Rain delay

Last week was exhausting, in part because my preparation for (and anxieties about) Yom Kippur had me waking up before my alarm every morning, fretting about the details. Finally, on the last morning of early waking, I told my brain don’t worry about it, it will be fine. I’ve been gradually getting back onto my sleep schedule ever since, but I have had some odd dreams. One was about a friend giving me a haircut and partially shaving my head down to the scalp. No thanks, I think I’ll go to the salon instead.

The end of the Jewish year also marks the end of a cycle of reading the Torah, with which I was, mostly, keeping up. I did read to the end this morning, which gives me more than a week to decide what kind of regular reading I’d like to do for the upcoming year.

I’m brainstorming now about establishing a reading pattern that will have me not just reading a small portion each week — just the first sentence — but studying the grammar of it so I’m actually learning some Hebrew. I’ll also practice chanting it, which may have me learning some new cantillation marks and will certainly give me lots of practice with the marks I already “know.”

And because I didn’t have enough projects this week, I spent part of this afternoon cleaning the upholstery in my car. I’ll backtrack to how it all began. Our boy Montmorency Jerome had a “senior checkup” at the vet on Friday morning. One of our concerns was that he has started bumping into things around the house, so the vet gave him a little trim around the eyes. She was very pleased at how well he tolerated this, and she was ready to award him a gold star for this part of the appointment.

However, it all went downhill when it was time to trim his nails. I had let this go for too long, and the quick had grown to the end of each nail. Which meant that every time a nail was clipped, it bled. And he writhed and wailed and whimpered with each snip, with the vet daubing a clotting solution on the end of each cut nail. We were all glad when this was over.

We entered the lobby, and there was a gentleman holding onto the collar of a large and enthusiastic yellow lab. No problem, I thought; I’ll leave my purse here and put Monty in the car and come back in to pay. But when I got outside I saw that there was a man sitting in the car next to ours, with a tiny yapping dog. Uh oh, I thought, this won’t work either. The man took his small dog inside, solving the problem of adjacency to Monty.

By the time I got back inside, the man with the eager yellow lab was on one side of the room and the man with the tiny dog was on the other, stroking it between yaps and growls and saying, let it go, let it go. I sat halfway between them, giggling. The vet’s chaotic-neutral cat, meanwhile, strolled through the lobby as it pleased, clearly embarrassed by the dogs’ uncouth behaviour. At last the cat was removed, the yellow lab was brought in for her exam, and I was able to pay my bill.

I went back out to the car, and Monty was sitting in the driver’s seat, his leash snagged on the center console. His claws had continued to bleed while he scampered across every seat in the car. It looked like a crime scene, and all I could do was drive back home and think about how to minimize the damage.

I laid towels across the seats until Sunday afternoon, when Eldest and I applied an industrial carpet cleaning solution to the bloodstains. It now looks like… less of a crime scene. Monty has his next “pedicure” appointment in another month. Please remind me to bring the towels with me when we’re on our way to the vet’s office so I can put them on the seats before Monty’s nails are trimmed.

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Knitwise, I was able to finish the next step of the pink project: weaving in the ends. As Eldest and I got ready to watch the Japanese Grand Prix, I didn’t think that I had an appropriate knitting project to accompany my viewing. But it was raining in Suzuka, and after three laps filled with one- and two-car incidents, the race was red-flagged until the rain might let up. (Eventually, it let up just enough. No spoilers from me.)

This was a perfect time to pick up the pink project and carefully weave in all of the loose ends that had been left when I transitioned from one skein to another. Some of the tails I left were quite long, which explains why I had gotten tangled up in the project the last few times I’d hauled it out. After the ends were in I removed a stitch marker and the twist-tie that marked the halfway point. It’s done, for now.

The last parts will be washing it — does anyone think that washing it in hot water might encourage the colors to bleed together? — and blocking it out at Mom’s house. At Thanksgiving. So I’ve actually finished a knitting project a month ahead of deadline. Gad freaking zooks!

The rain delay was quite long, so I picked up the project bag for Leroy’s Cowl, cast on 76 stitches with the wool held double, then knitted 4 rounds of 1×1 ribbing before switching to plain knitting in the round for another inch.

I haven’t knitted anything held double before and this yarn was bulky to begin with, so this was a big workout for my hands. On the other hand, it looks to be a very quick knit if I keep at it. The only tricky part will be guessing when it’s time to switch to 1×1 ribbing on the other end. But, you know what? If my estimate is off it will hardly matter. It’s a warm cowl I’ll wear around my own neck and it’s not a museum piece.

Maybe I’ll give my hands one day off before I start knitting on it again. I can use the time to find another quick knit to do — or to sort through my unfinished projects again. After all, it is Socktober and I have at least two unfinished projects that fall into the “sock” category. Which shall I finish — the socks for myself or the socks for a friend?