Monthly Archives: September 2009

Weekend Roundup With Bonus Monday Material

Sushi Friday night! This was a long-awaited treat. We went to our favourite sushi restaurant with Jeff and Paze, and as we went out after the kids were in bed there weren’t tables when we arrived. We chatted at the bar for about half an hour or forty-five minutes, and when we finally got a table the chef sent over a treat for us as a thank you for being so patient. It was one of his personal creations, not on the menu, and was delicious: a roll of salmon around tuna and what may have been red snapper, all wrapped in nori and lightly sauteed so that the first five millimeters or so of the salmon were barely cooked, all drizzled with a gingery sesame-chili-green oniony sticky glaze that we all scraped up with our chopsticks after the roll was gone. Oh ye gods, it was all heavenly. The tiny bit of cooked salmon contrasted so beautifully in taste and texture with the raw. I want to be kept waiting for half an hour every time now. We also learned that they’re expanding! Finally, after a decade of going to this tiny restaurant that seats maybe thirty people, they’re taking over half of the next space in the mall, so we’ll be able to bring a party larger than four people, which currently strains the seating. (Perhaps they will also take reservations. You never know.) We’re very excited about this, not only for our benefit, but because it means the restaurant is doing so very well. They opened two new locations over the past few years, one in Vaudreuil and one in Laval, but this one has stayed tiny and intimate. I can’t say I’m thrilled with their switch in music from jazz classics to modern pop, but everything else more than makes up or it. Dinner was, of course, delicious.

Saturday morning I headed out to my cello lesson, which was pretty intense in the focusing department. It was also very physical in that we spent a lot of time talking about back muscles and doing various exercises in order to isolate their movement. I also got to choose between two pieces for my solo in the upcoming Christmas recital, and I chose another duet with M, a lovely two-cello arrangement of Mozart’s ‘Canzonetta sull’ aria‘ from Le nozze di Figaro. I get to play Susanna! The lesson was good, but by the time I headed home I was drained, exhausted, and dizzy, and when I got in I knew that I was going to be useless for the rest of the day. This was problematic because I’d scheduled a very necessary grocery run and various errands, most birthday-related, and then had to drive to the south shore through a detour around the reserve to get to my in-laws’ house for HRH’s mom’s birthday dinner. (HRH was being picked up by his dad that morning in order to go help put a new fence in.) Well, the day got shafted because I couldn’t focus enough to drive, which made me even more irritated than the original irritation about being downed by the fibro. The boy and I stayed home all afternoon, napping together, watching movies, and making cupcakes. In the end we rescheduled the birthday dinner for next Friday night and HRH’s dad brought him back home again, going above and beyond the call of duty by crossing the bridge and traveling the associated detour four times in total.

I was climbing walls by that point, so HRH insisted that we head out to make an appearance at Scott’s birthday gathering after the boy was in bed. As I didn’t have to drive I agreed, with the proviso that the moment I felt not-good we had to leave. Things went rather well, and there was excellent company. I spent a couple of hours watching people play the new Beatles Rock Band game while HRH drummed or sat out, and he even pulled off a very impressive vocal performance of ‘Yellow Submarine’. We came home to bed at a reasonable hour. Blade is to be commended for being the Responsible Adult On Site two nights in a row.

Sunday morning we went apple picking! I have never done this before. Formally, I mean; I’ve pulled an apple here and there from people’s trees to eat as a child, but I’ve never done the full-out trip to an orchard. We met the Murphy-Aubin clan at an “apple forest” near Oka and had an absolutely fabulous morning. The weather was glorious, the company was excellent, the apples were delicious, and the kids had a great time running around, up and down ladders, in and out of branches so laden with apples that they bent to touch the grass below. It was spectacular. I ate more apples in one day than I have over the past year, and every single one of them was indescribably delicious. We now have twenty pounds of apples. It was a lovely way to celebrate the first day of fall, although one day early.

Back home we napped, and then the boys took me to my group cello lesson, which was great fun. While I was there they did the groceries, then they picked me up and brought me home again. We had sausages and eggs for dinner, I called my mum to chat, and went to bed. I slept poorly again, though, and only got about four hours, which made Monday kind of hard.

