Still Life, With Cats

While Sherman was confined in the library this past week, I set up the extra pet heating pad in one of the cat beds and lined the edges with a rolled up knit afghan, thus creating a cozy little nest because I was worried he might get cold in there all by himself oh shut up, you spoil your pets too, don’t deny it.

Anyway, where was I. So we let Sherman out of the room this morning because CLEARLY he is feeling just fine, but I didn’t get a chance to dismantle everything I’d set up for him. Turns out I may not be able to any time soon, because pretty much the nanosecond the door was open, Nutmeg waddled in, spotted a new heated bed, and claimed it for her own.

It’s a hard life these cats lead. Apparently that ‘new’ bed is going to stay right where it is.

And speaking of Sherman, last night I had a group of friends over, and while we were all sitting in the living room, nibbling cookies and chatting, I mentioned that we were feeling a little bit disappointed that none of the cats were showing any interest in climbing the tree this year.

No sooner had I uttered those words than Sherman came charging into the room at top speed, and dove into the tree, settling in about halfway up so he could keep an eye on us. It was as if he’d been lurking, waiting for me to bring up just that topic so he could prove me wrong.

Happy Holidailies!

Continuing the ‘Tour de Sock’ catch-up, fresh from the ‘joy’ (HA HA HA) of beaded socks, my team all eagerly awaited the final pattern. I was excited because it was to drop the weekend of Labor Day, which means I’d have three whole days to work on just these socks, and surely that would be plenty of time.

And then the pattern dropped and….wow. Um. yeah.

So I’m normally a fan of colorwork – I can do it pretty quickly and it can turn out some really lovely things. But this one…this one had places where you were to carry 3 strands, and sometimes even 4, at a time. This was going to be one really, really dense sock.

I started working on this, my enthusiasm significantly dampened, but still determined to make it work. Three hours later, the time it usually would have taken me to whip up half a plain vanilla sock, I had barely made it past the cuff. I checked in with the rest of my team, and one by one, they were all chiming in. Nope. Not happening. They tried it, they hated it, they were done.

And I looked at that stupid cuff and pondered spending the next several days swearing at a stupid pair of socks that I was never, ever going to wear anyway because of the thickness, and I remembered that I signed up for Tour de Sock because it was going to be fun and (yes, even with the stupid beads) so far it had been, but not if I kept going. There was no penalty for just saying enough is enough. I’d already knit five pairs of socks, and taken ninth place for two of them, which is really great (sleep is for the weak!), and nothing would happen if I just said ‘screw it’ and made something else instead.

So I did. I joined the rest of my team in declining to take part in the triple- and quadruple-stranded insanity (and considering that by the time the deadline had hit, only 36 people had finished, out of nearly a thousand participants who’d originally signed up, we clearly weren’t the only ones who took a look at that pattern and said ‘oh hell no’). And then I cast on for a completely different pair of socks by plucking a mosaic pattern out of one of my stitch books, and I made these socks for Richard. And thus the Summer of Socks was concluded for the year. Huzzah.

(I haven’t a clue what the yarn was that I used because *someone* whose name either rhymes with Herman or Schubert knocked the balls out of the bag where they were carefully placed to be safe from cats, and the balls fell on Nutmeg’s head, startling her so that she then proceeded to pee on them before skittering off, and I just gave up and threw the leftovers away, and also I’m too lazy to go try to figure out where I found the stitch pattern in the first place, but people, there’s a bazillion patterns on Ravelry so just go there and don’t ask me questions, okay?)

Last night, while lounging on the couch and waiting for trick-or-treaters to climb the stairs and ring the bell (I always feel bad for the littler ones because those front steps are kind of steep), Richard and I listened to a rebroadcast of the original radio program of War of the Worlds. Richard’s heard it before but for some reason, I never had (although I’ve read the book it’s based on, of course).

While the claims that the first airing of the radio drama in 1938 caused wide-spread panic are not true, the myth has continued to persist, and the radio drama itself has become part of west’s cultural heritage. And while we were listening, I noted to Richard that, in an era where social media wasn’t even a gleam in anyone’s eye, and the radio was the most common source of news, it’s easy to see why some listeners might have been understandably concerned.

And that got us to chatting about whether or not something like the radio drama could even *work* today, in the era of instant communication, across a wide variety of media platforms. Richard and I, years ago, took part in Blog Like It’s the End of the World Day a couple times, which was a lot of fun, but we haven’t done that in a very long time (well, except for when we were overrun with Daleks and when the giant mutant spiders attacked, but that was just me doing it by myself, for fun).

So….now I’m wondering. Would anyone else be interested in trying to do an homage to the original radio drama of War of the Worlds, for Halloween, 2018? My thinking is that everyone who participated would have to agree to stick to the plot of the both the book or the radio play, and work within those parameters (not just radio, of course, but any video/images/text done in the original style and theme), but using current media to spread the story over the course of the day. I’m not entirely sure how we’d all pull it off yet – this requires some thought – but it just feels like something that would be fun to try.