Enough With Everything Already!

And people wonder why I call him "Shameless"...

Enough With the Friggin' Skunks Already!

Seems funny to be talking about it now, but last Sunday we had yet another visitation from those strange black-and-white kitties. That morning, it was brightly sunny when I let the dogs outside... and what should I see wandering drunkenly around the backyard but another good-sized specimen of Stenchius Polecattius?!

Charlie and Seamus spotted it immediately and commenced to stampeding the fence, doing their best sheepdogs-of-the-Baskervilles impressions. Seamus tried to climb over the fence. Dinah bounded behind first one boy and then the other, barking excitedly because they were excited. Meanwhile, the skunk staggered around in circles, stopping to gaze in befogged amazement at the three lively noisemakers gyrating before him.

Skunks are nocturnal; you're not supposed to see them in daylight. If you do, they're rabid, they're roadkill, or they're waking up from a long winter's nap and are deeply disoriented (just like me before my morning caffeine). I called the animal control officer, who happened to be up and reading his Sunday paper. He assured me that the skunk was probably experiencing Case #3 -- sleepy rather than rabid -- and that it should be back in hiding within a couple of hours. If not, he advised, I should call him back, and he'd come out to shoot it. Mind you, I'm all for live-and-let-live, but not where rabies or the safety of my little canine/feline family is concerned.

Charlie has an iron-clad recall; he returned the second I called him, with Dinah still bouncing at his heels. (Dinah's recall isn't quite as solid -- she still subscribes to the independent school of thought that requires a good reason for anything. She doesn't want to miss out on any reward that Charlie might get, though.) Seamus, the dog I'm actually working with in obedience, possesses the power to humiliate me at any time. He has a fine "laboratory recall," but the perverse little bugger enjoys screwing with me at the worst possible times in real-life situations. I worry that someday he would happily run in front of an oncoming Hummer just because he enjoys defying me.

True to his usual methods, Seamus refused to come when I called him, forcing me to chase him around the dog yard until I cornered him and hauled him bodily up the stairs away from the skunk. This is not a method I ordinarily employ for training recalls, but there was no time for subtlety. I cursed; he barked. It's a miracle my neighbors' windows didn't crack from the long strings of cuss words that escaped me in the process.

Once back inside, Seamus's recall became rapid enough when it came time for him to take a nice ride in the car to rally class. You're think he was trained, forgoodnessake! We departed, glancing back at the yard as we pulled away to see whether the skunk had left.

By the time we returned from class, the little stinker (the skunk -- not Seamus, the other stinker) had apparently regained its senses and scuttled away. Good friggin' riddance, I say. Don't come back.

Enough With the Weather Already, Too!



A few days ago, Dinah performed her ritual dance to celebrate mud season...

Mother Nature is toying with us these days as well. Approximately 48 hours ago, the thermometer read nearly 70 degrees, and we appeared to be celebrating our infamous fifth season here in Maine: Mud. Not five minutes after Greg finished cleaning the floors, the dogs commenced to bringing the outdoors indoors on their muddy little Beardie feet. The experience was nearly worthwhile, if only because we could open a couple of windows and could fetch the mail without having to bundle up first.

Scratch that. Yesterday, the latest installment in our weather saga fell out of the sky -- about a foot of it. Greg still has the intestinal fortitude to be happy to see snow at this time in the season, but I responded to it with approximately the same the same exclamations of joy as the ones I'd used on the skunk.

A Very Funny 9:40

Most of the time, I make fun of "aren't-we-precious" stuff about knitting and needlework (like the endless rain of mediocre knitting-shop mysteries), but this is a Wicked Funny Christopher-Guest-style "mockumentary" about knitters vs. crocheters. If you have 9 minutes and 40 seconds to kill and a sense of humor, take a look. (Oh -- and this video is even cooler because the Knit Cafe and Lettuce Knit are featured in it...)

Life Stinks! or: Yucky Chucky

Charlie got skunked a couple of nights ago. Our dog fence is secure enough to keep varmints out and our dogs in, but poor Chuckles managed to get sprayed in the face anyway. I theorize that either he was standing downwind when the skunk nailed somebody else in the yard, or the skunk got so tired of Charlie's barking that it ambled over to the fence and gave him a nice big faceful of Shut the Hell Up.