The lack of sleep wasn’t the only thing making Monday hard. I opened my latest freelance assignment to find a 172,000-word manuscript presented in a font composed entirely of capital letters. (I am serious. The author screamed this novel. All five hundred pages of it.) Not only that, the classification was wrong; it wasn’t a fantasy novel, but religious fiction, which isn’t one of the areas I work in. After calming down I debated sending it back, but figured no, I would just be focused and ruthless like I’m supposed to be. I tend to give a lot more time to these evaluations than I ought to, and I need to learn how to be more precise and efficient. This is as good a place as any to begin. And I began by changing the damn font to Times New Roman and putting a big note on the front of the evaluation saying that in order to be read and evaluated the font had to be reformatted, and all page references were according to the new pagination. (I am still incandescent about it.)

Last night we had a Harvest ritual, focusing on celebrating our achievements over the past year. B brought a small bottle of ice cider, and we used our horn for the first time (although we offered the horn to the gods, ancestors, and spirits and used small glasses for ourselves, as most of us had colds). I am really enjoying how our coven is exploring a different way of celebrating, rather than using standard Wiccan format. We’ve chosen to explore the Germanic aspects of our tradition and heritage, and we’re finding that the philosophies reflect our goals and directions very well.

Today I finish up the evaluation, and if I have time, I may prep some more fibre to spin, or I may crack open the black roving I got with the wheel, or even try some of the silky BFL I have left over from spindling.

The Long-Awaited Spinning Wheel Arrives; Or, Yet Another Photo Essay

Just shy of eight weeks after I ordered it, my Louet S-15 wheel is finally here. I think I used up all my excitement waiting and fretting about it, because I have been remarkably sanguine about the whole affair since MA e-mailed me to confirm that it had arrived on Tuesday. I’ve somewhat disappointed in myself, actually; I wanted that adrenaline rush making the pickup and assembly and first go on it just a bit more exciting.

There’s a humorous saying that Louet is like the Ikea of spinning wheels. When we picked up the box at Ariadne yesterday (boxes, really, because my free skeinwinder was separate) we saw that the saying was so far accurate: it was shipped in a big flat box, complete with convenient carry-handle. Not what one envisions when one thinks “spinning wheel” at all. I’d been warned, so I knew what to expect.

Once home, we ate (this was very, very hard for the boy, despite having picked up chicken and fries from his favourite restaurant, St. Hubert, on the way home from Ariadne, because he was so incredibly excited about the wheel) and then adjourned to the living room to unpack the boxes.

The box yielded five pieces: the flyer, the-mother-of-all that holds the flyer and bobbin, the upright back post with the wheel on it, and the base/treadle unit, and the bobbins and the kate (the wire bobbin-holder on the base). If this photo is so far exploding your mental image of a spinning wheel, it gets even better. (Or worse, I suppose, depending on how attached you are to the image of a stereotypical Sleeping Beauty-style wheel, more correctly termed a Saxony wheel.)

We put it together to make sure everything was there and that it worked before staining it. We screwed two nuts onto bolts, and snapped the footman connector onto the flywheel. And that was literally that. And like Ikea, Louet thoughtfully includes the necessary wrenches with their material, so we didn’t even need to dig one out. Louet goes beyond Ikea, however, in that they even include a half-pound of fibre in the box (in my case a half-pound of black Coopworth) so you can set up and go right out of the box without any fuss. It’s like the Mac of spinning wheels or something. Anyway, so after attaching a leader onto a bobbin (which took longer than assembling the wheel, I confess, argh) we could spin.

And we did.

I spun a tiny handful of test fibre for a moment or two (and got a very respectable thin though slightly uneven yarn, yay me), but the boy was bursting to try. I got a ball of acrylic from the closet and tied it on for him so he could practice treadling (he’s not really there yet, even with me helping) and maintaining the tension on the fibre in his hands. He “spun” up a bunch, then I put the skeinwinder on the wheel (not shown here), wound it off for him, then showed him how to twist it into a skein, with which he was absolutely delighted because it was “his yarn that he had spun”. As you can see, Gryffindor is fascinated with the flywheel. There’s a black knob on the back of the disc that caps the bit you snap the footman on to, and he was watching it go round and round.

The boy cried when it was time to go to bed. I promised him he could spin again tonight.

Once he was in bed I took the wheel apart and began staining it. (For reference purposes, I used Varathane Gel Stain in Early American, no. 466, and I adore the colour; it’s almost exactly what I wanted. I would have preferred something a tad lighter, but the next lighter colours were much too gold or red for my taste, and besides, this will lighten slightly over time with exposure to sunlight.) The wood didn’t even need a sanding; all I had to do was wipe it down with a bit of flannel. It did soak up stain, but not to such an extent that the colour went irreversibly dark immediately. After I finished staining each piece I wiped off the excess and evened it out. It only took about an hour, and then I left it to dry overnight.

