I’ve been feeling a bit better lately, and the prevailing theory is something like, Hey, you have bipolar disorder with a seasonal pattern to it — did you really think you could go the entire rest of your life without that affecting you in any way? (Which is not at all the way my doctor phrased it, but I think that’s sort of what she meant.) So I suppose I should feel lucky that this fall/winter my drastic change in energy level was not accompanied by a drastic change in mood. (I do not feel lucky, by the way. If I were a lucky person, it would not have taken me fifteen cups of Tim Hortons coffee to finally win a free coffee, even though the odds for winning a prize in Roll Up the Rim are supposed to be 1 in 6. Also, I made my fiancé buy that last coffee for me in order to trick the cup into thinking that it wasn’t for me. You may scoff, but it worked.)

Anyway! Tomorrow I will go for the regular blood tests I am supposed to get because of my medication, and they will also make sure there is nothing else wrong with me, which there probably isn’t, and then it will be spring and the sun will shine and the birds will sing! And here, to catch you up a little bit, are some photos from 2010. Roughly one from each month, but not exactly. Because some months, either nothing happens, or you don’t take pictures of what does happen, or you do take pictures, but they’re crap.

2010 started like this, in a Cuban restaurant in Manhattan. That’s Mare on the left and me on the right, Yolande is taking the picture, and Yolande’s friend Carla is somewhere out of camera range.

The fiancé, who does not like his photo posted online, and I spent Valentine’s Day at the Homeport Historic B&B/Inn. (This year we went to a Goo Goo Dolls concert on Valentine’s Day.)

The sock acknowledges famous goalie and knitter Jacques Plante at the Bell Centre in Montréal.

Back in New York on April 1, I attended an event sponsored by Scholastic and Women in Children’s Media to celebrate the release of the Baby-sitters Club prequel and the rerelease of the series. Let’s just say that this was my childhood dream. Awesomeness quotient: Meeting Ann M. Martin? Check. Being in a room full of women my age who aren’t afraid to admit that they can still remember the names of all eight Pike siblings way more easily than they can remember useful things like where they put their keys? Check. Meeting people I know online from BSC fandom? Check. Meeting the amazing and funny David Levithan, who is a great YA author himself and has edited so many other novels I love? Swoon. I want to have his babies. It doesn’t matter that he’s gay and I’m engaged. I don’t see what could possibly go wrong with this plan. Um, I mean… Check!

Yes, this is the same sock that was held by Judy Blume and, well, everybody at the 2009 ALA conference. So many famous authors have touched it that I know I am never going to actually wear this pair of socks except to take pictures of how they look on my feet. Which is why I still haven’t finished them — I’m not in any all-fired hurry to finish knitting socks that have become strictly ornamental rather than functional. I’ll get back to them someday, and I’ve knit plenty of other socks in the meantime.

I told you the fiancé didn’t like his photo online.

A dishcloth I knit poses with Our First Dishwasher. Oddly enough, by now the boy and I are already on Our Third Dishwasher, as last fall we moved from the apartment with Our First Dishwasher to the apartment with Our Second Dishwasher, and when Our Second Dishwasher broke in an expensive manner, our landlords decided it would make more sense to replace it with Our Third Dishwasher (okay, so technically none of these are really ours) than to fix it.

I got this in July.

I named my engagement ring Sparkly. BECAUSE HE IS SPARKLY.

The wedding, by the way, will now be a semi-elopement, since we have invited our parents. Which means we say we are having a small wedding, and people say, “Oh, with about fifty guests?” and we say, “NO. SIX.”

I got some more sock photos with Canadian rock stars when I went to a Crash Karma show. Here’s the sock with Mike Turner, formerly of Our Lady Peace.

And here it is with Edwin. Who is really quite good-looking.

That night I did also get a sock photo with Jeff Burrows (formerly of The Tea Party) and The Other Guy in the Band (okay, he has a name; it’s Amir Epstein), and they were also very nice and they look fine in the picture… but I’m in it, too, and I look terrible. So nobody gets to see that one.

David Usher seemed more confused by my sock photo request than the guys from Crash Karma were (and more confused than his keyboard player Kevin Young was that one time), but he posed with it anyway. This is maybe a month after the Crash Karma show, and it’s the beginning of the mate of the previous sock.

Sock is a pirate! We’re on the HMS Bounty. This replica of the original was built for the 1962 movie Mutiny of the Bounty, and it’s been in other movies like Treasure Island and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Sock enjoys hanging out with movie stars.

I made my ballet debut at the age of 30 as a party guest in The Nutcracker. I did not fall down.

And no picture-filled post would be complete without a kitty pic! Here’s me and my girl at Christmastime.

