It's back to 30C temperatures after a few days in the 20s. One of those days was mostly spent in a car. One of the bands I play in had been hired to play a parade in the middle of nowhere. Seriously. It's an hour and a half drive from casa habsgirl. So, we get there at 1:30. The float (we do not march - before we rode floats, we ambled, since we NEVER practiced marching) was supposed to be there at 12:30. No float. We sit around for half an hour waiting, and the band exec is busy scrambling to find another option. I apply coat 2 of SPF 60 sunblock (I hate the farmer tan I'm developing while wearing 30). We end up cancelling at the last minute and going home. The whole day wasted.
I'm hoping the heat will keep the beasties lazy. Carolina scared a couple of years off of me last week. Late Thursday night, I was surfing the internet when I hear some chirpy noises from the hall, followed by the barrelling in of little miss, clearly chasing something. She seems to have knocked it down by the radiator. Figuring it's a cricket or something, I lean over and look. It ain't no cricket. It appears to be fist-sized, brown and fuzzy/feathery - I didn't lean in for a better look. I semi-squelch a scream (my mother later said "That wasn't squelched" and I told her if I had really shrieked, Zib would have heard me in Sicily), powered down the computer as fast as possible, bolted for my room, slammed the door shut and shoved my bathrobe under the door. I did not want little fuzzy/feathery corpses anywhere near me. When I get up the next morning, it seems no corpses have been found. Mom goes and checks the computer room (thankfully - I wasn't going near it until it had been cleared) - still nothing. Either I hallucinated or Carolina ate it.
Or not. Later that night, I see a large wingish thing by the door to the guest room/Mom's room (which is right next to mine.) It's just a flash, so I chalk it up to a combination of paranoia and a moth. Twenty minutes or so later I hear Dad calling for Mom. She goes down, then returns to get a piece of cardboard. Dad has trapped a bat in the dining room. So clearly little miss had stunned the bat the night before (if it had been flying, shrieking would have occurred,) but it had recovered enough to find a daytime resting spot before resuming flight the next night.
In knitting news, I started swatching again. I needed band practice knitting and Hush-hush is now in the upper lace band:
(This is two repeats - I'm now on repeat 6, but this picture was much better) and Grove Ribby's back is nearly to the shoulders, which is a little complex for practice:
Since my Elann shipment came today, I pulled out needles and started swatching:
Yummy. This is an extra-large swatch (should be about 8 inches across) because I'm going to wash and dry it, and I prefer a larger swatch to allow for a better idea of the shrinkage rate.
Time to get back to my knitting. Probably Hush-hush, since it's in the home stretch now.
Oh, and the Canadiens got the 5th pick in the draft lottery! I was hoping for #1 (come on, who wouldn't want Sidney Crosby), but 5th is excellent, and one would hope that had they played, the pick would have been much lower (playoff teams pick lower than non-playoff.) Now they just need to get a bunch of restricted agents signed, get some nice free agents, and play their way to the Cup! (Raging optimism is always easy in July. February will be a different story!)
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