The stain is only supposed to take six to eight hours to dry, but I happened to stain it on the only night where we got rain in September. It was still a wee bit tacky when we got up, but I gave it another two hours then rubbed it down with another piece of flannel (and near knackered myself doing it, stupid fibro). Then I put it back together.


Astute persons will see that the drive band is not on in the above pictures. What can I say; I was so excited about putting it together to take pictures for you that I forgot it. It’s on now. I haven’t decided if I’m going to stain the bobbins yet or not. It would be finicky. The wheel itself needs a touch-up in one or two tiny places.

It does not yet have a name, although it is a girl, and I am leaning toward Verity. I shall have to see what she feels like over the next week or so before she is properly named.

It’s a very modern-looking wheel, but I’m very all right with that. I wanted something with a small footprint, which meant an upright instead of a Saxony, and I wanted something I was comfortable with that was low-maintenance, didn’t require much adjustment, and could be easily serviced in case of problems. My LYS is a Louet dealer, and I worked with their Louet and was very happy with it. It’s remarkably light and not awkward at all to carry, which means that I can move it from the living room and back to my office when I want to, or even to the back deck in the summer. It will travel very well in the boot of the car on its back on a blanket. (Although I hear that many Louet spinners buckled their wheels into a seat in the car, which would also work.) I couldn’t do that with a Saxony. I’m also not afraid to knock this one about a bit; if I had a nicer traditional-looking wheel I’d be worried about it all the time. Louets are workhorses and go on forever, judging from the enthusiastic following they have in the spinning community. When I have room, and when I am better at this, and when there is extra money, perhaps I shall look into getting a Saxony as well. That’s far in the future, however. I have my wheel; I am content.

—

Flyers, mother-of-all, footman? I have no idea what you’re talking about! Here’s a diagram of a generic Louet upright wheel with all the parts named for you, although the model pictured is a few steps above my basic model.

What are the specs of your wheel? Here’s a basic outline of the Louet wheels, as they’re mostly the same with only minor differences. There’s a page for the S-15 but it doesn’t tell you anything more.

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ETA: I managed twenty yards of two-ply today, which is now hanging to dry. It is lumpy and uneven, will probably knit terribly, and I love it.

My Dyeing Experiment No. 2: Another Photo Essay

By Me.

(Or, I Have No Self-Restraint, Even Though I Am Being Virtuous By Doing Laundry, Baking Rolls, and Proofing The Freelance Thing At The Same Time.)

Today’s experiments: two concurrent dye jobs! Again, we have our setup:

From left to right: Brown, teal blue for the 1/4 oz first sample of fibre; burgundy and violet for the second. I had my doubts about that burgundy; it looked awfully brown. But this is why we swatch. Er, experiment. (Because we all know that swatches are actually lying little liars.)

The tea in the background was not used in the dyeing process.

I forgot to take Before pictures of the fibre in the freshly poured dye, but just imagine the colours you see in the glasses poured onto a faintly off-white fibre. Here’s the brown/teal, after its first trip to the microwave.

Here’s the burgundy/violet, after the first heating. Wow! Check out how drastically different the colour is after only two minutes in the microwave!

Here they are after their requisite heating times, with the dye fully developed.

And here they are, rinsed and dried.

Now, even I can see that the burgundy is deep pink, and the violet is, well, kind of a bright violet. I’m sure a little girl somewhere would love it. The way to tone things down is to mix, or overdye. But I’m pleased with the brown/teal, because it comes closest to what my brain was expecting. I’m going to need to work on deepening that brown, though.

And on that note, I am going to switch laundry then finish proofing the freelance thing.

My First Dyeing Experiment: A Photo Essay

By Me.

From left to right in the photo above we have a microwave-safe dish, with a coil of sliver (precise content unknown, beyond “it’s wool from Canadian sheep”) in it, and my four test dyes: brown, royal blue, yellow, and copper. The fibre weighed barely 1/4 oz. I used maybe a tablespoon to two tablespoons of the dye solution for each colour, perhaps more of the blue and less of the copper.

The fibre, with the dyes poured over it, just before it’s put in the microwave for its series of two-minute heatings. You can see how the blue and yellow are blending and being pulled around the dish by capillary action. Clockwise from upper left: blue, yellow, copper, brown.

