Knotty Mouse

…brought to you by Captain Jack.

House hunting tomorrow.. good vibes needed!

On Monday we received some depressing news that our credit score was a handful of points too low to qualify us for the home loan that we applied for on my birthday. I have been pretty hush hush about the potential house purchase because I didn’t want to jinx anything and I’m sort of sad to have to announce the crap news rather than a happy house buying post.   We were really hoping that we’d get approved so that we could purchase something of our own from the massive amount of foreclosures out there because the mortgage on them would be HALF of what we’re going to pay for rent on anything not in a horrible area.

Unfortunately we haven’t had any luck finding anything to rent in a decent area or for an amount of money we can afford. I’ve been searching Craigs List, the Atlanta newspaper, the ‘local’ newspaper (which covers where we are now and where we intended to move), and have everyone we know keeping an eye out for anything we could live in. Time is ticking down – apparently we have TEN days to find another place to live so that we can notify the company that owns the house and they can prepare our check for the date our 30 days is up. That means that technically we never had 30 days to get ready to leave.. we had TWENTY. Our 30 days is up on Thanksgiving. Our 10 days is up on the 16th. I have to pack a whole house, find a place to live, figure out how to afford first & last months rent + security deposit + TWO pet deposits, AND move my kid to a new school district & school.

Oh yeah, the kicker to this whole situation is that on top of having to mow the whole lawn (the property is huge and its something we never have had to do) and clean the house before we leave that we also have to remove EVERYTHING from the storage building out back!!! When we moved in, it was chocked full of old car parts, chemicals, junk, trash, and covered in rat pee & tons of rat crap IF we want ANY money we have to remove all of this because the property has to be COMPLETELY EMPTY regardless of whether it was our junk.

Good vibes… I needs them.

I’m back from my trip with the in-laws to Panama City Beach Florida, and I’m completely unhappy about being home.  Our trip was rather.. interesting.

We headed down on Wednesday morning, bright and early only to find out that my husband’s predictions of  “mild weather & no bugs” translated into “hordes of gigantic blood-sucking mosquitos, fire ants, and some sort of nasty bitey things that Mousie is also completely allergic to” coupled with 11,000% humidity.  Thursday was spent dragging a lawn chair from shady spot to shady spot in our camp site and loudly complaining about the shitty weather (me) while mass apologies (husbear) and whining (munchkin) occurred.  On Friday the weather shifted, a steady breeze blew the bugs away, and we were headed down to the beach when my husband’s phone rang.

The friend who was taking care of our kitties had called to tell us that there was a strange letter attached to our door when he came to check the animals. The doorhang read : ” The agent below has been sent to determine the occupancy status of this property. If you do not contact the agent immediately to arrange for the removal of your personal property, any property remaining on the premises will be considered abandoned and will be removed.  You have 72 hours to respond..”   *insert confusion & hysteria here*

Turns out that the rental house which we’ve been living in and paying rent on has been foreclosed upon and is now on its way to being auctioned off by the mortgage company!  Our landlord hasn’t been paying the mortgage with our monthly rent payments and apparently he wasn’t ever planning on telling us that he no longer owned the property but he was certainly willing to keep taking our monthly rent until the sheriff arrived to post an eviction notice in 30 days!!  There are  apparently some sort of aid or vouchers that we can receive to help us with the relocation to a new house… not that it was really any consolation as we were standing in a campsite, on vacation,  7 hours away from our home, hearing that we’ve got to move out.

After deciding that we were already ON vacation and that there was absolutely no reason to go home when we’re facing a SURPRISE!!! relocation,  we figured we’d make the most of the rest of the trip.   There were shells gathered, skull bathing suits bought, games of putt-putt golf played, ice cream eaten, trails walked, waves boarded & manta rays sighted.  Husbear and I were even able to have a child free “date night” (I hate that term really..) with a walk on the beach & a nice early-birthday dinner where I didn’t have to cut anyone’s food.

