Has It Really Been Four Months?

Unfortunately, it has been almost four months since I updated this blog. I've been listing the books I've read over there in the left sidebar & taking pictures, but it's been far too long since I've set fingers to keys (remember when the phrase was "pen to paper"?) to mention what's been happening here in Plain Janeland. So, I'll start where I should have after the last post with the antique cabbage roses blooming in the back yard.




These roses are descendants of the ones that were on the farm when my grandparents, Dad & Mom purchased it back in 1940 which is why I call them antique. They're super hardy & spread like crazy given the chance. Unfortunately, given a record amount of mosquitoes this year, I didn't get out of the house to take photos of the Seven Sisters roses when they bloomed.


As we had a bumper crop of catnip this year, I brought out the pattern I designed for the knitted catnip mouse & made about a dozen of them to sell at the Sr. Center. Instead of the felted wool & silk yarns of the original, I combined acrylic & fun fur in various color combinations & stuffed them with catnip wrapped in sections of nylon stockings. As you can see below, Max seemed to approve of the new version and I had to package them in plastic ziplock snack bags in a hurry before the mice disappeared.


DH was once again on the prowl at garage sales to find yarn for our K4 group at the Senior Center and he came up with some great stashes. A good portion of this yarn has already been turned into lap-robes for the Ann Arbor Veterans' Hospital, toddler sweaters destined for the Redbird Mission in Kentucky and other charity projects.




These next four photos are of the nine toddler sweaters I turned in this last Thursday. As you can see, Boomer & Max thought that they were Snuggles made just for them. My favorite is the one Boomer is determined to hide - the body is white while the yoke & sleeves are worked in a baby pastel variegated.








These are three of the lap-robes that I worked on this summer. With the excessive heat we had in July, it was too warm even with AC to sit under a half-finished lap-robe so I didn't get as many done as I would have liked.






And saving the best for last, meet our new family member, Quinn. We adopted him last Thursday from the Michigan Animal Rescue League just down the road in Pontiac. I'd had a PetFinder search up since the start of the year for another male front-declawed orange tiger, but most of the cats that came up were too far away to drive to meet, make an application & then drive back again to pick up after we'd been approved. Since we had adopted Callie from MARL back in 1998, they just had to call our vet to determine if we'd taken good care of her and we were able to bring Quinn home the same day. Tuesday afternoon & evening were a little wrought with tension but by Wednesday evening Quinn & Max were playing tag and there was very little hissing. We're very happy with our new family member who is just shy of three years old & still more kitten than cat. Quinn is the smallest cat we've had since Callie & the youngest since first Moki & then Tiger who were kittens.