We’ll see if I update more often this year. And I am knitting things that aren’t socks, too, although right now I’m mostly focused on the birth record I’m cross stitching for my new niece. I started it in July, the kid was born in January, and it’d be nice if I finished it before she starts school.

and a white one,

and the word on the street is that they are both very rambunctious (I believe the word “evil” may have been used). Which is to be expected. We kittens are are a rambunctious lot. I have not yet met them, but plan to this summer. Oh, and the kittens are both dudes, so they are my little brothers.

Speaking of which, my mom finally got my (allegedly) human brother to send photos of the Heartbreakingly Cute Baby Kimonos, too. You know, the ones that we finished knitting in December? Although I posted a picture of mine months ago, I hadn’t seen what it looked like once my mom sewed the ribbon onto it. So as well as having guest photos in this post (all of them were taken either by my mom or my brother), I have some guest knitting, too. Hers is the greenish one in front, although it doesn’t look too greenish in this picture.

It’s made from acrylic. I forget what kind of acrylic, but it was nice stuff. I think she got it at Baadeck Yarns. Mine is Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran. Yeah, I gave a baby item that must be handwashed to the parents of twin babies and a preschooler, because I’m a jerk like that.

I finished knitting Branching Out, but I haven’t blocked it yet, and I won’t get around to doing that until sometime next week. This week I have a virus which has provided me with an extremely sore throat, a headache, and exhaustion, so now I am going to fall into bed with a good murder mystery.

My grandmother knit a few things for me when I was a kid, so I wanted to knit something for her. She doesn’t need scarves and hats in her nursing home, and she likes stuffed animals, so I decided on the knitted kitty. I also thought it would be nice to get a picture of the kitty with a sweater that Grandma made for me when I was little.

It’s not a very good photo, but for once that isn’t my fault. I was trying to keep That Darn Cat off the sweater. She became fascinated with the horse sweater as soon as I tried snapping a photo. Evil thing.

The dog demands that there be equal-opportunity cuteness.

That is Honker, her Christmas goose. He honks. Or at least he will honk until she manages to kill his honking mechanism. That’s one of her favourite hobbies. The dog leads a rich and rewarding life.

I also finished knitting the Heartbreakingly Cute Baby Kimono, although I did not add the ribbon to it, and actually, I never will. My mom’s going to do that, but she has promised to send me a photo of it once it is beribboned. How much do you want to bet that the babies will have outgrown the baby kimonos already? (My cousin’s wife had twins, so my mom and I each knit a baby kimono.) Eh, it’s the thought that counts.

I am also very close to finishing the Mystery Intarsia Project, and since almost everyone I know in real life has already seen it by now, including its intended recipients, I figure there’s no point in taking a photo until it’s actually finished.

Stop laughing, it’ll happen.

I had always wanted a cat, but my parents weren’t cat people (especially not my father), so they wouldn’t let me get one. The summer after my first year of university, though, I really wanted a kitten, and one day I cut out a newspaper picture of an adorable kitten at the SPCA who was waiting to be adopted, and I left it on my dad’s pillow. Since I was severely depressed at the time, my parents decided I could get a kitten, because they hoped it would cheer me up. They told me I had to take her with me when I moved into an apartment, though, because they didn’t want to take care of her forever. This seemed like a no-brainer to me — I was the one who wanted the cat.

My mother and I went to the SPCA and asked for the kitten that was in the newspaper, but they said that they didn’t do it like that; we’d have to go pick a kitten out ourselves. So we went to the cages and I picked my favourite kitten. I didn’t realize until later, when I compared her to the picture, that she actually was the one from the newspaper.

My mom has often asked me, “But how did you know she was the best kitten out of all of the ones there? How did you know she would be as loving as she is?”

The only thing I can tell her is that it was always completely obvious.

I brought my kitten home the day before Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace was released, and I named her Leia.

She was a lot better than the movie.

Leia was a cat, but she thought she was a dog. It’s pretty obvious that she was part Maine Coon. She was longhaired, with a huge, fluffy tail, a ruff around her neck, and tufts of fur in her ears and between her toes. She followed us around like a dog, she didn’t mind water, and she always wanted somebody to watch her eat. (She would whap me in the face with her paw at six in the morning — “Mom, watch me eat. Watch me eat, Mom.” — until I would get up and stand over her at her food dish while she had breakfast.) Leia never meowed. Instead, she chirped like a bird. She also seemed to have a mild case of hip dysplasia, so mild that it never caused her any discomfort, just gave her a hip-swinging sort of walk. We called it her “sexy walk.”

She was best friends with the family dog, but she hated cats, so she barely tolerated Wednesday, the cat my brother and I got a few years ago. See, here she’s looking up at Wednesday and saying, “What the hell are you doing here?”