The fibre, now dyed, after the dye has set and the water has been poured off. (Yeah, I apologize for not using a consistent background colour.)

The teeny-tiny braid of dried fibre, posing with the big ball o’fibre that had its origins in a 3 oz bag stuffed full of mill ends and scrap that I picked through, combed/carded, then dizzed off with a button and rolled the resulting sliver into a ball.

In my opinion, the dyed fibre looks rather like a mangled parakeet. But this particular little dead budgie is my dead budgie, dyed all by myself. Now I know how things react with one another, and how the process works. Blue is very aggressive, as is yellow. (That’s why so much of this is blue, yellow, and green.) The brown needs a lot more dye to water ratio for a stronger colour. The copper is almost unnoticeable.

I call this experiment a success in the gaining experience department. Next experiment: to see what happens when it’s spun.

(I have done other stuff today, namely finish a never-ending editorial evaluation. I decided to treat myself to this test while making dinner. No dinners were dyed in the course of this experiment.)

ETA: OOOH! I could conduct Another Experiment and try overdyeing the fibre with more brown to tone it down/enrich the brown tones! Must plot.

Whee-l!

My spinning wheel just arrived in the shop!

I am very happy indeed. Of course, I can’t go get it because I don’t have the car, and I have too much work to head out to meet HRH at the school and pick it up on the way home. Tomorrow is orchestra, and doing the trip out and back is likely to exhaust me. Perhaps Thursday. It’s a bit more expensive than I anticipated because prices went up, the exchange isn’t great, and there’s all that tax, but I have the money aside, and the gift certificate my wonderful Witchy Editor sent me for my birthday will offset a bit of it, too. And then to stain it, and set it up, and spin!

But it is here, and I am very pleased.

I totally stole the title of the post from one of Pasley’s e-mails, as she has been chatting with me this morning about spindles and wheels as used in Sleeping Beauty retellings.

Weekend Roundup

The weather’s turned crisp. Nice cool mornings, sunny days that don’t get too hot, and cool nights. I love this time of year.

Busy weekend!

Saturday morning I had a cello lesson, where I couldn’t hold more than one thing in my mind at a time. I warned my teacher that I was on the low end of the fibro scale, and she was patient with me, but it was rather amusing in a rueful sort of way to observe how I forgot about left hand when focusing on right elbow, and that sort of thing. Anyway, we have reached the Lully Gavotte, which amuses me for some reason. I think I’ve heard enough other people talk about working on it that it has stuck in my mind somehow.

When I got back HRH and the boy were in the garage, tuning up HRH’s bike and the trailer; they were heading out for a ride. They picked up hot dogs and french fries for us from the local drive-in, where the local hospital was doing their annual fundraiser. The boy charmed everyone by wearing his Superman shirt, his cape, and his bike helmet.

After lunch Ceri picked me up to head out to Ariadne, our favorite LYS, so I could pick up a magazine they had aside for me and she could choose sock yarn for a Christmas project. When we got there MA looked up and said, “Oh hey, I just got a cryptic email from UPS. Apparently they have received a 23-pound box from Louet for us. Now, I could be wrong, but something that heavy sounds like it probably has a wheel in it.” “Either a wheel, or a whole lot of yarn,” I said, but inside I was jumping up and down and squealing, “MY WHEEL MIGHT BE HERE THIS WEEK!” I did say, and MA agreed, that I’d believe it when I see it, and I am somewhat tired of hoping the wheel will arrive sooner rather than later, but I am cautiously optimistic.

I did recon on colourways for a Yule gift I’ll be knitting, and alas, they don’t have the one I want in the weight I need, so I shall have to track it down elsewhere or order it. I squooshed yarn and offered opinions on colourways while Ceri decided on her sock yarn, and we kept wandering back to the shelves of spinning fiber to pet them all. Ceri also bought me… er, my wheel… a gift of beautiful Lorna’s Lace fibre, lovely squooshy strokable superwash merino wool top in the Baltic Sea colourway, a lovely misty green/brown/heather symphony that I adore. (It may be my monitor settings, but the actual top is more subdued and has more grey in it than the linked page shows.) I cuddled it a few times in the shop, and told her that when I had my wheel and was proficient enough to spin sock yarn, I was going to buy it and make yarn so she could knit me a pair of socks. And she picked it right up with a grin and carried it to the counter to buy it. I am a very, very lucky person in my friends. I take the fibre out of the box I hid it in and pet it every once in a while. I would leave it out on my desk to admire, but I have cats who think fiber is stuff to sink teeth into and pull apart with joyous abandon.

