I'm SO CLOSE to being done with the Emily shawl. Just a few rows to go. Didn't have the energy to push on through last night, though. But hopefully I'll get it done (and blocked!) this weekend.
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I think the Putney shawl from the Knitscene Accessories special issue will be my next shawl-type project. Because it's pretty and it makes me think of fall and I need things right now to make me think of fall.
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My parents called last night. The little dog is doing even better. They went out and got a get-well present for him (!) - a dog toy. My mom says when she took it over there, he accepted the toy immediately and started playing with it. He still limps a little from one of the bites, but it looks like he's going to recover fully.
It's funny, with all the bad stuff that goes on in the world that this one thing affected me so deeply. But I suppose part of it was that it seemed so UNJUST to me - here was a little dog who was well-loved, excellently taken care of, and even his owners could not protect him against getting attacked. (Fortunately, his owner didn't get hurt by the big dog).
I suppose also lots of people have special feelings for animals, because they lack some of the less-desirable properties of humans: they don't judge, they always seem happy to see you, they don't talk at you endlessly about their problems, they don't gossip. (I remember sitting with Sam, our then-cat, when I was a teenager and telling him all the stuff that bugged me and made me sad, and knowing he wouldn't - couldn't - blab it to anyone else).
And once again: it truly stinks how much shorter their lifespans are relative to ours.
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But there is other bad stuff in the world. There have been four domestic-violence related shootings in Marshall County (the next county over from me) in the past couple of weeks. That's a huge amount, and it's just sad. I realize in some cases people find it really hard to leave an abusive situation...but a couple of the women wound up dying. (One was expecting, and her baby died too). That's another thing that there's just no excuse for: hurting a person who loves you (and presumably, whom you loved at some point) in that way.
And one thing that aggravates me? One of the local news outlets was doing the stupid tease-the-story thing at first and very briefly made it sound (or at least, made it sound to me) like the shootings were linked, and that maybe there was a serial killer on the loose or something. Not cool, news outlet, not cool.
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There was also a rabid cow that turned up in North Texas. I guess it is true that "any mammal can get rabies" as I was once taught (and then more recently, someone told me it was only carnivores who could). I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess it was a bite from some other infected animal - maybe even a bat. They didn't say anything about seeing a bite on the cow, but I can't think of how else she'd get infected.
(And then they immediately ran a story about the high flea population and for a moment I was "wait, are they implying fleas could spread rabies?" I'm thinking now of what Ray Bradbury said about local television news...)
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I really hope we get a cold winter this winter. One reason there are so many fleas is we didn't get a good frost.
And it's a cricket summer. That's not necessarily tied to the warm winter (it seems every five years or so we get an outbreak of crickets). I've kind of adapted to dealing with it (but still, don't like seeing them wandering around in the produce section of the grocery), but I remember I moved down here right at the height of a cricket outbreak and felt very strongly the "What have I gotten myself into?" feeling that I felt off and on the first year I was here.
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This is my last long lab-day of the summer. And I'm glad that's over. I liked the summer teaching and I liked my classes but being in class more or less from 8 am to 5:30 pm two days a week got really old really fast.
I'm also glad I have a batch of Anasazi beans I cooked up leftover in the fridge, so when I'm tired at the end of the day I can just boil some rice and heat up a bowl of those, and have a fairly fast dinner. The last couple weeks I admit I resorted to carry out - pizza one week, Chinese another - but I don't like to do that too often, because restaurant food is usually saltier and fattier than what I cook for myself.
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