Mai tagged me for the latest random things meme, but I don't do those. I already tell you all everything you need to know. But Mitsy is basking in her renewed internet stardom and suggested I give you facts about her and Maggie.

rules: once tagged, you must link to the person who tagged you. then post the rules before your list, and list eight random things about yourself. at the end of the post, you must tag and link to eight other people, visit their sites, and leave a comment letting them know they’ve been tagged.

1. Maggie and Mitsy have the same father but different mothers, and their mothers were sisters. So they’re half-sisters and cousins at the same time. Only in the 4-legged world or in some southern states is this acceptable. Even before I brought them to live with me, out of the 6 kittens frolicking around my sister’s house, they were buddies. I picked Maggie and Mitsy picked me. Maggie was the only tabby of the six and I just had to have her. A week later, while contemplating getting a second kitty so Maggie wouldn’t be lonely, tiny 3-week-old Mitsy fell asleep in my lap. Who could resist?
2. Maggie was named for the French author Marguerite Duras. (She wrote The Lover among other things.) Mitsy was named for Mitsy Gaynor, an actress popular in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
3. When drinking water from the bathroom tap, Mitsy prefers to lick the faucet while Maggie prefers to drink from the bowl. I know they’ve been hydrating if Mitsy has the sniffles (it went up her nose) or if Maggie has a wet head.
4. While Maggie will only eat cat food, but any flavor of cat food, Mitsy will only eat certain flavors (chicken or turkey) but will also eat rubber bands, bologna rinds and a few other things that we promised never to speak of again.
5. Mitsy owns the entire apartment with the exception of the couch and me. Maggie gets those. Not a fair distribution of territory, it would seem, but they make it work. Well, they really don’t, as Maggie is often found under a chair hiding from Mitsy after daring to nap in a different part of the apartment, but it would seem that if Maggie wants to sit on the couch with me, Mitsy has to get down. And she does. Cats are weird. But if there’s a real mouse in the apartment, they tag-team.
6. Mitsy loves toys. Maggie prefers to watch Mitsy play. No amount of cajoling or purchasing of 2 toys and presenting them simultaneously or even putting Mitsy in another room will get Maggie to play. She’d just rather watch. (With the exception of a couple of toys with bells, the sparkly fish from SP11, and she’s been known to pop bubbles if I blow them at her.) And they share the mice.
7. Since they were kittens, if they truly treasure something, they’ll put it in or near their food bowls. They hadn’t done that in a long time, but the sparkly fishies were there a day or two after they received them. High praise for my secret pal’s taste in cat toys. If they treasure me on a particular day, they put their toys in my shoe.
8. Maggie is quite happy being a cat. She wants to eat and sleep, preferably undisturbed. Her needs are simple and few. Mitsy, on the other hand, seems to be watching me and taking notes on how to be a person. I’m quite confident that she’ll be homecoming queen in her next life. I hope for her parents’ sake she’ll have given up climbing out of windows.

Maggie tags Duncan and Mitsy tags Riley and Ziggy.

Guess who finally made her escape today?

OMG I have never known such terror. I come home, drop my stuff on the floor and start eating dinner (conveniently picked up on the way) while I check my e-mail. Maggie is extraordinarily annoying. Meow meow meow. Whine whine whine. First in my lap, then behind me, then on my ankle, around and around in a circuit. I finally put the laptop down and pick her up and say, "What the f*ck? Why are you so annoying today? What do you want?" And she just stares at me with these huge green eyes, looking very intently at me like she's trying to communicate telepathically.

And then it occurs to me. I haven't seen Mitsy. So I call her. I trained them to come when I call when they were kittens (the kitten books says to, in case of fires, etc.) And they always come when I call (unless the doorbell goes off at 4 am and I run through the apartment like a tornado.) I check the kitchen, the bathroom. No Mitsy. I check my bedroom even though the door is closed and I said goodbye to her this morning in the living room. No Mitsy. I go downstairs and check the basement. (Maybe the landlords were here and let her out.) No Mitsy. By this point I'm panicked. I call the landlords. No, they weren't here.

Now I am seriously panicked. I even go downstairs and ask the trailer-park-neighbors if anyone was around or if they saw her. No. And she proceeds to tell me a story about how her cat was caught in a dryer for 5 days. Not what I needed to hear. At this point I am really crying. I come back up and start pulling the drawers out of the kitchen cabinets and looking under the couch, hoping that she isn't sick or hasn't choked on something. Still no Mitsy.

Now I can't even think and I want to hold Maggie for a minute. And I can't find her. So now I'm calling Maggie too. I'm thinking to myself, "Surely this is too weird to be happening. Candid camera? No, too cruel. There's no way that they're getting out. I just don't understand." I'm sobbing and standing in the dining room and then I see Maggie sitting on the desk. Next to the window. With the air conditioner in it. And there is a 4 inch gap between the air-conditioner-accordian-side-thingy and the side of the window.

Oh my god.

I run downstairs and into the little alley between my building and the next. I'm relieved that I don't see a little pile of fur under the window, but even more horrified that I don't. It's dark, with only the light from the streetlight, and I don't see anything but wet pavement.