We got home and knitted companionably for a while, with HRH and the boy wandering in and out. Then Jan and t! stopped by, later than I had anticipated. t! had called me earlier to ask about construction in the area, as he was going to be driving through on his way to the south shore for paperwork, and upon hearing that he was going to drop Jan to wander aimlessly around from mid-afternoon till the concert later that night I told him to drop her here instead. Due to the incredible space-bending and cardinal point-switching properties of the borough in which we live they got turned around and were late, so t! ended up very sensibly canceling his paperwork errand in favour of calming down instead of rushing and being stressed before the show. So there were a bunch of us knitting and eating brownies and drinking beer or other refreshing beverages, and it was an impromptu party. Then t! left for the gig setup and sound check, and the three of us knitted or sewed until Ceri went home for dinner. HRH’s parents showed up and we all ordered pizza from the local pizzeria. The boy settled down to watch a film with his grandparents while Jan and I worked on the back deck till it was time to leave for the concert. I don’t get to see Jan very often any more, and I miss her, so it was really nice to spend quiet time with her and chat.

The concert was fantastic, of course. We’re always predisposed to enjoy ourselves at an Invisible concert, but this was particularly good. I’m so proud of the guys for further refining and developing their sound and skill. The band was relaxed, the songs were tight, the new songs were lots of fun, and the company was of course excellent. I’d made the decision to not dance, as I’ve been suffering from low energy and low-level pain (no love, fibro) as well as the exciting back spasms, but when ‘Sheena is a Punk Rocker’ started playing and the rest of the Random Colour girls present leapt to their feet, I knew I couldn’t let them or the band down, during both that song and ‘Poor DeeDee’ which followed it. I seem to have survived the rash but enthusiastic decision quite well on the fibro side, but in the realm of non-fibro-related mishaps, while dancing I whacked my right hand against the lead guitarist’s headstock when he’d jumped off the stage to dance with us. I discovered the mild sprain in the car on the way home: a swollen finger that wouldn’t bend. The next morning it was an interesting shade of dark purple, still swollen and not bending. It gradually improved, and the swelling has now completely vanished, although it’s still mildly discoloured and is creaky when I bend it. It’s just not a punk concert unless someone gets injured. Fortunately it’s my bow hand, so it hasn’t interfered with fingering. I can’t count the number of times I was asked if I missed performing at the concert, and the answer is, yes, I do miss it. I always miss it, and it’s worse at the shows themselves. But I don’t miss the stress and the struggle to perfect things. The further away we get from working on music together, the more I understand what a huge challenge we set for ourselves in trying to arrange music for the selection of instruments Random Colour comprised. It would be interesting to work with a different set of instruments, or on a different kind of music.

Sunday was lazy, lazy, lazy! I couldn’t fall asleep till about two in the morning after the concert, and I initially woke up at five something, so the boys let me doze in bed for a good long while. When I finally dragged myself out of bed we all decided that we were having a really relaxed sort of day. We had nowhere to be and nothing pressing to do until HRH left to help ADZO move some heavy appliances. The boy and I napped, then watched some TMBG DVDs and read books. My mum called, back from a wonderful visit to France with her sister, and it was great to hear about her experience.

There; that was our weekend. Today has been an exercise in lack of focus and self-discipline, although I did bake a batch of bread and one of cinnamon buns, edit a review, and practice (hello Lully Gavotte!), as well as setting up for the next freelance assignment that is due on Friday. I’ve been fighting bad fibro lethargy for a while now, and while the lower back spasmy thing has pretty much passed, the exhaustion that follows physical illness or injury is still happening.

On Saturday I finished the increases on the yoke/cap sleeves of my short-sleeved sweater. The next row I get to bind off the edge of the sleeves, and then the next row I cast on shorter rows and join them to the front and back to start knitting the body of the sweater. Progress! I may even finish it before it gets too cold to wear short sleeves, although at the rate the weather is going I doubt it. The lace scarf is progressing nicely.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print at the moment. Maybe something more exciting will happen tomorrow, although I doubt it.

Fifty-One Months Old!

