Sunday Morning Blogging

I don't usually post in the morning, or even during the day - 5 mornings out of 7, I'm at work, and there's barely time to read blogs, much less to post. On Sunday mornings, I'm usually in church. But today, even though it's Palm Sunday, a day where, in my church at least, you get to bring home a souvenir (a palm), I stayed home. My allergies have been really bad for the last few days and the thought of dealing with the Palm Sunday crowd was about more than I could bear.

So, I'm at home, doing laundry, reading blogs, and listening to knitting podcasts (currently, Episode 2 of It's a Purl, Man). So here are some random thoughts:

1. Thanks to a comment to Ann and Kay's latest hilarious post, I cannot get "King of the Road" by Roger Miller out of my mind. Of course, after reading that Wikipedia entry for Roger Miller, I seem to be moving on to "England Swings." I don't seem to really know more than the chorus of "England Swings," though, and that's really frustrating.

2. You've seen pictures of my current kitties, Simon and Harley. Here are my previous kitties, Charlotte and Aggie. Like Simon, Charlotte was a tuxedo cat. The only white on her face was on her chin and her whiskers. She was kind of a little cat and was the best cat ever. I got her in January 1985, when she was about 7 months old. She had been a stray, and I got her from a vet's office. She lived to be 18, when she went into kidney failure very suddenly. She definitely ruled the roost. For the last few years of her life, she lived not just with Aggie but with Simon and Schuster (my sister's other cat). Oh, and with my sister and me, too! She was a very sweet cat, very easy to live with, but definitely in charge of the cat posse.

I got Aggie (short of for Agnes, not anything to do with the Texas A&M Aggies, although I got that question all the time) in 1988, when Charlotte was 4 years old. You know how they tell you to keep the new kitten away from the old cat for a while? Charlotte would not allow that! As far as Charlotte was concerned, Aggie was her baby. Aggie was the daughter of two semi-feral cats (probably brother and sister) who were fed by a friend of mine. She looked like a Maine coon cat and was very shy. She was a big cat and had lots of hair. Charlotte groomed her for at least the first 5 years of her life, which meant that she never really learned to groom herself. After Charlotte quit grooming her, it became my job. She liked being combed and brushed, but would only let me do it while lying in bed. Aggie was very ill with a virus of some sort when she was a kitten and spend about 4 days at the vet. This apparently traumatized her and after that, she was always frightened of people, even, to an extent, me -- getting her to the vet was always a trauma for both of us! My friends knew they were really part of my life when they actually saw Aggie. Aggie lived to be 13, when she developed a tumor on her jaw. It was diagnosed on Sept 10, 2001, so my memories of 9/11 are always intertwined with my memories of the last month of her life. Operating on the tumor would have meant removing part of her jaw. This sounded awful and not really an improvement, so I spent about 6 weeks just watching her and adjusting her diet to softer and softer food as the tumor grew. I had to have her put to sleep in October 2001. She actually hung on longer than I thought she would; she sort of let me know when she was ready to go, which made it easier. Charlotte died almost exactly a year later, very suddenly, which was harder. (And now you know more about my late cats that you do about me....)

3. Knitting content: Nothing much to talk about. Scroll down and look at the sock cuffs. The Sixth Sense Sock is about two inches longer and the Cable Footies is down past the heel turn. It would be farther along except I frogged the whole thing and started over, after I screwed up the heel turn the first time through. (I was at a meeting on Friday, and tried to turn the heel while I talked. Oops......)