Lost kitty, found kitty

Rule #1 of living anywhere cold or anywhere with any crime whatsover: it is a Bad Thing when your door blows open in the middle of the night. No, let me add to that: when you have a pet, it is also a Bad Thing when your door blows open. I woke up yesterday morning and no longer had a cat. In addition, I no longer had a cat who was not wearing a collar, because I take it off periodically (it wears off his fur and then chafes him). He's front-declawed (I didn't do it; he came like that when I adopted him at age 4), other cats can beat the crap out of him, and he's never been outside before, other than in a carrier or one of the two times he ran out, became terrified, and then ran back in. I was sure he was gone forever, but my fiance and I walked around the neighborhood looking for him. (I called for him on my walkabout; my fiance just listened. As he said, "that cat is bloody loud when he's unhappy". He has a point.) We put up posters by 9am, put out his favorite blanket and food, and then went back to our major cleaning spree. (To mom and FMIL: this would be the time to visit, before the entropy takes over again ;) ) That afternoon, two moms and a gaggle of kids brought kitty back. Apparently he'd come back on his own, but didn't come as far as our steps. Instead he preferred the downstairs apartment's porch. These nice neighbors didn't want the reward, and actually had been walking around the neighborhood looking for our cat, since my fiance had talked to them when we were searching earlier. There are things I don't like about Pittsburgh, but these sorts of things make Squirrel Hill a great place to live.


Kitty doesn't deserve a reward, but I finished seaming up one of Krista's swatches and stuffed it with catnip. (An excellent use for swatches, btw, and seaming is an excellent use of leftover sock yarn.) Kitty gave the new toy a vote of confidence by trying to snatch it out of my hands while I was finishing it up, and promptly sitting on it. This is a vote of high praise, believe me. This is one of the only pictures I got in which one can actually see the toy.

A note on the plastic needles: I'm almost done with my first sock-buddy sock, and I wanted to clarify my comment about k2tog on these needles. (Just a question about sockapaloooza: do they match people up by foot size? I got someone else with really tiny feet, which was a great relief. Nothing personal, people with big feet, but I think I'd need to know and love you to be really happy about knitting socks for you.) Doing k2tog is not a big problem if you don't knit extremely tightly; I'm knitting these socks quite easily. However, they don't have the kind of feel I look for when I'm knitting lace, so I think that kXtog (for X > 2) would be really annoying. For everything else, they feel great. They do bend and don't come back to 100% straight, but I just bend them back into place. They're not like bent bamboo needles, which are harder to work with. Also, I find that metal needles make me think about them more, as they press against my hands. These needles make the knitting feel like part of your hand.