Come home Floyd!

Floyd kittie has gone over the fence…literally. We let her out to roam the back yard as usual last Wednesday night, and she never came back We put up posters, so here’s hoping someone has seen her. Wish us luck!

I has a fishy!

I saw these poor betta fish in tiny cups in PetSmart and felt the need to rescue one of them. Because 4 cats, 1 dog, and a hedgehog just aren’t enough. (Srsly.) He’s a fantail betta and his name is Unbeatable Banzuke. Because I’m a dork.

I can knit!!!

I’ve been crocheting for about 15 years, since my grandmother showed me how and I made a giant afghan. And then another. And then a few dozen more. I kept the first one (it’s still on the bed in our guest room - it’s made of 108 granny squares sewn together)

but gave the rest away as wedding/birthday/baby/Christmas presents.

A few years later I took up smaller projects, like hats:

But I never learned how to knit. I tried a few times, but it never really took. Dan once knitted a square that we use as a potholder, but I couldn’t get the hang of it. Till last weekend, a friend was in town and offered to teach me. Somehow, the method she uses works for me. So I knit a few rows, made a mistake, ripped it all out; repeat ad nauseum until finally it started to click and I just kept going. And going. And going. I knit the whole skein. 6 feet later, Nikki now has a loverly scarf:

with a crocheted flower and leaves on it, just for fun.

Hooray! I love learning new things. Especially new ways of making stuff. I imagine soon I’ll knit myself a dog or something. Watch me!

Yes We Can

Coming in a little late on this, I think, but this video brought me to tears. I’m an Obama supporter…I don’t agree with his positions on everything, but I agree with enough of them. And I think he has integrity and vision, things that have been sorely lacking in our political discourse. So I hope this inspires you. Not to vote for Obama, though that would be nice. But to ignore the voices in your head that tell you that things are too bad, problems are too big for one person to tackle, that The System is too powerful to be changed, that you can’t fight the powers that be. Si se puede.

Which is creepier?

I caught VH1’s “Little Beauties” show about the world of little miss pageants. I knew they existed - the whole Jon Benet Ramsey thing - but I’d never really seen much about them. I am now officially horrified that these things exist. The girls look like…well, like dolls. They do this weird swivel walk when they show off their bathing suits, they “flirt” (at the age of 6), they do little girl striptease moves, the whole 9 yards. It was like watching a train wreck, mesmerizing. The pageant was run by this gay man, and you have to wonder how much he must hate women to be shoehorning little girls into this completely manufactured, artificial pre-pubescent version of femininity. And what the hell is wrong with these mothers? It’s just bizarre…I would hate to be the parents of any of these girls when they hit puberty. Oy.

Surveillance society

So, so much for posting every day! The cold kind of took me out of action for a few days and I didn’t have the mental wherewithal to do much besides keep myself from suffocating on my own fluids. I’m feeling better today, largely due to the purchase of honest-to-god pseudoephedrine, not that stupid impostor phenylephrine. Curse those damn meth-heads for spoiling it for the rest of us!

When I went to the pharmacy to get the Real Stuff, I noticed that you can’t even buy other products in which pseudeophedrine is an active - but not the main - ingredient. I can’t imagine how much cough syrup you’d have to buy to distill enough of the good stuff to make a batch of meth. But the whole thing got me to thinking about how much of our freedom we just…hand away. I had to show ID to buy cough syrup. COUGH SYRUP. I had to sign and show ID to get the pseudoephedrine. I know drug abuse has terrible consequences for people, but honestly…when did we stoop to this? It seems like putting the rest of society through intrusive practices to keep some people from abusing themselves is a bad trade-off. It’s just the slippery-slope-ness of it that gets me…today it’s cough syrup and sudafed, tomorrow it’s having to show your ID just to enter the pharmacy! (I know, alarmist much?) Bruce Schneier is one of my favorite security bloggers. He posted a great article in wired about how security and privacy are not opposites. (Don’t get me started on airline screening procedures, really….) I think we’ve gotten far too used to handing over our phone numbers, IDs, zip codes, and other information to people just because we think we’re not doing anything wrong personally so we don’t have anything to worry about. I know we have to strike a balance, but I think it’s tipped way too far in favor of the panopticon.

Similarly, I’m seriously thinking of opting out of the credit economy. We have a mountain of credit card debt caused by thoughtless spending. I’ve been thinking about cancelling all our cards (after we pay them all off) and living on a cash economy, with the exception of paying bills online. If we want something, save up for it. If we don’t need it, don’t buy it.

So here goes day 1 of not buying shit I don’t need.

Remiss

I missed my post yesterday. Well, technically it must still be yesterday somewhere. So here’s why:

I’ll be blogging from the couch, it seems.

Hats!!!

Along with a bunch of vintage furniture, Dan’s parents brought me vintage hats. Lots. Of. Hats. To wit:

Veils…lots of veils on these hats.

Get out my face with that veil!

It looks like I’m bored but really I’m just trying not to blink for the camera. This is a hat my mom gave me for my birthday.

Nikki looks cute in hats:

Meet Sir Francis Bacon

I got a hedgehog for my birthday back in September. Since our friends refused to name their pets “Bacon,” I took it on myself to name him Sir Francis Bacon. Also known as Frankie Bacon, just plain Bacon, or Senor Grumpybutt.

He’s pretty much full-grown now, and is about the size of a small guinea pig. If you’ve never had the pleasure of meeting a hedgehog, they’re really something. They have terrible eyesight, so they’re kind of nervous. They puff up their quills (which aren’t barbed like a porcupine’s so they don’t stick in your skin, but they’re sharp enough to deter most predators) and roll into a ball at any sign of threat. They’re mostly nocturnal, so I usually take Bacon out to play around 9 or 10 at night. They’re not exactly affectionate critters, though he does know my smell (and equates it with treats - meal worms, nomnomnom) so he’s pretty easy to handle.

Hedgehogs also have the odd behavior of “anointing,” or coating their quills with foamy saliva whenever they smell something new and interesting. You can see a video of Bacon anointing over a piece of greenery (I thought it was spinach but I think now it’s a celery leaf) on youtube. Watch for the bright green saliva.

This is the traditional European hedgehog , which has finer spines and darker coloration. Those have not been domesticated. Bacon is an African Pygmy Hedgehog, which are smaller and have been domesticated for about 30-40 years as pets. Keep an eye out for more exploits of Bacon.

Penance post

Here’s my catchup post.

Here in Greensboro, like in much of the southeast, we’re in the middle of a fairly severe water shortage. Some towns have already run out of water, and it doesn’t look like the situation is going to improve much after an abnormally dry winter. I’m looking at ways to reduce our water usage, and one of them is replacing all our grass with moss.

Isn’t this lovely?

Moss doesn’t really have “roots” per se, so it derives nutrients from the air. We have a humid, shady back yard that makes growing grass difficult anyhow, so moss seems like the perfect alternative.

We’re also looking at using rain collection barrels and taking shorter showers. Sigh. Does it ever feel like you’re drifting slowly into a science fiction story? You always expect environmental disaster to be a quick, catastrophic thing, but really it’s very slow, like the story about the frog in the pan of water. Perhaps I”m overreacting, but when you see a city the size of Atlanta looking at persistent if not permanent water shortages over the next few years (and who knows how far beyond), it’s easy to get a bit pessimistic.