I’m off to the beach with the hubby and daughter today! This’ll be the first beach trip since Mr. Tvini and I took one just before the little niblet was born.
Everybody be good while I’m gone!
No mice caught last night, so I think that’s all of them.
However, the peanut butter in the traps has attracted ants. We’ve traded one species of vermin for another.
Great. Just great.
The Koigu project went well last night (finally!), to the point that I didn’t go to bed until 1am. This was a mistake, as I woke up at 5:30 feeling poorly. Then my daughter woke up and crawled into bed with me. If I’d been feeling better, it would have been great, but it was still good because she was so snuggly and sweet.
She’s been playing chess recently. She understands how the pieces move, and how they capture, and I think she’s starting to get the idea of thinking a move ahead. She does play by her own rules, of course. Wants to move and capture all the pawns, then some other piece, and so on. So here’s my little ham with our Simpsons chess board. This is why you never tell my daughter to “SMILE!”
We only caught one mouse last night, so either that’s it or the one we caught was shouting out little mousey warnings to the others. I’ll reset the traps tonight, just in case.
And mouse number two is caught. I wonder if we’ll go for three tonight. Lord, I hope not.
Second night running of thunderstorms. The power flickered just a bit, but we seem to be safe and sound. Famous last words, eh?
We caught a mouse last night, and my daughter was absolutely thrilled about letting it go. Quite the morning adventure. Actually she wanted to keep it, but I explained we couldn’t and she understood. Since my cousin said he had a mouse but wound up catching FOUR, I’m re-setting the traps tonight. My daughter told me, “I collect mice!” Yikes! Couldn’t we just go with stamps or bottle caps or something?
The first morning of summer camp at the Nature Museum went well. She had a good time, and was able to answer questions appropriately, like telling me that some animals with good senses of touch were raccoons and possums, since they have forepaws that look like hands. She’ll be doing the camp all this week, so they’ll probably focus on a sense a day.
It’s always a hoot going to the Nature Museum. They’ve had some of the same exhibits since I was a kid, and that’s a good thirty years ago. Some things really are slow to change, and that’s not a bad thing.
The Koigu project hit another snag when I misinterpreted the directions – again. But I am undeterred! Folks on my mother’s side of the family are known for our stubbornness determination!
I finally ordered my copy of Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party which I am looking forward to like crazy!
Made good inroads into cleaning the kitchen. The dishes are all clean and the counter may not be exactly sterile, but it is pretty spic and span. Somehow, even though I have less time, the house always winds up cleaner when it’s just me here. Maybe I’m doing more because I’m not expecting someone else to pitch in. Whatever the reason, a cleaner house can’t be a bad thing.
Hat on the needles for Australia (this will take slightly longer than usual, it’s cotton on smaller needles), then Pittsburgh, and Virginia.
Behold the stupidest, fattest, loudest, laziest cat in existence. This is Nerys, named in a contest on my husband’s old computer bulletin board, back before there was this newfangled intermanet thingie. Ironically, we originally got her to be sure another of our cats got enough exercise. You can see how well that worked out.
Has she lifted one fat-sheathed muscle to chase the mouse? No. She has not. And yet, if our old cat Purr-Zha were still around, this wouldn’t be an issue. OId, blind, toothless, diabetic, arthritic, and cancer-ridden, he would still have taken out this mouse with one swipe of his paw. Nerys, on the other hand, can’t even reach her own butt. Man, did we get the short end of the cat deal.
The Koigu is swatching up at 6 stitches per inch on a #3 needle, which would have been too tight, so it’s just as well I’m being thorough and checking the math now. I’m going with a WendyKnits pattern, which looks like it’ll work just fine.
(ETA 7-27-06 I wound up getting 6.25 stitches per inch on the final product.)
The hubby leaves for Raleigh in about 15 minutes. Fortunately, my daughter’s summer camp, which I thought was only for a few days, will run all week in the morning. Yay! I can still have my morning Jayne-hat knitting time!
And finally, of interest only to Firefly fans, an actual sign that was spotted in South Charlotte. Photographer Matt Wiggins titled it best:
Last week, I got a call from my cousin, who had mice, plural, in his house. He asked if we still had any Havahart traps. Their family is home to two pet rabbits, and I think a couple of rats and a gerbil, so they’re very soft on wildlife. Fortunately, we do still have the traps, after catching a mouse last year in our kitchen. They caught a mouse, which his wife promptly set up a habitat for and decided to keep. Insert eye-rolling from my cousin and I here. Anyway, they’re trying to catch the second mouse, which I’m guessing will also get a cushy setup in a terrarium. It’s a wild rodent, people. Two words: Black Plague.
Anywho, I just went into our bedroom and turned on the lights, and a mouse scurried down a chest of drawers. And us without our trap. Great. I went to write my mom to see if she still had a trap, and also to alert my husband to this. I came back into the bedroom just in time to see it scurry into our closet.
This is BAD, people. BAD! I know it seems like finding one in the kitchen last year would have been worse, but I keep yarn in that bedroom! No worries, the Jayne yarn is elsewhere, but the closet has lots of Lamb’s Pride, Manos del Uruguay, some handpaintedyarn.com worsted, hand-dyed mohair, and pippikneesocks handspun, among others. None of which is meant to be nesting material! BAD, BAD MOUSE!
I’m going to the massive 24-hour Harris Teeter RIGHT NOW and get a humane trap.
BAD MOUSE!
ETA: All I want is to be able to buy a no-kill mousetrap at 11:30 at night. Is that so wrong? No dice at the store, we’ll wait until the hardware store opens at 1pm tomorrow. Ugh!
Well, today was the last day of school, so I decided to head on up the road to Davidson to hit the Needlecraft Center, because it’s going to get a lot harder to take road trips after today. So I snagged myself some Koigu! See the pretty? I do have immediate plans for two of the skeins. More than this, I cannot say. Out of curiosity, which of the two colorways do y’all like best?
While driving back from Davidson, I was listening to the radio and my mind was wandering. I thought about the influence of the media, and a story my dad had told about being a kid in the audience at a radio show when the host commented on he and his buddies. They were all tow-headed*, and since one of the people in the band was called “Whitey” for his hair, it was remarked upon. 60 years later, and he still remembers it. And so did my grandmother, since I remember her talking about it too, saying that when she heard the fellow say that on the radio, she knew he had to be talking about her kid. I started thinking about it, and realized that while I knew it had happened, I couldn’t think of exactly where. It was 60 years ago, though, and the buildings have changed a bit since then. So when he called today to mention something, I asked him where he used to go and see the shows.
We had a great trip down memory lane, and the landscape of Charlotte music. The Briarhoppers (left) were mentioned, and so was Betty Johnson and the Johnson Family, Fred Kirby, and Arthur Smith, among others. I got to hear the story of how my dad got his first new bike, too.
So here are some questions for you: have you ever asked a parent a question that got you an unexpected or illuminating answer? Is there a question you wish you could ask your parents?
By the way, here’s what my dad was calling about. The Little Girl Giant, which I really recommend you check out.
*The things you learn. According to http://www.wordorigins.org/ , “Tow is an old (14th century) word for flax. People whose hair resembles flax–light colored and tousled–are tow-headed. The term dates to the 19th century.” Neat!