Here's the best part: Since Charlie was barking his fuzzy brown fool head off at the time, a respectable portion of the spray got him right in the open mouth. If you think dog breath is bad, try dog breath flavored with skunk stink sometime!

Celeste, our wonderful emergency backup groomer, comforted us when we called to see (read: beg) whether she could clean Sir Charles up for us. (Her shop is several miles closer to us than the closest grocery store, so she's easier to get to than anyplace that sells hydrogen peroxide for do-it-yourself jobs.) She told us to bring him on down yesterday afternoon, and she had just the right formula available to restore him to his normal, sweet-smelling self.

She was right, of course. A couple of hours later, she had transformed Puppy Le Pew into a handsome, clean, nicely-scented version of himself. The only problem she mentioned was that she had nothing to take the skunk stink out of his breath, and she had to hold her own breath when he kissed her as she soaped him. (You really had to have been there, I'm sure...)

And in Yarn News...

Sue's mittens are done! (Photo to follow.) I love the brown-sugar color of this yarn. The size of the strand got a little scrawny for #7 needles toward the end of the yarn ball, so I'm not completely satisfied with the top of the second mitten. I have another ball of bulky-weight yarn from the same spinner in a black-brown-white tweed that I'm going to attempt next. Those should make warmer mittens than the brown-sugar Shetland wool. If Sue likes both pairs, she's welcome to both.

In the Interest of Absolute Accuracy...

I have an erratum to report. Earlier on in the blog someplace I mentioned that Greg was preparing orchestral parts of Arkadia for the Holyoke Symphony -- but he's doing the orchestral arrangement of Water instead. My bad.

Mother Nature is a B***h Sometimes

Dinah enjoying the nice muddy ground on Thursday, just before the last snow. Look at those feet!

Oh, I am soooooo annoyed. Seamus and I were pumped to try for our first Rally Advanced leg yesterday at the Collie Club of Maine show. We ended up getting dumped with snow yesterday morning -- enough so getting on the road to Portland would have been a bad idea, since this town seems to feel that plowed roads are for sissies -- and so we had to stay home. Eating the entry fee was a pain, but not as much as knowing that we would have shown under a good obedience/rally judge, with all our friends and our instructor there to cheer us on. Seamus and I got our first Rally Novice leg at that show last year, and I was beginning to like the tradition. Now I have to find other trials to enter that aren't happening at the same time as conformation shows. BAH.



Make-Your-Own Yarn Stash

I'm planning to take Dinah to the National Capital Bearded Collie Club show next month. I got to chatting about that with an old Beardie buddy in the area who came up to the SPA Knit & Spin event a couple of weekends ago. She's offered to give me a spinning wheel she picked up in a trade a while ago -- she's bringing it to the dog show and tucking it into my vehicle for the drive home. Guess this means I'll be learning to spin next. (Pam is coming out to visit in June sometime. Although we'll probably spend a lot of the time on the road in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, I'm hoping she'll give me a lesson or two on the spinning wheel before we leave town.)

If All Else Fails, Knit

There's really only one thing to do when the weather cramps your style as badly as yesterday's storm did to me: pull out the needles and knit. I picked up a couple of skeins of lovely handspun, undyed wool in a brown-sugar shade for Sue's mittens. Because it's a handspun, the yarn varies in thickness quite a bit, so the knitted fabric is not perfectly even -- but I think it's really attractive, and I love the texture. Sue will like the fact that she can wear them to the barn without having to wash them every single day. (By the way, if you go to visit Sue's blog, you'll see not only some really great photos of the landscape and of her latest quilt, but also the beginning cuff of her first pair of mittens!) It took a bit of searching to find undyed yarn that wasn't white, but when I found some, I had a great time looking at all of the natural shades out there. I really wanted the black tweed Jacob yarn, but there wasn't enough of it to make a pair of mittens... so I went for the brown-sugar yarn instead. Later on, I'll dig the label out of my knitting bag and report back as to the breed of sheep that produced it.

Mitten #1 is almost done. It needs only a thumb (actually, half a thumb) to become complete. With a little luck, I should be well into the second mitten by the time the weekend's over.

Socks are coming along as well. Sock #2 of my blue-and-purple Sockotta pair needs a foot and a toe, and then that pair's done. (With regard to my embarrassingly large sock yarn stash, that's one pair down and 77 to go.) I've even cast on the cuff for a pair of socks for Greg in charcoal-gray Wildfoote yarn. The Trekking socks are still in the bag someplace -- one sock done, one ripped out and needing re-starting. That yarn is so pretty that I can't ignore those socks for too long.

