Best Laid Plans

Thursday was the day of the house concert and I had what I thought was a Pretty Good Plan. It involved going in to work early, getting out early and swiftly executing the remaining house concert preparations. It notably did *not* involve having my car die on the highway, having it towed, having some throttle work done and getting a new battery and arriving at work *late*. It could have been worse, of course. I had coffee, I had knitting, I had my work computer (and actually logged some work time via the car dealership's exceedingly handy wi-fi). And hey. At the rate I'm going, I'm going to have a new-ish car soon. Kind of like the old country song about the guy who worked in a car factory, and smuggled out a part a day in in his lunch pail, and after several years had a whole car. Funny song..but I always wondered what kind of lunch pail would conceal the chassis and axles....

Anyway. My day continued along those lines, with multiplying meetings, andn various minor customer crises. I left later than I wanted but still got home at a reasonable hour, dove into baking, schlepping chairs and arranging lighting and table space for the concert. It actually went very well- my husband made it home early and we had a couple of friends come over to help, which always makes things easier. We had twenty people, plenty of refreshments and didn't run out of chairs. And the music was excellent- here are Heather and Ben, in concert in my library:


We had been initially a bit concerned that Cookie would be weirded out by the invasion of company. He's only been with us two weeks, after all, and in that time he hasn't had to deal with any visitors at all. We took care to leave the bedroom and cellar doors open, so he'd have places to retreat to, and then left the decision to him. But to our delight, he was completely unbothered by the company, came out and greeted all the new people, accepting pats and neck-scritches with gracious aplomb and was generally charming to everyone. At one point in the evening, he went streaking across the floor and went belly down in front of a bookcase, peering with concentration underneath it. We didn't understand what was going on until one of our guests reported that they'd seen a mouse run under there. He kept the place staked out for the rest of the evening.

Now, mice are not really a problem we generally have, but it is October and with the weather turning chillier, the mice do sometimes try to get in. However Cookie takes his role as defender of the household very seriously...or at least he takes the potential for tasty mouse snacks seriously! When I originally wrote this post I said that if the problem persisted, I'd have to put out some traps. As it turns out, that probably won't be necessary. On my return home from work Friday, I discovered that the Cookie's persistence had paid off. Yep, one stiff little mousy corpse, laid out for my approval. Cookie was rewarded with cat food--apparently cat food tastes better than mice, since he'd made no attempt to eat it.

In other news, I have skeined up all that cream yarn ready for dying. I haven't quite mastered the knack of twisting my skeins neatly, but I'm getting better. I started by pushing on the pegs to turn the skein, which worked fine, but on the last skein, I realized that I could twirl the swift much more quickly without getting in the way of the yarn by pushing on the armature. The swift is really and truly seriously fast. I love it!

I finished knitting the latest hat during the concert and wove in the ends Friday- haven't taken a photo yet. It struck me when I was doing the last hat, that the yarn would go well with my raincoat, which I wear as a top layer most of the time in the winter. And I don't really like hats, but often wear a headband to keep my ears warm. The headband I've been wearing is polar fleece, and it's so old all the fleecy bits have worn off. High time to knit myself a new one. So for my next trick, I cast on a headband, using the same sort of circumferential band I've used for hats, only with an i-cord edging on both sides:


That got finished yesterday on a drive out to western Mass. to visit my in-laws. Annoyingly, I've misplaced my book light so I didn't have any light to knit on the drive back. Which might actually have been a blessing in disguise since I was so sleepy by the time we got home I pretty much fell into bed. Today has been a fairly lazy day- sleeping late and reading, for the most part. At least there weren't any commitments that required us to drive anywhere!