A Little Yarn On The Side

We hope we gave Milo one last weekend of love and cuddles, because he started going downhill fast on Monday, so on Tuesday we said goodbye to our sweet little Milo.  As much as we hated to lose him, we couldn't see him suffer.           We are simply heartbroken and not much in the mood for Christmas.  Venus has been very lonely without her buddy, but thankfully Theo had started playing with her more as Milo lost interest. Hope everyone else is having a happier Christmas.

Our little Milo is sick, and the vet says he's dying of a virus called FIP.  He's neither eating nor drinking on his own and I've been force-feeding him for a week now.  The problem is that there isn't a definitive test for FIP--it's more of a matter of elimination and I kind of feel like this vet is basing her diagnosis on something that might be unrelated.  We have him on an antibiotic for what the other vet in the practice thinks might be the problem and we're just keeping our fingers crosssed.  He's not showing any deterioration and aside from being lethargic and really hating the force feeding, he seems to be in decent spirits, and we're enjoying having some extra time with him if we are losing him.  The other kitten was very lonely when he first started feeling bad, but now Theo is playing more with her and we're spending more time playing and cuddling with her, so she's doing okay.  It's just been a very sad and emotional week.

Well--that was a fast month.  The new job is going well, though it was a rough start.  The company has so little turnover that there just isn't a training program, so the first weeks were overwhelming at times, but I'm getting the hang of things now.  My coworkers are so nice and help me all they can, so I'm enjoying it. There hasn't been much crafting time, though I did step off the fabric wagon for this: It's a laser-cut quilt kit, and is a perfect project for spare moments here and there after work. I'm going to hang it on the wall when it's done--which will hopefully be soon.  I've also done a little machine embroidery, but mostly crafting has screeched to a halt.  We've gotten more unpacking done, lots of fall yard cleanup, and have had a few friends over--something we haven't been able to do since March when we started the whole house journey.  We still have so much unpacking to do, but the new neighborhood is so lovely that it...

Okay--so it's time to admit that I'm NOT going to have all the boxes unpacked before going back to work, but that's okay.  I've made progress, though, and some of the time we can even find stuff.  It's worth it, though.  About 2 weeks ago there was a wreck at the intersection leading into our old subdivision because of the crazy school traffic, and the only surprise is that it didn't happen sooner.  And that's before the new subdivision of overcrowded homes has gone in.  Even if the F35s are sent elsewhere, it's great to be out of there.  I took yesterday off to sew AND get some pictures of my sewing progress.  I'm very proud of this: I have no idea what I intended to do with this fabric--especially since there wasn't enough of it to do most patterns--so since there was no emotional stake here, I convinced myself to embroider the bottom edges of the sleeves.  With embroidering, there's always a chance it won't work, and I didn...

And a LOT of unpacking.  We've made progress, and I've already emptied one more box this morning, but there are so MANY!!!   The sewing room is especially hard because I left behind all my wonderful shelving, so there is literally nowhere to put things as I unpack them.  I did run across my rope stash, so the first project in the new house was a large storage basket, and I could use a bunch more.  I'd saved a bunch of Andy's old jeans to make hanging storage for his old closet, and since I found that box, I've been cutting the denim into strips and I'm trying a new idea: twisting the denim strips into rope AS I sew.  The beginning was a bit rough and the bottom is puckering a bit, but as it's just for storage I don't really care.  I could be wrapping the denim around rope, but I was worried about how heavy that might be, and if this works, it's a great way to use up denim.  Besides, the rope stash has been commandeered: I also found my East...

Thanks for your kind thoughts everyone.  Callisto wasn't always the nicest cat, but I had her for 13 years and when she wanted to be, she was funny and charming and used to hide in my closet and the only way I would know she was in there was when the closet started purring when I walked in.  Theo has taken to sitting on my feet, so I think we're both missing her. We knew she wasn't going to last much longer, and after watching Theo searching the house for her, we decided to find him some friends.  Meet the latest additions: Venus and Milo are settling in well, and so far Theo mostly isn't interested.  We're introducing them slowly as recommended, but Theo wasn't showing the least bit of interest in them through a closed door, so we've let him get a few glimpses of them here and there. It's been a pretty eventful time for him, but luckily he likes the new sewing room, including the view, and sometimes I find him up there without me.  There hasn...

Last night we had to have Callisto put to sleep.  She had been declining but she LOVED the new backyard so we had given her as much time out there as possible, but Friday night we couldn't find her, had one glimpse of her Saturday, and then nothing.  We were worried that she had crawled off somewhere to die, but last night she came staggering onto the patio and was in such sad shape that Andy whisked her off to the emergency vet to put an end to her suffering.  I wish we could have taken her sooner, but all her life, when she wanted to hide from me I have NEVER found her, and I'm sort of proud of her for maintaining that to the end. Theo is wandering around the house looking for her, in spite of the fact that she was never really nice to him.  There may be a trip to the shelter to find a friend for him, but for right now, there are extra cuddles for all of us.

