Well, my tomatoes are now fenced in. All I can say about the fences is 'done beats perfect.' It's really a job for two people- hardware cloth, at least the weight I bought, is very recalcitrant and doesn't like to unroll. It would have helped to have had a second (strong) person to wrestle with the hardware cloth while I tried to staple it to the posts. (And the posts - out of a bundle of a dozen, two were bad - they had cracks or a big knothole that caused them to crack. I'm not happy about that). Hopefully though it will deter possums or whatever it was that was eating my tomatoes last year. (The cloth is also small enough to exclude largish mice and roof rats and cotton rats and that sort of thing. So if it was some kind of small rodent, I'm probably also protected)

I pulled some kind of funky chest muscle fighting the stapler. It's one of those muscles you don't actually realize you have until you hurt it. It's sort of in the intercostal region on the lefthand side (but I don't think it's one of the intercostal muscles)

annnnnd, it's comment roundup.

Dragonknitter: yes, I agree. "Storm Stories" makes me twitch because of the human-misery angle. I also dislike a lot of the "news magazine" shows for the same reason - I realize the people AGREED to be on and all (and maybe some enjoy the publicity), but still...

I also dislike "It Could Happen Tomorrow;" it seems too much like setting up for an "I told you so" if the bad thing actually happened. (And apparently, they were working on one about a ginormous hurricane hitting New Orleans last spring...bad timing, bad timing. I guess I'm also gonna be superstitious and say that it feels too much like "the devil comes when you call his name")

It bugs me that the weather channel - whose niche, in my mind, is to report the weather - feels the need to sensationalize like every other so-called news outlet.

Enjay: The toy book I recommend, with some reservations, is "World of Knitted Toys" by Kath Dalmeny. It has a great diversity of animals in it (sharks! sea turtles! parrots!) but some of the patterns are kind of fiddly and at least one I tried came out misshapen - I think my gauge may have been slightly off - and it was a disappointment.

I will say that the shark I made from it, as well as the snake, were successful. It may just be some of the mammalian critters that don't work as well. (Sometime I want to try the walrus and the kangaroo though).

I have the Debbie Bliss toy books but have never made anything from them. I also have the "Family Circle Easy Knitting Toys" book which has a few nice patterns in it.

There are also lots of fun free online patterns - Knitty has had some over the years (Pasha the Penguin, the kitty that Jess Hutchinson designed, the nauties). There are also some really neat dinos at xtreme knitting. (My take can be seen here). On Jessica Hutchinson's site (link in sidebar) she also has a link to a bunny pattern she wrote.

And I know there are others, those are the ones that immediately spring to mind. Fiber Trends has a number of "critter" patterns for sale, mostly felted.

Sarah: You're probably right and that I'm being a bit unfair. One of my "hot buttons" though is a fear that other people view me as "boring" and I think my attitudes are sometimes a bit of a defense. (And I did have a guy actually once say that to me - that I was boring. It's funny how much that kind of stupid assessment hurts.) And I do get the talking cosmology in a bar, except my few bar experiences were smoky, loud, and chaotic, and I found it hard to focus on any kind of thoughtful conversation. (But maybe that's just the frantic sort of bar that tends to crop up in college towns.) I also have something funky with my hearing that makes it hard for me to focus on a single conversation when there are lots of other conversations or background noise going on, which may also have been why bar-conversations never really got started for me.