And then I see the swish of a fluffy tail in the basement windowsill. And there she is. Safe. Unharmed. Perhaps even a bit triumphant. She just sits there as I scoop her up and checked her all over, sobbing and asking her if she's OK. I cry the whole way back to the front door. She jumps out of my arms to run up the stairs, straight to her food bowl and the litter box. I have no idea how long she was out there. Now that she's safe even more terrifying scenarios are running through my mind, like what if I'd left town on business today.... Horrible thoughts that will keep me up tonight, I'm sure. I can't believe she jumped from the second story window and is OK.

My heart is still pounding. Feeding her a whole handful of treats has made us both feel a little better.

And Maggie? I'll never call you annoying again, baby. I promise.

This is quite possibly the funniest thing I have read in a very, very, VERY long time.

The Bible for Lolcats

For example:

Genesis, chapt 1, verse 26: An Ceiling Cat sayed, letz us do peeps like uz, becuz we ish teh cute, An let min has dominion An stufs becuz tehy has can openers.

I haven't been to knit night in a long while. Usually I'm driving back from Cape BFE on Wednesday evenings, so I've been absent. I went into Knitorious last Sunday for the anniversary sale, and was literally astounded by how many people asked me where I'd been and if I'd been doing OK. Sometimes I forget that I'm in other people's viewfinders they same way they are in mine. Weird, tres spinsterish, but true.

So last night I went, toting along my freshly begun Hexagon Blanket and the Debbie Bliss Rialto that I'd purchased on Sunday for it. I'd done two hexagons so far, and was already concerned. I really liked the first one (on the far right) but the second wasn't doing it for me. Two more hexagons later and I knew that it just wasn't turning out like I'd hoped.

The pattern, from this book:

is designed around 7 colors, like this:

I wanted to follow Moonstitches' example and use more colors, rotating them, and create a larger blanket. I liked the color palette I'd chosen:

but it just wasn't right. It was looking way too ... granny. Like it had been assembled from scraps rather then a carefully chosen group of colors. So I thought going back to 7 colors might be a good idea, but which 7? This is where a knit night is the greatest thing in the world. Mindy and Kara and Deborah and Kathy and Ann and Fiona and Kim and the new Sarahs (do they have blogs? Why didn't I ask?) and everyone else offered opinions and suggestions. Here are the final options:

All pretty, all do-able. I couldn't decide. I declared that I'd put the pictures up on the blog and let the internet pick for me. (Not really thinking at the time that pretty much everyone who reads my blog was already there.)

So I took a little ramble around the store, sipping the coffee that Tammy (bless you!) had offered me, and thought about it. Eyed the Malabrigo Aquarella that I ended going back for today. Spotted Rachel's amazing new yarn which I won't tell you about because I want it all. Seriously. I'll tell you when I've got mine. (Alpaca Lips! Hah! OK, that was a hint. But that's all you get.)

By the time I finished the coffee I had scooped up this Elsebeth Lavold Cotton Patine and when I held the balls together and walked back into the room, the collective sounds of approval convinced me.

This was much better:

Thanks to everyone for your help, and hopefully I'll see you next week! (That is, if I don't get on the bus with the Black Crowes tomorrow night. It could happen.)

*Yes, the post title is a song title, which I don't often do, but which is in honor of Kara who bravely endured the Lane Bryant jeans sizing adventure before me, and inspired me to endure it to buy a friggin' pair of jeans so I could look nice at the above-mentioned Black Crowes concert.

The Queen of lace, that is. Fleegle has left me absolutely speechless, but at least I can point and make ooh and ahh sounds. Please take note of the size of this incredible piece of artwork, the Black Widow Spider King Shawl.

I’ve been reminded that I’m supposed to be posting to my blog on a regular basis. You all know that if I have something to say, I’m here with all the details. Lately I’ve been working 16 hour days, not knitting a stitch, and getting accustomed to thyroid medication. That’s about it. I haven’t been to a knitting group for weeks, my roommates don’t speak English or Japanese, and I’m too tired to even read at night. Not much to report. Do you really care that NEWS's new cd comes out November 7th? Do you care that I have a work trip to Disney World in 3 weeks? Do you care that I switched to Method cleaners? No, I didn't think so.

I did have a birthday. I turned the dreaded 39. I’m quite sure that had something to do with my current malaise. As a present to myself, I took my sewing machine out of the box. I purchased it in February, I think. And it sat in the box, unopened, for 8 months. I don’t have any projects in mind, so there wasn’t any rush. But I finally had a moment of inspiration on what to do for my downstream SP, so I figured it was time to get it out.

I put it on the table and opened the manual. I looked at the diagrams detailing its 437 parts. OK, only 42, but they’re complicated. Did you know these things come with different ways to wind bobbins, and different presser feet, and different sized needles, and that the tension is adjustable, and that basically there are 13,453 ways to screw stuff up? Well, there are. And I got a simple one – it only does 30 or so different kinds of stitches. 30! So I put the dust cover on it and haven’t touched it since. I did go to the fabric store, but the choices in fusible interfacing got my mind spinning again, so I left empty handed. This is additional stress in my life that I do. Not. Need. And mommy is in Italy, so I can’t ask her. It’s just going to have to wait.