I'd like to say everything went smoothly, but the moving company managed to be a HUGE nightmare--making mistakes, scratching up a lot of our furniture, breaking things, leaving our things in a hot truck in a hot parking lot leaving us forced to rent a Uhaul truck for everything we DIDN'T want baked into oblivion, and charging us almost double the written estimate--but again, Idaho doesn't license moving companies either.  I almost admire the consistency with which the nightmare movers worked.  If you see a large stack of boxes, the bottom one is guaranteed to be marked fragile, and if we carefully marked "this side up," they had a 100% rate of putting it any OTHER way than the way we marked.  If you're reading this and you're in Idaho, if you are ever foolish enough to consider hiring Peasley's Transfer and Storage, have a reliable friend lock you up until such a foolish impulse passes. The pod has been delivered, emptied in extreme heat, and return...

As it turns out, the buyer's inspector is so awful that he doesn't come back for the walkthrough unless he is PAID to do so, so we were spared his nonsense today.  (Really, one wonders why on earth these fools think he's so great) We guess the closing went okay, but it's not recorded yet and we ran into a bit of a snag with what to do with the proceeds for 3 days that won't cost us some sort of fee.  How weird is THAT?  Then there was a problem with our new purchase because our home owner's insurance agent was slow to get his stuff to the lender and almost cost us the closing date.  AND our movers--whom I had used before because I knew the family that started I but have unfortunately gone SERIOUSLY downhill as most family businesses do when family members who shouldn't be hired or promoted ARE, so they are the reason we are moving on Wednesday instead of Thursday and NOW I can't get a response to how they will be storing our things on Thursday which is ...

A week from today we move into our new house!!!!!!!  We are so ready to be done.  And we're HOPING to never, ever have any dealings with our buyers after Monday, because we're certainly not meeting them.  They're doing their walk through on the day of closing, and I've asked our realtor to be there for it.  Usually that isn't necessary, but their home inspector lied about several things, so we don't trust him and what the inspection is for is to inspect the requests they made--NOT all the stuff he missed the first time.  And of course the buyers wanted to make US drive 15+ miles away for the closing because--as we know--they are the centers of the known universe and no one else matters, but by this point our realtor's assistant is ready for them at every turn as we all now know to just expect problems.  We're almost done....we're almost done....we're almost done.... Work has been a bit surreal this week.  The first of the new people, who had bo...

Today marks 200 days since I last bought fabric, which is frankly becoming my bigger weakness.  As fabric is also much heavier than yarn, I hope that moving the whole fabric stash is going to keep me straight until I've made it at least two years without buying fabric.  It feels like I could do 10, but we'll see where we are with 2.  :)

As of yesterday, it has been two years since I last bought yarn!  And as long as I remember the fun of having to move the entire stash, I think I can make it another 2 years....

AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHH.  Who would have thought that packing would be the FUN part of our lives right now? Our house sale closes on the 24th.  There have been addendums back and forth for several weeks addressing the date and that we are paying for the unnecessary sump pump thing.  All of a sudden on MONDAY evening the buyers notified our realtor that they want the sump pump garbage DONE by the 24th--now less than 2 weeks away.  The contractor even specified in his proposal that he was booked 2 weeks out, but our buyers actually thought everyone would just drop everything because they decided at the last minute that this had to happen, and he couldn't do it.  We offered to move the closing to accommodate this new demand, knowing full well that they would lose their rate lock and rates have now gone up, but when you're dealing with people who live in the Fantasy Land, it isn't at all clear to them that just wanting something isn't going...

We've now had 3 REPUTABLE companies look at the water in our crawl space and every single one of them has said there isn't really a problem because it's just because of the winter we had and that we don't need to do anything, that a sump pump is both overkill and pretty unethical, and 2 gave us much lower bids to do ACTUAL cleanup--but only when pressed because none of THEM are crooks.  But our buyers' home inspector specifically told them his buddy had to be the one to fix it, and unfortunately they believe him.  So crooked inspector will get his obvious kick-back, the crooked "water expert" will get to install yet another unnecessary sump pump, and we get to pay for it.  Being Idaho, neither restoration nor home inspection is licensed or anything, so the crooks can do anything and get away with it because somehow that's better, but our realtor is paying half of the rip off, and I keep telling myself that the inspector is also screwing over his own...

So............where we last left off, we had countered a ridiculous offer on the house and I had accepted a new job.  We spent that weekend doing counter- and counter-counter- offers on the house, and while we were waiting Saturday to hear from our realtor, my cell phone died COMPLETELY, so we got to spend Saturday night at Costco, but Sunday we finally agreed to a deal on our home, and two things were down. Our realtor was heading out of town the following weekend, and with a pending offer we didn't have any showings, but weren't going to pack until after the inspection in case that killed the deal, so we had a weekend off!  Right until we had to take Callisto to the kitty emergency room. She's 13 or 14, and was throwing up and not eating and just not looking good, and they, of course, ran very expensive tests, asked to run even MORE expensive tests that weren't really going to tell us anything definite but would probably have made a nice boat payment for one of th...