I wish I had some photos to show of the trip but they’ll have to wait until the Husbear uploads some to me…  I never took my camera out of the case until this morning when I photographed the salt water taffy we brought home (it was free with purchase at one of the many tacky beach shops).

I’ll be away from the computer until next week, so I’ll leave you in the capable paws of the evil overlords Ms. Kitty & Captain Jack until I return.

Tv remote & a yarn catalog… of course!  I came in from getting the mail and found him like this… it was too funny NOT to post.

Its getting close to October and I changed the blog around for Halloween..  I really needed to freshen the place up, the dust bunnies had completely taken over!

(edited to add:  apparently this whole “post to the blog” thing works better if you actually hit the ‘publish’ key.  Its actually “Eye Candy 2AM on Sunday” now but there you have it.)

I seriously hope they don’t think I’m going to abide by that sh*t…

(Capt. Jack says he’ll be under this wet towel if anyone needs him)

just a test.. move along.. nothing to see..

Hope your weekend was this relaxing!

I haven’t baked or knitted in over a week now because we’ve been hit with one type of sickness after another around here. Earlier last week our new kitty Jack was attacked by something (we think a fox or a small coyote – and yes, its news to me that we have coyote here in Georgia) in our yard and had the side of his face torn up and his back leg injured. He was doctored up and is healing quite nicely.

I put a new piece of jewelry in my stretched earlobes and had a horrible reaction to the metal (surgical steel.. but maybe a high nickel content?) leading to a really big infected nightmare. Thankfully I caught it before it was unmanageable and I ordered in a nice new set of jewelry from BodyArtForms.com. My ears are now much happier…

On Friday at noon I got a call from the school to come get Munchkin because he has “pink eye”. A highly contagious illness you say? OF COURSE. We waited 24 hours (b/c the person in the clinic is not medically trained at all and even said it <em>might</em> not be conjunctivitis) and his eye was nasty – so we had to take him into one of those ‘emergency’ clinics and wait for 4 hours to be seen and get antibiotic eye drops. (Did I mention we don’t have insurance and the state run children’s medical insurance has been dicking me around for on the upwards of 6 months??? yeah… you don’t want to know what that visit cost.) HUGE amounts of sleep lost while I cleaned Munchkin’s eyes every few hours so that they didn’t get stuck shut. He is MUCH better today and has a note which allowed him back at school today.

Yesterday when I was woken up by the cats chasing each other around the bed (they were jumping on our heads.. what a great way to get woken up) I realized that I couldn’t see out of my left eye. When I stumbled into the bathroom and looked in the mirror I realized that I had caught Munchkin’s pink eye!! The good news is that the clinic doctor anticipated this issue, had given us enough eye drops, and had told ME how to take them (Love ya doc.. seriously.) should this happen. I’m doing much better but my last pair of contact lenses had to be thrown in the trash because they were contaminated.

I wear 2 week disposables but my prescription is LONG expired and I’ve been wearing this particular pair for an obscene amount of time. The only glasses I have are now about 12 years old (though apparently my prescription hasn’t gotten that much worse because I can see pretty well, just don’t ask me to read you anything on the tv or identify anyone at a distance).. and I’m blind as a bat (and I don’t have that handy sonar feature) without some sort of prescription eyewear. Fortunately my parents (who are AWESOME) are going to help me out for the extra money I need to get myself an eye exam and a box of new contact lenses.. they even said “happy mother’s day” – which means its a gift instead of a loan.. so I don’t feel as crappy about accepting money.

My husband is on a business trip to the West coast for the next 6 days (hence the utter chaos a contagious infection in the house has caused…) and he left early this morning for the airport.. so I’ve been up since about 4am. I’m going to go take a very VERY long shower (all your hot water is belonging to me!!!!) and veg in front of the tv. *sigh* Is it Friday yet??