I shipped off the Manos cotton ribbed scarf to Susannah, who is madly in love with it. She says she's put a box in the mail to us, and I wouldn't cry if I doscovered a few more skeins of Manos cotton in there to make her more stuff. The yarn is pure pleasure to work with, and the knitted fabric is so soft you just want to cuddle up with it.

I'd knit Susannah anything she wanted at this point, anyway -- she bought me one of these as a belated birthday present. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you'll see what I mean. There's plenty of room in one of those bags to hold many, many skeins of Manos cotton.

Happiness Is a Busy Man (And Other Stuff)

Greg is wildly busy these days. The Holyoke Symphony has requested his orchestral piece Arkadia to perform this season. Up until now he's been self-publishing, but it's time to get a bigger company to handle the process of cranking out all those parts (50-80 at a time).

He's also working on the CD of sax quartets with four other composers and the New Hudson Sax Quartet from New York. They'll record it sometime this summer at Town Hall in NYC, and it'll probably be on the market early next year.

He also has other performances of his pieces coming up, and I've lost count as to what is being done where. He took a leave of absence from BU this semester so he could get all the work done, plus finish up a brass quintet and another piece that have ensembles waiting to play it. The brass quintet will be premiered at Carnegie Recital Hall -- I forget when.

Shout Out!

A shout out to Sarah and Storm, who came by to visit the blog this week. Storm is one of Dinah Moe's buddies on Dogster. He and Sarah were lucky to find each other after Storm was left homeless by Hurricane Katrina. They romp together out in San Berdoo, CA, where there are no hurricanes to scare poor innocent Beardies.

Wish Us Luck!

Geez, it seemed like such a long ways away, but... Seamus and I are shooting for our very first Rally Advanced leg at the Collie Club of Maine's trial this coming Friday. Advanced is performed all off-lead, which makes it a particular challenge after doing Novice all on-lead. I'm hoping very hard that our cross-training in agility helps us with this part, and that the judge might accidentally forget to put an offset figure 8 on the course. Keep your fingers crossed for us, won't you?

Congratulations to Sampson and his mom Dale for persevering through the CGC course and passing the test!

Mitten-O-Mania Continues

Shortly after I posted about my newfound fascination with mittens, Sue dropped by the blog. One thing led to another, and now not only am I about to start making a pair of mittens from natural undyed wool for Sue, but she herself has taken up mitten knittin'. Way to go, Sue -- we want pictures of your first finished pair!

Wintertime Blues (and Purples, and Pinks...)

Aren't they pretty? These are my very-first-ever mittens, made from Peace Fleece yarn and using their Simple Mittens pattern. I can already feel my fingers itching to knit another pair... but more on that later. (Yes, they're the same size -- but they still need to be blocked.)

This past weekend, my friend Fran and I decided to check out the Spa Knit & Spin event up at the Doubletree in Portland. I'd only found out about it when I received an email from Central Yarn Shop talking about the shuttle they were running from the hotel to their shop and back. I saw the word "yarn" and dashed off an email to Fran: "Want to do something naughty?"

Anyway, we didn't know a soul there, but we had a blast! There were knitters and spinners all over the lobby, in the halls, in the rooms... everywhere. We missed the greeting table on the way in, but we sure didn't miss the vendors' area!

I swear I went into complete yarn overload. I can walk into a big yarn shop and still keep my wits about me, but this area carried hand-dyed and -painted yarns and fibers that you don't usually stumble across in a store or online. It was truly nice to be able to support New England fiber artists and to be able to bring home things you wouldn't see just anyplace. I was good, though -- I only brought home one skein of sock yarn, but it's a doozy. Go take a look at Amy's Spunky Eclectic site and The Woolen Rabbit. If these colorways don't make your fingers itch to knit, then you surely must be dead.

Remember when I said I was looking around for my next pair of mittens? They found me. One of Amy's thrummed mitten kits followed me home, as did a skein of Skinny Sock yarn. (No, it wasn't one in the Dinah colorway, but it should have been!)

Fran brought home a lovely Lantern Moon knitting bag in multicolored brocade. I found the size 5 shortie dpns I'd been looking for. All in all, it was a successful hunting trip.

