Emma's Big Adventures

Despite all of my good intentions, not a stitch was knit nor any roving spun this weekend. I spent most of yesterday cleaning the house and washing dishes. Yes, you heard me correctly...washing dishes. When I unloaded the dishwasher, I noticed that the dishes felt slick, almost like they were coated with a thin film of oil. And they were. The dishwasher gave up the ghost sometime during the wash cycle (it's not even fours years old yet!). Let me tell you, that discovery put me in quite the foul mood. I detest washing dishes and I particularly detest it when it is unexpected.

To distract you from lack of knitting content, I'll tell you about Emma's adventures.

When the weather is nice and there aren't any mosquitoes, we eat dinner on the deck. We're surrounded by green and love to watch the bats as they come out. When Jezebel was alive, she'd join us on the deck and make the occasional foray into the herb garden. She stayed close to the house and we had no worries about her wandering off. Although when she was young, she did climb the chestnut tree and get onto the roof of the garage, and occasionally meandered into the neighbors yard. But I digress.

We don't feel so confident that Emma will not wander off. Even though she's a very sweet cat, she does have a bit of an attitude. So we've put up all sorts of contraptions to keep her from leaving the deck. Saturday night we found that they don't work.

Emma is a good jumper and is able to leap onto the deck railing with ease. I find this scary because a) the railing is only three inches wide and b) it's about 12 feet off the ground. After she's on the railing, she walks back and forth and back and forth, like a soldier on guard duty.

Tom made a delicious dinner of grilled chicken stuffed with a mixture of goat cheese, grilled poblano and red peppers, and nicoise olives, accompanied by pearl couscous and grilled zucchini. Emma was on guard duty but she was clearly trying to figure out a way to go AWOL. She finally got up enough courage to jump from the railing onto the deck stairs and had access to the whole wide world.

She didn't bolt, but she wasn't as cautious as we had hoped. She explored the stairs, then headed toward the garden (I joined her at this point), then back to the house. She discovered the really cool (for a cat) passageway between our house and the house next door and headed to the front. I headed her off at the pass and attempted to herd her back up the steps. You cannot herd a cat. Tom was finally able to grab her and put her back in the house but she clearly was not finished exploring. We're going to have to beef up our railing security.

Or redo the deck and screen it.

Emma's second big adventure also involved the deck. For several weeks now, I've noticed an pale orange tomcat periodically hanging around the yard. He just kind of wanders through (our yard seems to attract hobo cats). I was in the kitchen Sunday evening putting the final touches on dinner when I heard Tom exclaim "Hey, where'd you come from?" I went out and saw that Emma was all puffed up...hackles raised, bottlebrush tail. She was peering over the edge of the deck and there was that orange tom laying on the roof of my car. He had made the leap from the roof of my car onto the deck, which is no mean feat. He hung out on the car roof for a while (he seems like a rather calm cat) and eventually wandered off. A little later, Emma looked like she was trying to figure out how to jump from the deck to my car. She was probably thinking "Hmmm, if he could get up, I should be able to get down."

It was all pretty exciting and plum wore her out.



Mystery Solved
My secret pal enlightened me about the miniature knitting needles. They are actually bamboo seaming pins. Very nice! If I ever finish the Sweaters of Despair, I will definitely use them.

Happy knitting!