The Christmas Task

A wee bit of wishful thinking for Christmas:

The wind tears at my breath as I step outdoors, and I have to concentrate to breath. Exhaling's no problem, but inhaling, stealing a breath back, is a challenge. But as miserable as it feels, the noisy, fretful, wicked wind that drowns out all but the loudest noises and can cause untold and unexpected property damage is why I've chosen this night for what I'm thinking of as "The Task."

I raise my head and see it directly in front of me. My fist tightens around the steak knife I'm clutching like a dagger. I step forward out of the shelter of the porch and look up the street, scanning first one side and then the other. It's after 2 am; only tree limbs are moving. There are no lights in bedrooms or bathrooms. A car glides by on the cross street a block up, but I can't hear its engine over the wind. Good.

Then I'm running, and I can't hear the wind anymore, only my breath and my feet thudding across the street, up to the house opposite, and I raise my fist and drop the knife, slashing through the nylon fabric that tears, shredding more easily than I had hoped. And then I turn and run back, and am safe inside my own house before the inflatable Homer Simpson dressed as Santa has fully collapsed, never to curse our street again with his tacky, doofy grin.

I just hope next year they don't put up something worse.

Bertie Sue is SENSITIVE, Y'all

Or picky. Whichever.

A year ago at just about this time, I made a sweater for Bertie Sue. I was inordinately proud of it, because, even if just a dog sweater, it was the first knitted object that I ever conceived of and knitted on my own without a pattern. And it was awesome.

Mostly.

I learned one important lesson while constructing that sweater: You should put the leg holes in where the legs end under the chest, not where they start up at the shoulder. This is an important feature for dog sweaters because doing it wrong adds a lot of unnecessary fabric across the chest and probably makes walking feel kind of funny. Miss Bert would consent to wear the sweater for trips in the car or to go outside for a quick potty, but she refused to go on walks while wearing the sweater. It may be that she is fashion conscious and the grab-bag quality didn't fit her personal style, but I think it's more likely that it felt strange to walk in.

So I cogitated on the problem for a while and decided that the best way to put the leg holes in exactly the right place is to leave them out altogether. Here is the result:

I found the purple mystery yarn in the yarn cabinet wound neatly into a cake with no label. No idea what that stuff is except that a flame test proves it to be an acrylic. (Bert won't be hanging out unattended in this sweater. That stuff melts.) The red ribbing is a design feature in the sense that I ran out of the purple mystery yarn and didn't have anything else to match or coordinate, so I decided to go with full-on clash instead. Embrace the ugly, people. The body is the honeycomb stitch most frequently seen of late in the Honey Cowl. The tummy is all ribbing so that if we manage to help Miss Bert lose the 5 pounds she needs to drop, it will still fit. I hope.

The innovation that made another dog sweater worth knitting is the single giant leg hole.

Sorry about the blurry photo, but that is an insanely difficult angle to photograph and that's the best I could get before Bert wandered off to see if Brew needed to have his rear end sniffed. (He did.)

So far, so good. She can run! She can jump! She can stroll leisurely up the block sniffing every third leaf!

Don't worry that Brewie might be chilly. He's always toasty in his ultra-hip fleece hoodie.