AARRGGHHH!!!!!!!!

**Update with Question: Is there any other cat in North America who does this?? Or is he the only one?
In vain have I struggled. Swallowed a gallon of Airborne and three bottles of Elderberry over the winter...apparently I let my guard down for one day too many and Young Typhoid visited sick with a respiratory "bug" of some kind. After my stomach illness I was not really up to taking my insane herbal concoctions, and during that time he visited, sick, and I acquired a cold. Colds and I are never friendly. They make a bee line for my chest and torment me with barking hoarse coughing which interferes with my sleep. I can barely even knit...

But I have gotten something done. Girl and I made three squares for Project Comforting Jef , an activity I highly recommend. All three are made from Valley Yarns Sugarloaf, colors 33115, 14111, and 34168. The stuff comes in a LOT of colors. The patterns for the two patterned squares were chosen at random; one is a slip stitch pattern from Barbara Walker's third treasury, pg 222, Crown of Candles, and the cable is from The New Knitting Stitch Library, pg80. I like this book for portability and variety. It felt very good to focus on someone besides myself!

Yesterday was a day for whining, complaining (I was just really tired and worn out) and getting the Longmeadow cardigan to the point where we can divide for front and back. Soon it will be done, and it and the pattern at the store where they belong. It will be perfect for tossing on over jeans or khakis on cool evenings, but dressy enough to go out over a cute little dress. It will also cost about $35 - $50 to knit up depending on size, which is marvelous, and part of why I LOVE Valley Yarns. (The quality of the yarn doesn't hurt either!) Very few of us can knit and not think about cost. The yarn is very soft and nice to work with, cotton and microfiber. The pattern will be available in five sizes...and so far it is so cute that I want one for myself, in black I think, or possibly 07 melon, or 05 fuschia. I may later change my mind. The closer they come to completion the more I dislike them, and once they are in the store I can't look at them without finding every minute flaw. It's a good thing I was not this hard on my biological children. My yarn children would suffer horribly if they had self esteem - they'd cry endlessly, "Mommy doesn't love me...."!!

I found this unfinished rattle in my grandmother's things and decided it must be duplicated for the Petite Born-Early. To that end I have begun recreation and pattern drafting. The initial phase is rather frustrating as you're crocheting a fairly small tube to make the handle bit, with a fairly small hook. But the product is worth the labor. It has a jingle bell under the hat which I think is probably prohibited by today's concerns for safety and choking risk, and I have been at pains to figure a way to get a bell or other noise maker into the thing "safely" as it really makes the thing come to life. It's so cuuuutte!!!

Last week we were doing this: ripping up a carpet where the dog had been incontinent for days before we noticed. She smells, the room smells, it took a few for the dog smell and ruined carpet smell to seperate. By the time Mr. Wonderful got home we'd done about a third. In the evening Typhus (he's the small one bent over my tool bag) and Opie (the bigger one, hiding behind the desk) went to work removing carpet tack strips while Omie (the kid is finally saying it - I am now "MeeMee"!!) and Girl focused on ripping up the remainder of the carpet. The kid works harder at two than his father did at 15, I swear. He hauled bits of carpet and underlay (the clean bits...) out onto the front porch and ordered "Bo-Pee" to take them to the garage with all the seriousness of a contractor. Here you can see him ably assisting Opie by removing all the tools from the tool bag one at a time, and delivering them to Opie, who then sneaks them back into the bag behind his little back, causing great concern - "I just took that to BoPee...How did it get HERE??". Oh to be two again...

Anyway - once we'd removed the carpet the dog got much sicker in a big hurry. Addisonians respond to stress by trying to croak. For three days I cleaned up endless nameless foul things. She saw the vet Saturday, who pronounced her healthy, with irritable bowel syndrome, not Addison's as the other vet had said previously. I was in disbelief as her clinical picture is that of an Addisonian. The vet did some bloodwork anyway, at my request. She called Monday to tell me that, based on the labs, perhaps Kioshi does have Addison's (well, Dr. M___ and Mommy were right after all!), and we can schedule a test to find out for certain. If she is proven to have Addison's the treatment appears to cost between $11-$30 a DAY. That's $4000 a year minimally, not including needed follow up labs and office visits, and a possible crisis which would run into the thousands for one incident. And Kioshi is too old to get Pet Insurance. I wish the meds were cheaper. But they're not. So - we'll skip the upsetting ACTH stim test that she'd hate, we'll keep her life as calm and stable as possible. If she were a young dog, and weighed significantly less, it might be a different story. My next dog, if there is a next dog, will weigh 10lbs, I swear. A ten pound dog would cost about $1.69 - $3.00 a day to treat for the same disease.

I love Lumber Liquidators! We've put in laminate flooring before, in our old home and my mother's home. One came from L.L. the other from Home Depot. My mother's I did by myself, much to her consternation - I think she was convinced that I was incompetent as a carpenter, and I really enjoyed the whole process of torturing her by using the radial arm saw while she stood by panicking. I also threw in an occasional "Ooopps...there's not supposed to be blood is there?" for my own amusement. Laminates are used extensively in Europe as floating floors where everything goes with you when you move but the plumbing. It goes in quickly, stands up to dog-abuse and kid-abuse, and this new stuff we got is made with a blueboard waterproof backing AND already has the underlay attached for ever faster and simpler installation. Home Depot had a lovely version for $3.77 a square foot. Lumber Liquidators had a comparable product...but for $1.69 a square foot!! I like the expensive stuff, and were it for a more public room I would probably be willing to spend the extra money. But we call this room "The Dog Room" for a reason, and I really don't think the dogs will notice that the L.L. version has less texturing, and 2mm less of the laminate surface. Well, Kioshi might...