Busy Night, Beautiful Day

I think last night at work was making up for my slow night on Tuesday. It was non-stop until midnight, and even then the phone kept ringing at a more or less regular pace all night long. We had a lot of cranky, impatient clients, as well, even though I'm pretty sure I kept wait times at an hour or less all evening. I'm always tempted to tell them that if they don't like it, they should try their luck up at the human hospital's ER.

When I did manage to get some down time, I was looking around for a lace heart motif for a group knitting project. I owe a thank you to elemmaciltur for helping me a bit on that search. I looked up that book title (Knitting Stitch Bible) in the public library catalogs, though, and the nearest location that had it was the Peaks Island branch library, which would have meant a ferry ride to the island and back just to photocopy one stitch pattern. Had I felt more rested it would have been a nice trip, but given that I'd just worked a fairly exhausting 15 hour shift, I opted for a pattern I found in a special breast cancer awareness print supplement to the Fall '04 issue of knitty (the issue that contains the wonderful Hallowig pattern). There doesn't appear to be a link to the supplement from the issue itself (maybe I just don't know where to look), but it's a pdf file that can be downloaded here.

Today was a beautiful sunny day, so I stayed up for a while before going to bed, just to be able to enjoy the nice weather. Upon getting home, Rosa immediately wanted to go out into the sideyard, where she spent the entire day sunbathing. I also had to go Old West showdown with the bug spray on a bunch of wasps that were looking for nesting sites in our doorways. I'm generally inclined to live and let live, but when they start trying to claim my living space as their territory, it's time for them to go.

Tonight I've done a bit of swatching with the heart motif. Although it was written for a stockinette background, I swatched in both stockinette and garter and have decided that it works better for this project in garter. My gauge seems to be good, so now I just need to plan out how best to work this motif in. Photos will follow when my camera batteries are recharged.

The other thing that I need to start working on is making more felted catnip mice. I cranked out quite a lot of them last fall to sell at shows so that I'd have yarn money. This year they're mostly going to be for a big ticket item. David came home from last weekend's show and asked me if I'd be interested in buying an alpaca together with him. He's making plans to buy a new weanling boy on his own, but he's also interested in a weanling girl from bloodlines he'd like to get back in his herd. This is a big deal, as it's probably the closest we'll come to adopting children, and I, of course, said yes. I calculated, though, that I'll have to sell 1200 mice. The other alternative is to work 7 or 8 overnight relief shifts at my clinic or one of the other emergency clinics. Maybe I'll do a bit of both and still keep some mouse money for yarn.