Leia didn’t go outside. Ever. She was terrified of the Great Outdoors. She never felt grass under her paws in her life. (My mom brought some snow inside on a baking sheet once, though, and got Leia to stand on it. She hated it. Unlike the dog, who loves nothing better than to run outside and purposely stick her entire head in a snowbank.) Since she never wanted to go out, we didn’t have to worry about the fact that she refused to wear a collar. If you put a collar on her, she would just manage to take it off. Smart girl.

Despite not being cat people, when I did move into an apartment, my parents did not want Leia to go with me. They loved my wonderful catlet, of course. Although I wished I could take her, I knew she’d be happier if she stayed, since moving would be traumatic for a cat who hated leaving the house and besides, she and the dog would miss each other. I missed her, but at least I got to see her when I visited.

I couldn’t visit much lately, because I didn’t have enough time to take the bus, but I didn’t have enough money to take a plane, either. I would have visited more anyway, though, if I had known Leia was going to get cancer. There’s nothing that would have been more worthwhile to spend my money or my time on than Leia. She’s the only pet I ever had that was all my own (except those two guppies, and I still feel guilty about what happened to them — sorry, Edmund and Lucy.) She was my daughter.

Last week, I got to be with Leia for her last few days. She ran to the door to greet me, and she slept in my arms at night. On Friday, I had to have her put to sleep.

She was only nine years old.

I miss my baby so much.

Great, now this is bugging me, because I swear I saw a site once with pictures of what looked like knitted roadkill, and it wasn’t Patricia Waller’s fabulously disturbing crochet. Or maybe not roadkill, but flat dead animals, anyway. I thought maybe I had it bookmarked, but I don’t seem to (although maybe this could be because it doesn’t actually exist). So right now I’ve got another browser tab open and I’m here Googling stuff like knit dead snake and knit dead tiger and trying to pretend I am not insane.

Oh, and regarding the kitty’s tail, the pattern says:

Cast on 16 sts. K 1st row. In the 2nd row, K 10 sts and turn (leaving 6 sts “unknitted”). 3rd row K (this row is shorter now). Repeat these 3 rows 3 times.

Now, I would interpret this as twelve rows, because if you are going to repeat these three rows three times, then wouldn’t you have to knit the three rows one other time first? Otherwise, it’s not really repeating them. I think it’s actually supposed to be nine rows, though, because the tail in the picture on the pattern page looks shorter than twelve rows, and other people on Craftster said they did nine rows, too. I’m not sure why I’m even bothering to mention this, because I’ve got a nine-row tail, and if it turns out that it looks funny, then I’ll just knit a new one. Duh.

Speaking of semantics, I am going to be even more pedantic than I just was and correct something I said in my last post. I said that the kitty would be a calico cat, but that’s because I thought it had some white on it. The light patches aren’t actually white, they’re cream. Technically, that makes the inanimate, currently flat cat-to-be a tortoiseshell, because according to Wikipedia, calicos have white on them and tortoiseshells don’t.

I finally got around to updating my version of WordPress. Go, me.

When I will find the time to knit a kitty is anybody’s guess. After a few months without any job at all, I got offered two different part time jobs within the space of an hour. I didn’t know at the time if I would be able to accept both of them, but it turned out that I could. Going from no jobs to two jobs takes some getting used to, schedule-wise. I’ve made some further progress on my Live Simply cross stitch, but I don’t have a recent picture of it. I’ll take one soon.

Right now I’m reading up on crochet so I can make the straps for those baby booties that I knit. This ought to be interesting.

Hey, Ria, you know that hamster that you mentioned who is knitting with crochet hooks? He (or she) is also pictured on the back of Charmed Knits: Projects for Fans of Harry Potter by Alison Hansel. That pic is smaller, though, so it’s not as easy to tell that he’s using crochet hooks.

The best way to distract people from one’s lack of anything to say, or time in which to say it, is with PEEKTURES of one’s KITTEH when she was a BAYBEE.

I made another one of those seed stitch scarves in Patons SWS for my mother, this one in Natural Geranium. It is folded very strangely in the picture so you can’t see that I hadn’t woven the ends in yet. In fact, I never did. I figured my mother could do it herself. I think this officially makes me a Bad Daughter. It’s also pretty short, but hey, it goes around her neck without choking her.

While there’s been a bit more knitting and a bit more yarn-buying, there hasn’t been any picture-taking this month, so I’ll detail those things when I have photographic evidence and instead I will POST PICTURES OF MY CATS. They live with my parents, and I miss them.

Aren’t they adorable? They’re also completely insane.

That’s the family dog’s butt on the left side of the previous two pictures, but don’t worry, I’ve also got one of her face.