Oh yes, I have found a new love. Love at first sight, it was.

What’s this? I can hear you thinking. Mom in love? Who is it? Someone tall, dark, handsome…. ?

Actually, it’s something thin, stretchy and brightly colored. It’s Cascade Yarns Fixation, an incredibly cool, stretchy, mostly-cotton-but-with-elastic yarn.

You will remember I picked up some in lime green, turquoise and hot pink last Saturday at Tangle. I decided to knit a swatch in various colors just to see how it was to work with. Usually swatching is one of my least favorite things to do. But this time I swatched and swatched and swatched with different color combinations and different stitches, until I finally decided I’d better stop swatching and actually decide what to knit while I still had some yarn left to knit with. The picture is my swatch. The saturation is not far off. The colors are really bright. Click for the big version.

I have, since getting to know my new love, become incredibly inspired by the “Color Socks” section of Socks Socks Socks. Three colors of this yarn, I’m thinking, are just too few…

OK. Who am I kidding? I’m like a junkie with a major jones on, and I need my fix. Now.

I ran to Tangle in Lake Oswego as soon as I could today after work and grabbed up the two colors I hadn’t picked up on Saturday — a light blue and a peachy pink. More! I cried to Alice, the dealer shop owner, as I lay twitching at her feet. I must have more!

Not to worry, Alice told me. There are many more colors being shipped on Friday. She promised to call when they arrived. Purple is coming! And more greens! And mixed colors!

I can see why this stuff is called fixation. I’m warning you fellow knitters… put this on your needles at your own risk! You can’t stop at one!

My pocketbook might be in serious trouble. 😉

As I’ve been promising, this is a pic of the Mermaid socks for E. The one on the left is the toe flattened out to show that the spirals go all the way to the end.

I’m kinda proud of that effect, actually. Remember that the pattern I’m sort of using is for a top-down sock, so I’m knitting it backward.

I’m also rather taken with the way that the colors in the Mermaid yarn are swirling in the opposite direction of the pattern spiral. It will be interesting to see if that continues as I work my way up the foot.

If I can get myself interested in working on it, that is. I like them, but I’m going to like them better finished. For some reason I’m feeling uninspired by them. I keep promising myself that I’ll knit mermaid socks at lunch. Today I forgot to take them with me to work. Again. When I got home, they glared balefully at me. Tomorrow, I promised them. Tomorrow, for sure!

And this is the progress on the shirttail sweater. I’m just about ready to start the decreases for the neckline in the front. This picture is the back. You can see the two front pieces off to each side.

The pic is a little blurry because Moo Cow reach up with her paw and tried to pull the left front off the counter just as I snapped. And then the camera battery, which I had been nursing along as I took the other pictures, gave up the ghost.

It’s not easy working with any fiber art while living with a fiber-obsessed cat. The other two cats don’t care about my yarn. Kidd can sit in my lap while I knit and never even look at my work. If Moo sat in my lap while I knitted, she’d eat the fruits of my labor. One emergency yarn-ectomy was enough.

OK. I’m going to try to work on the sweater (I want to wear it this fall, after all) and the mermaid socks.

But… many new colors are coming….

When I rolled my Noro Kochoran into center-pull balls, I started a new ball whenever I ran into a knot. So imagine my surprise last night as I knit along on my sweater and suddenly found a loose end in one of the balls.

Then I noticed that there was a matching end trailing out from my knitting tote. And both the tote end and the sweater end were… wet?

Then I saw a little furry white and brown tabby face peering out from under my chair.

Moo Cow, you see, has a string fetish. She will go to great lengths to gobble up any string left around the house. My “free kitten” has already cost me $500 in emergency vet bills after she snacked on the drawstring to #1 Son’s PJs. Since we don’t want a repeat performance, we are very careful about anything long and thin that’s not meant to be eaten. Presents in my house have no ribbons. Hoodies with drawstrings are hung up in a closed closet. Ditto my yarn stash. My UFOs are up high on a bookshelf where Moo can’t get and are in tote bags.