Oh, there was great emotional trauma this past month. The boy was playing out back with HRH and wailed when he discovered that he’s too big to make the little ride-on tractor he got just before he turned two move through the grass by pushing with his feet. He just can’t get the leverage any more, because his legs are so long that his knees are up around his ears. He was very distraught. The thing comes up to below his knee when he stands next to it; he can pick it up and tuck it under one arm. HRH said, “See, that’s new. You could never do that before.” And he tried to tell the boy that it was super awesome cool that he could carry a tractor, but the boy as unconvinced. He’s too big for the sandbox now, too; we haven’t told him that it’s being dismantled this fall. More resisting the growing up…

One of the three new fish died, of no discernible cause. This is the first time that he’s really been aware enough or present when we discovered it, and he had a minor breakdown, despite the fact that he ignores them most of the time. The only way he could work through it was to imagine that a shark was going to eat the flushed fish corpse. How this made it okay, I will never know. I’d have thought it would be more traumatic.

He made up his own Transformer and described it so HRH could draw it, then he sat down with his pencil crayons and coloured it. Unfortunately this has led to arguments and tears when he gets dressed because he has a shirt and a pair of pants in those colours, so he wants to wear them every day so he can pretend to be that Transformer. One day I told him he’d just have to use his imagination, and he stomped his feet and said, “But I can’t use my imagination!” Which amused me, of course, as that’s exactly what he’s doing when he wears those clothes.

He’s developed a very sweetgoodnight kiss routine. First he kisses me and hugs me, then I kiss and hug him, and then we both kiss and hug one another. There are specific words that go along with it: he says, “First me [kiss and hug]; now you [kiss and hug],” and then we both say, “And now, both of us, together.”

Fave songs these days include “Hickory Dickory Dock,” “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and “E Eats Everything.” We are anxiously awaiting the Canadian street release of Here Comes Science by TMBG. We have a couple of the new videos from it thanks to podcasts and YouTube, so everyone has “Electric Car,” “Paleontologist,” and “Davy Crockett (In Space)” stuck in their brains.

He’s so tall that all his pyjamas are too short in legs and arms. I’ve gone through a lot of his clothes, and we’re going to need new boots again (probably a size ten) and likely new socks as well. Good grief.

There are tougher things going on that he’s struggling to wrap his mind around, too. There are new kids at school, one who is a classic high maintenance child and who tells him on a regular basis that (a) he can’t play with her or be her friend, (b) she is his friend and therefore he can’t play with another already established older friend, or (c) if he plays with someone else he doesn’t like her. He is utterly confused, and often hurt by these statements. “But why would she say something like that, Mama?” he asks, usually at night after our story when we’re snuggling in bed. Trying to explain insecurity and fear of being rejected so one attempts to manipulate and arrange everyone’s relationships to a four year old is challenging, to say the least.

“What’s that?” he said when we were in the yarn store. “A ball winder,” I told him. He gazed at it hungrily, standing as close to it as he could, and I explained how it worked. “Can we get one?” he said. Recently he asked if he could help me knit and was upset when I asked him not to, so I got out the size 11 needles and a ball of rainbow yarn, and cast ten stitches on for him to knit. At the moment we’re at the ‘Mama holds her hands over his hands’ stage, but he is very enthusiastic about wrapping the yarn over the RH needle to make the new stitch. He has decided that he is knitting a scarf for his teacher (first it was a hat “because hers is getting very old”, but I suggested the easier scarf instead and he took the suggestion readily).

We ‘goed’ and ‘wented’ places, and it feels like I’m constantly correcting him on that one point of grammar alone. He used to say ‘went’ correctly, so I suspect either the new kids at school are misusing them, or he’s consciously trying to conjugate and getting it wrong because English follows so many different rules.

There is great excitement at breakfast now. On weekends we set up a bowl of cereal, a small finger bowl of raisins, and a spoon at the table, and turn a big plastic mixing bowl over it all so the cats don’t have a festival with it at night. We put a glass of juice in the fridge, and a half-glass of milk. When he gets up in the morning he comes and crawls into bed for a cuddle, then whispers that he’s going to go make his breakfast, patters into the kitchen to take the milk and juice out of the fridge, uncover the cereal, pour the milk and raisins into the cereal bowl, and have his breakfast. He adores it; he feels so grown up and important. And the bonus is, HRH and I get to sleep in a bit longer.

Fearsclave and his wife got a new kitten this past month, and she’s so tiny she needed to be fed from a bottle for a few weeks. They called her Maggy, and the boy was absolutely enchanted with the short video Fearsclave posted of the kitten being fed. I dug out a squeeze bottle and he ‘fed’ his own stuffed Maggie:

Things you can do with knitting needles other than knit: conduct!