my first knitting post: BLANKET!

My first knitting post has been a long time in the making--nearly a year! That's the problem with blogging about knit gifts: you can't talk about them until they're finished. But it is finished! Now for the part where I cheat: you should really read Kate's wonderful post on the same project, which even includes an animation with a pop-up Me. She has been the official photographer of this adventure, though I have some pictures of the process, too, from first set of stitched-up squares:


To pre-stitching lay-out, where you can see me at the top holding Blondie back:


Here's the finished beast, with my compatriots, without my head:

a holiday slide show

I'm going to let the pictures speak on this one, and I will only say what I did:
-I chose a tree, which Chris cut down
-I made four dozen cookies and two pies
-I gave and received
-I played A LOT of Guitar Hero. And Nintendo Wii.

Happy Holidays

Some Thanksgiving pictures

Before going into Blondie's trip to Indiana for Thanksgiving, I just have to recommend this turkey-cooking method for those who eat turkey.

Cook on a charcoal grill for about 15 minutes per pound. Add about twenty new coals every hour. It gets a delicious smoky flavor in the skin, and the meat stays nice and juicy. I imagine it would be even better if it were brined first.

I also made a pie. Thanks to Andrea's inspiration, Igot a little bit more ambitious with my decorative flourishes:



Blondie got to spend a lot of time with his Uncle Mozart.

As this photo suggests, they are often at odds. Mozart likes to spend the first several hours of any visit barking at Blondie when he comes too close, while Blondie takes that time to remind himself that Mozart doesn't like to wrestle. But eventually they get some good games of chase going (Blondie eventually lapping Mozart when they run in circles through the rooms of the house).

They also share a mission when it comes to monitoring feast preparation:


And greeting people at the door:

Blondie also discovered that the upstairs of the house provides an even better vantage for observing the details of kitchen activity:

Blondiesaurus

Normally I get up to feed and walk Blondie at 7am. I feed him, go back to sleep for 20 minutes, then walk him. But on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Chris has to get up at 6am for work. He usually feeds Blondie just before he leaves. And then....

Blondie has a variety of strategies for requesting his morning walk. They include sitting on my head, stepping on my head, biting my hands, chasing his tail on the bed, and trilling like the dilophosaurus in the Jurassic Park movie.

Obviously this last one is the main subject of this post. How does my dog make these amazing noises? One website classifies dog vocal behavior thus: barking, whimpering, muttering, and growling. I think the trilling, like the sound the dilophosaurus makes (a combination, acc. Wikipedia, of a swan, a hawk, a howler monkey, and a rattlesnake), is some combination of less glamorous animal noises, perhaps dog, cat, squirrel, pigeon, and green pigeon.

I tried to find a good video of another dog doing this on YouTube, but I got distracted by these golden retriever puppies rocking out to the Beatles.

First Day of School

Blondie's first day of school was so action-packed that I didn't manage to get any pictures. Here we are on the way, though:


Though we are starting behind (like a kid who was home-schooled until the third grade), we are catching up quickly. This week we're working on "push-ups" (sitting and lying down), "leave it," a.k.a., resistance to great temptation, and this trick called "around," where he walks around behind us and sits to our side. The last one is the most likely to cause total toddler melt-down mode: Blondie will jump up on the sofa and flop down to signal that the training session is over.

Halloween came early this year

I haven't posted for awhile and had sort of been planning to let the blog go. But then a demon dog TP-ed our apartment. We arrived home to discover that Blondie has figured out how to open doors. He, in turn, discovered that the closet where we keep his tennis ball when we're not around (because he needs to be monitored when playing with it) also hides all the toilet paper.


I wish I could say that he is hiding under the bed as an act of contrition. But no. He slithered under there to go after his tennis ball. This is why he can't play with his tennis ball on his own--he will go to great lengths to retrieve it from wherever it rolls.

Alaska

He has an appetite for literature

Literally!


I think that in this next one you can see the title of the tome really well.
Yup, it's "Surviving Your Dog's Adolescence," a moderately useful dog-training guide that Chris's mom found at a used book store and gave us. Well, it is no more. We had to throw it away, because every time we came home we found bits of it scattered all over the floor, and Blondie is afraid of the dustpan. Besides, it didn't say anything about what to do when your dog starts eating your dog training guide. That would be too meta.

We keep a lot of books in our living room, which is his room, and so far the only other one to suffer a similar fate is my copy of Jessie Fauset's "There Is Confusion." Fortunately, he only chewed off the cover and a few pages of Thadious Davis's foreword!

Arrrrr, he be walkin the plank!

As I have said, just before we left for Indiana, Blondie looked like this:


But that splint was on the wrong leg. A second opinion prescribed pain medication and lots of swimming, which Blondie did beautifully from land:

At sea, however, getting into the water was slightly more difficult.


We got him a doggie life jacket so that we could pull him out of the water by its handle:


But he still had trouble jumping into the water from height of the pontoon. The Gacks took action. A stick of 1x8, a few carpet scraps, an old life jacket, and some staple-gunning later...


we attached the creation to the side of the boat.


And, as my niece likes to say, ta-DAA! After a few minor adjustments, Blondie was getting on and off like a pro!


We have given Blondie some new middle names. Now his name is Blondie Seadog Sparrow, plus my last name, followed by Chris's. We were inspired by Chris's cousin's daughters' dog, who goes by Blackie (he looks a lot like Blondie, apparently), but whose full set of given names is Beethoven Blackie Christine.

Curbed!

Here's where I would post a pic of Blondie with his cute purple splint, but the computer here can't read my sandisk, so it will have to wait until we return to Chicago.

Blondie seems to have a broken leg, or something else wrong with his leg. Our Chicago vet took x-rays and then splinted his *left* leg, even though he's had an apparent problem with his right leg for several weeks. But, he got the splint wet (here's where I would post pictures of him swimming), and then he resumed limping on his *right* leg again. So, we took him to the vet here in Indiana to get a second opinion. Definitely the right leg, says she. And she prescribed pain meds, no splint, and lots of swimming!

Thanks to the wonders of doggie-profen, we now have our energetic pooch back again.
I think he's sleeping right now, but that's because he spent the morning playing (by himself) with his tennis ball. I have to try to get video of this. In the meantime, I'll post all manner of photographic evidence of life with Blondie upon our return to Chicago Sunday.

sick as a dog

Blondie has been sneezing like crazy for the last two days, and also "reverse sneezing." He kept me up half the night on Sunday, because his sneezing fits come in threes. It is awfully cute when a dog sneezes, but, being a health alarmist, I am taking him directly to the vet, since he did have kennel cough just a month ago, and sneezing can be a symptom of pneumonia in dogs, and he has been acting a little bit subdued. Except when he sees a squirrel.

We're also going to have his shoulder checked out, because he has this weird problem where it gets all stiff when he's been lying down. I hope it's nothing....I'm a worse hypochondriac for my dog than I am for myself!

Chris's daemon

so haughty!

no, this is not my baby

I got to hang out with Ryan and Dash at my reunion, and here's proof.

We've started taking Blondie to the dog park in Wicker Park. His favorite game is chase. It goes like this:

Step 1: Find another dog, preferably one that is slightly larger than you.
Step 2: Taunt and wrestle with this dog until it runs away.
Step 3: Chase it. If it stops running, repeat step 2. If dog won't run, repeat step 1.


It really tires him out!

my daemon

I start a blog!

Now that I have a dog, I have two things to share with the world: pictures of my dog,
and pictures of the things I knit (TK). Hence my blog, named for the Busters song from their eponymous album, a song that was named, in a roundabout way, for me.