When knitting socks I’ve kept the yarn next to me in my chair. Moo hasn’t shown much interest in my sock knitting, even when she’s jumped up on my lap to demand hugs when I was in mid-knit. I was lulled into a false sense of safety. She was just biding her time…

Sweaters are bigger than socks, and my sweater project is in a bigger tote that doesn’t fit well next to me on the chair. Last night I had the tote resting down on the floor. And apparently the yarn was just slack enough for Moo to hook it from under the chair. I’ll keep an eye on her for a few days to make sure she’s OK, but from the length of the remaining yarn ends it appears she didn’t do more than slice through the strand. Now I’ll need to try new arrangements to keep my yarn safe. Once she finds some string, Moo is as single minded as a bloodhound on a fresh scent. And since she knows with all certainty that the entire world is present only to do her bidding, keeping what she wants away from her can be a challenge.

Today at lunch I ran over to Button Emporium and found some great buttons for my sweater. I’ll try to get some pics up this weekend, if I have time amidst the graduation madness.

While I was in the neighborhood I stopped in at Knit Purl and augmented my stash of Blue Moon soft rock. I’ve got this sock idea rattling around in my brain…

Other people in the world might have a quiet, leisurely morning. I’m not one of them. This is how my morning schedule (on weekdays) typically goes:

5:30 AM — wake up call (free with my voice mail service). I ignore this.

5:45 AM — alarm goes off. I ignore this.

5:50 AM — three cats (11 lbs, 12-1/2 lbs and 14 lbs respectively) start jumping up and down on top of me demanding breakfast. Pavlov’s dogs salivated at the ring of a bell. With my cats, it’s the alarm. I don’t ignore this.

5:55 AM — wake up #1 Son

5:57 AM — start the first pot of coffee (we have small pot)

6:00 AM — wake up #1 Son

6:02 AM — feed the cats

6:05 AM — wake up #1 Son

6:02 AM — pour coffee — 1 cup for me, one for #1 Son. Start the second pot.

6:05 AM — wake up #1 Son

6:10 AM — hop in the shower, keeping fingers crossed that #1 Son is actually awake and getting out of bed.

6:20 AM — raise the roof in an effort to wake up #1 Son

Are you seeing a pattern here? The end result is a later start out of the house than I would like.

My question is this: What do you do to get your teenagers out of bed in the morning?

I’ve never had an ice-maker before. One was available for the 20-year-old, now-defunct fridge, but we didn’t have it installed. I have one now.

Did you know that when ice drops from the ice maker into the bin, it sounds almost exactly like a gun shot?

Can you imagine how three particular cats who are not used to being shot at feel about that, especially when they’ve just settled down for a long, long nap… BANG!

There was lots of hubbub yesterday when the new fridge was delivered. The front door had to be removed from the hinges, so the cats had to be rounded up and stashed in my bedroom. My sideboard (full of antique dishes that belonged to my forebears and some of which are over 100 years old) had to be very quickly unloaded and moved to the side. What little food I had managed to preserve had to be unloaded from the freezer (the only cold place in the old fridge) very quickly.

And then it turned out that one of the delivery guys was allergic to cats.

But now I have coldness available. And my remaining food is at the appropriate temperature. And I have fresh, cold water available via the door of the fridge. And ice. BANG. And unhappy kitties.

Today I go grocery shopping and start looking for a water heater.

Have you ever just had one of those days? The kind where nothing at all goes right. The kind that go way beyond a bad hair day to the place where everything just merges into one big lump of ickness?

Well… OK… my day wasn’t quite that bad. Not quite.

The day, strangely enough, began around 11:15 pm last night. I was snuggled with one of the cats in my rocking chair in the family room, trying to keep my eyes open to watch a bit of the news. #1 Son paused in his homework to go out to the garage for something. When he came back inside, he called out “Mom! The door won’t shut!”

I can’t recall any time I’ve heard those words when it was a good thing.

True, the door from the house to the garage had been a little sticky lately. Just yesterday morning we’d had a discussion about squooshing a bit of wd40 into the lock. But when I finally got home yesterday, it was late, I wanted to watch Earthsea on the Sci Fi Channel, and I couldn’t find the wd40 in the garage.

The door, in retaliation, went from sticky to stuck. And the following conversation thus ensued:

Mom: Where’s the wd40?

#1 Son: In the garage.

Mom: Where in the garage?

#1 Son: I dunno. I’m sure I put it out there. Look on a shelf or something

Mom: I looked on a shelf. I looked on all the shelves. I looked everywhere. Is it in your room?

#1 Son: Dunno, mom. I think I put it back. It’s not in my room.

And that meant a trip to the store at 11:30 at night for wd40. When I returned, lubricant in hand, #1 Son met me at the door with our existing can of wd40.

It wasn’t in the garage. It was in his room.

