One Down, One to Go

Crank up the recording of "Pomp and Circumstance!" I am now a full-fledged Sock Knitter. Dale will be so proud of me. She'd showed me a sock-in-progress with the heel turned, but I really couldn't follow her example until Jeannie showed me how to get there.

With Jeannie's helpful guidance, my knitting classmates and I completed our very first sock toes -- and thus our first socks -- this past Sunday. As soon as we finished weaving in our ends and clipping the yarn tails, we all pulled off our boots, tried on our socks, and wiggled our toes in the air. Woo hoo!

Our final class takes place next Sunday, so we're all knitting away madly on the cuffs of our second socks, hoping to get to the heel turn. We all want to complete that particular exercise while Jeannie's there to help us. By the time we've turned our second heels, we should have this process down solidly -- at least we hope to. Jeannie's a snowbird, and will head to Florida next week for a few months. We tried to get her to set up the 1-800-SOX-HELP hotline, but we don't know if she'll go for it.

Snow Business


Mother Nature is still being rather over-generous in the precipitation department. Last Friday, we ended up with about 18" of snow, so we now have the whole "White Christmas" thing going on. Whoopee. Enough already.

The boys never get tired of romping in the snow, making snow Beardie angels, eating snow cones without the cone, and plowing the backyard with their faces. I tried to get even one photo of the two of them romping together, but they couldn't sit still. They were having way too much fun. Charlie was having so much fun that he could only stand still for one photo this time. (I sometimes feel guilty that I don't have as many photos of Charlie on my blog these days, but Seamus is a bigger ham.)



Two Graduations

Seamus and I "graduated" from our rally obedience class last Sunday. Judy, our instructor, set up a competition-level course for us and separated us into Novice A and Novice B divisions. (To my relief, I can compete in Novice A, since the dog I co-owned has been gone for several years now. Apparently the "B" rule only applies to living dogs with obedience titles.) We ended up getting a 95; she dinged us a point here and there for a little lagging on the heeling. With more practice and some refinement, we could definitely enter and at least have a shot at finishing in the ribbons.

After the New Year, all of us in Novice Rally will return for Novice Competition Rally. We'll have one Advanced dog in the class with us who will be working off-lead, even though the rest of us will still be working on-lead. It should be helpful to watch her, though. Seamus seems to like working off-lead well enough, though I still wouldn't trust him not to take off if we were to work in an outdoor ring.

We missed our other graduation from last week, the one from our regular Novice obedience class. I ended up getting tied up overlong at work, to the point where I could never have made the class in time. Dale and Tuck went, and they received their diploma and bag of goodies -- but no mortarboard this time. Our Novice class and the Open class that meets after ours will stage run-throughs for Novice and Open for the next few weeks, and Seamus and I hope to show up for those. It will be a while before we go into the regular obedience ring -- we have the concepts, but need more precision if we ever hope to compete -- plus we really like Rally much better.