They're Not Dogs, They're Pupsicles

We got dumped on again last week, on Valentine's Day. (I'm sure at least half the guys in the county were silently thanking Mother Nature for getting them out of Valentine's Day dinners...) This time, we ended up with about 18-20" of snow. The pups, of course, were thrilled to bits.



Seamus couldn't be happier about having nice fresh snow to break-dance in.



Charlie thinks the world is his snow-cone.



Dinah spent the morning at the beauty parlor, and came home to greet her adoring public.

Warm Hands, Hot Needles

Dale can crank out mittens like nobody's business. She always seems to have a pair in progress somewhere, or one just finished. Since I don't tend to wear mittens much (I'm really more a glove kind of gal), I've never really had the burning desire to make them in the same way as I did socks. I couldn't wait to learn how to make socks, and there's always at least one pair in some stage of construction in my knitting "bucket."

That has changed a little bit since my friend Fran and I took a mitten-knitting class up at Rosemary's a couple of weeks ago. We had ourselves a grand old time (aside from the snowstorm we had to drive through on the way home). Mittens work up quickly and they're wicked easy to make. I may not wear them much myself (though the dark peacock blue shade of Peace Fleece I chose for my class pair is so beautiful you can taste it), but now I envision myself spewing forth pairs upon pairs of mittens from my blazing needles. My niece and nephew each need pairs (plus extras in case of loss), for sure. So does everyone else in my family, and in the neighborhood, and... If I were a faster knitter, I'd be leaving pairs of mittens on doorsteps, ringing the bell, and running away.

Not only that, but the basic mitten pattern looks awfully plain in just one color. I've caught myself scanning the available worsted-weight wool in the house and thinking about how nice some patterned mittens might look. Oh, and flip-top mittens at that, since I still want the use of my fingers at times, in ways that wearing mittens just won't permit. Extra-long cuffs? Yeah, those too...

I'll shoot a picture of my first pair and post them sometime soon. You can see where this mania got started.

It's not that I need more yarn, in worsted weight or any other. My current stash is almost embarrassing. After I counted enough balls/skeins of sock yarn in my collection to make an easy 78 pairs, I missed the additional bag of yarn that was hiding under a couple of other projects. Although I haven't had the nerve to make an exact tally yet, my guess is that the discovery of this additional stash will put me above to 100-pair mark without every trying too hard.

I'm not saying I need to go completely cold turkey in the yarn-buying department, but at least the next dozen pairs have to come straight from my stash before I can even make room for any more yarn. Sure, I know people (many of whom are reading this blog) whose personal stashes make mine look like Charlie Brown's bag of Hallowe'en candy ("I got a rock"), but I've amassed more of the stuff than anyone who has only been knitting for 3-odd years should have collected. I was able to adopt out a cone and a half of Brown Sheep Bulky to Dale, but that barely made an open spot in the Brown Sheep collection.

Greg has asked me to make him a pair of socks, which is a pretty neat thing. I typically make the first of any type of knitted article for myself, so I can live with whatever mistakes I've made during the learning process. Now that I've made several pairs of socks and even given a couple of pairs as gifts, I feel confident that I can create a pair for Greg that he'll actually be seen wearing. I showed him the two balls of dark-gray Jawoll I'd acquired, and he didn't wince much.

Gregory Hall Does Carnegie Hall

Speaking of Greg, he's been hard at work on the Brass Quintet of late, while he's waiting to hear what shakes out in the schedule for the upcoming CD of sax quartets. A trumpeter he's been corresponding with has mentioned possibly playing the piece at Carnegie Recital Hall this spring. Sounds like an auspicious place for a debut to me.

A Training Breakthrough

Seamus and I have been taking three classes a week for the past month and a half or so. Things just happened to have worked out that way -- we got into the competitive agility class in Portland that we'd been hoping to join, plus we have the Saturday class we enjoy, and Sunday is Rally Day. If it seems as though I've been spending half my time at one dog class or another, it's because... well... I have.

The work is paying off, though. Seamus's attention and my handling skills have both sustained a sudden increase, probably due to the fact that we're in class three nights out of every seven. Even though each class is distinct, they all have one main thing in common: they require teamwork. Seamus and I have been becoming a better team in the past few weeks. I'm very proud of the little guy, and I hope the additional work is helping me become the kind of handler who can help him be his best. I'm beginning to relax, and I'm even enjoying the competition class. Some of the other handlers are even talking to me now.