Trying to feel thankful that the family now possessed probably more wd40 than we could reasonably expect to use for the rest of our lives, I also took the opportunity to mention (once again) that it’s easier to find things when one puts them away in their proper resting place. I was way too tired to make more of an issue of it that that.

At midnight I began squooshing the door lock with wd40.

1:30 am found me still at work on the door. By that time I had squooshed ad infinitum with no result, and was attempting to take the knobs off and remove the latch so that I could close the door. I could get the interior knob off, but the exterior knob was held firmly in place by the frozen latch. It refused to let go even when I left off squooshing in favor of prying with a screwdriver while swearing, and finally jiggling the latch and knob while pleading to both the lock and to any personal deity that cared to answer to please let go.

OK I said finally, I’m getting out the hammer and giving you a good whack.

Hammer in hand, I suddenly felt misgivings. I’d worked for 13 hours on Monday. It was 1:30 in the morning. I could barely keep my eyes open. I knew my judgement was not at its usual peak of perfection.

What if… what if whacking the latch with a hammer resulted in an even worse mess than the one I was in? What if I was forced to call in a locksmith and confess that I’d totally screwed up not only the latch, but maybe the whole door? What if, instead of costing the $100 or so for the locksmith, I had to spend a whole lot more to fix whatever damage might be caused by my well-meaning hammer blows?

I put the hammer away and joined the cats in bed.

Around 11:00 this morning, after my round of early meetings, I decided I might as well know the rest of the bad news and looked up “Locksmiths” in the yellow pages. But, I had the good fortune to call Precision Locksmith. And this was my conversation with the Nice Guy At Precision:

NGAP: How can I help you?

Mom: I’m having problems with my door lock. The latch seems to be frozen.

NGAP: Do you have a quickset lock? You probably do. Their most common point of failure is a frozen latch. We see it all the time. Just bring the latch in. We have replacements.

Mom: I can’t get it out of the door. The latch is stuck in the out position and won’t let go of the exterior knob.

NGAP: Just give it a good whack with a hammer.

Mom: OK… uh, are you sure it won’t cause more damage if I do that?

NGAP: No, ma’am, I’m never known that to happen. We could come out if you want, but really you can do this yourself.

OK… So, off I went, from downtown to Tigard. There was a brief stop at home to remove the interior doorknob, whack the latch a good one with my hammer (most common point of failure, take that!), pop off the exterior knob, remove the latch, and put the knobs back on so none of the pieces got lost. Then a quick dash across Beaverton to Precision Locksmith, where for the paltry sum of $7.50 I was able to acquire a replacement latch. Then back to Tigard to install the latch in the door with the knobs and make sure everything works right. Then back downtown for afternoon meetings. Whew.

But I’d really like to thank Precision Locksmith, because I fully expected to have to pay for a house call. They lost the $$$ for that, but they gained a public thankee and a lifelong customer!

OK… the day looks a little better now.

[ed 12/15/04 6:55 am PT] When returning home yesterday after a hard day’s work, there was not nearly enough appreciation from #1 son of the smooth action of the newly installed door latch. Even when I pointed it out and demonstrated how the door could now be closed with one finger. Sheesh. The children of today…

What a week. Four-day work weeks always seem long, for some reason. Maybe because I usually have to try to fit 5 days worth of stuff in?

When I crawled exhausted into bed last night I found a wet spot courtesy of one of the cats and ended up doing laundry at midnight. None of them ‘fessed up, but I suspect Phoebe since that’s her usual reaction when she is pissed at me about something. What I can’t figure out is why she would be pissed. But, at least she missed the pillows this time. And thank god for my extra-large front-loading washing machine, which will actually do my matress pad, both sheets and my quilt (all queen sized) in one load. I had a hard time justifying the expense when I bought it, but it’s been worth every single penny.

On the craft front, I have more projects than I can shake a stick at.

My friend M asked me to add her stepdaughter’s name to a Christmas Stocking, and I foolishly decided that, instead of quickly embroidering it in stem stitch, I’d get fancy and hand-sew gold ribbon on. There are 6 letters in the name, and M wants it on both sides. By next Saturday.

I still have 16 wreaths to crochet by 12/20 or so.

I showed K my first attempt at handmade felt awhile back, and she commented that she’d love to have a throw made from it. And I fully intended to do that. But obviously that’s not going to happen this year by Christmas. So I am making her booties instead because her feet and ankles get cold at night. At least that shouldn’t take too long.

Next week, I’m hoping, will be better.