I’m in the middle of a ton of WIP’s right now – its the end of the year and I’m trying to crank out some teachers gifts (see: Kitchen Tribble scrubbers) and also get ready for the onslaught of May birthdays – SIL, Hubby, FIL & MIL are ALL May birthdays. I did however manage to make this silly, bright and clashy stuffed mouse toy from Stitch n’ Bitch Nation for a kitty named Jack. The stuffed mouse ended up being an R.O.U.S (rodent of unusual size.. for those who don’t love ‘ The Princess Bride’ as much as I do) because I used worsted weight instead of sport.

Some of you at this point are wondering… “Who’s this Jack she’s knitting for?”. Here’s a little picture gallery for you.

This is Jack playing with his new mouse…

This is Jack sitting on the rug on my kitchen floor…

And this is Jack sleeping on my husband’s pillow on the bed….

I’m sure you can guess where this is going.. right?? Yeah, Blog- Meet our new cat.. Jack. More accurately I should say, Blog- meet Ms. Kitty’s new cat.. since she’s the one responsible for bringing him home.

About 4 nights ago I heard a loud noise outside and ran out to make sure that Ms. Kitty (who is an indoor/outdoor cat) wasn’t in some sort of trouble and when I opened the door.. a very freaked out looking Ms. Kitty came plowing into me at about a thousand miles an hour.. followed by the kitty you see above.. followed by the biggest possum I’ve ever seen in my life. As my husband went to run the possum off, I reached down to pick up Ms. Kitty and take her in the house and this cat came right up and wanted to be petted! When hubby came back, the cat went over to him to be petted as well – and that’s when my husband- Mr ” no more pets EVER” – said ” he doesn’t seem to be sickly or have fleas, let’s let him inside and give him some food”. (*insert eye-roll here*) I opened the door so that Ms. Kitty could go inside and this little guy went running right after her! They’ve been following each other around the house and the yard ever since.. and my husband decided (with the help of Munchkin) that the cat’s name should be ” Captain Jack” – or ‘Jack’ for short. (His full name is something like “Captain Jack Skellington Sparrow Rackham Harkness” – if you’re really wondering. There are a lot of folks named Jack that we’re fond of around here.. lol) He is still a kitten, from the looks of him he’s about a year old or so… and he LOVES yarn.

I do wonder where Jack came from or how he came to be sitting at my front door.. which is why I’ve waited to write this post. I’ve done some asking around and no one seems to have ‘lost’ a kitty, I’ve let him in and out of the house as he pleased in case he wanted to go “home” (if he had a home), but so far there isn’t any sign of someone wanting to find this guy. There have been a lot of cases (I’ve heard from the owner of the small store down the road) of people dumping animals recently, and there have been a few local rental houses which have recently had people move out.. so I’m wondering if he’s simply been abandoned. We’ve lived here a year and have had our share of stray cats on the property but we’ve never seen this guy.

Morally, I do feel like I’m doing the right thing by not turning him into a shelter (because they are over-crowded, under-funded, and currently putting a LOT of animals down that aren’t being adopted) when even though we don’t have much money ourselves, I know that we can at least afford to feed him and give him a good home as long as we have a home ourselves. I’m going to be checking into low cost pet clinics and having the little guy checked over (which will also check to see if he has a micro-chip) as soon as possible now that we’re pretty sure that his new home is here at Chez Mousie. Besides, how could you say no to a face like that and those big ol’ paws??

Proper blocking of a lacey knitted object requires water, pins, an appropriate sized blocking area, and a feline blocking unit (FBU). The FBU’s main purpose is to weight down the knitted object and provide warmth to stimulate the fibers to open and thus allowing the lace pattern to be better viewed. The Feline Blocking Unit also adds textural elements to your finished item. This function of the FBU depends greatly on the color of your knitted item and the color of your Feline Blocking Unit.. but most FBU’s can sense that the item is of an appropriate color to properly receive ‘textural element deposits’ and will roll and stretch to cover as much surface area as possible. You will never have to worry about over-blocking with an FBU, as the unit has an “automatic shut-off” feature – when your item is finished being blocked.. the FBU will simply turn its nose up at the knitted item and wander away. It will return to its docking station (see figure below) and proceed to recharge for its next use.