hard, and really soon.

12. Spend more time with friends and family.

13. Do something concrete to really and truly understand my finances. This year I want to learn how to manage money better. Something besides piling all my receipts and W-2's and such into a box and dropping them off at the office of the ever-suffering Peter The Tax Guy.

14. Floss. More often, anyway.

15. Clear my closet of clothes I haven't worn in ages. Shoes too. I am really not much of a "shoe person," but I never get rid of shoes, either. I own far more boots than shoes and I spend about 99% of my shoe-wearing time in Birks or roper boots anyway. And sneakers for walking or the gym. I have shoes that are so old, I could sell them to the retro store. Hmmm....

16. Read (or re-read) one classic book each month. There are too many great books I either read far too long ago, or did not read completely because I procrastinated until the day before exams and I had to default to Cliff notes. I am starting the year with Origin of Species, which I did read in its entirety the first time around, but so long ago that it smells like patchouli.

So there I am. Putting up my resolutions for the whole world to see, or at least that portion of it which reads this blog. Maybe it will be motivating. I hope so. I can also check back now and again to see how I am coming along.

A happy New Year to all of my readers. I do value each and every one of you. May 2007 bring peace, health, prosperity and happiness to you all.

--Mambocat