Sunday, January 18, 2009

Knitted Angel Greyhound



Meet Angel - I won her in a GPA auction fundraiser this fall. She has taken up residence in Anchorage, Alaska with my mom. My mom is a retired physical therapist who spends most of her time divided between gardening, gold mining and fiber arts such as spinning, knitting and felting wool. I figured if I sent Angel to her, Angel might have 'puppies' to share next holiday season. Mom spends quite a bit of time knitting custom decorative chemo caps for patients at Providence Hospital in Anchorage.


I know we have several knitters in our club, and I hope this might be inspiration for you come up with your own "Angel" greyt pet. Angel's just a petite version of Ms. Petmytail. I'm hoping mom will card and spin up some brindle colored yarn and do a Handy look alike for Handy's Gotcha Day next December. I've seen mom's attempt at making a felt casting of our white persian Rambeau - not a pretty sight. She 'felt' so bad at the finished product, she took it back. I guess getting the body shape and facial expression right is rather difficult when felting, even needle felting.


I hope this is a good enough picture. If you want to try to knit a twin of Angel and need more information, let me know. It might mean taking a trip up to Alaska for a few more detailed photos - darn!

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Photo Tag

Okay, just remember folks, you asked for this. I know the rule is to share the 6th picture from your 6th photo album and tell about it, but I'm organizationally challenged and only have one 'My Pictures' folder with a gazillion images in it. So to simulate some randomness, I opened the folder, scrolled down and just picked one. Well, my selection will probably assure that I never get tagged again, but here goes:

It's about two years ago towards the end of Spring on a wonderful Saturday afternoon when the call of nature knocked so I wandered off to the upstairs hall bathroom, grabbed a magazine to read, sat down and started to flipping pages. All of a sudden there's a splash... Uhhh, what the h#ll, that wasn't me. So quick as a flash I pop up, spin around to find a frog swimming in the toilet. Thank goodness it didn't wait a couple more minutes to announce itself or I might not have been so eager to retrieve it and put it the yard.

Apparently having frogs in your toilet is not that uncommon. Honest, put 'frog in toilet' in Google and see for yourself. Ever notice those pipes that stick up on top of your house? Those are vent pipes. We have a large tree that partially hangs over one corner of the house and the tree frogs fall off onto the roof, why I do not know, and for some even stranger reason feel compelled to jump down those vent pipes. After a short swim they pop up in your toilet. So far we've had it happen twice. One in the down stairs bath and one in the up stairs hall bath.

Now tell me that won't make you look twice before you sit down from now on.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Random Thoughts

Finally, my first post of the year. Several months ago the hard drive on my computer had an untimely death and since I had to re-install everything anyway I figured I might as well update my machine to Windows Vista. And for those several months I have regretted that decision. So early last week I had had enough and backed up everything (so I thought) that I cared about and went back to Windows XP. This explains my absence from the blogs for the past week. Finding all of the programs I've downloaded and install over the past 5 years was quite a treasure hunt. At least I make backups occasionally. So I'm back and have much catching up to do.

I love our muppies. The last two weeks of the year I burned my unused vacation and pretty much just stayed around the house. So me and pups got to spend lots of time together doing a little bonding. It was great to be able to spend time with Garth. His new nickname is 'The Toy Man'. The three of them are so different. Kinda strange, but I've noticed that they each have a unique smell. I could pick them out blindfolded. Anyone else with multiple hounds notice that? I think I had a little SA those first couple days back at work.

I see that I've been tagged (a couple times) to show the 6th picture in the 6th folder of my photo gallery. I appreciate that you guys think I'm organized enough to have 6 folders... HA! I have like 1 folder with about 6 thousand pictures in it, but I will pull out something interesting and post it in short order :-)